The Iron Woman Part 56

He shook his head sympathetically. "A hack? _Here?_ Lord, no! There isn't no depot carriage running at this time of year.

You'd ought to have got off at Normans, the station above this, and then you could have drove over; fourteen miles, though.

Something of a drive on an evening like this! But Normans is quite a place. They run two depot carriages there all winter and a dozen in summer."

"I'll walk," she told him, briefly.

"It's more 'an three miles," he warned her; "and it's sheeting down! If I had such a thing as an umbrella, except this one, I'd--"

But she had gone. She knew the way; she remembered the summer-- oh, so long ago!--when she and Nannie had driven over that sandy road along the beach on their way to Mrs. Richie's house. It was so deep with mud now that sometimes she had to walk outside the wheel-ruts into the wiry beach-gra.s.s. The road toiled among the dunes; on the sh.o.r.e on her right she could hear the creaming lap of the waves; but rain was driving in from the sea in an impenetrable curtain, and only when in some turn of the wind it lifted and s.h.i.+fted could she catch a glimpse of the scarf of foam lying on the sands, or see the gray heave of an endless expanse that might be water or might be sky folded down into the water.

It was growing dark; sometimes she blundered from the road to one side or the other; sometimes she thought she saw approaching figures--a man, perhaps, or a vehicle; but as she neared them they were only bushes or leaning, wind-beaten pines. She was drenched and her clothes seemed intolerably heavy. Oh, how David would laugh at her hat! She put up her hand, in its soaked and slippery glove, and touched the roses about the crown and laughed herself. "He won't mind," she said, contentedly. She had forgotten that he had stopped loving her. She began to sing under her breath the old tune of her gay, inconsequent girlhood--

"Oh, won't it be joyful, joyful, joyful, Oh, won't it be joyful, to meet..."

She stopped; something warm was on her face; she had not known that she was weeping. Suddenly, far off, she saw a glimmer of light.... Mrs. Richie's house! Her heart rose in her throat.

"David," she said aloud, weakly, "David, I'm coming just as fast as I can."

But when she opened the door of the living-room in the little house that sat so close to the crumpling lap and crash of the tide, and saw him, his pipe in his hand, half rising from his chair by the fire and turning around to see who had entered, she could hardly speak his name--"_David_."

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

"... And that was Thursday; your letter had come in the first mail; and--oh, hush, hush; it was not a wicked letter, David.

Don't you suppose I know that, now? I knew it--the next day. And I read it. I don't know just what happened then. I can't remember very clearly. I think I felt 'insulted.' ... It sounds so foolish to say that, doesn't it? But I was just a girl then, and you know what girls are like.... David, I am not making any excuse. There isn't any excuse. I am just--telling you. I have to talk slowly; I am tired. You won't mind if I talk slowly? ... I suppose I thought I had been 'insulted'; and I remember something seemed to flame up. You know how it always was with me? David, I have never been able to be angry since that day. Isn't that strange? I've never been angry since. Well, then, I went out to walk. I remember Cherry-pie called down-stairs to know if I had a clean pocket-handkerchief. I remember that; and yet I can't seem to remember why I went out to walk. ... And he came up and spoke to me. Oh, I forgot to tell you: he'd been in love with me. I meant to tell you about that as soon as we were married.... Where was I?--Oh, yes; he spoke to me...."

Her voice broke with exhaustion; she closed her eyes and lay back in the big chair. David put her hand against his face, and held it there until she opened her eyes. She looked at him dumbly for a little while; then the slow, monotonous outpouring of all the silent months began again: "And I said I hated you. And he said if I married him, it would show you that I hated you. David, he was fond of me. I have to remember that. It wouldn't be fair not to remember that, would it? I was really the one to blame. Oh, I must be fair to him; he was fond of me.... And all that afternoon, after he married me, I was so glad to think how wicked I was. I knew how you would suffer. And that made me glad to be wicked...."

There was a long pause; he pulled a little shawl across her feet, and laid her hand over his eyes; but he was silent.

