第60章

As one of the first results of this awakening, Laura reproached herself with having done but little for Page.She told herself that she had not been a good sister, that often she had been unjust, quick tempered, and had made the little girl to suffer because of her caprices.She had not sympathised sufficiently with her small troubles--so she made herself believe--and had found too many occasions to ridicule Page's intenseness and queer little solemnities.True she had given her a good home, good clothes, and a good education, but she should have given more--more than mere duty-gifts.She should have been more of a companion to the little girl, more of a help; in fine, more of a mother.Laura felt all at once the responsibilities of the elder sister in a family bereft of parents.Page was growing fast, and growing astonishingly beautiful; in a little while she would be a young woman, and over the near horizon, very soon now, must inevitably loom the grave question of her marriage.

But it was only this realisation of certain responsibilities that during the first years of her married life at any time drew away Laura's consideration of her husband.She began to get acquainted with the real man-within-the-man that she knew now revealed himself only after marriage.Jadwin her husband was so different from, so infinitely better than, Jadwin her lover, that Laura sometimes found herself looking back with a kind of retrospective apprehension on the old days and the time when she was simply Miss Dearborn.How little she had known him after all! And how, in the face of this ignorance, this innocence, this absence of any insight into his real character, had she dared to take the irretrievable step that bound her to him for life? The Curtis Jadwin of those early days was so much another man.He might have been a rascal; she could not have known it.As it was, her husband had promptly come to be, for her, the best, the finest man she had ever known.But it might easily have been different.

His attitude towards her was thoughtfulness itself.

Hardly ever was he absent from her, even for a day, that he did not bring her some little present, some little keep-sake--or even a bunch of flowers--when he returned in the evening.The anniversaries--Christmas, their wedding day, her birthday--he always observed with great eclat.He took a holiday from his business, surprised her with presents under her pillow, or her dinner-plate, and never failed to take her to the theatre in the evening.

However, it was not only Jadwin's virtues that endeared him to his wife.He was no impeccable hero in her eyes.He was tremendously human.He had his faults, his certain lovable weaknesses, and it was precisely these traits that Laura found so adorable.

For one thing, Jadwin could be magnificently inconsistent.Let him set his mind and heart upon a given pursuit, pleasure, or line of conduct not altogether advisable at the moment, and the ingenuity of the excuses by which he justified himself were monuments of elaborate sophistry.Yet, if later he lost interest, he reversed his arguments with supreme disregard for his former words.

Then, too, he developed a boyish pleasure in certain unessential though cherished objects and occupations, that he indulged extravagantly and to the neglect of things, not to say duties, incontestably of more importance.

One of these objects was the "Thetis." In every conceivable particular the little steam yacht was complete down to the last bolt, the last coat of varnish; but at times during their summer vacations, when Jadwin, in all reason, should have been supervising the laying out of certain unfinished portions of the "grounds"--supervision which could be trusted to no subordinate--he would be found aboard the "Thetis," hatless, in his shirt-sleeves, in solemn debate with the grey MacKenny and--a cleaning rag, or monkey-wrench, or paint brush in his hand--tinkering and pottering about the boat, over and over again.

Wealthy as he was, he could have maintained an entire crew on board whose whole duty should have been to screw, and scrub, and scour.But Jadwin would have none of it."Costs too much," he would declare, with profound gravity.He had the self-made American's handiness with implements and paint brushes, and he would, at high noon and under a murderous sun, make the trip from the house to the dock where the "Thetis" was moored, for the trivial pleasure of tightening a bolt--which did not need tightening; or wake up in the night to tell Laura of some wonderful new idea he had conceived as to the equipment or decoration of the yacht.He had blustered about the extravagance of a "crew," but the sums of money that went to the brightening, refitting, overhauling, repainting, and reballasting of the boat--all absolutely uncalled-for--made even Laura gasp, and would have maintained a dozen sailors an entire year.

This same inconsistency prevailed also in other directions.In the matter of business Jadwin's economy was unimpeachable.He would cavil on a half-dollar's overcharge; he would put himself to downright inconvenience to save the useless expenditure of a dime--and boast of it.But no extravagance was ever too great, no time ever too valuable, when bass were to be caught.

For Jadwin was a fisherman unregenerate.Laura, though an early riser when in the city, was apt to sleep late in the country, and never omitted a two-hours' nap in the heat of the afternoon.Her husband improved these occasions when he was deprived of her society, to indulge in his pastime.Never a morning so forbidding that his lines were not in the water by five o'clock;never a sun so scorching that he was not coaxing a "strike" in the stumps and reeds in the shade under the shores.