Restless Earth/Chapter 7

It was after six o’clock when James Harley rolled over and sat up. He struggled to complete wakefulness with an effort, conscious that he had made some sort of an appointment with somebody. When he remembered with whom the appointment had been made he yanked out his watch in mild panic. He ​sighed in great relief when he saw that it still wanted over thirty minutes to seven o’clock.

He stretched, and yawned noisily, luxuriating in a restored sense of freedom, then rose to his feet and gazed at the beach and the leagues of sea with a sense of ownership. He grinned as he admitted to himself that there was something in the song which he remembered his mother singing in the “middle ages,” after all. Pat loved him and the world was his!

He remembered his hat, and laughed when he discovered that he had been lying on it. He recovered the wreck, punched it into wearable shape, and set it upon his head carelessly.

He talked to himself light-heartedly as he made his way in the direction of the road.

“Item, in the new expenses schedule, one hat, forty-five shillings—or less. James, make a note of that and call my attention to it first thing to-morrow morning. Oh, and James—better mention a new suit, too, while you're about it. We must look after ourselves, James. And don’t forget that we must have our hair cut. It is too long altogether. We will overlook it this time, James, because the length of it has undoubtedly saved us from sunstroke this afternoon, but don’t let it occur again. And, just one other thing, James, you really must shed that habit of talking to yourself. Look at those children staring at you open-mouthed. Try whistling for a change.”

He was whistling blithely as he turned into Plover Street. Mrs. Langham was crossing the sidewalk to her car as he passed her house. He interrupted his whistling to raise his battered hat, smile politely upon her and ask her how she did. She replied with one withering glance and a turning of her ample back.

“Delightful evening, isn’t it?” he ventured unabashed.

Mrs. Langham expressed no agreement. She ​climbed into her car as regally as she could at a moment’s notice and banged the door shut with a violence which rocked the vehicle. She clashed her gears badly as she moved away.

“Pointed, James; decidedly pointed,” Harley murmured as he continued on his path. “‘We have done those things which we ought not to have done.’ But, for a sinner, we are not unduly miserable, James. Whistle, you ass!”

He was whistling when he reached his gate, which he slammed behind him with an exuberant gesture. In little but the clothes he wore did he resemble the man who had shut it listlessly a few hours earlier. He was now vigorously alive. No signs of mental travail showed in his expression. His eyes sparkled, he walked upright, swinging his arms with the joy of living. His firmly-planted boots raised little explosions of dust as he marched around the house to the back door; and when Ginger miaowed hungrily at him and stood in his path he was filled with a vast sympathy for the animal. He lifted the cat in his arms—a liberty which Ginger resented.

“What’s the matter with the old man?” he asked, caressing the struggling animal. “Not afraid of me, surely? What do you say to a nice piece of meat? A piece of steak, or perhaps a fried chop?”

It was only when he had mentioned a ‘fried chop’ that he realised he could smell a frying mutton chop. Moreover, he could hear the chop frying.

He lifted his head and stared at the closed back door of the house in puzzled speculation. Ginger took advantage of his wandering attention to scramble from his arms and dart under the hedge.

“Somebody in the house, James,” muttered Harley. “Somebody cooking chops on our stove.”

He thought of tramps, he thought of compassionate friends, he thought of Grace!

Grace returned!

His exaltation crashed; and a moment of panic, ​in which he almost turned tip-toe away from the house, was succeeded by a wave of unreasoning anger.

By what right did she return like this, unheralded? She had deliberately run away from him, and if she thought she could return just when it pleased her———! No, by God!

He strode forward, turned the handle, and flung the door open with his shoulder.

“Well?” he demanded savagely.

Then he gasped in amazement, and coloured furiously.

Patricia Weybourn stood confronting him as she calmly wiped the last of the dishes which had been piled upon the sink board. She wore one of Grace’s gingham aprons over her stylish afternoon frock. Her hands and wrists were damp and unusually pink.

The air was full of the odour of soapy water and frying chops.

“Do you usually charge in like this?” asked the girl calmly.

James Harley stared at her foolishly, his mouth agape, entirely unbelieving.

“Am I not welcome?” she asked, tossing her head coquettishly as she turned to place the wiped dish with the others which gleamed freshly upon the shelves.

“Pat!” he managed to gasp.

