Saturday's Child Part 48

"Susan!"

"Feeling better?" Susan smiled encouragingly, maternally, down upon him.

But his gaze had wandered again. He drained the gla.s.s, and immediately seemed quieter.

"He'll sleep now," said Miss Baker, when they were back in the adjoining room. "Doesn't it seem a shame?"

"Couldn't he be cured, Miss Baker?"

"Well," the nurse pursed her lips, shook her head thoughtfully. "No, I don't believe he could now. Doctor thinks the south of France will do wonders, and he says that if Mr. Saunders stayed on a strict diet for, say a year, and then took some German cure--but I don't know! n.o.body could make him do it anyway. Why, we can't keep him on a diet for twenty-four hours! Of course he can't keep this up. A few more attacks like this will finish him. He's going to have a nurse in the morning, and Doctor says that in about a month he ought to get away. It's my opinion he'll end in a mad-house," Miss Baker ended, with quiet satisfaction.

"Oh, don't!" Susan cried in horror.

"Well, a lot of them do, my dear! He'll never get entirely well, that's positive. And now the problem is," the nurse, who was knitting a delicate rainbow afghan for a baby, smiled placidly over her faint pinks and blues, "now the question is, who's going abroad with him? He can't go alone. Ella declines the honor," Miss Baker's lips curled; she detested Ella "Emily--you know what Emily is! And the poor mother, who would really make the effort, he says gets on his nerves. Anyway, she's not fit. If he had a man friend---! But the only one he'd go with, Mr.

Russell, is married."

"A nurse?" suggested Susan.

"Oh, my dear!" Miss Baker gave her a significant look. "There are two cla.s.ses of nurses," she said, "one sort wouldn't dare take a man who has the delirium tremens anywhere, much less to a strange country, and the other---! They tried that once, before my day it was, but I guess that was enough for them. Of course the best thing that he could do,"

pursued the nurse lightly, "is get married."

"Well," Susan felt the topic a rather delicate one. "Ought he marry?"

she ventured.

"Don't think I'd marry him!" Miss Baker a.s.sured her hastily, "but he's no worse than the Gregory boy, married last week. He's really no worse than lots of others!"

"Well, it's a lovely, lovely world!" brooded Susan bitterly. "I wish to G.o.d," she added pa.s.sionately, "that there was some way of telling right from wrong! If you want to have a good time and have money enough, you can steal and lie and marry people like Kenneth Saunders; there's no law that you can't break--pride, covetousness, l.u.s.t, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth! That IS society! And yet, if you want to be decent, you can slave away a thousand years, mending and patching and teaching and keeping books, and nothing beautiful or easy ever comes your way!"

"I don't agree with you at all," said Miss Baker, in disapproval. "I hope I'm not bad," she went on brightly, "but I have a lovely time!

Everyone here is lovely to me, and once a month I go home to my sister.

We're the greatest chums ever, and her baby, Marguerite, is named for me, and she's a perfect darling! And Beek--that's her husband--is the most comical thing I ever saw; he'll go up and get Mrs. Tully--my sister rents one of her rooms,--and we have a little supper, and more cutting-UP! Or else Beek'll sit with the baby, and we girls go to the theater!"

"Yes, that's lovely," Susan said, but Miss Baker accepted the words and not the tone, and went on to innocent narratives of Lily, Beek and the little Marguerite.

"And now, I wonder what a really good, conscientious woman would do,"

thought Susan in the still watches of the night. Go home to Auntie, of course. He might follow her there, but, even if he did, she would have made the first right step, and could then plan the second. Susan imagined Bocqueraz in Auntie's sitting-room and winced in the dark.

Perhaps the most definite stand she took in all these bewildering days was when she decided, with a little impatient resentment, that she was quite equal to meeting the situation with dignity here.

But there must be no hesitation, no compromise. Susan fell asleep resolving upon heroic extremes.

Just before dinner, on the evening following, she was at the grand piano in the big drawing-room, her fingers lazily following the score of "Babes in Toyland," which Ella had left open upon the rack. Susan felt tired and subdued, wearily determined to do her duty, wearily sure that life, for the years to come, would be as gray and sad as to-day seemed. She had been crying earlier in the day and felt the better for the storm. Susan had determined upon one more talk with Bocqueraz,--the last.

And presently he was leaning on the piano, facing her in the dim light.

Susan's hands began to tremble, to grow cold. Her heart beat high with nervousness; some primitive terror a.s.sailed her even here, in the familiar room, within the hearing of a dozen maids.

"What's the matter?" he asked, as she did not smile.

Susan still watched him seriously. She did not answer.

"My fault?" he asked.

"No-o." Susan's lip trembled. "Or perhaps it is, in a way," she said slowly and softly, still striking almost inaudible chords. "I can't--I can't seem to see things straight, whichever way I look!" she confessed as simply as a troubled child.

"Will you come across the hall into the little library with me and talk about it for two minutes?" he asked.

"No." Susan shook her head.

"Susan! Why not?"

"Because we must stop it all," the girl said steadily, "ALL, every bit of it, before we--before we are sorry! You are a married man, and I knew it, and it is ALL WRONG--"

"No, it's not all wrong, I won't admit that," he said quickly. "There has been no wrong."

It was a great weight lifted from Susan's heart to think that this was true. Ended here, the friendship was merely an episode.

"If we stop here," she said almost pleadingly.

"If we stop here," he agreed, slowly. "If we end it all here. Well. And of course, Sue, chance might, MIGHT set me free, you know, and then--"

Again the serious look, followed by the sweet and irresistible smile.

Susan suddenly felt the hot tears running down her cheeks.

"Chance won't," she said in agony. And she began to fumble blindly for a handkerchief.

In an instant he was beside her, and as she stood up he put both arms about her, and she dropped her head on his shoulder, and wept silently and bitterly. Every instant of this nearness stabbed her with new joy and new pain; when at last he gently tipped back her tear-drenched face, she was incapable of resisting the great flood of emotion that was sweeping them both off their feet.

"Sue, you do care! My dearest, you DO care?"

Susan, panting, clung to him.

"Oh, yes--yes!" she whispered. And, at a sound from the hall, she crushed his handkerchief back into his hand, and walked to the deep archway of a distant window. When he joined her there, she was still breathing hard, and had her hand pressed against her heart, but she was no longer crying.

"I am mad I think!" smiled Susan, quite mistress of herself.

"Susan," he said eagerly, "I was only waiting for this! If you knew--if you only knew what an agony I've been in yesterday and to-day--! And I'm not going to distress you now with plans, my dearest. But, Sue, if I were a divorced man now, would you let it be a barrier?"

"No," she said, after a moment's thought. "No, I wouldn't let anything that wasn't a legal barrier stand in the way. Even though divorce has always seemed terrible to me. But--but you're not free, Mr. Bocqueraz."

He was standing close behind her, as she stood staring out into the night, and now put his arm about her, and Susan, looking up over her shoulder, raised childlike blue eyes to his.

"How long are you going to call me that?" he asked.

"I don't know--Stephen," she said. And suddenly she wrenched herself free, and turned to face him.

"I can't seem to keep my senses when I'm within ten feet of you!" Susan declared, half-laughing and half-crying.

"But Sue, if my wife agrees to a divorce," he said, catching both her hands.

"Don't touch me, please," she said, loosening them.