“I’m bound for Baltimore anyhow. Why not get off your rocking horse and sit in my car a minute.”
She tied the mare to a tree and got in beside him.
He had not realized that flashing fairness could last so far into the twenties—only when she didn’t smile, he saw from three small thoughtful lines that she was always a grave girl—he had a quick recollection of Amanda on an August afternoon, and looking at Bess, he recognized all that he remembered of Amanda.
“How’s your father?”
“Father died last year. He was bedridden a year before he died.” Her voice was in the singsong of something often repeated. “It was just as well.”
“I’m sorry. How about Jean? Where is she?”
“Jean married a Chinaman—I mean she married a man who lives in China. I’ve never seen him.”
“Do you live alone, then?”
“No, there’s my aunt.” She hesitated. “Anyhow, I’m getting married next week.”
Inexplicably, he had the old sense of loss in his diaphragm.
“Congratulations! Who’s the unfortunate—”
“From Philadelphia. The whole party went over to the races this afternoon. I wanted to have a last ride with Juniper.”
“Will you live in Philadelphia?”
“Not sure. We’re thinking of building another house on the place, tear down the old one. Of course, we might remodel it.”
“Would that be worth doing?”
“Why not?” she said hastily. “We could use some of it, the architects think.”
“You’re fond of it, aren’t you?”
Bess considered.
“I wouldn’t say it was just my idea of modernity. But I’m a sort of a home girl.” She accentuated the words ironically. “I never went over very big in Baltimore, you know—the family failure. I never had the sort of thing Amanda and Jean had.”
“Maybe you didn’t want it.”
“I thought I did when I was young.”
The mare neighed peremptorily and Bess backed out of the car.
“So that’s the story, Lew Lowrie, of the last Gunther girl. You always did have a sort of yen for us, didn’t you?”
“Didn’t I! If I could possibly stay in Baltimore, I’d insist on coming to your wedding.”
At the lost expression on her face, he wondered to whom she was handing herself, a very precious self. He knew more about people now, and he felt the steel beneath the softness in her, the girders showing through the gentle curves of cheek and chin. She was an exquisite person, and he hoped that her husband would be a good man.
When she had ridden off into a green lane, he drove tentatively toward Baltimore. This was the end of a human experience and it released old images that regrouped themselves about him—if he had married one of the sisters; supposing—The past, slipping away under the wheels of his car, crunched awake his acuteness.
“Perhaps I was always an intruder in that family… But why on earth was that girl riding in bedroom slippers?”
At the crossroads store he stopped to get cigarettes. A young clerk searched the case with country slowness.
“Big wedding up at the Gunther place,” Lew remarked.
“Hah? Miss Bess getting married?”
“Next week. The wedding party’s there now.”
“Well, I’ll be dog! Wonder what they’re going to sleep on, since Mark H. Bourne took the furniture away?”
“What’s that? What?”
“Month ago Mark H. Bourne took all the furniture and everything else while Miss Bess was out riding—they mortgaged on it just before Gunther died. They say around here she ain’t got a stitch except them riding clothes. Mark H. Bourne was good and sore. His claim was they sold off all the best pieces of furniture without his knowing it… Now, that’s ten cents I owe you.”
“What do she and her aunt live on?”
“Never heard about an aunt—I only been here a year. She works the truck garden herself; all she buys from us is sugar, salt and coffee.”
Anything was possible these times, yet Lew wondered what incredibly fantastic pride had inspired her to tell that lie.
He turned his car around and drove back to the Gunther place. It was a desperately forlorn house he came to, and a jungled garden; one side of the veranda had slipped from the brick pillars and sloped to the ground; a shingle job, begun and abandoned, rotted paintless on the roof, a broken pane gaped from the library window.
Lew went in without knocking. A voice challenged him from the dining room and he walked toward it, his feet loud on the rugless floor, through rooms empty of stick and book, empty of all save casual dust. Bess Gunther, wearing the cheapest of house dresses, rose from the packing box on which she sat, with fright in her eyes; a tin spoon rattled on the box she was using as a table.
