Romance Classics (112 page)

“You may do as you like,” she told him hotly.

“Then I’ll stay, for the present,” Jonathan told her. “And I’ll make you a promise that should ease your mind considerably.”

Puzzled, curious she waited uneasily.

“I’ll give you my sworn word of honor never to ask you for another date,” said Jonathan quietly.

“Well, thanks,” she snapped.

“Of course,” he went on gently, “should you at any time want to ask
me
for one, I’ll take it under consideration.”

Loyce caught her breath and sputtered furiously. But Jonathan merely smiled at her, stepped out of the path, motioned her ahead and went on down to the creek.

Loyce watched him for a moment, and then she turned, her head high, bright color flaming in her cheeks, and went hurrying up the path to the Lodge.

Jonathan was infuriatingly matter of fact at dinner, merely rising politely when she excused herself and fled upstairs. Cherry watched him curiously, and soon after the Judge and Jonathan had retired to the living room for the chess game that was now a nightly ritual, went upstairs to Loyce’s room.

The door was locked, to her surprise, and she knocked lightly.

Loyce’s voice was somewhat muffled as she called out, “Sorry, honey. I think I’m catching a cold. I’m going to bed and try to sleep it off.”

“Can I bring you anything?” asked Cherry.

“Thanks, no. I’ll be fine. Good night, honey.”

Cherry turned away and went back downstairs.

Something had happened between Jonathan and Loyce and it bothered her a bit. She loved her sister and she liked Jonathan, and she didn’t see why they couldn’t be friends.

She sighed and went on into the library to attend to the day’s mail and to bring the books up to date, washing out of her mind anything except the task at hand. When she had finished and came back into the big living room, the Judge had gone to bed and Jonathan was alone in front of the fire. Even this late in spring, the mountain nights made a log fire a necessity, and Jonathan obviously enjoyed relaxing in front of it until bedtime.

He stood up as she came in and smiled at her, knocking out his pipe.

“Come and relax a bit before you say good night,” he suggested, “if you aren’t too tired.”

Cherry dropped into a deep rustic chair, drew her feet up under her, propped an elbow on the broad arm of the chair, cupped her chin in her palm and eyed Jonathan speculatively.

Jonathan’s brows went up a little as he watched her, and suddenly he grinned.

“Now that you are all comfortable and tucked in, what’s furrowing your pretty brow, Angel-Face?” he teased her.

“I’m just trying to figure out why you and Loyce don’t like each other,” she said frankly.

Jonathan sobered and answered quietly, “I like Loyce very much. It’s pretty plain that she doesn’t like me. I’m truly sorry, but I honestly don’t know what I can do about it, do you?”

“Did you have a fight with her today?” demanded Cherry.

“Now what ever gave you that idea?

“Well, she’d hardly finished her dinner before she excused herself and rushed off to her room.”

“What’s odd about that? It’s her customary procedure every evening.”

Cherry nodded, her brows drawn together in an unhappy frown.

“Jonny, I worry about her,” she confessed.

Jonathan said quietly, “I know you do, Angel-Face. And it’s a shame. But she can’t be helped as long as she insists on wallowing in her grief.”

Cherry stiffened and her eyes flashed.

“I don’t like that phrase, Mr. Gayle.”

“Don’t you?” Jonathan was entirely undisturbed. “Well, what would you call it? A little honest grief for a bereavement is understandable. But just to lie down and let it swamp you seems to me a pretty spineless attitude. You mentioned the girl who dated your boy friend Job at the church supper and said she was a young widow. Yet she seems to have made up her mind to go on living, even if her chief reason for wanting to is gone. So why shouldn’t Loyce pick herself up, brush herself off, and face up to the fact that life goes on whether we want it to or not?”

Cherry was listening, wide-eyed, unwilling to be convinced, and yet not quite able to resist his logic.

“Believe me, Cherry, I’m not unsympathetic,” Jonathan told her gently. “I know she has suffered a great heartache. I’m truly sorry for her. But after all, she is not the only woman who has lost a man she loved. Think of the widows with small children; women whose husbands and sweethearts have died in war, in automobile accidents — Loyce seems to set herself in a niche all by herself and to feel that she alone of all the women in the world has suffered a great loss. And that, my girl, is simply self-pity. And a more loathsome disease I can’t think of at the moment.”

