CHAPTER XXVI
Durkin’s first feeling, incongruously enough, once he was out in the open air, was a ravenous sense of hunger. Through all that busy day his only meal had been a hasty and half-eaten breakfast.
His second thought was at once both to submerge and sustain himself in one of those Broadway basement restaurants where men perch on seats and gulp down meals over a seat-fringed counter.
Then he thought of Frances, of her anxiety, of her long waiting, and he tried to tell himself, valiantly enough, that another hour would make little difference, and that they would take their dinner in state and at their ease, at the Beaux-Arts, or at the Ritz, or perhaps even at the St. Regis.
The thought of her gave a sudden, warm glow to the gray flatness of life, born of his hunger and weariness. He pictured her, framed in the gloom of the open doorway, in answer to his knock, the slender oval of her face touched with weariness, her shadowy, brooding, violet eyes grown suddenly alert, even her two warm, woman’s arms open, like a very nest, to receive and hold him, and her motherly young shoulder to shield him. He laughed to himself as he remembered the time that he had described her as the victim of an “ingrowing maternal instinct”—she had always seemed so ready to nurture and guard and cherish. She was a woman, he said to himself—with a sudden, strange foreboding of he knew not what—who ought to have had children. She was one of those deeper and richer natures, he knew, who would always love Love more than she could love men.
“What is electricity?” he had asked her one quiet night, touched into wonder for the familiar miracle, as they bent together over their relay, while an operator five hundred miles away was talking through the darkness. “We live and work and make life tenser with it, and do wonders with it, but, after all, who knows what it is?”
He remembered how the great, shadowy eyes had looked into his face. “And what is love?” she had sighed. “We live and die for it, we see it work its terrible wonders; but who can ever tell us what it is?”
Durkin had forgotten both his hunger and his weariness as he mounted the stairs to his up-town apartment, where, he knew, Frances was waiting for him. He decided, in his playful reaction of mood, to take her by surprise. So he slipped his pass-key silently into the door-lock and was about to fling the door wide when the unexpected sound of voices held him motionless, with his hand still on the knob.
It was Frank herself speaking.
“Oh, Mack, don’t come between him and me now! It’s all I’ve got to live for—his love! I need it—I need him!”
“The devil you do!” said a muttered growl.
“Oh, I do! I always wanted the love of an honest man.”
“An honest man!” again scoffed the deep bass of the other’s voice, with a short little laugh. It was MacNutt who spoke. “An honest man! Then what were you hanging round Sunset Bryan for?”
“Yes, an honest man,” went on the woman’s voice impetuously; “he is honest in his love for me, and that is all I care! Leave him to me, and I’ll give you everything. If it’s money you want, I’ll get you anything—anything in reason! I can still cheat and lie and steal for you, if you like—it was you whotaughtme how to do that!”
Durkin felt that he could stand no more of it; but still he listened, spellbound, incapable of action or thought.
“I’ve got to have money!” agreed MacNutt quietly. “That’s true enough!” Then he added insolently, “But I almost feel I’d rather have you!”
“No, no!” moaned the woman, seemingly in mingled horror and fear of him. “Only wait and I’ll get you what money I have here—every cent of it! It’s in my pocketbook, here, in the front room!”
Durkin could hear her short, hard breath, and the swish of her skirt as she fluttered across the bare floor into the other room. He could hear the other’s easy, half-deprecating, half-mocking laugh; and at the sound of it all the long-banked, smoldering, self-consuming fires of jealous rage that burned within him seemed to leap and burst into relieving flame. An invisible cord seemed to snap before his eyes—it might have been within his very brain, for all he knew.
“And now I kill him!” This one idea spun through his mind, the one living wheel in all the deadened machinery of consciousness.
Darting back until he felt the plaster of the narrow hallway behind him, he flung himself madly forward against the door again. He kicked with the solid flat of his boot-sole as he came, against the light pine, painted and grained to look like oak.
It crashed in like so much kindling, and a second later, white to the very lips, he was in the room, facing MacNutt.
In his hand he held his revolver. It was of blue metal, with the barrel sawed off short. It had once been carried by a Chinaman, and had figured in a Mock Duck Street feud, and had been many times in pawnshops, and had passed through many hands.
