The Cost Part 13

Pauline laughed--it struck her as ridiculous that either she or Jack should distrust the other. Indeed, she only hazily knew what distrust meant, and hadn't any real belief that "such things" actually existed.

Half an hour later the party was driving up to Weber and Fields'.

Pauline, glancing across the thronged sidewalk and along the empty, brilliantly lighted pa.s.sage leading into the theater, saw a striking, peculiar-looking woman standing at the box-office while her escort parleyed with the clerk within. "How much that man looks like Jack,"

she said to herself--and then she saw that it was indeed Jack. Not the Jack she thought she knew, but quite another person, the one he tried to hide from her--too carelessly, because he made the common mistake of underestimating the sagacity of simplicity. A glance at the woman, a second glance at Dumont, his flushed, insolent face now turned full front--and she KNEW this unfamiliar and hitherto-only-hinted Jack.

The omnibus was caught in a jam of cars and carriages; there were several moments of confusion and excitement. When the Fanshaw party was finally able to descend, she saw that Jack and his companion were gone--the danger of a scene was over for the moment. She lingered and made the others linger, wis.h.i.+ng to give him time to get to his seats.

When they entered the theater it was dark and the curtain was up. But her eyes, searching the few boxes visible from the rear aisle, found the woman, or, at least, enough of her for recognition--the huge black hat with its vast pale blue feather. Pauline drew a long breath of relief when the Fanshaws' box proved to be almost directly beneath, the box.

If she had been a few years older, she would have given its proper significance to the curious fact that this sudden revelation of the truth about her husband did not start a tempest of anger or jealousy, but set her instantly to sacrificing at the shrine of the great G.o.d Appearances. It is notorious that of all the household G.o.ds he alone erects his altar only upon the hearth where the ashes are cold.

As she sat there through the two acts, she seemed to be watching the stage and taking part in the conversation of the Fanshaws and their friends; yet afterward she could not recall a single thing that had occurred, a single word that had been said. At the end of the last act she again made them linger so that they were the last to emerge into the pa.s.sage. In the outside doorway, she saw the woman--just a glimpse of a pretty, empty, laughing face with a mouth made to utter impertinences and eyes that invited them.

Mrs. Fanshaw was speaking--"You're very tired, aren't you?"

"Very," replied Pauline, with a struggle to smile.

"What a child you look! It seems absurd that you are a married woman.

Why, you haven't your full growth yet." And on an impulse of intuitive sympathy Mrs. Fanshaw pressed her arm, and Pauline was suddenly filled with grat.i.tude, and liked her from that moment.

Alone in her sitting-room at the hotel, she went up to the mirror over the mantel, and, staring absently at herself, put her hands up mechanically to take out her hat-pins. "No, I'll keep my hat on," she thought, without knowing why. And she sat, hat and wrap on, and looked at a book. Half an hour, and she took off her hat and wrap, put them in a chair near where she was sitting. The watched hands of the clock crawled wearily round to half-past one, to two, to half-past two, to three--each half-hour an interminable stage. She wandered to the window and looked down into empty Fifth Avenue. When she felt that at least an hour had pa.s.sed, she turned to look at the clock again--twenty-five minutes to four. Her eyes were heavy.

"He is not coming," she said aloud, and, leaving the lights on in the sitting-room, locked herself in the bedroom.

At five o'clock she started up and seized the dressing-gown on the chair near the head of the bed. She listened--heard him muttering in the sitting-room. She knew now that a crash of some kind had roused her. Several minutes of profound silence, then through the door came a steady, heavy snore.

The dressing-gown dropped from her hand. She slid from the bed, slowly crossed the room, softly opened the door, looked into the sitting-room.

A table and a chair lay upset in the middle of the floor. He was on a sofa, sprawling, disheveled, snoring.

Slowly she advanced toward him--she was barefooted, and the white nightgown clinging to her slender figure and the long braid down her back made her look as young as her soul--the soul that gazed from her fixed, fascinated eyes, the soul of a girl of eighteen, full as much child as woman still. She sat down before him in a low chair, her elbows on her knees, her chin supported by her hands, her eyes never leaving his swollen, dark red, brutish face--a cigar stump, much chewed, lay upon his cheek near his open mouth. He was as absurd and as repulsive as a gorged pig asleep in a wallow.

The dawn burst into broad day, but she sat on motionless until the clock struck the half-hour after six. Then she returned to the bedroom and locked herself in again.

Toward noon she dressed and went into the sitting-room. He was gone and it had been put to rights. When he came, at twenty minutes to one, she was standing at the window, but she did not turn.

"Did you get my note?" he asked, in a carefully careless tone. He went on to answer himself: "No, there it is on the floor just where I put it, under the bedroom door. No matter--it was only to say I had to go out but would be back to lunch. Sorry I was kept so late last night.

Glad you didn't wait up for me--but you might have left the bedroom door open--it'd have been perfectly safe." He laughed good-naturedly.

