Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 155

"Yes."

"But you don't see why I had the right to kill him?"

A shiver pa.s.sed over her. She turned away again, began again to lace the boot--but now her fingers were uncertain.

"I'll explain," pursued he. "You and I were getting along fine. He had had his chance with you and had lost it.

Well, he comes over here--looks us up--puts himself between you and me--proceeds to take you away from me. Not in a square manly way but under the pretense of giving you a career.

He made you restless--dissatisfied. He got you away from me.

Isn't that so?"

She was sitting motionless now.

Palmer went on in the same harsh, jerky way:

"Now, n.o.body in the world--not even you--knew me better than Brent did. He knew what to expect--if I caught on to what was doing. And I guess he knew I would be pretty sure to catch on."

"He never said a word to me that you couldn't have heard,"

said Susan.

"Of course not," retorted Palmer. "That isn't the question.

It don't matter whether he wanted you for himself or for his plays. The point is that he took you away from me--he, my friend--and did it by stealth. You can't deny that."

"He offered me a chance for a career--that was all," said she.

"He never asked for my love--or showed any interest in it. I gave him that."

He laughed--his old-time, gentle, sweet, wicked laugh. He said:

"Well--it'd have been better for him if you hadn't. All it did for him was to cost him his life."

Up she sprang. "Don't say that!" she cried pa.s.sionately--so pa.s.sionately that her whole body shook. "Do you suppose I don't know it? I know that I killed him. But I don't feel that he's dead. If I did, I'd not be able to live. But I can't! I can't! For me he is as much alive as ever."

"Try to think that--if it pleases you," sneered Palmer. "The fact remains that it was _you_ who killed him."

Again she shivered. "Yes," she said, "I killed him."

"And that's why I hate you," Palmer went on, calm and deliberate--except his eyes; they were terrible. "A few minutes ago--when I was exulting that he would probably die--just then I found that opened cable on the mantel. Do you know what it did to me? It made me hate you. When I read it----" Freddie puffed at his cigarette in silence. She dropped weakly to the chair at the dressing table.

"Curse it!" he burst out. "I loved him. Yes, I was crazy about him--and am still. I'm glad I killed him. I'd do it again. I had to do it. He owed me his life. But that doesn't make me forgive _you_."

A long silence. Her fingers wandered among the articles spread upon the dressing table. He said:

"You're getting ready to leave?"

"I'm going to a hotel at once."

"Well, you needn't. I'm leaving. You're done with me. But I'm done with you." He rose, bent upon her his wicked glance, sneering and cruel. "You never want to see me again. No more do I ever want to see you again. I wish to G.o.d I never had seen you. You cost me the only friend I ever had that I cared about. And what's a woman beside a friend--a _man_ friend?

You've made a fool of me, as a woman always does of a man--always, by G.o.d! If she loves him, she destroys him. If she doesn't love him, he destroys himself."

Susan covered her face with her bare arms and sank down at the dressing table. "For pity's sake," she cried brokenly, "spare me--spare me!"

He seized her roughly by the shoulder. "Just flesh!" he said.

"Beautiful flesh--but just female. And look what a fool you've made of me--and the best man in the world dead--over yonder! Spare you? Oh, you'll pull through all right.

You'll pull through everything and anything--and come out stronger and better looking and better off. Spare you! h.e.l.l!

I'd have killed you instead of him if I'd known I was going to hate you after I'd done the other thing. I'd do it yet--you dirty skirt!"

He jerked her unresisting form to its feet, gazed at her like an insane fiend. With a sob he seized her in his arms, crushed her against his breast, sunk his fingers deep into her hair, kissed it, grinding his teeth as he kissed. "I hate you, d.a.m.n you--and I love you!" He flung her back into the chair--out of his life. "You'll never see me again!" And he fled from the room--from the house.

CHAPTER XXV

THE big ship issued from the Mersey into ugly waters--into the weather that at all seasons haunts and curses the coasts of Northern Europe. From Sat.u.r.day until Wednesday Susan and Madame Deliere had true Atlantic seas and skies; and the ship leaped and shivered and crashed along like a brave cavalryman in the rear of a rout--fighting and flying, flying and fighting. Four days of hours whose every waking second lagged to record itself in a distinct pang of physical wretchedness; four days in which all emotions not physical were suspended, in which even the will to live, most tenacious of primal instincts in a sane human being, yielded somewhat to the general la.s.situde and disgust. Yet for Susan Lenox four most fortunate days; for in them she underwent a mental change that enabled her to emerge delivered of the strain that threatened at every moment to cause a snap.

On the fifth day her mind, crutched by her resuming body, took up again its normal routine. She began to dress herself, to eat, to exercise--the mechanical things first, as always--then to think. The grief that had numbed her seemed to have been left behind in England where it had suddenly struck her down--England far away and vague across those immense and infuriated waters, like the gulf of death between two incarnations. No doubt that grief was awaiting her at the other sh.o.r.es; no doubt there she would feel that Brent was gone. But she would be better able to bear the discovery.

