The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig Part 26

"No matter."

"You must be in love with him!"

"Women take strange fancies."

"What's the matter, Rita? What have you in the back of your mind?"

She looked straight at him. "Nothing about YOU. Not the faintest, little shadow of a regret." And her hazel eyes smiled mirth of the kind that is cruelest from woman to man.

"How exasperating you are!"

"Perhaps I've caught the habit from my man."

"Rita, you don't even like me any more."

"No--candidly--I don't."

"I deserve it."

"You do. I can never trust you again."

He shrugged his shoulders; but he could not pretend that he was indifferent. "It seems to me, if Josh forgave me you might."

"I do--forgive."

"But not even friendship?"

"Not EVEN friendship."

"You are hard."

"I am hard."

"Rita! For G.o.d's sake, don't marry that man! You don't love him--you know you don't. At times you feel you can hardly endure him. You'll be miserable--in every way. And I--At least I can give you material happiness."

She smiled--a cold, enigmatic smile that made her face seem her grandmother's own peering through a radiant mask of youth. She glanced away, around--"Ah! there are mamma and Augusta Burke." And she left him to join them.

He wandered out of the garden, through the thronged corridors, into the street, knocking against people, seeing no one, not heeding the frequent salutations. He went to the Wyandotte, to Craig's tawdry, dingy sitting-room, its disorder now apparently beyond possibility of righting. Craig, his coat and waistcoat off, his detachable cuffs on the floor, was burrowing into ma.s.ses of huge law-books.

"Clear out," said he curtly; "I'm busy."

Grant plumped himself into a chair. "Josh," cried he desperately, "you must marry that girl. She's just the one for you. I love her, and her happiness is dear to me."

Craig gave him an amused look. "However did she persuade you to come here and say that?" he inquired.

"She didn't persuade me. She didn't mention it. All she said was that she had wiped me off the slate even as a friend."

Craig laughed uproariously. "THAT was how she did it--eh? She's a deep one."

"Josh," said Arkwright, "you need a wife, and she's it."

"Right you are," exclaimed Craig heartily. "I'm one of those surplus-steam persons--have to make an a.s.s of myself constantly, indulging in the futility of blowing off steam. Oughtn't to do it publicly--creates false impression. Got to have a wife--no one else but a wife always available and bound to be discreet. Out with you. I'm too busy to talk--even about myself."

"You will marry her?"

"Like to see anybody try to stop me!"

He pulled Arkwright from the chair, thrust him into the hall, slammed the door. And Arkwright, in a more hopeful frame of mind, went home.

"I'll do my best to get back her respect--and my own," said he. "I've been a dog, and she's giving me the whipping I deserve."

CHAPTER XVI

A FIGHT AND A FINISH

In his shrewd guess at Margaret's reason for dealing so summarily with Arkwright, Craig was mistaken, as the acutest of us usually are in attributing motives. He had slowly awakened to the fact that she was not a mere surface, but had also the third dimension--depth, which distinguishes persons from people. Whenever he tried to get at what she meant by studying what she did, he fell into the common error of judging her by himself, and of making no allowance for the sweeter and brighter side of human nature, which was so strong in her that, in happier circ.u.mstances, the other side would have been mere rudiment.

Her real reason for breaking with Grant was a desire to be wholly honorable with Craig. She resolved to burn her bridges toward Arkwright, to put him entirely out of her mind--as she had not done theretofore; for whenever she had grown weary of Craig's harping on her being the aggressor in the engagement and not himself, or whenever she had become irritated against him through his rasping mannerisms she had straightway begun to revolve Arkwright as a possible alternative. Craig's personality had such a strong effect on her, caused so many moods and reactions, that she was absolutely unable to tell what she really thought of him. Also, when she was so hara.s.sed by doubt as to whether the engagement would end in marriage or in a humiliation of jilting, when her whole mind was busy with the problem of angling him within the swoop of the matrimonial net, how was she to find leisure to examine her heart? Whether she wanted him or simply wanted a husband she could not have said.

She felt that his eccentric way of treating the engagement would justify her in keeping Arkwright in reserve. But she was finding that there were limits to her ability to endure her own self-contempt, and she sacrificed Grant to her outraged self-respect. Possibly she might have been less conscientious had she not come to look on Grant as an exceedingly pale and shadowy personality, a mere vague expression of well-bred amiability, male because trousered, identifiable chiefly by the dollar mark.

Her reward seemed immediate. There came a day when Craig was all devotion, was talking incessantly of their future, was never once doubtful or even low-spirited. It was simply a question of when they would marry--whether as soon as Stillwater fixed his date for retiring, or after Craig was installed. She had to listen patiently to hours on hours of discussion as to which would be the better time. She had to seem interested, though from the viewpoint of her private purposes nothing could have been less important. She had no intention of permitting him to waste his life and hers in the poverty and uncertainty of public office, struggling for the applause of mobs one despised as individuals and would not permit to cross one's threshold. But she had to let him talk on and on, and yet on. In due season, when she was ready to speak and he to hear, she would disclose to him the future she had mapped out for him, not before. He discoursed; she listened. At intervals he made love in his violent, terrifying way; she endured, now half-liking it, now half-hating it and him, but always enduring, pa.s.sive, as became a modest, inexperienced maiden, and with never a suggestion of her real thoughts upon her surface.

It was the morning after one of these outbursts of his, one of unusual intensity, one that had so worn upon her nerves that, all but revolted by the sense of sick satiety, she had come perilously near to indulging herself in the too costly luxury of telling him precisely what she thought of him and his conduct. She was in bed, with the blinds just up, and the fair, early-summer world visioning itself to her sick heart like Paradise to the excluded Peri at its barred gate. "And if he had given me half a chance I'd have loved him," she was thinking. "I do believe in him, and admire his strength and his way of never accepting defeat. But how can I--how CAN I--when he makes me the victim of these ruffian moods of his? I almost think the Frenchman was right who said that every man ought to have two wives.... Not that at times he doesn't attract me that way. But because one likes champagne one does not wish it by the cask. A gla.s.s now and then, or a bottle--perhaps--" Aloud: "What is it, Selina?"

"A note for you, ma'am, from HIM. It's marked important and immediate.

You told me not to disturb you with those marked important, nor with those marked immediate. But you didn't say what to do about those marked both."

"The same," said Margaret, stretching herself out at full length, and snuggling her head into the softness of her perfumed hair. "But now that you've brought it thus far, let me have it."

Selina laid it on the silk and swansdown quilt and departed. Margaret forgot that it was there in thinking about a new dress she was planning, an adaptation of a French model. As she turned herself it fell to the floor. She reached down, picked it up, opened it, read:

"It's no use. Fate's against us. I find the President is making my marriage the excuse for not appointing me. How lucky we did not announce the engagement. This is a final good-by. I shall keep out of your way.

It's useless for you to protest. I am doing what is best for us both.

Thank me, and forget me."

She leaped from the bed with one bound, and, bare of foot and in her nightgown only, rushed to the telephone. She called up the Arkwrights, asked for Grant. "Wake him," she said. "If he is still in bed tell him Miss Severence wishes to speak to him at once."

Within a moment Grant's agitated voice was coming over the wire: "Is that you, Rita? What is the matter?"

"Come out here as soon as you can. How long will it be?"

"An hour. I really must shave."

"In an hour, then. Good-by."