At the Age of Eve Part 33

"And Blake is going to work up the campaign _for me_--on the condition--"

My blood was pounding like fire through my veins, but I felt absolutely unable to move. I knew what he was going to say and my heart was pleading for mercy, but my lips were mute. They could not even move enough to say, "I know it all. Don't say the hideous words."

Richard had grown painfully embarra.s.sed, and he stammered awkwardly:

"--on the condition that I become his son-in-law."

Just what happened after this I do not know. I might sit here all night trying to recall his explanations and protestations, but I shall get through with it all as speedily as possible, for all I really remember about that terrible day is that I felt dreadfully ill--and _benumbed_. I listened in a sort of trance to his recital of how Berenice Blake had labored under an hallucination for some time that he cared for her; and she had learned to return the fancied affection; how very ill she was, so ill that when she came home for Thanksgiving it was found that she would have to go right back to Denver--

"And you went as far as St. Louis with them--and brought me a string of pearls," I said in a dazed fashion.

"Yes, I always think of you first--no matter where I am," he answered, looking at me fondly. "And our love-affair will not even be suspended for very long," he went on. "She can't possibly live six months; and her father wants, above everything on earth, that she shall be happy for the little while that she has to live."

"By marrying you."

"By being engaged to me. I would _not_ marry her--there is no necessity for that."

"And you are asking me to release you?"

"I am _not_," he said very firmly. "I am asking you to give me--a leave of absence."

Some unknown power seemed to put the words into my mouth, for I was not conscious of any effort toward thinking.

"But I release you, Richard. I could not be--mixed up in that kind of thing."

He sprang from his chair and caught me violently in his arms.

"That's just what you're not going to do. You are _mine_. You are going to stick to me."

"I said that I would stick to you if you were a horse-thief," I said slowly. "--But not--_this_."

"Oh, Ann, you are breaking my heart," he cried, as he caught me close to him and buried his head on my shoulder. "You can't mean to throw me over."

"You are kind to put it that way, Richard," I said.

"You are a sensible girl," he exclaimed suddenly as he raised his head and looked at me again. "You must listen to reason and do exactly as I tell you in this matter. Then all will be well. The affair will be nothing more than a make-believe between us all, for Major Blake knows that I do not love the poor, homely, half-dead creature; the betrothal will have no more feeling in it than a stage kiss. The only deception you will have to practise will be to announce your own engagement to some one else this week, so that--"

"This week? My own engagement? Richard, what do you mean?"

"I mean just this, my poor little girl," he began, his deep gray eyes full of tears, and his hands, as they held mine, trembling piteously, "--that if the story gets noised abroad that I--I hate even to suggest such a thing, Ann, it is so far from truth, darling--but if the story gets noised abroad that I jilted you it will harm my prospects, as well as being a humiliation to you."

"Oh, I see."

"So I thought you might announce your engagement to some one else--of course, just for a pose, but--"

"But there isn't any one else."

His eyes glanced into mine for a moment, then sought the floor.

"I've thought of all that," he said easily. "But you know that Alfred Morgan would--would--"

"Would let me use his name?"

"Oh, Ann, don't look so queer and unnatural, dear; you frighten me!

You're not going to faint, nor--anything, are you?" he began, looking around helplessly.

"I'm not going to faint," I a.s.sured him with a little smile that was forced up from somewhere in the depths of my misery. "But I'm not going to use Alfred's--nor any other man's name in the way you suggest."

"It is only to save yourself humiliation, dear," he said, looking annoyed and relieved at the same time.

"Oh, I'll take the humiliation for my part," I said but with no evidence of anger nor reproach. I was still stunned and benumbed. "I can stand the humiliation--but I hate a liar."

So it ended this way--that beautiful dream of mine; and I should not tell the truth if I pretended that I did not wish many times in the bitter weeks which followed to close my eyes to the cruel reality and dream again, even knowing all the while that it was a dream.

No, there was no sense of thankful relief that I had found my knight of the lion heart to be a poor-spirited, craven, selfish thing. Not then! At the time of the revelation and for many days following I gave myself up to a bitter, longing sorrow for the man whom I had created out of my own fancy and had named King Richard. I had made the image as entirely as ever Pygmalion made Galatea, and I had worshipped it. I had loved it so that if its coming to life could have been brought about through my giving up my own I should gladly have let it live.

But it would not come to life, for it was nothing--it was a dream-creature. Even as such, its image continued with me, and I sorrowed for it with such an aching, lonely hopelessness that more times than once during the spring months of that year I felt that it was not within my nature to keep up the struggle any longer. I must give it up and send for Richard to come back.

The pale blue of the flowers which came up and blossomed in thousands along the hillsides of the "garden" back of the village, and the deep blue of the April skies were both turned to gray this spring--the cold, piercing gray of his eyes. They had not been cold for me!

And then a little later there was the "humiliation" he had mentioned.

Possibly he did what he could to make this as light as it might be made, for his engagement to Major Blake's daughter was not publicly announced until several weeks after I felt sure the understanding had been reached. But he could not ask her to keep the betrothal a secret, as he had asked me, for his capital must be quickly and surely made from its brief existence.

Taking a new lease on life from this sudden and mighty happiness of hers, the poor, dying creature came home from Colorado and set about a feverish enjoyment of the brief span of time which was left her.

