“Don’t you really mean to ‘nag’ him?” Geraldine asked.
“Oh, well — nag or prod — the results will be the same!” she said sweetly. “I really think that most of our wealthy self-made men, if they could be persuaded to be honest about it, would admit that an extravagant wife was more help to them than the drudging, thrifty ones who haven’t enough pride to keep up their looks and refuse to be made draught horses.”
“That’s a perfectly loathsome thing to say,” accused Geraldine.
“Oh, well, darling, you of course belong to that vast crowd of women who like making door mats of themselves during their husband’s early years, and then yelling to high heaven when the poor dear runs off to a woman who’s kept her looks!” she said lightly.
“I’ve got to go.” Geraldine hurried so that she would be out of reach of that light, carrying voice, and stumbled a little, blinded with angry tears as she hurried up the steps and into the house.
She had lived under a strain ever since the news had reached her that Tip was alive; she had not realized until now just how severe that strain had been. The effort to keep Tip convinced of the strength and the reality of her love — She stopped short and for a moment her heart grew cold within her.
Had
she convinced Tip? Had she unconsciously, for all her efforts, let him glimpse a little of her heart, which in spite of everything she could do, would always be in Phil’s keeping? And what did Sally know that she should hint at an “accident.”
Later, she made herself join the others on the lawn, where cocktails were being served.
“Well, you must have had a nice nap, lazybones,” chided Betsy good-naturedly, but her eyes were unexpectedly sharp.
“I didn’t nap, thanks. I had some letters to write.”
They sat lazily relaxed in the dying warmth of the day, knowing that any moment now they must go inside to a leaping log fire that was not entirely decorative, for the mountain nights were chilly even in late July.
“I can’t imagine what’s keeping Tip and Mr. Donaldson,” said Mrs. Parker fussily after a moment. “They’ve been gone since five this morning.”
“The fishing must be good,” contributed Ted.
In the little silence that followed that, they heard the sound of a car coming up the steep, winding drive from the highway to the house; but as they all listened, they knew instantly that it was not the smoothly singing powerful motor of the station wagon in which Tip and Phil had departed, but an older and more rugged machine that protested angrily at the steep grade and the narrow curves.
Suddenly tense, they waited and listened, and for a moment all of Geraldine’s uneasiness was back, in full measure. And just then the car turned in at the gate and they saw that it was a battered Ford, mud-spattered and very old. They saw the grizzled mountaineer behind the wheel; and they saw a man in leather fishing jacket and stout boots getting slowly and painfully out, standing for a moment as though steadying himself before he turned towards the group on the lawn. The last rays of the dying sun fell on his bloodstained face, and they saw that it was Tip, and that he moved awkwardly, painfully towards them.
Dimly, as from a great distance, Geraldine heard Mrs. Parker’s scream. She was conscious of Sally’s shocked, but somehow almost triumphant glance in her own direction; and then Geraldine was on her feet, swaying a little as Tip stumbled towards them.
“Hi,” he tried hard to sound jaunty. “Don’t be alarmed. We had a bit of an accident.”
The earth heaved beneath Geraldine’s feet, and sky and earth seemed to rush together in a mad, crazy dance like a moving picture montage; and then she heard a high, screaming voice that she could not recognize as her own crying out, and she was stumbling towards Tip.
“Phil?” she gasped and the word came painfully, as though it had been squeezed out of her half-mad heart. “Where is Phil? What have you done to him?”
She swayed and would have fallen had Tip not caught her by the shoulders and steadied her.
“Hi, take it easy, baby! Phil’s all right,” he told her sharply.
But she would not believe him and she struggled like a wild thing in his tightening grasp.
“You’ve — k-k-killed him,” she babbled wildly. “You’ve killed him! Where is he? Let me go!
Let
me
go!
Oh, Phil,
Phil darling — ”
Tip’s face was quite white beneath the blood that stained one side of his face, and his eyes were stunned and harsh. He shook her hard, and his voice was rough.
“Be quiet, you little fool,” he said, and his words were like the sting of a whip. “He’s
all right,
I tell you.”
“I don’t believe you! He’s hurt — I’ve got to go to him,” she babbled and once more tried to wrench herself free of his grasp.
