Shadows of Flames Part 119

Chesney's tone--almost his words again! Sophy, too, had her haunting nightmare.

The third day Loring decided to speak with Judge Macon "man to man." He asked for a private interview. The Judge gravely ushered him into his sanctum. As during that first "serious talk" with Sophy, he established himself in the revolving-chair before his desk. Loring sat to one side.

He was pale and felt abominably nervous. The Judge looked calm and noncommittal. He waited for Loring to begin.

The young man began rather unfortunately:

"Sophy tells me she's confided in you about this teapot tempest of ours," he said. "I find it's devilish hard to get a woman to look sensibly at such things. But you're a man, Judge ..."

"Yes," admitted the Judge imperturbably, as the other paused.

".... You're a man," Loring continued. "You know that these ... a ...

little lapses will occur 'in the best-regulated households'...."

The Judge's face took on suddenly the expression of a Rhadamanthus.

"May I ask what you refer to?" he said starkly.

Loring's smile became a rather foolish grin.

"Why ... a ... this ... a ... this--this.... Oh, hang it all, Judge!

You've surely kissed some pretty woman besides your wife in twenty years of marriage!"

He was rather startled by the effect of this jocose insinuation. The Judge suddenly stood up. Wrath and disgust transformed his kindly face.

"I allow no liberties from any man," he said, in his deepest ba.s.s.

Loring, also, leaped to his feet. He looked genuinely dismayed and confounded.

"But ... but ... I meant no liberty...." he stammered.

"Then," said the Judge, in no wise placated, "your idea of what const.i.tutes a liberty differs fundamentally from mine."

He remained standing.

"Do you mean to say...?" fumbled Loring.

"I mean this," retorted the Judge: "That to the best of my poor ability I strive to conduct myself according to the teaching of the Christian faith." (The Judge, like Charlotte, always became Johnsonian when righteously wrathful.) "The Founder of that Faith p.r.o.nounced once for all upon the question that you refer to as a 'little lapse.' He said: 'He that looketh upon a woman to l.u.s.t after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.'"

The blood beat into Loring's face. He looked away from the other's contemptuous eyes. He was too dumfounded to feel resentful at the moment. Somehow it never occurred to him to doubt the Judge's perfect sincerity. He was dumfounded just because he believed in it. Here was actually a man who looked upon strict faithfulness in marriage as onerous on both s.e.xes.

There is no one so fiercely chaste as the Southerner who believes in the sanct.i.ty of marriage. "Philandering" is not admitted in his code. He would call it by a plainer and a coa.r.s.er name.

When Loring had recovered his wits, he apologised profusely and meekly.

But the interview was not a success. The Judge was now too frankly on Sophy's side in the matter. He thought the whole situation deeply to be deplored, but he gave, as his judicial opinion, that in such cases the process of "patching up" was never successful.

Loring left the study, humiliated and downcast. He realised that he had not only lost Sophy's love but the friends.h.i.+p of a man whom he really valued. Somehow, though he tried to jeer at the Judge for a narrow-minded old fossil who had never known the true fire of manhood, he could not actually do so. Something in him knew that the old Virginian was every inch a man. The strength of his pa.s.sions was apparent in his dark, powerful face. But these pa.s.sions had been curbed by a principle--an ideal. And, drearily enough, Loring began to wonder less at Sophy's present att.i.tude. It was from the loins of men like this that she had sprung. She came of a race that required chast.i.ty in husbands as well as in wives. What made it all so overwhelming was that Loring knew well that he "had committed adultery already in his heart."

It was as though his spirit were being arraigned by these people. That he had only kissed a woman made no difference to them. To them it was adultery in the heart....

When he had been at Sweet-Waters a week, something happened that absolutely staggered him. He felt, when he read a certain item in a letter from his mother, as though he had received a violent blow in the midriff. He had ridden down to the station at mail-time, and opened this letter on his way back. The portion of its contents that so undid him ran as follows:

"What I am going to tell you now, my dear boy, is a family secret as yet. Eleanor is delighted. I reserve my opinion. I wish to hear what _you_ think on the subject. Of course, from a worldly standpoint the match is a very brilliant one for Belinda...." For _Belinda_?... Loring held the letter nearer his eyes. He thought that he must have read the name wrong. His mother's writing was not always easy to read. No. It was plain enough this time. The word was "Belinda." His eyes gulped the following pages. "She seems in high spirits--but then her spirits are always high. But I must explain. She is engaged to Lewis Cuthbridge. He was in your set at Harvard, he tells me. He is certainly what people would call very handsome, and, as you know, the Cuthbridges are extremely rich. But I don't care for that kind of good looks myself. He is too red and white and black for a man in your old mother's opinion. I like a more distinguished type...."

"G.o.d! Get on ... get on ... get on!..." Loring was raging in his mind.

His eyes glanced avidly ahead. He read: "They certainly seem very much in love with each other. Belinda, I think, shows all her feelings far too openly. They make a very striking couple. But haven't I heard that Lewis Cuthbridge was rather 'wild'? I surely have that impression. I should have preferred a more settled character for Belinda. Some one of mature opinions--a professional man, steady in his habits...."

