The Empty Sack Part 26

"You look like a gur-rl that'd have an eye and a taste for beauty. You don't find them often among Americans, and when you do it's a G.o.d-send.

Poles, Jews, Russians, yes. When the French and Italian officers was in New York, their eyes 'd fairly eat the museum up. But Americans-they don't know and they don't want to know-not wan in a hundred thousand.

Well, good-day to you and good luck. I'm always here, and I'm just the wan to tell you which is the things to pick out."

But by the time she discovered her Lady Hamilton she had only the courage to note listlessly that the hair _was_ somewhat the color of her own-not chestnut, not russet, not copper, not red-gold, but perhaps a combination of them all. She had reached her limitations unexpectedly.

The tide she had dammed had burst its barriers and rushed in on her. She sank to a chair in the middle of the almost empty room, her eyes blinded by sudden tears.

Hubert was still with that woman! The woman was perhaps resting now and they were talking! She would be so much at her ease that she would talk without taking the trouble to throw her wrap round her. Hubert, too, would be at ease, preferring her without her wrap rather than with it.

In vain she reminded herself that the situation was one to which an artist was accustomed. She hadn't been in a studio for a year without learning that much, though she got no comfort from it now. No comfort was possible with the vision of this naked magnificence seared on her memory. Hubert had let her come without a welcome, and go without a protest. He was probably glad when she went so that he might be alone with this wanton who didn't know shame.

In the end, she saw but one course before her. She would make the best of Bob. To do so would mean that Bob would be disinherited by his ogre of a father, but with Mrs. Collingham's aid a counteracting influence might be found. Moreover, she could thus return home, confess herself Bob's wife, and offer the hundred dollars to her father as cash lawfully her own. Life would be simplified in this way, even though happiness were dead.

She was the last of the commuting family to reach the house that evening, and on crossing the threshold was greeted with a sense of cheer. It did not mean much to her at first, for, with the optimism of a hand-to-mouth existence, a sense of cheer was the last thing the family ever abandoned. She herself cast all outward air of trouble away from her on opening the door, because it was in the tradition.

Her father was seated quietly smoking his pipe, which he had not done for the past week or more. Gussie held the middle of the floor, her arms extended in a serpentine wave, humming a dance tune and practicing the step. To mark the rhythm, Gladys was clapping her hands with a slow, tom-tom beat. Pansy alone stood apart, blinking and unresponsive, as if for reasons of her own she considered this mirth ill-timed.

"Look, Jen!" Gladys giggled, as her eldest sister pa.s.sed down the room.

"This is the new thing at the Washington. Gus has got it so you wouldn't know her from Samarine herself."

Jennie went on to the kitchen, where, as she expected, her mother was getting the supper, and did her best to be nonchalant.

"h.e.l.lo, momma! What's the good word? What makes everyone so gay?"

Lizzie looked up, a cover in one hand and a spoon in the other. Her face was so radiant that Jennie was still more mystified.

"Oh, Jennie darling, your father has the money! He can make the payment to-morrow, and everything will come right."

So Jennie's plans recoiled upon herself. She had meant to tell her mother here and now that for four days past she had been Bob Collingham's wife, and had a hundred dollars in her top bureau drawer.

Her mother was to tell her father, and her father Teddy and the girls.

But now-well, what would be the use? By keeping her secret she might put off inevitable fate a little longer.

"Who lent it?" Jennie asked, after she had chosen her line of action.

"n.o.body; that's the wonderful part of it. It's a hundred and fifty dollars Teddy has earned."

"'Earned!' How?"

"Selling bonds for a man he knows. He doesn't want anything said about it, because it's what he calls 'on the side.' If the house knew of it-that he was working in off times for some one else-he might lose his job. But, oh, Jennie, isn't it wonderful?"

Jennie thought it wonderful for other reasons than Teddy's glory and the peace of the family mind. It was less easy to renounce Hubert than it had been an hour or two earlier. If he snapped his fingers she had said to herself, while crossing the ferry, she would run to him like a dog, in spite of everything; and if she did it, she would want to be free from the complications that must ensue if she were to proclaim herself Bob's wife.