As he faced the man he was going to kill it flitted vaguely through Durkin’s mind that somebody—he could not remember who—had said always to shoot for the stomach—it was the easiest, and the surest. He also remembered that his weapon had a rifled barrel, and that the long, twisting bullet would rend and tear and lacerate as it went.
“Before I kill you,” he heard himself saying, and the quietness of his voice surprised even his own ears, “before I kill you, I want to know, once for all, justwhat that woman is to you.”
The other man looked vacantly down at the pistol barrel, within six inches of his own gross stomach. Then he looked at his enemy’s face. A twitching nerve trembled and fluttered on one side of his temple. Only two claret-colored blotches of color remained on his otherwise ashen face.
“For the love of God, Durkin, don’t be a fool!”
MacNutt’s fingers were working spasmodically, and his breath began to come wheezily and heavily.
“I’m going to kill you!” repeated Durkin, in the same level monotone. “But what is that woman to you?”
MacNutt was desperately measuring chance and distance. There was not the shadow of escape through struggle.
“It’s murder!” he gasped, certain that there was no hope.
He could see Durkin’s preparatory jaw-clench.
“You—you wouldn’t get mixed up in cold murder like this!” MacNutt half pleaded, hurriedly and huskily, with his eyes now on the other man’s. “Why, you’d swing for it, Durkin! You’d go to the chair!”
Durkin uttered a foul name, impatiently, and closed out the picture with his shut eyelids as he thrust his right hand forward and down.
He wondered, with lightning-like rapidity of thought, if the blood would stain his hand.
Then he felt a quick bark, and a sudden great spit of pain shot through him.
The gun had exploded, he told himself dreamily, as he staggered to the wall and leaned there weakly, swaying back and forth. But why didn’t MacNutt go down? he asked himself unconcernedly, as he watched with dull eyes where a jet of red blood spurted and pumped regularly from somewhere in his benumbed forearm.
Then he had a thin and far-away vision of Frances, with a smoking revolver in her hand, drifting out from the other room. He seemed to see her floating out, like a bird on the wing almost, to where his own weapon lay, and catch it up, as MacNutt or some vague shadow of him, leaped to put a heavy foot on it.
A hundred miles away, seemingly, he heard her voice in a thin and high treble telling MacNutt to go, or she would shoot him there herself, like a dog.
Succeeding this came a sense of falling, and he found something bound tightly round his arm, and a new dull and throbbing pain as this something twisted and twisted and grew still tighter on the benumbed flesh. Then he felt the weight of a body leaning on his own, where he lay there, and a hand trying to fondle his face and hair.
“Oh, Jim, Jim!” the thin and far-away voice seemed to be wailing, “oh, Jim, I had to do it! I had to—to save you from yourself! You would have killed him. . . . You would have shot him dead. . . . And that would be the end of everything. . . . Don’t you understand, my beloved own?”
Some heavy gray veil seemed to lift away, and the wounded man opened his eyes, and moved uneasily.
“It’s only the arm, poor boy . . . but I know it hurts!”
“What is it?” he asked vacantly.
“It’s only the arm, and not a bone broken! See, I’ve stopped the bleeding, and a week or two of quiet somewhere, and it’ll be all better! Then—then you’ll sit up and thank God for it!”
He could hear her voice more distinctly now, and could feel her hands feverishly caressing his face and hair.
“Speak to me, Jim,” she pleaded, passionately. “You’re all I’ve got—you’re all that’s left to me in the whole wide world!”
He opened his eyes again, and smiled at her; but it was such a wan and broken smile that a tempest of weeping swept over the woman bending above him. He could feel her hot tears scalding his face.
Then she suddenly drew herself up, rigid and tense, for the sound of heavy footsteps smote on her ear. Durkin heard them, too, in his languid and uncomprehending way; he also heard the authoritative knock that came from the hall door.
He surmised that Frank had opened the splintered door, for in the dim sidelight of the hall he could see the flash of metal buttons on the dark blue uniform, and the outline of a patrolman’s cap.
