CHAPTER XXX
Frances sent Durkin on alone to the Chelsea, where, he had finally agreed, they were to take rooms for a week at least. There, she argued, they could live frugally, and there they could escape from the old atmosphere, from the old memories and associations that hour by hour had seemed to grow more unlovely in her eyes.
On wisely reckless second thought, she ran into a florist’s and bought an armful of roses. These she thrust up into the taxi-seat beside him, explaining that he was to scatter them about their rooms, so that he could be in the midst of them when she came. Then she stood at the curb, watching him drive off, demanding of herself whether, after all, some Indian Summer of happiness were not due to her, wondering whether she were still asking too much of life.
Then she climbed the stairs to the little top-floor apartment, saying to herself, compensatingly, that it would be for the last time. She felt glad to think that she had taken from Durkin’s hands the burden of packing and shutting up the desolate and dark-memoried little place.
Yet it had taken her longer than she imagined, and she was still stooping, with oddly mixed emotions, over the crumpled nurse’s dress and the little hypodermic that she carried away from the Van Schaick house, when she heard a hurried footfall on the stairs and the click of a pass-key in the lock. She realized, with a start, that it was Durkin come back for her, even after she had begged him not to.
She ran over toward the door, and then, either petulantly or for some stronger intuitive reason—she could never decide which—stopped short, and waited.
The door opened slowly. As it swung back she saw standing before her the huge figure of MacNutt.
“You!” she gasped, with staring eyes.
“Sure it’s me!” he answered curtly, as he closed the door and locked it behind him.
“But, how dare you?” and she gasped once more. “What right have you to break in here?”
She was trembling from head to foot now, recoiling, step by step, as she saw some grim purpose written on the familiar blocked squareness of his flaccid jaw and the old glint of anger in the deep-set, predatory eyes.
“Oh, I didn’t need to break in, my lady! I’ve been here before, more than once. So don’t start doin’ the heavy emotional and makin’ scenes!”
“But—but Durkinwillkill you this time, when he sees you!” she cried.
MacNutt tapped his pocket confidently.
“He’ll never catch me that way twice, I guess!”
“How dare you come here?” she still gasped, bewildered.
“Oh, I dare go anywhere, after you, Frank! And I may as well tell you, that’s what I came for!”
She still shivered from head to foot. It was not that she was afraid of him. It was only that, in this new beginning of life, she was afraid of some unforeseen disaster. And she knew that she would kill herself, gladly, rather than go with him.
“Now, cool down, little woman,” MacNutt was saying to her in his placid guttural. “We’ve been through enough scrapes together to know each other, so there’s no use you gettin’ high-strung and nervous. And I guess you know I’m no piker, when it comes to anybody I care about. I never went back on you, Frank, even though youdidtreat me like a dog and swing in with that damned welcher Durkin, and try to bleed me for my last five hundred. I tell you, Frank, I can’t get used to the thought of not havin’ you ’round!”
She gave forth a little inarticulate cry of hate and abhorrence for him. She could see that he had been drinking, and that he was shattered, both in body and nerve.
“Oh, you’ll get over that! I’ve knocked around with women—I’ve been makin’ and spendin’ money fast enough for anybody this season; but no one’s just the same as you! You thought I was good enough to work with once, and I guess I ought to be good enough to travel with now!”
“That’s enough!” she broke in, wrathfully. She had grown calmer by this time, and her thoughts were returning to her mind now, buzzing and rapid, like bees in a fallen hive.
“No, it’s not,” he retorted, with an ominous shake of the square jaw and beefy neck. “And you just wait until I finish. You’ve been playin’ pretty fast and loose with me, Frank Candler, and I’ve been takin’ it meek and quiet, for I knew you’d soon get tired of this two-cent piker you’ve been workin’ the wires with!”
She opened her lips to speak, but no sound came from them.