Patricia laughed mirthfully and continued her task.

Harley crossed the room and leaned upon the edge of the table, his gaze wandering here and there, noting the return of the old order, then settling upon the girl’s back as she serubbed the sink-board vigorously. His thoughts struggled for coherency, and he noted subconsciously that Pat’s hair brushed the lowest shelf above the sink as she bent forward. Grace had come short of that shelf by a good four inches.

​“Say something, Jimmy,” commanded Patricia, turning upon him suddenly.

“Wh—what are you doing here, Pat?” he stuttered, his eyes still wide with amazement.

“As you see, restoring order in the kitchen and cooking the evening meal,” she answered easily.

“But—but———” he began helplessly, spreading his hands protestingly.

“Do you like living on husks in a stye, Jimmy?”

“No, of course not! But, my dear girl, you mustn’t———”

“Don’t ask me what the neighbours will think,” she interrupted, with a cold smile, “because you should know that I don’t care what they think. At this moment Mrs. Langham is spreading the glad news that I have proved myself an abandoned hussy, I dare say. She was vastly interested when I shook the bedroom rugs over the verandah rail an hour ago. I made plenty of noise over it especially for her edification.”

He shook his head in bewilderment.

Patricia read reproof in the action and came close to him, her shapely jaw set challengingly. She looked steadily into his eyes.

“Have you finally decided that you do care what local society thinks of you?” she asked, a suggestion of contempt in her tones.

Harley returned her gaze as he straightened slowly. A possessive smile curved his lips and deepened the lines at their corners. His eyelids drooped slightly as his gaze kindled. With a sudden, fierce movement he seized her in his arms and crushed her to him.

“The neighbours and local society can go to the devil!” he answered. “I wish I could keep you here.”

Patricia found the wet dish-cloth she held rather difficult in his close embrace, but she refrained from mentioning it. Harley had not noticed it.

“Do you? Really?” she asked.

“You know I do, Pat.”

​He kissed her hair, the blonde hair which he had once thought ultra, but which he now knew to be “angel gold.”

“Jimmy, you’re—awfully satisfying,” she breathed happily.

They were still for enchanted seconds, then she tore herself free.

“The chops!” she cried.

“Confound the chops!” he exclaimed fervently.

He watched her in admiration as she turned the chops in the pan dexterously; and when she stooped to lower the flame beneath them he stooped swiftly and kissed the back of her neck.

The gas went out with a plop.

“Damn!” said the girl.

Harley hastened to re-kindle the flame.

“A good cook never swears, my dear,” he admonished her.

“But I’m not a good cook,” she defended herself. “You’ll find that out.”

“To tell you the truth, Pat, I am surprised to find that you can cook at all.”

“Indeed? I’m rather too decorative for the kitchen?”

He laughed softly and placed an arm about her shoulders.

“Well—you’re not the kitchen type, sweetheart. You know what I mean. It ought never to be necessary for you to have to cook. You were designed to grace dinners, not to cook ’em.”

“Exactly. Too decorative.”

“Not ‘too,’ Pat. I’ll never agree to that.”

“Good appetite cares little about decoration in any degree, Jimmy.”

Patricia reached for the dish of tomatoes upon the table.

“Fried tomatoes?” she asked.

“My favourite dish,” he replied; and became grave as an unwelcome vision of Grace slicing tomatoes into the pan obtruded itself.

​“We’ll see if I cook them as well as Grace does,” Patricia said, reading his thoughts in one swift glance.

She smiled enigmatically, and he looked at her profile suspiciously.

“Why did you say that?” he asked quietly.

“Why do I say anything?” she countered lightly, as she sliced the tomatoes skilfully. “Good heavens, man!” she added, turning to him sharply. “You don’t suppose I’m so hardened that I can stand here in Grace’s place and not think of her?”

Harley turned to the door with a weary movement.

“Please, Pat! We’ve done all the necessary thinking about Grace. She wasn’t compelled to go. She went of her own free will. You have every right to be here if you want to be here. How long before those things are cooked?”

“About five minutes. You had better furbish up a little.”

Harley felt his spirits rise immediately at the proprietory command.

“A good idea,” he agreed. “Could I have, say, ten minutes?”

“Yes. But no longer.”

“Ten will be long enough.”

