# Dear Old Dick

Extracted from "Smith's Magazine", Feb 1918, pp. 748–762. Accompanying illustrations by R. L. Lambdin may be omitted.
Dear Old Dick
by A. M. and C. N. Williamson Authors of “Flower Forbidden,” “The Lightning Conductor,” etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY R. L. LAMBDIN
He loved greatly and—for her sake—dared greatly; then he went back to France.
EVERYBODY called him dear old Dick. He was not old, but he was that sort of man. Now men were saying to each other in the club:
“Dear old Dick Cobbold's got back!”
He was breakfasting at the club, just off the Lafayette from Bordeaux after a year of helping the American Ambulances in France. No one knew why he had gone to France, though there had been a little gossip concerning some reason other than benevolence and a wish for adventure. Now no one knew why he had come back, though perhaps there would be some talk about that, too, when more people heard of his arrival in New York. Indeed, already the first whisper was starting at a table not far from Dick's. Two men were there, not friends of his. They knew all about him, however—almost more than he knew himself.
“Vamosed just after she married, and turns up just when it seems as if the lovers' knot had worked a bit loose.”
“Stow it, you duffer! He'll hear you!”
Dick ate his breakfast whenever his friends would let him, and gazed out of the window. It was the end of May, a day of sunshine, and New York looked almost as good as any other place in the world, he thought. His face was thin and weather-beaten to a deep red brown, for he had been driving a motor ambulance all winter. There was the expression in his eyes that comes to those who have seen war—as if little things in life didn't matter. Otherwise, he was the same old Dick, and only the observant would have noticed a change in his humorous placidity. Still, if there hadn't been a change, he wouldn't have come back—he couldn't. He had come, not for the reason the men who wished they knew him were discussing, not because he'd heard news of any one he cared for, but simply because he had begun to feel that the little things of life didn't matter.
Of course what is little and what is big depends upon the point of view. But Dick thought his view was: “When all the young men of Europe are giving their lives or limbs for an ideal, what does such a detail as whether you're happy or unhappy weigh in the scheme?” He wasn't tired of his work in France, but there were other men, younger men—Dick was forty-three—eager to grab it, and he had work, neglected for a year, in New York. In his heart he knew that he was doing a braver thing in coming back than in driving an ambulance to the firing line. But the way to test himself was to get in touch with a certain menage. He'd taken a room at the club for a few days, for when his ward had married a year ago, he had discharged his housekeeper and her companion and let the old family home in Washington Square. Therefore, he was adrift.
He went to his room after breakfast and took up the telephone. There was no need to look for the number; it was on Mrs. Gordon Philipps' writing paper, and he had had half a dozen letters from her in France.
“Hello! Who's this talking? Mrs. Philipps' maid? Mrs. Philipps in? Will you ask her to come to the phone?”
Dick had a minute to wait. His heart began to bump, which annoyed him intensely. Bad beginning! Remember, old sport, little things don't matter in this tragic world to-day! But, oh, her voice again, after all these months! Heavens, how it was sweet to hear, and how it hurt—and what a dashed fool he was!
“Hello, my good kid!” he calmly answered. “Yes, it's Dick—nobody else. Ha, ha! You're surprised? Why, yes, that's what I wanted. Wondered if you'd recognize my hooter. Oh, well, my partner was ass enough to think I could decide a certain legal question better than he could. Besides, there were lots of chaps waiting to jump at my job over there. Yes, thanks, fit as a fiddle. Do give me time to ask how you are, and—— What? Not up to much? Nothing serious, I hope? Spring fever! Ha, ha! But your voice doesn't sound very chirpy, kid. Forgive your not writing oftener—and such short letters? Great Scott, why should a radiant bride fuss over her poor old guardian? I thought you were jolly good to let me hear as often as you did. I know how busy you were, just living! There was the new flat to settle into—and everything. And all Don's friends—and your own. I always understood. No, don't know how long I'll stay or whether I shall go back. Only docked a couple of hours ago—the Lafayette. Plenty of time to make up my mind. But the question is, when am I going to see you—and Don?”
“Do come and have lunch with me at half past twelve. Come early,” said the voice that sounded so sweet, even over a wire. “Don's away over Sunday.”
“Oh! Thanks. I'll come with all the joy in life.”
Dick hoped his “Oh!” didn't reveal itself as a gasp of surprise. He believed that he'd got it under control at birth. But—Don away over Sunday! This was Wednesday. And was he mistaken, or had Nell's tone dropped to dreariness? Probably that was his morbid imagination. Why shouldn't Don be away? Even a writer of plays and novels, who has no boring business, must leave his worshiped wife sometimes for one reason or another after a year of marriage. Never on earth had a man and a girl been so desperately in love—so had thought the girl and the man concerned—as Gordon Philipps and Helen Sands, They had found it impossible to part without anguish for more than a few hours at a time. but life can't go on at such a pitch. Everyday things must be attended to, in spite of love, or even because of it,
Already it was eleven o'clock, and Dick had just finished breakfast, but he intended to have an immense appetite for Nell's luncheon, to show how jolly and happy he was. That wonderful apartment of hers—which his wedding present had furnished, and of which her short letters had told much, too much—was up in the Seventies. Dick arrived in a taxi at twelve-fifteen, having been bidden to “come early;” and as he was ushered in by a story-book-looking maid, he saw his late ward hovering in a doorway. Once she'd have bounced at him with a shriek of joy, but now, of course, she was a dignified married woman, with appearances to preserve before a servant.