“I tell you, Frank, you’re not the sort of woman that can go half fed and half dressed, driftin’ ’round dowdy and hungry and homeless, most of the time! You’re too fine for all that kind o’ thing. A woman like you has got to have money, and be looked after, and showed around, and let take things easy—or what’s the use o’ bein’ a beauty, anyway! You know all that, ’s well as I do!”
“Yes, I know all that!” she said vacantly, wearily, for her racing thoughts were far away. She was inwardly confessing to herself that they who live by the sword must die by the sword.
“Then what’s the use o’ crucifyin’ yourself?” cried MacNutt, seeming to catch hope from her change of tone. “You know as well as I do that I can hound this Durkin off the face o’ the globe. I can make it so hot for him here in New York that he daren’t stick his nose within a foot o’ the Hudson. And I’m goin’ to do it, too! I’m goin’ to do it, unless you want to come and stop me from doin’ it!”
“Why?” she asked emptily.
“Didn’t you save my life once, Frank, right in this room? Damn it all, you must have thought a little about me, to do a thing like that!”
“And what did you do for it?” she demanded, with a sudden change of front. Once again she was all animal, artful and cunning and crafty. “You played the sneak-thief. You slunk back here and stole his money. No, no; there’s no good your denying it—you came and stole his honestly earned money!”
“Honestly earned?” he scoffed.
“No, not honestly earned, perhaps, but made as clean as it could be made, in this low and mean and underhand business you taught us and dragged us into! And you came and stole it, when it meant so much to me, and to him!”
“Yes, I said I’d knock him, and I did knock him! But, good heavens, what’s his money to a high-roller like me! If that’s all you’re swingin’ your clapper about, you may as well get wise. If it’s the money you’re achin’ after, you can have it—providin’ you take it the way I’m willin’ to give it to you!”
“I can’t believe you—you know that!”
“You think I’m talkin’ big? Well, look here. Here’s my wad! Yes, look at it good and hard—there’s enough there to smother you in diamonds, and let you lord it ’round this town for the rest of your life!”
“You’re drunk,” she cried, once more consumed by a sudden fear of him.
“No, I’m not; but I’m crazy, if you want to put it that way, and you’re the cause of it! I’m tired o’ plottin’ and schemin’ and gettin’ mixed up in all kinds o’ dirty work, and I want to take it easy now, and enjoy life a little!”
She gasped at his words. Werehisaspirations, then, quite as high as hers? Were all the vague ideals she mouthed to Durkin and herself only the thoughts of any mottled-souled evil-doer?
Then she watched him slowly close the great polished pig-skin wallet, replace it in his inside breast-pocket, and secure it there with its safety-button.
Frances gazed at him blankly, with detached and impersonal attention. He stood to her there the embodiment of what all her old life had been. In him she saw incarnate all its hideousness, all its degrading coarseness, all its hopeless vileness and wickedness. And this was what she had dreamed that at a moment’s notice she could thrust behind her! She had thought that it could be slipped off, at a turn of the hand, like a soiled skirt, when the insidious poison of it had crept into her very bones, when it had corroded and withered and killed that holier something which should have remained untouched and unsullied in her inmost heart of hearts. He was her counterpart, her mate, this gross man with the many-wrinkled, square-set jaw, with the stolid bull-neck, with his bloated, vulpine face and his subdolous green eyes. This was what she had fallen to, inch by inch, and day by day. And here he was talking to her, wisely, as to one of his kind, bargaining for her bruised and weary body, as though love and honor and womanly devotion were chattels to be bought and sold in the open market.
The ultimate, inexorable hopelessness, the foredoomed tragedy of her dwarfed and perverted life came crushingly home to her, as she looked at him, still confronting her there in his challenging comradeship of crime and his kinship of old-time dishonor.
“Mack,” she said quietly, but her voice was hard and dry and colorless, “I could never marry you, now. But under one condition I would be willing to go with you, wherever you say.”
“And that condition is?”
“It is that you return to Durkin every cent you owe him, and let him go his way, while we go ours.”
“You mean that, Frank?”
“Yes, I mean it!”
