A Tangled Web

  “It matters nothing to me,” said Joscelyn stiffly, rising to go. She bade Aunt Becky good-bye rather shortly. Aunt Becky smiled cryptically after Joscelyn had gone out.

  “I’ve made Joscelyn Dark tell one fib in her life, if she never tells another,” she thought. “Poor little romantic splendid fool. I don’t know whether I feel envy or contempt. Yet I remember when I took myself almost as seriously as that. Lord, what does get into girls? Old Cy Dark’s son!”

  16

  Joscelyn went home slowly through the glamour and perfume of the June evening. Slowly, because she was in no hurry to get home where her mother and her Aunt Rachel would be talking the afternoon over indignantly and expecting her to be as indignant as they were. Slowly, because some unwelcome shadow of imminent change seemed to go with her as she walked. Slowly, because she was living over again the story she had told Aunt Becky.

  She had been very sure she loved Hugh when she had finally promised to marry him. She had been happy in their brief engagement. Everybody had been happy—everybody well enough pleased about it, except Hugh’s mother, Mrs. Conrad Dark, and his second cousin, Pauline Dark. Joscelyn did not care whether Pauline was pleased or not, but she was sorry Mrs. Conrad wasn’t. Mrs. Conrad did not like her—never had liked her. Joscelyn had never been able to imagine why—until this very afternoon, when Aunt Becky had illuminated the mystery by her reference to Alec. Joscelyn had known Mrs. Conrad detested her from their first meeting, when Mrs. Conrad had told her that her petticoat was below her dress. Now, in the days of petticoats, there were three different ways you could tell a girl that her petticoat was below her dress. You could tell it as a kindly friend who felt it a duty to help get matters righted as soon as possible before anyone else noticed it, but who felt a sympathy with her as the victim of an accident which might happen at any time to yourself. You could tell it as a disinterested onlooker who had no real concern with the affair but wanted to do as you would be done by. Or you could tell it with a certain suppressed venom and triumph, as if you rather delighted in catching her in such a scrape and wanted her to know you saw the fatal garment and had your own opinion of any girl who could be so careless.

  The last way had been Mrs. Conrad Dark’s, and Joscelyn knew her for an enemy. But this did not disturb to any extent the happiness of her engagement. Joscelyn had a good deal of Peter Penhallow’s power of detachment from the influence of anyone else’s opinion. As long as Hugh loved her it did not matter what Mrs. Conrad thought; and Joscelyn knew how Hugh loved her.

  Soon after their engagement, Treewoofe Farm at Three Hills came into the market. Treewoofe had been so named from some old place in Cornwall whence the Trevernes had come. The house was built on a hill overlooking the valley of Bay Silver, and Hugh bought the farm because of its magnificent view. Most of the clan thought the idea of buying a farm because it was beautiful very amusing and suspected Joscelyn of putting him up to it. Luckily, they thought, the soil was good, though run down, and the house practically new. Hugh had not made such a bad purchase, if the winter winds didn’t make him wish he’d picked a more sheltered home. As for the view, of course it was very fine. None of the Darks or Penhallows were so insensitive to beauty as not to admit that. There was no doubt old Cornelius had tacked another hundred on his price because of that view. But it was a lonely spot and rather out of the world, and most of them thought Hugh had made a mistake.

  Hugh and Joscelyn had no qualms about it. They both loved Treewoofe. The splendor of many sunsets had flooded that hill and the shadows of great clouds rolled over it. One evening after he had bought it, he and Joscelyn walked up to see it, going to it, not by the road but by a little crooked, ferny path through the Treewoofe beech woods, full of the surprises no straight path can ever give. They had run all over the house and orchard like children and then stood together at their front door and looked down—down—down—over the hill itself—over the farmsteads and groves in the valley below—over her own home, looking like a doll’s house at that distance—over the mirror-like beauty of Bay Silver—over the harbor bar—out—out—out—to the great gulf—a gray sea, this evening, with streaks of silver—Joscelyn had drawn a breath of rapture. To live every day looking at that! And to know that glorious wind everyday—sweeping up over the harbor, over the sheltered homesteads that hid from it—up—up—up—to their glorious free crest that welcomed it. And oh, what would dawn over those seaside meadows far below be like?

