WHO CARES?

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"Gilbert," she said, "tell me the truth. Be frank with me. Let me
help you, dear."

Poor little wife. For the third time she had said the wrong thing.
"Help"--the word angered him. Did she imagine that he was a callow
youth crossed in love?

He drew his arm away sharply. There was something too domestic in
all this to be borne with patience. Humiliating, also, he had to
confess.

"When did I ever give you the right to delve into my private
affairs?" he asked, with amazing cruelty. "We're married,--isn't
that enough? I've given you everything I have except my
independence. You can't ask for more than that,--from me."

He added "from me" because the expression of pain on her pretty face
made him out to be a brute, and he was not that. He tried to hedge
by the use of those two small words and put it to her, without
explanation, that he was different from most men,--more careless and
callous to the old-fashioned vows of marriage, if she liked, but
different. That might be due to character or upbringing or the times
to which he belonged. He wasn't going to argue about it. The fact
remained. "I'll take you back," he added.

But she blocked the way. "I only want your love," she said. "If
you've taken that away from me, nothing else counts."

He gave a sort of groan. Her persistence was appalling, her courage
an indescribable reproach. For a moment he remained silent, with a
drawn face and twitching fingers, strangely white and wasted, like a
man who had been through an illness,--a caricature of the once easy-
going Gilbert Palgrave, the captain of his fate and the master of
his soul.

"All right then," he said, "if you must know, you shall, but do me
the credit to remember that I did my best to leave things vague and
blurred." He took her by the elbow and put her into a chair. With a
touch of his old thoughtfulness and rather studied politeness he
chose one that was untouched by the sun that came low over the dune.
Then he sat down and bent forward and looked her full in the eyes.

"This is going to hurt you," he said, "but you've asked for the
truth, and as everything seems to be coming to a head, you'd better
have it, naked and undisguised. In any case, you're one of the women
who always gets hurt and always thrives on it. You're too earnest
and sincere to be able to apply eye-wash to the damn thing we call
life, aren't you?"

"Yes, Gilbert," she answered, with the look of one who had been
placed in front of a firing squad, without a bandage over her eyes.

There was a brief pause, filled by what he had called the
everlasting drumming of the sea.

"One night, in Paris, when I was towering on the false confidence of
twenty-one,"--curious how, even at that moment, he spoke with a
certain self-consciousness,--"I came out of the Moulin Rouge alone
and walked back to the Maurice. It was the first time I'd ever been
on the other side, and I was doing it all in the usual way of the
precocious undergraduate. But the 'gay Paree' stuff that was
specially manufactured to catch the superfluous francs of the
pornographic tourist and isn't really in the least French, bored me,
almost at once. And that night, going slowly to the hotel, sickened
by painted women, chypre and raw champagne I turned a mental
somersault and built up a picture of what I hoped I should find in
life. It contained a woman, of course--a girl, very young, the very
spirit of spring, whose laugh would turn my heart and who, like an
elusive wood nymph, would lead me panting and hungry through a maze
of trees. I called it the Great Emotion and from that night on I
tried to find the original of that boyish picture, looking
everywhere with no success. At twenty-nine, coming out of what
seemed to be the glamor of the impossible, I married you to oblige
my mother,--you asked for this,--and imagined that I had settled
into a conventional rut. Do you want me to go on with it?"

"Please, Gilbert," said Alice.

He shrugged his shoulders as much as to say, "Well, if you enjoy the
Christian martyr business it's entirely your lookout."

But he dropped his characteristic habit of phrase making and became
more jerky and real. "I respected you, Alice," he went on. "I didn't
love you but I hoped I might, and I played the game. I liked to see
you in my house. You fitted in and made it more of a home than that
barrack had ever been. I began to collect prints and first editions,
adjust myself to respectability and even to look forward with pride
to a young Gilbert."

Alice gave a little cry and put her hand up to her breast. But he
was too much obsessed by his own pain to notice hers.

"And then,--it's always the way,--I saw the girl. Yes, by God, I saw
the girl, and the Great Emotion blew me out of domestic content and
the pleasant sense of responsibility and turned me into the panting
hungry youth that I had always wanted to be." He stopped and got up
and walked up and down that mausoleum, with his eyes burning and the
color back in his face.

"And the girl is Joan?" asked Alice in a voice that had an oddly
sharp note for once.

