The Side Of The Angels Part 9

"What else did he say? Tell me all you can think of."

She narrated the brief incident.

"Will it make any difference to us?" she ventured to ask.

"It'll make a difference to us if he blabs to father. Of course!"

"What sort of difference, Claude?"

"The sort of difference it makes when there's the devil to pay."

She clasped him to her the more closely. "Does that mean that we shouldn't be able to see each other any more?"

The question being beyond him, Claude smothered it under a selection of those fond epithets in which his vocabulary was large. In the very process of enjoying them Rosie was rallying her strength. She was still clasping him as she withdrew her head slightly, looking up at him through the moonlight.

"Claude, I want to ask you something."

With his hand on the knot of her hair, he pressed her face once more against his. "Yes, yes, darling. Ask me anything. Yes, yes, yes, yes."

She broke in on his purring with the words, "Are we engaged?"

The purring ceased. Without relaxing his embrace he remained pa.s.sive, like a man listening. "What makes you ask me that?"

"It's what people generally are when they're--when they're like us, isn't it?"

Brushing his lips over the velvet of her cheeks, he began to purr again.

"No one was ever like us, darling. No one ever will be. Don't worry your little head with what doesn't matter."

"But it does matter to me, Claude. I want to know where I am."

"Where you are, dearie. You're here with me. Isn't that enough?"

"It's enough for now, Claude, but--"

"And isn't what's enough for now all we've got to think of?"

"No, Claude dearest. A girl isn't like a man--"

"Oh yes, she is, when she loves. And you love me, don't you, dearie? You love me just a little. Say you love me--just a little--a very little--"

"Oh, Claude, my darling, my darling, you know I love you. You're all I've got in the world--"

"And you're all I've got, my little Rosie. Nothing else counts when I'm with you--"

"But when you're not with me, Claude? What then? What am I to think when you're away from me? What am I to be?"

"Be just as you are. Be just as you've always been since the day I first saw you--"

"Yes, yes, Claude; but you don't understand. If any one were to find out that I came here to meet you like this--"

"No one must find out, dear. We must keep that mum."

"But if they did, Claude, it wouldn't matter to you at all--"

"Oh, wouldn't it, though? Father'd make it matter, I can tell you."

"Yes, but you wouldn't be disgraced. I should be. Don't you see? No one would ever believe--"

"Oh, what does it matter what any one believes. Let them all go hang."

"We can't let them all go hang. You can't let your father go hang, and I can't let mine. Do you know what my father would do to me if he knew where I am now? He'd kill me."

"Oh, rot, Rosie!"

"No, no, Claude; I'm telling you the truth. He's that sort. You wouldn't think it, but he is. He's one of those mild, dreamy men who, when they're enraged--which isn't often--don't know where to stop. If he thought I'd done wrong he'd put a knife into me, just like that." She struck her clenched hand against his heart. "When Matt was arrested--"

He tore himself from her suddenly. The sensitive part of him had been touched. "Oh, Lord, Rosie, don't let's go into that. I hate that business. I try to forget it."

"No one can forget it who remembers me."

"Oh yes, they can. _I_ can--when you don't drag it up. What's the use, Rosie? Why not be happy for the few hours every now and then that we can get together? What's got into you?" He changed his tone. "You hurt me, Rosie, you hurt me. You talk as if you didn't trust me. You seem to have suspicions, to be making schemes--"

"Oh, Claude! For G.o.d's sake!" Rosie, too, was touched on the quick, perhaps by some truth in the accusation.

He kissed her ardently. "I know, dear; I know. I know it's all right--that you don't mean anything. Kiss me. Tell me you won't do it any more--that you won't hurt the man who adores you. What does anything else matter? You and I are everything there is in the world. Don't let us talk. When we've got each other--"

Rosie gave it up, for the present at any rate. She began to perceive dimly that they had different conceptions of love. For her, love was engagement and marriage, with the material concomitants the two states implied. But for Claude love was something else. It was something she didn't understand, except that it was indifferent to the orderly procession by which her own ambitions climbed. He loved her; of that she was sure. But he loved her for her face, her mouth, her eyes, her hair, the color of her skin, her roughened little hands, her lithe little body. Of nothing else in her was he able to take cognizance. Her hard life and her heart-breaking struggles were conditions he hadn't the eyes to see. He was aware of them, of course, but he could detach her from them. He could detach her from them for the minutes she spent with him, but he could see her go back to them and make no attempt to follow her in sympathy.

But he loved her beauty. There was that palliating fact. After all, Rosie was a woman, and here was the supreme tribute to her womanhood. It was not everything, and yet it was the thing enchanting. It was the kind of tribute any woman in the world would have put before social rescue or moral elevation, and Rosie was like the rest. She could be lulled by Claude's endearments as a child is lulled by a cradle-song. With this music in her ears doubts were stilled and misgivings quieted and ambitions overruled. Return to the world of care and calculation followed only on Claude's words uttered just as they were parting.

"And you'd better be on your guard against Thor. So long as he's going to your house you mustn't give anything away."

CHAPTER VIII

Dressed for going out, Mrs. Willoughby was b.u.t.toning her gloves as she stood in the square hall hung with tapestries of a late Gobelins period and adorned with a cabinet in the style of Buhl flanked by two decorative Regency chairs. Her gaze followed the action of her fingers or wandered now and then inquiringly up the stairway.

Her broad, low figure, wide about the hips, tapered toward the feet in lines suggestive of a spinning-top. She was proud of her feet, which were small and shapely, and approved of a fashion in skirts that permitted them to be displayed. Being less proud of her eyes, she also approved of a style of hat which allowed the low, sloping brim, worn slantwise across the brows, to conceal one of them.

"You're surely not going in that rag!"

The protest was called forth by Lois's appearance in a walking-costume on the stairs.

"But, mamma, I'm not going at all. I told you so."

"Told me so! What's the good of telling me so? There'll be loads of men there--simply loads. Goodness me! Lois, if you're ever going to know any men at all--"