The Light Heart (22 page)

“I don’t know,” said Phoebe tersely. “It’s funny what you can bear.”

And she went off to her own room to remove her hat.

New
York
Spring,
1903–1911

B
UT before the boat reached New York Phoebe knew, for certain, that she had answered wrong.

It was no good telling herself that when she saw Miles again she would feel differently. Every turn of the screw which carried her away from Oliver made Miles more impossible. She promised herself that as soon as she got to New York she would send Oliver a cable, but when she tried to word it nothing came. The last day out she wrote him a letter—and tore it up because it sounded to her like a self-conscious heroine in a very amateurish novel. How do you tell a man you have refused to marry that you have changed your mind? Simplify. Reduce it to a cable again. Bracken always said that for good reporting you should remember your word-rate, and if you weren’t cabling pretend you were.
Dear
Oliver
—
I
was
wrong.
Please
forgive
me.
Then what?
I
want
to
marry
you
after
all.
Well, hardly, in so many words. But what other words were there for the same thing?

Oughtn’t she to see Miles first? Would that be fairer to him? And then write to Oliver saying, I’m free, what about you? But that cornered him. That left him no choice whatever, made no allowance for the pressure put on him by his own
surroundings
and code of behaviour. That forced him to jilt one girl, no matter what he did.

Stick to it, then. See it through, as you said you were going to. He’s given up by now, don’t open it again. Let him make what he can of his life with Maia.—The familiar sharp pain which was plain, old-fashioned jealousy wrenched at her heart. Maia didn’t deserve him. Maia wouldn’t come half way. And as for herself, to see it through with Miles was beyond her now.

Once her feet touched American soil Phoebe knew what she wanted, and that was Cousin Sue. She left New York the following day and sat pushing the train all the way to Williamsburg. Then another night had to pass before she could get Cousin Sue alone. But at last, oh a sunny morning at the end of September she sat in the drawing-room of Great-uncle Ransom’s house, with the door closed, and told Cousin Sue with laughter and tears and unconscious pathos all about Oliver Campion.

Sue listened almost wordlessly, supplying a tactful
handkerchief
mid-way, until Phoebe came to the end and said, “So what am I to do now? Which of them must I tell first? What can I say to Oliver?”

“None of it really matters,” Sue said without hesitation, “so long as you
tell
Oliver.”

“You do think I should?” Phoebe quavered hopefully. “I wrote him a letter on the boat but I couldn’t have sent it, it sounded—childish!”

“Write him another,” said Sue. “To-night. Never mind how it sounds. Just tell him.”

“B-before I tell Miles?”

“To-night,” said Sue.

“And Miles too? Should I write to Miles to-night as well?”

“Yes,” said Sue, and sighed, for her conscience gave a twinge. “Poor Miles. But it’s best for you. Oliver is the one for you.”

“Oliver told me about a man named Forbes-Carpenter,” Phoebe remarked, and watched Sue’s cheeks get pink. “Then it’s true! He did fall in love with you! But you came back to Williamsburg. Why?”

“It wasn’t the same,” Sue said, confused and defensive. “Gratian was a dear, but—the only man I ever loved was here.”

“Father,”
said Phoebe in an awed whisper, watching her, and Sue nodded.

“We are three times cousins,” she said. “It wouldn’t have been right for us to marry. But I want you to promise me one thing. Never mention anything you heard in England to him.”

Phoebe promised solemnly, and Sue’s dimple showed.

“It’s none of his business,” she said defiantly. “But if he should find it out now from you, after all this time I’ve kept it from him, he’d have a fit. Besides,” she added more seriously, “I came back. That’s all he needs to know. But there’s nothing like that standing between you and Oliver, and Miles can get along somehow. I know that sounds heartless, but Miles isn’t really the marrying kind, I sometimes think.”

“Well, but there’s Maia to think of,” Phoebe reminded her, and Sue shook her head.

“She wouldn’t want him if she knew how it was,” she said.

Phoebe wasn’t so sure.

It wasn’t very good, but it would have to do. She sealed and stamped it, and took another sheet of paper.

This one also she stamped and sealed and sat a moment with both letters in her hand—so easy not to send them, even now—so easy just to let things drift, and perhaps by and by it wouldn’t matter so much….

Phoebe’s lower lip came out. She rose, and ran downstairs
and out into the warm autumn dusk, and carried her two letters to the post office and pushed them through the slot. And then, further to burn her boats, she went home and told a surprised and interested family what she had done.

It would take, say, ten days for the letter to reach London, and at least ten more for his reply—or would he cable? Being Oliver, he was sure to cable. If he did, she could be with him again in a little more than a month. If only she had
stayed,
there would have been only one letter to write. If she had stayed, she might have been Oliver’s wife by now….

But the tenth day came and went, with no cable from London. And when nine more had gone, and she had told herself over and over that cables weren’t private enough for what Oliver had to say, and of course he would write it, a letter came from Dinah in New York, enclosing one from Virginia—Oliver had married Maia very suddenly, without the elaborate church ceremony Maia had always intended, and they had gone away to the Lake Country for the honeymoon.

