Emily's Quest (1927)

Chapter 21

I

Teddy and Ilse were coming home for a brief ten days in July. How was it, wondered Emily, that they always came together? That couldn't be just a coincidence. She dreaded the visit and wished it were over. It would be good to see Ilse again--somehow she could never feel a stranger with Ilse. No matter how long she was away, the moment she came back you found the old Ilse. But she did not want to see Teddy. Teddy who had forgotten her. Who had never written since he went away last. Teddy who was already famous, as a painter of lovely women. So famous and so successful that--Ilse wrote--he was going to give up magazine work. Emily felt a certain relief when she read that. She would no longer dread to open a magazine lest she see her own face--or soul--looking at her out of some illustration--with "Frederick Kent" scrawled in the corner, as if to say "know all men by these presents that this girl is mine." Emily resented less the pictures which looked like her whole face than the ones in which only the eyes were hers. To be able to paint her eyes like that Teddymust know everything that was in her soul. The thought always filled her with fury and shame--and a sense of horrible helplessness. She would not--could not--tell Teddy to stop using her as a model. She had never stooped to acknowledge to him that she had noticed any resemblance to herself in his illustrations--she never would stoop.

And now he was coming home--might be home any time. If only she could go away--on any pretence--for a few weeks. Miss Royal was wanting her to go to New York for a visit. But it would never do to go away when Ilse was coming.

Well--Emily shook herself. What an idiot she was! Teddy was coming home, a dutiful son, to see his mother--and he would doubtless be glad enough to see old friends when their actual presence recalled them to his memory; and why should there be anything difficult about it? She must get rid of this absurd self-consciousness. She would.

She was sitting at her open window. The night outside was like a dark, heavy, perfumed flower. An expectant night--a night when things intended to happen. Very still. Only the loveliest of muted sounds--the faintest whisper of trees, the airiest sigh of wind, the half-heard, half-felt moan of the sea.

"Oh, beauty!" whispered Emily, passionately, lifting her hands to the stars. "What would I have done without you all these years?"

Beauty of night--and perfume--and mystery. Her soul was filled with it. There was, just then, room for nothing else. She bent out, lifting her face to the jewelled sky--rapt, ecstatic.

Then she heard it. A soft, silvery signal in Lofty John's bush--two higher notes and one long, low one--the old, old call that would once have sent her with flying feet to the shadows of the firs.

Emily sat as if turned to stone, her white face framed in the vines that clustered round her window. He was there--Teddy was there--in Lofty John's bush--waiting for her--calling to her as of old. Expecting her!

Almost she had sprung to her feet--almost she had run downstairs and out to the shadows--the beautiful, perfumed shadows where he was waiting for her. But--

Was he only trying to see if he still had the old power over her?

He had gone away two years ago without even a written word of farewell. Would the Murray pride condone that? Would the Murray pride run to meet the man who had held her of so little account? The Murray pride would not. Emily's young face took on lines of stubborn determination in the dim light. She would not go. Let him call as he might. "Whistle and I'll come to you, my lad," indeed! No more of that for Emily Byrd Starr. Teddy Kent need not imagine that he could come and go as went the years and find her meekly waiting to answer his lordly signal.

Again the call came--twice. He was there--so close to her. In a moment if she liked, she could be beside him--her hands in his--his eyes looking into hers--perhaps--