Sally Bishop Part 45

"I don't want to look into the future," she said bravely. "I hate looking into the future. I'm happy in the present; why shouldn't I remain so?"

"How will this prevent you? Doesn't it appeal to you at all, that when we came to live together, I took up a certain responsibility with you? I've got to fulfil that responsibility. This evening, when we go back, I'm going to draw out some form of settlement which I intend to place with you. I shall take it to my solicitor and get it legalized to-morrow morning."

She leant forward across the table and touched his hand again. Her lips were trembling; her whole face, which only a few moments before was bright with cheerfulness, was now drawn, pinched with the suffering and terror in her mind.

"Please don't," she said brokenly. "Please don't. I don't want any settlement as long as you care for me. What is a settlement to me if, as you say, you were to die? What good would it be to me then?

Do you think I could bear to go On living?"

He searched her face with amazement. "You mustn't talk foolishness like this," he replied firmly, but not unkindly. "We've all got our own lives to get through. We've all got to answer for them one by one, and live them one by one as well. There's no condition of relations.h.i.+p in existence, which can make a man and a woman one person except in their imaginations and according to the fairy tales of the Church. You're a dear, simple, little child to talk about not being able to go on living if I were to peg out; but you would. You'd go on living. There's no doubt in my mind, but that you'd love some one else again."

"You little understand me," she exclaimed bitterly, "if you could ever think that."

"Well--in that respect, at least, I believe I understand human nature; and in that respect, too, I imagine it must be a surer criterion from which to judge of such matters. I don't insist upon it as a certainty--I only suppose it possible. But in any event you would want money to live upon, and my mind is quite made up that I ought to make a settlement on you. Why should you not want me to--eh?

Why?"

She hung her head. To tell him, when she had no definite proof that he had thought of leaving her, might be to put the thought into his mind. She could not tell him. But pride did not enter the matter in the least. If it could have served her purpose in any way, she would willingly have let him know that she counted it possible for him to desert her. But the fear that it might create a suggestion to his consciousness which hitherto had not existed, locked the words in her lips. She would not have uttered them for a crown of wealth.

"Why?" he repeated. "Eh?"

"I'd rather you didn't," she said, with trouble in voice. "I'd rather you didn't--that's all."

"Well--I'm afraid it's got to be," he replied finally. "In my mind it's not fair to you, and I'm determined that where you're concerned, I shall have nothing with which to reproach myself. I shall draw it up this evening when we go back."

She looked pitiably about her. Now it seemed that the little Dutch clock, which had been ticking so merrily, so much in unison with life, all went out of time. It seemed a farce then, that little Dutch clock.

All the romance went out of it--it was only a trade--a trade machine for the making of money, no longer the counting of happy hours.

Everything seemed a trade then--everything seemed a trade.

CHAPTER VI

That evening the settlement was drawn up. When he had finished it, Traill held it out to her.

"You'd better just read it through," he said; "the substance of it is there. To legalize, merely means to write the same thing at greater length and in less comprehensive English."

"I don't want to read it," she replied.

"But why?"

"It doesn't interest me. You've written it to please yourself, not to please me. Please don't ask me to read it!"

He was unable to follow the reasoning of this, and he shrugged his shoulders with a sense of irritation. "As you wish," he said quietly and put the paper away in a drawer of his bureau. "I'll give you a copy of this, at any rate."

Before they had gone abroad, Traill had taken a lease of the floor above his chambers, which contained rooms similar in shape and size to those in which he lived. These, he had decorated and furnished according to the slightest wish that he could induce Sally to express.

In the room which she used as a sitting-room, he had given her a piano with permission to play on it whenever he was not in the rooms below.

Most of the daytime, then, she was at liberty to make what noise she liked and, at all times, free to have any friends she wished to see, on the strict understanding that he was not to be bothered by them.

There was only one friend. Janet came to see her on every occasion when Traill had to be out for the evening--at a Law Courts dinner or some such public function, but she never met him.

"Why doesn't he want to meet your friends?" Janet once asked her.

"I have only one," Sally had replied, laughing.