He looked at her colorless face closely. Something in it seemed to satisfy him.
“But how am I to know you’re going to stick to your bargain?” he still hesitated. “How am I to be sure you won’t get your price and then give me the slip?”
“Would Durkin want me,after that? Would he take up with me whenyouhad finished with me? Oh, he’s not that make of man!” she scoffed in her hard, dry voice. There was a little silence; then, “Is that all?” she asked in her dead voice.
“That’s just as you say,” he answered.
“Very well,” she said between her drawn lips. She stepped quickly to the back of the room, and lifting the hidden telephone transmitter up on the table she threw open the window to loop the wire that ran by the overhanging eave.
“Hold on, there!” cried MacNutt, in alarm. “What’s all this, anyway?”
“I have got to tell Durkin, that’s all. He has got to know, of course, what we have decided on.”
“Oh, no, you don’t, my beauty! If there’s goin’ to be any telephonin’ out o’ this house, I do it myself!”
“It makes no difference,” she answered, apathetically. “You can tell him as well as I could.”
She could see some new look of suspicion and rage mounting into his watchful eyes. “I do the talking this trip,” he cried.
“Then cut in and loop that third wire—no, the fourth, counting the lighting wire—on the eave there. It is the Van Schaick house-wire—indeed, it would be much better to cut them off altogether, after we cut in, or there might be some interference from them with Central. Now throw open that switch behind the window-curtain there—so. Now, if you will ring up Central and ask for the Chelsea, they will connect you directly with Durkin. He is waiting in his room there for me.”
He looked at her, suspicious and puzzled, the momentary note of triumph gone out of his voice.
“See here, Frank, I may as well tell you one thing, straight out. Although I square up with Durkin for what I got out of him, and pass this money of his over to you, I tell you now, I’m going to smash that man!”
“Smash him?” she echoed, dismally. “Then you’ve been lying!”
“Yes, smash him! You don’t imagine I’m goin’ to have that piker shadowin’ and doggin’ me like a flatty all my days! I stand pat now with Doogan and his men. And in ten days I can have Durkin up against ten years!”
“That’s a lie,” she contended.
“Well, I can have him so he’ll be glad to get ten years, just to get out o’ what’s comin’ to him!”
“Then this was all a trap, a plot?” she gasped.
“No, it’s not a trap—it’s only that I wanted to save you out o’ the mess. I’m wise enough in most things, but about you I’ve always been a good deal of a fool. It’s my loose screw, all right; sometimes it’s driven me near crazy. I’m goin’ to have you, I don’t care what it costs me—I don’t care if I have to pound this Durkin’s brains out with a lead-pipe!”
“Take me! Take me—but save him!” she pleaded.
“Good God, it’s not just you I want—it’s—it’s your feelin’s, it’s your love that I’ve got to have!”
“Oh!” she moaned, covering her face with her hands.
“It’s a queer way of makin’ love, eh?—but I mean it! And I want to know if you’re goin’ to swing in with me and get taken care of, or not?”
“Oh, you fool, you fool!” she cried suddenly, smiting the air with her vehemently closed fists. “You poor, miserable fool! I loathe and hate the very sound of your voice! I despise every inch of your brutish, bloated body! I’d die—I’d kill myself ten times over before I’d so much as touch you!”
He looked at her gathering storm of rage, first in wonder, and then in a slow and deadly anger that blanched his face and left only the two claret-colored blotches on his withered cheeks.
“I’ll give you one last chance,” he said, clenching his flaccid jaw.
“Chance! I don’t want a chance! Now I know how thingsmustgo! Now I know how to act! And before we settle it between us, and if I have to—to lose everything, I want you to know one thing. I want you to know that I’m doing it for Durkin! I’m doing it all, everything, forhim!”
“For Durkin?” he choked, with an oath. “What are you fightin’ for that washed-out welcher for?”
“Because Durkin is my husband!” she said, in her ashen white determination, as she stepped quickly to the door and double-locked it. “And because I woulddiefor him”—she laughed shrilly, horribly, as she said it—“before I’d see him hurt or unhappy!”
