Daphne Dean Read online

  She was very lovely there in the moonlight, with her trailing gown of chiffon and that one great glorious jewel reflecting its gleam in thousands of prisms. She had never been so lovely before, perhaps, with the soft cloud of hair about her face and her eyes starry and wistful. But Keith Morrell was not looking at her. He was hearing her father's swordlike voice cutting down upon his visions and telling out in unmistakable words truths that Keith had drifted along without perceiving before. He was seeing a lot of things now, as he had never thought of them before, knowing that one cannot make two wrongs a right by wishing them so. Knowing that he himself had been falling from his own standards, or he would never have got so far as to be part of a scene like this.

  They were almost to the lighthouse when he spoke: "Your father is right," he said, more as if he were thinking aloud, "absolutely right. I had no right for a moment to think that I could ask you to marry me. I had no right to think that I, and the only life I could give you, would satisfy you, instead of the things to which you have been accustomed."

  "But listen, dear," she said, and her voice was honey-sweet as he had never heard it before, "there is absolutely no need for you to take the matter in that heroic way. There is absolutely no need for you to be a martyr, poor but plodding. I told you that before. Father has been trying to make you see that tonight. He will put you in a year's time where we can be rich and independent and live our lives as we please. He wants to do that for me. He is entirely willing to do it for you, because he sees that you are a bright young man and able to--"

  But Keith stopped short on the sand and looked down at her.

  "Don't!" he said, and his voice almost frightened her. "I told you before that I could never do what your father has suggested. I could never take money from poor, helpless, duped people no matter how legally it appeared to be done, nor how well I got away with it. I would not have come here tonight if I had known this was to be brought up again. I do not want a wife who has to be a martyr, nor one who thinks I am a fanatic. If married people do not think alike and work out their lives together, there is nothing ahead of them but sorrow."

  "Oh, there is always divorce," laughed Anne, smilingly with the idea of making light of the whole matter.

  "Not for me!" said Keith quickly. "Never! I would not go into marriage with such a possibility ahead."

  "But Keith!" she said and suddenly threw all her young passion into her voice. "Do you love your profession better than you love me? Don't you love me? Don't you want me?" And she suddenly flung her soft arms about his neck, reaching up to draw his proud head down to her and lay her warm cheek against his breast, her body clinging close to his as she looked up into his face, yielding herself to his nearness as she had never done before.

  Startled, he looked down at her, saw her beauty but saw something more, her determination, the cunning way in which she was wielding her power as a woman to force a victory. Almost the flesh leaped up to meet her call, almost the temptation of her loveliness in his arms broke down his barriers, and she saw it and pressed her advantage.

  "Keith, I love you so!" she whispered. "You will do this for me, won't you? You won't be so proud and stubborn. You will yield and do as Father says, just for a little, little while, and then we'll be rich and happy and--"

  She had lifted her face till her lips could reach his, and she laid them warm and tender upon his mouth and kissed him, with such a kiss as all hell's most beautiful temptations could not rival. But suddenly he drew back, lifting his head away from that kiss, putting up his hands to take her arms from about his neck. It was as if some power outside him were compelling him to this action.

  "Do you mean you could not love me unless I was rich? You would not have love enough to work side by side with me and wait for my success when it came?" His voice was stern; his eyes searched her face for the truth. He stood, holding her delicate wrists, looking down at her, the little pretty thing with her white trailing gown there in the moonlight, with her kisses spurned upon her lips and an angry light flaming up from the deep mysteries of her dark eyes.

  "Oh, Keith, don't be silly! Why should I when there's neither sense nor reason in your folly? If you really loved me, you would not be willing to let me go in poverty for long months or years, and you would never really get where you could have the things I want. You know you wouldn't. Keith, don't you love me better than all those silly ideas?" She tried to lift her arms again and put them about his neck. "Don't you love me, dearest?"

  She breathed the words softly, with lure in their caressing notes, but Keith held her hands firmly down before him and looking into her beautiful eyes could find nothing in them to trust.

  "I'm not sure that I do!" he said slowly.

  Anne Casper stood aghast, staring in horror and growing disgust at him for an instant, and then she cried out in wrath: "You unspeakable fool!" she said, and wrenching her hand from his grasp she lifted it and struck him sharply across his mouth. Then she turned and fled down the silver-sanded way in the moonlight, her white gown floating around her like a ghostly cloud, and twice she turned her head and shouted back, "I hate you! I hate you!"

  He watched her go into the silvery distance, with the vast sea beating in soft rhythm at her side, and the great white marble mansion that was her summer home in the distance. Above that melody of the sea he heard her voice again, more faintly, echoing back: "I--hate--you!" as she mounted white and ghostlike the marble steps and disappeared into her father's house.

  Chapter 13

  Keith Morrell, as he stood for an instant where she had left him on the sand, and watched her vanish into the marble palace, had a feeling that he had just been standing on the brink of a deep abyss, into which he was about to be drawn to great depths of calamity, and that a Power behind him somewhere had suddenly reached out and drawn him back into safety.