“Anything wrong up here, lady?” the officer was demanding, a little out of breath.
“Dear me, no,” answered her voice in meek and plaintive alarm. Then she laughed a little.
“She is lying—lying—lying,” thought the wounded man, languidly, as he lay there, bleeding in the darkened room, not twelve paces away from her, where the room was stained and blotched and pooled with blood.
“H’m! Folks downstairs said they heard a pistol-shot up here somewhere!”
“Yes, I know; that was the transom blew shut,” she answered glibly. “It nearly frightened the wits out of me, too!” She opened the door wide. “But won’t you come in, and make sure?”
The officer looked up at the transom, wagged his head three times sagely, glanced at the lines of the girl’s figure with open and undisguised admiration, and said it wasn’t worth while. Then he tried to pierce the veil that still hung from her hat and about her smiling face. Then he turned and sauntered off down the stairs, tapping the baluster with his night-stick as he went. Then Durkin tried to struggle to his feet, was stung with a second fierce stab of pain, fell back drowsily, and remembered no more.
Frances waited, pantingly, against the doorpost. She listened there for a second or two, and then crept inside and closed the door after her.
“Thank God!” she gasped fervently, as she tore off her hat and veil once more. “Thank God!”
Then, being only a woman, and weak and hungry and tired, and tried beyond her endurance, she took three evading, half-staggering steps toward Durkin, and fell in a faint over his feet.
The door opened and closed softly; and a figure with an ashen face, blotched with claret-color, slunk into the silent room. Night had closed in by this time, so having listened for a reassuring second or two, he groped slowly across the bare floor. His trembling hand felt a woman’s skirt. Exploring carefully upward, he felt her limp arm, and her face and hair.
Then he came to the figure he was in search of. He ripped open the wet and soggy coat with a deft little pull at the buttons, and thrust a great hungry hand down into the inside breast pocket. The exploring fat fingers found what they were in search of, and held the carefully banded packet up to the uncertain light of the window.
There he tested the edges of the crisp parchment of the bank-notes, and apparently satisfied, hurriedly thrust them down into his own capacious hip-pocket.
Then he crept to the broken door and listened for a minute or two. He opened it cautiously, at last, tip-toed slowly over to the stair-balustrade, and finally turned back and closed the door.
As the latch of the shattered lock fell rattling on the floor a sigh quavered through the room. It was a woman’s sigh, wavering and weak and freighted with weariness, but one of returning consciousness. For, a minute later, a voice was asking, plaintively and emptily, “Where am I?”
CHAPTER XXVII
Often, in looking back on those terrible, phantasmal days that followed, Frances Candler wondered how she had lived through them.
Certain disjointed pictures of the first night and day remained vividly in her memory; unimportant and inconsequential episodes haunted her mind, as graphic and yet as vaguely unrelated as the midday recollection of a night of broken sleep and dream.
One of these memories was the doctor’s hurried question as to whether or not she could stand the sight of a little blood. A second memory was Durkin’s childlike cry of anguish, as she held the bared arm over the sheet of white oilcloth, pungent-odored with its disinfectant. Still another memory was that of the rattle of the little blackened bullet on the floor as it dropped from the jaws of the surgical forceps. A more vague and yet a more pleasing memory was the thought that had come to her, when the wound had been washed and dressed and hidden away under its white bandages, and Durkin himself had been made comfortable on the narrow couch, that the worst was then over, that the damage had been repaired, and that a week or two of quiet and careful nursing would make everything right again.
In this, however, she was sadly mistaken. She had even thought of shyly slipping away and leaving him to sleep through the night alone, until, standing over his bed, she beheld the figure that had always seemed so well-knit and self-reliant and tireless, shaking and trembling in the clutch of an approaching chill. It seemed to tear her very heartstrings, as she gave him brandy, and even flung her own coat and skirt over him, to see him lying there so impotent, so childishly afraid of solitude, so miserably craven, before this unknown enemy of bodily weakness.