She stood firmly with her back against the door, panting a little, her jaw fallen loosely down, her eyes luminous with their animal-like fire.
“Then, by God, youwill!” said MacNutt in his raucous guttural, with his limbs beginning to shake as he glared at her.
She stood there motionless, trying to think out the first moves in that grim game for which freedom and love and life itself were the stakes.
“Then, by God, you will!” repeated MacNutt, with the sweat coming out in beads on his twitching temples.
CHAPTER XXXI
Frances Durkin knew the man she had to face. She knew the pagan and primordial malevolence of the being, the almost demoniacal passions that could sweep through him. More than once she had seen his obsessions tremble on the verge of utter madness. She had come to know the rat-like pertinacity, the morbid, dementating narrowness of mind, that made him what he was. In his artful and ruthless campaign against Penfield, in his relentless crushing of old-time confederates, in each and all of his earlier underground adventures, she had seen the sullen, bulldog, brutal contumacy of the man.
She expected nothing from him, neither mercy nor quarter. And yet, she told herself, she was in no way afraid of him. As she had felt before, time and time again, in moments of great danger, a vague sense of duality of being took possession of her, as if mind stood detached from body, to flutter and dodge through the darkness before her, freed from its sheath of flesh.
She felt that she might kill him now, if the chance came, quite easily and calmly. Yet she still diffidently half-hoped that the chance would be denied her. It was not that she would be cowardly about it, but it seemed to her the darker and more dubious way out of it all.
No; it washewho must do the killing, she told herself, with a sudden pang of half-delirious abnegation.
That was the utter and ultimate solution of the tangled problem; it would be over and done with in a minute. She had lived by the sword and she could die by the sword; from that moment, too, would be counted the days of MacNutt’s own doom, the release and the deliverance of Durkin!
She seemed to hug this new self-illumination to her, and a smile of scorn trembled on her lips as he stood over her, in his white and shaking wrath.
“Oh, I know you, you she-devil!” he suddenly cried out, with an animal-like snarl from the depths of his flabby throat. “I know what you’re after! You think you’ll do the cheap-heroine act; you think you’ll end it by comin’ between him and me this way! You think you’ll save his puny piker’s heart a last pang or two, don’t you! You think you’ll cheat me out of that, do you? You think that it’s just between you and me now, eh, and that you can do your martyr’s act here while he’s off somewhere else moonin’ about your eyebrows and takin’ it easy!”
And he laughed horribly, quietly. “No!” he cried, with a volley of the foulest oaths; “no! If I’m goin’ to get the name I’m goin’ to have the game! I mean to get my money’s worth out o’ this! I’m goin’ to kill you, you cat, but I’m goin’ to do it in my own way!”
The room, which rang with his hoarse voice, seemed to grow small and dark and cell-like. The great, gorilla-like figure, in the gray light, seemed to draw back and go a long way off, and then tower over her once more.
“You’re going to kill me?” she gasped, as though the thought of it had come home to her for the first time.
Her more ecstatic moment of recklessness had passed strangely away, and had left her helpless and craven.
Nothing but terror was written on her face as she cowered back from him and sidled along the wall, with her fingers groping crazily over its blind surface, as though some unlooked-for door of release might open to their touch.
“You cat! You damned cat!” he cried hoarsely, as he leaped toward her and tried to catch her by the throat. She writhed away from him and twisted and dodged and fought until she had gained the door between the front and the back room. Through this, cat-like, she shot sidewise, and swung to the door with all her strength.
It had been her intention to bolt and lock it, if possible. But he had been too quick for her. He thrust out a maddened hand to hold it back from the jamb, and she could hear his little howl of pain as the meeting timbers bit and locked on the fingers of the huge, fat hand.