There were crowded arrangements made for the wedding, which was announced for June--after the primaries were well over--and she had the satisfaction of having her full-length picture appear in all the prominent newspapers of the state, all bearing the legend that she was Mr. Richard Chalmers' fiancee. The sight of these pictures, homely as they were, was no consolation to me, for I had never been jealous of her. And now I felt an infinite pity.

I used often to think with a laugh of scorn of the man I had imagined Richard Chalmers to be, making love to the poor, ugly, emaciated thing, in hopes of gaining her father's political favor! For of course he had made love to her all along, just as he had to me, in the same beautiful language, and with the same beautiful smile--but he had not kissed her. I could fancy him telling her of his great admiration and his mighty respect, and how unworthy he was to touch the hem of her garment--when all the while he was thinking how ugly she was and what a risk there might be of his catching tuberculosis!

Poor girl! She was happy, though, for her little while, tagging around the country with her father and Richard, and watching him adoringly as he made his pretty speeches to the enthusiastic crowds of const.i.tuents. But she played the game too quick and fast, and with such a studied disregard for consequences that it was no wonder the end came so soon. She spent the most uncertain, changeable weeks of the time which is ever an ominous one for consumptives in driving through long stretches of damp country roads, then sitting for hours in stuffy, ill-ventilated little a.s.sembly rooms, where the foul air did its deadly work for her. She contracted pneumonia and died; and Mr. Chalmers canceled all speaking dates for one week!

But she died still thinking her Richard was a lion-hearted king, so who can say that Fate was not kind to her?

That there was an aftermath to my own affair with Richard was almost inevitable, for only in books do such bubbles burst and vanish entirely, leaving nothing in their wake. But this is the true record of what happened that spring and summer, and undignified and inartistic enough these happenings ofttimes were. If Fate had wished to bring the matter to a beautiful and aesthetic close she would never let Richard and me meet again in this world, for oh, those after-meetings are bitter dregs of romance! But we met again--on the night of his defeat, a strange chance meeting it was, for he was standing at the door of his headquarters hotel, which is just across the street from the _Times_ building, trying to make way for his mother and Evelyn, when I pa.s.sed with the Claybornes. Evelyn saw me and called out a surprised greeting, so I was forced to stop for a moment, while Rufe and Cousin Eunice, never missing me, continued threading their way slowly across the street.

Richard stood very pale and weary looking, with his hat in his hand, while I spoke to Mrs. Chalmers and Evelyn; then seeing that I had been left alone he gravely suggested that I could never make my way through the crowd by myself, so he sent his mother and sister up-stairs and const.i.tuted himself my temporary knight errant. His hand, which tightly clutched my arm, as we struggled on, was icy cold; and the lines around his eyes made him look decidedly middle-aged. Clearly he had already realized his defeat, although the returns were only beginning to be flashed before the eyes of the cheering throng.

He walked with me to the elevator of the _Times_ building, and the great mirror in the back of the car held our two images a moment as he lifted his hat and turned to leave me. The reflection held a wholesome lesson as I gazed for an instant upon the features of the handsome, blase, middle-aged man, then glanced at myself in my short-sleeved white gown, with my rounded elbows showing youthfully. Yes, I was undeniably _young_; and I felt, even in the midst of my sorrow for him, a little thrill of satisfaction that it was so.

It was a week or two after his defeat that Richard began a renewal of his lover-like att.i.tude toward me, calling me on the telephone and asking permission to come, and again bombarding the express office with boxes of candy and flowers. When I gave abnormally polite refusals to these requests he would usually acquiesce with his half amused smile, which I could see just as plainly as if only a few feet lay between us, instead of many miles.

"You are a stubborn little vixen," he would say sometimes. "How long do you expect to keep this up?"

And if he had studied the matter over carefully and tried to hit on a means of curing me of my fancy for him he could never have found anything more effectual than this. Then one day in the early autumn when all the world was dreary and the state was so evidently going Republican that no doubt he had cause for his odd temper, Richard called me again and asked that a meeting might be arranged, either at home or in the city. I began giving my usual reasons for not seeing him, when he cut me short with quick impatience.

"Oh, that's all right, if you don't want to see me," he said harshly, his rich drawl entirely obliterated in the sudden anger which tinted his speech. "And I'll promise never to give you the chance again of turning me down. But, my dear Ann, you must remember there was a time when I didn't have to _beg_ you for every little favor I got."

"There was a time!" Ungenerous, despicable as this was, coming from Richard, I took it with a sort of calmness born of the knowledge that it was only what I deserved. For I don't believe that a woman ever acts a fool over a man but that she lives to have the unwholesome fact cast up to her while she is drinking the dregs of her folly. "There was a time," the man is always ready to remind her, ofttimes hoping to use this memory as a lever to remove the aftergrowth of indifference or positive hatred.

In this case the words caused me to feel something very nearly akin to hatred for Richard, and I quickly ran away up-stairs, where I threw myself across my bed and gave way to the storm of tears which had been brought on by the angry selfishness of his act. But tears, while they are bitter and scalding, are also _cleansing_, and they acted that day as a purifying flood which washed my soul clean from all thoughts of Richard Chalmers. When, late in the afternoon of that rainy day, I arose from my bed I was weak from weeping, and unutterably saddened over this final, ugly blow which Reality had dealt the fragments of my house which was built upon the sands; but, weak and sad and world-wise, as I felt myself to be, there was a great joy singing in my heart, for I knew, for the first time, I _knew_ that I was free.