As the night advanced the fever that followed on Durkin’s chill increased, his thirst became unappeasable, and from the second leather couch in the back room, where she had flung herself down in utter weariness of nerve and limb, she could hear him mumbling. Toward morning she awakened suddenly, from an hour of sound sleep, and found Durkin out of bed, fighting at his bedroom mantelpiece, protesting, babblingly, that he had seen a blood-red mouse run under the grate and that at all hazard it must be got out.
She led him back to bed, and during the five days that his fever burned through him she never once gave herself up to the luxury of actual sleep. Often, during the day and night, she would fling herself down on her couch, in a condition of half-torpor, but at the least word or sound from him she was astir again.
Then, as his mind grew clearer, and he came to recognize her once more, her earlier sense of loneliness and half-helpless isolation crept away from her. She even grew to take a secret pleasure in giving him his medicine and milk and tablets, in dressing his wound, day by day, in making his pillow more comfortable, in sending the colored hall-boy out after fruit and flowers for him, and in all those duties which broke down the last paling of reserve between them.
And it was a new and unlooked for phase of Frances Candler that Durkin slowly grew to comprehend. The constraint and the quietness of everything seemed to have something akin to a spiritualizing effect on each of them, and it was not long before he waited for her coming and going with a sort of childish wistfulness. Her tenderness of speech and touch and look, her brooding thoughtfulness as she sat beside him, seemed to draw them together more closely than even their old-time most perilous moments had done.
“We’re going to be decent now, aren’t we, Frank?” he said, quietly and joyously one morning.
But there were times when his weakness and stagnation of life and thought gave rise to acute suffering in both of them, times when his imprisonment and his feebleness chafed and galled him. It was agony for her to see him in passionate outbursts, to be forced to stand helplessly by and behold him unmanned and weeping, sometimes when his nervous irritability was at its worst, wantonly and recklessly blaspheming at his fate.
This sinfulness of the flesh she set down to the pain which his arm might be giving him and the unrest which came of many days in bed. As he grew stronger, she told herself, he would be his old, generous-minded and manly self once more.
But Durkin gained strength very slowly. A rent-day came around, and rather than remind him of it Frances slipped out, on a rainy afternoon, and pawned her rings to get money for the payment.
It was as she was creeping shamefaced out of the pawnshop that she looked up and caught sight of a passing automobile. It was a flashing sports-model with a lemon-colored body, and in it, beside a woman with lemon-colored hair, sat MacNutt, gloved, silk-hatted and happy-looking.
At first she beheld the two with an indeterminate feeling of relief. Then a hot wave of resentment swept over her, as she watched them drive away through the fine mist. A consuming sense of the injustice of it all took possession of her, as her thoughts went back to the day of the theft, and she remembered what a little and passing thing Durkin’s money would be to MacNutt, the spender, the prodigal liver, while to her and to Durkin it had meant so much! She knew, too, that he would soon be asking about it; and this brought a new misery into her life.
It was, indeed, only a day or two later that he said to her:
“Do you know, I’m glad we didn’t take that girl’s money—the Van Schaick girl, I mean. It was all our own from the first!”
Frances did not answer.
“She was a decent sort of girl, really, wasn’t she?” he asked again, once more looking up at her.
“I wish I had a woman like that for a friend,” Frances said, at last. “Do you know, Jim, it is years and years since I have had a woman friend. Yes, yes, my beloved own, I know I have you, but that is so different.”
He nodded his head sorrowfully, and stretched out his hand for hers.
“You’re better than all of ’em!” he said fondly.
They were both silent for several minutes.
“We’re going to be decent now, aren’t we, Frank?” he went on at last, quietly, joyously.
“Yes, Jim, from now on.”
“I was just thinking, this town has got to know us a little too well by this time. When we start over we’ll have to migrate, I suppose.” Then he smiled a little. “We ought to be thankful, Frank, they haven’t got us both pinned up by the Bertillon system, down at Headquarters!”
“I’d defy Bertillon himself to find you,” she laughed, “underneath that two weeks’ beard.”
He rubbed his hand over his stubbled chin, absent-mindedly.
“Where shall we go, when we migrate?” he asked, not unhappily.
She gazed with unseeing eyes through the window, out over the house-top.
