The Real Adventure
He was saved from carrying out this program by the fact that Rose, of
her own accord, anticipated him. At least she controlled, rather
suddenly, her sobs, sat up, wiped her eyes and, after a fashion, smiled.
Not at him, though; resolutely away from him, he might almost have
thought--as if she didn't want him to see.
"That's right," he said, craning round to make sure that the smile was
there. "Have a look at the funny side of it."
She winced at that as from a blow and pulled herself away from him.
Then she controlled herself and, in answer to his look of troubled
amazement, said:
"It's all right. Only it happens that you're the one who d-doesn't know
how awfully funny it really is." Her voice shook, but she got it in hand
again. "No, I don't mean anything by that. Here! Give me a kiss and then
let me wash my face."
And for the whole evening, and again next morning until he left the
house, she managed to keep him in the only half-questioning belief that
nothing was the matter.
It was about an hour after that, that her maid came into her bedroom,
where she had had her breakfast, and said that Miss Stanton wanted to
see her.
CHAPTER VI
THE DAMASCUS ROAD
It argued no real lack of sisterly affection that Rose didn't want to
see Portia that morning. Even if there had been no other reason, being
found in bed at half past ten in the morning by a sister who inflexibly
opened her little shop at half past eight, regardless of bad weather,
backaches and other potentially valid excuses, was enough to make one
feel apologetic and worthless. Rose could truthfully say that she was
feeling wretched. But Portia would sit there, slim and erect, in a
little straight-backed chair, and whatever perfunctory commiseration she
might manage to express, the look of her fine eyebrows would be
skeptical. Justly, too. Rose could never deny that. Not so long as she
could remember the innumerable times when she had yielded to her
mother's persuasions that she was over-tired and that a morning in bed
was just what she needed. Portia, so far as she could remember, had
never been the subject of these persuasions.
But this was only the beginning of Rose's troubles to-day. She was
paying the price of yesterday's exaltation and her spirits had sunk down
to nowhere. What a fool's paradise yesterday had been with its vision of
her big self-sufficient husband coming to her for mothering because he
had lost a law-suit! What a piece of mordant irony it was, that she
should have found herself, after all her silly hopes, sobbing in his
arms, while he comforted her for her bitter disappointment over not
being able to comfort him! She had told the truth when she said he was
the one, really, who didn't know how funny it was.
Well, and wasn't her other effort just as ridiculous? If ever he found
her heap of law-books and learned of the wretched hours she had spent
trying to discover what they were all about in the hope of promoting
herself to a true intellectual companionship with him, wouldn't he take
the discovery in exactly the same way--be touched by the childish
futility of it and yet amused at the same time--cuddle her indulgently
in his arms and soothe her disappointment;--and then urge her to look at
the funny side of it? He must know hundreds of practising lawyers. Were
there a dozen out of them all whose minds had the power to stimulate and
bring into action the full powers of his own?
Well then, what was the use of trying? If James Randolph was right--and
it seemed absurd to question it--she had just one charm for her
husband--the charm of sex. To that she owed her hours of simulated
companionship with him, his tenderness for her, his willingness to make
her pleasures his own. To that she owed the extravagantly pretty clothes
he was always urging her to buy--the house he kept her in--the servants
he paid to wait on her. Well then, why not make the best of it?
Only, if she went on much longer, feeling sick and faded like this,
she'd have nothing left to make the most of, and then where would she
be?
Oh, she was getting maudlin, and she knew it! And when she got over
feeling so weak and giddy, she'd brace up and be herself again. But for
the present, she didn't feel like seeing Portia.
But Rose's shrinking from a talk with Portia that morning was a mild
feeling compared with Portia's dread of the impending talk with Rose.
Twice she had walked by the perfect doorway of the McCrea house before
she entered it; ostensibly to give herself a little more time to
think--really, because she shrank from the ordeal that awaited her in
there.
Her sister's menage had been a source of irritation to Portia ever since
it was established, though a deeper irritation was her own with herself
for allowing it to affect her thus. Rose's whole-hearted plunge into the
frivolities of a social season, her outspoken delight in it, her finding
in it, apparently, a completely satisfactory solution to the problem of
existence, couldn't fail to arouse Portia's ironic smile. This was the
sort of vessel her mother had freighted with her hopes! This was the
course she steered.
She had fought this feeling with a bitter self-contempt. The trouble
with her was, she told herself in icy self-communings, that she envied
Rose her happiness, her opportunities, her husband--even her house. Why
should all that wonderful furniture have been wasted on Rose, to whom a
perfect old Jacobean gate-legged table was nothing but a surface to drop
anything on that she wanted out of her hands? Why should a man of
Rodney's powerful intelligence waste his time on her frivolous
amusements, content, apparently, just to sit and gaze at her, oblivious
of any one else who might happen to be about? She knew that she, Portia,
out of her disciplined experience of life, and her real eagerness for
knowledge of it, was better able to challenge the attention of his mind
than Rose. And yet she had never really got it. She remained half
invisible to him--some one to be remembered with a start, after an
interval of oblivion, and treated considerately--even affectionately,
for that matter--as Rose's sister!
