The Salamander Part 55

She stopped, looked at him tensely, and went on:

"You would take up your life again, and I would bury myself in my career, and you would watch me, little by little, become a great name!"

"And never see each other--"

"Perhaps when we are quite old," she said suddenly. "You won't believe me! I would do it!" She clasped her hands tumultuously over her heart.

"Oh, how easily I would do it! Ah, to have such a romance--anything might come!"

"What book have you been reading?" he asked quietly--yet feeling a little sad that he could not follow where her lawless imagination ran.

She turned away hotly, clenching her fists, crying:

"Ah, you will never let go of yourself! You are afraid--afraid of everything!"

He followed her, laying a hand on her shoulder as she stood by the window.

"Keep your island in southern seas!" he said, with such emotion in his voice that she wheeled about. "Believe in it all you want, extraordinary child, even if it ends by my paying all the penalty. Go on with your day-dreaming."

His glance lay in hers, his arms were longing to take her into them, when Snyder entered, with a quick knock that gave them only time to spring apart. At this moment Dodo could have driven her out, fiercely rebelling against this constant espionage. What right had Snyder or any one to interfere with her liberty, or to say whom she should see? She resolved hotly to have an explanation when she returned. Now it was necessary to master her emotion.

"A moment--a moment to change my dress; ready in ten minutes!"

She ran quickly to trunk and bureau, gathering up her articles of dress; disappearing behind a screen in the corner. Ma.s.singale, after a calculating glance at the figure of Snyder, rigid in the window, sat down, drawing a magazine to him. He no longer felt the unease he had experienced at the woman's first interruption. It seemed so natural to be there, in the musty high room, littered with trunks, with its patches of carpet and incongruous wall-paper.

In the closet, behind a discreetly closed door, Dodo was laughing at her narrow quarters. Outside, through the windows, the marshaled city was setting its lights for Christmas Eve--thousands on thousands of human beings disciplined under the old order of what is called right and wrong, the millions who never really entered _his_ life and for whose approval his every word and action must be calculated.

"Snyder, come and b.u.t.ton me!" called Dodo, emerging from the closet behind the screen.

She felt nothing unusual in this hidden change of dress, but to him the touch of intimacy aroused more than his curiosity.

When they descended to the closed car, gaily brushing the snowflakes from each other, a little moved by all that had pa.s.sed, feeling, too, the obliterating unrealities of dark streets and lights glistening amid the obscurity, he said:

"Dodo, I wish it could be!"

"It can, it can!" she answered impulsively, excited at his approach to consent.

"The world's too big for us!"

"Some men would have the courage!"

"The trouble is, I am born under a curse," he said moodily. "I'm limited--a gentleman: that's the best and the worst of me!"

"A gentleman!" she repeated scornfully. "Yes, that's the whole of it!

That's why you're afraid of everything--why you'll never, never dare!"

"That's true, Dodo!"

"And what is a gentleman?" she asked angrily.

He looked beyond her at the lighted windows of his club, arrogantly set in judgment over the mult.i.tude on the avenue, and answered, in mockery:

"A gentleman, Dodo, is one who is a gentleman because he a.s.sociates with those who are gentlemen because they a.s.sociate with him!"

She did not laugh at this; there was more below it than the sarcasm.

Presently she drew his hand into hers.

"How much you need me, Your Honor!" she said softly. "What is the rest worth? Let me guide you!"

He did not reply. In fact, he knew too well that he had surrendered already, and in that moment, he said to himself that he would take his courage in his hands--that now, before the week had ended, he would go to his wife and claim from her his liberty, whatever her terms.

Dore returned early, after a dinner at the Hickory Log, riotous with the Christmas cheer. Ma.s.singale had an engagement; she wished to be in her room, childlike, eager for the excitement of arriving presents. Besides, she had planned a tree for Betty, and with Ida's aid, she set delightedly to the task of arranging candles, twining tinsel, tying up presents in neat tissue-paper with enticing bows of red ribbon. She had depleted her slender treasury in presents for Betty, having bought almost a dozen, inscribing each from some imaginary fairy prince or goblin whom they had met in their enchanted wanderings.

By ten o'clock the tree was completed, the pile of her own presents had stopped at respectable proportions, and the wanderl.u.s.t having come, Dodo--not without a little feeling of treachery to Ma.s.singale--allowed herself to be persuaded, and departed for a "spree." When they returned in Peavey's automobile, which Dodo had commandeered, there was already a slight covering of snow, and at the windows the slipping wheels flung flurries of white flakes.

"I can't bear an old masher--a fossil that's falling to pieces!" said Ida gaily, returning over the events of the evening. "Did you see that old Caxton, that was buzzing around me all evening?"

Dodo laughed.

"He started after me, but I shook him!"

"Heavens, Do, how do you manage? I never can!"

"I gave him an awful shock," explained Dodo, continuing to laugh. "He'd been looking at me with big wolf eyes, licking his chops and telling me he'd leave his happy home for me--you know the stuff. He had me cornered at the upper table, and just as I started to slip away he caught my arm.

[Ill.u.s.tration: She was riotous with Christmas cheer]

"'And what's your fairy name, you darling?' says he.

"And I answered:

"'Gussie!'

"You should have seen the face he made! He dropped me like a hot potato!"

Then she was silent, deliciously cradled in her own thoughts, convincing herself that what yesterday had seemed but a faint dream was now a possibility, visualizing, in dormant balmy seas, an island all white and green, a fairy island as enchanted as the kingdoms which each day she constructed for Betty's wondering eyes. To be Mrs. Ma.s.singale, to enter into all the irksome routine of formal society--no, that had no appeal!

A year or a season in a world of her own, a great romance, a love that would sweep them up like the magnificently reckless storms of pa.s.sion which came to her over the inspired motives of _Tristan and Isolde_--that, and then a life of work and accomplishment, a career.

All at once, as the skidding automobile slowed and sloughed about a corner, a group under a lamp-post, black and silhouetted against the snow, sprang across the fragile fabric of her dreams out of the horrid world of reality--a figure that scattered all selfish thoughts and overwhelmed her with the power of a great remorse. She leaned forward precipitately, beating on the window for Brennon to stop, and even in the moment of her disorder, true to the Salamander instinct, she explained hastily:

"A cousin--oh, dear! he's been on a spree for months; the family's distracted. Stop! Wait--I must get hold of him. No, no; let me out!"

And to Ida's amazement, opening the door, heedless of the slush on her delicate feet, of the bitter night, of what any one would think,--obeying only an irresistible cry from her soul,--Dodo had sprung out and run to the sidewalk, where the ghost of Lindaberry, come up from the abyss, was standing embattled, torn and disheveled, magnificently crazed, and at his feet a policeman, knocked out.

CHAPTER XXIII