“I know a little south of England village,” she said, in her soft, flute-like contralto, “I know a little village, nestling down among green hills, a little town of gardens and ivy and walls and thatches, in a country of brooks and hawthorn hedges—a little village where the nightingales sing at night, and the skylarks sing by day, and the old men and women have rosy faces, and the girls are shy and soft-spoken—”
“But we’d die of loneliness in that sort of place, wouldn’t we?”
“No, Jim, we should get more out of life than you dream. Then, in the winter, we could slip over to Paris and the Riviera, or down to Rome—it can be done cheaply, if one knows how—and before you realized it you would be used to the quiet and the change, and even learn to like it.”
“Yes,” he said wearily. “I’ve had too much of this wear-and-tear life—even though it has its thrill now and then. It’s intoxicating enough, but we’ve both had too much of this drinking wine out of a skull. Even at the best it’s feasting on a coffin-lid, isn’t it?”
She was still gazing out of the window with unseeing eyes.
“And there is so much to read, and study, and learn,” Durkin himself went on, more eagerly. “I might get a chance to work out my amplifier then, as I used to think I would, some day. If I could once get that sort of relay sensitive enough, and worked out the way I feel it can be worked out, you would be able to sit in Chicago and talk right through to London!”
“But how?” she asked.
“I always wanted to get a link between the cable and the ordinary Morse recorder, and I know it can be done. Then—who knows—I might in time go Lee De Forest one better, and have my amplifier knock his old-fashioned electrolytic out of business, for good.”
Then he fell to talking about wireless and transmitters and conductors, and suddenly broke into a quiet chuckle of laughter.
“I don’t think I ever told you about the fun we had down in that Broadway conduit. It was after the fire in the Subway and the Postal-Union terminal rooms. A part of the conduit roof had been cleared away by the firemen. Well, while we were working down there a big Irish watering-cart driver thought he’d have some fun with us, and every time he passed up and down with his cart he’d give us a shower. It got monotonous, after the fourth time or so, and the boys began to cuss. I saw that his wagon was strung with metal from one end to the other. I also knew that water was a good enough conductor. So I just exposed a live wire of interesting voltage and waited for the water-wagon. The driver came along as bland and innocent-looking as a baby. Then he veered over and doused us, the same as ever. Then the water and the wire got together. That Irishman gave one jump—he went five feet up in the air, and yelled—oh, how he yelled!—and ran like mad up Broadway, with a policeman after him, thinking he’d suddenly gone mad, trying to soothe him and quiet him down!”
And Durkin chuckled again, at the memory of it all. The sparrows twittered cheerily about the sunlit window-sill. The woman did not know what line of thought he was following, but she saw him look down at his bandaged arm and then turn suddenly and say:
“What a scarred and battered-up pair we’d be, if we had to keep at this sort of business all our lives!”
Then he lay back among the pillows, and closed his eyes.
“I say, Frank,” he spoke up unexpectedly, “where are you taking care of that—er—of that money?”
Her hands fell into her lap, and she looked at him steadily. Even before she spoke she could see the apprehension that leaped into his colorless face.
“No, no; we mustn’t talk more about that today!” she tried to temporize.
“You don’t mean,” he cried, rising on his elbow, “that anything has happened to it?”
He demanded an answer, and there was no gain-saying him.
“There is no money, Jim!” she said slowly and quietly. And in as few words as she could she told him of the theft.
It was pitiable, to her, to see him, already weak and broken as he was, under the crushing weight of this new defeat. She had hoped to save him from it, for a few more days at least. But now he knew; and he reviled MacNutt passionately and profanely, and declared that he would yet get even, and moaned that it was the end of everything, and that all their fine talk and all their plans had been knocked in the head forever, and that now they would have to crawl and slink through life living by their wits again, cheating and gambling and stealing when and where they could.
All this Frances feared and dreaded and expected; but desperately and forlornly she tried to buoy up his shattered spirits and bring back to him some hope for the future.
She told him that he could work, that they could live more humbly, as they had once done years before, when she had taught little children music and French, and he was a telegraph agent up at the lonely little Canadian junction-station of Komoka, with a boarding-house on one side of him and a mile of gravel-pit on the other.