  “We’ll have three good neighbors up here,” said Joscelyn. “The wind—and the rain—and the stars. They can come close to us here. All my life, Hugh, I’ve longed to live on a hill. I can’t breathe in the valley.”

  Turning round she could see, past the other end of the hall that ran right through the house, the lovely old-fashioned garden behind—and behind it again the orchard in bloom. Their home, haunted by no ghosts of the past—only by wraiths of the future. Unborn eyes would look out of its windows—unborn voices sing in its rooms—unborn feet run lightly in the old orchard. Beautiful tomorrows—unknown lovely years were waiting there for them. Friends would come to them—hands of comrades would knock at their door—silken gowns would rustle through their chambers—there would be companionship and good smacking jests such as their clan loved. What a home they would make of Treewoofe! All the richness and ripeness of life would be theirs.

  Joscelyn saw their faces reflected in the long mirror that was hanging over the fireplace in the corner. A mirror with an intriguing black cat a-top of it which had been brought out from Cornwall and sold with the house. Young, happy, merry faces against a background of blue sky and crystal air. Hugh put his arm about her neck and drew her cheek close to his.

  “That’s an old looking-glass, honey. It has reflected many a woman’s face. But never, never one so beautiful as my queen’s.”

  The wedding was in September. Milly, Joscelyn’s harum-scarum younger sister, was bridesmaid. Frank Dark was best man. Joscelyn had never seen Frank Dark. He lived in Saskatchewan, where his father, Cyrus Dark, had gone when his family were small, and where Frank and Hugh had been cronies during the years Hugh had spent in the west. But he came east for the wedding, arriving there only on the afternoon of the day itself. Joscelyn saw him for the first time when her Uncle Jeff swept in with her and left her standing by the side of her waiting groom. Joscelyn raised her eyes to look at Hugh—and instead found herself looking past him straight into Frank Dark’s eyes as he gazed with open curiosity at this bride of Hugh’s.

  Frank Dark was “dark by name and dark by nature” as the clan said. He had black, satiny hair, a thin olive-hued face and dark liquid eyes. A very handsome fellow, Frank Dark. Beside him, Hugh looked rather overgrown and raw-boned and unfinished. And at that moment Joscelyn Penhallow knew that she had never loved Hugh Dark, save with the affection of a good comrade. She loved Frank Dark, whom she had never seen until that minute.

  The ceremony was well begun before Joscelyn realized what had happened. She always believed that if she had realized it a moment sooner she could have stopped the marriage somehow—anyhow—it did not matter how, so long as it was only stopped. But Hugh was saying, “I will” when she came to her senses—and Frank’s shadow was on the floor before her as she said, “I will” herself, without knowing exactly what she was saying. Another moment and she was Hugh Dark’s wife—Hugh Dark’s wife in the throes of a wild passionate love for another man. And Hugh at that moment was making a vow in his heart that no pain, no sorrow, no heartache should ever touch her life if he could prevent it.

  Joscelyn never knew how she got through the evening. It always seemed a nightmare of remembrance. Hugh kissed her on her lips—tenderly—possessively. The husband’s kiss against which Joscelyn found herself suddenly in wild rebellion. Milly gave her a tear-wet peck next and then Frank Dark, easy, debonair Frank Dark, bent forward with a smile and good-wishes for Hugh’s wife on his lips and kissed her lightly on the cheek. It w
as the first and last time he ever touched her; but today, ten years after, that kiss burned on Joscelyn’s cheek as she thought of it.

  There was an orgy of kissing after that. At Dark and Penhallow weddings everybody kissed the bride and everybody else who could or would be kissed. Joscelyn, bewildered and terrified, had yet one clear thought in her mind—no one—no one must kiss the cheek where Frank’s kiss had fallen. She gave them her lips or her left cheek blindly, but she kept the right to him. On and on they came with their good wishes and their tears or laughter—Joscelyn felt her mother’s tears, she felt her bones almost crack in Drowned John’s grip, she heard old Uncle Erasmus whisper one of the smutty little jokes he always got off at weddings, she saw Mrs. Conrad’s cold, venomous face—no kiss from Mrs. Conrad—she saw Pauline Dark’s pale, quivering lips—Pauline’s kiss was as cold as the grave—she heard jolly old Aunt Charlotte whispering, “Tell him he’s wonderful at least once a week.” It was all a dream—she must wake presently.