Cherry was staring at him. After a moment she said uneasily, “But, Jonny, what should she do? She loved him so terribly.”

“I’m sure she did, Cherry,” said Jonathan quietly. “But what else was mixed up in that love?”

Cherry blinked, puzzled.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she admitted.

“Simply that this locked-in grief, this withdrawal from the whole human race is very bad for her and, Cherry dear, very dangerous,” Jonathan told her.

Startled, Cherry repeated the word, “Dangerous?”

“Mental illness can easily develop, Cherry,” he told her with brutal frankness, and saw shock spread over her vivid face.

“Oh no, Jonny!” she whispered at last.

“Hadn’t you and the Judge ever thought of that, Cherry?” asked Jonathan. “I would have thought that with all his experience in the legal profession, the many times he must have had to rule on mental illnesses, he would have sensed the danger in Loyce’s behavior. But I suppose when it’s someone in your own family, you just don’t notice — or try not to.”

“Oh, Jonny!” Cherry shuddered. “What are we going to do?”

Jonathan felt a swift stab of compunction at his revelation of his thoughts about Loyce.

“Cherry dear, I’m terribly sorry to have frightened you — sorry as the dickens,” he told her. “But I’ve been thinking about this ever since I first came here. I’ve watched her, and because I’m an outsider I can see telltale signs that you and the Judge would never notice. Oh, I’m no expert; but it doesn’t take an expert to see that Loyce is really sick. The only hope is to draw her out of her black mood; find out what it is besides grief that’s got her so locked up inside herself that she’s in a world of her own in which she is hardly aware of those of us outside that world. There is something there, Cherry, that’s intensifying the grief. I think if we could find out what that was and get rid of it, she would get rid of this melancholia that’s threatening her.”

Cherry was still for a long moment and then she asked anxiously, “Do you think it’s because she works so hard? She does, you know.”

“I think she works hard at physical labor, Cherry, because of this black thing that is driving her. Whatever it is, it makes her work until she is ready to drop; probably so that she can sleep. It’s not the physical labor that’s driving her; it’s the darkness inside of her. And finding out what this is, and maybe easing it, is something that only a trained psychiatrist could accomplish.”

“And we’d never get her to go to one,” Cherry admitted huskily.

“No, I suppose not,” Jonathan agreed. “I’d hoped she would go out with me; perhaps a day in town, Atlanta or Rome or even Gainesville. But of course you know what happened with that effort. She wouldn’t even go to dinner with me, so I had no chance to offer her a day of light-hearted gaiety in town.”

He was trying hard to cheer Cherry as he leaned toward her and said gently, “Honey, I can’t tell you how sorry I am to have been so frank. I didn’t mean to be; if you hadn’t come in here tonight, and caught me with my emotions showing, I could easily have kept things to myself. But I’ve been very worried about her. I know I’m sticking my neck out — way out — in being presumptuous enough to think that any attentions I could offer her would be of any help in solving her problem. But at least I am someone she doesn’t know. She’s accustomed to all the others around her. I thought perhaps if I could get her to go out with me, maybe I could cheer her up; get her mind off her grief. I know that sounds presumptuous as the devil. But, honestly, Cherry it was all I had in mind. I swear it.”

Cherry said shakily, “Oh, I know, Jonny. And it was sweet of you. And she was very foolish not to let you. I had fun when you took me out.”

Jonathan smiled down at her and suddenly put out his hand and drew her to her feet.

“You’re a sweetheart, Cherry,” he said, “and I feel like the world’s worst heel to have upset you by talking this way about Loyce. But, honey, she needs help and needs it badly.”

Cherry was suddenly weeping, and Jonathan’s arms drew her comfortingly close as though she had been a grieving child. For a long moment she stood with her face hidden against his shoulder, sobs shaking her body. And then suddenly she felt his arms tighten, his body go rigid.

Startled, she looked up at him and then followed the direction of his eyes to the stairs where Loyce stood, head held high, face white as paper above the shabby dark blue robe that was belted tightly about her slender body.

