Ladies Must Live Part 25

"I know, too," she answered, unperturbed by his rudeness, "and some day if you're good I'll tell you."

Her calm a.s.sumption that everything was well seemed to him unbearable. "I don't know that I feel very much inclined to chat," he said, turning toward the door. "I'll see you sometime to-morrow."

She said nothing to oppose him, and he left the room. Downstairs the same footman was waiting to let him out. To him, at least, Riatt seemed a triumphant lover, only as Linburne had long since heavily subsidized him, even his admiration was tinctured with regret.

As for Max, himself, he left the house even more restless and dissatisfied than he had entered it.

To be honest, he had, he knew, sometimes imagined a moment when he would take Christine in his arms and say: "Marry me anyhow." Such an action he knew would be reckless, but he had supposed it would be pleasant. But now there was nothing but bitterness and jealousy in his mood. What did he know or care for such people? he said to himself. What did he know of their standards and their histories? How much of Christine's story about Linburne was to be believed? What more natural than that they had always loved each other? Some one knew the truth--every one, very likely, except himself. But whom could he ask? He could have believed Nancy on one side as little as Laura on the other.

And as he thought this, he saw coming down the street, Hickson--a witness prejudiced, perhaps, but strictly honest.

For the first time in their short acquaintance, Hickson's face brightened at the sight of Riatt, and he called out with evident sincerity: "I am glad to see you."

"I came on rather unexpectedly."

"I'm glad you did. Quite right." Hickson stopped at this, and looked at his companion with such wistful uncertainty, that it seemed perfectly natural for Riatt, answering that look, to say:

"You may speak frankly to me, you know."

Ned took a long breath. "I believe that I may," he said. "I hope so, anyhow. I haven't had any one I could be frank with. Between ourselves, Fenimer is no good at all."

"What, my future father-in-law?"

"Is that what he is?" Hickson asked with, for him, unusual directness.

Riatt's affirmative was not very decided, and Ned went on:

"I can't even talk to Nancy about it. She's keen, but she does not understand Christine. She attributes the most shocking motives to her, and when I object, she says every one is like that, only I haven't sense enough to see it. Well, I never pretended to have as much sense as Nancy, but I see some things that she doesn't. I see, for instance, that there's something n.o.ble in Christine, in spite of--I beg your pardon for talking to you like this, but you must remember that I have known her a good deal longer than you have, and that in a different way perhaps I care for her almost as much as you do."

"I told you to speak frankly," answered Riatt. "What is it that Mrs.

Almar says of Christine?"

At first Hickson refused to answer, but the suffering and anxiety he had been undergoing pushed him toward self-expression, and Riatt did not have to be very skilful to extract the whole story. Nancy had a.s.serted that Christine had never intended for a minute to marry Riatt--that she had just used him to excite Linburne's jealousy to such a point that he would arrange matters so that he could marry her himself. For once Riatt found himself in accord with Nancy.

"Do more people than your sister think that?"

Hickson was not without his reserves. "Oh, I dare say, but I don't care about that sort of gossip. It's absurd to say she and Linburne are engaged. How can a girl be engaged to a married man?"

"We must move with the times, my dear Hickson," said Riatt bitterly.

"Linburne's no good," Ned went on, "not where women are concerned. He wouldn't treat her well if he did marry her. Why, Riatt," he added solemnly, "I'd far rather see her married to you than to him."

If Max felt disposed to smile at this innocent endors.e.m.e.nt, he suppressed the inclination, and merely answered:

"You may have your wish."

"I hope so," said Ned. "But you mustn't go off to kingdom-come, and leave Linburne a clear field. He's a man who knows how to talk to women, and what with the infatuation she has always had for him--"

"You think she has always cared for him?" asked Max. He tried to smooth his tone down to one of calm interest, but it alarmed Hickson.

"I don't know," he returned hastily. "I used to think so, but I may be wrong. I thought the same thing about you at the Usshers'. She kept saying she wasn't a bit in love with you, but it seemed to me she was different with you from what she had ever been with any one else. I suppose I oughtn't to have said that either. Upon my word, Riatt, it is awfully good of you to let me talk like this! I can a.s.sure you it is a great relief to me."

His companion could hardly have echoed this sentiment. As he walked back alone to his hotel, he found that Hickson's words had put the last touches to his mental discomfort.