She stood with the light at her back, holding out both hands, and when he grasped them to shake with brotherly heartiness, she drew him into the parlor or boudoir or whatever it was, still keeping her back to the light.
“Dear, dear old Dick!” she said. “Aren't you going to kiss your poor little kiddy?”
Dick shut his eyes and kissed her forehead. Her hair smelled like violets. His lips brushed the soft waves. He couldn't help that. And if he hadn't shut his eyes——”
“Why do you say 'poor'?” he asked when that ordeal was over.
“Oh—no reason—a slip of the tongue!” she hurried to explain, “Tell me al! about yourself.”
If he had told her all!
She sat down at one end of a sofa and made him sit facing her. Perhaps it was only by accident that her back was turned to the window, for a girl with a complexion like Nell's needn't fear, but Dick began to wonder about those changes of tone and “slips of the tongue” and “accidents.” She wanted to hear about himself, and she hadn't let him ask for Don. Was that an accident, too?
He told a few things, because he had a queer feeling that Nell was screening herself behind his talk, gaining breath, finding a pose; and if she wished to do that, he would give her the chance. Luncheon was announced promptly. Dick hadn't been fifteen minutes alone with his hostess when the break came. It was a relief as well as a break, and at the table, conversation was easy. While the maid flitted about, Dick gave “the kid” news from “somewhere in France,” and “the kid” gave Dick news of everywhere in New York. They hardly said a personal thing, but Dick's eyes soon grew used to the dimness of half-drawn green curtains, and he knew it wasn't the under-sea light that lent Nell's face its tragic pallor.
She had lost her prettiness and gained beauty in a strange, alarming way. Her eyes were too big, and the shadows underneath turned them black. Her long throat was pathetically slim, and her features were sharpened, so that Dick got the impression of her profile as an ivory carving.
“What's happened to the girl?” Dick puzzled; and he was wondering, after they'd gone back to the next room for coffee, whether it would be possible or wise to have it out with her. He was wondering this when the problem was suddenly solved, just by a simple “Do you remember?”
The words—the homely little incident they called up—brought tears bursting from “the kid's” eyes. She laughed shakily, but it was no use.
“You've got to tell old Dick what's the matter,” he heard himself saying.
And then down went her head on the shoulder that had never failed her for nineteen happy years—radiantly happy years. No wonder that “Do you remember?” had made her cry! Nell's father and mother, very young, almost children, had been killed when she had been a baby. The child had been left to Dick, her father's best chum at Yale.
The whole story came pouring out at last, with tears that had the curious double power to drench Dick's sleeve and scorch his heart. Don didn't love her any more. He was in love with some one else. He'd gone to stay in the same country house with that some one else now. Oh, yes, it was true! No good trying to comfort her by saying it wasn't. It was. Everybody was talking about Gordon Philipps and Mrs. Lane.
“Oh, she's a Mrs., is she?” mumbled Dick.
“Yes, a widow, from California—or somewhere! She's the kind of woman born to be a widow!”
“Young?”
“Don thinks she's young. And he thinks she's the most beautiful, fascinating thing he ever saw. He can't keep away from her. He can't take his eyes off her. When she's in a room, he doesn't see any one else, doesn't hear any one else. He's like—like he used to be with me. You remember.”
“I remember well.” Dick might have added “too well.” As he spoke—Nell's head still on his shoulder, his arm round her waist—his eyes traveled to a portrait of Gordon Philipps on the wall. It was safer, because less pleasant, than looking at Mrs. Gordon Philipps' hair.
The portrait was a rough sketch in oils done by a young artist who had sprung to fame through impressionist work. The thing looked to an amateur as if it might have been done in fifteen minutes, but it simply was Gordon Philipps—dark, passionate, temperamental, obstinate, conceited, tender, impulsive, everything else good and bad that Nell's Don was at twenty-nine.
With her first sob in his arms, he let the hate flame up again. He had a right to hate Don now. He wouldn't be human if he didn't!
Dick had come pretty near to hating the fellow for taking Nell away so easily, so triumphantly. He had “crossed her life line,” as palmists would put it, just at the time when Nell had come out and Dick had begun to ask himself if it would be as unfair as he'd once thought to let his great love do its best and biggest to carry the girl off her feet. Dick had known how he felt, and must always feel, for Nell, while her hair still dangled in a long plait with a curl at the end of it. She had said, when she was a little girl, that Dick must wait for her. She would probably want to marry him when she grew up, because he was “the nicest man that ever happened.” It didn't seem fair that an hour of Gordon Philipps should blot out Dick Cobbold's nineteen years of unselfish worship.