As she stood there, panting, with her full weight against the door, she could see the discoloring finger-tips, and the blood beginning to drip slowly from the bruised hand. Yet she knew she could not long withstand the shock of the weight he was flinging against her. So she looked about the darkening room quickly, desperately. Her first thought was of the windows. She could fling herself from one of them, and it would all be over with her in a minute.
Then she caught sight of the nurse’s uniform of striped blue and white linen flung across the bed, and in a sudden inspirational flash she remembered the hypodermic. That, at least, would be painless—painless and sure.
She slipped away from the door, and at the next lunge of his great body MacNutt fell sprawling into the room. By the time he was on his feet she had the little hollow-needled instrument in her hand.
But he fell on her, like a terrier on a rat, caught her up, shook and crushed her in his great ape-like arms.
“Oh, I’ll show you!” he panted and wheezed. “I’ll show you!”
He dragged her writhing and twisting body through the door into the back room. She fought and struggled and resisted as best she could, catching at the door-posts and the furniture with her one free hand as she passed. She would have used her hypodermic and ended it all then and there, only his great grip pinned her right arm down to her side, and the needle lay useless between her fingers.
The room was almost in darkness by this time, and a chair was knocked over in their struggles. But still MacNutt bore her, fighting and panting, toward the little table between the two windows, where the telephone transmitter stood.
He pinned and held her down on the edge of the table with his knees and his bleeding right hand, while with his left hand he caught up the receiver of the telephone.
“Central, give me the Chelsea, quick—the Chelsea, the Chelsea!”
It was then and then only that the exhausted woman clearly understood what he meant to do. She started up, with a great cry of horror in her throat; but he muffled it with his shaking hand, and, biting out an oath, squeezed the very breath out of her body.
“I want to speak to Durkin,” panted MacNutt into the transmitter, a moment later. “Durkin, James Durkin—a man with his arm in a sling. He just took rooms with you today. Yes, Durkin.”
There was another long wait, through which Frances lay there, neither struggling nor moving, saving her strength for one last effort.
“Yes, yes; Duggan; I guess that’s it!” MacNutt was saying over the wire to the switchboard operator at the hotel. “Yes, Duggan, with a lame arm!”
Then he let the receiver swing at the end of its cord and with his freed hand drew his revolver from his pocket.
The gasping woman felt the crushing pressure released for a moment, and fought to free her right hand. It came away from his hold with a jerk, and as her finger slipped into the little metal piston-ring she flung the freed arm up about his shoulder and clung to him. For a sudden last thought had come to her, a rotten thread of hope, on which swayed and hung her last chance of life.
It was through the coat and clothing of the struggling MacNutt that the little needle was forced, through the skin, and deep into the flesh of the great, beefy shoulder. She held it there until the barrel was empty, then it fell on the floor.
“You’d try to stab me, would you!” he cried, madly, uncomprehendingly, as he struggled in vain to throttle the writhing body, and then raised his revolver, to beat her on the head. The signal-bell rang sharply, and he caught up the receiver instead.
“Now!” he gloated insanely, deep in his wheezing throat. “Now! Is that Durkin speaking? Is that Durkin? Oh, it is! Well, this is MacNutt—I say your old friend MacNutt!” and he laughed horribly, dementedly.
“You’ve done a good deal of business over the wires, Durkin, in your day, haven’t you? Well, you listen now, and you’ll hear something doin’! I say listen now, and you’ll hear something doin’!”
“Jim!” screamed the woman, pinned down on the edge of the table. “Jim!” she screamed insanely. “Oh, Jim, save me!”
She could hear the sharp phonographic burr of her husband’s voice through the receiver.
“Oh, Jim, he’s killing me!” she wailed.
For MacNutt had taken up the revolver in his trembling left hand and was forcing the head with all its wealth of tumbled hair closer and closer up before the transmitter.
It had been too late! She closed her eyes, and in one vivid, kaleidoscopic picture all her discordant and huddled life stood out before her.
She felt a momentary shiver speed through the body that pinned her so close to it, as she waited, and it seemed to her that the gripping knees relaxed a little. He was speaking now, but brokenly and mumblingly.
