SEPTEMBER CHANGES
When September came Carlotta, who
had been ostensibly visiting Tony though spending
a good deal of her time “in the moon with Phil”
as she put it, departed for Crest House, carrying
Philip with her “for inspection,” as he
dubbed it somewhat ruefully. He wasn’t particularly
enamored of the prospect of being passed upon by Carlotta’s
friends and relatives. It was rather incongruous
when you came to think of it that the lovely Carlotta,
who might have married any one in the world, should
elect an obscure village store keeper for a husband.
But Carlotta herself had no qualms. She was shrewd
enough to know that with her father on her side no
one would do much disapproving. And in any case
she had no fear that any one even just looking at
Phil would question her choice. Carlotta was
not the woman to choose a man she would have to apologize
for. Phil would hold his own with the best of
them and she knew it. He was a man every inch
of him, and what more could any woman ask?
Ted went up for his examinations and
came back so soberly that the family held its composite
breath and wondered in secret whether he could possibly
have failed after all his really heroic effort.
But presently the word came that he had not only not
failed but had rather covered himself with glory.
The Dean himself, an old friend of Doctor Holiday’s,
wrote expressing his congratulations and the hope that
this performance of his nephew’s was a pledge
of better things in the future and that this fourth
Holiday to pass through the college might yet reflect
credit upon it and the Holiday name.
Ted himself emphatically disclaimed
all praise whatsoever in the matter and cut short
his uncle’s attempt at expressing his appreciation
not only of the successful finish of the examinations
but the whole summer’s hard work and steadiness.
“I am glad if you are satisfied,
Uncle Phil,” he said. “But there isn’t
any credit coming to me. It was the least I could
do after making such a confounded mess of things.
Let’s forget it.”
But Ted Holiday was not quite the
same unthinking young barbarian in September that
he had been in June. Nobody could work as he had
worked that summer without gaining something in character
and self-respect. Moreover, being constantly
as he was with his brother and uncle, he would have
been duller than he was not to get a “hunch,”
as he would have called it, of what it meant to be
a Holiday of the authentic sort. Larry’s
example was particularly salutary. The younger
Holiday could not help comparing his own weak-willed
irresponsibility of conduct with the older one’s
quiet self-control and firmness of principle.
Larry’s love for Ruth was the real thing.
Ted could see that, and it made his own random, ill-judged
attraction to Madeline Taylor look crude and cheap
if nothing worse. He hated to remember that affair
in Cousin Emma’s garden. He made up his
mind there would be no more things like that to have
to remember.
“You can tell old Bob Caldwell,”
he wrote from college to his uncle, “that he’ll
sport no more caddies and golf balls at my expense.
Flunking is too damned expensive every way, saving
your presence, Uncle Phil. No more of it for
this child. But don’t get it into your head
I am a violently reformed character. I am nothing
of the kind and don’t want to be. If I
see any signs of angel pin-feathers cropping out I’ll
shave ’em. I’d hate to be conspicuously
virtuous. All the same if I have a few grains
more sense than I had last year they are mostly to
your credit. Fact is, Uncle Phil, you are a peach
and I am just beginning to realize it, more fool I.”
Tony also flitted from the Hill that
September for her new work and life in the big city.
Rather against her will she had ensconced herself in
a Student Hostelry where Jean Lambert, Phil’s
older sister, had been living several years very happily,
first as a student and later as a successful illustrator.
Tony had objected that she did not want anything so
“schooly,” and that the very fact that
Jean liked the Hostelry would be proof positive that
she, Tony, would not like it. What she really
wanted to do was either to have a studio of her own
or accept Felice Norman’s invitation to make
her home with her. Mrs. Norman was a cousin of
Tony’s mother, a charming widow of wealth and
wide social connections whom Tony had always adored
and admired extravagantly. Just visiting her had
always been like taking a trip to fairy land and to
live with her well, it would be just too
wonderful, Tony thought. But Doctor Holiday had
vetoed decidedly both these pleasant and impractical
propositions. Tony was far too young and pretty
to live alone. That was out of the question.
And he was scarcely more willing that she should go
to Mrs. Norman, though he liked the latter very well
and was glad that his niece would have her to go to
in any emergency. He knew Tony, and knew that
in such an environment as Mrs. Norman’s home
offered the girl would all but inevitably drift into
being a gay little social butterfly and forget she
ever came to the city to do serious work. Life
with Mrs. Norman would be “too wonderful”
indeed.
So Tony went to the Hostelry with
the understanding that if after a few months’
trial she really did dislike it as much as she declared
she knew she would they would make other arrangements.
