Daphne Deane (12 page)

It was likely that the tale Ransom Deane had brought home from his bloody fight had been very much overdrawn. It was unthinkable that any man would dare to come into that staid old quiet suburb and attempt to make a roadhouse and gambling den or worse of a respected old house, but it would be bad enough just to have a place that had been a landmark for a century or two turned into a noisy apartment house.

But anyway, no matter what the intention, he was definitely not going to sell it. That was settled. He had given his word. And the minute he set foot in the Pennsylvania Station in New York he would send a telegram to that persistent agent in unmistakable language, once and for all. Someday--
some
day, he would go back there and live. He smiled ruefully as he remembered Dinsmore's picture of his wife living with him there. His wife! Well, if Anne Casper was to be his wife, which of course was by no means certain now, he was quite sure she would never live there. He could see her lip curl and her nose tilt at the thought of quiet little Rosedale, and even if she came there she would feel that the old Morrell place was on the wrong side of town and would want to build on Winding Way or Latches Lane as Evelyn Avery had suggested.

Oh, Anne Casper! Why couldn't she be different? Why couldn't she be sweet and practical like the girl he had been with all day? He'd half closed his eyes and watched the darkness whirl by, interspersed with flashes of lights in small towns, and remembered Daphne's face as she had looked around upon the rooms in his old home and loved it. How she had caressed every old bit of polished furniture with her glance, and her tone had fairly lilted with pleasure in each room. How she had helped the old days to return, and memories and people to troop around their rooms again. How she had brought back even the sweet little drama of his own evening prayers and reimagined it for him as he stood there beside her. She, a little neighborhood girl, who had made pleasant playtime pictures of his home and rejoiced in them!

Why couldn't Anne Casper be like that? Why couldn't her eyes grow misty over the tale of his childhood? But they wouldn't. He knew they wouldn't. It wasn't in her to be anything but bored by such a recital. He couldn't fancy himself telling her these things, these sacred things. Or if he did, he couldn't fancy her doing anything but laugh at them, laugh them to scorn. She would call him a sentimentalist. He could hear the tones of her voice, and he winced over the thought. Why had he ever got tangled up with Anne Casper, anyway? She wasn't his kind, and he wasn't hers. She wasn't a girl his mother would have loved. And she would never have honored his mother and her standards the way a girl he loved should honor them.

And yet--she was very beautiful! And sometimes she seemed to care for him a great deal!

Well, he was probably done with Anne. She had given her ultimatum, and he had turned it down. If she gave in and called him back to her--but she wouldn't, not Anne, with that stubborn pretty little chin. But if she did, it would prove that she really cared for him, wouldn't it? Or would it? When he tried to judge Anne, he was perplexed. She seemed to be an unknown quantity. Perhaps that was one reason why she intrigued him so much.

And what would life be, lived beside a woman like that? Tempestuous? He wouldn't like to live in the midst of tempest and uncertainty. He wanted a calm, peaceful home, filled with love and sunshine. Was it conceivable that Anne could fit into such a background? Could help to create such an atmosphere?

He found himself thinking of the home where he had been all day. The sunny atmosphere, the free harmonious life of the whole family, all working together, all interested in the same things.

But
work
! Anne didn't work. She had probably never done anything harder in her life than to play a set of tennis, or sail a boat, or win a swimming match. She wouldn't want to work. She might even feel degraded if she had to work. He couldn't think of her taking down curtains and washing them and putting them on stretchers. He had never seen her tried, of course, and he might possibly be misjudging her, but his feeling about it was that she would scorn such employment, consider it menial.

And yet what a good time he and that other girl had had today working side by side. How utterly unspoiled she was, how sane and wise she seemed! Now that was the kind of girl his mother would have approved as a friend for him.