But so it had been. The “bud” and the celebrated young playwright had rushed together in love at first sight, and the girl had adored her man of fire all the more because he was the very opposite of unselfish. He had wanted everything—and had taken it. They had been engaged when they'd known each other three wonderful days, more important than years. Two months later they had been married. And Dick had made no protest because he hadn't been sure of his motives.
In France—seeing things that had brought that new expression to his eyes—he'd tried hard to stop hating Nell's Don; but with her first sob in his arms, he let the hate flame up again, hot as a blast from a well-stoked furnace. He had a right to hate Don now. He wouldn't be human if he didn't!
But Dick was cursed with the unfortunate clearness of vision that forces a man to see both sides of a question, whether he wishes to see or not. People who see only their own side are happier and more successful in their careers, but it had always been like that with Dick. Frowning at Philipps' portrait, he couldn't help admitting that it wasn't a bad or even a weak face. The eyes were loyal, the lines of the too passionate mouth not untrue.
“Perhaps you wrong Don,” something made him suggest—“like a damned fool,” he told himself at once; for what business was it of his to defend the fellow when Nell wanted sympathy and would misunderstand argument? Still, the words were out, and Dick had to stumble on.
“If ever there was a man in love with a girl it was Gordon Philipps with you,” he reminded her. “You're prettier and sweeter than ever. He can't have got over it in twelve months. It's not done. Maybe he's studying this Mrs. Lane as a 'type' for one of his plays or stories. Maybe you and other people have jumped to the conventional conclusion——”
“If you saw them together, you wouldn't say anything as silly as that!” Nell snapped him short, flinging up her head. Her face was blurred and marred with tears as it had been sometimes when she had been a child, flying to dear old Dick for comfort. His heart yearned over her.
“My girl!” he thought. “Good God, why shouldn't I get her back? It all depends on what I do now—her whole future—mine.”
He felt this with sudden, overwhelming force. There was a thing he must do—a decision he must make, for Nell had called to him and he mustn't fail. It was just at this instant, while the thought was taking form in his head, dazzling him with possibilities, that she—struck by the look on his face, perhaps—wailed:
“Oh, dear old Dick, why didn't you make me love you, and marry me yourself? I should always have stayed happy then!”
Dick broke out in a queer laugh.
“Easier said than done, my good kid!” he growled. “A fairy thistledown like you wasn't for my catching!”
“You could have caught me young and have done anything you liked—if you'd liked. But of course you didn't like. Why should you? What a self-centered pig I am! Anyhow, it's too late to think of what might have been.”
There was no suitable reply to give that Dick dared to give. Body and soul, he flamed to snatch her against his heart, instead of holding her in that kind-brother way—flamed to answer:
“Is it too late? You talk of leaving Don. Do it! Divorce him and marry me! I went to France because I'd loved you too much and too long. I love you better than ever now!”
But it wasn't fair to catch the girl up at a wild word forced from her by hurt love and pride. He must get away while self-control held and think over the situation in some sort of calmness—think what was best for Nell; never mind himself. As for Don, damn him—just simply damn him!
All that Dick ventured to say was that Nell was not a self-centered pig. She was a dear kid and a darling. He, Dick, was going to do something—he couldn't quite tell what yet, because he didn't know, but something.
“But I don't see—what you can do,” she said, looking at him in the suddenly interested way Dick had hoped for. “Unless—— Oh, Dick, if you could manage to meet them together, without Don suspecting that you know! I'd give anything for you to do that—now—quick—while they're both staying at the Teddy Jamesons'. I don't mean to spy—I'd not ask you to do that, even if you would. But I'd love to know what you'd think of her—in comparison with me, and—and—— Oh, I can't explain exactly what good it would do, but it would be a comfort. It would help.”
“If it would be a comfort and help, that settles it. Somehow it's got to be done,” said Dick. “When you say they're staying with the Teddy Jamesons, I suppose it's Tuxedo?”
“Yes. Miriam Jameson has taken up Mrs. Lane like anything. Miriam never liked me, you know. She disliked me before I came out, and I'm sure she's invited Don and Freda Lane out of sheer spite.”
“Didn't she invite you?” Dick made no comment on Nell's assertion, because he knew that she was right about Miriam. Jameson, and at the back of his mind he knew why, though he wasn't conceited enough to encourage certain reminiscences.
“Ye-es, she invited me. She said, 'Teddy and I are going to open Lake Vale next week. It's very early, but Freda Lane's feeling rather seedy, and the country will do her good. I shall have a little party for her—several little parties—but only her and you and Don—if you'll come—to stay the whole week; others in relays. Don and she get on so well together. She says he “rests her nerves and wakes up her intellect.” And I know you're too sensible to be jealous?' What would you have said, Dick, if any one had invited you like that?”
“I'd have told them to go to the devil!”