"Then," she said, in a whisper, "I died, I think. I suppose that is why I have never been angry since. Something was killed in me.... I've wondered a good deal about that. David, isn't it strange how part of you can die, and yet you can go on living? Of course I expected to die. I prayed all the time that I might. But I went on living;--you are glad I lived?" she said, incredulously, catching some broken murmur from behind his hands in which his face was hidden; "glad? Why, I should have thought-- Well, that was the most awful time of all. The only peace I had, just single minutes of peace, was when I remembered that you hated me."

He laid his face against her knee, and she felt the fierce intake of his breath.

"You _didn't_ hate me? Oh, don't say you didn't, David.

Don't! It was the only comfort I had, to have you despise me.

Although that was just at first. Afterward, last May, when you walked down to Nannie's with me that afternoon, and I thought you had got all over it, I...something seemed to be eating my heart away. That seems like a contradiction, doesn't it? I don't understand how I could feel two ways. But just at first I wanted you to hate me. I thought you would be less unhappy if you hated me; and besides, I wanted to feel the whips. I felt them--oh, I felt them!...And all the time I thought that soon I would die.

But death would have been too easy. I had to go on living." There was another long silence; he kissed her hand once; but he did not speak... . "And the days went on, and went on, and went on.

Sometimes I didn't feel anything; but sometimes it was like stringing sharp beads on a red-hot wire. I suppose that sounds foolish? But when his mother disinherited him, I knew I would have to go on--stringing beads. Because it would have been mean, then, to leave him. You see that, David? Besides, I was a spoiled thing, a worthless thing. If staying with him would make up for the harm I had done him,--Mrs. Maitland told me I had injured him; why of course, there was nothing else to do. I knew you would understand. So I stayed. 'Unkind to me?'" She bent forward a little to hear his smothered question. "Oh no; never. I used to wish he would be. But he--loved me"--she shuddered. "Oh, David, how I have dreamed of your arms. David ... David ..."

They had forgotten that each had believed love had ceased in the other; they did not even a.s.sert that it was unchanged. Nor was there any plea for forgiveness on either side. The moment was too great for that.

She sank back in her chair with a long breath. He rose, and kneeling beside her, drew her against his breast. She sighed with comfort. "_Here_! At last to be here. I never thought it would be. It is heaven. Yes; I shall remember that I have been in heaven. But I don't think I shall be sent to h.e.l.l. No; G.o.d won't punish me any more. It will be just sleep."

He had to bend his ear almost to her white lips to catch her whisper. "What did I say? I don't remember exactly; I am so happy... . Let me be quiet a little while. I'm pretty tired.

May I stay until morning? It is raining, and if I may stay ...

I will go away very early in the morning." The long, rambling, half-whispered story had followed the fierce statement, flung at him when she burst in out of the storm, and stood, sodden with rain, trembling with fatigue and cold, and pus.h.i.+ng from her his alarmed and outstretched hands,--the statement that she had left Blair! There were only a few words in the outburst of terrible anger which had been dormant in her for all these years: "He stole your wife. Now he is stealing your money. I told him he couldn't keep them both. Your wife has come back to you. I have left him--"

Even while she was stammering, shrilly, the furious finality, he caught her, swaying, in his arms. It was an hour before she could speak coherently of the happenings of the last twenty-four hours; she had to be warmed and fed and calmed. And it was curious how the lover in him and the physician in him alternated in that hour; he had been instant with the soothing commonplace of help,-- her wet clothes, her chilled body, her hunger, were his first concern. "I know you are hungry," he said, cheerfully; but his hands shook as he put food before her. When he drew her chair up to the fire, and kneeling down, took off her wet shoes, he held her slender, tired feet in his hands and chafed them gently; but suddenly laid them against his breast, warming them, murmuring over them with a sobbing breath, as though he felt the weariness of the little feet, plodding, plodding, plodding through the rain to find him. The next minute he was the doctor, ordering her with smiling words to lie back in her chair and rest; then looking at her with a groan.

When at last she was coherent again, she began that pitiful confession, and he listened; at first walking up and down; then coming nearer; sitting beside her; then kneeling; then lifting her and holding her against his breast. When, relaxing in his arms like a tired child, she ended, almost in a whisper, with her timid plea to be allowed to stay until morning, the tears dropped down his face.

