The Prairie Mother Part 31

"It's terrible for me," acknowledged d.i.n.ky-Dunk, with a self-pity which I wasn't slow to resent.

"But why aren't you there?" I demanded. "Why aren't you there to keep a little decency about the thing? Why aren't you looking after what's left of her?"

d.i.n.ky-Dunk's eye evaded mine, but only for a moment.

"Colonel Ainsley-Brook is coming back from Was.h.i.+ngton to take possession of the remains," he explained with a sort of dry-lipped patience, "and take them home."

"But why should an outsider like--"

d.i.n.ky-Dunk stopped me with a gesture.

"He and Allie were married, a little over three weeks ago," my husband quietly informed me. And for the second time I had to work life into what seemed limp and sodden words.

"Did you know about that?" I asked.

"Yes, Allie wrote to me about it, at the time," he replied with a sort of coerced candor. "She said it seemed about the only thing left to do."

"Why should she say that?"

d.i.n.ky-Dunk stared at me with something strangely like a pleading look in his haggard eye.

"Wouldn't it be better to keep away from all that, at a time like this?" he finally asked.

"No," I told him, "this is the time we _can't_ keep away from it. She wrote you that because she was in love with you. Isn't that the truth?"

d.i.n.ky-Dunk raised his hand, as though he were attempting a movement of protest, and then dropped it again. His eyes, I noticed, were luminous with a sort of inward-burning misery. But I had no intention of being merciful. I had no chance of being merciful. It was like an operation without ether, but it had to be gone through with. It had to be cut out, in some way, that whole cancerous growth of hate and distrust.

"Isn't that the truth?" I repeated.

"Oh, Tabby, don't turn the knife in the wound!" cried d.i.n.ky-Dunk, with his face more than ever pinched with misery.

"Then it _is_ a wound!" I proclaimed in dolorous enough triumph. "But there's still another question, d.i.n.ky-Dunk, you must answer," I went on, speaking as slowly and precisely as I could, as though deliberation in speech might in some way make clearer a matter recognized as only too dark in spirit. "And it must be answered honestly, without any quibble as to the meaning of words. Were you in love with Lady Allie?"

His gesture of repugnance, of seeming self-hate, was both a prompt and a puzzling one.

"That's the hideous, the simply hideous part of it all," he cried out in a sort of listless desperation.

"Why hideous?" I demanded, quite clear-headed, and quite determined that now or never the overscored slate of suspicion should be wiped clean. I still forlornly and foolishly felt, I suppose, that he might yet usher before me some miraculously simple explanation that would wipe his scutcheon clean, that would put everything back to the older and happier order. But as I heard his deep-wrung cry of "Oh, what's the good of all this?" I knew that life wasn't so romantic as we're always trying to make it.

"I've got to know," I said, as steel-cold as a surgeon.

"But can't you see that it's--that it's worse than revolting to me?"

he contended, with the look of a man harried beyond endurance.

"Why should it be?" I exacted.

He sank down in the low chair with the ranch-brand on its leather back. It was an oddly child-like movement of collapse. But I daren't let myself feel sorry for him.

"Because it's all so rottenly ign.o.ble," he said, without looking at me.

"For whom?" I asked, trying to speak calmly.

"For me--for you," he cried out, with his head in his hands. "For you to have been faced with, I mean. It's awful, to think that you've had to stand it!" He reached out for me, but I was too far away for him to touch. "Oh, Tabby, I've been such an awful rotter. And this thing that's happened has just brought it home to me."

"Then you cared, that much?" I demanded, feeling the bottom of my heart fall out, for all the world like the floor of a dump-cart.

"No, no; that's the unforgivable part of it," he cried in quick protest. "It's not only that I did you a great wrong, Tabby, but I did _her_ a worse one. I coolly exploited something that I should have at least respected. I manipulated and used a woman I should have been more generous with. There wasn't even bigness in it, from my side of the game. I traded on that dead woman's weakness. And my hands would be cleaner if I could come to you with the claim that I'd really cared for her, that I'd been swept off my feet, that pa.s.sion had blinded me to the things I should have remembered." He let his hands fall between his knees. Knowing him as the man of reticence that he was, it seemed an indescribably tragic gesture. And it struck me as odd, the next moment, that he should be actually sobbing. "Oh, my dear, my dear, the one thing I was blind to was your bigness, was your goodness. The one thing I forgot was how true blue you could be."

I sat there staring at his still heaving shoulders, turning over what he had said, turning it over and over, like a park-squirrel with a nut. I found a great deal to think about, but little to say.