“That's just what I'd have adored telling Miriam to do. But, instead, I sweetly cooed that I'd love Don to go—to her, not to the devil!—and that I was desolated because I'd heaps of engagements—personal sorts of engagements, which Don wasn't in—that I couldn't break.”
“Did you sweetly coo also to Don?”
“No, I didn't! I'm past cooing to him about Mrs. Lane. I lost my temper two weeks ago, after a party at the Jamesons' here in town, when Don danced six times with that woman and forgot our dances. His apologies only made things worse. They sickened me, and I told him so. He was furious. Since then—oh, Dick, we hardly speak, except about the weather or something like that—unless before the servants! Life can't go on like this! I feel as if I should soon die! It would be the best way out, for both of us.”
“Allow me to differ with you there,” said Dick. “Well, when I promise to do a thing, my motto is 'Do it now.' I'm going to accept an invitation to visit the Jamesons. I expect it will come by long-distance phone to the club this afternoon or evening.”
“How will you manage it without Don thinking——”
“Mr. Philipps has been calling me a dryad,” she announced.
“It will manage itself. Old 'Goggles' Farrar was having breakfast when I blew into the club this morning. He mentioned that he and his wife were just off by motor to Tuxedo for two days with the Teddy J's. Wanted to know if I sent them my love. Luckily I said yes. Next minute I wished I'd asked Goggles not to tell them I'd come home. Thought it would have saved me a lie over the phone, as an invitation looked a sure thing. Now the only lie I'll have to tell will be about my delight in accepting. You see how easy it's going to work out.”
Nell did see, and became instantly resigned to the thought of losing Dick, in order that he might rush back to the Wanderers and be ready to hurl himself at the telephone.
“You're an angel to me,” she said with eyes and voice, at the door, whither she had almost urged him. “I feel better—not because you can help me with Don—nobody could. I believe I wouldn't take him back now if he'd come. But you help me with myself. If—if we part, Don and I, do you think you could take me back?”
“Do I?” he echoed noncommittally, and then fled before she could go into details.
He didn't hurry to the Wanderers. Farrar couldn't quite yet have accomplished his carrier-pigeon act. If Dick reached the club in an hour, he'd be ahead of any message. Meanwhile, the hour was his. He planned to use it in deciding something—that big thing which was to seal Nell's future and his own. But he decided nothing. He walked miles, through streets that he didn't see—though he'd been homesick for them in France—and thought and thought. He couldn't see, or wouldn't see—wretchedly, he wasn't sure which—why it would not be the happiest ending to this broken love story for Nell to divorce Gordon Philipps and marry him.
Dick had feebly pleaded Philipps' cause and suggested a misunderstanding, but the man was just the sort to commit some mad, irrevocable act through rage, if not through love. From what Nell had said, apparently she had done her best and worst to arouse that rage. Perhaps she was to blame for tactlessness, but Dick had no inclination to accuse her. He wanted to free Nell, and he blessed fate for beckoning him across the sea in time.
At last, his one pretence at decision was to tell himself, “If I see a sign of anything serious, I shall be justified in advising Nell to leave the fellow. Afterward——
He didn't let his thought go further, but his blood was bounding as if he had won a race when he reached the Wanderers.
Some time later, the expected invitation came, like the homing dove to the ark. Miriam Jameson and “Ted” were enchanted to hear that dear old Dick had returned. He was begged to board the next train and make them a visit.
“There's nobody here,” Miriam assured him, “but the Farrars and Don Philipps—Nell took cold and couldn't come—and a pretty new pal of mine. You'll like her. All men do.”
Dick had to be urged a little, but finally consented to transfer himself that night to Tuxedo. He would arrive late, but Miriam promised a motor at the train and his favorite lobster à la Newburg afterward.
It was at the altar of the lobster that Dick had his first sight of Mrs. Lane. She'd evidently heard of him and looked forward to the meeting as an event with spice in it. He had been the guardian of Mrs. Philipps when she was Miss Sands! Don also showed up at supper and behaved with discretion. If he were self-conscious under Dick's eyes, he betrayed no awkwardness; but then one couldn't imagine Gordon Philipps being awkward. His place was between his hostess and Mrs. Lane, and he paid no more attention to one than to the other. Yet there was the look in Mrs. Lane's eyes of a woman who knows herself the center of a Situation.
“I'd bet my boots,” Dick thought, “that all the while she's talking ambulance to me, she's touching Don's foot under the table.”
Miriam and Don both asked—Miriam cordially, Don courteously—if Dick had seen Nell. Yes, he had, Dick replied. He'd phoned, and Nell had invited him to feed with her—said she'd a cold or something and hadn't been able to go to the country with Don.
“I had to leave soon after lunch,” Dick went on. “An engagement at the club.”
The way that Don listened to this ininformation about his wife's doings was perfect. He was interested, and yet might have had news, almost as late, himself. Once or twice during the meal, Dick caught him gazing at Mrs. Lane's profile; yet “caught” wasn't quite the fair word. Don was known and confessed as an adorer of beauty—beauty of form, color, or sound. He let himself be carried away by enthusiasm for poetry, for music, for pictures, and Mrs. Lane's profile was lovely to look at. Dick looked at it, too, but mostly at her full face, for he sat nearly opposite. He didn't mind staring, because he saw that Freda Lane was one of those women who like men to stare and who wonder if anything's wrong when they don't.