"Well--why won't he meet me? I suppose you've shown him that photograph you've got of me? It's enough to put any man off."

"I shall never take any notice when you talk like that," said Sally.

"Very well--don't! But why is it?"

"I think I know--but I'm afraid you'll be angry."

"No, I shan't. Come along--out with it!"

"Well--I told him once--that first day I dined with him--that I should love you two to meet. I said I'd love to hear you argue--"

"Oh, G.o.d!" exclaimed Janet. She cast her eyes up to the ceiling. "That did it! What did he say?"

"He said he could love a woman, but he couldn't argue with her."

"Yes--of course he did. A woman has to be confoundedly pretty before a man's going to let her have a point of view. Even then, if she isn't fairly cute, it's his own he gives her. Then I suppose when you came to live here, he saw my photograph?"

"I suppose he--yes, I think he did. I showed it to him; or he asked who it was."

Janet broke out into a peal of harsh--strident laughter.

"It's a wonder he risks your bringing me as near as the next floor,"

she had said. "Lord! A woman with a face like mine, who argues! G.o.d help us!"

But once she had understood that point, Janet had never alluded to it again; had made no effort to catch a glimpse of the man who so filled Sally's life. So much, in fact, had she endeavoured to avoid their contact that, on one occasion, when she and Sally had been climbing up to the second floor, and the door of his room was opened, through which his voice had sounded, calling to Sally, she had run hurriedly up the stairs out of sight, her heart thumping with excitement when he had shouted out--

"Who the devil's that?"

The inclination to shout back--"What the devil's that to you?" she had clipped on the tip of her tongue; but only for Sally's sake.

On this evening, then, that the settlement was drawn up, Sally had slowly climbed the stairs to the floor above, and once in her little sitting-room, with the door closed behind her, she had seated herself upon the settee near the fireplace and gazed into the cheerless, unlighted fire with dry and tearless eyes.

To her, the shadow of the end fell on everything. Just a little more than three years and a bend in the road had shown it stretching across her path. True, it was only a shadow. He had said nothing whatever about leaving her; had not even suggested it in the slightest word he had uttered. She must pa.s.s through the shadow, then; but what lay upon the other side was beyond her knowledge, though not beyond her fear.

To drive the apprehensions from her mind, she rose suddenly, shrugging shoulders, as though her blood were cold, and went to the piano. Without thinking, she sat down, began to play; then her hands lifted from the keys as if they burnt her touch. She had as suddenly remembered. Traill was below. For a moment longer she sat there, just touching, feeling the notes with the tips of her fingers--listening to the sounds in her mind--then she rose, standing motionless, attentive to all the little noises in the room below.

She heard the clink of a gla.s.s. He was taking his whisky. The sound indicated that he would soon be going to bed. She glanced at the clock, ticking daintily on her mantelpiece. It was just after eleven.

Thoughts, calculations began to wander to her mind. Downstairs, he had said good night, kissed her--gently, as he always did--and opened the door for her as she came upstairs. But then he did that every night. Every evening he kissed her, every evening he said good night; but then perhaps, some half-hour later, she would hear him mounting the stairs to her room, and her heart would hammer like steel upon an anvil until he had knocked at her door and she had whispered--"Come in."

Would he come up that evening, she wondered. Two weeks now had pa.s.sed since he had been to her thus, and so her mind--searching, as it would seem, for its trouble--intuitively connected the circ.u.mstance with this event of the settlement. So she drove herself to judge him by the lowest standards--those standards to which a woman at last resorts when she thinks she sees the waning of her influence. That in the heart of them they seldom put first, but last. Yet in the ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is, in a man, the soonest to come and the soonest to go, while fondness, caring and affection may remain behind, untouched by its departure. The beast in the every man has little to do with the intellect, and it is with his intellect, above all things, that he loves truest and most of all.

But here Sally fell into that most common of women's mistakes. She judged him by his pa.s.sions. If she did not hear his footsteps on the stairs that night; if his knock did not fall upon the door and startle the silence in her heart into a thousand pulsating echoes, then she knew that she would be one step nearer to the realization that it was the end indeed.