The Side Of The Angels Part 51

"Because she lied to me."

"Oh! And had you never lied to her?"

He mumbled something about that not being the same thing. "She swore to me that there'd never been any put-up job between her and--and--"

She helped him out. "The--the other person." She could hear the key grating as it turned. "And was there?"

He made the impatient, circular movement of his head, as though his collar chafed him, with which she was familiar. He was gaining time in order to use tact. "Oh, I don't know. There was--there was something.

Whatever it was, she denied it, when all the while they were--"

She felt obliged fully to turn the key. She knew how perilous the question might be, but it was beyond her to keep it back. "They were what, Claude?"

"They were trying to catch me in a trap."

It was like the door into the hall of mysteries opening, but only to make disclosures dimmer and more mystifying still. The postponement of dreadful certainties enabled her, however, to say with some slight relief, "But this--this other person couldn't have been very fond of her himself if he--if he gave her up to you."

He bowed his head still lower into his hands, muttering toward the floor: "Oh, I don't know. I don't care--now. Anyhow, she lied to me, and"--he lifted his haggard eyes again--"and I jumped at it. I saw the way out--and I jumped at it. I told her--I told her--I'd go and marry some one else."

"Did you mean Elsie Darling?"

He nodded speechlessly.

It was to come back again to the point which her anger had caused her to miss that she went forward and laid her hand on his shoulder kindly. "I would, Claude, if I were you," she said, in a matter-of-fact voice.

"She'd make you a good wife."

"No one will make me a good wife now," he said, hoa.r.s.ely. "I'm going to marry Rosie. I'll marry her if it puts me in the gutter. I'll marry her if I never have a cent."

She went back to her place between the pillars, leaning against one of them. "But, Claude," she reasoned, "would that do any good? Would it make either of you happy, after all that's been said and done?"

He seemed to writhe. "I don't care anything about that. I've got to do it."

"You haven't got to do it if Rosie doesn't want it."

"It's got nothing to do with her."

She looked at him in astonishment. "Nothing to do with her? What do you mean?"

He tried to explain further. He had not primarily come back to atone for the suffering he had inflicted on Rosie, or because his love for her was such that he couldn't live without her. He had come back to propitiate the demon within himself--the demon or the G.o.d, he was not sure which it was, for it possessed the attributes of both. He had come back to escape the chastis.e.m.e.nt his soul inflicted on itself--because without coming back he could no longer be a man. He had come back because the Furies had driven him with their whip of knotted snakes, and he could do nothing but yield to their hounding. If Lois thought that traveling in the West was beer and skittles when hunted and scourged by yourself like that--well, she had better try it and see.

What she must understand already was that Rosie and happiness had become minor considerations. He would sacrifice both to regain a measure of his self-respect. He had never supposed, and he didn't suppose now, that Rosie would be happy in marrying him, but that was no longer to the point. The demon or the G.o.d must be appeased, at no matter what cost to the victim.

He made these explanations not straightforwardly or concisely, but with rambling digressions that took him over half the Middle West. He described, or hinted at, all sorts of scenes, peopled by gay young business men and garnished by pretty girls, in which he could have enjoyed himself had it not been for the enemy in his heart. It wasn't merely that he had thrown over Rosie with a cruelty that made her try to kill herself, and still less was it that he couldn't live down his love when once he set about it. It was that the Claude who might have been was strangled and slain, leaving him no inner fellows.h.i.+p but with the Claude who was. Reviving the Claude who might have been was like reviving a corpse, and yet there was nothing to do but make the attempt.

"I'm a gentlemen--what?" he asked, raising his white face pitifully. "I must act like a gentlemen--what?"

"Yes, but if it's too late, Claude--for that particular thing?"

"Oh, but it isn't--it won't be--not when she sees me."

"It might be; and if she doesn't want it, Claude, I don't see why you--"

"You don't see why because you're not me. If you were, you would. A woman hasn't a man's sense of honor, anyhow."

She let this pa.s.s with an inward smile in order to say, "But, Claude, suppose you _can't_ do it?"

He twisted his neck, with his customary chafing, irritated movement.

"I'll do it--or croak."

"Oh, but that's nonsense!"

"To you--not to me. You haven't been through the mill that I've been ground up in. You don't know what it is to have been born--born a gentleman--and to have blasted yourself into human remains. That's what I am now--not a man--to say nothing of a gentleman--just human remains--too awful to look at."

She tried to reason with him. "But, Claude, you mustn't exaggerate things or put the punishment out of proportion to the crime. Admitting that what you did to Rosie was dishonorable--brutal, if you like--"

"Oh, it isn't that. It's what I did to myself. Can't you see?"

She saw, but not with the intensity of Claude himself. Sitting down at last, she let him talk again. He had felt something shattered in him, so he said, at the very minute when he had turned to leave the cuc.u.mber-house on the day of the final rupture. He knew already that he was a cad, and that he was doing what only a cad would have done; but he had expected the remorse to pa.s.s. He had known himself for a cad on other occasions, and yet had outlived the sense of shame. That he should outlive it again he had taken for granted, though he knew that this time he couldn't do it without suffering. He was willing to take the suffering. He was not specially unwilling that Rosie should take it, too. In her way she had been as much to blame as he was. Though he didn't question the sincerity of her love for him, she had plotted and schemed to catch him, because from her point of view he was a rich man's son, and even so had had moments of disloyalty. He found it not unreasonable to expect her to share the responsibility for what had overtaken her. But she, too, would outlive the pain of it and follow his example in marrying some one else.

Lois felt her opportunity to have fully come. "I think she will. She'll marry Jim Breen--if you'll only leave her alone."