Never before had he deliberately set out to analyse a woman, not only to read her mind, but to dissect her beauty. But now, while he good-naturedly answered questions across the table or told stories of war time in France, his humorous eyes had the lady under a microscope. She had quantities of red hair wound round her small head, the bands kept in place by very green jade hairpins. Her complexion had a kind of magnolia pallor, and her lips were as ruddy as coral. Her eyebrows and lashes were dark auburn brown; and at night her long, softly glancing eyes seemed almost black. She wore a green dress, and if to Dick occurred the idea of a lily in its sheath, what must have been the simile in Philipps' romantic mind?
“Grand siren make-up,” Dick said to himself. “Couldn't be better done. But that's just it—who did it, she or God? I'm not in love with her, thank Heaven, so I shall know by the light of day.”
But there he was out in his reckoning. Either she was too clever for him, or he wasn't clever enough for her. Mrs. Lane was exquisite in the morning when he saw her next, dressed in simple white with a big Leghorn hat, a pearly figure of grace against a background of trees. The trees were American pretending to be Italian cypresses and, with a few marble pillars, they surrounded on three sides the immense swimming pool that was the Jamesons' pride. Besides the pillars and the carved benches and the grass-seamed pavement, there was a temple of marble. That pretended, too, like the cedars, for it wasn't a temple, really. It was a place where you undressed for a swim in the pool, and in that way it was being utilized by all the party with two exceptions, when Dick came along. The two exceptions were Mrs. Lane and Gordon Philipps—Gordon, who'd already been in the water and who had come out to talk to Mrs. Lane; Mrs. Lane, who sat on a marble bench to be talked to, while Gordon, in some inches of indigo-blue bathing costume, sprawled at her feet.
“You're like a John Lavery and an Alma Tadema on the same canvas,” said Dick, who had a smattering of artist lore.
Mrs. Lane smiled up from under the shadow of her floppy hat—that pearl-gray shadow that comes out of doors among trees and is loved by artists. She couldn't guess that, behind his admiring eyes, the nice man was saying:
“Good Lord, is it paint and dye or nature? Is she old looking for twenty-two or young looking for—goodness knows what?”
“Mr. Philipps has been calling me a dryad,” she announced.
“A twentieth-century dryad, dressed in petals from Paris,” Don elaborated hastily, afraid of being laughed at.
“Why not now be kind and give us a nymph or naiad effect?” asked Dick. “The other two ladies are going to do their best. But you——” He broke off on that emphasis—a bold compliment.
“I've been teasing her to come into the water, but she won't,” said Don. “It's warmed, you know, and only four feet deep. I'd soon teach her to swim and to float like a pond lily.”
“I didn't bring my bathing dress,” Mrs. Lane objected.
“Miriam has them, all shapes and sizes and styles.”
The lovely lady shook her head.
“The truth is I don't care for this sort of thing,” she confessed. “I had a fright in the sea when I was a wee girl and my people forced me to bathe. I can't get over it. I never go into the water now, salt or fresh, except in my own bathtub! I know I'm a coward, and I'm ashamed, but I can't help it.”
Don was drawn into giving her a look that said, “Coward or heroine, what does it matter, when your beauty is a dream?”
Dick said nothing. But an odd thought waked in his head. It was about Mrs. Lane's first excuse for not going into the water. She'd excused herself because she hadn't her bathing dress. Then, when Don had swept that plea away, she had confessed that she hadn't bathed, except in her tub, since a shock when she was a child. Ladies didn't, so far as Dick knew, wear bathing costumes in their bathrooms. Now why had she made that remark about the dress? Had she a bathing dress? Had she told a white fib about her childhood's adventure because she didn't want the bother of going in to-day? Or——
It was quite a queer alternative that suggested itself to Dick. It might have been funny if the whole affair hadn't been so deadly serious to him. As it was, he wished to Heaven the thought hadn't come, because it brought in its train a chance of snatching Philipps from the siren, to hand him back to Nell. That was against Dick's interest—he could easily persuade himself against Nell's interest, too; for a man who could forget his bride of a year would go on forgetting his wife.
“If I see it's a real case of infatuation, I shall advise Nell to stick to her resolve and turn him down,” Dick had decided, on starting for Tuxedo.
Well, in spite of Don's discretion, he did see that it was such a case. If left to run its course, the infatuation might or might not last. But there it was. Nell and her husband were practically parted in spirit already. Why prolong the pain? And yet—and yet—— The girl's face rose before him, blurred with tears as, when a child, she had flown to him for comfort. Cold comfort it would be if he went back and said, “In my judgment, you can't do better than carry out your plan. Free yourself and Don.”
What if—— And then a struggle waged itself in Dick's soul, a tragic struggle, begun by the chance mention of a pretty lady's bathing dress.
