Part 36 (2/2)

Through his hands which held her he felt the shock, the momentary agony of the effort to recover the threatened balance, the resolute relaxation of the muscles and the steadying breath she drew.

”Oh, there are plenty of trains,” she said. ”You mustn't bother.--Why, Wallace Hood has a sister living in Omaha. (Wallace Hood, not James Wallace. It would be terrible if you confused them.) She's been trying for months to find a nursery governess. And I've been trying--perhaps you didn't know; the family have been very unpleasant about it--to find a job.--Oh, for the most realistic of reasons, among others. Well, it occurred to me the other day that Wallace's sister and I might be looking for each other.”

There she paused, but only for a moment. Then she added, very explicitly, ”So I'm going to Omaha to-morrow.”

Even her lying she had to do honestly. She preferred, he saw, that he should remember she had lied to having him recall that she had tricked him by an evasion.

One need not invoke clairvoyance to account for his incandescent certainty that she had lied. The mere unconscious synthesis of the things she had said and left unsaid along the earlier stages of their talk, would have amounted to a demonstration. Her moment of panic over his discovery that she was saying good-by, her irrespressible shudder at the question whether she was going away in the ordinary literal sense of the phrase; finally, her pitiful attempt to avoid, in answer to his last question, a categorical untruth and then her acceptance of it as, after all, preferable to the other. But it was by no such pedestrian process as this that he reached the truth.

He knew, now, why he had been terrified from the moment she came into the room. He knew why she had wrung that promise from him--a death-bed promise she had dared with a smile to call it--that he would not, whatever happened, destroy _The Dumb Princess_. It would be a likely enough thing for him to do, she had perceived, when he learned the truth.

She could not--sleep, she had told him, until that surmise was laid.

There were, as she had said, plenty of trains to that unknown destination of hers, but he thought that that word sleep offered the true clue. She was a physician's daughter; there must be, somewhere in that house, a chest or cupboard that would supply what she needed. They'd find her in her own bed, in that room he had once cast a glance into on his way up-stairs to Paula.

The conviction grew upon him that she had her plans completely laid; yes, and her preparations accomplished. That quiet leisureliness of hers would not have been humanly possible if either her resolution or the means for executing it had remained in doubt. It was likely that she had whatever it was--a narcotic, probably; morphine; she wouldn't, conceivably, resort to any of the corrosives--upon her person at this moment. In that little silken bag which hung from her wrist.

He clenched the finger-nails into the palms of his hands. This thing was a nightmare. He had fallen asleep over his table; had only to wake himself.--It would not do to play with an idea like that. Nor with the possibility that he had misread her mind. He knew. He was not mistaken.

Let him never glance aside from that.

For one moment he thought wildly of trying to call in help from outside, of frustrating her design by sheer force. But that could not be done. As between them, he would be reckoned the madman. Her project might be deferred by that means, perhaps. It could not be prevented.

It was that terrible self-possession of hers that gave the last turn to the screw. She could not be dealt with as one frantic, beside herself, to be wooed and quieted back into a state of sanity. She was at this moment as sane as he. She was not to be held back, either, by a mere a.s.surance of his love for her. She had never, it appeared, lacked that a.s.surance.

But her life, warmed even as it was by their love, presented itself to her somehow as something that it was not possible to go on with.

This was very strange. All of its externals that were visible to him made up, one would have said, a pattern singularly gracious and untroubled. Buried in it somewhere there must be some toxic focus that poisoned everything. He must meet her on her own ground. He must show her another remedy than the desperate one she was now resolved upon. And before he could find the remedy he must discover the virus. The only clue he had was the thing she said about sentimentalists, and the tragedies they caused. More tragedies than malice was responsible for.

He thought she was probably right about that. It was some such tragedy anyhow, ludicrous, unendurable, that had driven her to this acquiescence in defeat.

He said, in as even a tone as he could manage, ”I asked about trains because I wondered whether there was anything to hurry you to-night.

Packing to do or such a matter; or whether we mightn't have a really leisurely visit. I haven't much idea what time it is except that I don't think I've eaten anything since around the middle of the day. Have you?

If you'd stay and have supper with me ... But I suppose you're expected somewhere else.”

She smiled ironically at this, then laughed at herself. ”It happens rather funnily that I haven't been so little expected or looked after, since I came home from New York, as I am to-night. I'm not--in a hurry at all. I'll stay as long as you like.”

”Is that a promise?” he asked. ”As long as I liked would be a long while.”

”I'll stay,” she said, ”as long as I can see I'm making you happy. When I find myself beginning to be a--torment to you, I shall--vanish.”

He was almost overmastered by the temptation to forget everything except his love for her; to let himself be persuaded that his ghastly surmise was a product of his own fatigue and sleepless nights. Even supposing there were a basis for it, could he not keep her safe by just holding her fast in his arms?

He dashed the thought out of his mind. She would surrender to his embrace, how eagerly he already knew. For a matter of moments, for a few swift hours she might forget. She had perhaps come to him meaning to forget for a while in just that way. But no embrace could be eternal.

He'd have to let her go at last and nothing would be changed save that she would have a memory of him to take with her into her long sleep.

No, love must wait. That obscure unendurable nightmare tragedy of hers must be brought out into the light first and shorn of its horrors.

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