As he entered the breakfast-room its cleanliness seemed to hithim painfully. He crossed to the mantelpiece and drummed upon it with his fingers as he gazed around. Fresh blooms had replaced the dead stalks in the vases on the tables and the mantel; the dust had vanished from the furniture and the door ledges; the clean smell of floor polish insisted on being noticed. Everything as it had been with Grace.

He wondered what Grace was doing at the moment. Having dinner at the Masonic in Napier, he supposed.

Oh, well———!

He went into the bedroom—the room he had occupied with Grace, but which he had lately de​serted in favour of the spare bedroom whose single bed required less attention.

Here again was a reminder of Grace’s handiwork. The bed was freshly made; the breeze blew cleanly through the room as it had not done since Grace left, for the very good reason that he had not bothered to open the windows. The order upon the dressing table—his erstwhile vanished studs standing in a neat row before his pot of hair-dressing; his brushes and the various odds and ends in their rightful places—evidence that Pat had keenly observed their disposition in other days—distressed him.

His slippers placed neatly beside the easy chair in the corner; his dressing-gown depending from the hook behind the door; the tidiness of the books on the small bedside table, assisted his recurring doubt.

Had not Patricia been guilty of something in the nature of mild sacrilege in thus assuming the offices of a housewife unasked—the offices of Grace? Would not delicacy have dictated another arrangement of these intimate things, at least? Would it not have been better if the things on the dressing-table, for instance, were otherwise arranged, and his slippers somewhere else?

Then his gaze rested upon the bed, and his scruples were forgotten.

From beneath the pillow near the wall a narrow, pale-blue ribbon trailed across the tangerine silk of the bed-spread!

Harley stared at it incredulously for a moment, then he leaned over the bed and rolled the pillow aside.

He stood perfectly still. The blood mounted in his cheeks slowly.

“Pat, you’re a great girl!” he exclaimed softly, at last, as he lifted the delicate sheer-silk pyjamas— the dainty night-attire of the modern fashionable young lady. “A great girl!”

He replaced the pyjamas beneath the pillow reverently. No thought of the shameless defiance ​of the laws of conventional decency which they argued, lying thus beneath the pillow which was Grace’s by right of law and his oath, crossed his mind. He looked at the pillow, he saw it in imagination dinted by a glorious golden head, and nothing else mattered.

“Whistle, you lucky blighter!” he laughed.

He whistled in the bedroom, he sang in the bathroom. He was gloriously uplifted, gloriously happy.

Patricia’s frocks hanging in the wardrobe, and her portmanteau and cabin trunk beneath the bed, occasioned him no further surprise. He would have been surprised had they not been there. They were where they should be.

“What a girl!” he apostrophised his reflection in the mirror. “No foolish nonsense about her. As great in courage as beauty, God bless her! James, you don’t deserve her! No man could deserve her! And if you dare to ask me if I am the first, James, I’ll break your neck!”

****

Patricia, sliding the chops and tomatoes into a dish, heard Harley singing in the bathroom. She shook her head rather sadly and smiled a one-sided, pitying smile.

The evening paper, still in its wrapper as it had been delivered, lay upon the table. Harley had rested his hand upon it and had not noticed it. Patricia gazed at it resentfully, hesitatingly.

Should she take the chance—take the brief happiness? What matter if he saw it now, or in the morning? He could think no worse of her?

She would let chance decide.

She replaced the pan upon the stove, caught up the folded paper, and, going into the breakfast-room, hurled it through the open window. The paper twirled in the air and came to rest in the tecoma hedge which shut out the road. Its whiteness was plainly visible in the dark foliage.

Patricia sighed and closed the window.

​“I must be naturally bad,” she reproached herself, as she went back to the chops and tomatoes.

When Harley entered the breakfast-room she was putting unnecessary finishing touches to the table arrangement. She did not turn. He stood with his back against the closed door, his hands behind him. He had changed his attire and was strikingly handsome. His eyes were sparkling; his lips were smiling, revealing a narrow line of white teeth; his dark brown hair gleamed in natural short waves; his pallor gave him an appearance of refinement which was the antithesis of his thoughts.

Patricia felt his hungry gaze upon her and coloured slowly.

“Pat!”

She turned slowly and looked at him.

“What are we having for breakfast?” he asked softly.

“Chops and tomatoes,” she answered unsteadily. “That’s all we have in the house.”