The Flower Brides (99 page)

He watched her furtively from beneath his half-closed lids, as she stood with her hands gripped fiercely together, her young brows knit in trouble, and her eyes dark with indignation.

Suddenly he raised his head with that motion that his young office force knew so well when he was hurried or troubled and was giving some command about work to be done. “Well, I’ll
make
you love me!” he declared. “I swear I will.”

Camilla laughed suddenly, a slow, amused laugh.

“That would be quite impossible!” she said in a low, controlled tone. “Not even if you were free and all things to be desired, I wouldn’t love you!” And something faraway, like the memory of a dream, danced in her eyes and made them laugh.

And Ralph Whitlock stood and watched her grimly, helplessly, and suddenly knew that he had lost.

“Camilla,” he asked after a long, long silence, “why? Is there someone else? Is there, Camilla?”

She looked at him steadily for a moment, startled anew, then turned her face away from him toward the window where the sun had suddenly shot out from behind a cloud, and a smile dawned in her eyes.

“Yes,” she said quietly, in a clear voice, “there is!”

I
t was growing late for the Florida season, and Mrs. Wainwright was beginning to talk about going home.

There had been no word of her husband’s coming south, and she was beginning to realize that he hadn’t really expected to be able to come at all. And now that the season was about over and so many were flitting to their homes, it didn’t matter so much after all. She talked idly with her friends of “business” and of how hard her husband had to work in these times, and rocked and knitted.

She was distinctly glad that Stephanie Varrell had given up bombarding her with questions as to where Jeff had gone and was about to leave the hotel. Rumor had it that she had a quarrel with her latest fiancé and he had departed hastily. But recently a new adherent had arrived, a dark-browed, foreign-looking stranger who walked the patios with her and seemed to order her around as if he had the right. They were off now in an airplane, sailing over the blue sea, into the bluer sky, looking like a mosquito on a field of blue. Jeffrey Wainwright’s mother profoundly hoped she would sail so far that she would never come back into her range of vision again.

Jeff, meanwhile, had been with John Saxon, doing actual physical labor and learning profound truths from the Word of God. Such fellowship and joy had come from this friendship as he had never had before and a vision of what heavenly lives could be on earth, even in a little old ramshackle shanty in the midst of a lonely Florida orange grove, waiting for the oranges to mature and pay for ordinary necessities.

One night, sitting under the Florida moon, Jeff told John about Camilla. Told him, too, that he was worried because she had not answered his letter.

John listened quietly, read between the lines, studied the speaking face of his friend, and then spoke in a tone of deep brotherly love.

“Man! If you’ve found a girl like that, go back and get her promised before someone else carries her off! There aren’t many of them these days. Jeff, I’ll be missing you, but—I’ll be praying for you, old man!”

Jeff went the next day.

He found at the hotel a summons for him from his father. He would come down for a week with Jeff’s mother and bring her home if Jeff would come back at once. So Jeff sent a wire and went.

His first day in the office was a busy one, for his father had left detailed directions, and Jeff carried them out conscientiously to the letter. It was late, and he was tired when he got through, but his heart was singing. He was going to see Camilla in a few minutes. God grant no other man had found her yet and carried her off. What a fool he had been to leave without telling her something, getting some definite word from her, and yet, how could he? She had definitely put a barrier between them, which he had to find out how to cross. Thank God he had found the way and crossed it, and now was free to go and tell her.

So he ate a hasty dinner and drove down to Vesey Street.

But when he reached Vesey Street, it wasn’t there at all! Something had happened. It was gone entirely, dropped right out of the world. It seemed as if he were living in a fairy tale and a bad fairy had woven an enchantment. Of course, he had made some ridiculous mistake and it was there somewhere, but he couldn’t find it.

He drove up a block and down a block and round several blocks and came to a standstill again right where he had thought it was, but Vesey Street had departed.

He consulted a policeman new on the beat who informed him that there were portions of an intermittent Vesey Street located erratically here and there in the neighborhood, and he canvassed them all to no purpose. It was as if 125 Vesey Street had vanished off the map.

Stephanie Varrell, sailing trackless skies to strange lands with her dark foreigner, would have laughed if she could have seen his face, utterly baffled, and so easily, by a couple of summary little telegrams. Sometimes in her thoughts she exulted over having wiped that block of Vesey Street from the face of the earth. She wondered what had become of the girl and whether she was by this time forgotten. Whether the letter, too, in ashes, had done its work. She felt, if she had no other satisfaction, at least she had that. For she hated that girl, of whose likeness to herself more than one man had dared to tell her that night.

But Jeffrey Wainwright came back at last to the heap of bricks and plaster and glass and tin that composed that portion of Vesey Street and searched until he found a boy who used to live in the row and who remembered a family by the name of Chrystie. He used to deliver them papers sometimes, he said. But they had moved away. “Suddenly,” he said. “Maybe they couldn’t pay their rent.” He didn’t know where they had gone, perhaps a long way off. “People did sometimes, when they couldn’t pay their rent.”

So Jeffrey went his troubled way. He tried to find out who had done the moving, but the boy didn’t know. He wasn’t on the spot at the time. He was delivering papers on his route. His brother might know, but he was gone away to his uncle’s on a farm.

Long evenings Jeffrey Wainwright searched for Camilla, coming back each night to the empty place where Vesey Street used to be and asking anyone who passed, but nothing came of it.

He even searched out the postman on that beat, but the postman, though he remembered the Chrysties, said they had left no forwarding address. He said they never got much mail, anyway, just a letter now and then from the west. But he couldn’t remember the name of the town, so that came to nothing. And the bricks and debris of Vesey Street grew daily less and less as the ground was cleared and prepared for the large building that was to go up for the gas company. Even the old wooden step where Jeffrey had stood with Camilla that night was carried away, gone, utterly gone. Only the memory of that precious kiss was left.