"As it was, I was so kind-hearted that I didn't disturb you, but slept on the sofa."

As he advanced toward her with the obvious intention of kissing her, she slowly turned and faced him. Their eyes met and he stopped short--her look was like the eternal ice that guards the pole.

"I saw you at the theater last night," she said evenly. "And this morning, I sat and watched you as you lay on the sofa over there."

He was taken completely off his guard. With a gasp that was a kind of groan he dropped into a chair, the surface of his mind strewn with the wreckage of the lying excuses he had got ready.

"Please don't try to explain," she went on in the same even tone. "I understand now about--about Paris and--everything. I know that--father was right."

He gave her a terrified glance--no tears, no trace of excitement, only calmness and all the strength he knew was in her nature and, in addition, a strength he had not dreamed was there.

"What do you intend to do?" he asked after a long silence.

She did not answer immediately. When she did, she was not looking at him.

"When I married you--across the river from Battle Field," she said, "I committed a crime against my father and mother. This is--my punishment--the beginning of it. And now--there'll be the--the--baby--" A pause, then: "I must bear the consequences--if I can. But I shall not be your wife--never--never again. If you wish me to stay on that condition, I'll try. If not--"

"You MUST stay, Pauline," he interrupted. "I don't care what terms you make, you must stay. It's no use for me to try to defend myself when you're in this mood. You wouldn't listen. But you're right about not going. If you did, it'd break your father's and mother's hearts. I admit I did drink too much last night, and made a fool of myself. But if you were more experienced, you'd--"

He thought he had worked his courage up to the point where he could meet her eyes. He tried it. Her look froze his flow of words. "I KNOW that you were false from the beginning," she said.

"The man I thought you were never existed--and I know it. We won't speak of this--ever--after now. Surely you can't wish me to stay?"

And into her voice surged all her longing to go, all her hope that he would reject the only terms on which self-respect would let her stay.

"Wish you to stay?" he repeated. And he faced her, looking at her, his chest heaving under the tempest of hate and pa.s.sion that was raging in him--hate because she was defying and dictating to him, pa.s.sion because she was so beautiful as she stood there, like a delicate, fine hot-house rose poised on a long, graceful stem. "No wonder I LOVE you!" he exclaimed between his clenched teeth.

A bright spot burned in each of her cheeks and her look made him redden and lower his eyes.

"Now that I understand these last five months," she said, "that from you is an insult."

His veins and muscles swelled with the fury he dared not show; for he saw and felt how dangerous her mood was.

"I'll agree to whatever you like, Pauline," he said humbly. "Only, we mustn't have a flare-up and a scandal. I'll never speak to you again about--about anything you don't want to hear."

She went into her bedroom. When, after half an hour, she reappeared, she was ready to go down to lunch. In the elevator he stole a glance at her--there was no color in her face, not even in her lips. His rage had subsided; he was ashamed of himself--before her. But he felt triumphant too.

"I thought she'd go, sure, in spite of her fear of hurting her father and mother," he said to himself. "A mighty close squeak. I was stepping round in a powder magazine, with every word a lit match."

In January she sank into a profound la.s.situde. Nothing interested her, everything wearied her. As the time drew near, her mother came to stay with her; and day after day the two women sat silent, Mrs. Gardiner knitting, Pauline motionless, hands idle in her lap, mind vacant. If she had any emotion, it was a hope that she would die and take her child with her.

"That would settle everything, settle it right," she reflected, with youth's morbid fondness for finalities.

When it was all over and she came out from under the opiate, she lay for a while, open-eyed but unseeing, too inert to grope for the lost thread of memory. She felt a stirring in the bed beside her, the movement of some living thing. She looked and there, squeezed into the edge of the pillow was a miniature head of a little old man--wrinkled, copperish. Yet the face was fat--ludicrously fat. A painfully homely face with tears running from the closed eyes, with an open mouth that driveled and drooled.

"What is it?" she thought, looking with faint curiosity. "And why is it here?"

Two small fists now rose aimlessly in the air above the face and flapped about; and a very tempest of noise issued from the sagging mouth.

"A baby," she reflected. Then memory came--"MY baby!"

She put her finger in the way of the wandering fists. First one of them, then the other, awkwardly unclosed and as awkwardly closed upon it. She smiled. The grip tightened and tightened and tightened until she wondered how hands so small and new could cling so close and hard.

Then that electric clasp suddenly tightened about her heart. She burst into tears and drew the child against her breast. The pulse of its current of life was beating against her own--and she felt it. She sobbed, laughed softly, sobbed again.

Her mother was bending anxiously over her.

"What's the matter, dearest?" she asked. "What do you wish?"

"Nothing!" Pauline was smiling through her tears. "Oh, mother, I am SO happy!" she murmured.

And her happiness lasted with not a break, with hardly a pause, all that spring and all that summer--or, so long as her baby's helplessness absorbed the whole of her time and thought.