"Yes," he said. "Joan. . . . She's done it," he added, no longer
choosing his words. "She's got me. She's in my blood. I'm insane
about her. I follow her like a dog, leaping up at a kind word,
slinking away with my tail between my legs when she orders me to
heel. My God, it's hell! I'm as near madness as a poor devil of a
dope fiend out of reach of his joy. I wish I'd never seen her. She's
made me loathe myself. She's put me through every stage of
humiliation. I'd rather be dead than endure this craving that's
worse than a disease. You were right when you said that I'm ill. I
am ill. I'm horribly ill. I'm . . . I'm . . ."

He stammered and his voice broke, and he covered his face with his
hands.

And instantly, with the maternal spirit that goes with all true
womanly love ablaze in her heart, Alice went to him and put her arms
about his neck and drew his head down on her shoulder.

And he left it there, with tears.

A little later they sat down again side by side, holding hands.

As Hosack had told himself, and Gilbert had just said, things seemed
to be coming to a head. At that moment Tootles was strung up to play
her last card, Joan was being driven back by Harry from the cottage
of "Mrs. Gray" and Martin, becalmed on the water, with an empty pipe
between his teeth, was thinking about Joan.

Palgrave was comforted. The making of his confession was like having
an abscess lanced. In his weakness, in his complete abandonment of
affectation, he had never been so much of a man.

There was not to Alice, who had vision and sympathy, anything either
strange or perverse in the fact that Gilbert had told his story and
was not ashamed. Love had been and would remain the one big thing in
her own life, the only thing that mattered, and so she could
understand, even as she suffered, what this Great Emotion meant to
Gilbert. She adopted his words in thinking it all over. They
appealed to her as being exactly right.

She too was comforted, because she saw a chance that Gilbert, with
the aid of the utmost tact and the most tender affection, might be
drawn back to her and mended. She almost used Hosack's caustic
expression "rescued." The word came into her mind but was instantly
discarded because it was obvious that Joan, however impishly she had
played with Gilbert, was unaffected. Angry as it made her to know
that any girl could see in Gilbert merely a man with whom to fool
she was supremely thankful that the complication was not as tragic
as it might have been. So long as Joan held out. the ruin of her
marriage was incomplete. Hope, therefore, gleamed like a distant
light. Gilbert had gone back to youth. It seemed to her that she had
better treat him as though he were very young and hurt.

"Dearest," she said, "I'm going to take you away."

"Are you, Alice?"

"Yes. We will go on the yacht, and you shall read and sleep and get
your strength back."

He gave a queer laugh. "You talk like a mother," he said, with a
catch in his voice.

She went forward and kissed him passionately.

"I love you like a mother as well as a wife, my man," she whispered.
"Never forget that."

"You're,--you're a good woman, Alice; I'm not worthy of you, my
dear."

It pained her exquisitely to see him so humble. . . . Wait until she
met Joan. She should be made to pay the price for this! "Who cares?"
had been her cry. How many others had she made to care?

"I'll go back to Mrs. Jekyll now," she went on, almost afraid that
things were running too well to be true, "and stay at Southampton
to-night. To-morrow I'll return to New York and have everything
packed and ready by the time you join me there. And I'll send a
telegram to Captain Stewart to expect us on Friday. Then we'll go to
sea and be alone and get refreshment from the wide spaces and the
clean air."

"Just as you say," he said, patting her hand. He was terribly like a
boy who had slipped and fallen.

Then she got up, nearer to a breakdown than ever before. It was such
a queer reversal of their old positions. And in order that he
shouldn't rise she put her hands on his shoulders and stood close to
him so that his head was against her breast.

"God bless you, dearest boy," she said softly. "Trust in me. Give
all your troubles to me. I'm your wife, and I need them. They belong
to me. They're mine. I took them all over when you gave me my ring."
She lifted his face that was worn as from a consuming fire and
kissed his unresponsive lips. "Stay here," she added, "and I'll go
back. To-morrow then, in New York."

He echoed her. "To-morrow then, in New York," and held her hand
against his forehead.

Just once she looked back, saw him bent double and stopped. A
prophetic feeling that she was never to hear his voice again seized
her in a cold grip,--but she shook it off and put a smile on her
face with which to stand before the scandal-mongers.

And there stood Joan, looking as though she had seen a ghost.

