The Side Of The Angels Part 50

He studied her awhile, with eyes that seemed to read her secret. "What for?"

"To see the country, I suppose. My last letter was from Colorado Springs."

He dropped back into the chair with a tired sigh of relief. "All right.

I'll stay to dinner. Thanks."

She allowed him to rest, asking no more questions than she could help till dinner was over and they had come out again on the portico, so that he might have his cigar in the cool, scented evening air. She was more at ease with him, too, now that she could no longer see the suffering in his pinched, emaciated face.

"Claude, why did you come home?"

He withdrew the cigar from his lips just long enough to say, "Because I couldn't stay away."

"Why couldn't you?"

"Because I couldn't."

"Don't you think it would have been well to make the effort?"

"What was the good of making the effort when I couldn't keep it up?"

"But you kept it up for a while."

"Not after--after I heard."

"Heard about Rosie?"

He made an inarticulate sound of a.s.sent.

"What did you hear?"

"I heard--what she did."

"How? Who told you?"

"That chump Billy Cheever. Wrote me."

"How did he know it had anything to do with you?"

"Oh, I was fool enough to tell him about her once--and so he caught on to it. Put two and two together, I suppose, when he heard that--that--"

She seized the opportunity to make the first incision toward getting in her point. "That she threw herself into the pond? Did he say that Jim Breen dived after her and brought her up?"

He answered indifferently. "He said some one did. He didn't say who."

"It was Jim. He saved her." As the statement evoked no response, she continued, "Claude, what did you come home _for_?"

Again he withdrew his cigar from his mouth, looking at her obliquely.

"To marry her."

She allowed some time to elapse before saying, "Claude, I don't think you will."

"Oh yes, I shall."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Because I am."

"I'm not. Or, rather, if I _am_ sure--it's the other way."

He sprang up, seizing her by the arm over which there was nothing but a gauze scarf by way of covering. "Lois, for G.o.d's sake! What do you mean?

You know something. Tell me. She hasn't gone away with Thor, has she?"

She, too, sprang up, shaking off his hand as if it had been a serpent.

"You fool! Don't touch me! She'll marry Jim Breen. She'll be in love with him in a week or two."

It was all over in an instant, but the blaze in her eyes seemed literally to knock him down. He fell back into the deck-chair again, though he sat astride on it with his feet on the floor, covering his face with his hands.

"I beg your pardon, Lois," he muttered, humbly. "I don't know what I'm saying."

"No, you don't," she agreed, speaking breathlessly because the leaping of her heart was so wild; "but that's hardly an excuse for taking leave altogether of your senses."

He continued to mutter into his hands. "I'm crazy! I'm drunk! I'm stark mad! But, oh, Lois, if you knew what I've been through you wouldn't mind."

The hot anger that had rolled over her with a wrath such as she had never felt before began to roll away again, leaving her sick and shivering. It was an excuse for going into the house to find a cloak and for getting the minute's respite necessary to self-control. To regain it--to overcome that throb of her being of which the after effect was a faintness unto death--she was obliged to walk steadily, holding her head high. She was obliged, too, to repent of the tigress impulse with which she had turned on Claude, flinging in his face that for which she had meant to prepare him by degrees. The fact that it had seemingly pa.s.sed over his head was no palliation to the outrage. As she mounted the stairs and went to her room she repeated her own formula: "_Nothing that isn't kind and well thought out beforehand._" What she had said had been neither well thought out nor kind, but the temptation had been overwhelming. For the instant it had seemed secondary that Thor hadn't taken Rosie to the West, since Claude, who knew so much more of the inner history of the episode than she did herself, had thought such an action possible. More clearly than ever before she saw that some appalling struggle for the possession of the little creature must have taken place, and that it had been going on during those months when life was apparently so peaceful and she had been living in her fool's paradise. It was not till he had lost the fight that Thor had come to her in the snow-bound woods with the twitter of birds and the deep music of the tree-tops accompanying those half-truths she had been eager to believe. She herself had been fatuous and vain in a.s.suming that he could love her; but if there was little to say for her, there was nothing at all to be said for him. He had been the more false for the reason that, as far as he went, he had been sincere. It was his very sincerity that had tricked her. Less than at any time since the day when he had stammered out his futile explanations did she feel it possible to pardon him.

But there was something else. Now, if she chose, she could _know_. In his present state of mind Claude would betray anything. She had only to question him, to throw the emphasis adroitly here or there, and the whole story would come out. It was like having a key come into her hands--a key that would unlock all those mysteries which were her terror. She was still irresolute, however, as to using it after she had taken an old opera-cloak from a wardrobe, thrown it over her shoulders, and gone down=stairs again.

She found Claude as she had left him--astride on the deck-chair, his face in his hands, the burning end of the cigar that protruded between his fingers making a point of light. The abject att.i.tude moved her to pity in spite of everything. She herself remained standing, her tall figure thrown into dim relief between two of the white Corinthian pillars of the portico. By standing, it seemed to her obscurely, she could more easily escape if any such awful revelation as she was afraid of were to spring on her against her will. She could almost feel it waiting for her in the depths of the heavy-scented darkness.

For the minute, however, the folly of Claude's return was the matter immediately to be dealt with; to get him to go away again was the end to be attained. It was with this in view, as well as with a measure of compa.s.sion, that she said:

"You poor Claude! You _have_ been through things, haven't you?"

The answer came laconically: "Been in h.e.l.l."

"Yes, that's what I thought," she agreed, simply. "I thought it the instant you came round the corner this afternoon. But why? For what reason--exactly?"

He lifted his haunted face, stammering out his recital in a way that reminded her of Thor. She could see that he had profited by his mistake of a few minutes earlier, and that just as Thor had tried to tell Claude's story without involving his own, so Claude was endeavoring to spare her by doing the same thing. Being able to supply the blanks more accurately now than on the former occasion, she found a kind of poignant, torturing amus.e.m.e.nt in fitting her knowledge in.

He began with his first meeting with Rosie, describing the scene. He had not taken the adventure seriously, not any more than he had taken a dozen similar. Girls like that could generally be thrown off as easily as they were taken on, and they bore you no ill-will for the change. As a matter of fact, a new flirtation generally began where the old one ended, which made part of the fun for the girl as for the man. He was speaking of respectable girls, Lois was to understand--village girls, shop girls, and others of the higher wage-earning variety, who didn't mind showing a spice of devil before they married and settled down. Lots of them didn't, and were no worse for it in the end. It had not occurred to him that Rosie would be different from others of the cla.s.s, or that she would take in deadly earnest what was no more than play for him.

When he had made this discovery he had tried to withdraw, but only with the result of becoming involved more deeply. Over the processes by which he was led finally to pledge himself he grew incoherent, as also over the signs which caused him to suspect that Rosie was playing fast and loose with him. His mutterings as to "somebody else who was in love with her" and who was "ready to put up money" threw her back on memories of his uneasy questions concerning Thor on the evenings after the return from the honeymoon. It was with a sense of the key slipping into the lock that she said:

"And that made you jealous?"

"As the devil. It was because it did that I knew I couldn't give her up--that I'd never let her go."

There was sincere curiosity in her tone as she asked the question, "But, Claude, why did you?"