From the Car Behind
Copyright© 2024 by Eleanor M. Ingram
Chapter 15: The Strength of Ten
It had required more than eloquence or tact, it had required actual compulsion to bring Corrie Rose back to race at Long Island. All his successful work, all the cordiality that met him wherever he went, and the temptation to essay new conquest, failed to overcome his repugnance. But he could not defy Gerard.
“I don’t see how you can bear to look at the place,” he had flung, in his final defeat.
“My dear Corrie, I am not any further from that here than there,” Gerard had quietly replied.
Corrie understood, and submitted dumbly thereafter. And, in spite of himself, his first day’s practice on the course swept everything aside except eager exhilaration. He was too superbly healthy for morbidity, too masculine for continuous dwelling in memories; if Gerard had not been very certain of that fact, he would never have brought his ward there. When Corrie was driving, Corrie was happy. He drove with a sober intensity of devotion, his passion was serious, whereas Gerard had raced fire-ardent and won or lost laughing.
There was a small hotel near the course which the motor-men had made a rendezvous. Here Gerard established his party, during the two weeks of practice work. He did not choose to have Corrie in New York, although Rupert chafed and he himself was obliged to go in to the city frequently, at considerable inconvenience.
On the last afternoon before the race, he returned from such a trip, and arrived before the hotel just as Corrie rolled up with the Mercury Titan and halted it opposite him.
“It’s five o’clock,” the driver explained, stilling his roaring motor and leaning out. “Everyone is coming in, to get ready for to-morrow.”
There was little trace left of the petulant, gaudily dressed boy who a year before had driven the pink car, in this serious young professional clad in the Mercury’s racing gray and bearing the Mercury’s silver insignia on his shoulder. The bend of his mouth was firmer, his dark-blue eyes had acquired the steady, all-embracing keenness of Gerard’s—the gaze of all those men with whom the inopportune flicker of an eyelid may mean destruction. He was clothed with his virile youth as with a radiant garment, as he smiled across at Gerard.
“Yes, get some rest; you will be out at dawn,” approved Gerard, coming closer. “Where is Rupert? What is the matter, Corrie? You look disturbed.”
“Rupert got off at the corner, back there. I suppose if I look rattled, that he is what is the matter. He——” Corrie suddenly dropped his face in his folded arms as they rested upon the steering-wheel, his shoulders shaking.
“He? How? He has been talking to you?”
“He sure has been talking to me,” Corrie affirmed, lifting his laughter-flushed face. “When I think that he once gave me the silence treatment! His tongue would take the starch out of a Chinese laundry and make a taxicab chauffeur feel he couldn’t drive.”
“You do not let him talk to you when you are driving!”
“Oh, when I am driving he is the perfect mechanician. He wouldn’t open his lips if I hit a right-angle turn at ninety miles an hour or disobey if I told him to climb out and cut the tires off the rear wheels. No, it is when I am not officially driving that he gives me some remarks to study about. Good pointers, too! I like it, really. I only wish,” his expression shadowed abruptly, “I only wish I didn’t have to remember that nothing could bring him to shake hands with me.”
“Corrie——”
“I know—I beg your pardon for speaking of that to you. But, Gerard,” he bent to grasp a lever, “I’d take what you got last year, I’d consent to be picked up dead from under my car to-morrow, if I could that way buy one hour to stand clean before you and Jack Rupert. That’s all—don’t think I want to flinch, please. If you will go on in, I’ll put this machine away and be back to dinner in fifteen minutes. I see Rupert coming to help me, now. We’re starved to death and some tired. By the way, George shouted over to me that he would be in as soon as he got the Duplex canned for the night, and to order a few dozen eggs and a couple of hams fried for him. Would you attend to it on your way in?”
“I surely would,” Gerard answered, the great gentleness of his tone mating oddly with the light words. “What do you want ordered for yourself?”
“Anything, and plenty of it.”
