So Dies the Dreamer
her that the other woman was in love with Charles. Hunter Gideon, restlessly anxious to be gone, took Sarah’s hand with a gentleness that astonished her and gave her one of the fierce looks he couldn’t help. “Take my advice and get yourself out of here. A hotel, anyplace.”And then they were gone. Harry Brendan had not even bothered to say goodbye. Sarah, widowed after six weeks of marriage, went back to the wilting flowers, the clock-ticking silence, the letdown, and found Harry sitting on her living room couch, turning over the pages of a magazine.
He would have used Charles’s key, of course. She couldn’t remember giving it to him, but there were a lot of things that had escaped her in the past few days. He stood up at once, saying briskly, “Do you want to change your hat or wash your face or anything before we go to lunch?”
“But I’m—”
“What,” said Harry with an air of detached interest, “were you planning on having for lunch? That skinless lemon? A few ice cubes? I had a look at your icebox, which I hope you don’t mind, and that’s it.”
He took over, sweepingly, impersonally, that day and the next, and got Sarah through the first few dreadful hours. He knew restaurants she had never heard of before, and his quiet and faintly morose air brought waiters running. He was good for her, because although he did not attempt to shut her out from reality—he asked her point-blank about Charles’s insurance—he cushioned it a little. It was like being escorted by a male nurse, or so Sarah thought until the proprietress of a small Village restaurant sent them, with a knowing twinkle, a cordial on the house.
It was peculiarly embarrassing. The waiter cocked his head smilingly and glanced from Sarah to Harry, the proprietress waited beamingly in the distance. Harry lifted his glass to Sarah after the smallest pause. “They know me here,” he said.
But what had been effortless became instantly a burden. Harry saw Sarah into the apartment house and said, gazing at the faded oriental rug in the lobby, that he would be going up to Boston the next day. Was there anything further he could do, any messages he could take?
Sarah said no, and thanked him for everything. There was no one to watch them except a white marble bust which bore a suspicious resemblance to the renting agent, but they were both too conscious, and not quite formal enough, to even touch hands. The elevator came, and the last she saw of Harry Brendan for almost three months was his quiet unsmiling face and his hand lifted in salute.
They had spent a good part of the past forty-eight hours together, but at no time, beyond the briefest shrug and head-shake, had they touched upon what could have driven Charles to suicide. Harry seemed to be waiting for Sarah, and to Sarah it would have been bitter beyond words to try and extract from Charles’s friend the burden Charles had chosen to die with rather than to share it with his wife. She might be able to do it later; she couldn’t do it now. It would make the whole thing too—pitiable, like opening a lifesaving letter that had come too late.
But she wondered, through the days and the nights.
She kept the apartment, because she didn’t know what else to do. Somebody, probably Bess Gideon, had tactfully put away Charles’s things, and Sarah was queerly relieved that the framed snapshot of him that she had kept on her dressing table had been removed, although she could not have done it herself.
Could Kate Clemence have . . . ? Sarah put that out of her mind at once, along with the realization, new for some reason, that Kate must hate her, must have found it very difficult even to be near her.
After a week or two, in desperation, she started working again. Not at the agency; although she might have gotten her job back, she flinched from the cheerful teasing inquiries of people who wouldn’t have seen the brief obituary. On a deeper level, she flinched from being whispered about as the brand-new widow of a suicide; eyebrows couldn’t help being raised, lightly cruel theories being advanced. From time to time, to pad out her income, she had done free-lance copy for a lingerie house, and it meant no more contact than telephone calls and envelopes exchanged by mail or messenger. They were delighted to hear from her, and they sent her a number of lavish garments to start extolling at once.
It didn’t get her out of the apartment, but it put up a merciful smoke-screen in her mind. Instead of Charles’s pleading eyes, she stared at satin rosettes, insets of lace, cunning panels of elastic that would theoretically make nymphs out of nonagenarians. She would think desperately, “Why? . . .” and then her gaze would fall on a scrawl from the manufacturer: “Positively can’t ride up.”
When Charles’s will was probated, she owned the pheasant farm.
Sarah had never realized that it was his. It must have been left by his father to his stepmother, and gone to Charles upon her death. When she thought of all the people housed there—Bess and Hunter, Evelyn and Milo—and their absorption in the place, the disposition of it seemed uncomfortable and unfair. Sarah wrote a brief and awkward note in response to Bess Gideon’s long formal letter proposing to buy the farm: she had never considered its coming to her, wouldn’t know what to do with the pheasants or the bantams, and couldn’t things go on as they were for the time being at least?
No indeed, Bess Gideon wrote back, delicately hostile. They could none of them consider taking advantage of Sarah’s generosity. If she would name a price, they would try to meet it. In case their own resources fell short, Kate Clemence was interested in investing money in it.
Kate Clemence, who walked about so calmly and superbly in her man’s