"Get on ... _get on_ ... can't you?..." Loring's thought was urging angrily again. He skipped ahead.

"What gives me the greatest concern, though, is that the whole affair is to be so hurried. They are to be married at Christmas, and go straight to India. It seems that Belinda is very anxious to see the East. But the engagement will not be announced until the last part of November. I am most anxious to talk with you about this young man," _et cetera, et cetera_.

Loring crammed the letter into his pocket. The glare of the sunlight on the sheet of white paper had set reddish spots dancing before his eyes.

He rode on in a wild flare of outraged protest for half a mile, the horse going as it willed, at a lazy walk. Suddenly it snorted and leaped forward, feeling the jab of spurs in its sides. It ran away indignantly for quite a mile. Then Loring pulled it in, and again they subsided to a dawdling foot pace.

The spurs had been jabbed into Poor Aleck because Loring had suddenly thought of Cuthbridge's too red mouth under its too black moustache....

Of this mouth and of Belinda's....

"Engaged"!... The little devil!... So this was her way of paying him off!... The callous, revengeful little devil!... But then it couldn't be allowed.... He knew too much about Lewis Cuthbridge to think for a moment of allowing him to marry one of the women of his family....

Belinda might not be a blood-relation, but that made no difference. It must be put a stop to--at once--at once! He would write his mother. His head spun. He felt as though some one had his brain in a sling and were whirling it round and round.

When he reached the house, he went up to his own room, locked the door, and, dropping into a chair, pulled out the crushed letter and read it over. Then he jumped up and began striding to and fro in a blind fury.

The crash of a chair that he flung out of his way startled him into self-realisation. He recalled Griffeth's warning after that last outbreak in Newport, and sat down again, battling for self-control. And boiling up in him with his wild rage came the old, mad pa.s.sion for the girl. Those lips--those lips that he had made his own at such cost!--given to that low blackguard!... Pah! The things he knew of the brute!... And now ... now.... Perhaps at this very minute.... Oh, he understood how men could beat women!... He could have dragged Belinda out of that hound's arms by the hair of her head--and beaten her with his fists!... He remembered Griffeth's words again, and again got some sort of hold upon himself....

Morals are more a matter of geography than we like to admit. Loring, an indifferent member of Christianised society, would have made a very respectable Mohammedan.

He withstood for two days the gnawing, racking desire to go and see for himself just "how things were." Then he gave in. He told Sophy that he had decided to go away and think over this crisis between them by himself. Sophy, who had also heard from Mrs. Loring of Belinda's engagement, understood quite well why he was leaving so suddenly.

Something in her was glad and sad both at this knowledge. "It is the end," she thought. And endings are always sad. It is said that prisoners of many years leave their cells with a certain regret. Convalescents often have this queer nostalgia on quitting the sick-room. Sophy had known far more sorrow than joy in her marriage with Loring, and yet it was with a mysterious, indescribable, contradictory pain that she held up her cheek for his farewell kiss. He said that he would see her again in two or three weeks. But she felt utterly sure that this was their final parting. Very pale, she held his hand in both hers.

"I wish you all good ... all good, Morris," she whispered. "Whatever comes ... you know that, don't you?"

"I think so ... yes. I know it," he said unsteadily.

The carriage was waiting for him. There was no one else about. She went down the old stone steps of the portico, and stood there while he got in. She was not going to drive to the station with him. Neither of them wanted to say good-by in public. As he took his seat, she put out her hand and tucked in the rug which had slipped. He caught this kind hand and his face broke into a shamed wretchedness. One of the horses plunged impatiently. Their hands were torn apart.

As he drove off and Sophy was left standing alone in the autumn sunlight, they both felt as those in old times must have felt when the sword was pulled from a wound and death came as a relief with the gush of blood. It was like death in many ways, this parting; but it was also an unspeakable relief.

XLIII

Loring's mother had written that Belinda was now with her at Nahant.

He arrived there late the next day, and learned that Lewis Cuthbridge was stopping in the neighbourhood and was expected to dinner. He did not see Belinda until she came down to the drawing-room. He was already there alone when Cuthbridge was announced. They had never liked each other. Now, instinct turned dislike to loathing. It was hard for them to be ordinarily civil. But while Loring's detestation amounted to fury, Cuthbridge only thought Loring "a sour, ill-bred cub." He was by several years the elder of the two, and showed it. As Mrs. Loring had said, he was good-looking, but too exuberantly so. He looked almost "made up,"

with his white forehead, red lips, shoe-black hair, and eyes of a dense, swimming blue. And he was also slightly fat. As he sat there with crossed legs, talking to Mrs. Horton, Loring thought the way that his full, pleasure-loving thigh filled tight the sleek black cloth of his trousers was one of the most obnoxious things he had ever seen. He hated that plump, self-a.s.sured thigh and the glossy black stripe that curved along it.