The Salamander Part 77

"Blainey, you're an awfully good sort!" she said genuinely.

"d.a.m.ned few would agree with you!" he said grimly.

"You've always been with me! Why?"

"'Cause I'm a sentimental nature!" he said, grinning. "Well, kid, how about it?"

"Well, Blainey, it may be yes! I shouldn't be surprised!"

He started up eagerly, with a look that somehow spoiled it all. She retreated instinctively, and perceiving it, he was clever enough to retain his seat, saying:

"When will you know?"

"To-night!"

"Telephone me here or at the hotel. Now, one thing more. This marriage means freedom to each--no spying and no interfering! It's a sentimental business contract for life. Savvy?"

She nodded.

"That's the best way!"

"You're free--I'm free!"

She nodded again, giving him her hand.

"Now I must go," she said hastily, with a glance at the clock. She went to the door, while he watched her without a word. Suddenly she turned.

"If I decide, I want it over to-night! Do you understand?"

He nodded seriously. She smiled and went lightly out.

When she reached her room again she received a shock. Snyder informed her that Lindaberry had called twice, once while they were at luncheon, and again at three. Dodo was in a panic at the news, expected though it was. Josephus had informed her of Nebbins' insistent queries. All that she had planned dramatically, which now she wished to avoid, was rising up to confound her. She turned breathlessly on Snyder.

"You saw Mr. Lindaberry?"

"Yes!"

"He was here? Long?"

"About an hour!"

"Then you talked to him?" she persisted, suddenly suspicious.

"So-so," said Snyder evasively.

"What did you talk about? What did you say? What did you tell him about me? You didn't discuss--did he leave a message?"

"No, he left no message!" said Snyder obstinately.

"When is he coming back? You know!"

"No, I don't know!"

"Snyder!"

"I don't know!" she repeated, shrugging her shoulders and escaping into the other room, leaving Dodo in a torment of suspense, half inclined to flight.

She could explain whatever she intended doing to Blainey, to Ma.s.singale even, but not to Lindaberry. The thing was unthinkable. And she was afraid of his coming, for she was afraid to destroy the illusion, fragile and beautiful, which she had built of herself in his soul. To undeceive him, to let him see her as she believed she really was, brought her pain that she could not endure. And at that moment, as the town clock was methodically beating out the hour of five, she stopped abruptly, suddenly recalled to Ma.s.singale by the sound of his step on the stairs, torn between hope and fear, but inwardly steeling herself against the shock of disillusionment which she was certain awaited her with the opening of the door.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

When a man has taken a step across those limits which society imposes on his conduct, he immediately begins, with a certain anxiety, to seek for the visible results in those events, ordinary or extraordinary, which affect his prosperity. From the time of Ma.s.singale's meeting with Dodo, everything had succeeded with him. He had had a period of unusual success in the stock market. Property which he had accepted in lieu of a debt had unexpectedly proved necessary to the approaches of a new bridge and had returned him ten times its value. His kennel had swept everything before it in the Dog Show, and in the daily sessions at the card table his run of luck had continued with extraordinary persistence.

Finally, the newspapers, lately, had given him columns of publicity.

Certain criticisms which he had pa.s.sed on the haphazard conduct of justice had been taken up and had set in movement great machines of investigation, which threatened an overturn at the coming munic.i.p.al elections. As a consequence, he had received proffers of advancement, and a political career seemed within his reach.

Whatever vague rumblings of conscience may have stirred within him, they were, in a measure, stilled by these evidences of the good favor in which he stood with Providence since Dodo's introduction into his life.

He was resolved to see in her the explanation of all that was favorable, and he repeated, in daily self-justification, that if she brought him this good luck, there could be no great harm, else a moral Heaven certainly would not continue to shower him with blessings. He did not express the feeling in so many words, but it existed, half avowed, as often, when tendered a match, he would say to himself:

"If it remains lighted until it reaches me, it is a favorable sign!"