  The ordeal of well-wishing over, the ordeal of supper came. Joscelyn was laughed at because she could not eat. Uncle Erasmus made another smutty jest and was punished by his wife’s sharp elbow. After supper Hugh took his bride home. The rest of the young folks, Frank Dark among them, stayed at Bay Silver to dance the night away. Joscelyn went out with only a cloak over her bridal finery. Hugh had asked her to go home with him so.

  The drive to Treewoofe had been very silent. Hugh sensed that somehow she did not want to talk. He was so happy he did not want to talk himself. Words might spoil it. At Treewoofe he lifted her from the buggy and led her by the hand—how cold the hand was. She was frightened, his little love—across the green before the house and over the threshold of his door. He turned to welcome her with the little verse of poetry he had composed for the occasion. Hugh had the knack of rhyme that flickered here and there in the clan, sometimes emerging in very unexpected brainpans. He had pictured himself doing this a hundred times—leading in a white-veiled, silk-clad bride—but not a bride with such white lips and such wide, horror-filled eyes. For the first time Hugh realized that here was something most terribly wrong. This was not the pretty shrinking and confusion of the happy bride.

  They stood in the entrance-hall at Treewoofe and looked at each other. A fire was flickering in the fireplace—Hugh had lighted it with his own hands before he left and bade his hired boy to keep it alive—and the rosy flamelight bathed the hall and fell over his lovely golden bride—his no more.

  “Joscelyn—my darling—what is wrong?”

  She found her voice.

  “I can’t live with you, Hugh.”

  “Why not?”

  She told him. She loved Frank Dark and loving him she could be wife to no other man. Now her eyes were no longer blue or green or gray, but a flame.

  There was a terrible hour. In the end Hugh set open the door and looked at her, white anger falling over his face like a frost. One only word he said:

  “Go.”

  Joscelyn had gone, wraithlike in her shimmer of satin and tulle, out into the cold September moonlight silvering over Treewoofe Hill. She had half walked, half run home to Bay Silver in a certain wild triumph. As she went past the graveyard, her own people buried there seemed to be reaching out after her to pluck her back. Not her father, though. He lay very quiet in his grave—quieter than he had ever lain in life. There had been Spanish blood in him. Mrs. Clifford Penhallow could have told you that. Her clan thought—she thought herself—that she had had a hard life with Clifford’s vagaries. Though when she became a widow she found there were a good many harder things he had fended from her.

  Joscelyn cherished no delusion. She was Hugh’s wife in law and she could marry no other man. The thought of divorce never entered her head. But she was free to be true to her love—this wonderful passion which had so suddenly filled her soul and given it wings, so that she seemed rather to fly than walk over the road. Its dark enchantment lifted her above fear and shame; nothing could touch her, not even what she knew was to be faced. And in this rapt mood she came back to her mother’s door and the dismayed dancers scattered to their homes as if a ghost had walked in among them. Joscelyn, as she went upstairs with the frost of the autumn night wet on her limp wedding-veil, wondered if Frank saw her and what he would think. But Frank was not there. Ten minutes after Hugh had taken his bride away a telegram had come for Frank Dark. Cyrus Dark was dying in Saskatchewan. Frank left at once to pack his scarcely unpacked trunk and catch the early boat-train, thereby perhaps escaping the horsewhipping a madman at Treewoofe was silently threatening to give him and which, it must be admitted, he did not in the least deserve.

  Frank Dark returned to the west without ever knowing that his friend’s bride had fallen in love with him. He hadn’t the slightest wish that she should fall in love with him—though he thought her a dashed pretty girl. A bit of money, too. Hugh had always been a lucky beggar.

  17

  Joscelyn paused at the gate of her home and looked at it with some distaste. The old Clifford Penhallow house was prim, old-fashioned and undecorated, but it was considered to be very quaint by the summer tourists who came to Bay Silver, and a postcard had been made of it. The house was built on a little point running out into Bay Silver. On one side its roof sloped unbrokenly down to within a few feet of the ground. Its windows were high and narrow. A little green yard surrounded it, with nothing in it but green grass which Rachel Penhallow swept every day. To the right was a huddle of trees—a lombardy, a maple, and three apple trees, girt by a tidy stone dyke. On the left a neat gate opened into a neat pasture—oh, everything was so neat and bare—where there were some windy willows and where Mrs. Clifford kept her cow. Back of it was a straight blue line of harbor, a glimpse of pink sand-dunes and over them a hazy sunset.

