第77章

For a little while nothing was said.Out of a clear sky the sun beat down upon the car and the brown sand of the narrow road.Many times the boy shot sidelong glances at the silent girl beside him, burning to ask questions about this husband who was never mentioned and who appeared to him to be something of a myth and a mystery.He didn't love Joan, because it had been mutually agreed that he shouldn't.

But he held her in the sort of devoted affection which, when it exists between a boy and a girl, is very good and rare and even beautiful and puts them close to the angels.

Presently, catching one of these deeply concerned glances, she put her little shoulder against his shoulder in a sisterly way."Go on, then, Harry," she said."Ask me about it.I know you want to know."And he did.Somehow he felt that he ought to know, that he had the right.After all he had stopped himself from loving her at her urgent request, and their friendship was the best thing that he had ever known.And he began with, "When did you do it?""Away back in history," she said, "or so it seems.It's really only a few months.""A few months! But you can hardly have been with him any time.""I have never really been with him," she said.She wanted him to know everything.Now that the wound was open again and Martin in possession of her once more, she felt that she must talk about it all to some one, and who could be better than Harry, who was so like a brother?

The boy couldn't believe that she meant what she implied but would have bitten off his tongue rather than put a direct question."Is he such a rotter?" he asked instead.

"He's not a rotter.He's just Martin--generous, sensitive, dead straight and as reliable as a liner.You and he were made in twin molds."He flushed with pleasure--but it was like meeting a new Joan, a serious, laughterless Joan, with an odd little quiver in her voice and tears behind her eyes.He felt a new sense of responsibility by being confided in.Older, too.It was queer--this sudden switch from thoughtless gaiety to something which was like illness in a house and which made Joan almost unrecognizable.

He began again."But then--" and stopped.

"I'm the rotter," she said."It's because of me that he's in Devon and I'm at Easthampton, that he's sailing with your cousin, and I'm playing the fool with Gilbert.I was a kid, Harry, and thought Imight go on being a kid for a bit, and everything has gone wrong and all the blame is mine.""You're only a kid now," said Harry, trying to find excuses for her.

He resented her taking all the blame.

She shook her head."No, I'm not.I'm only pretending to be.I came to Easthampton to pretend to be.All the time you've known me I've been pretending,--pretending to pretend.I ceased to be a kid before the spring was over,--when I came face to face with something I had driven Martin to do and it broke me.I've been bluffing since then,--bluffing myself that I didn't care and that it wasn't my fault.Imight have kept it up a bit longer,--even to the end of the summer, but Gilbert said something this morning that took the lynch pin out of the sham and brought it all about my ears."And there was another short silence,--if it could be called silence with the whirring of the engine and the boy driving with the throttle out.

"You care for him, then?" he asked finally, looking at her.

She nodded and the tears came.

It was a great shock to him, somehow; he couldn't quite say why.

This girl had, as she had said, played the fool with Gilbert,--led the man on and teased him into desperation.He loathed the supercilious fellow and didn't give a hang how much he suffered.

Anyway, he was married and ought to have known better.But what hit was the fact that all the while she had loved this Martin of hers,--she, by whom he dated things, who had given him a new point of view about girls and who was his own very best pal.That was not up to her form and somehow hurt.

And she saw that it did and was deeply sorry and ashamed.Was she to have a bad effect on every man she met? "I won't make excuses, Harry," she said."They're so hopeless.But I want you to know that I sprang into marriage before I'd given a thought to what it all meant, and I took it as a lark, a chapter in my adventure, something that I could easily stop and look at after I'd seen and done everything and was a little breathless.I thought that Martin had gone into it in the same spirit and that for the joke of the thing we were just going to play at keeping house, as we might have played at being Indians away in the woods.It was the easiest way out of a hole I was in and made it possible for me not to creep back to my grandmother and take a whipping like a dog.Do you understand?"The boy nodded.He had seen her do things and heard her say things on the spur of the moment that were almost as unbelievable.

His sympathy and quick perception were like water to her.And it was indescribably good to be believed without incredulous side-looks and suspicions, half-smiles such as Hosack would have given,--and some of the others who had lost their fineness in the world.