The Girl in the Mirror Part 29

"I know," she muttered, almost inaudibly. "It's all--horrible. It's infinitely worse than you suspect. And that's why I'm going to tell you the truth, big as the cost may be to me."

"Wait a minute," he interrupted. "Let's get this straight. You're telling me, aren't you, that any revelation you make now will react on you. Is that it?"

"Yes."

"You will be the chief sufferer by it?"

"Yes."

"Will it help you any to have me understand? Will it straighten out the trouble you're in?"

She considered her answer.

"The only help it will give me will be to know that you do understand,"

she said at last; "to know that--that--you're not suspecting things about me."

"And it will make things hard for you, otherwise, to have me know?" he persisted.

"Yes." This time her answer was prompt. "It will end everything I am trying to do, and destroy what I have already done."

Laurie threw his half-burned cigarette into the fire, as if to lend greater emphasis to his next words.

"That settles it," he announced. "I won't listen to you."

She turned to look at him.

"But you must," she faltered. "I'm all ready to tell you. I've been working myself up to it ever since you came."

"I know. I've watched the process, and I won't have another word." He lit a second cigarette, drew in a mouthful of smoke, and sent it forth again in a series of widening rings. "Your conversation is extremely uninteresting," he explained; "and look at the setting we've got for something romantic and worth while. This cozy room, this roaring fire,"--he interrupted himself to glance through the nearest window--"a ripping old snow-storm outside, that's getting worse every minute, and the exhilarating sense that though we're prisoners, we've already taken two perfectly good prisoners of our own; what more could one ask to make an afternoon in the country really pleasant?"

He stopped, for she was crying again, and the sight, which had taxed his strength an hour earlier, overtaxed it now. She overwhelmed him like a breaker. He rose, and going close to her, knelt beside her chair.

"Doris," he begged, brokenly. "Don't, don't cry! I can't tell you how it makes me feel. I--I can stand anything but that." He seized her hands and tried to pull them away from her face. "Look at me," he urged. "I've got all sorts of things to say to you, but I won't say them now. This isn't the time or the place. But one thing, at least, I want you to know. I _do_ trust you. I trust you absolutely. And whatever happens, whatever all this incredible tangle may mean, I shall always trust you."

She wiped her eyes and looked into his, more serious in that moment than she had ever seen them.

"I will stop," she promised, with a little catch in her voice. "But please don't think I'm a hysterical fool. I'm not crying because I'm frightened, but because--because--Laurie, you're so splendid!"

For a moment his hands tightened almost convulsively on hers. In the next instant he rose to his feet, walked to the fireplace, and with an arm on the mantel, stood partly turned away from her, looking into the fire. He dared not look at her. In that moment he was pa.s.sionately calling on the new self-control which had been born during the past year; and, at his call, it again awoke in him, ready for its work. This, he had just truly said to Doris, was not the time nor the place to tell her what was in his heart. Only a cad would take advantage of such an opportunity. He had said enough, perhaps too much. He drew a deep breath and was himself.

"I told you you'd find all sorts of unexpected virtues in me," he lightly announced; and it was the familiar Laurie who smiled down at her. "There are dozens more you don't dream of. I'll reveal them to you guardedly. They're rather overwhelming."

She smiled vaguely at his chatter, but it was plain that she was following her own thoughts.

"The most wonderful thing about you," she said, "is that through this whole experience, you've never, for one single instant, been 'heroic.'

You're not the kind to 'emote'!"

"Great Scott!" gasped Laurie, startled. "I should hope not!"

He could look at her now, and he did, his heart filled with the satisfying beauty of her. She was still leaning forward a little in the low chair, with her hands unconventionally clasped around one knee, and her eyes staring into the fire. A painter, he reflected, would go mad over the picture she made; and why not? He himself was going mad over it, was even a little light-headed.

She wore again the gown she had worn the first day he saw her, and the memory of that poignant hour intensified the emotion of this one. Taking her in, from the superb ma.s.ses of hair on her small head to the glittering buckles on her low house-shoes, Laurie knew at last that whoever and whatever this girl might be, she was the one whose companionship through life his hungry heart demanded. He loved her. He would trust her, blindly if he must, but whatever happened fully and for all time.

There had been a long silence after his last words, but when she spoke it was as if there had been no interval between his chatter and her response.

"Almost any other man would have been 'heroic,'" she went on. "Almost any other man would have been excited and emotional at times, and then would have been exacting and difficult and rebellious over all the mystery, and the fact that I couldn't explain. I've set that pace myself," she confessed. "I haven't always been able to take things quietly and--and philosophically. The wonderful thing about you is that you've never been overwhelmed by any situation we've been in together.

You've never even seemed to take them very seriously. And yet, when it came to a 'show-down,' as Shaw says, you've been right there, always."

He made no answer to this. His mind was caught and held by the phrase "as Shaw says." So she and Shaw had talked him over! He recalled the silver-framed photograph of her on Shaw's mantel, the photograph whose presence had made him see red; and a queer little chill went down his spine at this reminder of their strange and unexplained a.s.sociation.

Then, resolutely, he again summoned his will and his faith, and became conscious that she was still speaking.

"You're the kind," she said, "that in the French Revolution, if you had been a victim of it, would have gone to the guillotine with a smile and a jest, and would have seen in the experience only a new adventure."

At that, he shook his head.

"I don't know," he said slowly, and with the seriousness he had shown her once or twice before. "Death is a rather important thing. I've been thinking about it a good deal lately."

"_You_ have!" In her astonishment, she straightened in her chair. "Why?"

"Well," he hesitated, "I haven't spoken about it much, but--the truth is, I'm taking the European war more seriously than I have seemed to. I think America will swing into the fight in a month or two more; I really don't see how we can keep out any longer. And I've made up my mind to volunteer as soon as we declare war."

"Oh, Laurie!"

That was all she said, but it was enough. Again he turned away from her and looked into the fire.

"I want to talk to you about it sometime," he went on. "Not now, of course. I'm going in for the aviation end. That's my game."

"Yes, it would be," she corroborated, almost inaudibly.

"I've been thinking about it a lot," he repeated. There was an intense, unexpected relief in this confidence, which he had made to no one else but Bangs, and to him in only a casual phrase or two. "That's one reason why it has been hard for me to get down to work on a new play, as Bangs and Epstein have been hounding me to do. I was afraid I couldn't keep my mind on it. All I can think of, besides you--" he hesitated, then went on rather self-consciously--"are those fellows over there and the tremendous job they're doing. I want to help. I'm going to help. But I'm not going into it with any illusions about military bands and pretty uniforms and grand-stand plays. It's the biggest job in the world to-day, and it's got to be done. But what I see in it in the meantime are blood and filth and stench and suffering and horror and a limitless, stoical endurance. And--well, I know I'm going. But I can't quite see myself coming home."

Save for his revelation on the morning they met, this was the longest personal confidence Laurence Devon had ever made to another human being except his sister Barbara. At its end, as she could not speak, he watched her for a moment in silence, already half regretting what he had said. Then she rose with a fiercely abrupt movement, and going to the window stood looking at the storm. He followed her and stood beside her.

"Laurie," she said suddenly.

"Yes?"

"I can't stand it."

"Can't stand it?"

He repeated her words almost absently. His eyes were on a stocky figure moving among the trees below. It kept in constant motion and, he observed with pleasure, it occasionally stamped its feet and swung its arms as if suffering from the cold.

"I can't stand this situation."

"Then we must clear it up for you." He spoke rea.s.suringly, his eyes still on the active figure. "Is that one of our keepers, down there?"

She nodded.