Stranger within the Gates

by Grace Livingston Hill

  "Sure!" said Rex again, feeling very gallant and generous and thinking how pretty the girl looked when she smiled. What pretty little white teeth she had. He certainly would enjoy teaching that hound a lesson if they should chance to meet him.

  So presently, when the proprietor came in with another man, Rex paid his check and left, and in almost no time at all the girl stood beside him on the dark side of the drugstore.

  "Come up this way," she said softly. "I think I see some college boys coming down the street, and you don't want them to see you going out with a waitress."

  "What do you think I am?" growled Rex. "Stuck up?" But he turned his steps into the street where she led him, and they walked away into the darkness side by side, she accommodating her steps gracefully to his longer stride.

  But she kept looking back fearfully and catching her breath. Once she started and clutched at his sleeve.

  "Oh!" she said. "I thought I saw him coming!"

  "Say, look here, you don't need to be scared. I'm here to protect you. What's the idea? Can't you trust me?"

  He drew her arm within his own and looked down at her as if she had been a little child, and she edged closer to him and clung to his arm confidingly.

  "You're so good to me!" she whispered. "And I should feel so perfectly terrible if anything happened to you on my account."

  "Nonsense!" he said and tried to laugh it off. But every now and then as they turned into far and darker streets, her body would quiver and she would draw closer to him in another spasm of fright, till Rex, as if she were a frightened, hysterical child, put his arm about her to steady her. And she drew still closer and hid her face against his shoulder.

  She was weeping there, her whole body quivering against him, her slender hands creeping into his. He wasn't just sure whether that was his fault or hers, but it seemed the right thing to do. He had to protect her and comfort her, didn't he? And there she was in the darkness against him, and his whole body thrilled with the contact. His heart suddenly went out to her, such a sweet little frightened thing, her tears falling hot on his hands and filling him with tenderness!

  Suddenly he drew her closer into his arms and bent his head down to her face. And she lifted her sweet white face there in the darkness, her wet cheeks against his lips, her slender body creeping closer within his arms, her lips raised close to his. Then without warning even to himself, he kissed her, a long kiss, her lips clinging even after his astonished ones had ceased.

  "Oh, you're wonderful!" she murmured. "You're darling!" and clung the closer.

  Then his whole body thrilled again, with an exaltation he had never known before. He had not been a boy who spent much thought on girls, or love. Before now girls had been merely good pals, or else flat tires. But this girl was different. This was a little spirit who had been shut into sorrow all her life, imprisoned by fear and desolation, and she had turned to him in her distress. She was pouring out her young soul to his, and it filled him with a great and reverent joy.

  That was the beginning of it all. Yet Rex felt as if a new world had opened before him and life had taken on a different meaning from what he had ever dreamed it would have.

  He didn't see her often, of course, for he was bound by college duties and strict rules, rules that he had been brought up to respect and obey and to count among first obligations. But the girl managed to impress him with her importance even amid these. She claimed all possible moments when she was free herself from a job on which depended her bread and butter, and more important still, the smart garments she considered necessary to her outfitting under the circumstances.

  For a day or two after that first night Rex went about in a daze of ecstatic joy, his mind on new matters that had never concerned him before. But gradually the exhilaration cleared somewhat and his mind settled down to sanity again, enough at least for him to keep up with his studies and to keep fit athletically. By that time the thought of the girl only appeared on the horizon, at intervals, like the memory of a pleasant dream--until she herself took a hand in things and wrote him cryptic notes that were most intriguing. Not long letters, only a word or two that revived the memory of her, the wonder and the charm that she had brought. Now and again she demanded his presence at some late hour, in a lonely meeting place where danger, she said, lurked for her. And then he would be recalled.

  It was on one of these nights that she wept and pleaded that he would put her at once safely under his guardianship by marriage. If she were married, she told him, the man would cease to torment her. They needn't necessarily tell everybody. The college needn't know it, but she should be able to tell people who were harassing her that she would send for her husband at once if they dared trouble her anymore.

  Rex didn't quite see this. He couldn't understand her line of reasoning. He was ready to come out in the open and fight her enemy, but he told her he was in no position to marry anybody yet; he had to finish college or he never could be a man and take his rightful position in the world. He tried out all the traditions of his upbringing on her, but somehow they didn't seem to register with her. She was like a child, it seemed, when it came to reasoning. She said she never would feel safe again unless he would marry her. She was willing to go on working and keep still about it for a time, at least until he was through his examinations, but to go back to desolation of loneliness with nothing sure ahead but his promises was beyond her. She could not endure it.

  She wept and clung to him, till her very nearness and abandon of utter love for him wore down his good sense and reduced him to desperation.