The first disagreeable shock had come in the form of a message from Harrigan Blood saying that he would oppose any attempt to raise Ma.s.singale to the Court of General Sessions. The message was delivered by a mutual friend with intimations that, on account of certain sides of his personal life, it would be better not to lay himself open to the attack of a vindictive antagonist. The truth was that Harrigan Blood, since the day when Dodo had been so unfortunately inspired as to bring them together, had conceived the idea that the luncheon had been arranged with the express purpose of making him ridiculous, and that Ma.s.singale had been a party to the plot. From the first he had felt the humiliation of the role he had been forced to play with Dodo. The quarrel with Sa.s.soon had been costly; his sense of pride had been cruelly tried; on top of which the thought that she had paraded him for the delectation of a favored rival was unbearable to his sensitive vain nature. He took his revenge thus, from a need of feeling that at the end the ridicule would not rest on his side. Ma.s.singale knew the man too well to have any doubts as to his yielding. If the political campaign were to be entered, he saw now that it would mean a distressing facing of every indignity. It was the threat, perhaps, more than the deprivation, that annoyed him; for at the bottom he had now come to a full realization of the utter disorganization which the pursuit of Dodo must inevitably bring him.

The morality of a man of the world after forty is largely a question of what is, and what is not, done. Ma.s.singale, without being aware of it, possessed this code to an unusual degree. Petty political grafting was something of which he would have been simply incapable, from a pride of caste. There were certain vices that were a.s.sociated with a lower order of human beings. Courage, in such surroundings, was as requisite to a gentleman as recklessness before the consequences of a five-foot leap in the hunting-field. So, with Dore, his moral code of good manners (which might be expressed as eligibility to club membership) could not permit what, to the eyes of the world, must appear as a deliberate seduction.

Despite the depths of infatuation into which he had plunged, the genuine outcry of his whole nature, the intense and ceaseless longing with which he was consumed, he never for a moment contemplated anything but the permissible: divorce and remarriage.

This decisive step he had contemplated now for more than two months, approaching and retreating. At times he had been on the point of breaking in tempestuously on his wife and delivering an ultimatum, and the next day he had thanked heaven for the accident that had prevented a crisis. He was afraid of Dodo. Never for a moment had he placed the slightest faith in her romantic dramatization of a lawless elopement.

Beyond that, a future in which she should join him as his wife was illegible to his eyes. He was too profoundly sensible of the utter change she had effected in his life not to fear where he might follow.

He found that she consumed his day; that only the moments spent with her were vital. His old a.s.sociations bored him.

His club friends of his age seemed hopelessly and incomprehendingly old.

In their presence he felt unaccountably young, eager for youth. The evenings when Dodo punished him by departing with mysterious others were intolerably long and heavy. And then he suffered! He came to know all the torments of jealousy, hatred and submission violently reacting.

A little thing had perhaps more influence on his decision at this moment than anything else--the ring which Lindaberry had given Dodo, and of which she would furnish no explanation. This ring haunted him, terrified him. He was a keen enough observer to perceive instinctively its threat--that back of it was a deep import, not a mere pa.s.sing entanglement of a week. Something else there was in her life, of major importance, he felt, strong enough to threaten him. Finally, on the night he had taken Dodo in his car after her meeting with Nebbins, this feeling of jealousy and alarm had become so intensified that he had suddenly flung the future to the winds, and determined to be rid of the pain, the frenzy and the miserable longing which his resistance brought him in daily torture.

When he returned to his home, he learned from the footman at the door that Mrs. Ma.s.singale had entered half an hour before. He went directly to her rooms, giving himself no time for hesitation or reflection.

"Who is it?" cried a startled voice at his knock.

"It's I; may I come in?"

"But I'm not dressed! Is it serious?"

"Yes! Put on a dressing-gown!"

A moment later he entered. His wife, a frail, neurasthenic, thinly pretty woman of forty, was standing with a peignoir hastily clutched about her, a towel in hand, hastily rubbing off the cream with which her maid had been industriously ma.s.saging her face. On the dressing-table was a heap of hair in disordered braids. The mellow shades on the electric candles flung frightened shadows on the sharp oval face and the penciled eyebrows, that took flight above the nervous eyes, now white with an exaggerated alarm.