Phoebe found herself face down and crosswise on the bed in her room with the letter from Dinah and its enclosure under her hand. She was not sure how she had got there, but the door was closed and she was safe from observation for a while. Finally she sat up and smoothed out Virginia’s letter and read it slowly again, with dry eyes. Virginia was indignant, for she considered that Maia had forced Oliver’s hand. It was all because Maia’s father, invalid though he was, had succeeded in acquiring a wife, a sympathetic (and impecunious) widow of the neighbourhood, who apparently asked nothing better than to take charge of a peevish, well-to-do, and not unattractive man barely into his sixties, whose ailments were more than half imaginary. And Maia, who had hitherto only longed to escape her own bondage, now chose to be outraged and humiliated that her services were no longer required, and had flounced up to London and descended on Clare, announcing her willingness to be married at once, in what she stood up in, rather than be beholden and subordinate to the intruder for
another hour. Oliver, wrote Virginia, had risen magnificently to the occasion. And so they were married, very quietly, at St. Peter’s in Eaton Square, about a week after Phoebe had sailed, or she and Dinah and Bracken and Eden could all have come to the wedding, added Virginia innocently. It was at least a little less depressing than Rosalind’s, and Maia had looked divine, though she was a bit of
a gum-boil and would never be as good to Oliver as he deserved.

Phoebe sat still on the edge of the bed, taking it in. Her letter to Oliver must have arrived in London just after he departed to the Lake Country with Maia, and would be waiting for him when he returned. There was no way now to get it back or stop him from reading it. He would go into the club some day in the usual way, a reasonably happy man who had done the right thing and was entitled to enjoy what he could make of his life. And they would hand him her letter, which turned his kind-hearted, philosophical marriage into a bitter farce, with laughter by the gods.

What would he do? Nothing, how could he? What would he reply to her, who had now made hash of both their lives? Would he write at all? Better, perhaps, if he didn’t.

Gradually other aspects of the situation than Oliver’s began to emerge from her dazed thoughts. Miles would probably feel sorry for her now and offer himself once more, as
consolation
. She could never face Miles again. She could never face any of them, here in Williamsburg. Oliver had let her down before all her world—they would never be able to understand how powerless he was to do otherwise in the circumstances. They would think he had trifled with her. Or that she had misunderstood and magnified a casual flirtation….

Phoebe slid off the bed and stole out of the house, carrying Virginia’s letter. When she got past the gate she ran.

Sue was alone in the drawing-room doing up the corrected page-proofs of her latest book to send back to the publishers, when the tornado struck. She shut the door and made Phoebe sit down and get her breath, while she read Virginia’s letter
with great thoroughness, making up her mind meanwhile. It had gone all wrong, her gift and Gratian’s, to Phoebe. They had bought her the chance to love, and brought heartbreak upon her as well. And humiliation. That was the hard part. One had to be able to hold up one’s head.

Phoebe was crying into the back of the sofa, and Sue leaned over and laid her hand on the shaken shoulders.

“Don’t spoil your face,” she said gently. “We’ve got to lay plans now. We’re going to New York.”

Phoebe looked up at her with streaming eyes, and her breath caught on a childish hiccup.

“N-New York? What for?”

“We’re going to get you out of this at once. Phoebe, you will have to keep a secret. From your father. Can you do that, for me?”

Phoebe nodded, her tears arrested by bewilderment.

“When Gratian Forbes-Carpenter died he left me all his money—quite a lot. He hadn’t anybody else, you see, but I won’t touch it, I don’t need it, I meant it all for you some day. I’m going to give it to you now, enough for you to live on in New York and write your book and forget all about both Miles and Oliver. I can arrange for you to be independent there with Eden to look after you, of course—but I want your father to think that Eden is paying for it all, and not me, the same as when you went to England.”

“W-was that you?”

“It was Gratian,” said Sue. “He would want you to have this money, since I can’t use it here. I have, every thing I’ll ever need, I shall have to talk to Bracken. We’ll tell them at home that Eden is lonely and wants you for a visit, and that I have to go to see the publishers about my book. I can go with you and be back here by Saturday.”

“You mean I can
stay
in New York—as long as I like? And pay my own way?”

“Thanks to Gratian, you can. Eden will say it’s nonsense for you to pay anything, and in a way it is. She has plenty of room
at the house, and you must live there under her roof, at first anyway where you’ll be safe. But Bracken will give you an allowance each month, from Gratian’s money. Till you can earn with your writing.”

“Maybe Bracken would give me a job on the newspaper. They do hire girls, to do the weddings and things.”

“We can ask him,” Sue nodded, remembering what it had done for Phoebe’s brother Fitz when Cabot Murray gave him a job on the paper a few years before. “But I want you to work hard on your book now. You ought to be able to make something out of it. And work is the best pain-killer I know.”

“Then I won’t have to stay here and have everybody sorry for me,” said Phoebe, tears drying on her cheeks.

“Bless me, no!” cried Sue, who had been through all that herself. “And you’re not to be sorry for yourself, either. Some day you’ll be able to see that you’re the better for having known Oliver, hard as it is.”

“I can see it even now,” said Phoebe steadily. “He taught me—well, just about everything, I reckon. He was—” She caught Sue’s shoulders, looking up earnestly into her face. “You’re not to blame Oliver for this,” she insisted. “Everyone else will. But you’ve been in England, you know how they are, especially in the Army. Oliver had given his word to Maia. We both knew that from the start. We never really lost sight of it—and of Miles. It would have been desperately hard for Oliver if my letter had got there before the wedding, I knew that. It’s probably better for him, some ways, that it didn’t. If only I hadn’t written it
at
all
—but you won’t hold Oliver to blame, will you?”