From the Car Behind
Copyright© 2024 by Eleanor M. Ingram
Chapter 10: Sentence of Error
It was nearly twelve o’clock, that night, when Corrie arrived home. Flavia ran down the wide staircase to meet him, finger on lip; a childish figure in the creamy lace and silk of her negligee, with her heavy braids of shining hair falling over her shoulders.
“You are so late,” she grieved. “And so cold! Come near the hearth—papa is in the library, still.”
Corrie allowed her small urgent hands to draw him towards the fireplace that filled the square hall with ruddy reflections and dancing shadows. He was cold to the touch, ice clung to the rough cloth of his ulster, but there was color and even light in the face he turned to her.
“It is snowing,” he recalled. “But I’m not cold. I am going to bed and to sleep. I want you to sleep, too, Other Fellow, because the worst of it all is over. I don’t mean that things are right—they never can be that again, I suppose—but I see my way clear to live, now.”
She gazed up at him attentively, sensitively responsive to the vital change she divined in him. Before he could continue or she question, Mr. Rose came between the curtains of the arched library door, a massive, dominant presence as he stood surveying the two in the fire-light. He made no remark, yet Corrie at once moved to face him, gently putting Flavia aside.
“I am sorry to be so late, sir; I have been arranging for my going away,” he gave simple account of himself. “I should like to leave the day after to-morrow, if you do not object. I am going to stay with a western friend. I know you would rather not hear much about me or from me for a while, but I will leave an address where I can always be reached.”
It is not infrequently disconcerting to be taken promptly and literally at one’s word. Moreover, Corrie looked very young and pathetically tired, with his wind-ruffled fair hair pushed back and in his bearing of dignified self-dependence. A quiver passed over Mr. Rose’s strong, square-cut countenance, his stern light-gray eyes softened to a contradiction of his set mouth.
“I’m not in the habit of saying things twice,” he curtly replied. “I gave you leave to go when and where you pleased. To-morrow I’ll fix your bank account so you can draw all the money you like.”
“Thank you, sir,” Corrie acknowledged.
“You’ve no call to thank me,” his father corrected. “I guess that when I own millions you’ve got the right to all you can spend. It won’t help anything for you to be pinched or uncomfortable. I’ve no wish to see it. I am going to take your sister to Europe for the winter, as I told her this evening, so we ourselves leave soon after you. Try to keep straighter, this time.”
There was no intentional cruelty in the concluding sentence, delivered as the speaker stepped back into the inner room, but Corrie turned so white that Flavia sprang to him with a low exclamation of pain.
“It’s all right,” he reassured her. And after a moment: “Flavia, I am going with Allan Gerard, to work under him and help him in his factory.”
“Corrie?”
“I have been with him to-night. I don’t want father to know this because he wouldn’t understand; he might even forbid me to go. Unless he forces an answer, I shall not say where I am to be. But Gerard said I must tell you everything and write to you often—I would have done that, anyhow. You won’t mind my going away, now, when you know I am with him?”
She comprehended at last the change in him, the change from restless uncertainty to steady fixity of purpose, from an objectless wanderer to a traveller towards a known destination, comprehended with a passionate outrush of gratitude to the man who had wrought this in a generosity too broad to remember his own injury. The eyes she lifted to her brother’s were splendidly luminous.
“No,” she confirmed, in the exhaustion of relief. “I can bear to let you go from me, if you are to be with Mr. Gerard.”
They nestled together—as each might have clung in such an hour to the mother they had left so far down the path of years—on the hearth from which one was self-exiled and the other about to be taken.
“Do you remember the story he told us?” Corrie asked, after a long pause. “About that Arabian fellow’s vase and the pearls, you know? I—well, I meant what I said, about expecting to have lots of days like that, pearl-days. I couldn’t see any farther than that! Yet that night—I don’t expect now, what I did then; I’ve lost my chance for it. But I would like to do something for Allan Gerard before I die. I’d like to make all my pearls into one, and put it into his vase. Instead, he is doing things for me.”
Her clasping arms tightened about him. Heretofore she always had turned a steady face to her brother, sparing him the reproach of grief, but now she helplessly felt her eyes fill and overflow. One comfort, one hope she had that he did not share. If he went with Allan Gerard, and if Gerard took home the wife he had seemed to woo, brother and sister would not be separated. Flavia Gerard would be in Allan Gerard’s house, where Corrie was going.
