第16章

"It was contemptible," she said hotly."It was treachery! It was a piece of cold-blooded ambition.He'd sacrifice anything, any one, to ambition.I shall never like him again."Pierson was puzzled--being in love with her, he had been deceived by her pretense that she had a poor opinion of him; and he did not appreciate that her sense of justice was now clouded by resentment for his sake.At dinner, when the four were together, she attacked Scarborough.Though she did not confess it, he forced her to see that at least his motives were not those she had been attributing to him.When he and Pauline were alone--Olivia and Pierson had to hurry away to a lecture he said:

"What do YOU think, Miss Gardiner? You--did you--do you--agree with your cousin?

"I?" Pauline dropped her eyes."Oh, I----"She hesitated so long that he said: "Go on--tell me just what you think.I'd rather know than suspect.""I think you did right.But--I don't see how you had the courage to do it.""That is, you think I did right--but the sort of right that's worse than wrong.""No--no!" she protested, putting a good deal of feeling into her voice in the effort to reassure him."I'd have been ashamed of you if you hadn't done it.And--oh, I despise weakness in a man most of all! And I like to think that if everybody in college had denounced you, you'd have gone straight on.And--you WOULD!"Within a week after this they were calling each the other by their first names.

For the Christmas holidays she went with her mother from Battle Field direct to Chicago, to her father's sisters Mrs.

Hayden--Colonel Gardiner had been called south on business.When she came back she and Scarborough took up their friendship where they had left it.They read the same books, had similar tastes, disagreed sympathetically, agreed with enthusiasm.She saw a great deal of several other men in her class, enough not to make her preference for him significant to the college--or to herself.

They went for moonlight straw-rides, on moonlight and starlight skating and ice-boat parties, for long walks over the hills--all invariably with others, but they were often practically alone.

He rapidly dropped his rural manners and mannerisms--Fred Pierson's tailor in Indianapolis made the most radical of the surface changes in him.

Late in February his cousin, the superintendent of the farm, telegraphed him to come home.He found his mother ill--plainly dying.And his father--Bladen Scarborough's boast had been that he never took a "dose of drugs" in his life, and for at least seventy of his seventy-nine years he had been "on the jump"daily from long before dawn until long after sundown.Now he was content to sit in his arm-chair and, with no more vigorous protest than a frown and a growl, to swallow the despised drugs.

Each day he made them carry him in his great chair into HERbedroom.And there he sat all day long, his shaggy brows down, his gaze rarely wandering from the little ridge her small body made in the high white bed; and in his stern eyes there was a look of stoic anguish.Each night, as they were carrying him to his own room, they took him near the bed; and he leaned forward, and the voice that in all their years had never been anything but gentle for her said: "Good night, Sallie." And the small form would move slightly, there would be a feeble turning of the head, a wan smile on the little old face, a soft "Good night, Bladen."It was on Hampden's ninth day at home that the old man said "Good night, Sallie," and there was no answer--not even a stir.

They did not offer to carry him in the next morning; nor did he turn his face from the wall.She died that day; he three days later--he had refused food and medicine; he had not shed a tear or made a sound.

Thus the journey side by side for fifty-one years was a journey no longer.They were asleep side by side on the hillside for ever.

Hampden stayed at home only one day after the funeral.He came back to Battle Field apparently unchanged.He was not in black, for Bladen Scarborough abhorred mourning as he abhorred all outward symbols of the things of the heart.But after a week he told Pauline about it; and as he talked she sobbed, though his voice did not break nor his eyes dim.

"He's like his father," she thought.

When Olivia believed that Dumont was safely forgotten she teased her--"Your adoring and adored Scarborough."Pauline was amused by this.With his unfailing instinct, Scarborough had felt--and had never permitted himself to forget--that there was some sort of wall round her for him.It was in perfect good faith that she answered Olivia: "You don't understand him.He's a queer man--sometimes I wonder myself that he doesn't get just a little sentimental.I suppose I'd find him exasperating--if I weren't otherwise engaged."Olivia tried not to show irritation at this reference to Dumont.

"I think you're mistaken about which of you is queer," she said."You are the one--not he.""I?" Pauline laughed--she was thinking of her charm against any love but one man's, the wedding ring she always wore at her neck."Why, I COULDN'T fall in love with HIM.""The woman who gets him will do mighty well for herself--in every way," said Olivia.

"Indeed she will.But--I'd as soon think of falling in love with a tree or a mountain."She liked her phrase; it seemed to her exactly to define her feeling for Scarborough.She liked it so well that she repeated it to herself reassuringly many times in the next few weeks.