The Immortal Moment Part 14

Miss Keating's hands struggled with her veil.

"I mayn't tie it for you?" said Kitty.

"No, thank you."

There was a knock at the door, and Miss Keating started.

"It's the men for your boxes. Come into my room and say good bye."

"I prefer to say good bye here, if it's all the same to you. Good bye."

"You won't even shake hands with me? Well, if you won't--why should you?"

"I am holding out my hand. If you won't take it----"

"No, no. I don't want to take it."

Kitty was crying.

"I must let those men in," said Miss Keating. "You are not going to make a scene?"

"I? Oh Lord, no. You needn't mind me. I'll go."

She went into her own room and flung herself, face downward, on to her pillow, and slid by the bedside, kneeling, to the floor.

CHAPTER IX

At eight o'clock Mrs. Tailleur was not to be found in her room, or in any other part of the hotel. By nine Lucy was out on the Cliff-side looking for her. He was not able to account for the instinct that told him she would be there.

The rain had ceased earlier in the evening. Now it was falling again in torrents. He could see that the path was pitted with small, sharp footprints. They turned and returned, obliterating each other.

At the end of the path, in the white chamber under the brow of the Cliff, he made out first a queer, irregular, trailing black ma.s.s, then the peak of a hood against the wall, and the long train of a woman's gown upon the floor, and then, between the loops of the hood, the edge of Mrs. Tailleur's white face, dim, but discernible. She sat sideways, leaning against the wall, in the slack, childlike att.i.tude of exhausted misery.

He came close. She did not stir at the sound of his feet trampling the slush. Her eyes were shut, her mouth open; she breathed, like a child, the half-suffocated breath that comes after long crying. He stood looking at her, tongue-tied with pity. Every now and then her throat shook like a child's with guileless hiccoughing sobs.

He stooped over her and called her name.

"Mrs. Tailleur."

She turned from him and sank sidelong into the corner, hiding her face.

The long wings of her cloak parted and hung back from her cowering body.

Her thin garments, beaten smooth by the rain, clung like one tissue to the long slope above her knees. Lucy laid his hand gently on her gown.

She was drenched to the skin. It struck through, cold and shuddering, to his touch. She pushed his hand away and sat up.

"I think," she said, "you'd better go away."

"Do you want me to go?"

"I don't want you to see me like this. I'm--I'm not pretty to look at."

"That doesn't matter in the very least. Besides, I can hardly see you in this light."

He drew her cloak about her and fastened it. He could feel, from the nearness of her flushed mouth, the heat and the taste of grief. She flung her head back to the wall away from him. Her hood slipped, and he put his arm behind her shoulders and raised it, and drew it gently forward to shelter her head from the rough wall. His hand was wet with the rain from her loose hair.

"How long have you been walking about in the rain before you came here?"

She tried to speak, and with the effort her sobs broke out in violence.

It struck him again, and with another pang of pity, how like a child she was in the completeness of her abandonment! He sat down beside her, leaning forward, his face hidden in his hands. He felt that to hide his own face was somehow to screen her.

Her sobbing went on, and her hand, stretched toward him unawares, clutched at the top of the wooden seat.

"Would you like me to go away and come back again?" he said presently.

"No!" she cried. And at her own cry a terrible convulsion shook her. He could feel her whole body strain and stiffen with the effort to control it. Then she was calm.

"I beg your pardon," she said. "I told you, didn't I, that you'd better go away?"

"Do you suppose that I'm going to leave you here? Just when I've found you?"

"Miss Keating's left me. Did you know?"

"Yes, I heard. Is it--is it a great trouble to you?"

"Yes." She shook again.

"Surely," he began, and hesitated, and grew bold. "Surely it needn't be?

She wasn't, was she, such a particularly amiable person?"

"She couldn't help it. She was so unhappy."

His voice softened. "You were very fond of her?"

"Yes. How did you know she'd gone?"

It was too dark in there for him to see the fear in her eyes as she turned them to him.

"Oh," he said, "we heard she'd left. I suppose she had to go."

"Yes," said Mrs. Tailleur, "she had to go."

"Well, I shouldn't distress myself any more about it. Tell me, have you been walking about in the rain ever since she left?"

"I--I think so."