“Listen, you welcher, while I—”
She felt the little steel barrel waver and then muzzle down through her hair until it pressed on her skull. At the touch of it she straightened her limp body, galvanically, desperately. He staggered back under the sudden weight.
Then she caught his hand in hers, and with all her strength twisted the menacing barrel upward. The finger trembling on the trigger suddenly compressed as she did so. The bullet plowed into the ceiling and brought down a shower of loosened plaster.
Then he fell, prone on his face, and she stood swaying drunkenly back and forth, watching him through the drifting smoke. Twice he tried to raise himself on his hands, and twice he fell back moaning, flat on his face.
“It’s a lie, Jim, it’s a lie!” she exulted insanely, turning and springing to the transmitter, and catching up the still swaying receiver. “Do you hear me, Jim? It’s a lie—I’m here, waiting for you!Jim, can’t you hear?”
But Durkin had fainted away at the other end of the wire, and no response came to her cries.
She flung herself down upon the collapsed MacNutt, and tore open his coat and vest. As she did so the polished pig-skin wallet fell out on the floor.
His heart was still beating, but it would be murder, she felt, to leave him there without attention. His life was his own. She wanted and would take only what the written law would allow. She wanted only her own.
She came to a sudden pause, as she looked from the paper wealth between her fingers to the huge and huddled figure beside her. Some inner and sentinel voice, from the calmer depths of her nature, was demanding of her how much of what had thus come into her handwasher own? After all, how much of that terrible and tainted wealth could truly be called their own?—was the untimely question this better part of her was crying out.
She knew that in the end most usurious toll would be exacted for what she took. Her life had taught her that no lasting foundation of good, no enduring walls of aspiration, could be built on the engulfing sloughs of evil. And as she looked at her prostrate enemy once more, and breathed out a fervent and grateful: “Oh, God, I thank Thee for this deliverance!” a sudden chastening and abnegative passion prompted her to thrust back every dollar she had drawn from that capacious wallet.
Then she thought of the future, of the exigent needs of life, of the necessities of her immediate flight; and her heart sank within her. To begin life again with a clean slate—that had been her constant wish. Yet much as she hungered to do so, she dare not leave it all. As with many another aspiring soul in quieter walks of life, she found herself grimly but sorrowfully compelled to leave the pure idea sacrificed on the altar of compromise. All life, she told herself, was made up of concessions. She could only choose the lesser evil, and through it still strive to grope a little onward and upward.
So she slowly detached one Treasury note—it was for one thousand dollars—from the bulky roll, and the rest she restored to its wallet. It was a contribution to conscience. As she replaced that wallet in the inner pocket of the prostrate man, her feelings were akin to those of some primordial worshipper before his primordial Baal or his exacting Juggernaut. She felt that with that sacrifice she was appeasing her gods. She consoled herself with the thought that the Master of Destiny would know and understand—that she had given up the great thing that she might not sorrow in the little. As yet, He would not expect too much of her! That minute fraction of what she might have taken, she argued with herself, appeasingly,—surely that little moiety of what they had fought and worked for might be theirs.
It was fifteen minutes later that a frightened and pale-faced woman left word at the corner drugstore that an old gentleman was ill of morphine poisoning, and asked if the ambulance might be sent for. All that the clerk could remember, when he was later questioned by the somewhat bewildered police, was that she had seemed weak and sick, and had asked for some aromatic spirits of ammonia, and that the side of her face was swollen and bruised where she lifted her veil. He was of the opinion, too, that she had been under the drug herself, or had been drinking heavily, for she walked unsteadily, and he had had to call a taxi for her and help her into it. What made him believe this, on second thoughts, was the fact that she had flung herself back in her seat and said, “Thank God, oh, thank God!” half a dozen times to herself.
CHAPTER XXXII
Neither Frances nor Durkin seemed to care to come on deck until the bell by the forward gangway had rung for the last time, and the officer from the bridge had given his last warning of: “All visitors ashore!”