The Jamesons and Farrars and perhaps Mrs. Lane were grieved when dear old Dick Cobbold got a wire from his partner recalling him to New York that day. But Nell was thankful to see him.
“Well, what do you think of her?” was the girl's first breathless question.
“I think I'll invite her to make me a country-house visit, if you'll be hostess,” was the amazing reply.
“I won't!” was Nell's answer.
“Wait! Don't decide in a hurry. You don't have to. I've not got the country house yet. But I shall get it before I'm many days older—there are plenty to let, with furniture and servants—if you'll back me up.”
Nell stared, half angry, half astonished, wholly bewildered.
“What are you driving at?” she catechized him. “Have you fallen in love with the creature yourself, or are you doing this for my sake—are you planning to—to marry her and get her out of Don's way? Stupid! As if that would do any good! As if that would make him fall back in love with me!”
Dick changed his tone and let her see that, whatever he meant, the matter was no joke.
“Look here, girl,” he said, “haven't you in old times gone blindly ahead, trusting me if I asked you to, and not been sorry in the end? Well, I ask you to do that now. I have a plan. To bring you in, on the ground floor, would spoil it. You may think I'm a fool and you may be right. Or you may be wrong. If you are wrong, there's a sporting chance that suddenly you may get Don back, just as he was before—your lover, appreciating you more than he ever did. Would that happy ending be worth trying for?”
“It would,” said Nell. “But it seems impossible. Can the dead be brought to life? Don's love for me——”
“I've seen major operations have mighty near that effect in France,” Dick replied, as if he were speaking to himself. “The dead brought to life. What do you say now? If I take a country house and invite Mrs. Lane, will you and Don come?”
“I answer for myself 'Yes,'” said Nell. “She can probably answer for him! What next?”
“Nothing, for the moment,” said Dick, still in a thoughtful way. “Except—you mustn't brutalize the machine—I mean you mustn't break with Don when he strolls in from Tuxedo. Wait. That's all you have to do. Wait. I'll do the rest.”
Dick Cobbold had more friends and more money than most people. He was every one's dear old Dick, but no one had managed to marry him yet. For these reasons and others, he was interesting. When Freda Lane found a letter from him at her flat in New York—she'd given him her address—she was flattered. It was a letter to flatter any woman:
    Dear Mrs. Lane: I want to know you better, and when I want a thing, I want it now. With the sole object of getting your society and the hope of enjoying it selfishly, I've hired a house on Shelter Island—a niceish house with lawns that touch the water—and I'm going to invite a couple of friends to chaperon you, if you'll come for a few days. Will you? And when? The sooner, the better. Yours sincerely,
Richard Cobbold.
    P. S.—The two friends I propose are Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Philipps.
“What a man!” Freda Lane thought, and laughed a pleased laugh.
She believed that Dick Cobbold was showing her a new side of his nature which no woman had seen before, not even Nell Philipps, with whom some people—among others Miriam—supposed him to be in love. This was an immense compliment, and it made Mrs. Lane like the returned traveler better than before. At first, she hadn't felt sure about him. It would be great to take both of Nell's men away, even though she couldn't make permanent use of the two as a tandem. Nell hated her so! She might as well be hated for a sheep as a lamb. Besides, Freda Lane wanted to marry a rich man. She liked Don Philipps, and if he were not precisely rich, he was making a success and a good deal of money. But unless his wife divorced him—there was no use hoping he could or would divorce her—he wasn't in the market. It was good to have two strings to your bow, to say nothing of the fun of manipulating them more or less together.
She wrote a charming answer to Dick's letter—playful, rather teasing, yet showing that his peculiarities pleased her. And she named the end of that week for the visit. She said she could “spare him three days.”
“Dick has taken a furnished house called 'The Old Cottage,' on Shelter Island,” Nell informed her husband. “He wants us to go for the weekend, and he's asking Mrs. Lane. Perhaps she told you?”
Mrs. Lane had told him, and Don had wondered, not at the invitation—any man must wish to annex that beautiful woman!—but whether Nell would consent to go, even to please Dick. Don hadn't dared to hope, and Dick wouldn't ask him without her; the party would be made up of others. But she was consenting!
Cautiously, Don explained that, having met Mrs. Lane walking on Fifth Avenue that morning—Sunday—she'd happened to mention Cobbold's letter. He'd like to go well enough, if Nell would. Evidently dear old Dick had fallen a victim!
“To the man-eater!” Nell couldn't resist that stab. “She'll find him a tough morsel.”
