Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 74

Susan took the paper, read the four stanzas several times, handed it back to him without a word. "Don't you think it fine?"

asked he, a little uneasily--he was always uneasy with a woman when the conversation touched the relations of the s.e.xes--uneasy lest he might say or might have said something to send a s.h.i.+ver through her delicate modesty.

"Fine," Susan echoed absently. "And true. . . . I suppose it is the best a woman can expect--to be the one he returns to.

And--isn't that enough?"

"You are very different from any woman I ever met," said Drumley. "Very different from what you were last fall--wonderfully different. But you were different then, too."

"I'd have been a strange sort of person if it weren't so. I've led a different life. I've learned--because I've had to learn."

"You've been through a great deal--suffered a great deal for one of your age?"

Susan shrugged her shoulders slightly. She had her impulses to confide, but she had yet to meet the person who seriously tempted her to yield to them. Not even Rod; no, least of all Rod.

"You are--happy?"

"Happy--and more. I'm content."

The reply was the truth, as she saw the truth. Perhaps it was also the absolute truth; for when a woman has the best she has ever actually possessed, and when she knows there is nowhere else on earth for her, she is likely to be content. Their destiny of subordination has made philosophers of women.

Drumley seemed to be debating how to disclose something he had in mind. But after several glances at the sweet, delicate face of the girl, he gave it over. In the subdued light from the shaded candles on their table, she looked more child-like than he had ever seen. Perhaps her big pale-blue hat and graceful pale-blue summer dress had something to do with it, also. "How old are you?" he asked abruptly.

"Nearly nineteen."

"I feel like saying, 'So much!'--and also 'So little!' How long have you been married?"

"Why all these questions?" demanded she, smiling.

He colored with embarra.s.sment. "I didn't mean to be impertinent," said he.

"It isn't impertinence--is it?--to ask a woman how long she's been married."

But she did not go on to tell him; instead, she pretended to have her attention distracted by a very old man and a very young girl behaving in most lover-like fas.h.i.+on, the girl outdoing the man in enthusiastic determination to convince. She was elegantly and badly dressed in new clothes--and she seemed as new to that kind of clothes as those particular clothes were new to her.

After dinner they walked down through the Park by the way they had come; it did not look like the same scene now, with the moonlight upon it, with soft shadows everywhere and in every shadow a pair of lovers. They had nearly reached the entrance when Drumley said: "Let's sit on this bench here. I want to have a serious talk with you."

Susan seated herself and waited. He lit a cigar with the deliberation of one who is striving to gain time. The bench happened to be one of those that are divided by iron arms into individual seats. He sat with a compartment between them. The moonbeams struck across his profile as he turned it toward her; they shone full upon her face. He looked, hastily glanced away.

With a gruffness as if the evening mist had got into his throat he said:

"Let's take another bench."

"Why?" objected she. "I like this beautiful light."

He rose. "Please let me have my way." And he led her to a bench across which a tree threw a deep shadow; as they sat there, neither could see the other's face except in dimmest outline.

After a brief silence he began:

"You love Rod--don't you?"

She laughed happily.

"Above everything on earth?"

"Or in heaven."

"You'd do anything to have him succeed?"

"No one could prevent his succeeding. He's got it in him. It's bound to come out."

"So I'd have said--until a year ago--that is, about a year ago."

As her face turned quickly toward him, he turned profile to her.

"What do you mean?" said she, quickly, almost imperiously.

"Yes--I mean _you_," replied he.

"You mean you think I'm hindering him?"

When Drumley's voice finally came, it was funereally solemn.

"You are dragging him down. You are killing his ambition."

"You don't understand," she protested with painful expression.

"If you did, you wouldn't say that."

"You mean because he is not true to you?"

"Isn't he?" said she, loyally trying to pretend surprise. "If that's so, you've no right to tell me--you, his friend. If it isn't, you----"

"In either case I'd be beneath contempt--unless I knew that you knew already. Oh, I've known a long time that you knew--ever since the night you looked away when he absent-mindedly pulled a woman's veil and gloves out of his pocket. I've watched you since then, and I know."

"You are a very dear friend, Mr. Drumley," said she. "But you must not talk of him to me."

"I must," he replied. And he hastened to make the self-fooled hypocrite's familiar move to the safety of duty's skirts. "It would be a crime to keep silent."

She rose. "I can't listen. It may be your duty to speak. It's my duty to refuse to hear."

"He is overwhelmed with debt. He is about to lose his position.

It is all because he is degraded--because he feels he is entangled in an intrigue with a woman he is ashamed to love--a woman he has struggled in vain to put out of his heart."

Susan, suddenly weak, had seated herself again. From his first words she had been prey to an internal struggle--her heart fighting against understanding things about her relations with Rod, about his feeling toward her, which she had long been contriving to hide from herself. When Drumley began she knew that the end of self-deception was at hand--if she let him speak. But the instant he had spoken, the struggle ended. If he had tried to stop she would have compelled him to go on.

"That woman is you," he continued in the same solemn measured way. "Rod will not marry you. He cannot leave you. And you are dragging him down. You are young. You don't know that pa.s.sionate love is a man's worst enemy. It satisfies his ambition--why struggle when one already has attained the climax of desire? It saps his strength, takes from him the energy without which achievement is impossible. Pa.s.sion dies poisoned of its own sweets. But pa.s.sionate love kills--at least, it kills the man. If you did not love him, I'd not be talking to you now. But you do love him. So I say, you are killing him. . . . Don't think he has told me----"

"I know he didn't," she interrupted curtly. "He does not whine."

She hadn't a doubt of the truth of her loyal defense. And Drumley could not have raised a doubt, even if she had been seeing the expression of his face. His long practice of the modern editorial art of clearness and brevity and compact statement had enabled him to put into those few sentences more than another might have been unable to express in hours of explanation and appeal. And the ideas were not new to her. Rod had often talked them in a general way and she had thought much about them. Until now she had never seen how they applied to Rod and herself. But she was seeing and feeling it now so acutely that if she had tried to speak or to move she could not have done so.

After a long pause, Drumley said: "Do you comprehend what I mean?"

She was silent--so it was certain that she comprehended.

"But you don't believe?. . . He began to borrow money almost immediately on his arrival here last summer. He has been borrowing ever since--from everybody and anybody. He owes now, as nearly as I can find out, upwards of three thousand dollars."