Then, as the last line was cast off, and the great vessel wore slowly out from the crowded pier, a-flutter with hands and handkerchiefs, the two happy travelers came up from their cabin.
While the liner was swinging round in midstream, and the good-byes and the cheering died down in the distance, the two stood side by side at the rail, watching the City, as the mist-crowned, serrated line of the lower town sky-scrapers drifted past them. The shrouded morning sun was already high in the East, and through the lifting fog they could see the River and the widening Bay, glistening and flashing in the muffled light.
Frances took it as a good omen, and pointed it out, with a flutter of laughing wistfulness, to her husband. Behind them, she took pains to show him, the churned water lay all yellow and turgid and draped in fog.
“I hope it holds good,” he said, linking his arm in hers.
“We shallmakeit hold good,” she answered valiantly, though deep down in her heart some indefinite premonition of failure still whispered and stirred. Yet, she tried to tell herself, if they had sinned, surely they had been purged in fire! Surely it was not too late to shake off the memory of that old entangled and disordered life they were leaving behind them!
It was not so much for herself that she feared, as for her husband. He was a man, and through his wayward manhood, she told herself, swept tidesand currents uncomprehended and uncontrolled by her weaker woman’s heart. But she would shield him, and watch him, and, if need be, fight for him and with him.
She looked up at his face with her studious eyes, after a little ineloquent gesture of final resignation; and he laughed down at her, and crushed her arm happily against his side. Then he emitted a long and contented sigh.
“Do you know how I feel?” he said, at last, as they began to pace the deck, side by side, and the smoke-plumed city, crowned with its halo of purplish mist, died down behind them.
“I feel as if we were two ghosts, being transported into another life! I feel exactly as if you and I were disembodied spirits, travelling out through lonely space, to find a new star!”
“Yes, my beloved, I know!” she said, comprehendingly, with her habitual little head-shake. Then she, too, gave vent to a sigh, yet a sigh not touched with the same contentment as Durkin’s.
“Oh, my own, I’m so tired!” she murmured.
He looked down at her, knowingly, but said nothing.
Then she stopped and leaned over the rail, breathing in the buoyant salt air. He stood close beside her, and did the same.
“It’s fresh and fine and good, isn’t it!” he cried, blinking back through the strong sunlight where the drifting city smoke still hung thinly on the skyline in their wake.
She did not answer him, for her thoughts, at the moment, were far away. He looked at her quietly, where the sea-wind stirred her hair.
“Good-bye, Old World, good-bye!” she murmured at last, softly.
“Why, you’re crying!” he said, as his hand sought hers on the rail.
“Yes,” she answered, “just a little!”
And then, for some unknown reason, with her habitual sense of guardianship, she let her arm creep about her uncomprehending husband. From what or against what that shielding gesture was meant to guard him he could not understand, nor would Frances explain, as, with a little shamefaced laugh, she wiped away her tears.
“Good-bye, Old World!” he repeated, as he looked back at the widening skyline, with a challenging finality which seemed to imply that what was over and done with was for all time over and done with. . . . “Good-bye!”
“Good-bye!” said the woman. But it was not a challenge. It was a prayer.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes:
Punctuation errors have been corrected without note. Other errors have been corrected as noted below:
Page 5. The touch of content ==> The touch ofcontemptPage 35. it drives about the open ==>itsdrives about the openPage 47. what it it, Mack ==> whatisit, MackPage 133. Your heard about the fire ==>Youheard about the firePage 266. strength was was equally slow ==> strengthwasequally slowPage 299. swept tides and and currents ==> swept tidesandcurrents
Page 5. The touch of content ==> The touch ofcontempt
Page 35. it drives about the open ==>itsdrives about the open
Page 47. what it it, Mack ==> whatisit, Mack
Page 133. Your heard about the fire ==>Youheard about the fire
Page 266. strength was was equally slow ==> strengthwasequally slow
Page 299. swept tides and and currents ==> swept tidesandcurrents