Don did not retort. He knew Nell was jealous. She hadn't cared to hide her feelings. At first, she'd cried, and then she'd sulked. Her society had ceased to be pleasant, and what was to happen in the future he didn't know. He no longer looked ahead, but everything seemed to be Nell's fault. Their romance was spoiled. In front of her sullen face and gloomy eyes floated the face of Freda Lane, a face whose like could not be seen twice in a man's lifetime. She had the allurement of the other woman—the woman not your wife, the woman not known to the depths, the woman who doesn't nag or sulk because you belong to her. Freda Lane possessed not only the siren charm of her coloring and temperament, but the radiant freshness of youth which Don worshiped. He had a morbid horror of age or of any sign of its approach. Perhaps, as he himself grew older, he might overcome that horror, but now it was an obsession. No fading beauty could have any appeal for Gordon Philipps. Mrs. Lane's advantage over Nell's young crudeness was that she had everything Nell lacked, while lacking nothing which Nell had.
Other things that once had made her dread the water were forgotten now that she was fighting for life.
Dick alone knew how Dick was feeling about his house party, but as for Nell, only passionate curiosity could pull her through the ordeal. To her, as well as to Mrs. Lane, it seemed extraordinary that Dick objected to inviting at least another couple. Fancy, whenever Dick and Freda Lane were together, Nell and Don would be thrown upon each other for society! Both women, in different ways, presented this complication to Dick's notice, which apparently it must have escaped. But Dick stuck to his plan for a “square party,” whatever the reason could be.
Nevertheless, from Mrs. Lane's point of view, the ball opened well enough, for it looked as if she were to have both men, Nell neither. This was not polite of Dick, even if his late ward had been invited merely as a “chaperon.” But Freda couldn't blame him. She had brought lovely frocks, and saw that she must be almost irresistible.
“Have you got your bathing dress with you this time?” Dick asked, the night when his “party” began. “The bathing's fine here, and——”
“No, I haven't,” laughed Mrs. Lane. “I'm too lazy for that sort of thing.” A brand-new excuse!
“Perhaps salt water gives you rheumatism?” suggested the cat in Nell.
The lovely lady laughed.
“I don't expect to have rheumatism for twenty years to come—not till I'm forty-four or five.” Which was a neat way to advertise an age.
Don glared at Nell. He would have liked to box her ears, and Nell knew it. Dick had asked her to bring “the prettiest bathing get-up she'd ever had,” and she'd obeyed him, though it hadn't seemed much use.
Next morning, however, when she and Dick went into the water, showing off all the old “stunts” Dick had taught her long ago, Don followed, tempted to prove that he could swim as well as old Dick Cobbold. For a few minutes he forgot that he and Nell were on “official terms only,” and they gamboled together like dolphins. Later, when Nell went ashore—a gleaming wet Tanagra figure, perfect from head to foot—she saw a look on Freda Lane's face that made her glad she'd taken Dick's advice. It was a look of envy. And that was strange, because what cause had Mrs. Lane to envy Mrs. Philipps?
“Your fear of the water doesn't extend to boats, I hope?” Dick inquired, and Mrs. Lane hurried to explain that her fear wasn't ordinary fear. She couldn't stand being thought a coward, cowardice not being smart for women in 1916. As for a boat, she “didn't mind going in one with somebody who knew how to manage it.”
“Nell, tell Mrs. Lane whether I know how to manage a boat,” Dick commanded.
Again Nell obeyed, wondering if this were part of the game. She praised Dick highly as a sailor, and Mrs. Lane promised to venture that afternoon if the weather were fine.
It was fine, or looked fine from the shore. Once they were out in a small sailing boat, they found that, after all, the sea wasn't, as Dick said, “smooth as a ballroom floor.” Still, Mrs. Lane controlled herself and was not sick. She would, she felt, rather have died than be sick, with Nell looking rosy and almost gay. Her head swam slightly, but her maid had pinned a thick white veil firmly over her face, and the spray could do no damage.
Suddenly, just when Dick had headed the Mayflower for shore, the boat gave a stumble, like a human thing, heeled over, shipped a wave, and—the rest was all horror and confusion. Freda Lane was in the water, struggling, screaming, choking, drowning.
“Save Mrs. Lane! I'll look after Nell!' she heard a voice shout over the rush of water. Whose voice it was she didn't know or care. Who was to save her she neither knew nor cared. All she did know was that she desperately wanted to be saved. This was the only thing that mattered in the world. Other things that once had made her dread the water were forgotten now that she was fighting for life. Her clothes were sheets of lead wrapping her body. The thick veil stuck to her mouth and nostrils. She tried in vain to claw it off. A wave surged over her head. Drums were beating in her ears. She sucked salt water into nose and lungs. It pricked like a thousand needles. Two or three hundreds of years passed—and when at last she realized that she was not dead, she lay gasping and gurgling in the bottom of a boat.
Even then she didn't care for anything, if only the salt water she had swallowed would come up and let her breathe. Some one was doing something to her—getting off her soaked hat and veil. Some one else was saying, “It's all right. We'll land in a minute.” Some one was wiping her face with a wringing-wet handkerchief and pushing hair out of her eyes. Dimly it seemed printed on her brain that there was a reason, a dreadful reason, why she mustn't let this be done. But she couldn't remember what it was, and she was too weak to resist, except by rolling her head back and forth.
