Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/316

292 "We've always gathered at Thanksgiving," he said, hesitatingly. "It's our home custom, you know. I've never missed more than two or three of those festivals. Mother would break her heart if—" He left the sentence unended.

Frances had a mental flash in which she saw all that Keppel had told her of the bleak, barren, wintry little place, set off in an alien valley peopled by men and women assuredly not her own kind, distant, comfortless. In her present repelled emotional condition, it all seemed unendurably intolerable.

"Oh, I couldn't—" she gasped, quickly.

Keppel was silent, shrinking inwardly from the truth of her words.

"Must we go—now? It seems so—so far, and surely they understand how engaged we are here? How difficult it is to take such a journey, just at the beginning of the season in town? I—"

"Please don't think of it, Frances," he said, coldly. "I understand how difficult the journey would be for you. I—I scarcely thought that you'd care for it. I can say that you are ill, if you like—ill enough not to undertake the trip. You'll get on quite safely here for the two days I'll be away."

She looked at him with the calm curiosity of utter aloofness. "Then you'll go—without me?"

Keppel rose, avoiding her eyes. "I cannot disappoint them, of course—it means very much to them. Yes, I shall go," he said, as he left her.

"Very well, Richard. As you will."

She had, at the moment, not the least inclination toward tears. Indeed, she was conscious of a certain relief in the thought of prospective freedom. Later she had a wretched time over the whole unfortunate affair.

For Keppel the journey home had absolutely none of the traditional about it. He could not foresee with his former warmth at the heart the eager faces, the generous glow of the house, the brightness, the welcomes, which, jovial as they always were, had a scarcely concealed depth of tender affection, the sense of reunion accentuated by a smoking-hot turkey and a burden of home dishes. In fact, he shook himself out of the disordered sleeping-car early in the gray creeping chill of Thanksgiving morning, utterly at odds with the whole situation. The effort to greet his father's blankness of face over the sight of Keppel alone, with a cordial gayety of reassurance, of explanation of Frances's inability to come, of her dreadful disappointment, nearly set him crazy.

"Well, well, I am sorry. I've counted so on seeing my new daughter," his father said, regretfully, as Keppel climbed into the big red "cutter" and they drove off. The younger man took sorry note of the robes and the hot soapstones that filled the conveyance; they had been provided for Frances, he knew, though he did not speak of the fact.

The "Why, where is Frances?" that Keppel had shrunk from all the way, with keen sensitiveness, came at last, with even more of blankness, of dismay, of incredulity, than he had anticipated, as his family tumultuously drew him back among them again. He put them all off gayly—so gayly that he almost re-aroused the suspicions he was trying to allay in them.

"So I came without her—just to see your Thanksgiving faces, eat your blessed food, tell my old jokes, and be gone. No, really, she wasn't fit to take that long trip."

"Well, if I was as young as Frances—" sharply began an aunt whose spirit was irreconcilable with extreme delicacy.

"Now, Mary," protested Keppel's mother quickly.

After the momentary forgetfulness in the greetings, the cloud settled on Keppel heavily. On a slight pretext he went up to his old room—they had kept it for him just as it was the day he went to college a matter of twelve years ago—went just to get away from his sisters and their good-natured raillery about his being a "bachelor again" and "deserted."

The parting from Frances had been worse than he had thought it might be, and he had given it every dull shade. He had still the sense of her at parting—straight, slim, calm, unprotesting, and terribly removed from him. In his distress over the whole thing, in his feeling of hurt, Keppel had—he saw it clearly enough now—made himself out in a worse light than he had intended. His wretchedness stopped his throat, laid on his tongue a silence that was a leaden