She had forgotten the others standing in a small, shocked huddle about them. Just as Tip seemed to have forgotten that he and Geraldine were not alone in that starkly revealing moment that tore down all her carefully and painfully erected barricades of silence.
“Be quiet, Gerry.” Tip’s voice was no longer harsh and stinging. There was even a queer sort of wonder in it. “We had an accident to the car — do you understand? It slid into a ditch. I was driving and I got a thundering thump on the forehead that bled quite a bit Phil wasn’t hurt — he wasn’t even in the car. I was moving it to turn around and start for home, and he was having a last cast. The car was damaged; the old mountaineer came along in his struggle-buggy, and Phil thought it would be better if he stayed with the car while I came home to get some first aid and telephone for a wrecker to get the car out of the ditch.”
He had spoken deliberately, slowly, and under the impact of his quiet words, she had fought her way back to some semblance of control. Now she looked at Tip’s white, strained face with haggard eyes.
“He’s — not hurt?” she whispered faintly.
“No,” stated Tip and now his voice was angry. “I haven’t suddenly gone berserk with war hysteria and murdered my best friend. You needn’t be alarmed.”
But she heard no more. Once more the earth and the sky seemed to rush together with a resounding crash that brought a merciful wave of blackness into which Geraldine sank gratefully as one exhausted sinks into a featherbed.
Geraldine awakened to consciousness with a feeling that something rather terrible had happened. She looked about her with dazed eyes, and realized that she was in her own room, and that the morning sun was pouring in at the open windows. But that was ridiculous, she told herself worriedly. She hadn’t the faintest memory of going to bed last night; in fact, she couldn’t remember anything after cocktails on the lawn — And then, with a devastating crash, she remembered.
She moaned with the memory and someone bent over her suddenly. Shrinking, she turned her head dazedly on her pillow and looked up into Betsy’s piquant, worried face.
“Hi; it’s about time you snapped out of it. A twelve-hour nap is really something, my pet!” she said sternly, but there was an embarrassed look in her usually frank eyes.
“Oh, Betsy —
did
I make a fool of myself?”
Betsy’s grin was gamine-like, but it did not vanquish the confusion in her eyes.
“Well, that’s a bit of an understatement, pet,” she admitted unwillingly.
Geraldine put her hands over her face for a moment, and Betsy patted her shoulder awkwardly.
“Don’t take it so to heart, pet. After all, you’re human, and having Tip walk in on us looking like something fresh from a battlefield — ”
There was a knock at the door and Geraldine whispered, “Oh, don’t let anyone come in!”
“It’s probably the Dowager Queen. I’ll see.”
“Run along, Betsy, and get some rest like a good child,” Geraldine heard Tip say quietly, but in a tone that would brook no denial. “You’ve been up most of the night You could do with a bit of shuteye.”
“Oh, but — I’m not a bit sleepy,” stammered Betsy.
“Beat it, scrap,” ordered Tip and though he tried to speak lightly there was an edge in his voice. “I have no intention of beating my wife, even though she does deserve it She’ll be perfectly safe with me, I assure you.”
“Don’t be a fool, Tip,” protested Betsy.
Tip closed the door behind her with a firmness that was not quite a bang. He crossed to the bed, took Betsy’s chair, and looked down at Geraldine. She was white, but beneath his look, scarlet flowed into her face and she could not meet his eyes.
“Oh, Tip — I’m — so ashamed,” she whispered miserably.
“I should think you would be,” Tip agreed grimly. “Of all the barefaced, conscienceless little liars it’s ever been my misfortune to meet, I think you take the brass medal, my girl. What was the big idea?”
Geraldine forced herself to face him, though she had never done anything more difficult.
“I — well, Tip, I —
tried,”
she whispered piteously.
“Thanks,” said Tip dryly. “Tried to love me — or Phil?”
She could not steady her voice and he made a little gesture of dismissal. “That’s a damn fool thing to ask, at that You proclaimed to the world at large last night that you were mad about Phil, and that you nursed some pretty dark thoughts about me. What I want to know, Gerry — and for heaven’s sake, be honest with me, if you never were before in your life! — is why you didn’t tell me the truth when I first came home. Why you let me believe you still loved me and that you wanted to be my wife. You know, Gerry, that if you had given me the slightest inkling that you were in love with Phil — ”
“I — tried hard to — do my duty — ” she began faintly.
Tip cut in sharply.
