Part 61 (1/2)
”That's all a bluff.” Then to Norvin: ”I'll admit it _was_ a mean trick, and I guess my heart really might have petered out if she'd married you; but I'm all right now, and you can have satisfaction.”
”I don't know whether to be angry or amused at you children,” Norvin told them. ”Understand, once for all, that our engagement wasn't serious. There have been a lot of mistakes and misunderstandings-- that's all. Now tell us how and when this all happened.”
”Y-yes!” echoed Bernie, who was still dazed.
Myra Nell seemed more chagrined than relieved.
”It was perfectly simple,” she informed them. ”It happened during the Carnival. I--never heard a man talk the way he did, and I was really worried about his heart. I said no--for fifteen minutes, then we arranged to be married secretly. When it was all over, I was frightened and ran away. You're such a deep, desperate, unforgiving person, Norvin. I--I think it was positively horrid of you.”
”Good Lord!” breathed her brother. ”What a perverted sense of responsibility!”
”Are we forgiven?”
”It's all right with me, if it is with Norvin,” said Bernie, somewhat doubtfully.
”Forgiven?” Blake took the youthful pair by the hands, and in his eyes was a brightness they had never seen. ”Of course you are, and let me tell you that you haven't cornered all the love in the world. I've never cared but for one woman. Perhaps you will wish me as much happiness as I wish you both?”
”Then you have found your Italian girl?” queried Myra Nell, with flas.h.i.+ng eagerness.
”Vittoria!”
”Vittoria!” Miss Warren shrieked. ”Vittoria--a _countess!_ So, she's the one who spoiled everything?”
”Gee! You'll be a count,” said Rilleau.
There followed a period of laughing, incoherent explanations, and then the beaming bridegroom tugged at Myra Nell's sleeve, saying:
”Now that it's all over, I'm mighty tired of being a widower.”
She flung her arms about his neck and lifted her blus.h.i.+ng face to his, explaining to her half-brother, when she could:
”I don't know what you'll do without some one to look after you, Bernie, but--it's perfectly grand to elope.”
Dreux rose with a grin and winked at Norvin as he said:
”Oh, don't mind me. I'll get along all right.” And seizing his hat he rushed out with his thin face all ablaze. When Blake was finally alone, he closed his desk and with bounding heart set out for the foreign quarter. His day had dawned; he could hardly contain himself.
But, as he neared his goal, strange doubts and indecisions arose in his mind; and when he had reached Oliveta's house he pa.s.sed on, lacking courage to enter. He decided it was too soon after the tragedy at the parish prison to press his suit; that to intrude himself now would be in offensively bad taste. Then, too, he began to reason that if Margherita had wished to see him she would have sent for him--all in all, the hour was decidedly unpropitious. He dared not risk his future happiness upon a blundering, ill-timed declaration; therefore he walked onward. But no sooner had he pa.s.sed the house than a thousand voices urged him to return, in this the hour of the girl's loneliness, and lay his devotion at her feet. Torn thus by hesitation and by the sense of his unworthiness, he walked the streets, hour after hour. At one moment he approached the house desperately determined; the next he fled, mastered by the fear of dismissal. So he continued his miserable wanderings on into the dusk.
Twilight was settling when Margherita Ginini finished her packing. The big living-room was stripped of its furnis.h.i.+ngs; trunks and cases stood about in a desolate confusion. There was no look of home or comfort remaining anywhere, and the whole house echoed dismally to her footsteps. From the rear came the sound of Oliveta's listless preparations.
Pausing at an open window, Margherita looked down upon the street which she had grown to love--the suggestion of darkness had softened it, mellowed it with a twilight beauty, like the face of an old friend seen in the glow of lamplight. The shouting of urchins at play floated upward, stirring the chords of motherhood in her breast and emphasizing her loneliness. With Oliveta gone what would be left?
Nothing but an austere life compressed within drab walls; nothing but sickness and suffering on every side. She had begun to think a great deal about those walls of late and--The bells of a convent pealed out softly in the distance, bringing a tightness to her throat. In spite of herself she shuddered. Those laughing children's voices mocked at her empty life. They seemed always to jeer at that hungry mother-love, but never quite so loudly as now. She remembered surprising Norvin Blake at play with these very children one day, and the half-abashed, half-defiant light in his eyes when he discovered her watching him.
Thinking of him, she recalled just such another twilight hour as this when, in a whirl of shamed emotion, she had been compelled to face the fact of her love. A sudden trembling weakness seized her at the memory, and she saw again those cold gray walls, which never echoed to the gleeful crowing of babes or the thrilling merriment of little voices. In that brief hour of her awakening life had opened gloriously, bewilderingly, only to close again, leaving her soul bruised and sore with rebellion.
She crossed the floor listlessly in answer to a knock, for the repeated attentions of her neighbors, although sincere and touching, were intrusive; then she fell back at sight of the man who entered.