They had been seeing each other with reasonable frequency all winter.
The Aldriches had Portia and her mother in to a family dinner pretty
often, and always came out to Edgewater for a one-o'clock dinner with
the Stantons on Sunday. The habit was for Rose to come out early in the
car and take them to church, while Rodney walked out later, and turned
up in time for dinner.
Mrs. Stanton had taken a great liking to Rodney. His manner toward her
had just the blend of deference and breezy unconventionality that
pleased her. So, while Portia would worry through the dinner, for fear
it wouldn't be cooked well enough, or served well enough, not to present
a sorry contrast to the meals her guests were accustomed to, her mother
would sit beaming upon the pair with a contentment as unalloyed as if
Rose were the acknowledged new leader of the great Cause and her husband
her adoring convert, as they had been in her old day-dream.
As far as Rodney went, the dream might have been true, for he showed an
unending interest in the Woman Movement--never tired of drawing from his
mother-in-law the story of her labors and the exposition of her beliefs.
Sometimes he argued with her playfully in order to get her started. More
often, and as far as Portia could see, quite seriously, he professed
himself in full accord with her views.
After this had been going on for about so long, Rose would yawn and
stretch and sit down on the arm of her mother's chair, begin stroking
her hair and offering her all manner of quaint unexpected caresses. And
then, pretty soon, Rodney's attention to the subject would begin to
wander and at last flag altogether and leave him stranded, gazing and
unable to do anything but gaze, at the lovely creature--the still
miraculous creature, who, when he got her home again, would come and sit
on the arm of his chair like that! When this happened, Portia found it
hard to stay in the room.
Until Mrs. Stanton's terrifying illness along in January, these meetings
constituted the whole of the intercourse between the families. Rose had
done her best to carry Portia with her, to some extent at least, into
her new life--to introduce her to her new friends and make her, as far
as might be, one of them. And in this she was seconded very amiably, by
Frederica. But Portia had put down a categorical veto on all these
attempts. She hadn't the inclination nor the energy, she said, and her
mother needed all the time she could spare away from her business. Once,
when Rose pressed the matter, she gave a more genuine reason. Rose's new
friends, she said, would regard her introduction to them solely as a bid
for business. She didn't want them coming around to her place to buy
their wedding presents "in order to help out that poor old maid sister
of Rose Aldrich's." She was getting business enough in legitimate ways.
Sometimes she told herself that if Rose had really wanted her, she'd
have pressed the matter harder--wouldn't have given up unless she was
clutching with real relief at an excuse that let her out of an
embarrassment. But at other times she accused herself of having acted in
a petty snobbish spirit in declining the chance not only for pleasant
new friendships, especially Frederica's, but for a closer association
with her sister. Well, the thing was done now, and the question
certainly never would rise again.
The reason why it couldn't arise again was what Portia came to tell Rose
this morning. She hoped she'd be able to tell it gently--provide Rose
with just the facts she'd have to know, and get away without letting any
other facts escape, so that afterward she'd have the consolation of
being able to say to herself, "That was finely done." All her life, she
told herself, she had been doing fine things grudgingly, mutilating them
in the doing. If she weren't very careful, that would happen this
morning. If she could have known the truth and made her resolution, and
confided it to Rose during the first hours of her mother's illness, when
the fight for life had drawn them together, it would not have been hard.
But with the beginning of convalescence, when Rose, with an easy visit
and a few facile caresses, could outweigh in one hour, all of Portia's
unremitting tireless service during the other twenty-three, and carry
off as a prize the whole of her mother's gratitude and affection, the
old envy and irritation had come back threefold.
Rose greeted her with a "Hello, Angel! Why didn't you come right up?
Isn't it disgraceful to be lying around in bed like this in the middle
of the morning?"
"I don't know," said Portia. "Might as well stay in bed, if you've
nothing to do when you get up." She meant it to sound good-humored, but
was afraid it didn't. "Anyhow," she added after a straight look into
Rose's face, "you look, this morning, as if bed was just where you ought
to be. What's the matter with you, child?"
"Nothing," said Rose, "--nothing that you'd call anything at any rate."
Portia smiled ironically. "I'm still the same old dragon, then," she
said. And then, with a gesture of impatience, turned away. She hadn't
meant to begin like that. Why couldn't she keep her tongue in control!
"I only meant," said Rose very simply, "that you'd say it was nothing,
if it was the matter with you. I've seen you, so many times, get up
looking perfectly sick and, without any breakfast but a cup of black
coffee, put on your old mackintosh and rubbers and start off for the
shop, saying you were all right and not to bother, that I knew that was
what you'd say now, if you felt the way I do."
"I'm sorry," said Portia. "I might have known that was what you meant. I