“Stop sounding like something out of the not-too-gay Nineties! No man wants a wife who lives with him as a duty. That’s about as deadly an insult as you can offer any man!” he told her. “And while you were being so noble and self-sacrificing, did you ever stop to think of my side of the matter?”
Startled, she looked up at him.
“I didn’t stop to consider anybody else’s!” she told him hotly.
“Nuts!” said Tip inelegantly and forcefully. “You were so busy seeing yourself as a martyred wife, like something out of the movies, that it didn’t occur to you, I suppose, to realize that just as you could grow out of love for me, I could grow out of love with you?”
Dazedly she lay still against her pillows, looking at him with wide, incredulous eyes.
“That gives your vanity a bit of a jolt, I daresay,” Tip went on grimly. “But it happens to be true, my pet. After all, we were a couple of kids when we marri$$, we were a world apart while we were growing up. Didn’t it ever occur to you that I could change, just as you did? And neither of us to blame for what we couldn’t help?”
She lay still for a stunned moment and then color came back to her white face and her eyes widened.
“Who, Tip?” she gasped.
“Jamie, of course — Ruth Jamison,” answered Tip. There was a thread of warmth and tenderness in his voice, as though the bare mention of her name had the power to make his heart leap.
“The navy nurse?”
Tip nodded. “She didn’t want to come to the cottage to meet you and Miss Lucy, for fear we’d give ourselves away,” he said, and now his tone was warm and eager and the anger had vanished. “But I had to see her, for one last time; I hoped until the last moment that you’d set me free.”
“Oh, Tip, Tip! If only you’d given me the tiniest hint.”
“I couldn’t. Jamie wouldn’t let me,” he answered as though marveling at Jamie’s decency. “She wouldn’t steal a man from the girl who had stayed at home and waited for him and who always signed her letters
‘Loving you always.’ “
“But that was the way you signed yours.”
Tip grinned at her.
“We were a couple of plaster saints trying to live up to an out-of-date idea. You can’t
make
two people stay in love with each other. We simply outgrew a youthful fondness that had developed between us simply because we didn’t know anything better. But the moment I met Jamie — She’s — well, Gerry, she’s just about the most wonderful woman you could imagine. The way she fought for the boys in her care — the flights to and from the battlefronts, sometimes twenty-four hours alone with them, their lives in her keeping — ” His voice thickened a little and he was silent.
There were tears thick in Geraldine’s throat.
“We’ve been a couple of fools, Tip,” she said huskily.
“We have indeed,” he admitted. “Jamie tried to tell me that I wasn’t really in love with her. That it was just a natural reaction of a man who’s been sick and wounded to the woman who nursed him back to health. She was so sure of it. And after she saw you and realized what a good person you are and how beautiful you are, she tried to make me believe that I’d forget about her as soon as I was with you. She said that all men fell in love with their nurses, that the nurses expected it and that they would have been hurt if it didn’t happen. I knew she was wrong, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. She insisted we give it a try — and Gerry, please believe me, I
did
try!”
“I know you did, darling. So did I,” she said huskily.
For a moment he was silent and then he lifted her hand and kissed its palm, and said quietly, “Well, Gerry, where do we go from here?”
“You are free, Tip. Free as air!” she told him swiftly, earnestly. “I’ll get a divorce, or you can — ”
“One of those brave, gallant divorces where we are still the best of friends?” he suggested and now his grin was gay.
“What else?” she answered, her tone matching his. “I’ll go to Florida or Reno or anywhere you like.”
“And afterwards it’s Phil for you — and Jamie for me,” he said and drew a deep breath. “Boy, it’s going to be wonderful, isn’t it, Gerry?”
“Perfectly wonderful,” she echoed.
Tip studied her curiously. “What’s the reservation?” he demanded flatly. “You’re giving me my freedom, and taking your own — and there’s Phil waiting.”
“But he isn’t,” she protested and her voice shook a little. “There’s Sally.”
Tip said harshly, “Have you lost your mind? Phil’s no more in love with Sally Walker than I am! He’s crazy about you. I’ve known that from the very first and felt sorry as hell for the poor guy, not knowing, dumb guy that I am, that the two of you were breaking your hearts for each other, because of me. Get any crazy idea about Sally out of your head, my pet. Phil’s for you, first, last, and always!”