At first his own conduct had seemed inexplicable to him. Everything had been going well, he had been just about to be free from the whole entanglement, when an impulse of primitive jealousy and fierce masculine egotism had suddenly brought him to New York and bound him hand and foot.

It had not been an agreeable prospect--to live among people whose standards he did not understand, with a woman whom he did not love. But, since his conversation with Hickson, his eyes were opened, and he saw the situation in far more tragic colors.

He _did_ love her. He did not believe in her or trust her; he had no illusions as to her feeling for him, but his for her was clear--he loved her, loved her with that strange mingling of pa.s.sion and hatred so often found and so rarely admitted.

He could imagine a man's learning, even under the most suspicious circ.u.mstances, to conquer jealousy of a woman who loved him. Or he could imagine having confidence in a woman who did not pretend love. But to be married to a woman whom you love, without a shred of belief either in her principles or her affection, seemed to Riatt about as terrible a prospect as could be offered to a human being.

There was just one chance for him--that Christine might be willing to release him. If she really loved Linburne, if there had been some sort of understanding between them in the past, if his coming had only precipitated a lovers' quarrel, then certainly Christine had too much intelligence to let such a chance slip through her fingers just on the eve of Linburne's divorce. Nor was she, he thought bitterly, too proud to stoop to ask a man to reconsider; nor did it seem likely, however deeply Linburne's vanity had been wounded, that he would refuse to listen.

With this in mind, as soon as he reached his hotel, he sat down and wrote her a letter:

"My dear Christine:

"What was it, according to your idea, that happened this afternoon? I believed that for the first time I asked you to marry me, and that you, for the first time definitely accepted me. But as I think over your manner, I am led to think you supposed it was just a continuation of our old joke.

"Did you accept me, Christine? And if so, why? Why commit yourself to a marriage without affection, at the psychological moment when a man for whom you have always cared is about to be free?

"If you still need me in the game, I am ready enough to be of use, but I will not be bound to a relation unless you, too, consider it irrevocably binding.

"Yours, M.R."

He told the messenger to wait for an answer, but he thought that Christine would hardly be willing to commit herself on such short notice, or without an interview with Linburne.

But, within a surprisingly short interval, her letter was in his impatient hands.

"Dear Max:

"I will not be so cruel as to leave you one moment longer in the false hope that your little break for freedom may be successful. Face the fact, bravely, my dear. I am going to marry you. We are both irrevocably bound--at least as irrevocably as the marriage tie can bind nowadays. If this afternoon my manner seemed less portentous than you expected, that must have been because I have always counted on just this termination to our little adventure. You must do me the justice to confess that I have always told you so. As for Lee, in spite of Nancy (I suppose it was Nancy to whom you rushed for information from my very doorstep) I have never cared sixpence for him.

"Yours till death us do part,

"CHRISTINE."

Max read the letter which was brought to him while he was at dinner. He put it into his pocket, finished an excellent salad, went to the theater, came back to the hotel and went to bed and to sleep rather congratulating himself on the fact that he had become callous to the whole situation, and that, so far as he was concerned, the crisis was past.

But of course it wasn't. With the rattle of the first milkcart, which in a modern city has taken the place of the half-awakened bird, he woke up, and if he had been in jail he could not have felt a more choking sense of imprisonment. There was no escape for him, no hope.

He got up and looked out at the city far below, all outlined like a great electric sign that said nothing. There must be some way of being free, besides jumping from the twelfth story window. He lit a cigarette, and stood thinking. Men disappeared every day; it could be done. What were the chances, he wondered, of being identified if he shipped as steward, or engineer for that matter, on a South American freighter?

It was full daylight before he found himself in possession of a possible scheme. He remembered the legend of a certain Saint, told him by his nurse in his early days. She had been beautiful, too beautiful for her religious ideals; the number of her suitors was distracting; so to one of them who had extravagantly admired her eyes she sent them on a salver.

Riatt did not intend sending Christine his worldly goods, but recognizing that they were the source of the whole trouble, he decided to get rid of the major part. The problem was simply to lose his money before the date set for the wedding. And that was not so difficult, after all. There were a number of people in the metropolis he thought who would give him every a.s.sistance.

The problem of getting it back again at some future time was more complicated, but even that he thought he could accomplish. He had made one fortune and he supposed he could some day make another.