Sally Bishop Part 28

There was no answer.

"Are you, Sally?"

"Yes, frightfully--frightfully! Oh, I wish I hadn't got to go on."

It was rent from her heart, torn from her. All the spirit in her was broken--crushed.

"But why, my darling? Why?" The thin arms held her tighter, warm lips kissed her neck and shoulders. "Did he treat you badly--did he?"

"No!"

Janet gleaned much in the directness of that answer.

"Doesn't he care for you?"

She knew then that Sally cared for him.

"I don't know. How could I know?"

"He hasn't told you so, one way or the other?"

"No."

"But you think he doesn't?"

"Oh, I don't know."

"Then what makes you so frightfully unhappy?"

"Because I'm never going to see him again."

The words were thick, choked almost in her throat.

"Oh, then he doesn't care," said Janet, softly.

"Yes, he does!" retorted Sally, wildly. "He does care, only--only--"

"Only what?"

"Only, he thinks too little of himself and--and too much of me. He says he's not the sort of man I ought to have anything to do with"--the words were rus.h.i.+ng from her now--the torrent of earth that a landslip sets free. "He never wants to marry, he hates the conventionalities and the bonds of marriage like you say you do. And he asked me to forgive him for thinking I was different--different--to what he had expected. He said he ought never to have spoken to me in the first instance, and that it was his fault, and he blamed himself entirely for what had happened. Then he took me downstairs and put me in a hansom and said good-bye. And--I'm not to see him--any more."

It was a pitiable little story, pitiably told; punctuated with tears and choking breaths, with no heed for effect, nor attempt to make it dramatic or sadder than it already was.

When she had finished, she lay there, crying quietly in Janet's arms, all courage gone, all vitality sapped from her.

For a long time Janet waited, thinking it all through. Then she whispered in Sally's ears.

"And you love him, Sally?"

The heavy sigh, so deep drawn that it seemed to strain down to her heart--that was answer enough. What further answer need she give?

Sighs, tears, the catch in the breath, the look in the eyes, the look from the eyes--those are the language in which a woman really speaks.

Words, she uses to hide them.

CHAPTER XIX

If you look into life, you will find that the key-note of every woman's existence is love--the broad, the great, the grand pa.s.sion.

She may take up a million causes, champion a thousand aims; but the end that she reaches--is love. To fail in such an end--to lose the grasp of it when once it might have been hers--this is the most bitter of aloes; gall that eats into her blood and corrodes her clearest vision. A man, forging destinies, is a king, to be mated only with a woman who loves.

There are exceptions; but these are not needed to prove the rule; for there hangs even some doubt, like a fly in the amber, in the history of Jeanne D'Arc, the most patent an example of them all. Yet whether, as some chronicles would say, she was never burnt as a witch, but smuggled into the country, and there mated in love--and it would seem a shame unpardonable to rob history of a great martyr and the Church of Rome of a saint--it makes no odds in the counting. Great women have loved greatly--lesser women have loved less--but all who are of the s.e.x have made the heart their master, and obeyed it whenever it has truly called.

So it had come to Sally. Beyond all doubt, she loved; beyond all question, she was prepared to obey the faintest call that her heart prompted. Janet, tender to her that night, fondling her and caressing her, answering to her with the very heart that she had tried to stifle within herself, was Janet herself again the next morning. But Sally was unchanged.

She dressed herself silently before the mirror, looking out through the window at the grey river-fog that fell gloomily across the water and Janet lay in bed, her hands crossed behind her head, a cigarette hanging between her lips and the smoke curling up past her eyes. The school of Art did not open until eleven o'clock that morning. Sally had to be at the office at nine.

"There'll be a fog up in Town," said Janet. She did not take the cigarette out of her mouth. It jerked up and down with the words.

"Sure to be," Sally replied.

"Suppose Mr. Traill will come and take you out to lunch?"

Sally turned quickly. "I told you last night," she said bitterly.

"We shan't see each--"

"Oh yes, I know that. But do you think he means it?"

"I'm sure he does."

"I'm not."

Sally unpinned a coil of her hair and re-arranged it more carefully, unconscious that she did it because Janet had suggested the vague hope in her mind that he might come.

"Why are you so different this morning?" she asked.

Janet brushed away a piece of glowing ash that had fallen like a cloud of dust into one of the hollows below her neck.

"Didn't know I was very different."

"You are."

"Well, I've been thinking--" She threw the end of her cigarette away and jumped out of bed, walking on her heels over the cold, linoleumed floor to the washstand. "I've been thinking," she repeated as she poured out the cold water into the basin--"and as far as I can see"--she dipped her face with a rush into the icy water, and her words became a gurgle of speeding bubbles--"there was really no need for all your crying and misery--heavens! this water'd nip a tenderer bud than I am. Ain't I a bud, Sally?" She laughed and s.h.i.+vered her shoulders as she struggled to work the soap into a lather.

"I never can understand you when you talk like that," said Sally.

"I never know whether you really mean what you say."

"Well, I mean every word of it. It's the only time I do mean things, when I talk like that. Where'd you put the towel? We want a clean towel, Sally. I sopped up some tea I spilt with this last night.