ICE end of a honeymoon I'm having!” Jim grumbled. “With my wife thinking and talking all the time about another fellow.”
“My darling, adored man!” I exclaimed. “You know perfectly well that you're the background and undercurrent and foundation of all my thoughts every minute of the day and night. And this 'other fellow' is dying.”
Yes, “darling, adored man” were my adjectives for Jim Courtenaye, whom I had once abused. But he was no longer my “forty-fourth cousin four times removed.” He was my very own husband and the pivot of my world.
All the same, if a cat may look at a king, a bride may just glance at a man who isn't her bridegroom.
“Ruling passion strong in marriage, I suppose,” said Jim. “I bet you'd like to try your hand at 'brightening' that chap, though judging from his face, he's almost past even your blandishments. I wouldn't be past 'em, not in my coffin! But it isn't every man who can love as I do, you minx.”
“And it isn't every man who has such a perfect woman to love,” I capped him with calm conceit. “But I wish I could 'brighten' that poor fellow. Or else I wish that some one else would!”
And at that very instant my wish was granted in the most amazing way!
A girl came—but no, I mustn't let her appear upon the scene quite yet. First I must explain that Jim and I were on shipboard, coming back to England from America, where we had been having the most wonderful honeymoon. Jim had taken me out West, and showed me the places where he had lived in his cowboy days. We had ridden long trails together, in the Grand Cañon of Arizona, and in the Yosemite Valley of California. I had never imagined that life could be so glorious, and our future together, Jim's and mine, stretched before us like a dream of joy. We were going to live in the dear old Abbey which had been the home of the Courtenayes for hundreds and hundreds of years, and travel when we liked. Because we were so much in love and so perfectly happy, I yearned to make at least a few thousand other people happy also, though it did seem impossible that any one else on earth could be as happy as we were.
This was our second day out from New York on the Acquitania, and my spirits had been slightly damped by discovering that two fellow passengers, if not more, were extremely unhappy. One of them lived in the stateroom next to our suite. At night in my cabin I could hear her crying and moaning to herself in a fitful sleep. I had not seen her, so far as I knew, but I fancied from the sound of those sobs that she was young.
When I told Jim, he wanted to change cabins with me, so that I should not be disturbed. But I refused to budge, saying that I “wasn't disturbed.” My neighbor didn't cry or talk in her sleep all through the night by any means. Besides, once I had dropped off, the sounds were not loud enough to wake me. This was true enough not to be a fib, but my realest reason for clinging to the room was an odd fascination in that mysterious sorrow on the other side of the wall; the sorrow of a woman I hadn't seen, might perhaps never see, yet to whom I sent out warm waves Of sympathy. I felt as if those waves had colors, blue and gold, and that they would soothe the sufferer.
Her case obsessed me until, in the sunshine of a second summer day at sea, the one empty chair on the crowded deck was filled. A man was helped into it by a valet or male nurse, and a steward. My first glimpse of his face as he sank down on to carefully placed cushions made my heart jump in my breast with pity and protest against the hardness of fate.
If he'd been old, or even middle-aged, or if he had been one of those colorless characters dully sunk into chronic invalidism, I should have felt only the pity without the protest. But he was young, and though it was clear that he was desperately ill, it was clear, too, in a more subtle, psychic way, that he had not been ill long, and that love of life or desire for denied happiness burned in him still.
Of course Jim was not really vexed because I discussed this man and wondered about him. But my thoughts did play around that piteously romantic figure a good deal, and it rather amused Jim to see me forget the mystery of the cabin in favor of the cushioned chair.