The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig Part 29

Grant was laughing, with a choke in his throat. "Josh," said he, "you're either more or less than human."

"Both," said Craig. "Grant, we're wasting time. Walter!" That last in a stentorian shout.

The valet appeared. "Yes, Mr. Craig."

"Pack your friend Grant, here, for two days in New York. He's going to-night and--I guess you'd better come along."

Arkwright threw up his hands in a gesture of mock despair. "Do as he says, Walter. He's the boss."

"Now you're talking sense," said Craig. "Some day you'll stand before kings for this--or sit, as you please."

On their way out Josh fished from the darkness under the front stairs a tattered and battered suitcase and handed it to Walter. "It's my little all," he explained to Grant. "I've given up my rooms at the Wyandotte.

They stored an old trunkful or so for me, and I've sent my books to the office."

"Look here, Josh," said Grant, when they were under way; "does Margaret know you're coming?"

"Does Margaret know I'm coming?" repeated Joshua mockingly. "Does Margaret know her own mind and me?... Before I forget it here's a list I wrote out against a lamp-post while I was waiting for you to come home.

It's the things I must have, so far as I know. The frills and froth you know about--I don't."

CHAPTER XVIII

PEACE AT ANY PRICE

Miss Severance, stepping out of a Waldorf elevator at the main floor, shrank back wide-eyed. "You?" she gasped.

Before her, serene and smiling and inflexible, was Craig. None of the suits he had bought at seven that morning was quite right for immediate use; so there he was in his old lounge suit, baggy at knees and elbows and liberally bestrewn with lint. Her glance fell from his mussy collar to his backwoodsman's hands, to his feet, so cheaply and shabbily shod; the shoes looked the worse for the elaborate gloss the ferry bootblack had put upon them. She advanced because she could not retreat; but never had she been so repelled.

She had come to New York to get away from him. When she entered the train she had flung him out of the window. "I WILL NOT think of him again," she had said to herself. But--Joshua Craig's was not the sort of personality that can be banished by an edict of will. She could think angrily of him, or disdainfully, or coldly, or pityingly--but think she must. And think she did. She told herself she despised him; and there came no echoing protest or denial from anywhere within her. She said she was done with him forever, and well done; her own answer to herself there was, that while she was probably the better off for having got out of the engagement, still it must be conceded that socially the manner of her getting out meant scandal, gossip, laughter at her. Her cheeks burned as her soul flamed.

"The vulgar boor!" she muttered.

Was ever woman so disgraced, and so unjustly? What had the G.o.ds against her, that they had thus abased her? How Was.h.i.+ngton would jeer! How her friends would sneer! What hope was there now of her ever getting a husband? She would be an object of pity and of scorn. It would take more courage than any of the men of her set had, to marry a woman rejected by such a creature--and in such circ.u.mstances!

"He has made everybody think I sought him. Now, he'll tell everybody that he had to break it off--that HE broke it off!"

She ground her teeth; she clenched her hands; she wept and moaned in the loneliness of her bed. She hated Craig; she hated the whole world; she loathed herself. And all the time she had to keep up appearances--for she had not dared tell her grandmother--had to listen while the old lady discussed the marriage as an event of the not remote future.

Why had she not told her grandmother? Lack of courage; hope that something would happen to reveal the truth without her telling. HOPE that something would happen? No, fear. She did not dare look at the newspapers. But, whatever her reason, it was not any idea that possibly the engagement might be resumed. No, not that. "Horrible as I feel,"

thought she, "I am better off than in those weeks when that man was whirling me from one nightmare to another. The peace of desolation is better than that torture of doubt and repulsion. Whatever was I thinking of to engage myself to such a man? to think seriously of pa.s.sing my life with him? Poor fool that I was, to rail against monotony, to sigh for sensations! Well, I have got them."

Day and night, almost without ceasing, her thoughts had boiled and bubbled on and on, like a geyser ever struggling for outlet and ever falling vainly back upon itself.