  For ten years this had been to Joscelyn merely a place to live her strange inner dream-life. She asked no more of it. But now she was suddenly conscious of this odd distaste for it. She had never cared very much for it. It lay too low—she wanted the wind and outlook of a hill. She did not want to go in. She could see her mother and Aunt Rachel at the living-room window. They seemed to be quarreling as usual. Rather—bickering. They couldn’t do anything as genuine and positive as quarrel. There was no Spanish blood in either of them. Joscelyn knew what was ahead of her if she went in—the whole afternoon would be threshed over and somehow they would make her feel that she was responsible for their not getting what they wanted. She could not endure that just now—so she walked around the pasture, as if she were going to the shore, and when she was out of their sight she slipped through the sweet-briar thicket, in at the kitchen door, and upstairs to her own room. With a sigh of relief and weariness she sank into a chair by the open window.

  She suddenly felt tireder than she had ever felt in her life before. Was this to be her existence forever? She had not thought about the future for years—there was no future to think of—nothing but the strange present where her secret love burned like an altar flame she must tend forever, a devoted priestess. But now she thought of the future. A future lived with two old women who were always bickering—an aunt who was bitter and miserly, a mother who was always complaining of “slaving” and not being appreciated. Milly, gay, irresponsible Milly, was long since married and gone. Her going had been a relief to Joscelyn because Milly thought her a fool, but now she missed Milly’s laughter. How still and quiet everything was. But up at Treewoofe there would be wind. There was always a wind there. She could see every dell and slope of Treewoofe Farm from where she sat, lying in the light of a queer red smoky sunset. Dear Treewoofe which seemed in some curious way to belong to her still, when she watched the moon sinking over its snowy hill on winter nights or the autumn stars burning over its misty harvest fields. Over it a cloud was drifting—a cloud like a woman with long, blowing, wet hair. She thought of Pauline Dark—Pauline who still loved Hugh. Could it be true that Hugh’s family reall
y wanted him to get a U. S. divorce? Would Pauline ever be mistress of Treewoofe? Pauline with her thin malicious smile. Demure as a cat, too. At the thought Joscelyn felt a wave of homesickness engulf her. Treewoofe was hers—hers, though she could never enter into her heritage. Hugh would never—could never—take another woman there in her place. It would be sacrilege. Joscelyn shivered again. She had a bitter realization that her springtime suddenly seemed far away. She was no longer young—and all she had had out of life was a certain cool indifferent kiss dropped ten years ago on a cheek that no lips had ever touched since. Yet for that kiss she had given her soul.

  Aunt Rachel came in without the useless formality of a knock. She had been crying and the knobby tip of her long nose was very red. But she was not without her consolation. Mercy Penhallow hadn’t got Aunt Becky’s bottle of Jordan water, thank heaven. She, Rachel Penhallow, was now the only woman in the clan who had one. Penny Dark didn’t count. Men had no real understanding about such sacred things.

  “What did you think of the afternoon, Joscelyn?”

  “Think—the afternoon—oh, it was funny,” said Joscelyn.

  Aunt Rachel stared. She thought the afternoon had been dreadful and scandalous but it would never have occurred to her to call it funny.

  “We have no real chance for the jug, of course. I told your mother that before we went. And less than ever now. Dandy Dark and Mrs. Conrad are first cousins. If you had not been so crazy—Joscelyn—” Joscelyn winced. She always winced when Aunt Rachel gave her jabs about her behavior. She hated Aunt Rachel. Always had hated her. It was always a comfort to reflect that if she chose she could humiliate Aunt Rachel to the dust. Aunt Rachel with her poor pitiful pride in the possession of that bottle of Jordan water, one of several which an itinerant missionary had once sold for the benefit of his cause. She and Theodore Dark had been the only ones in the clan to buy one. The bottle stood in the middle of the parlor mantelpiece. Aunt Rachel dusted it every day with reverent hands.