"Oh, rot!"

The tone expressed the degree of importance he attached to this possibility. He went on again, discursively, incoherently, covering much of the same ground, but with new and illuminating details, details of which the background was still a jumble of suppers and dances and journeys, but in which the G.o.d or the demon gave him no rest. His distaste for diversion having declared itself from the day of his starting for Chicago, he had whipped up an appet.i.te to counteract it.

Availing himself of the freedom of a young man plentifully supplied with money for the first time in his life, he had made use of all the resources with which strange and exciting cities could furnish him to get back his zest in light-heartedness. The result was not in pleasure, but in disgust, and a horror of himself that grew. It grew from the beginning, like some giant poisonous weed. It grew while he was in Chicago; it grew with each further stage of his journey--in St. Louis, in Cincinnati, in Los Angeles. It was in Los Angeles that he had received Billy Cheever's letter with the news of Rosie's mad leap, and he knew for a certainty that the only thing to be done was to turn his face eastward. Whatever happened, and whoever suffered, he must redeem himself. Redemption had become for him a need more urgent than food, more vital than life. Though he didn't use the word, though his terms were simple and boyish and slangy, Lois could see that his stress was that which sent pilgrims to the Holy Sepulcher, and drove Judas to go and hang himself. Redemption lay in marrying Rosie, and restoring his honor, and bringing the Claude who might have been back to life. Indeed, it was difficult to tell at times which of the two was slain--whether the Claude who might have been, or the other Claude--so distraught and involved were his appeals. But beyond marrying Rosie and keeping his word--being a gentleman, as he expressed it--his outlook didn't extend.

"Any d.a.m.n thing that liked could happen" when that atoning act had been accomplished.

There were so many repet.i.tions in his turns of thought that Lois ended by following them no more than listlessly. Not that she had ceased to be interested, but her mind was occupied with other phases of the drama.

She remembered, what she had so often heard, that in the Mastermans there was this extraordinary strain of idealism of which no one could foresee the turn it would take. She knew the traditions of the great-grandfather whose heart had broken on finding that America was not the regenerated land he hoped for. Tales were still current in the village of old Dr. Masterman, his son, who through sheer confidence in his fellow-men never paid any one he owed and never collected money from any one who owed it to him. Archie Masterman, in the next generation, was supposed to have taken the altruistic tendency by the throat in himself and choked it down; but Uncle Sim was a byword of eccentric goodness throughout the countryside. Now the impulse was manifest in Claude, in this revulsion against his own failure, in this marred and broken vision of a Something to which he had not been true. And as for Thor....

But here she was tortured and frightened. Who knew what this strange inheritance might be working in him? Who could tell how big and tender and transcending it might become? That it would be transcending and tender and big was certain. If poor, frivolous, futile Claude could feel like this, could feel that he must redeem his soul though "any d.a.m.n thing that liked" should happen as the price of his redemption, in Thor the yearning would outflank her range. Might not the secret of secrets be in that? Might not that which she had been seeing as treachery to herself be no more than a conflict of aspirations? If Claude, with his blurred distortion of the divine in him, served no other purpose, he at least threw a light on Thor. Thor, too, was a Masterman. Thor, too, was born to the vision--to the longing after the nationally perfect that had become legendary since the time of the great-grandfather--to the sweet, neighborly affection that ran through all the tales of that man's son--to the st.u.r.dy righteousness of Uncle Sim--to the standards of honor from which poor Claude had fallen as angels fall--and to G.o.d only knew what high promptings strangled and vitiated in his father. Thor was heir to it all, with something of his own to boot, something strong, something patient, something laborious and loyal, something long-suffering and winning and meek, that might have marked the leader of a rebellious people or a pagan, skeptic Christ.

Her mind was so full of this ideal of the man against whom--and also for whom--her heart was hot that she made no effort to detain Claude when, after long silence, he picked up his hat and slipped away into the darkness.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

He slipped away into the darkness, but only to do what he had done on the previous evening after making arrangements with old Maggs. He climbed the hill north of the pond, not so much in the hope of seeing Rosie or any one else, as to haunt the scenes so closely a.s.sociated with his spiritual downfall.

It was a languorous, luscious night, with the scent of new-mown hay mingling with that of gardens. If there was any breeze it was lightly from the east, bringing that mitigation of the heat traditional to the week following Independence Day. As there was no moon, the stars had their full midsummer intensity, the Scorpion trailing hotly on the southern horizon, with Antares throwing out a fire like the red rays in a diamond. Beneath it the city flung up a yellow glow that might have been the smoke of a distant conflagration, while from the hilltop the suburbs were a-sparkle. As, standing in the road, Claude looked through the open gateway down over the slope of land, the hothouse roofs and the distant levels of the pond gleamed with a faint, ghostly radiance like the sheen of ancient tarnished crystal.

The house was dark. It was dark and dead. It was dark and dead and haunted. Everything was haunted; everything was dark. Even the furnace chimney looming straight and black against the stars was plumeless. But in the silence and stillness there was something that drew him on. He crossed the road and went a few paces within the gate. He had not ventured so far on the previous evening, and during the day he had dared no more than to look upward from the boulevard below, after that pilgrimage to Duck Rock on which William Sweetapple had surprised him.

Now in the darkness and quietness he stood, not searching so much as dreaming. He was dreaming of Rosie, dreaming of her with a kind of cheer. After all, he would be bringing joy to her as well as getting peace of spirit for himself. It wouldn't be so hard. She would meet him as she used to meet him here, as she used to let him come and visit her, and then the atonement would be made. The process would be simple, and he should become a man again.