Outside Inn Part 31

"Of course I didn't."

"You let three years go by without a word."

"Of course--"

"If you say 'of course I did' again I'll fly straight up through this roof. If you'd ever loved me you wouldn't have gone away and left me."

"If I hadn't loved you I wouldn't have gone away."

"Oh, dear," Betty sighed. "I don't see how you can stand there and think about yourself with Nancy out in the night--we don't know where."

"Ourselves, Betty--did you ever really love me?"

"It doesn't make any difference whether I did or not," Betty said. "I hate men."

"I think I'd better be going," Preston Eustace said, his face dark with pain. He was rather a literal-minded young man, as Caroline's brother would have been likely to be.

Betty buried her face in her hands.

"My head aches," she said, "and I was never in my life so mad and so miserable. I can't understand why everything and everybody should behave so--devilishly. You and every one else, I mean. I just simply can't bear to have Nancy suffer so. My head aches and my heart aches and my soul aches." She lifted her head defiantly.

"I think I had better be going," Preston Eustace repeated, looking down at her sorrowfully.

"Oh! don't be going," Betty said. "What in the name of sense do you want to be going for?" Then without warning or premeditation she hurled herself at his breast. "Oh! Preston, if there is anything comforting in this world," she said, "tell it to me, now."

Preston Eustace gathered her to his breast with infinite tenderness.

"I love you," he said with his lips on her brow. "Doesn't that comfort you a little?"

"Yes," she admitted, "yes," winding her arms about his neck, "but you have no idea what a little devil I am, Preston."

"I don't want to have any idea," he said, still holding her hungrily.

"No, I don't think you do," Betty said. "Oh! kiss me again, dear, and tell me you won't ever let me go now."

When Nancy came in she found the lovers so oblivious to the sound of her key in the latch or her footstep in the corridor that she decided to slip into bed without disturbing them, and did so, without their ever realizing that for the latter part of the evening at least, they had a hostess within range of the sound of their voices--indeed, she was obliged to stuff the pillow into her ears to prevent herself from actually hearing what they were saying.

At first her freedom--her release from the monotonous constraint of her daily confinement at the Inn--the unaccustomed independence of her new activities which justified her most untoward goings and comings--was very soothing to her. She liked the feeling of slipping out of the house at night, accountable to no one except the redoubtable Hitty to whom she presented any explanation that happened to occur to her,--however wide its departure from the actual facts--and losing herself in the resurgent town. But after a while her liberty lost its savor. She began to feel uncared for and neglected.

The unaccountable anguish in her breast was neither a.s.suaged nor mitigated by the geographical lat.i.tude she permitted herself. She kept doggedly on with her personally conducted philanthropies, but she began to feel a little frightened about her capacity for endurance.

Her body and brain began to show strange signs of fatigue. She was afraid that one or the other might suddenly refuse to function.

One night, on coming out into the heterogeneous human stream on Avenue A, after a visit to a Polish family in the model tenements on Seventy-ninth Street, she ran into d.i.c.k.

"Why, d.i.c.k," she said, "what an extraordinary place to find you!"

"Yes, isn't it?" he said. "My business often brings me up this way."

"Your business? What business?" she asked incredulously.

"I don't know exactly what business it is. The ministering business, I guess." He motioned toward the basket on her arm: "Let me carry that, and you, too, if you'll let me, Nancy. You look tired."

"I am tired, d.i.c.k," she said. "Have you got a car anywhere around?"

"I can phone for it in two shakes," he said. "Here in this ice-cream parlor. Can I buy you a cone while you're waiting?"

"Buy cones for that crowd of children and I'll watch them eat them.

Doesn't that little girl in the pink dress look like Sheila, d.i.c.k?"

She sank down on a stool in the interior of the candy shop and rested her elbows on the damp marble table in front of her, splotched and streaked still with the refreshment of the last customer who occupied the seat there and watched the horde of dirty clamorous street children devouring ice-cream cones and cheap sweets to the limit of their capacity.

"I didn't know you believed in this promiscuous feeding of children between meals," d.i.c.k said, when she was settled comfortably at last among the cus.h.i.+ons of his car, which had arrived on the scene with an amazing, not to say, suspicious promptness.

"I don't," Nancy said, "in the least; but I don't _really_ believe in the things I believe in any more."

"Poor Nancy!" d.i.c.k said.

"I've had some trouble, d.i.c.k. I'm shaken all out of my poise. I can't seem to get my universe straight again."

"I'm sorry for that," he said. "Anything I can do?"

"Stand by; that's all, I guess."

"You couldn't tell me a little more about it, could you?"

"No, I couldn't, d.i.c.k."

"I'm not even to guess?"

"You couldn't guess. It's the kind of thing that's entirely outside of--of the probabilities. I think it's outside of the range of your understanding, d.i.c.k. I don't think you know that there is exactly that kind of trouble in the world."

"And you think you'd better not enlighten me?"

"I couldn't, d.i.c.k, even if I wanted to. Funny you happened to be in this part of town to-night just when I really needed you."

He smiled. Every night of his life he followed her, watching over her, dodging down dark alley ways, waiting at squalid entrances until she came out. To-night he had ventured to speak to her only because he knew her to be in need of actual physical a.s.sistance.

"Awfully glad to be anywhere around when you need me," he said; "still I hope you don't mind my suggesting that this is a Gehenna of a place for either of us to be in."

"Haven't you any feeling for the downtrodden?" Nancy asked, with a faint reflection of what Billy referred to as her "older and better manner."

"I'm downtrodden myself, Nancy."

She smiled in her turn.

"You don't look very downtrodden to me," she said. "_You've_ got everything to live for."