The Driver (27 page)

Vera lived in New York at her studio, but came often to Moonstool. Her engagement to Lord Porteous was renewed. She spoke to me about it one evening on the west terrace, after sunset.

“You were right about Lord Porteous,” she said. “He refused from the beginning to consider our engagement broken.”

“Of course,” I said.

That was evidently not what she expected me to say. She gave me a slow, sidewise look.

“I’m very glad,” I added, making it worse.

We took several turns in silence.

“Why are you glad?” she asked, in a tone she seldom used.

“Isn’t that what I should say?... I was thinking... I don’t know what I was thinking... nor why I am glad.”

We stood for a long time, a little apart, watching the afterglow. She shivered.

“I am cold,” she said. “Let’s go in, please.”

iv

The next day in the midst of a conference with Mordecai Galt’s eyes closed. The doctor was in the house. He shook his head knowingly.

There followed a fortnight of horrible suspense. Most of the time we did not know at a given moment whether he was alive or dead. Once for three days he did not open his eyes and we thought it was over. Then he looked at us again and we knew he had been conscious all the time. The faculty of speech never returned. There would be a rumor that he was dead and prices would fall on the Stock Exchange; then a rumor that he wasn’t, and prices would rise again. The newspapers established a death watch in the private Galt station and kept reporters there day and night to flash the news away. To keep them from the house I had to promise them solemnly that I would send word down promptly if the fatality happened.

Mrs. Galt and Natalie watched alternately. One or the other sat at his bedside all the time. One evening about 8 o’clock I was sharing the vigil with Natalie when Galt opened his eyes. We were sitting on opposite sides of his bed. He looked from one of us to the other slowly, several times, and then fixed a wanting expression on me

I knew what he wanted without asking. Natalie knew also. It concerned us deeply, uniting our lives, yet at that moment we were hardly conscious of ourselves. What thrilled us was the thought of something we should do for him, because he wanted it.

I put out my hand to her across the bed. She clasped it firmly.

“That is what you mean,” I said.

“Yes,” he answered.

A flood of recollection swept through me. I saw Natalie all the way back to girlhood, to that night of our first meeting in her father’s house. I could not remember when I had not loved her. I saw everything that had happened between us, saw it in sunlight, and wondered how I could have been so unaware. Trifling incidents, almost forgotten, became suddenly luminous, precious and significant. And this instant had been from the beginning appointed!

Natalie, still clasping my hand, leaned far over and gazed intendy into his eyes.

“You want me to marry Coxey?” she asked, in a tone of caressing anxiety, which seemed wholly unconscious of me, almost excluding.

“Yes,” he answered, repeating it several times, if that may be understood. The answer lingered in his eyes. Then they closed, slowly, as ponderous gates swing to, against his utmost will, and they never opened again.

He was buried in the side of Moonstool. All of his great enemies came to assist at the obsequies. Bullguard was one of the pallbearers.

A
FTER the funeral the family returned to the Fifth Avenue house. Though I took up a permanent abode elsewhere, my apartment was still there, and I came and went almost as one of the household.

The more I saw of Natalie the stranger and more distant she was. Her behavior was incomprehensible. She was friendly, often tender, always solicitous, but kept a wall of constraint between us. She positively refused to talk of our engagement, and came to the point where she denied there was any such thing. When I proposed to cure that difficulty in a very obvious way she took refuge in fits of perverse and wilful unreasonableness. She would spend a whole evening in some inaccessible mood and become herself only for an instant at the last. Suddenly they resolved to travel. She persuaded her mother to it.

“Then we won’t see Coxey for a long, long time,” she said, one evening at dinner; “and maybe he will miss us.”

They went around the world. Her letters were friendly, sprightly, teasing, and very unsatisfactory. She would not be serious.

At last Galt’s posthumous affairs began to settle, so that I could leave them, and I immediately set out in a westerly direction, intending to meet Mrs. Galt and Natalie in the Orient on surprise. I missed them in China, because they had revised their schedule and gone to Japan. In Japan I missed them again because they were suddenly homesick and cut their sojourn short. We crossed the Pacific a week apart. They stopped only four days in San Francisco, so I missed them there. Then I telegraphed Natalie what I had been doing. Four months had passed without a word of news between us.

On arriving in New York I went directly to the Fifth Avenue house. As I rang the bell a feeling of desolation assailed me. The absurd thought rose that she somehow knew of my pursuit and had purposely defeated it.

She was downstairs, sitting alone before the fireplace in the reception hall, reading. She dropped her book and ran toward me, rather at me, slid the last ten feet of it with her head down, her arms flung wide, and welcomed me with a hearty hug.

“Are we?” I asked, holding her.

“Coxey, silly dear! All this time we have been.”

THE END