"I don't blame you for despising me," d.i.n.ky-Dunk said, out of the silence, once more in control of himself.

"I was thinking of _her_," I explained. And then I found the courage to look into my husband's face. "No, d.i.n.ky-Dunk, I don't despise you,"

I told him, remembering that he was still a weak and shaken man. "But I pity you. I do indeed pity you. For it's selfishness, it seems to me, which costs us so much, in the end."

He seemed to agree with me, by a slow movement of the head.

"That's the only glimmer of hope I have," he surprised me by saying.

"But why hope from _that_?" I asked.

"Because you're so utterly without selfishness," that deluded man cried out to me. "You were always that way, but I didn't have the brains to see it. I never quite saw it until you sent me down to--to _her_." He came to a stop, and sat staring at the terra-cotta Spanish floor-tiles. "_I_ knew it was useless, tragically useless. You didn't.

But you were brave enough to let my weakness do its worst, if it had to. And that makes me feel that I'm not fit to touch you, that I'm not even fit to walk on the same ground with you!"

I tried my best to remain judicial.

"But this, d.i.n.ky-Dunk, isn't being quite fair to either of us," I protested, turning away to push in a hair-pin so that he wouldn't see the tremble that I could feel in my lower lip. For an unreasonable and illogical and absurdly big wave of compa.s.sion for my poor old d.i.n.ky-Dunk was welling up through my tired body, threatening to leave me and all my make-believe dignity as wobbly as a street-procession Queen of Sheba on her circus-float. I was hearing, I knew, the words that I'd waited for, this many a month. I was at last facing the scene I'd again and again dramatized on the narrow stage of my woman's imagination. But instead of bringing me release, it brought me heart-ache; instead of spelling victory, it came involved with the thin humiliations of compromise. For things could never be the same again. The blot was there on the scutcheon, and could never be argued away. The man I loved had let the grit get into the bearings of his soul, had let that grit grind away life's delicate surfaces without even knowing the wine of abandoned speed. He had been nothing better than the pa.s.sive agent, the fretful and neutral factor, the cheated one without even the glory of conquest or the tang of triumph. But he had been saved for me. He was there within arm's reach of me, battered, but with the wine-glow of utter contrition on his face.

"Take me back, _Babushka_," I could hear his shaken voice imploring.

"I don't deserve it--but I can't go on without you. I can't! I've had enough of h.e.l.l. And I need you more than anything else in this world!"

That, I had intended telling him, wasn't playing quite fair. But when he reached out his hands toward me, exactly as I've seen his own d.i.n.ky do at nightfall when a darkening room left his little spirit hungry for companions.h.i.+p, something melted like an overlooked chocolate _mousse_ in my crazy old maternal heart, and before I was altogether aware of it I'd let my hands slip over his shoulders as he knelt with his bowed head in my lap. The sight of his colorless and unhappy face with that indescribable homeless-dog look in his eyes was too much for me. I gave up. I hugged his head to my breast-bone as though it were my only life-buoy in an empty and endless Atlantic and only stopped when I had to rub the end of my nose, which I couldn't keep a collection of several big tears from tickling.

"I'm a fool, d.i.n.ky-Dunk, a most awful fool," I tried to tell him, when he gave me a chance to breathe again. "And I've got a temper like a bob-cat!"

"No, no, Beloved," he protested, "it's not foolishness--it's n.o.bility!"

I couldn't answer him, for his arms had closed about me again. "And I love you, Tabbie, I love you with every inch of my body!"

Women are weak. And there is no such thing, so far as I know, as an altogether and utterly perfect man. So we must winnow strength out of our weakness, make the best of a bad bargain, and over-scroll the walls of our life-cell with the illusions which may come to mean as much as the stone and iron that imprison us. All we can do, we who are older and wiser, is wistfully to overlook the wobble where the meshed perfection of youth has been bruised and abused and loosened, tighten up the bearings, and keep as blithely as we can to the worn old road.

For life, after all, is a turn-pike of concession deep-bedded with compromise. And our To-morrows are only our To-days over again.... So d.i.n.ky-Dunk, who keeps saying in unexpected and intriguing ways that he can't live without me, is trying to make love to me as he did in the old days before he got salt-and-peppery above the ears. And I'm blockhead enough to believe him. I'm like an old shoe, I suppose, comfortable but not showy. Yet it's the children we really have to think of. Our crazy old patch-work of the Past may be our own, but the Future belongs to them. There's a heap of good, though, in my humble-eyed old d.i.n.ky-Dunk, too much good ever to lose him, whatever may have happened in the days that are over.

_Sunday the Twenty-fourth_