  He had half a mind to go home and tell his mother all about it. Ask his mother to take the girl home with her and take care of her until he was able to look after her aright, but when he suggested this to the girl, she went wild. She would never go to his mother unwed. What had his mother to do with it, anyway? She would kill herself before she would ever go and stay with his mother. Besides, that would not make her safe from the man she professed to fear. He would find out where she was. He had the most uncanny way of discovering things. He would find out and come for her and perhaps make it uncomfortable for his mother; he would tell lies about herself, claim she belonged to him, make Rex's mother think horrible things about her! And then she would go into despairing tears again, until Rex was at his wit's end, and at last he gave in and went with her to get a license.

  The weekend that followed he had set aside for some gravely important study, which meant a good deal in his course, but that was the time that she had chosen for their wedding. Rex looked troubled, but her radiant face when he finally said yes seemed for the time being to repay him, filled him again with that ecstasy that had overwhelmed him the first night he had known her.

  "Do you, Rex, take Florimel--?"

  Florimel! That was her name. And somehow it seemed to him sweet-sounding and lovely, expressing what she really was, just a lovely flower that had been unfortunate and almost got crushed and trampled in the mire. Now she was his, and he meant to cherish her and bring her into loveliness. He looked down at his little bride as they came away from the very common place where she had suggested it wouldn't cost much to be married. Her face was shining in triumph like the face of a sweet child who had just gotten what she wanted most of all in life, and he felt the sudden thrill that she was his. Why, he hadn't known that a man would feel that way when he had taken a bride. For a few minutes at least he was glad that he had done it. Lessons, college, and the future, what where they? This was here and now, and he was finding out what real life meant. Why had he been afraid to go ahead when she first asked him? Why hadn't he known it would be like this? He looked down at her and saw beauty in her where it did not exist, because his eyes were full of glamour.

  Florimel was exquisitely attired, according to the taste of this world. She had just the right amount of makeup to give her wistful girlish appeal. Her hair had received distinctive attention, and she was wearing a new black suit with gray fur bands. She really looked smart. Her gray eye
s as she looked up adoringly to his seemed almost jade green in color, her hair had glints of gold and copper in the sun, and she had brought with her a shining gray suitcase filled with delightful garments that she had been preparing for several days, whenever she could get time off to visit the store where they sold goods on an installment plan. Of course, Rex knew nothing about that part. He could only look in wonder that she could be so beautiful and look so altogether properly clad on the very small earnings she must receive for her job in the pie shop. He was infatuated, perhaps not so much with the look of this girl but with her utter dependence upon himself and her great abandoning love for him. It had never occurred to Rex that anybody would ever care for him that way, and his senses were all stirred by her till he was scarcely responsible for the time being.

  She had not revealed to him until they were out and away from the place where they had been married that now she was expecting a honeymoon. But she made it plain almost at once.

  He looked at her gravely, sadly, when she suggested it, asking him naively where he was taking her.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know you were counting on going somewhere. I've got to go right back to college and do some tall studying. I'll have to study half the night to make up for being away as long as I have been this afternoon." He tried to smile apologetically, tenderly, to make up for the hard facts, but her childlike radiance vanished at once and she pouted.

  "You don't mean that you are going off to leave me! Now, when we have just been married!"

  She looked up into his eyes with sudden large tears in her own that gave them the appearance of strange sinister jewels and gripped his heart with quick reproach.

  "But I told you," said Rex, "I told you we oughtn't to get married now. I told you I had to graduate first. And you said you were quite willing to wait for all the nice things I could get you till later and to get along as best we could now."

  "But I never thought you would be so hard-hearted as to grudge me a little honeymoon! Just a couple of days! That is all I asked. When you consented to get married, I supposed, of course, that you understood that at least a honeymoon went with getting married! And I got time off from my job. I don't have to be back till Monday morning! And now it's all for nothing!"

  Rex looked down at her in troubled perplexity. This was something he had not counted on.

  "You don't really love me!" said Florimel sadly, and one big tear rolled down and made a little wet path on her cheek before it dropped on her black wool coat and sank into its texture.

  "Florimel! Don't say that!"

  "Well, you don't!" said the girl. "You think more of your old studies and your college than you do of me!"

  "Now you know that isn't right," he declared. "You know I have to care about my college, because if I don't graduate, I'll never get a place where I can support you."

  "Well, but surely two days won't make any difference!"

  The tears were rolling down thick and fast, and people passing were looking curiously at the lovely girl who so evidently was being persecuted by the young man with her. Rex was suddenly very sensitive to the public gaze and annoyed beyond measure. If his sister had ever carried on this way on the public street, he certainly would have told her where to get off in short order. But Florimel was his bride, and he was responsible! He must do something about it!

  "Two days makes a good deal of difference if it's two days before examinations," said Rex sharply. "I really don't know what to do, Florrie! I didn't dream you counted on going away somewhere. And there's another reason, too, why we can't. It takes money to go away. I haven't but fifteen dollars in my pocket, and I owe that to somebody I promised to pay today!"

