Part 21 (1/2)

”But you made me promise I wouldn't do anything--wouldn't break my Ravinia contract--until we could talk it all out together. Your temperature went up a little that afternoon and when Doctor Darby asked me why, I told him. He said I mustn't, on any account, speak again to you about it until you brought the subject up yourself. I don't know whether he'd call this bringing it up or not, but anyway that's it. I've kept my promise to you though,” she concluded. ”I haven't written. They still think I am going to sing this summer.”

”I am very glad of that,” he said quietly. ”I thought the thing was settled by our first talk. I didn't realize that you had taken it merely as an--adjournment.”

She was still turned rigidly away from him, but the grip of one of her hands upon the arm of a chair betrayed the excitement she was laboring under, while it showed the effort she was making to hold it down.

”I didn't think, though,” he went on, ”that that resolution of yours to give up your whole career,--make ducks and drakes of it, in obedience to my whim--was nothing more than one of those pious lies that invalids are fed upon. I knew you meant it, my dear. I knew you'd have done it--then--without a falter or a regret.”

”Then or now,” she said. ”It's all the same. No, it isn't! Now more than then. With less regret. Without a shadow of a regret, John,--if it would bring you back to me.”

The last words were m.u.f.fled, for she had buried her face in her hands.

He had heard the ring of undisguised pa.s.sion in her voice without an answering pulse-beat, sat looking at her thoughtfully, tenderly. The reflection that occupied his mind was with what extravagant joy he would have received such an a.s.surance only a few weeks ago. On any one of those last days before his illness fastened upon him;--the Sunday he had gone to Hickory Hill alone because Paula had found she must work with March that day; the evening when he had made his last struggle against the approaching delirium of fever in order to telephone for an ambulance to get him out of that hated house. What a curious compound of nerve ends and gland activities a man's dreams--that he lived by, or died for--were!

She pulled him out of his reverie by a deliberate movement of resolution, taking her hands away from her face, half rising and turning her chair so that she faced him squarely.

”I want to know in so many words,” she said, ”why you're glad that I'm still bound to that Ravinia thing. You seem to want me to sing there this summer, as much as you hated the idea of my doing it before. Well, why? Or is it something you can't tell me? And if I sing and make a success, shall you want me to go on with it, following up whatever opening it offers; just as if--just as if you didn't count any more in my life at all?”

Before he could answer she added rather dryly, ”Doctor Darby would kill me for talking to you like this. You needn't answer if it's going to hurt you.”

”No,” he said, ”it isn't hurting me a bit. But I'll answer one question at a time, I think. The first thing that occurred to me when you spoke of the Ravinia matter was that I didn't want you to break your word. You had told them that they could count on you and I didn't want you, on my account, to be put in a position where any one could accuse you of having failed him. My own word was involved, for that matter. I told LaChaise I wouldn't put any obstacles, in your way. Of course, I didn't contract lobar pneumonia on purpose,” he added with a smile.

The intensity of her gaze did not relax at this, however. She was waiting breathlessly.

”The other question isn't quite so easy to answer,” he went on, ”but I think I would wish you to--follow the path of your career wherever it leads. I shall always count for as much as I can in your life, but not--if I can help it--as an obstacle.”

”Why?” she asked. ”What has made the perfectly enormous difference?”

It was not at all an unanswerable question; nor one, indeed, that he shrank from. But it wanted a little preliminary reflection. She interrupted before he was ready to speak.

”Of course, I really know. Have known all along. You haven't forgiven me.”

He echoed that word with a note of helplessness.

”No,” she conceded. ”That isn't it, exactly. I can't talk the way you and Mary can. I suppose you have forgiven me, as far as that goes. That's the worst of it. If you hadn't there'd be more to hope for. Or beg for. I'd do that if it were any good. But this is something you can't help. You're kind and sweet to me, but you've just stopped caring. For me. What used to be there has just--gone snap. It's not your fault. I did it myself.”

”No,” he said quickly. ”That's where you're altogether wrong. You didn't do it. You had nothing to do with the doing of it.”

She winced, visibly, at the implication that, whoever was responsible, the thing was done.

”Paula, dearest!” he cried, in acute concern. ”Wait! There are things that can't be dealt with in a breath. That's why I was trying to think a little before I answered.”

Even now he had to marshal his thoughts for a moment before he could go on. It was too ridiculous, that look of tragic desperation she wore while she waited! He averted his eyes and began rather deliberately.

”You are dearer to me now--at this moment, as we sit here--than ever you've been before. I think that's the simple literal truth. This matter of forgiveness--of your having done something to forfeit or to destroy my--love for you... Oh, it's too wildly off the facts to be dealt with rationally! I owe you my life. That's not a sentimental exaggeration.

Even Steinmetz says so. And you saved it for me at the end of a period of weeks--months I guess--when I had been devoting most of my spare energies to torturing you. Myself, incidentally, but there was nothing meritorious about that. In an attempt to a.s.sert a--proprietary right in you that you had never even pretended to give me. That I'd once promised you I never would a.s.sert. The weight of obligation I'm under to you would be absolutely crus.h.i.+ng--if it weren't for one thing that relieves me of it altogether. The knowledge that you love me. That you did it all for the love of me.”

She moved no nearer him. These were words. There was no rea.s.surance for her in them. One irrepressible movement of his hands toward her, the mere speaking of her name in a voice warmed by the old pa.s.sion, would have brought her, rapturous, to his knees.

”There's no such thing as a successful pretense between us, I know,” he said. ”So I'll talk plainly. I'm glad to. I know what it is you miss in me. It's gone. Temporarily I suppose, but gone as if it had never been.

That's a--physiological fact, Paula.”