The Making of a Soul Part 38

Jim Herrick, more silent and worn-looking than Toni had ever seen him, helped his wife to alight and then shook hands gratefully with Toni.

"So many thanks, Mrs. Rose." His big, bright eyes looked into hers, almost as the eyes of a nice dog might have done. "You have saved us a long wait, and I'm only sorry we have taken you out of your way."

"Oh, that's nothing," Toni said. "I like being out on these bright days, and I'm ever so glad I happened to be at the station."

She shook hands with Mrs. Herrick, who looked a pitifully fragile figure as she stood beside the car; and then Toni gave the order for home, and Fletcher obeyed that order too promptly to allow of any further leave-takings.

Just for one moment Jim Herrick stood looking after the car, and in his heart there was a great sickness of apprehension.

With the best intention in the world to be fair to his wife, he could not help comparing the fresh, simple-hearted Toni with the world-weary and disillusioned Eva; and at the thought of the future his spirits sank to zero.

A mocking voice broke on his ear as he watched the car gliding swiftly down the road.

"When you've finished staring at that young woman, Jim, perhaps you'll open the gate." Eva stood back to allow him to reach the latch. "I must say this is a nice place to bring me to. Is it a cottage or what?"

"It's quite a decent little place, dear," he said steadily, as he held open the gate for her to pa.s.s through. "Of course, I quite understand that it is only a temporary arrangement, but you will try to put up with it, won't you?"

"I suppose I shall have to," she replied ungraciously; and then she uttered an impatient exclamation as the big white dog tore over the lawn to meet her master, uttering deep-throated bays of welcome the while.

"You've still got that beast, then--go down, you brute," she added, as Olga approached, with instinctive courtesy, to greet her former mistress.

"Don't snap at her, dear," said Herrick kindly. "The poor creature is only trying to say how do you do."

"Then she can say it to someone else," said Eva curtly. "I hate big dogs--I wish you'd get rid of her."

Herrick made no reply, but opened the door, and they went into the house together.

Eva pa.s.sed into the quaintly attractive sitting-room with a frown on her face, which lightened, however, at sight of the tea-table standing ready, and pulling off her gloves and coat she flung herself into a low chair with a sigh of fatigue.

"Heavens, how thirsty I am," she said. "Give me some tea, Jim--quickly."

And as he moved forward to obey her, her eyes followed him with a curious expression in their grey depths.

"What's for dinner?" she asked, suddenly, and Herrick looked his memory to recall the _menu_.

"Soup, roast chicken, plum tart, and a savoury," he said at last, smiling with a rather pathetic attempt at cheerfulness. "Mrs. Swastika, as I call her, is what is known as a 'good plain cook,' but anything at all elaborate throws her off her balance altogether."

"Have you no other servants?" she demanded shortly.

"Not yet. I didn't want them, you know, and I thought you would prefer to choose them yourself."

"I? If I can get any," she said darkly, drawing her delicate brows together resentfully. "Of course they won't stay when they find out things; but we must be decently waited on."

Herrick made no reply; and his silence exasperated the girl, whose nerves were all on edge.

"Oh, don't stand there saying nothing." Her voice was shrill. "Of course, you think I ought to wait on myself--now. And I suppose because I've been in prison you expect me to be thankful to be here--even in a hole like this. Well, I'm not. I hate the place. It's common and shabby and horrid, and I'm not going to live all anyhow, to please you."

Herrick, dismayed at the vehemence of her manner, could find no words; and she went on with increasing pa.s.sion:

"I'm your wife--if I _am_ a jail-bird!" She flung the taunt at him, and her whole little figure was shaken with the intensity of her emotion.

"If you think I'm going to pretend to be penitent--and grateful to you--you are wrong! I _hate_ you, Jim, I loathe and despise you--you might have taken the blame on your shoulders--and instead you stood by and watched them torture me. _You've_ not been to prison, _you've_ not been bullied and despised--you've not spent weeks and months in a loathsome little cell where the sun never shone and there was never a breath of air--you've not been called by a number, and preached at by the chaplain--oh, no, you've been living here in the suns.h.i.+ne--enjoying yourself, eating good food--your chicken and your savouries--and for all I know pa.s.sing as a single man, and keeping your disgraced wife in the background!"

She struck the table sharply with her hand, and her cup and saucer fell to the ground and smashed, the tea trickling in a brown stream over the dim blues and greens of the Persian carpet.

She ignored the catastrophe.