“Oh, my God!” she heard a man sharply cry out, as if at some horrid sight. The name that sprang to her mind was “Don.” It was all like a dream, for she couldn't think who “Don” was or why he should be of importance. Only, he was of importance, and her life—if she were alive—was crumbling into ugly ruin.
“Oh, Dick, when I saw her like that, and Don's face so deathly, staring at her, I knew the boat hadn't upset by accident! I saw right to the bottom of your plan!” Nell groaned to Dick two hours later, when all was over.
All was so thoroughly over that Mrs. Lane, pleading in a note to Dick a frightful chill and immediate need for her doctor, had fled to New York in his automobile. As for Don, he'd not been seen since he helped Dick carry Mrs. Lane ashore, into the house and up to her room. Presumably he had then gone to his, and changed wet clothing for dry, but whether he had remained there, or whether he'd rushed off somewhere—anywhere—seeking his lost balance, was unknown. Nell hadn't even contemplated knocking at his door. Her one definite wish was to see Dick, and she'd found him waiting for her in the living room.
He looked fresh and composed as if a cataclysm hadn't happened—except that he was unusually pale. But he didn't answer when she spoke. He only looked at her, with that new expression he'd brought back from France very marked in his eyes.
“How did you dare to do it?” the girl went on, in a lowered, secret voice.
“I'd dare a good deal for your good—and Don's,” Dick said then.
“Oh, I know! But if she'd drowned!”
“No fear! You two are fishes in the water, and I was certain that while I was busy righting the boat, Don would see to you and you would see to her.”
“That Don would see to me! Why didn't you think his first thought would be for Mrs. Lane?”
“Ruling passion strong in death. I banked on his love for you being the ruling passion when it came down to bedrock. I was right, wasn't I?”
“I seem to have an impression of Don's arm round me, and my saying that I was safe—that we must help Mrs. Lane. The next thing I really remember is when you'd righted the Mayflower and we were all on board, me getting off her hat and veil and wiping her face. Honest and true, Dick, I was only wishing to help. I didn't dream—— But you must have known, and based your whole plot on that. But how——”
“It wasn't the sharpness of my eyes. On my life, I couldn't tell whether the woman was a miracle of nature or of art. She beat me that way. It was just putting two and two together did the trick—some talk about a bathing dress—and one excuse or another about not going in for a dip. I thought, 'If there's anything to hide, it will come out in the wash.' And I remembered Don being mighty particular—touchy—about some things, even more than most men are.”
“Oh, his look when he knelt there staring, and cried out 'My God!' I shall never forget! And her face, with the white all mixed up with the stuff off her eyebrows and lashes—and that short brown hair, with gray at the temples, sticking out under the wig! Even I never guessed she wore a wig! Banded the way it was, it looked so natural—so beautiful! Dick, if I were in her place, I believe I'd kill myself after that exhibition!”
“She won't. She'll just keep out of our way and make some excuse for avoiding us that isn't to our credit. She'll count on our not telling. And as for that, for the Lord's sake never let on to Dick your—suspicion about me. It hasn't occurred to him. He thinks no worse than that I'm a land lubber with a boat.”
“He doesn't think of you at all, I'm sure. He's just sick and shuddering over the same picture that you and I see. But I'll never give you away, dear old Dick.”
“Thanks,” said Dick.
There was a certain dryness in his tone, but he would have bitten out his tongue rather than explain to Nell why he begged her not to let Don suspect. Let her go on believing that it was for his own sake he was afraid, not for hers!
“Diseases desperate grown need desperate remedies,” he seemed to defend himself. “I had to be cruel because I was working for the survival of the fittest, and you are the fittest. But you see now why I didn't want the size of the party to be increased.”
“I see. I see a whole heap of things,” Nell said.
Yet Dick knew that there were more things under that heap which she would never see. It was much better so. She had trusted him, and he had done the best he could for her. If she guessed the cost of the offering, the virtue of it would be gone.
“You took this house, and did everything, just for this one coup!” Nell murmured on, half to herself,
“I suppose I've got rather dramatic—living in France. That must be how it came into my head. I saw—well, something like the picture you speak of. I saw Don disgusted, hating the sight of that woman. I saw him turning to you again——”
“Dick! You think he will?”
“Sure of it. He'll be wax in your hands, kid. Don't squeeze too hard.”
“I won't squeeze the leastest bit. I—I'm sorry for poor Don.”
“That's right. Go on those lines and he'll be yours again—for all he's worth.”
If there were a double meaning in those last words, Nell didn't see it.
“You said, if I'd trust you, maybe there'd be 'a happy ending to my love story,' after all,” she reminded him.
“Yes, I had faith in the happy ending,” he repeated.
“What should I have done without you? You knew me better than I knew myself when I was raving to you the other day. You knew I worshiped Don and couldn't live without him.”
“I kind of felt it was that way with you. That's why—I didn't take the next boat back after my business was fixed up, as I meant to do.”
Nell laid her hand on his.
“You're not going to France again?”
“I must,” said dear old Dick. “There are lots of little things I didn't think would matter that do matter a good deal.”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1933, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 90 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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