But Daphne Deane was "as good as engaged to the new minister." The words still echoed unpleasantly in his mind from the vine-clad porch of the Gassner house and reached him over the miles that were rapidly multiplying between himself and the delightful day he had spent. Involuntarily he sighed. Whatever the new minister was, he hoped he was good enough for Daphne. And of course a minister would be very well suited-- No, he would put it the other way, Daphne Deane would be an ideal minister's wife. He could see that in a flash. But he grudged her that life unless the minister were also an ideal minister. Well, perhaps he was. Why should he care anyway? But he did. Probably just because it was all a part of the old life that she had given him back again, and he hated to think of anything imperfect connected with it. Anyway, he must stop thinking about it. The thought of that minister, whom he had seen but dimly in the moonlight, was somehow spoiling the brightness of the day he had just spent, and he didn't want it spoiled. It was something unsullied and lovely to keep in memory. And besides, he had Anne Casper to think of.

Or did he? Well, at least he would write a letter to Daphne, thanking her for the day. That would be expected of him. And he had promised dear old Emily Lynd to go down sometime soon and call on her. He could run in on the Deanes for a few minutes' call, and then--well, probably he wouldn't see them anymore, but it was nice to have them on his list of friends. And he must never forget that Daphne had given him back the most precious things of his youth, the things he might otherwise have forgotten utterly till it was too late to regain them.

As he sat thinking he began to enumerate in his mind things that he ought to change in his habit of living. Prayer. That was among the most important. He must get back to some sort of prayer. He wasn't just sure how much he still believed of the old religion his mother had taught him, but he had a feeling that prayer, at least, was essential, that it would somehow clarify the atmosphere of his life and help him to see things more clearly in their relative values.

He tried to think back and remember when he had stopped praying, and decided that it was somewhere along in the second year of his college life. He had a roommate who never prayed, who jeered at the idea in a pleasant gentlemanly way, and who was a swell fellow in other ways if there ever was one. Had he let that influence him? The swell fellow had had a brief and brilliant career, married a famous beauty, a youthful divorcee, before his graduation and three weeks after his marriage had plunged from an airplane and ended his bright career. It all came back to Keith now, that first night that he had knelt to pray with his friend Estabrook in the room. The caustic sarcasm, the mild amusement in his handsome eyes. He had prayed hurriedly, secretly, after that, anxious to please his mother and keep his promises to her and yet not get caught again on his knees. Fool that he had been.
Young
fool! Extremely young! Not afraid of his friend, of course, yet unwilling to seem a sissy!

Of course, he couldn't have had any very deep conviction himself about prayer, or he wouldn't have been a coward before a fellow-student. But yet he could remember back even when he was a boy in high school, what utter faith he had had in prayer. How he had resorted to it on all occasions when he felt a need of any kind of help, how often he had thought he received distinct answers to prayer and felt a throb of thankfulness. How implicit had been his faith when he was quite young! And where had it gone? Had it really gone or just been mislaid? Covered up by the rubbish with which he had chosen to clutter his life? When had it disappeared? He couldn't quite remember. There hadn't been any distinct time when he abandoned it. He just forgot all about it, in the cares and interests and sorrows that the years had brought.

But now that he recognized its absence he had a definite idea that he ought to do something about it. The son of his father and mother had no business going around like an atheist. He knew better. He recognized that that interesting college chum of his must have been a sort of atheist, or he never would have lived his life as he had, died as he had. He remembered sharp-flung words that voiced his unbelief. They hadn't bothered him at the time, but he saw now they should have done so. If he had not allowed his Christian faith to become dim, a lot of things might have been different in his own life. Perhaps even this perplexity of Anne Casper would never have been there to vex him! And dimly it came to him that his own life might have counted for more in its contact with the lives of others. Perhaps something had been expected of him when in the course of human destinies his life had been sorted out in a pair with Harold Estabrook for two long years. Estabrook was gone beyond his power to reach now, and his own life was at least two years back in its moral tone from what it had been then. He could not go back and undo any of it! That was an appalling thought!

He went on with his list. Prayer. He must begin to pray again. That is, if it was possible to get back to praying terms with a God whom he had forgotten so long.

