What then is love, p.1
What Then Is Love, page 1
WHAT THEN
IS LOVE
Emilie Loring
© Emilie Loring 1956
Emilie Loring has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1956 by Little, Brown and Company.
This edition published in 2019 by Lume Books.
Table of Contents
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
I
The Conway scandal broke in April, but it was not until July, three months later, that Patricia Langston was able to leave Europe and sail for home. Three frantic months during which the familiar world she had known disappeared as though it had never been; the safe and enduring things she had taken for granted dissolved into thin air.
Standing on deck as the ship came slowly into the harbor at New York, Patricia drew a long breath as she absorbed the magnificent panorama of the sky line. It was midmorning of a jeweled day, a sky of cobalt blue, sparkling air that turned the soaring shafts of the buildings into dazzling, blinding towers of silver.
Head flung back, eyes wide with enchantment, she was completely absorbed in the most exciting sky line in the world, unaware of the passengers milling around her, unconscious as she had been during the voyage of the admiration she aroused.
A soft, salt-scented ocean breeze lifted ruddy bronze hair, increased the brilliancy of blue-gray eyes with a sweep of gold-tipped lashes. She stood with her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her gray silk coat, braced against the tilt of the ship, with something touchingly gallant in the proud carriage of her head, the lift of her chin, the brave challenge in the set of her shoulders. Slim, lovely, and curiously tragic.
Her thoughts went round and round as they had done all those weeks, wondering why disaster had struck so hard at the Langston family, wondering—as thousands of New Yorkers were still wondering—what the truth was behind the Conway scandal. None of the passengers who paused for a second look at her fresh, glowing beauty could have guessed that she was shaping a high resolve. She was going to uncover the facts about the Conway case and clear her father. What no one had been able to accomplish she intended to do. She, Patricia Langston, who had known nothing but gaiety, protection, the devotion lavished upon an only child, the privileges of the wealthy, was going to tackle the problem that no one had succeeded in solving.
I suppose, she admitted to herself, it is ridiculous. I don’t know where to start. Just the same I’ll do it, somehow, some way. I’m not the same girl who went abroad three months ago.
Three months. They seemed longer in retrospect than the twenty-three years of her life up to then. Happy years. An unruffled time in a cheerful and affectionate home where a devoted father had tried not only to discharge his own obligations to her but to take as well the place of the mother who had died while Patricia was a child. Winters at boarding school, then college, and still later in New York, where she acted as hostess for her father, Daniel Langston, who was honored as a brilliant judge with an impeccable record, who was generally assumed to be destined for the State Supreme Court. Winter seasons when she not only presided over dinner parties for her father’s distinguished guests, but took part in an endless round of gaiety with her own generation, sprinkled with plays, operas, visits to museums, and the exhilaration of shopping in the most luxurious city on earth.
The summers had been different, simpler, a time for long drowsy hours lying on the sand, of ocean and sky and pine woods, of swimming and boating and working in the garden. A sunlit time on the Maine coast where Madge Parsons and Bill Blair, the youngsters who lived in the houses on either side of the Langston estate, filled the empty places of the brother and sister she had never had.
Now everything was changed. Patricia’s eyes stung with tears as she thought of her father, tall, distinguished, white-haired, whose life had been devoted to his three loves: his daughter, his profession, and his hobby of delving into Americana, particularly the history of the little town on the Maine coast that Langstons had helped to found and where they had had a home for generations.
Now it was all gone. Gone in three months. If I had only been with him, she thought for the hundredth time, so he wouldn’t have had to endure it alone. But she had not been with him; she had gone to Switzerland to visit her mother’s only sister, who was desperately ill. Even when the Conway scandal broke she had been unable to leave her aunt.
Patricia’s small fists dug deeper into the pockets of her coat. I’ll make the Langston name as clean and proud and burnished as it has been all these generations, she vowed. She ignored the jeering voice in her mind that scoffed, “You, a girl! Accomplish what lawyers failed to do?” But I have an advantage, she consoled herself. I believe in him with all my heart. I know he is innocent. No one else could be sure of that. They gave up too soon.
She was seized and shaken by a gust of panic. All this time she had been daydreaming of the moment when she would clear her father, a dramatic moment in which she would be flushed with pride at what she had accomplished. Now she realized that the time for daydreaming was over, the time for action had come, and she did not have the faintest conception of how to start. The pernicious factor about daydreaming, as she was well aware, is that one skips over all the obstacles to one’s goal, which is a great deal pleasanter than tackling the obstacles.
Once more she went over the thrice-familiar story in her mind. Three months earlier her father had been on the bench during the trial of Nelson Conway, a successful young architect who had been accused of bribery in landing contracts for the building of a large housing project. Judge Langston had heard the evidence brought by both sides and then had dismissed the case.
