“Not unmercifully—lethally. What about him?”
“Only that I rather believe he’s going to make people sit up. I’ve got something of his here that strikes an entirely new note—”
“Another?” Frenside groaned.
Tarrant’s lips narrowed; but after a moment he went on: “Yes, the phrase is overworked. But I don’t use it in the blurb sense. This boy has had the nerve to go back to a quiet, almost old-fashioned style: no jerks, no paradoxes—not even afraid of lingering over his transitions; why, even the title …”
Halo, mindful of Frenside’s expectation of a whiskey and soda, rose and went into the dining room to remind the maid. She reflected, not ill-humouredly, that it would be easier for Lewis to get through with the business of appropriating her opinions if she stayed out of hearing while he was doing it; and she lingered a few minutes, musing pleasurably over the interest of their editorial venture, and of the part Vance Weston might be going to play in it. She had believed in him from the first; and her heart exulted at the thought that he was already fulfilling his promise.
“If he keeps up to this standard he may be the making of The Hour; and when he finds himself an important literary figure he’ll take a different view of his future. We’re not likely ever to hear of his engagement again,” she thought, irresistibly reassured; and she decided that she must manage, as often as possible, to keep an evening free for their Dante readings. When Lewis went to his men’s dinners it would be easy. …
As she reentered the library she heard Frenside’s gruff laugh, and her husband saying: “Damned cheek, eh? Just told me in so many words he couldn’t come to the office that day because he had to go and see his girl. … Seems the poor devil’s going to be married; and who do you suppose she is? Why, one of those down-at-the-heel Tracys at Paul’s Landing. … Halo, my dear, did you know you were going to have your new genius for a cousin?”
XXI
“Where are we going? You’ll see,” Vance said with a confident laugh.
He stood with Laura Lou on the doorstep of a small gingerbread-coloured house in a rustic-looking street bordered with similar habitations. Her bare hand lay on his sleeve, and the gold band on her fourth finger seemed to catch and shoot back all the fires of the morning.
It was one of those windless December days when May is in the air, and it seems strange not to see grass springing and buds bursting. The rutty street lay golden before Vance and Laura Lou, and as they came out of the Methodist minister’s house they seemed to be walking straight into the sun.
Vance had made all his plans, but had imparted them to no one, not even to his bride. The religious ceremony, it was true, had been agreed on beforehand, as a concession to her prejudices, and to her fear of her mother. When Mrs. Tracy learned of the marriage it must appear to have been performed with proper solemnity. Not that Vance had become irreligious; but, since his elementary course in philosophy had shown him that the religion he thought he had invented was simply a sort of vague pantheism, and went back in its main lines to the dawn of metaphysics, he had lost interest in the subject, or rather in his crude vision of it. What he wanted now was to learn what others had imagined, far back in the beginnings of thought; and he could see no relation between the colossal dreams and visions amid which his mind was moving and the act of standing up before a bilious-looking man with gold teeth, in a room with a Rogers statuette on the sideboard, and repeating after him a patter of words about God and Laura Lou—and having to pay five dollars for it.
Well, it was over now, and didn’t much matter anyhow; and everything to come after was still his secret. Laura Lou had not been inconveniently curious: she had behaved like a good little girl before the door opens on the Christmas tree. It was enough for her, Vance knew, to stand there looking up at him, her hand on his arm, his ring on her finger; from that moment everything she was, or wanted, was immersed and lost in himself. But his own plans had been elaborately worked out; he was in the state of lucid ecstasy when no material detail seems too insignificant to be woven into the pattern of one’s bliss.
“Come,” he said, “there’s just time to catch the train.” They hurried along the straggling streets of the little Long Island town, and reached the station as the last passengers were scrambling to their places. They found two seats at one end of the car, where they could sit, hand locked in hand, while the train slid through interminable outskirts and finally reached an open region of trees and fields. For a while neither spoke. Laura Lou, her head slightly turned toward the window, was watching the landscape slip by with a wide-eyed attention, so that Vance caught only the curve of her cheek and the light shining through the curls about her ear. There was something almost rigidly attentive in her look and attitude, as though she were a translucent vessel so brimming with happiness that she feared to move or speak lest it should overflow. The fear communicated itself to him, and as they sat there, hand in hand, he felt as if they were breathlessly watching a magic bird poised just before them, which the least sound might put to flight. “My dove,” he thought, “we’re watching my dove. …”
At length she turned and said in a whisper (as if not to frighten the dove): “Mother’ll come home soon and