"Until morning?" he said, with a laugh that broke into a sob-- "until death!"

Long before this his first uneasiness, at the situation--for her sake,--had disappeared. The acquired uneasinesses of convention vanish before the primal realities. The long-banked fire had glowed, then broken into flames that consumed such chaff as "propriety." As he held her in his arms after that whispered and rambling story of despair, he trembled all over. For Elizabeth there had never been a single moment of conventional consciousness; she was solemnly unaware of everything but the fact that they were together for this last moment. When he said "until death," she lifted her head and looked at him.

"Yes," she said, "_until death_."

Something in her broken whisper touched him like ice. He was suddenly rigid. "Elizabeth, where did you mean to go to-morrow morning?" She made no answer, but he felt that she was alert.

"Elizabeth! Tell me! what do you mean?" His loud and terrified command made her quiver; she was bewildered by the unexpectedness of his suspicion, but too dulled and stunned to evade it. David, with his ear close to her lips, raised his head. "Elizabeth, don't you understand? Dear, this is life, not death, for us both."

She drew away from him with a long sigh, struggling up feebly out of his arms and groping for her chair; she shook her head, smiling faintly. "I'm sorry you guessed. No, I can't go on living. There's no use talking about it, David. I can't."

He stood looking down at her, pale from the shock of his discovery. "Listen to me, Elizabeth: you belong to me. Don't you understand, dear? You always have belonged to me. He knew it when he stole you from yourself, as well as from me. You have always been mine. You have come back to me. Do you think I will let Blair Maitland or death or G.o.d Almighty, steal you now? Never.

You belong to me! to me!"

"But--" she began.

"Oh, Elizabeth, what do we care for what they call right and wrong? 'Right' is being together!"

She frowned in a puzzled way. She had not been thinking of "right and wrong"; her mind had been absorbed by the large and simple necessity of death. But his inevitable reasonableness, ignoring her organic impulse, was already splitting hairs to justify an organic impulse of his own.

"G.o.d gave you to me," he said, "and by G.o.d I'll keep you! That's what is right; if we parted now it would be wrong."

It seemed as if the gale of pa.s.sion which had been slowly rising in him in these hours they had been together blew away the mists in which her mind had been groping, blew away the soothing fogs of death which had been closing in about her, and left her, shrinking, in sudden, confusing light.

"Wrong?" she said, dazed; "I hadn't thought about that. David, I wouldn't have come to you except--except because it was the end.

Anything else is impossible, you know."

"Why?" he demanded.

"I am married," she said, bewildered.

He laughed under his breath. "Blair Maitland will take his own medicine, now," he said;--"you are married to _me!_"

The triumph in his voice, while it vaguely alarmed her, struck some answering chord in her mind, for while mechanically she contradicted him, some deeper self was saying, "yes; yes."

But aloud she said, "It can't be, David; don't you see it can't be?"

"But it _is_ already; I will never let you go. I've got you-- at last. Elizabeth, listen to me; while you've been talking, I've thought it all out: as things are, I don't think you can possibly get a divorce from Blair and marry me. He's 'kind' to you, you say; and he's 'decent,' and he doesn't drink--and so forth and so forth. I know the formula to keep a woman with a man she hates and call it being respectable. No, you can't get a divorce from him; but he can get a divorce from you ... if you give him the excuse to do so."

Elizabeth looked at him with perfectly uncomprehending eyes. The innocence of them did not touch him. For the second time in her life she was at the mercy of Love. "Blair is fond of me," she said; "he never would give me a divorce. He has told me so a hundred times. Do you suppose I haven't begged him to let me go?

On my knees I begged him. No, David, there is no way out except-- "

"There is a way out if you love me enough to--come to me. Then,"

he said in a whisper, "he will divorce you and we can be married.

Oh, Elizabeth, death is not the way out; it is _life_, dear, life! Will you live? Will you give me life?" He was breathing as if he had been running; he held her fingers against his lips until he bruised them.

She understood. After a minute of silence she said, faintly: "As for me, nothing matters. Even if it is wicked--"