Having a.s.sented to her mother's praise of Teddy, she went back through the living room and on upstairs to take off her hat and coat. Near the top of the stairs, the door of the bathroom opened suddenly and Teddy appeared in his shirt sleeves. There being nothing unusual in that, she was about to say, "h.e.l.lo, Ted!" and ascend the few remaining steps to her room.

But seeing her moving upward in the dim hall light, Teddy started back within the bathroom, and, with a movement he couldn't control, slammed the door noisily. The action was so odd that she called out to him:

"It's only me, goose! What's the matter with you? Have you got the jumps?"

The door opened and Teddy reappeared, grinning sheepishly.

"I-I didn't have my coat on," was the only explanation he could find.

"Dear, dear!" Jennie threw over her shoulder, as she pa.s.sed into her own room. "We've got terribly modest all of a sudden, haven't we?"

But weeks later she recalled this lame excuse.

CHAPTER XV

During the next few days, Wray snapped his fingers twice, and on each occasion Jennie ran to him like a dog, as she had foreseen she would.

The first time was in response to a telegram. The telegram said, simply:

Studio Thursday, 3 P.M.

There was no signature, but Jennie knew what it meant. By one o'clock she was dressing feverishly; by two, she had said good-by to her mother and was on her way. She was not thinking of her twenty-five thousand dollars now, or of any offering up of herself. Her one objective was to drive that woman from the Byzantine chair so that Hubert shouldn't look at her again.

But she had not got out of Indiana Avenue on her way to the trolley car when something happened which had never happened in her life before. She received another telegram, the second in one day. The messenger boy, who was a neighbor's son, had hailed her from across the street.

"h.e.l.lo, Jennie! Are you Miss Jane Scarborough Follett? That's a name and a half, ain't it?"

Her first thought was that Hubert was wiring to put her off because he wanted the other woman, after all. Her second, that he had already addressed her as "Miss Jennie Follett," and she doubted if he knew her full baptismal name. Only in one connection had it been used of late, and that recollection made her tremble.

This message, too, was unsigned, and, being so, it puzzled her:

Always close to you in spirit and loving you.

That wasn't like Hubert-and Bob was on the sea.

She walked slowly, reading it again and again, till her eyes caught the address in a corner-Havana. She remembered then that the _Demerara_ was to touch at that port, and understood. Crushing the telegraphic slip into the bottom of her handbag, she made her way to the square and took her place in the car.

As she jolted down the face of the cliff she wished that this message hadn't come till after her return from the studio. Then it wouldn't have mattered. It would have been too late to matter. Not that it mattered now-only, that the way in which Bob expressed himself made her feel uneasy. "Always close to you in spirit." She didn't want him to be close to her in any way, but in spirit least of all. Latterly, she had heard Mrs. Weatherby, a convert to some school of New Thought, discourse on the unreality of separations and the bridging power of spirit, and while these ideas made no appeal to her, they endued Bob's telegram with a ghostly creepiness. If he was close to her in spirit on an errand like the present one....

So she turned back from the very studio door. She couldn't go in. She couldn't so much as put her hand on the k.n.o.b. Knowing that Hubert was within a few yards of her, eager to be hers as she was to be his, she crept guiltily down the stairs.

She cried all night from humiliation and repentance. It was as if Bob had laid a spell on her. Unless she could break it, her life would be ruined.

But the opportunity to break it came no later than the very next day.

Chancing to look out into Indiana Avenue, she saw Hubert scanning Number Eleven from the other side of the street. He must indeed want to see her, since he had taken this journey into the unknown.

Picking up a sunshade, she went out and spoke to him. He refused to come in, but begged her to take a little walk.

"Jennie, what's your game?" he asked, roughly, as they sauntered down the avenue toward the edge of the cliff. "Why don't you come to the studio when I ask you? What are you afraid of?"

"I did come-the other day-but-"

"Why didn't you stay? I thought you would. Bra.s.shead wouldn't have minded it, and you could have seen how the thing is done."