Had Gerard thought of that, also? Dared she tread on this nebulous fairy-ground? Dared she lead Corrie to set foot there, with her?
“Dear,” she essayed, her voice just audible, “dear, has Mr. Gerard ever spoken to you of me?”
Surprised, Corrie looked down at the bent head resting against his rough overcoat. Himself a lover, he yet had not suspected this other romance flowering beside his own; he did not guess the obvious secret, now.
“Of you? Oh, yes; he asks if you are well, each day. He never forgets such things. Why?”
She had no answer to that natural question. In spite of her reason, Flavia was chilled by the flat conventionality of Gerard’s apparent attitude, as represented by those formal inquiries. Almost she would have preferred that he had not spoken of her at all; silence could not have implied indifference.
“Nothing,” she faltered. It clearly was impossible to speak as she had imagined. “Only, as his hostess, and your sister, I fancied that he might——”
“He wouldn’t say that sort of thing to me, Other Fellow. No doubt he will come to pay a farewell call before he leaves. He isn’t very fit, you know; he hasn’t been out yet. He must be at his western factory this week, he said, or he wouldn’t try to travel.”
Her color rushed back. Why had she not remembered that? Why should he speak of her to anyone, since to-morrow he would come to see her? To-morrow? The clocks had struck midnight, to-day they would see each other.
“It is late,” Corrie added, as if in answer to her thought. He sighed wearily. “You are tired, I suppose we both are. Come up.”
He passed his arm about her waist, and they went up the stairs together, leaning on one another. But Allan Gerard was a third presence with them, and in their sense of his guardianship brother and sister rested like children comforted.
The following day was one filled with an atmosphere of disruption and imminent departure. The very servants caught the contagion and hurried uncomfortably about their tasks. Corrie’s preparations were unostentatious, but Isabel’s agitated the entire household. Also, Mr. Rose issued his instructions that Flavia should be ready to start for France on the next steamer sailing. The house that had been rose-colored within and without was become a gray place to be avoided.
Flavia thought all day of Allan Gerard. She knew her father went in the afternoon to pay him a farewell visit, she knew Corrie was with him all the morning, and when each returned home she suspended breath in anticipation of hearing the step of a guest also—the step of Gerard coming towards the goal which he had half-showed her in the fountain arbor. But Corrie and Mr. Rose each entered alone.
Nevertheless, she chose to wear his color, that night; the pale, glistening tea-rose yellow above which her warm hair showed burnished gold. He must come that evening, if at all; she would be truly “Flavia Rose” to him.
She was standing alone before her mirror, setting the last pearl comb in place, when her cousin came into the room.
“You look as if you were happy enough,” Isabel commented fretfully. “I don’t believe you care at all about Corrie’s going away. Of course you don’t care about me. What are you putting on that old-fashioned thing for?”
Flavia gravely turned her large eyes upon the other girl; the unjust attack fell in harsh dissonance with her own mood of hushed anticipation. She could not have robed herself for her wedding with more serious care and earnest thoughtfulness than she had used in preparing to receive Gerard to-night. This was no time for coquetry; as he came for her, she would go to him, she knew, without evasion or pretense to harass his weakness. She shrank, wincing sensitively, from this rough criticism, but every member of the family had learned not to reply to the new Isabel’s peevish tartness.
“It was my mother’s,” she explained, to the last inquiry, tenderly lifting the long chain of pearl and amber beads ending in a lace-fine pearl cross. Never could she attempt to tell her cousin the blended motives from which she had chosen to wear this rosary. “And her mother’s and again her’s. It is very old Spanish work. Shall we go down?”
“What for? It is not time for dinner. Oh, Martin told me there was a messenger waiting to deliver a letter, just now, as I came here.”
The color flared up over Flavia’s delicate face.
“A messenger, Isabel?”
“Yes, who would not send up his message. I told Martin that we would ring.”
Flavia slowly wound the chain around her throat. There was no escape from Isabel’s insistent companionship, she realized.
“Ring, then, please,” she requested, and passed into her little sitting-room, beyond.
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