  He didn't understand it. He didn't try to reason it out. He was filled with a great awe and humiliation. Awe that he had been saved in a way he didn't understand, humiliation that he had ever got himself into such jeopardy.

  Then he came to himself and began to walk. Straight on into the silver distance he kept his gaze and took great strides across the hard sand. Past the marble mansion where he had just been dining, without looking back at it, with no thought for his hat and bag that he had left there. He did not look to the right nor the left. His only thought was to get away. If the girl who had but a few minutes before said in such dulcet tones, "I love you!" was watching him, at least she would have no satisfaction in his passing. Her words of hate were still ringing in his ears, and his face was still smarting where she had struck him. There was a long scratch where the jewels on her hand had gouged his flesh, but he was not aware of it. His spirit was too deeply shaken to notice mere physical stings.

  Yet it was not merely what the girl had done to him that stirred him so deeply. It was that he felt it was all somehow his own fault, and he was ashamed. He should never have gone after a girl like this in the first place. He had got away from his own natural standards that were his inheritance from both Father and Mother, or he never would have gone after such a girl. He had known from the start that she was not his kind, that the world and its interests were foremost in her thoughts, that she had no visions of home and little children and a loving relationship with the man she married. As he walked on through the bright night, mile after mile by the sea, he was seeing himself as he had come down through the months since he had first met her, to this night. How she had caught his fancy at the first, by that slow lifting of her lashes, the too-intimate way she had of looking into his eyes, giving him the feeling that her soul had leaped to his at first sight.

  Fool that he had been! How he had conjured the hope that her eyes had meant what they said. That they spoke of a great and sudden passion for him that she had never felt before for any man, a passion that would carry her anywhere with no limit at all so she might please him! How she had made him sure that she was the answer to all his dreams!

&n
bsp; As he looked back he could see that she had never given him much joy of companionship in all their brief acquaintance. Their intimacy had consisted only in that tantalizing lure that was ever leading him onward to hope for precious things ahead that never quite came in sight. He remembered how she had never let him kiss her when he asked but only held him off as if when she finally gave her lips they would be so much more precious because of the waiting.

  He shuddered as he walked along to think of those red lips upon his own just now, and how falsely they had been set there, only to lure him to go against his conscience. He didn't question whether there had really been love in her heart just now when she had kissed him so ravishingly. He didn't seem to care. She had suddenly turned to clay before his vision, mere clay, and all her passion unholy.

  How was a man to live with himself after a revelation like that of what he himself had done, of how he had been deceived?

  Yet he must not blame her. She had only been acting out her true self, and in a sense he had never been deceived in her; he had only conjured a vision of her that if he had listened to his own common sense he would have known long ago was not true. Perhaps he had known it all the time, only he didn't want to believe it.

  As he walked on mile after mile, the breeze blowing in his face, gradually his mind was clearing, and he began to see himself as he had never seen himself before. He began to see everything with a clarified vision. His whole life passed in review before him, as if God had been trying to show him a part of the original specifications of himself in the mind of his Creator.

  Not that he put this in so many words. Not that he at all understood that it was God doing this. It wasn't as definite as that. It was just like seeing a picture or reading a story, but through it all a truth dawned upon him that if there was a Creator, and he had never really taken on modern ways enough to doubt that basic truth, then He must have had some idea in creating souls; and if God had indeed created them as individuals, as he had been taught in his early youth, then He must have had some reason for it all, some plan in mind. What that reason was Keith had no conception, but dimly he could realize that because of the parents he had been given, and his early rearing, the plan must have been something entirely different from the one Anne Casper had for him. If that was so, a man hadn't a right to break through God's plan and give his life an entirely different turning, had he? It would be like that man up in Boston who was so insistent on sticking an annex on the building they had planned for him, an annex that would have been utterly out of harmony with the original plan, already well under way.

  He went on and on thinking these strange new thoughts, passing many beautiful seaside places of millionaires like Mr. Casper, taking no note of them save to realize that they were of the same alien world from which he was walking away. He did not stop to think where he was going, nor what he was going to do next. He just walked on, a tall, personable young man in a dinner coat, bareheaded, with his hair blowing in the sea breeze, his face stern and white and set ahead.

  The fine estates and wide private beaches were past now and a boardwalk appeared on the land side, but still he walked on upon the sand, keeping as close to the water as possible. People were still walking on the boardwalk, and long lines of electric lights still outlined the shore. Occasional bursts of dance music were wafted from colossal hotels and piers jutting out to the ocean. At last one of these more extensive than the rest stopped his progress and drove him from the sand. But still he walked on, striding rapidly as if he had been sent for, as if life and death depended upon his going.

  He was passing through one resort after another now, and it was very late. He did not realize how far he must have come. The lights were out in most cottages, though most of the hotels were in full swing. But there were fewer people abroad, and the general air of night shutting down at last was about him. He suddenly realized that he was very tired. He felt as if he had come halfway across the continent, and it came to him to wonder why he was going on at such a hectic pace and what he was going to do next, anyway. Why was he so upset? Did he care so much for that heartless girl who had breathed her love and her hate almost in the same breath?

