The Song of the Lark Willa Cather (free ebooks romance novels .TXT) 📖

it in mine. I’m not going to try to carry you off, as I might another girl. If you wanted to quit me, I couldn’t hold you, no matter how many times you had married me. I don’t want to overpersuade you. But I’d like mighty well to get you down to that jolly old city, where everything would please you, and give myself a chance. Then, if you thought you could have a better time with me than without me, I’d try to grab you before you changed your mind. You are not a sentimental person.”

Thea drew her veil down over her face. “I think I am, a little; about you,” she said quietly. Fred’s irony somehow hurt her.

“What’s at the bottom of your mind, Thea?” he asked hurriedly. “I can’t tell. Why do you consider it at all, if you’re not sure? Why are you here with me now?”

Her face was half-averted. He was thinking that it looked older and more firm⁠—almost hard⁠—under a veil.

“Isn’t it possible to do things without having any very clear reason?” she asked slowly. “I have no plan in the back of my mind. Now that I’m with you, I want to be with you; that’s all. I can’t settle down to being alone again. I am here today because I want to be with you today.” She paused. “One thing, though; if I gave you my word, I’d keep it. And you could hold me, though you don’t seem to think so. Maybe I’m not sentimental, but I’m not very light, either. If I went off with you like this, it wouldn’t be to amuse myself.”

Ottenburg’s eyes fell. His lips worked nervously for a moment. “Do you mean that you really care for me, Thea Kronborg?” he asked unsteadily.

“I guess so. It’s like anything else. It takes hold of you and you’ve got to go through with it, even if you’re afraid. I was afraid to leave Moonstone, and afraid to leave Harsanyi. But I had to go through with it.”

“And are you afraid now?” Fred asked slowly.

“Yes; more than I’ve ever been. But I don’t think I could go back. The past closes up behind one, somehow. One would rather have a new kind of misery. The old kind seems like death or unconsciousness. You can’t force your life back into that mould again. No, one can’t go back.” She rose and stood by the back grating of the platform, her hand on the brass rail.

Fred went to her side. She pushed up her veil and turned her most glowing face to him. Her eyes were wet and there were tears on her lashes, but she was smiling the rare, wholehearted smile he had seen once or twice before. He looked at her shining eyes, her parted lips, her chin a little lifted. It was as if they were colored by a sunrise he could not see. He put his hand over hers and clasped it with a strength she felt. Her eyelashes trembled, her mouth softened, but her eyes were still brilliant.

“Will you always be like you were down there, if I go with you?” she asked under her breath.

His fingers tightened on hers. “By God, I will!” he muttered.

“That’s the only promise I’ll ask you for. Now go away for a while and let me think about it. Come back at lunchtime and I’ll tell you. Will that do?”

“Anything will do, Thea, if you’ll only let me keep an eye on you. The rest of the world doesn’t interest me much. You’ve got me in deep.”

Fred dropped her hand and turned away. As he glanced back from the front end of the observation car, he saw that she was still standing there, and anyone would have known that she was brooding over something. The earnestness of her head and shoulders had a certain nobility. He stood looking at her for a moment.

When he reached the forward smoking-car, Fred took a seat at the end, where he could shut the other passengers from his sight. He put on his traveling-cap and sat down wearily, keeping his head near the window. “In any case, I shall help her more than I shall hurt her,” he kept saying to himself. He admitted that this was not the only motive which impelled him, but it was one of them. “I’ll make it my business in life to get her on. There’s nothing else I care about so much as seeing her have her chance. She hasn’t touched her real force yet. She isn’t even aware of it. Lord, don’t I know something about them? There isn’t one of them that has such a depth to draw from. She’ll be one of the great artists of our time. Playing accompaniments for that cheese-faced sneak! I’ll get her off to Germany this winter, or take her. She hasn’t got any time to waste now. I’ll make it up to her, all right.”

Ottenburg certainly meant to make it up to her, in so far as he could. His feeling was as generous as strong human feelings are likely to be. The only trouble was, that he was married already, and had been since he was twenty.

His older friends in Chicago, people who had been friends of his family, knew of the unfortunate state of his personal affairs; but they were people whom in the natural course of things Thea Kronborg would scarcely meet. Mrs. Frederick Ottenburg lived in California, at Santa Barbara, where her health was supposed to be better than elsewhere, and her husband lived in Chicago. He visited his wife every winter to reinforce her position, and his devoted mother, although her hatred for her daughter-inlaw was scarcely approachable in words, went to Santa Barbara every year to make things look better and to relieve her son.

When Frederick Ottenburg was beginning his junior year at Harvard, he got a letter from Dick Brisbane, a Kansas City boy he knew, telling him that his fiancée, Miss