The body can be accustomed to the deadliest poisons, so that they become harmless--even useful--even a necessary aid to life. In the same way the mind can grow accustomed to the cruelest calamities, tolerate them, use them to attain a strength and power the hot-housed soul never gets.

When a human being is abruptly plunged into an unnatural unconsciousness by mental or physical catastrophes, the greatest care is taken that the awakening to normal life again be slow, gradual, without shock. Otherwise the return would mean death or insanity or lifelong affliction with radical weakness. It may be that this sea voyage with its four days of agitations that lowered Susan's physical life to a harmony of wretchedness with her mental plight, and the succeeding days of gradual calming and restoration, acted upon her to save her from disaster. There will be those readers of her story who, judging her, perhaps, by themselves--as revealed in their judgments, rather than in their professions--will think it was quite unnecessary to awaken her gradually; they will declare her a hard-hearted person, caring deeply about no one but herself, or one of those curiosities of human nature that are interested only in things, not at all in persons, even in themselves. There may also be those who will see in her a soft and gentle heart for which her intelligence finally taught her to construct a shield--more or less effective--against buffetings which would have destroyed or, worse still, maimed her. These will feel that the sea voyage, the sea change, suspending the normal human life, the life on land, tided her over a crisis that otherwise must have been disastrous.

However this may be--and who dares claim the definite knowledge of the mazes of human character and motive to be positive about the matter?--however it may be, on Thursday afternoon they steamed along a tranquil and glistening sea into the splendor and majesty of New York Harbor. And Susan was again her calm, sweet self, as the violet-gray eyes gazing pensively from the small, strongly-featured face plainly showed. Herself again, with the wound--deepest if not cruelest of her many wounds--covered and with its poison under control. She was ready again to begin to live--ready to fulfill our only certain mission on this earth, for we are not here to succ.u.mb and to die, but to adapt ourselves and live.

And those who laud the succ.u.mbers and the diers--yea, even the blessed martyrs of sundry and divers fleeting issues usually delusions--may be paying ill-deserved tribute to vanity, obstinacy, lack of useful common sense, pa.s.sion for futile and untimely agitation--or sheer cowardice. Truth--and what is truth but right living?--truth needs no martyrs; and the world needs not martyrs, not corpses rotting in unmarked or monumented graves, but intelligent men and women, healthy in body and mind, capable of leading the human race as fast as it is able to go in the direction of the best truth to which it is able at that time to aspire.

As the ship cleared Quarantine Susan stood on the main deck well forward, with Madame Clelie beside her. And up within her, defying all rebuke, surged the hope that cannot die in strong souls living in healthy bodies.

She had a momentary sense of shame, born of the feeling that it is basest, most heartless selfishness to live, to respond to the caress of keen air upon healthy skin, of glorious light upon healthy eyes, when there are others shut out and shut away from these joys forever. Then she said to herself, "But no one need apologize for being alive and for hoping. I must try to justify him for all he did for me."

A few miles of beautiful water highway between circling sh.o.r.es of green, and afar off through the mist Madame Clelie's fascinated eyes beheld a city of enchantment. It appeared and disappeared, reappeared only to disappear again, as its veil of azure mist was blown into thick or thin folds by the light breeze. One moment the Frenchwoman would think there was nothing ahead but more and ever more of the bay glittering in the summer sunlight. The next moment she would see again that city--or was it a mirage of a city?--towers, mighty walls, domes rising ma.s.s above ma.s.s, summit above summit, into the very heavens from the water's edge where there was a fringe of green. Surely the vision must be real; yet how could tiny man out of earth and upon earth rear in such enchantment of line and color those enormous ma.s.ses, those peak-like piercings of the sky?

"Is that--_it?_" she asked in an awed undertone.

Susan nodded. She, too, was gazing spellbound. Her beloved City of the Sun.

"But it is beautiful--beautiful beyond belief. And I have always heard that New York was ugly."

"It is beautiful--and ugly--both beyond belief!" replied Susan.

"No wonder you love it!"

"Yes--I love it. I have loved it from the first moment I saw it. I've never stopped loving it--not even----" She did not finish her sentence but gazed dreamily at the city appearing and disappearing in its veils of thin, luminous mist. Her thoughts traveled again the journey of her life in New York.

When she spoke again, it was to say:

"Yes--when I first saw it--that spring evening--I called it my City of the Stars, then, for I didn't know that it belonged to the sun-- Yes, that spring evening I was happier than I ever had been--or ever shall be again."

"But you will be happy again dear," said Clelie, tenderly pressing her arm.

A faint sad smile--sad but still a smile--made Susan's beautiful face lovely. "Yes, I shall be happy--not in those ways--but happy, for I shall be busy. . . . No, I don't take the tragic view of life--not at all. And as I've known misery, I don't try to hold to it."