XV

Alice marched up to her, blazing with anger and indignation. She
was not, at that moment, the gentle Alice, as everybody called her,
Alice-sit-by-the-fire, equable and pacific, believing the best of
people. She was the mother-woman eager to revenge the hurt that had
been done to one who had all her love.

"Ah," she said, "you're just in time for me to tell you what I think
of you."

"Whatever you may think of me," replied Joan, "is nothing to what I
think of myself."

But Alice was not to be diverted by that characteristic way of
evading hard words, as she thought it. She had seen Joan dodge the
issues like that before, many times, at school. They were still
screened from the veranda by a scrub-supported dune. She could let
herself go.

"You're a thief," she blurted out, trembling and out of all control
for once. "Not a full-blown thief because you don't steal to keep.
But a kleptomaniac who can't resist laying hands on other women's
men. You ought not to be allowed about loose. You're a danger, a
trap. You have no respect for yourself and none for friendship.
Loyalty? You don't know the meaning of the word. You're not to be
trusted out of sight. I despise you and never want to see you
again."

Could this be Alice,--this little fury, white and tense, with
clenched hands and glinting eyes, animal-like in her fierce
protectiveness?

Joan looked at her in amazement. Hadn't she already been hit hard
enough? But before she could speak Alice was in breath again. "You
can't answer me back,--even you, clever as you are. You've nothing
to say. That night at my house, when we had it out before, you said
that you were not interested in Gilbert. If that wasn't a cold-
blooded lie what was it? Your interest has been so great that you've
never let him alone since. You may not have called him deliberately,
but when he came you flaunted your sex in his face and teased him
just to see him suffer. You were flattered, of course, and your
vanity swelled to see him dogging your heels. There's a pretty
expressive word for you and your type, and you know it as well as I
do. Let me pass, please."

Joan moved off the narrow board-walk without a word.

And Alice passed, but piqued by this unexpected silence, turned and
went for her once most intimate friend again. If she was callous and
still in her "Who Cares?" mood words should be said that could never
be forgotten.

"I am Mrs. Gray. My husband won't be back for several days," These
were the only words that rang in Joan's ears now. Alice might as
well have been talking to a stone.

"Things are coming to a head," Alice went on, unconsciously using
Gilbert's expression and Hosack's.

"And all the seeds that you've carelessly sown have grown into great
rank weeds. Ask Mrs. Jekyll what you've driven Martin into doing if
you're curious to know. She can tell you. Many people have seen. But
if you still don't care, don't trouble, because it's too late. Go a
few yards down there and look at that man bent double in the summer
house. If you do that and can still cry out 'Who Cares?' go on to
the hour when everything will combine to make you care. It can't be
far away."

"I'm Mrs. Gray. My husband won't be back for several days." Like the
song of death the refrain of that line rose above the sound of the
sea and of Alice's voice. Joan could listen to nothing else.

And Alice caught the wounded look in the eyes of the girl in whom
she had once had faith and was recompensed. And having said all that
she had had in her mind and more than she had meant to say, she
turned on her heel, forced herself back into control and went
smiling towards the group on the veranda. And there Joan remained
standing looking as though she had seen a ghost,--the ghost of
happiness.

"Mrs. Gray,--and her husband Martin. . . . But what have I got to
say,--I, who refused to be his wife? It only seemed half true when I
found them together before, although that was bad enough. But this
time, now that my love for Martin has broken through all those days
of pretending to pretend and that girl is openly in that cottage,
nothing could be truer. It isn't Martin who has taken off his armor.
It's I who have cut the straps and made it fall from his shoulders
Oh, my God, if only I hadn't wanted to finish being a kid."

She moved away, at last, from the place where Alice had left her
and without looking to the right or left walked slowly down to the
edge of the sea. Vaguely, as though it was something that had
happened in a former life, she remembered the angry but neat
figure of Alice and a few of the fierce words that had got through
to her. "Rank weeds . . . driven Martin . . . too late. . . . Who
Cares?" Only these had stuck. But why should Alice have said them?
It was all unnecessary. She knew them. She had said them all on
the way back from Devon, all and many more, seated beside that nice
boy, Harry, in his car. . . . She had died a few feet from the stoop
of the cottage, in the scent of honeysuckle and Come back to
something that wasn't life to be tortured with regrets. All the way
back she had said things to herself that Alice, angry and bitter as
she had seemed to be, never could have invented. But they too were
unnecessary. Saying things now was of no more use than throwing
stones into the sea at any time. Rank weeds . . . driven
Martin . . . too late . . . who cares--only who cares should
have come first because everything else was the result.