On the following day an incredible, a startling fact emerged. Two days before handing down his decision in the Conway case Judge Langston had made a ten-thousand-dollar deposit in cash in his bank account. There was a widespread opinion that Conway had not only got his contracts by bribery but had also bribed the Judge to dismiss the case.
The most painful part of the whole hideous disclosure was the fact that the Judge stuck to his original statement that he had no knowledge of the deposit. He was unable to account for the money, for his possession of so large a sum in small bills. Unfortunately, the teller in the New York bank who had received the deposit and credited it to the Judge’s account, the only person who knew whether or not it had been made by the Judge in person, had died suddenly.
The story of the mysterious deposit had been printed by a newspaper which refused to disclose the source of its information.
Because of Judge Langston’s high standing at the bar and the reputation he had built not only as a fair judge but as a compassionate man who frequently attempted in private to rectify what seemed to him to be legal injustices, there was deep reluctance to bring any charges against him. In any case, he had promptly and voluntarily retired. And Nelson Conway, storm center of the affair, had disappeared.
Nothing, Patricia thought, her lips quivering, remained of the past she had known. Nothing but Madge Parsons and Bill Blair. They had been known as the Three Musketeers. Three motherless children who formed an offensive and defensive alliance, all for one and one for all. But even that relationship, which they had believed was as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, would be different now. While Patricia was abroad Madge had become engaged to be married. There would be new ties and new affections for her.
And Bill? The handsome boy next door whom she had adored all her life? Perhaps Bill had changed, too. It had been over a year since she had seen him or heard from him. She still remembered that last memorable visit. He had come, white-faced and shaking, to tell her that his uncle, Samuel Sheridan, was sending him on an expedition into a South American jungle. It would be months before he could return or even get in touch with her.
She could see him now as she had seen him then, tall, broad-shouldered, with lithe grace; heavy blond hair, dark blue eyes thickly lashed, a sunlit smile. The very thought of him made her smile.
But that night his own smile had been missing. He was no longer a childhood friend, he was a new Bill, ardent and tender and pleading.
“I love you, Pat. I can’t live without you. You know Uncle Sam. Once he has made up his mind nothing can swerve him. He has decided that I don’t take life seriously enough, that I haven’t prepared for a career, that I’m a playboy. So he has arranged for me to go on this expedition. We’ll be gone for months, perhaps a year, out of touch with the world.”
“But it doesn’t make sense,” Patricia had exclaimed. “Unless you plan for a scientific career, this won’t prepare you for anything.”
Bill had smiled grimly. “Uncle Sam doesn’t expect it to be a preparation for anything. He wants me to be disciplined, to be punished for playing around. He never played around; why should I? I have to go and I hate it. But I can bear anything if I have you to look forward to. If you’ll wait for me. Oh, Pat, my beautiful, I need you so!”
He had watched her face with heartbreaking anxiety. “There’s no one else in the world I completely trust. If you were to break faith with me I wouldn’ t believe in anything ever again.”
She had answered his terrible, half-understood need as best she could. “I’ll never break faith with you, Bill.”
By now Bill would be home again. By nightfall she would be seeing him. They would go back to their old affectionate companionship and dissolve that secret engagement. During the months abroad she had realized that her feeling for Bill was still the devotion she might have given a brother, not the love she wanted to feel for a husband. Bill, too, would have learned that. Only his unhappiness at being sent away, his bitter sense of his rejection by his uncle had made him believe that he loved her.
At least, she told herself with all the assurance she could muster, it should be that way. Or had it really been love Bill had felt for her? She did not want to hurt him. If only his uncle had been a kinder man, less stern in dealing with him, more indulgent and understanding. But Samuel Sheridan was a harsh, embittered eccentric. Aside from his two friends, Judge Langston and Hamilton Parsons, he had trusted no one.
Except herself, Patricia remembered. To her he had shown affection; he had given her the approval he always withheld from the nephew who longed for it so wistfully. When Bill had first gone on the South American expedition she had tried for his sake to soften the old man’s attitude toward the boy by going to see him in his strange house, which was sealed up like a fortress. She had even made him a gift that was to be a secret between themselves and the crusty old banker had enjoyed it like a schoolboy.
“I wish you had been my sister’s child, Patricia,” he had told her gruffly. “There’s no one else I’m really fond of.”
“You have Bill,” she had reminded him. “At least, if you hadn’t sent him away, you’d have Bill. I wonder,” she had added impulsively, “if you have ever known how much your approval meant to him? From the time when he first came home, such a lonely little boy.”
“I gave him a home, an education, a start in life.” The banker was on the defensive.
“But not love,” she had said timidly.
“No one can control that. And I had to be careful. He inherited bad blood. His father was a handsome scoundrel and his mother, if she was my own sister, was a sentimental fool.”
There had been a pause while the old man looked at her averted face. “You are a fine girl, Patricia, as well as a lovely and intelligent one. Don’t judge me too harshly without knowing all the circumstances. I want to do what is right. I thought it would be best for Bill to have some tough discipline. But perhaps you are right. Perhaps I have been too hard. There may be some way I can make things easier for him.”
