Part 34 (2/2)

”You haven't even asked me where I am taking you.”

He started like a somnambulist awakened suddenly, and there was now some meaning in his stare; a sort of alarmed speculation. He opened his mouth slowly. Flora struck in with forced gaiety. ”You would never guess.”

He waited, still more startled and suspicious. ”Guess! Why don't you tell me?”

He uncrossed his arms and leaned forward towards her. She got hold of one of his hands. ”You _must know_ first...” She paused, made an effort: ”I am married, papa.”

For a moment they kept perfectly still in that cab rolling on at a steady jog-trot through a narrow city street full of bustle. Whatever she expected she did not expect to feel his hand s.n.a.t.c.hed away from her grasp as if from a burn or a contamination. De Barral fresh from the stagnant torment of the prison (where nothing happens) had not expected that sort of news. It seemed to stick in his throat. In strangled low tones he cried out, ”You--married? You, Flora! When? Married! What for? Who to? Married?”

His eyes which were blue like hers, only faded, without depth, seemed to start out of their orbits. He did really look as if he were choking.

He even put his hand to his collar...

”You know,” continued Marlow out of the shadow of the bookcase and nearly invisible in the depths of the armchair, ”the only time I saw him he had given me the impression of absolute rigidity, as though he had swallowed a poker. But it seems that he could collapse. I can hardly picture this to myself. I understand that he did collapse to a certain extent in his corner of the cab. The unexpected had crumpled him up.

She regarded him perplexed, pitying, a little disillusioned, and nodded at him gravely: Yes. Married. What she did not like was to see him smile in a manner far from encouraging to the devotion of a daughter.

There was something unintentionally savage in it. Old de Barral could not quite command his muscles, as yet. But he had recovered command of his gentle voice.

”You were just saying that in this wide world there we were, only you and I, to stick to each other.”

She was dimly aware of the scathing intention lurking in these soft low tones, in these words which appealed to her poignantly. She defended herself. Never, never for a single moment had she ceased to think of him. Neither did he cease to think of her, he said, with as much sinister emphasis as he was capable of.

”But, papa,” she cried, ”I haven't been shut up like you.” She didn't mind speaking of it because he was innocent. He hadn't been understood.

It was a misfortune of the most cruel kind but no more disgraceful than an illness, a maiming accident or some other visitation of blind fate.

”I wish I had been too. But I was alone out in the world, the horrid world, that very world which had used you so badly.”

”And you couldn't go about in it without finding somebody to fall in love with?” he said. A jealous rage affected his brain like the fumes of wine, rising from some secret depths of his being so long deprived of all emotions. The hollows at the corners of his lips became more p.r.o.nounced in the puffy roundness of his cheeks. Images, visions, obsess with particular force, men withdrawn from the sights and sounds of active life. ”And I did nothing but think of you!” he exclaimed under his breath, contemptuously. ”Think of you! You haunted me, I tell you.”

Flora said to herself that there was a being who loved her. ”Then we have been haunting each other,” she declared with a pang of remorse.

For indeed he had haunted her nearly out of the world, into a final and irremediable desertion. ”Some day I shall tell you... No. I don't think I can ever tell you. There was a time when I was mad. But what's the good? It's all over now. We shall forget all this. There shall be nothing to remind us.”

De Barral moved his shoulders.

”I should think you were mad to tie yourself to ... How long is it since you are married?”

She answered ”Not long” that being the only answer she dared to make.

Everything was so different from what she imagined it would be. He wanted to know why she had said nothing of it in any of her letters; in her last letter. She said:

”It was after.”

”So recently!” he wondered. ”Couldn't you wait at least till I came out? You could have told me; asked me; consulted me! Let me see--”

She shook her head negatively. And he was appalled. He thought to himself: Who can he be? Some miserable, silly youth without a penny.

Or perhaps some scoundrel? Without making any expressive movement he wrung his loosely-clasped hands till the joints cracked. He looked at her. She was pretty. Some low scoundrel who will cast her off. Some plausible vagabond... ”You couldn't wait--eh?”

Again she made a slight negative sign.

Why not? What was the hurry? She cast down her eyes. ”It had to be.

Yes. It was sudden, but it had to be.”

<script>