And for a little while, with the feeling that she was on an island,
deserted and forgotten, she stood on the edge of the sea, looking at
a horizon that was utterly blank. What was she to do? Where was she
to go? . . . Not yet a woman, and all the future lay about her in
chaos. . . . Once more she went back in spirit to that room of
Martin's which had been made the very sanctum of Romance by young
blood and moonlight and listened to the plans they had made together
for the discovery of a woild out of which so many similar explorers
had crept with wounds and bitterness.

"I'm going to make my mark," she heard Martin cry. "I'm going to
make something that will last. My father's name was Martin Gray, and
I'll make it mean something out here for his sake."

"And I," she heard herself say, "will go joy-riding on that huge
Round-about. I've seen what it is to be old and useless, and so I
shall make the most of every day and hour while I'm young. I can
live only once, and I shall make life spin whichever way I want it
to go. If I can get anybody to pay my whack, good. If not, I'll pay
it myself,--whatever it costs. My motto's going to be a good time as
long as I can get it and who cares for the price!"

Young fool, you young fool!

The boy followed her to the window, and the moonlight fell upon them
both.

"Yes, you'll get a bill all right. How did you know that?"

And once more she heard her answer. "I haven't lived with all those
old people so long for nothing. But you won't catch me grumbling if
I get half as much as I'm going out for. Listen to my creed, Martin,
and take notes if you want to keep up with me. . . . I shall open
the door of every known Blue Room, hurrying out if there are ugly
things inside. I shall taste a little of every known bottle, feel
everything there is to feel except the thing that hurts, laugh with
everybody whose laugh is catching, do everything there is to do, go
into every booth in the big Bazaar, and when I'm tired and there's
nothing left, slip out of the endless procession with a thousand
things stored in my memory. Isn't that the way to live?"

"Young fool, you young fool," she cried, with the feeling of being
forgotten and deserted, with not one speck on the blank horizon.
"You've failed--failed in everything. You haven't even carried out
your program. Others have paid,--Martin and Gilbert and Alice, but
the big bill has come in to you . . . Who cares? You do, you do, you
young fool, and you must creep out of the procession with only one
thing stored in your memory,--the loss of Martin, Martin."

It was a bad hour for this girl-child who had tried her wings too
young.

And when Gilbert straightened up and gave thanks to God for the
woman who had never stirred him, but whose courage and tenderness
had added to his respect, he too turned towards the sea with its
blank horizon,--the sea upon which he was to be taken by his good
wife for rest and sleep, and there was Joan . . . young, and slight
and alluring, with her back to him and her hands behind her back,
and the mere sight of her churned his blood again, and set his dull
fire into flames. Once more the old craving returned, the old
madness revived, as it always would when the sight and sound of her
caught him, and all the common sense and uncommon goodness of the
little woman who had given him comfort rose like smoke and was blown
away. . . . To win this girl he would sacrifice Alice and barter his
soul. She was in his blood. She was the living picture of his
youthful vision. She only could satisfy the Great Emotion. . . .
There was the plan that he had forgotten,--the lunatic plan from
which, even in his most desperate moment, he had drawn back,
afraid,--to cajole her to the cottage away from which he would send
his servants; make, with doors and windows locked, one last
passionate appeal, and then, if mocked and held away, to take her
with him into death and hold her spirit in his arms.

To own himself beaten by this slip of a girl, to pack his traps and
leave her the field and sneak off like a beardless boy,--was that
the sort of way he did things who had had merely to raise his voice
to hear the approach of obsequious feet? . . . Alice and the yacht
and nothing but sea to a blank horizon? He laughed to think of it.
It was, in fact, unthinkable.

He would put it to Joan in a different way this time. He would hide
his fire and be more like that cursed boy. That would be a new way.
She liked new things.

He left the summer house, only the roof of which was touched by the
last golden rays of the sun, and with curious cunning adopted a sort
of caricature of his old light manner. There was a queer jauntiness
in his walk as he made his way over the sand, carrying his hat, and
a flippant note in his voice when he arrived at her side.

"Waiting for your ship to come home?" he asked.