Now--here he was, greeting her at the elevator car, smiling and confident, as if nothing had happened. She did not deign even to stare at him, but, with eyes that seemed to be simply looking without seeing any especial object, she walked straight on. "I'm in luck," cried he, beside her. "I had only been walking up and down there by the elevators about twenty minutes."

She made no reply. At the door she said to the carriage-caller:

"A cab, please--no, a hansom."

The hansom drove up; its doors opened. Craig pushed aside the carriage man, lifted her in with a powerful upward swing of his arm against her elbow and side--so powerful that she fell into the seat, knocking her hat awry and loosening her veil from the brim so that it hung down distressfully across her eyes and nose. "Drive up Fifth Avenue to the Park," said Craig, seating himself beside her. "Now, please don't cry,"

he said to her.

"Cry?" she exclaimed. Her dry, burning eyes blazed at him.

"Your eyes were so bright," laughed he, "that I thought they were full of tears."

"If you are a gentleman you will leave this hansom at once."

"Don't talk nonsense," said he. "You know perfectly well I'll not leave.

You know perfectly well I'll say what I've got to say to you, and that no power on earth can prevent me. That's why you didn't give way to your impulse to make a scene when I followed you into this trap."

She was busy with her hat and veil.

"Can I help you?" said he with a great show of politeness that was ridiculously out of harmony with him in every way. That, and the absurdity of Josh Craig, of all men, helping a woman in the delicate task of adjusting a hat and veil, struck her as so ludicrous that she laughed hysterically; her effort to make the laughter appear an outburst of derisive, withering scorn was not exactly a triumph.

"Well," she presently said, "what is it you wish to say? I have very little time."

He eyed her sharply. "You think you dislike me, don't you?" said he.

"I do," replied she, her tone as cutting as her words were curt.

"How little that amounts to! All human beings--Grant, you, I, all of us, everybody--are brimful of vanity. It slops over a little one way and we call it like. It slops over the other way and we call it dislike--hate--loathing--according to the size of the slop. Now, I'm not here to deal with vanity, but with good sense. Has it occurred to you in the last few days that you and I have got to get married, whether we will or no?"

"It has not," she cried with frantic fury of human being cornered by an ugly truth.

"Oh, yes, it has. For you are a sensible woman--entirely too sensible for a woman, unless she marries an unusual man like me."

"Is that a jest?" she inquired in feeble attempt at sarcasm.

"Don't you know I have no sense of humor? Would I do the things I do and carry them through if I had?"

In spite of herself she admired this penetration of self-a.n.a.lysis. In spite of herself the personality beneath his surface, the personality that had a certain uncanny charm for her, was subtly rea.s.serting its inexplicable fascination.

"Yes, we've got to marry," proceeded he. "I have to marry you because I can't afford to let you say you jilted me. That would make me the laughing-stock of my State; and I can't afford to tell the truth that I jilted you because the people would despise me as no gentleman. And, while I don't in the least mind being despised as no gentleman by fas.h.i.+onable noddle-heads or by those I trample on to rise, I do mind it when it would ruin me with the people."

Her eyes gleamed. So! She had him at her mercy!

"Not so fast, young lady," continued he in answer to that gleam. "It is equally true that you've got to marry me."

"But I shall not!" she cried. "Besides, it isn't true."

"It IS true," replied he. "You may refuse to marry me, just as a man may refuse to run when the dynamite blast is going off. Yes, you can refuse, but--you'd not be your grandmother's granddaughter if you did."

"Really!" She was so surcharged with rage that she was shaking with it, was tearing up her handkerchief in her lap.

"Yes, indeed," he a.s.sured her, tranquil as a lawyer arguing a commercial case before a logic-machine of a judge. "If you do not marry me all your friends will say I jilted you. I needn't tell you what it would mean in your set, what it would mean as to your matrimonial prospects, for you to have the reputation of having been turned down by me--need I?"