For a moment that seemed to all three of them endless, the tableau held. And then Loyce, still without a word, turned and went back up the stairs, moving on swift slippered feet that made no sound. Not until the sound of her door closing behind her released them from the grip of silence did Cherry speak.

She turned a ravaged, tear-streaked face toward Jonathan and whispered in horror-stricken tones, “Oh, Jonny, how much did she overhear?”

Jonathan was scowling darkly, trying to remember all that had been said and wondering how much of it Loyce had heard.

“I don’t know, honey,” he said at last, his voice husky. “We were not talking very loudly. But she must have heard more than we wanted her to hear. I know that from the way she was watching us.”

“Oh, but that doesn’t have to be the reason she was looking so stricken,” Cherry stammered, and there was a faint ray of hope in her voice. “It could have been partly because she thought you were making love to me.

A wry grimace touched Jonathan’s face.

“Would that thought distress her so much?” he asked.

Cherry flushed beneath the look in his eyes.

“Well, she was afraid I might fall in love with you and that you might not like me that much.” Her words stumbled awkwardly.

Jonathan eyed her curiously.

“I hope you convinced her there was no danger of such a thing happening,” he drawled.

“Well, I couldn’t,” Cherry replied. “I mean I couldn’t convince her that I might not fall in love with you. I tried, though — truly I did — because I know how crazy it would be for me to think you could care anything about me.”

“You don’t say!” Jonathan murmured, diverted from the problem of Loyce by the incredible attitude of the girl before him. “Matter of fact, youngster, it would be the easiest thing in the world to fall in love with you. Only I’m not going to do it.”

“Aren’t you?” asked Cherry wistfully.

“Of course not, any more than you are going to fall in love with me, you ridiculous child,” Jonathan told her. “So that’s one problem Loyce doesn’t have to worry about, isn’t it?”

Subdued, Chery said huskily, “Well, yes, I suppose it is.”

Jonathan looked down at her where she stood, a foot or two away from his arms now, leaning against the tall back of the chair in which she had been sitting. His eyes took her in from the top of her tumbled red-gold curls to the tips of her small feet in scuffed brown shoes. Her sweater and skirt were brown-gold like her hair; a dark green scarf was twisted carelessly about her throat.

“Wouldn’t it be ridiculous,” he said very softly, “for us to fall in love with each other? You are so much a part of the mountains that you’d die of homesickness away from here; yet all that I have worked for, the whole of my life is in the city. You’d hate it; you couldn’t endure it, any more than I could endure a life spent here in the mountains. Don’t you see that, honey?”

Cherry set her teeth hard against the impulsive assurance that she could make herself happy anywhere he wanted to live. Instead, when she managed to speak her voice was colorless, without expression, and all she said was, “Yes, of course. Very ridiculous, if you say so.”

She turned away then and without another word went quickly up the stairs and away from him. Jonathan stood for a long moment watching the now empty stairs. And then, scowling, he plunged one clenched fist into the palm of the other hand and swore luridly.

Cherry greeted the morning with relief, knowing that it was Friday, and the Lodge was booked solid for the week-end. There would be no time to worry about personal problems, either her own or Loyce’s, for the guests would begin arriving shortly after lunch and from then until after breakfast on Monday morning the whole place would be jumping. There was much for her to do to assure the comfort and the satisfaction of the guests, so that they would want to return and would send their friends. She caught a glimpse of Loyce vanishing out of the back door shortly after Cherry herself had come downstairs, but she knew it would do no good to follow her or try to talk to her. That would have to wait until Monday after the last guest had left.

She was grateful that Jonathan did not appear for breakfast.

“Oh, he was up and out an hour ago,” the Judge told her when she took her place at the breakfast table. “Left word that there was a certain trout he had had his eye on for some time and he wanted to make one more effort to catch him before somebody else got him.”

Cherry murmured something and did not look up.

The Judge eyed her sharply.

“Headache, honey?” he asked gently.

Cherry looked up as though startled at the question.

“Who, me?” she asked in surprise. “Now when did you ever know me to have a headache?”

“Well, I just thought you didn’t look as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as usual,” the Judge teased her, but the slightly anxious look was still in his eyes. “Something on your mind?”