Told in a French Garden Part 19

She knew afterward that it was only five hours and a half, but that five hours and a half were an eternity--three hundred and thirty minutes, each one of which dragged her down, like a weight, into the black abyss of the unknown; three hundred and thirty minutes of listening to the labored beating of her own heart--it was an age, after all!

Only once did she lose control of herself. She imagined she heard voices in the hall--that some one laughed--was there still laughter in the world? In spite of herself, she rushed to the door, and pounded on it. This was so useless that she began to cry hysterically. Yet she knew how foolish that was, and she stumbled back to her chair, sank into it, and calmed herself. She would not do that again.

What was her mother thinking? Poor mama! What would Jack say, when, at eleven o'clock, he ran in from his bachelor's dinner--his last--which he was giving to a few friends? What would her father say?

He had always prophesied some disaster for her excursions into the slums.

Her imagination could easily picture the mad search that would be made--but who could find a trace of her?

The blackness, the fear, the dread, were doing their work! She was numb! She began to feel as if she were suspended in s.p.a.ce, as if everything had dropped away from her, as if in another instant she would fall--and fall--and fall--.

Suddenly she heard a laugh in the hall again--this time there was no mistake about it, for it was followed by several voices. Some one approached the door.

A key was inserted and turned in the lock.

She started to her feet, and steadied herself!

The door swung open quickly--some one entered. By the dim light in the hall behind, she saw that it was a man--a gentleman in evening clothes, with a hat on the back of his head, and a coat over his arm.

But while her alert senses took that in, the door closed again--the man had remained inside.

The thought of making a dash for the door came to her, but it was too late.

She heard the scratching of a match--a muttered oath at the darkness in a thick voice--then a sudden flood of light blinded her.

She drew her hands quickly across her eyes, and was conscious that the man had flung his hat and coat on the bed before he turned to face her.

In a moment all her fear was gone.

She stumbled weakly as she ran toward him, crying hysterically, "Jack, dear Jack, how did you find me? I should have gone mad if you had been much later! Take me home! Take me home--"

Had Miss Moreland fainted, as a well-conducted girl of her cla.s.s ought to have done, this would have been a very different kind of a story.

Unluckily, or luckily, according as one views life--in the relief of his presence, all danger of that fled. Unluckily for him, also, the appearance of his bride-elect in such an unexpected place was so appalling to him that his nerve failed him entirely. Instead of clasping her in his arms as he should have done, he had the decency to recoil, and cover his face instinctively from her eyes.

Miss Moreland stopped as if turned to stone.

She was conscious at first of but one thing--he had not expected to find her there. He had not come to seek her. Then, for what?

A sudden flash illumined her ignorance, and behind it she grasped at the vague accusation her other suitor had tried to make to her unwilling ears.

Her outstretched hands fell to her sides.

He still leaned against the wall, where the shock had flung him. The exciting fumes of the wine he had drunk too recklessly evaporated, and only a dim recollection remained in his absolutely sobered brain of the idiotic wager, the ugly jest, the still more contemptible bravado that had sent him into this h.e.l.l.

He did not attempt to speak.

When her strained voice said: "Take me home, please," he started and the fear that had been on her face was now on his. A hundred dangers, of which she did not dream, stood between that room and a safe exit in which she should not be seen, and that much of this wretched business--which he understood now only too well--miscarry.

He started for the door. "Stay here," he said. "You are perfectly safe," and he went out, and closed and locked the door behind him.

For the man who plotted without, and the woman who sat like a stone within that room, the next half hour were equally horrible. But time was no longer measured by her!

She never remembered much more of that evening. She had a vague recollection that he came back. She had a remembrance that he had helped her stand--given her a gla.s.s of water--and led her down the uncarpeted stairs out into the street. Then she was conscious that she walked a little way. Then that she had been helped into a carriage, and then she had jolted and jolted and jolted over the pavings, always with his pale face opposite, and she knew that his eyes were full of pity. Then everything seemed to stop, but it was only the carriage that had come to a standstill. She was in front of her own door.

A voice said in her ear, "Can you stand?" And she knew she was on the steps. She heard the bell ring, but before her mother could catch her in her arms as she fell, she heard the carriage door bang, and he was gone forever.

All that night she lay and tossed and wept and raved, and longed in her fever to die.

And all night, he walked the streets marvelling at himself, at Nature, and at Civilization, between which he had so disastrously fallen, and wondering to how many men the irremediable had ever happened before.

And the next morning, early, messengers were flying about with notices of the bride's illness.--Miss Moreland's wedding was deferred by brain fever.

When she recovered, her hair was white, and she had lost all taste for matrimony, but she had found instead that desire for anything rather than personal existence, which made her the ardent, self-abnegating worker for the welfare of the downtrodden that the world knew her.

There was a moment of surprised silence.

Some one coughed. No one laughed. Then the Journalist, always ready to leap into a breach, gasped: "Horrible!"

"Getting to be a pet word of yours," said the Lawyer.

The Violinist tried to save the situation by saying gently: "Well, I don't know. It is the commonest of all situations in a melodrama. So why fuss?"

The Trained Nurse shrugged her shoulders. "I know that story," she said.

"You do not," snapped the Lawyer. "You may know _a_ story, but you never heard that one."

"All right," she admitted. "I am not going to add footnotes, don't be alarmed."

"You don't mean to say that is a true story?" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the Divorcee.

"As for me," said the Critic, "I don't believe it."

"No one asked you to," replied the Lawyer. "It is only another case of the Doctor's pet theory--that whatever the mind of mortal mind can conceive, can come to pa.s.s."

"I suppose also that it is a proof of another of his pet theories.

Scratch civilized man, and you find the beast."

The Doctor was lying back in his chair. He never said a word. Somehow the story seemed a less suggestive topic of conversation than usual.

"The weather is going to change," said the Doctor. "There's rain in the air."

"Well, anyway," said the Journalist, as we gathered up our belongings and prepared to shut up for the night, "the Youngster's ghost story was a good night cap compared to that."

"Not a bit of it," said the Critic. "There's the foundation of a bully melodrama in that story, and I'm not sure that it isn't the best one yet--so full of reserves."

"No imagination, all the same," answered the Critic. "As realistic in subject, if not in treatment, as Zola."