But rather to her chagrin she found herself liking
the place very much and enjoying the society of the
other girls who were all in the city as she and Jean
were, pursuing some art or other.
The dramatic school work was all she
had hoped and more, stimulating, engrossing, altogether
delightful. She made friends easily as always,
among teachers and pupils, slipped naturally here as
in college into a position of leadership. Tony
Holiday was a born queen.
She had plenty of outside diversion
too. Cousin Felice was kind and delighted to
pet and exhibit her pretty little kinswoman. There
were fascinating glimpses into high society, delightful
private dancing parties in gorgeous ball rooms, motor
trips, gay theater parties in resplendent boxes, followed
by suppers in brilliant restaurants all
the pomp and glitter of life that youth loves.
There were other no less genuinely
happy occasions spent with Dick Carson, way up near
the roof in the theaters and opera house or in queer,
fascinating out-of-the-way foreign restaurants.
The two had the jolliest kind of time together, always
like two children at a picnic. Tony was very
nice to Dick these days. He kept her from being
too homesick for the Hill and anyway she felt a wee
bit sorry for him because he did not know about Alan
and those long letters which came so frequently from
the retreat in the mountains where the latter was
sketching. She knew she ought to tell Dick how
far things had gone but somehow she couldn’t
quite drive herself to do it. She didn’t
want to hurt him. And she did not want to banish
him from her life. She wanted him, needed him
just where he was, at her feet, and never bothering
her with any inconvenient demands or love-making.
It was selfish but it was true. And in any case
it would be soon enough to worry Dick when Alan came
back to town.
And then without warning he was back,
very much back. And with his return the pleasant
nicely balanced, casual scheme of things which she
had been following so contentedly was knocked sky
high. She had to adjust herself to a new heaven
and a new earth with Alan Massey the center of both.
In her delight and intoxication at having her lover
near her again, more fascinating and lover-like than
ever, Tony lost her head a little, neglected her work,
snubbed her friends, refused invitations from Dick
and Cousin Felice, and indeed from everybody except
Alan. She went everywhere with him, almost nowhere
without him, spent her days and more of her nights
than was at all prudent or proper in his absorbing
society, had, in short, what she afterward described
to Carlotta as a “perfect orgy of Alan.”
At the end of ten days she called
a halt, sat down and took honest account of herself
and her proceedings and found that this sort of thing
would not do. Alan was too expensive every way.
She could not afford so much of him. Accordingly
with her usual decision and frankness she explained
the situation to him as she saw it and announced that
henceforth she would see him only twice a week and
not as often if she were especially busy.
To this ultimatum she kept rigidly
in spite of her lover’s protests and pleas and
threats. She was inexorable. If Alan wanted
to see her at all he must do it on her terms.
He yielded perforce and was madder over her than ever,
feted and worshiped and adored her inordinately when
he was with her, deluged her with flowers and poetry
and letters between times, called her up daily and
nightly by telephone just to hear her voice, if he
might not see her face.
So superficially Tony conquered.
But she was not over-proud of her victory. She
knew that whether she saw Alan or not he was always
in the under-current of her thoughts and feelings.
In the midst of other occupations she caught herself
wondering whether he had written her, whether she
would find his flowers when she got home, where he
was, what he was doing, if he was thinking of her
as she of him. She wanted him most irrationally
when she forbade his coming to her. She looked
forward to those few hours spent with him as the only
time when she was fully alive, dreamed them over afterward,
knew they meant a hundredfold more to her than those
she spent with any other man or woman. She wore
his flowers, pored over his long, beautiful, impassioned
letters, devoured the books of poetry he sent her,
danced with him as often and as long as she dared,
gave her soul more and more into his keeping, the
more so perhaps in that he was so tenderly reverential
of her body, never even touching her lips with his,
though his eyes often told a less moderate story.
The orgy over she was again doing
well with her work at the school. She knew that.
Her teachers praised her gifts and her progress.
Without any vanity she could not help seeing that
she was forging ahead of others who had started even
with her, had more real talent perhaps than most of
those with whom she worked and played. But she
took no pride in these things. For equally clearly
she saw that she was not doing half what she might
have done, would have done, had there been no Alan
Massey in the city and in her heart. She had
a divided allegiance and a divided allegiance is a
hard thing to live with as a daily companion.
But she would not have had it otherwise.
Not for a moment did she ever wish to go back to those
free days when love was but a name and the flame had
not blown so dangerously near.
As for Alan Massey himself, he alternated
between moods which were starry pinnacles of ecstasy
and others which were bottomless pits of despair.