That night he wrote John Saxon a brief anxious letter asking him to pray hard!

One day Jeffrey remembered Miss York. Why hadn’t he thought of her before? And he drove to the house where he had gone for her on that memorable night in the winter.

The snow was gone, and the grass was growing green. There was a scraggy row of daffodils blooming in the little side yard of the house where he had found the nurse, but when he knocked at the door nobody answered and, looking at the windows, he found there were no curtains and no sign of inhabitants. A query around the neighborhood brought out the fact that the folks had gone to live with their daughter instead of her coming to live with them, and the house and daffodils were for sale or rent, but no one knew what had become of the nurse!

It was a strange set of circumstances, as if some evil-minded power were playing a trick on Jeff. He thought of the kind old doctor next. He would know his patients, the Chrysties, and what had become of them. He would surely know where Nurse York was, at least.

But when he went to the doctor’s house where he and Camilla went that first night they had met, he found crepe on the door. The doctor had had a stroke and died two days before, and no one around the house knew or cared where a Nurse York lived, and they had never heard of patients named Chrystie.

All day Jeffrey worked in the office, and every evening he searched for Camilla. He occasionally met acquaintances here and there in the city who invited him to their homes or asked him to go out with them, but he declined them all. He was too busy. It got around that he was at home and the telephone rang incessantly when he was there, but he told his man to say he was going out. If Stephanie Varrell called or did not call, he did not know nor care. If she was in the city, it made no difference to him. What did make a difference was that Camilla had vanished as completely as Vesey Street, and his heart was crying out to find her. The kiss upon his lips was real now and came back to him in his dreams and thrilled him. Where, oh, where was Camilla?

M
atters at the office had been most trying ever since that Monday talk that Camilla had had with Whitlock.

He had been in and out of the office, working hard and silently, answering everybody shortly, glaring into the telephone as if it were a human being, most irascible, even to Camilla. And as for poor Marietta, she was getting in these days all the discipline of life that she had missed when she was a child.

Camilla had time now and then to look at her proudly and encourage her with a smile, for really, Marietta was showing some of the fruits of righteousness that hard trials often bring. She was neat, and she was respectful; even in the face of faultfinding, she was humble. She did not answer back nor chew gum nor read novels, and she did her work well and more and more rapidly.

If I should have to leave
, thought Camilla—and she thought it many times a day in these days
—Marietta could almost take my place!

Camilla had not told her mother her fears. Time enough when the blow fell if it did, but she knew enough about human nature to understand that things could not go on continually as they were doing.

But wise Nurse York was watching, and whenever she came over to the house for a few hours, which she did as often as she got a chance, she watched Camilla keenly. And she asked casual, wise questions to find out whether Whitlock was as frequent a visitor as he used to be. She had pretty well convinced herself that the Chrysties had not known about Whitlock’s wife until she let it out. She did not mean to say any more about it unless she had to, to save Camilla from making a mistake, but she was taking no chances. They Chrysties were thoroughbreds and would not show their amazement, would not want her to think there had been any attention that a married man should not show. They would keep their thoughts to themselves, but nevertheless Nurse York would watch. She so loved Camilla and despised Whitlock that she would not let things go too far.

She noted the strained look around Camilla’s eyes at night when she came home yet was satisfied that it was not from heartbreak, at least, and when the next weekend passed and there was no further sign of Whitlock, she drew a breath of relief and took heart of hope.

One day Whitlock came into the office about noon with a strange, desperate look on his face. He sent Marietta off to her lunch summarily, and Camilla wished she dared rise and go, too, but Marietta was scarcely out of the way before Whitlock came over and stood before her desk.

“Camilla, I’m desperate,” he said. “I can’t stand this any longer.”

Camilla lifted up her heart in swift prayer for help and guidance. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said quickly, gently. “I know myself there are times when it seems as if there was not a soul to go to but God. But I know, too, that He can always help us through hard places.”

The man looked at her strangely, his head down, his eyes lifted, piercing through her very soul as if he would probe her to find out if she was really meaning all she said, as if he would find some weak place in her armor if he could.

“How could God help me?” asked the man in a tone of scoffing.

“Nothing is worthwhile in which God cannot help,” said Camilla. “You told me once, I think, that you are a Christian.”

“Oh, yes, I told you that I’m a Christian. I suppose I am, perhaps; I don’t know. I joined the church, but it hasn’t done me much good, has it? Look what a rotten deal I’ve had. A marriage that was a failure and a love that came to nothing—the only woman in the world that I could ever love telling me that she hates me! Would you call that a fair deal? Would you want a God that treated you that way? Come, tell me what
you
would do about it?”

His lower jaw was out, and his eyes were flushed and angry, desperate eyes. They almost made her shudder to look into them. Camilla, if she had followed her impulse, would have turned and fled from the building and never gone back again. But something, perhaps it was the challenge from the lips of the man who was usually so calm and conservative, so absolutely correct in everything he said, made her stay and answer.

“Come, what would
you
do?” he urged. There was something in his eyes, like an angry bull about to charge.

Quietly she answered. “I think I would look into my own heart first, before I blamed God, and try to find out whether any of the trouble had been my own fault.”

“What?
My
own fault?” he bellowed. “What do you know about it?”

“Nothing,” said Camilla calmly. “You asked me what I would do, and that is what I think I would do first. I would get down on my knees—on my face—and ask God to show me myself utterly. And if facing things honestly that way I found any of my trouble was my own fault, and if there was anything left to be done that I could do toward righting things, no matter if it cost me all my pride, I’d
do
it!”

He scowled down upon her, and a wave of memories rolled over him, each one bringing a deeper frown. “Right it? What do you mean,
right it
? Right my love for you?”