Part 13 (2/2)

That wordless message told her how my sanity reeled on the brink of seizing her and holding her in wild defiance of this man, across the room, whose name she bore.

”I won't interrupt business,” she was saying with perfect serenity. ”But later I hope to see you again.”

I bowed. ”I hope so,” I answered politely, while a wave of anger swept me.

She would not interrupt! She who had snapped all the thread of life and let my soul go plunging down the abysses.

She would not interrupt!

The grandfather clock against the wall stood at nine twenty-four. At nine twenty I had been stolidly puffing one of Weighborne's Havanas and listening to his disquisitions on courts of appeals decisions and squatters' rights. The cigar which I had dropped on an ash-tray at the first sound of her voice still held its ash and sent up a thin spiral of smoke. It had outlived me.

My host plunged afresh into his papers. He might as well have been reading me ukases from the Romonoff Czar in the undiluted Russian. But as the clock ticked off the half-hour I seemed to freeze out of the eruptive and into the glacial stage. I felt my lips drawing into a stiff smile. I even contrived to nod my head in sedulous and ape-like agreement when he raised interrogative eyes to mine. So rapidly had my volcanic lava of spirit hardened to clinkers that when the telephone called him to a barn, where some accident had befallen a thoroughbred colt, I was able to turn a conventionally masklike countenance on Frances, who came to chat with me till his return. She sat in a great leather chair, and I, standing on the hearth, looked down on her, braced for whatever might develop. I was resolved to make amends for my self-revelation of a half-hour ago; I should at least prove myself the capable mummer; yet I found that I was fettered by an unaccustomed silence.

There was only one topic on which I could find words for talk with this woman and that topic was forbidden. She, too, for some unaccountable reason, seemed hampered by a diffidence which her bearing told me was foreign to her normal nature. So, for a while, our conversation lagged and faltered and fell into fitful fragments and puerile tatters, while my gaze devoured her. There was no flaw in the perfection of her beauty from the coils of her amber and honey hair to the white satin toe of her small slipper. I had given opulent scope to my painter's fancy in those island days and had imagined her, in the color of life, as a being expressed in the souls of orchids. Now I realized, with a terrible yearning, that I had not done her justice.

Step by step I went back over the record of the last year and found it painfully distinct and clear. I had, with my imagination built a house of cards which had tottered. I had been lonely and morbid and had pretended a picture was a woman. It had come to mean a great deal--clay idols have come to mean immortal G.o.ds to poor creatures who have had no better deities. I had told myself that the finger of Destiny had traced through my life a thread of gold linking my life to hers. After all it had been nothing more than a series of inconceivable coincidences. I had no more part in her cosmos than in that of any woman whose photograph I might have admired in a miscellaneous collection. It behooved me to scourge out of my brain the mischievous chimeras I had harbored there.

As for her momentary excitement--the something vague and deep and disturbed in her pupils as she stood at the door and later when we touched hands; that was only the psychic realization that this guest of her husband was staring at her out of insanely wild eyes.

I started to speak, then halted, perplexed over a ridiculous point. How should I address her? On the island I had called her Frances, and now I could no more compel my rebellious tongue to frame the t.i.tle ”Mrs.

Weighborne” than I could have forced it to utter an epithet. So I said nothing at all.

”You are a great traveler, aren't you, Mr. Deprayne?” she suggested when the silence had begun to be oppressive.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”You are a great traveler, aren't you, Mr. Deprayne?” she suggested when the silence had begun to be oppressive.]

I had always been accounted a talkative man. One could read in her face that she had the wit to sparkle in conversation like champagne in cut gla.s.s, yet under the constraint that had settled over us, we labored as plat.i.tudinously as a knickerbockered boy and a school-girl entertaining her first caller.

”I have traveled a little,” I answered.

”And encountered unusual adventures?”

”No--just traveled.”

”Billy says,” she went on as graciously as though I had not rebuffed every conversational advance, ”that you were s.h.i.+pwrecked in the south seas and wounded by savages.”

”Billy!” My bruised consciousness flinched under the familiarity of the t.i.tle and I fell back upon shameless churlishness.

”A n.i.g.g.e.r stuck me with a spear,” I admitted shortly.

She glanced quickly up with perplexity. Her eyes seemed to read that I was not at heart a boor and her graciousness remained impervious to my ruffianism.

”I wish,” she said slowly, ”you would tell me about it, or are you one of the men who tell women only empty and pretty things?”

There was a vagrant hint of wistfulness in the tone of the question. I wondered if she had been fed, like the girl of our diary, too much on sweetmeats, and wanted a more nutritious fare.

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