"Well, you've got me back now, and I'm going to make _your_ life what mine has been for the last year and a half! I've longed for this moment, Jim"--she set her teeth--"longed for it during the horrible days and the still more horrible nights. It was only my hatred of you that kept me alive in the first ghastly weeks. I could have died--I was very ill at first, and they thought I'd die--but I knew I wouldn't. I meant to live so that I could tell you again to your face that I hate you, hate you--_hate_ you! And I'm going to show you what hate is, Jim--I'm going to make you wish you were dead--or in prison, as I have been. Oh, my G.o.d--I wish--I wish I _were_ dead!"

With a sudden collapse of all her powers she dropped, face downwards, on the big divan, and burst into a fit of wild and uncontrollable sobbing.

With an effort whose magnitude he himself only half realized, Herrick went softly over to the weeping, writhing figure, and laid his hand very gently on her shoulder.

"Eva, for pity's sake----"

She flung off his hand as though it had been a venomous serpent which had touched her; and again her wild sobbing filled the room.

"Eva, listen to me, dear." Herrick sat down beside her and spoke in a quiet tone, which yet pierced through her sobs. "You must not say anything like that to me again. There isn't any question of hatred between you and me. We are together now, and we must build up a new and happy life together which will help us to forget the less happy past.

Come, dear, look up and tell me you will help me to make a fresh start."

She did not speak, but her sobs lessened as though she were listening.

"Now, Eva, sit up and dry your eyes and we will drop the subject. Come upstairs and have a rest before dinner. You are tired out and want a good sleep."

She rose without a word, but in her face he read only fatigue, none of the softening which he had hoped to see.

"Yes. I'm tired--dead tired." She moved languidly towards the door. "I think I shall never be anything else--now."

Her fit of pa.s.sion had indeed worn her out. For the rest of the evening she was quiet and listless; and she went upstairs very early to bed, leaving Herrick to sit alone with his dog, smoking his pipe, and facing the future with a sinking heart.

He sat there until the hour was really late; and then crept upstairs very softly to avoid waking Eva, if indeed she slept.

Just as he reached her door he heard a faint, strangled cry, and rushed into her room to find her in the throes of one of the nightmares which he found, later, were a dreadful legacy from her prison life. On waking, her relief at finding she was not, as usual, alone was so great that for the first time she clung to Herrick as she might have done in happier days; and as he soothed her and pushed the damp golden curls from her brow she spoke naturally, with none of the resentment she had hitherto displayed.

Her husband's heart melted towards her in this gentler mood; and long after she had fallen asleep again, soothed by his presence, he sat watching her uneasy slumber with a feeling of compa.s.sion which, had she realized it, must surely have done something to bridge the gulf which now yawned between them.

In the morning she was her hard, mocking self again; and Herrick's patience was sorely tried in the days which followed.

It seemed, indeed, as though she had stated her feelings for him correctly, as though she did really hate him with a bitter and relentless hatred. The prison life had changed her whole being, turned her from a brilliant, reckless, worldly girl, warmhearted and extravagant, but generous to a fault, into a cold, malignant, callous woman, nursing a grudge until it attained gigantic proportions, and fully resolved to exact from her husband and the world a heavy payment for the humiliating punishment she had been forced to undergo.

Herrick could never discover that she felt that punishment to be deserved. The whole world was to blame, but never she herself. It was the fault of her husband, who had kept her short of money; of the tradespeople who had pressed her, of the usurers who had got her into their clutches--the fault of everyone save Eva Herrick; and the fact that they had all, as it were, combined against her, that together they had been too much for her, embittered her outlook on life to such a degree that she was positively incapable of any reasonable a.n.a.lysis of her own guilt.

It was her husband against whom her resentment was chiefly directed.

With all the perversity of her ill-regulated, half-formed mind, she refused to realize the fact that it had been absolutely impossible for Herrick to take her crime on to his own shoulders. She clung childishly to the notion that if he had wished he could have borne the blame and endured the consequences; and since there is no reason to doubt that to a girl in her position her life in prison was a horrible experience, her bitterness is perhaps hardly to be wondered at, after all.

Her sentence had left on soul and body traces which would never be effaced; and sometimes Herrick could hardly believe that this cold, cynical, bitter-tongued woman was indeed the gay Irish girl he had married.

But in spite of everything she was his wife. And Herrick was not the man to s.h.i.+rk an obligation which was so plainly marked as this. Although he shrank inwardly from her constant recriminations, he never let her see how he was wounded by her biting tongue; and to all her reproaches he presented so serene and complacent a front that she sometimes desisted from very weariness.

So the autumn days went on; and if Herrick felt sometimes that in spite of the beautiful world around him, life was no longer full of "sweet things," he never wavered in his resolve to do all in his power to make up to Eva, for the misery she had endured behind those heartless prison walls.