“Have you been kidding me?” he demanded. “Are you actually living like this?”
“It’s you.” She smiled in relief; then, with visible effort, she spurred herself into amenities:
“Take a box, Mr. Lowrie. Have a canned-goods box—they’re superior; the grain is better. And welcome to the open spaces. Have a cigar, a glass of champagne, have some rabbit stew and meet my fiancй.”
“Stop that.”
“All right,” she agreed.
“Why didn’t you go and live with some relatives?”
“Haven’t got any relatives. Jean’s in China.”
“What are you doing? What do you expect to happen?”
“I was waiting for you, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“You always seemed to turn up. I thought if you turned up, I’d make a play for you. But when it came to the point, I thought I’d better lie. I seem to lack the S.A. my sisters had.”
Lew pulled her up from the box and held her with his fingers by her waist.
“Not to me.”
In the hour since Lew had met her on the road the vitality seemed to have gone out of her; she looked up at him very tired.
“So you liked the Gunthers,” she whispered. “You liked us all.”
Lew tried to think, but his heart beat so quick that he could only sit her back on the box and pace along the empty walls.
“We’ll get married,” he said. “I don’t know whether I love you—I don’t even know you—I know the notion of your being in want or trouble makes me physically sick.” Suddenly he went down on both knees in front of her so that she would not seem so unbearably small and helpless. “Miss Bess Gunther, so it was you I was meant to love all the while.”
“Don’t be so anxious about it,” she laughed. “I’m not used to being loved. I wouldn’t know what to do; I never got the trick of it.” She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. “So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.”
He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. “Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I’m not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don’t move suddenly.”
It was the same old story of reserve Lew could not fathom, motives reaching back into a past he did not share. With the three girls, facts seemed to reveal themselves precipitately, pushing up through the gay surface; they were always unsuspected things, currents and predilections alien to a man who had been able to shoot in a straight line always.
“I was the conservative sister,” Bess said. “I wasn’t any less pleasure loving but with three girls, somebody has to play the boy, and gradually that got to be my part… Yes, touch me like that. Touch my cheek. I want to be touched; I want to be held. And I’m glad it’s you; but you’ve got to go slow; you’ve got to be careful. I’m afraid I’m the kind of person that’s forever. I’ll live with you and die for you, but I never knew what halfway meant… Yes, that’s the wrist. Do you like it? I’ve had a lot of fun looking at myself in the last month, because there’s one long mirror upstairs that was too big to take out.”
Lew stood up. “All right, we’ll start like that. I’ll be so healthy that I’ll make you all healthy again.”
“Yes, like that,” she agreed.
“Suppose we begin by setting fire to this house.”
“Oh, no!” She took him seriously. “In the first place, it’s insured. In the second place—”
“All right, we’ll just get out. We’ll get married in Baltimore, or Ellicott City if you’d rather.”
“How about Juniper? I can’t go off and leave her.”
“We’ll leave her with the young man at the store.”
“The house isn’t mine. It’s all mortgaged away, but they let me live here—I guess it was remorse after they took even our old music, and our old scrapbooks. They didn’t have a chance of getting a tenant, anyhow.”
Minute by minute, Lew found out more about her, and liked what he found, but he saw that the love in her was all incrusted with the sacrificial years, and that he would have to be gardener to it for a while. The task seemed attractive.
“You lovely,” he told her. “You lovely! We’ll survive, you and I because you’re so nice and I’m so convinced about it.”
“And about Juniper—will she survive if we go away like this?”
“Juniper too.”
She frowned and then smiled—and this time really smiled—and said: “Seems to me, you’re falling in love.”
“Speak for yourself. My opinion is that this is going to be the best thing ever happened.”
“I’m going to help. I insist on—”
They went out together—Bess changed into her riding habit, but there wasn’t another article that she wanted to bring with her. Backing through the clogging weeds of the garden, Lew looked at the house over his shoulder. “Next week or so we’ll decide what to do about that.”
It