Gerard did not smile as he went into the building. He too would have given much to spare Corrie Rose the memory of that October morning’s fault. From all punishment except that memory he had sheltered him, further aid no one could give. But because he loved Corrie, he climbed the hotel stairs in slow abstraction and failed to perceive the limousine that came up before the Mercury Titan, and stopped.
He was standing by a table in the empty parlor of the hotel, when the door opened, and closed. Thinking some other guest had entered, he did not turn from the letters he was reading, nor was there any further movement or demand upon his attention. That which slowly invaded his consciousness was a summons more delicate than sound, a faint, distinctive flower-fragrance that proclaimed one individual presence. Flavia Rose was in the room; he knew it before he swung around and saw her standing there.
The shock that leaped along his pulses was less of hope than of renewed pain.
“Miss Rose!” he exclaimed.
She moved a little forward. Against her dark velvet gown, under her wide velvet hat, her soft, earnest face showed whitely lustrous and irradiated, her beautiful eyes dwelt on his.
“I never knew,” she said, her clear voice like rippled water. “Your letter, the night before you went away, never came to me. I never knew you had sent for me, until last month.”
The movement that brought Gerard across the room was as nakedly passionate as the incoherent simplicity of her speech.
“You never knew? Flavia, you would have come?”
“I would have come; I wanted to come long before, while you were so ill——”
They had waited a year on the verge of that moment; it was enough to touch one another in this security of understanding. There was no question between them, no doubt, now that they saw each other face to face; all their world flowered into light and fragrance, present and future one dazzling marvel.
But at last they drew slightly apart, gazing at each other with an incredulity of such happiness, both Flavia’s little hands held in the firm clasp of Gerard’s left. And then gradually awoke amazement that they could ever have been separated, who were so closely bound together.
“My dear, my dear, you knew I loved you,” he wondered. “How did this happen to us?”
“How could I know? You had never said it.”
“Did I need to? I thought the very stones in the fountain arcade must have seen it. And I trusted Rupert with the letter; he said he had given it to you, he even brought an answer.”
“Do not blame him,” she quickly defended. “He told you that he had given it to Miss Rose; he meant to Isabel, who claimed it.”
“Your cousin? What had I to do with her? Why should I have written to her? Have written that, Flavia!”
The tears rushed to her eyes.
“Your letter—Allan, if I had known that message was for me, I would have gone back with Rupert to you that evening. But Isabel took it, for some reason she expected a message from you, that night. I have not been able to understand that, although I have tried ever since papa told me, last month, that it was I whom you chose. She spoke of something Corrie had said. I—I think she believed you did care for her more seriously than she had meant you should. She was so very sure the letter was for her—and you did not call me Flavia once.”
“I had no right, I dared not. Dear, I had had a bad month; I did not remember that any Miss Rose but you existed. I used to close my eyes, when things were worst, and see your eyes against the dark. There were days when I did not see much else. But they were not so bad, no day ever was so bad as the morning Corrie came to the station without you. Forgive me, I hurt you!”
She shook her fair head, wordless. Quiet from the very vehemence of feeling that possessed them both, Gerard stooped and kissed her.
“Will you marry me soon, Flavia? After this race, when Corrie can be with us? Let us waste no more time apart; I have wanted you so long, so very long.”
The lovely color flushed her transparent face, but her fingers clung to his.
“All the way home from Spain, I have been remembering that I really was betrothed to you this whole year,” she answered, not turning from him the innocent candor of her clear gaze. “Before that, before I knew the truth, I used to think how strange a thing it would have been if you had died in the accident and I had lived all the rest of my life believing myself promised to you, when in fact you had loved Isabel, not me. I used to think, often, of that first day when I fell on the stairs at the Beach race track—when you caught me and held me close to you—and how you would never again hold me like that or miss not doing so. I am quite sure that no one ever was wanted so much as I have wanted you. It may not be right to tell this even to you, but it is true. And I will marry you whenever you ask, Allan.”
Allan Gerard, man of the practical world and the twentieth century, went to his knee on the floor of the hotel parlor and hid his face against her hand.
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