“And if I have you, Jim, what more do I want in life?” she cried out, as she turned and left him, that he might not see the misery and the hopelessness on her own face.
“Oh, why didn’t you let me kill him!” he called out passionately after her. But she did not turn back, for she hated to see him unmanned and weeping like a woman.
CHAPTER XXVIII
“Surely this is Indian Summer—strayed or stolen!” said Frank one morning a few days later, as she wheeled Durkin and his big arm-chair into the sunlight by the open window.
His arm was healing slowly, and his strengthwas equally slow in coming back to him. Yet she was not altogether unhappy during those fleeting days of work and anxiety.
Her darkest moments were those when she saw that Durkin was fretting over the loss of his ill-gained fortune, burning with his subterranean fires of hatred for MacNutt, and inwardly vowing that he would yet live to have his day.
She was still hoping that time, the healer, would in some way attend to each of his wounds, though that of the spirit, she knew, was the deeper of the two. Yet from day to day she saw that his resentment lay sourly embedded in him, like a bullet; her only hope was that what nature could neither reject nor absorb it would in due time encyst with indifference. So if she herself became a little infected with his spirit of depression, she struggled fiercely against it and showed him only the cheeriest inglenooks of her many-chambered emotions.
“See, it’s almost like spring again!” she cried joyously, as she leaned over his chair and watched the morning sunlight, misty and golden on the city house-tops.
The window-curtains swayed and flapped in the humid breeze; the clatter of feet on the asphalt, the rumble of wheels and the puff and whir of passing automobiles came up to them from the street below.
“It seems good to be alive!” she murmured pensively, as she slipped down on the floor and sat in the muffled sunlight, leaning against his knees. There was neither timidity nor self-consciousness in her attitude, as she sat there companionably, comfortably, with her thoughts far away.
For a long time Durkin looked down at her great tumbled crown of chestnut hair, glinting here and there with its touch of reddish gold. He could see the quiet pulse beating in the curved ivory of her throat.
She grew conscious of his eyes resting on her, in time, and turned her face solemnly up to him. He held it there, with the oval of her chin caught in the hollow of his hand.
“Frank, there’s something I’m going to ask you, for the twentieth time!”
She knew what it was even before he spoke. But she did not stop him, for this new note of quiet tenderness in his voice had taken her by surprise.
“Frank, can’t you—won’t you marry me, now?”
She shook her head mournfully.
“Isn’t it enough that I’m near you and can help you, and that we can both still go and come as we want to?”
“No, I get only the little fragments of your life, and I want all of it. If you can’t do it willingly, of course, it’s as silly for me to demand it as to try to nail that sunbeam down to the floor there! But tell me, has there ever been another?”
“No, never, Jim!” she cried. “There was never any one who could make me so happy—and so miserable,—who could make me so unsatisfied with myself and with my life!”
He studied her upturned face. In it he imagined he could see all the old opposition of the dual and strangely contending nature. About the shadowy eyes seemed to lurk the weariness and the rebelliousness of the inwardly pure woman who had been driven to face life in its more dubious phases, the woman who had broken laws and essayed great hazards with him. Yet about the fresh young mouth remained all the pride and virginal purity of the woman whose inward life was till virginal and pure. In this, he felt, lay the bitterest thing of all. She was still a good woman, but the memory of how, through the dark and devious ways of the career that seemed to have engulfed her, she had fought and struggled for that almost incongruous purity of mind and body, remained to him a tragic and autumnal emblem of what her unknown earlier, April-like goodness of girlish soul must have been. He sighed as he thought of it, before he began to speak again, for it gave him the haunting impression that he had been cheated out of something; that the beauty and rapture of that Aprilian girlhood should have been his, and yet had eluded him.
“Even though there had been another,” he went on quietly, “I don’t believe it would count. Isn’t it strange how we all beat and flutter and break our wings around a beautiful face! One face, just a little softer, one woman’s eyes, just a little deeper, and one voice, a little mellower; and dear me, dear me—how this wayward mortal passion of ours throbs and beats and surges about it! One beautiful face, and it sends world-history all awry, and brings out armies and changes maps, and makes men happy or miserable, as it likes!”