  "Oh, that!" said Florimel, laughing lightly. "You shouldn't worry about what you owe! You can pay him again someday. Tell him you forgot it or you didn't have it or you'll pay him next week. Don't let a little thing like that worry you! Besides, I've got a little money myself! I can lend it to you and put your fifteen with it. I'm sure we can get quite a honeymoon out of it. I know a good cheap place to go." She launched into a description of its qualities, and her face lit up with anticipation as she talked, until Rex, watching her eagerness, stirred by her little hand in his, her confiding young body hugged close to his side, little by little yielded.

  "We don't get married but once, you know!" she pleaded with a tender look, and Rex, with a despairing thought of the studying he had meant to do, yielded.

  "All right!" he said and sighed deeply, his eyes full of trouble. "Come on! Where is this place we're going?"

  She explained volubly, but his own mind was leaping ahead, trying to plan.

  "If I'd only brought a couple of books along," he said meditatively, "I could snatch a bit of study while you're resting or something."

  "Well, I like that!" said Florimel plaintively. "If you're going to divide up even this little time we have together, I might as well go back to the pie shop and begin to serve again and pretend we didn't get married at all."

  In the end he had to soothe her and do as she wanted him to--there seemed to be no alternative--and of course, one only got married once, as she said. She must have what she wanted.

  So they went to a sordid, forlorn hotel that was really nothing more than a cheap roadhouse on the back country road, and Florimel showered endearments upon him and smiles on the way, till she brought him back to think of her again and how good it was going to be to make her happy.

  But after they had dined, he stood by the window gazing out at a bleak countryside then turned with disgust from the noisy room with its blatant radio and its cheap assembly of unpleasant, uncongenial people.

  "This is a lousy place!" he said. "I wish we hadn't come here. This is no place for a honeymoon!"

  "Oh, but you mustn't say that!" protested the girl. "This is our honeymoon. Forget the things you don't like, and let's have the time of our lives! Let's go in the other room and dance!"

  Then she exerted herself to make him think of nothing but herself, and for a little while succeeded. But the place and the time that was not his to spend this way kept intruding into his thoughts. Then Florimel would fling her lithe young body against his, slide her warm little hand possessively into his hand, lay her soft red mouth against his lips in a brief moment of privacy, and he would forget everything except this wonderful glamour girl who loved him and who was worthy of a far better honeymoon than the one he was trying to let her have these two days.

  That was the way it all happened, so that afterward that honeymoon became a dream memory, full of strange, sweet incidents, with a background of worry, like lovely poison that came to him with sinister menace as they made their way back to the college town very late Sunday night, at an hour that most people would have called Monday morning.

  Back in his college room he flung himself down on his bed unwilling to waken his roommate who was sleeping, and then what he had done rushed upon him like a fierce tribunal and put him through the ordeal of a regular trial, wherein he found himself deeply guilty.

  It was that day, later on, being unable to get away from the sense of guilt, now that Florimel was not about to dull his mind with her glamour, that he wrote his mother and told the truth.

  Always, as a little boy, when he had done wrong he was uneasy until he had told his mother. His brother Paul used to say about him that Rex always felt if he could just tell his mother, he didn't have to be sorry for what he had done anymore. Perhaps that feeling lingered with him. For at least he seemed beset behind and before with the thought of his family and what they would say when they found out what he had done. He could not settle down to think or study until his mother knew. After the letter was written and mailed, he plunged into his college work with all his might to make up for lost time and seemed to cast the whole thing from him.

  He had a feeling that now that his mother knew--that is, when she got his letter--she would somehow help him to make all things right. He would take Florimel home for Christmas, and she would become
one of them all, then his way would go on happily.

  Fortunately for his own peace of mind, he had very little opportunity to see his new wife all the rest of that week, that is, to see her alone. The basketball games and his examinations filled up all the hours. And when he did hurry down to the pie shop for a few minutes, frequently Florimel was so busy she had only time to cast a quick smile in his direction.

  But when the examinations were all out of the way and he got a moment alone with Florimel, he found her strangely reluctant to go to his home with him. She put it on the ground of shyness. She wanted to be perfectly sure what his mother thought of their hasty marriage before she went there. And so from day to day, and then from hour to hour, he was not just sure how his affairs were going to come out, for Florimel did not give in easily. If they could possibly have got together money enough for a "real holiday," as she called it, she would have insisted that they go to the shore or some winter resort, for she was eager to see life, and she had understood that she had married a young man who was fairly well off and would be more so someday. Not that Rex had told her much except that until he reached full legal age he had only an allowance, which was mostly all spent just now, and he didn't expect more till after the holidays. But now she began to urge him to borrow money enough for them to have a good time. He wouldn't, of course. He had been well drilled on things like borrowing money before ever his mother sent him away to college, but Florimel couldn't understand why he wouldn't. Now that he had told his mother they were married, she ought to make everything right for them, and Florimel fought hard against going there to spend Christmas. So they argued and argued, and Rex compromised, first on one small thing and then another, that took almost the last cent Rex had.

  And still he thought he was very much in love with his bride.

  Chapter 6