But it was too late now. Samuel Sheridan had died a week ago, old, paralyzed, embittered. Too late to make his peace with Bill Blair. Anyhow, Patricia thought, Bill is free now. He’ll be a wealthy, independent man with the Sheridan fortune. He’ll tear down the preposterous wall that makes a prison of the Sheridan house. He’ll have so much that he won’t—he won’t need me.
She drew a long, uneven breath and pushed away the thoughts—the fears—that had obsessed her so long. The aunt whom she had been visiting in Switzerland had given her some of her own philosophy: Be courageous in facing the little things and the big ones will take care of themselves. What you do in a major crisis, however impulsive it may seem, is really the sum total of what you are.
She lifted her head in a little salute to the proud lady with the lamp who stood in the harbor, with raised arm, and leaned over to watch busy little tugs nuzzling against the side of the great ship. Her heart sank as she heard the drawl of a voice which had grown much too familiar during the days at sea.
“Are you glad to be home, Miss Langston?”
“Very glad,” she said briefly. Sometimes she wondered why she shrank from talking to this man. He had been introduced as Neil Cranston, a tall man in his early thirties, with unruly dark hair, a thin intellectual face, eyes whose expression was concealed by thick lenses, an air of physical languor, and a slow, drawling voice.
In her heart she knew why she disliked him, resented him. Knew that this same situation would occur over and over until her father was cleared. From now on, she supposed, people would raise their eyebrows when they heard the Langston name, turn for a curious look at the daughter of the notorious judge, whisper to one another, “Her father is the man who took the bribe in the Conway case, you know.” They would stare at her as people stare at a movie actor shopping, at a window cleaner at work, at the digging of an excavation. They would look at her inquisitively, as though seeking in her face for some stamp of dishonor.
Neil Cranston, lounging lazily but tenaciously at her side, seemed to be unaware of her coolness. “Is anyone meeting you?”
“No,” Patricia said. “I wanted to surprise my father.”
But that wasn’t true. The worst element of the whole situation was that her father had not wanted her to return home. In answer to all her letters expressing her unalterable faith in him, her fury at the insinuations that had been made, the shadow that had been cast on his name, he had said little. But when she had written that she would return as soon as she could leave her aunt he had cabled her not to come and followed up the cable with airmail messages, urging her to stay in Switzerland or to travel for a while, perhaps for six months. See Europe while she could.
For some reason the Judge did not want her to return. That was obvious. It underlay all the affection, the tender concern for her distress, the phrases that betrayed how much he missed her. He did not want her to return. So in the end she had arranged for passage on the first boat without telling him. Something warned her that she was needed, that she must go back.
“So you are going to surprise your father!” Neil Cranston exclaimed. For the first time in their shipboard acquaintance he did not drawl. His tone was almost sharp. “Surprises are apt to be two-edged swords, aren’t they? That is, people often prefer to be informed in advance about arrivals. I always think it is dangerous to take people by surprise.”
“Dangerous!” Patricia laughed and it was a pleasant sound. The mirth in her face gave it the one quality it had lacked while it wore its look of strain. Now it was warm and vivid.
Behind the thick glasses Cranston’s eyes seemed blank. “It is a dangerous world, Miss Langston,” he said with unexpected grimness, raised his hand in farewell and strolled away.
And that’s that, Patricia thought to herself in satisfaction, watching him stroll away from her, out of her life. Now I’ve seen the last of you.
Later she wondered whether she hadn’t let Neil Cranston become an obsession with her. After believing that she had seen the last of him she found him behind her while she got into a taxi. It seemed almost as though he lingered at her side until she had given the airport as her destination.
During the drive through the city she forgot him. New York is always a stupendous city, but it is not at its best in July. Tropical heat and muggy air that is stifling and hard to breathe assault the helpless individual. Dingy streets—for the streets near the docks are always dingy—were cluttered with scraps of paper, with choking dust swirled by a hot wind. People moved quickly, for even in July, New Yorkers walk with nervous haste, but with the tired, drawn look brought about by the heat wave.
At La Guardia field it was cooler. Walking toward the plane Patricia saw someone who looked very much like Neil Cranston, but he disappeared in the crowd before she could make sure. There wasn’t, after all, any reason why the man should not be taking a plane. It had nothing to do with her.
But on the plane she put him out of her mind in relief. The voyage had become part of the past and now she was projecting herself eagerly forward. She thought of the little town with the ocean stretching beyond it, dotted at this season with sailboats, fishing smacks, yachts. She thought particularly of the neck of land that contained three houses. On the left was the barn-red, long, modern, one-story house which Hamilton Parsons had built when the family home was destroyed by fire. In the center was Judge Langston’s big white house with its two-story-high pillars and the small balcony on the second-floor level which jutted out over the doorway. The velvety lawns of the two houses swept down to the sandy beach.