His Bible? Well, of course that, too, had been packed away in a trunk that same year with his discarded prayers and eventually been given away to the Salvation Army, hadn't it? No, perhaps he had kept it after all. He seemed to remember that at the last minute he had found an inscription written by his mother on the flyleaf, a precious personal word, and for that he had kept it. It must be packed away somewhere in the old house. Sometime he would go down again to Rosedale and hunt it up, just for the sake of reading his mother's tender words.

Then there was a church service. He hadn't attended a church service in a long time. Of course, there had been chapel in college, but it was always more or less formulaic and quite elective. Even when he went he had usually used the time to glance over the notes of some topic that he must be ready to discuss in a following class. But gradually he had ceased even the occasional form of attendance at chapel.

Of course, when they were in Europe he sometimes went to a church with his mother but more to admire the architecture of the building in which they were supposed to be worshipping than with any idea of worship.

He resolved that he would start going to church again. Not that he was especially interested in doing so, but merely that he might cultivate a Christian character such as his father's son might be supposed to have. He felt that all these things would be in the nature of anchors to keep his life from drifting against dangerous rocks and into unknown harbors. It was not that in any sense he felt that he was a sinner and needed a Savior. He was merely bringing his life to conform once more to the path in which his parents, who had been successful and respected citizens, had set his young feet. He felt that they were pretty safe guides to follow.

By the time that the train reached the Pennsylvania Station in New York, Keith Morrell felt with self-respecting relief that he was well on his way to becoming everything that his mother could possibly expect of him.

He went at once to the telegraph desk and sent his message to Knox couched in no uncertain terms.

 

Have decided not to sell my property in Rosedale. Please take it off your list. Do not even care to rent at present. Send bill for any expense you may have incurred in the matter.

Signed,

Keith Morrell

 

Having paid for his message he turned away satisfied that he was well on his way back to his mother's teaching and his mother's God. If he felt anything more about it at all, it was that God would be well pleased to see him coming back. He had perhaps been rather impolite to God for a time, but he was going to make it all up now, and refusing to sell the old home was the first step in setting his spiritual house in order.

He slept well that night, though he dreamed toward morning that Anne Casper sent word that she was coming to his office to see him, but when he went out to greet her it was Daphne who was there, rising to meet him, putting her warm hand in his, the way it had touched his in the sunny garden among the loam, and it thrilled him with a strange happiness. But she only looked up at him with those wonderful, beautiful brown eyes of hers and smiled at him, a strange wistful smile, and then suddenly she was gone and it was Anne Casper standing there frowning and flashing her eyes at him. And he might not let his eyes search for Daphne in the shadows of the room, for Anne Casper was demanding his attention!

But all day long, at intervals, he remembered Daphne's look, and try as he would, he could not shake off that thrill of pleasure he had felt in her presence.

 

When the telegram reached William Knox he was sound asleep in his bed, snoring the snore of the just, his over-fat pocketbook safely hidden in a little steel-lined compartment in an innocent-looking box, with his important papers. No one, not even Martha, had access to it, because he was the only one who knew the combination of the lock.

He had been snoring for approximately two hours when the telephone rang, and Martha, whose mind had not been at ease since the visit of Bill Gowney, was the first to hear it. In fact, William Knox seldom heard that telephone bell when he was in bed. He always left it to Martha to answer, and to call him if it was necessary. But sometimes, especially in cold weather, she shook him awake and compelled him to go and answer it himself.

Tonight, however, having lain awake conjuring up all the possibilities of trouble that might come through that veiled threat of Bill Gowney's, she was alert and curious. It was not like any of William's clients to telephone at this hour of the night, unless it was that dark-browed man who had been so angry earlier in the evening. Of course, there was always the possibility that Harvey Knox, her stepson, might be in some sort of trouble. Maybe he was trying to get a surreptitious message across to his father when he thought she was asleep. Perhaps he was wanting to come home with his good-for-nothing wife and live with them. And William Knox was just soft enough to say yes before she found it out. But somehow tonight that possibility did not loom quite so large as it often had. She was more afraid of that ugly-jowled man who had threatened William and said something would be his responsibility. Perhaps this would be him again, and she could find out something more about it.