“That’s the first time I ever knew you were a poet!” she cried in almost a coo of pride.
His hand lay heavily on her crown of tumbled gold hair. “Won’t you marry me?” he asked again, as quietly as before.
“Oh, Jim,” she cried, “I’m afraid of it! I’m afraid of myself, and of you!”
“But see what we’ve been through together—the heights and the depths. And we never hated each other, there!”
“But there were times, I know there were times when you might have, if you were tied to me! We were each free to go and come. But it’s not that, Jim, I’m so afraid of. It’s the keeping on at what we have been doing, the danger of not keeping decent, of getting our thoughts and feelings deadened, of getting our hearts macadamized. That’s why I could never marry you until we are both honest once more!”
“But if I do try to get decent—I can’t promise to turn angel all at once, you know!—if Idotry to be decent, then will you marry me, and help me along?”
“I don’t look for miracles,—neither of us can be all good, anyway; it’s the trying to be good!”
“But wehavetried—so often!”
“Who was it said that the Saints were only the sinners who kept on trying?”
“Wasn’t there a bishop in your family?” he asked, with a quizzical little upthrust of his mouth corners.
“A bishop?” she asked, all gravity.
“There must have been a bishop, somewhere—you take to preaching so easily!”
“It’s only to make it easier for you,” she reproved him. Then she added drearily, “Heaven knows, I’m not self-righteous!”
“Then take me as I am, and you will be making it easier for me!”
“I could, Jim, if I thought you would begin by doing one thing.”
“And that is?”
“Not try to get even with MacNutt.”
She could feel the galvanic movement of uncontrol that sped down his knees.
“When that damned welcher gives me back what is mine, fair and square and honest, then he can go his way and I’ll go mine—but not before!”
“But,wasit fair and square and honest?”
“About as much so as most of the money people get—and I’m going to have it!”
“And that means going back to all the old mean, humiliating ways, to the old, degrading dodges, and the old, incessant dangers!”
“But it’s ours, that money—every cent of it—it’s what we’ve got to have to start over again with!”
“Then you will scheme and plot and fight for it? And keep on and on and on, struggling in this big quicksand of wrong-doing, until we are deeper than ever?”
“Doyouforgive MacNutt?”
“No, I do not! I can’t, for your sake. But I would rather lie and scheme and plot myself than see you do it. A woman is different—I don’t know how or why it is, but in some way she has a fiercer furnace of sacrifice. If her wickedness is for another, her very love burns away all the dross of deceit and selfishness!”
“I hate to hear you talk that way, when you know you’re good and true as gold, through and through. And I want you to be my wife, Frank, no matter what it costs or what it means.”
“But will you make this promise?”
“It’s—it’s too hard onyou! Think of the grind and the monotony and the skimping! And besides, supposing you saw a chance to get the upper hand of MacNutt in some way, would you fold your hands and sigh meekly and let it slip past?”
“I can’t promise thatIwould! But it’s you I’m afraid of, and that I’m trying to guard and protect and save from yourself!”
She caught up his free hand and held it closely in her own.
“Listen,” he broke in irrelevantly, “there’s a hurdy-gurdy somewhere down in the street! Hear it?”
The curtains swayed in the breeze; the street sounds crept to them, muffled and far away.
“Can’t you promise?” she pleaded.
“I could promise you anything, Frank,” he said after a long pause. “Yes,” he repeated, “I promise.”
She crept closer to him, and with a little half-stifled, half-hungry cry held his face down to her own. He could feel the abandon of complete surrender in the most intimate warmth of her mouth, as it sought and clung to his own.
When her uplifted arms that had locked about his neck once more fell away, and the heavy head of dull gold sank capitulatingly down on his knee, the hurdy-gurdy had passed out of hearing, and the lintel-shadow had crept down to where they sat.
CHAPTER XXIX
On the following afternoon Frances Candler and Durkin were quietly married.
It was a whim of Durkin’s that the ceremony should take place on Broadway, “on the old alley,” as he put it, “where I’ve had so many ups and downs.” So, his arm in a black silk sling, and she in a gown of sober black velvet, with only a bunch of violets bought from an Italian boy on a street corner, they rode together in a taxi-cab to the rectory of Grace Church.