"It's come," she said.

"You have all the luck, don't you?"

She choked back a sob.

He saw the new look on her face. Something,--perhaps boredom,--
perhaps the constant companionship of that cursed boy,--had brought
her down from her high horse. This was his chance! . . .

"You thought I had gone, I suppose?"

"Yes," she said.

"To-morrow suits me best. I'm off to-morrow,--I've not decided
where. A long journey, it may be. If you're fed up with these people
what do you say to my driving you somewhere for dinner? A last
little dinner to remind us of the spring in New York?"

"Would you like me to very much?"

He steadied his voice. "We might be amused, I think."

"That doesn't answer my question," she said.

"I'd love you to," he answered. "It would be fair, too. I've not
seen much of you here."

Yes, it would be fair. Let her try, even at that late stage of the
game, to make things a little even. This man had paid enough.

"Very well," she said. "Let's go." It would be good to get away from
prying eyes and the dull ache of pain for a few hours.

He could hardly believe his ears. Joan,--to give him something! It
was almost incredible.

She turned and led the way up. The sun had almost gone. "I'll get my
hat at once," she said, "I'll be ready in ten minutes."

His heart was thumping. "I'll telephone to a place I know, and be
waiting in the car."

"Let me go in alone," she said. "We don't want to be held up to
explain and argue. You're sure you want me to come?" She drew up and
looked at him.

He bowed to hide his face. "Of all things on earth," he said.

She ran on ahead, slipped into the house and up to her room.

Exultant and full of hope, Gilbert waited for a moment before
following her in. Going straight to the telephone room he shut the
door, asked for the number of his cottage and drummed the instrument
with his fingers.

At last!

"Is that you, Itrangi? . . . Lay some sort of dinner for two,--cold
things with wine. It doesn't matter what, but at once. I shall be
over in about an hour. Then get out, with the cook. I want the place
to myself to-night. Put the door key on the earth at the left-hand
corner of the bottom step. Telephone for a car and go to the hotel
at Sag Harbor. Be back in the morning about nine. Do these things
without fail. I rely upon you."

He hardly waited for the sibilant assurance before putting back the
receiver. He went round to the garage himself. This was the first
time he had driven Joan in his car. It might be the last.

Harry was at the bottom of the stairs as Joan came down.

"You're not going out?" he asked. She was still in day clothes,
wearing a hat.

"Yes, I am, Harry."

"Where? Why?"

She laid her hand on his arm. "Don't grudge Gilbert one evening,--
his last. I've been perfectly rotten to him all along."

"Palgrave? Are you going out with Palgrave?"

"Yes, to dine somewhere. I want to, Harry, oh, for lots of reasons.
You know one. Don't stop me." Her voice broke a little.

"But not with Palgrave."

"Why?"

"I saw him dodge out of the telephone room a minute ago. He looked--
queer. Don't go, Joan."

"I must," she said and went to the door. He was after her and caught
hold of her arm.

"Joan, don't go. I don't want you to."

"I must," she said again." Surely you can understand? I have to get
away from myself."

"But won't I do?"

"It's Gilbert's turn," she said. "Let go, Harry dear." It was good
to know that she hadn't hurt this boy.

"I don't like it. Please stay," but he let her go, and watched her
down the steps and into the car, with unaccountable misgiving. He
had seen Gilbert's face.

And he saw it again under the strong light of the entrance--
triumphant.

For minutes after the car had gone, with a wave from Joan, he stood
still, with an icy hand on his heart.

"I don't like it," he repeated. "I wish to God I'd had the right to
stop her."

She thought that he didn't love her, and he had done his best to
obey. But he did love her, more than Martin, it seemed, more than
Gilbert, he thought, and by this time she was well on her way to--
what?

PART FOUR

THE PAYMENT

I

It was one of those golden evenings that sometimes follows a hot
clear day--one of those rare evenings which linger in the memory
when summer has slipped away and which come back into the mind like
a smile, an endearment or a broad sweet melody, renewing optimism
and replenishing faith. The sun had gone, but its warm glow lingered
in a sky that was utterly unspotted. The quiet unruffled trees in
all the rich green of early maturity stood out against it almost as
though they were painted on canvas. The light was so true that
distances were brought up to the eye. Far-away sounds came closely
to the ear. The murmur from the earth gathered like that of a
multitude of voices responding to prayers.

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