He lived for two things only his hours
with Tony and his work. For he had begun to paint
again, magnificently, furiously, with all his old power
and a new almost godlike one added to it. As an
artist it was his supreme hour. He painted as
he had never painted before.
His love for Tony ran the whole gamut.
He loved her passionately, found it exquisite torture
to have her in his arms when they danced and to have
still to bank the fires which consumed him and of which
she only dimly guessed. He loved her humbly,
worshipfully as a moth might look to a star.
He loved her tenderly, protectingly, longed to shield
her by his own might from all griefs, troubles and
petty annoyances, to guard her day and night, lest
any rough, unlovely or unseemly thing press near her
shining sphere. He desired to wrap her about with
a magic mantle of beauty and luxury and the quintessence
of life, to keep her in a place apart as he kept his
priceless collection of rubies and emeralds. He
loved her jealously, was sick at the thought that some
other man might be near her when he might not, might
dance with her, covet her, kiss her. He hated
all men because of her and particularly he hated with
black hate the man whom he was wronging daily by his
silence, his cousin, John Massey.
Beneath all this strange, sad welter
of emotion deeper still in Alan Massey’s heart
lay the tragic conviction that he would never win Tony,
that his own sins would somehow rise to strike at him
like a snake out of the grass. He had lost faith
in his luck, had lost it strangely enough when luck
had laid at his feet that most desirable of all gifts,
Jim Roberts’ timely death.
In the House on the Hill, things were
very quiet, missing the gay presence of the two younger
Holidays and with those at home cumbered with cares
and perplexity and grief.
Things were easier for Ruth than for
Larry. It was less difficult for her to play
the part of quiet friendship than for him, partly because
her love was a much less tempestuous affair and partly
because a woman nearly always plays a part of any
kind with more facility than a man does. And
Larry Holiday was temperamentally unfit to play any
part whatsoever. He was a Yea-Yea and Nay-Nay
person.
The simplicity of the girl’s
rôle was also very largely created by her lover’s
rigid self control. She took her cue from his
quietness and felt that things could not be so bad
after all. At least they were together.
Neither had driven the other away from the Hill by
any unconsidered act or word. Ruth had no idea
that being with her under the tormenting circumstances
was scarcely undivided happiness for poor Larry or
that her peace of mind was more or less purchased
at cost of his.
Larry kept the promise he had made
to his uncle more literally than the latter had had
any idea he would or could. He never sought out
Ruth’s society, was never alone with her if
he could help it, never so much as touched her hand.
Ruth being a very human and feminine little person
sometimes wished he were not quite so consistently,
“Holidayish” in his conduct. She
missed the ardent gaze of those wonderful gray eyes
which he now kept studiously averted from hers.
Privately she thought it would not have mattered so
fearfully if just once in a while he had forgotten
the ring. Life was very, very drab when you never
forgot and let yourself go the tiniest little bit.
Child like little Ruth never guessed that a man like
Larry Holiday does not dare let himself go the tiniest
little bit, lest he go farther, far enough to regret.
Doctor Holiday watching in silence
out of the tail of his eye understood better what
was going on behind his nephew’s quiet exterior
demeanor, and wondered sometimes if it had not been
a mistake to keep the boy bound to the wheel like
that, if he should not rather have packed him off
to the uttermost parts of the earth, far away from
the little lady with the wedding ring who was so little
married. And yet there was Granny, growing perceptibly
weaker day by day, clinging pathetically to Larry’s
young strength. Poor Granny! And poor Larry!
How little one could do for either!
Ruth’s memory did not return.
She remembered, or at least found familiar, books
she had read, songs she must have sung, drifted into
doing a hundred little simple everyday things she
must have done before, since they came to her with
no effort. She could sew and knit and play the
piano exquisitely. But all this seemed rather
a trick of the fingers than of the mind. The
people, the places, the life that lay behind that crash
on the Overland never returned to her consciousness
for all her anxious struggle to get them back.
It began to look as if her husband,
if she had one, were not going to claim her.
No one claimed her. Not a single response came
from all the extensive advertising which Larry still
kept up in vain hope of success. Apparently no
one had missed the little Goldilocks. Precious
as she was none sought her.
In the meanwhile she was an undisguised
angel visitant to the House on the Hill. If in
his kindly hospitality Doctor Holiday had stretched
a point or two in the first place to make the little
stranger feel at home the case was different now.
She was needed, badly needed and she played the part
of house daughter so sweetly and unselfishly that her
presence among them was a double blessing to them
all, except perhaps to poor Larry who loved her best
of all.