To the silent disappointment of each of them the rector was not at home. They were told, indeed, that it would be impossible for a marriage service to be held at the church that afternoon. A little depressed, inwardly, at this first accidental cross-thread of fate, they at once made their way up Fifth Avenue to the Church of the Transfiguration.
“The way we ought to do it,” said Frances, as they rode up the undulating line of the Avenue, “would be to have it all carried on over a long-distance telephone. We should have had some justice of the peace in Jersey City ring us up at a certain time, and send the words of the service over the wire. That would have been more in the picture. Then you should have twisted up an emergency wedding ring of KK wire, and slipped it on my finger, and then cut in on a Postal-Union or an Associated Press wire and announced the happy event to the world!”
She rattled bravely on in this key, for she had noticed, in the strong sidelight of the taxi-window, that he looked pale and worn and old, seeming, as he sat there at her side, only a shadow of the buoyant, resilient, old-time Durkin that she had once known.
The service was read in the chapel, by a hurried and deep-voiced English curate, who shook hands with them crisply but genially, before unceremoniously slipping off his surplice. He wished them much happiness. Then he told them that the full names would have to be signed in the register, as a report of the service must be sent to the Board of Health, and that it was customary to give the sexton and his assistant two dollars each for acting as witnesses.
Frances noticed Durkin’s little wince at the obtrusion of this unlooked-for sordidness, though he glanced up and smiled at her reassuringly as he wrote in the register, “James Altman Durkin,” and waited for her to sign “Frances Edith Candler.”
The service, in some way, had utterly failed to impress Durkin as it ought. The empty seats of the chapel, with only one pew crowded with a little line of tittering, whispering schoolgirls, who had wandered in out of idle curiosity, the hurriedly mumbled words of the curate—he afterward confessed to them that this was his third service since luncheon—the unexpected briefness of the ceremony itself, the absence of those emblems and rituals which from time immemorial had been associated with marriage in his mind—these had combined to attach to the scene a teasing sense of unreality.
It was only when the words, “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” were repeated that he smiled and looked down at the woman beside him. She caught his eye and laughed a little, as she turned hurriedly away, though he could see the tear-drops glistening on her eyelashes.
She held his hand fiercely in her own, as they rode from the little ivy-covered church, each wondering at the mood of ineloquence weighing down the other.
“Do you know,” she said, musingly, “I feel as though I had been bought and sold, that I had been tied up and given to you, that—oh, that I had been nailed on to you with horseshoe nails! Do you feel any difference?”
“I feel as though I had been cheated out of something—it’s so hard to express!—that I ought to have found another You when I turned away from the railing; that I ought to be carrying off a different You altogether—and yet—yet here you are, the same old adorable You, with not a particle of change!”
“After all, what is it? Why, Jim dear, we were married, in reality, that afternoon I opened the door to MacNutt’s ring and saw you standing there looking in at me as though you had seen a ghost!”
“No, my own, we were joined together and made one a million years ago, you and I, in some unknown star a million million miles away from this old earth; and through all those years we have only wandered and drifted about, looking for each other!”
“Silly!” she said happily, with her slow, English smile.
In the gloom of the taxi-cab, with a sudden impulsive little movement of the body, she leaned over and kissed him.
“You forgot that,” she said joyously, from the pillow of his shoulder. “You forgot about that in the chapel!”
They drifted down through what seemed a shadowy and far-away city, threading their course past phantasmal carriages and spectral crowds engrossed in their foolish little ghost-like businesses of buying and selling, of coming and going.
“You’re all I’ve got now,” she murmured again, with irrelevant dolefulness.
Her head still rested on the hollow of his shoulder. His only answer was to draw the warmth and clinging weight of her body closer to him.
“And you’ll have to die some day!” she wailed in sudden misery. And though he laughingly protested that she was screwing him down a little too early in the game, she reached up with her ineffectual arms and flung them passionately about him, much as she had done before, as though such momentary guardianship might shield him from both life and death itself, for all time to come.