  Then it came to him that it was something deeper even than love or hate that had stirred him. It was his own awakening to the fact that he was a fool that hurt, and he was dazed, because he had regarded himself up to now as a rather wise and cautious person with high standards and fine vision. And now he knew that he had not been any better than others who had not his standards and vision, and he was mortified at himself. He had got no further than self, as yet, but the revelation had shaken him greatly.

  Having owned this much to himself, however, he felt exceedingly weary. He wanted to lie down and sleep before he thought any more about it or made any plans. But it was very late and he was in a strange district. Moreover he had neither hat nor baggage. Would they take him in at a hotel that way? And if they wouldn't, how far must he walk before he found a train or trolley or bus available at that hour on Saturday night?

  The realization of his predicament brought him to his senses and back to a practical world. He stepped into the next hotel he came to and asked a few questions. The sleepy night clerk shook his head. Not a room left, and he didn't know any nearby place, either, that had rooms left. It was a busy season and a popular resort. Yes, there was a bus line to New York from the next village, about a mile and a half farther up the coast. He called up for the schedule. The bus was supposed to stop there at three a.m. He glanced at the clock. He might make it if he hurried. No, there were no taxis around here, all gone for the night.

  Keith hurried out and started his weary feet springing on to the next village and just missed the three o'clock bus by a half minute. He saw it wending a hurried way down the highway as he came almost within hailing distance. But there was a night watchman crossing the street to climb into his car, and he told him there would be another bus at five o'clock, so he settled on a hard bench by the sea and prepared to wait the two hours.

  There was plenty of time now to consider his past, his present and future, but strangely a languor crept over him, and he didn't seem to be able to think of anything except how good it would feel to stretch out in bed and sleep. Presently the sea before him grew vague, and several times he dozed off, coming to himself with a start and a memory of Daphne Deane's laughing face smiling at him as they gathered flowers together for the supper table in her home. A nice home! A rare family, where he might have found friendships. But somehow he felt shut out from everywhere now. What would Daphne Deane say if she knew what he had been living through, knew that it was all his fault that he had got into such a mess? Besides, Daphne Deane was interested in a minister, so why should he think of her? She was no more of his world than this other girl. Her world was a safe, sane, sweet home place where people lived honestly, happily, thought often of God, and remembered little boys praying by their mother's knee. He had somehow "unhomed" himself and didn't belong anywhere. In allowing himself to consider getting into the big, selfish social world, he had even lost his hold on the world that was his own. He was like a man without a country. He didn't belong anywhere.

  The bus finally ambled up, and he got on board and went to sleep again, a deep desolation in his heart.

  It was still early morning in New York when he arrived at his apartment, disheveled and weary, thankful only that there was no one about and he might get into his bed at last.

  Meantime, down at Rosedale, Daphne Deane had awakened early as she often did on Sunday morning to have a little quiet time to herself putting the final study on her Sunday school lesson for her class of girls. The morning was dewy and sweet, and as she looked out of her window toward the old Morrell house she could see the dew on the grass down by the garden paths and across the lawn, and she noticed with some surprise there were places where the dew had been brushed away as by a heavy foot, in regular footsteps coming from the back of the house and crossing the well-cut lawn on which Donald had spent a
good part of his Saturday afternoon. She studied the footprints in perplexity, for they were distinctly marked as the dew glistened all around on the short turf. They went straight from the driveway by the back door, across the lawn in front of the garden, and over to the far fence that led to the other road. Could they belong to Crowell's great Saint Bernard dog who sometimes roamed the neighborhood? No, they did not look like dog's tracks; they were distinctly a man's footprints. But perhaps it was only a milkman taking some bottles across lots to a house on the other road. She dismissed them from her mind and took up her Bible.

  But before she opened her Bible she knelt to pray, as she always did before her Bible study, and strangely the thought of Keith Morrell came to her mind, like a heavy burden pressed upon her. Probably it was looking at the old house that reminded her of him, or glancing across to Miss Lynd's cottage on the other side of the meadow that made her remember her promise to pray for him. And so first on her lips was a petition for the young man.

  "Oh, Father, if he doesn't know Thee, or if he has just wandered away, take the veil away from his eyes and heart so that he may see Thee and come to know a precious fellowship with Thee, his Lord and Savior. And if he be in any perplexity, or doubt, or temptation, wilt Thou keep him and free him from the power of Satan? Oh, Lord, I claim Thy victory on Calvary over Satan, in his behalf!"

  She lingered several minutes upon her knees praying, and when she rose there was a lovely peace on her brow and in her eyes. She went and stood a moment again at the window looking out and thinking of the young man, wondering why it was that she could not get him out of her mind. She noticed that the footprints were not so plain now as they had been a few minutes before. The sun was fast pulling up the dew and erasing them from the grass. Perhaps it had only been a dog after all. Then she turned away and sat down to her study. The quiet peace of the morning stole in at her window, free from the clatter and rumble of the waking world that would presently begin. There was only the high, sweet note of a bird in a treetop nearby, the sound of an early church bell a mile away, and the breath of the honeysuckle under the window.