BITTERNESS
"Dead!" Christine echoed Jimmy's hoarse word in a dull voice, not
understanding. "Dead!" she said again blankly.
He moved away from the door; he dropped into a chair and hid his face
in his hands.
There was a moment of absolute silence.
Christine stared at Jimmy's bowed head with dull eyes.
She was trying to force her brain to work, but she could not; she was
only conscious of a faint sort of curiosity as to whether Jimmy were
lying to her; but somehow he did not look as if he were. She tried to
speak to him, but no words would come.
Suddenly he raised his head; he was very pale. "Well?" he said
defiantly.
His eyes were hard and full of hurt; hurt because of another woman,
Christine told herself, in furious pain; hurt because the woman he had
really and truly loved had gone out of his life for ever.
She tried to say that she was sorry, but the words seemed to choke
her--she was not sorry; she was glad. She was passionately glad that
the beautiful woman whom she had at first so ardently admired was now
only a name between them.
"So you've no need to be jealous any more," said Jimmy Challoner, after
a moment.
No need to be jealous! There was still the same need; death cannot
take memory away with it. Christine felt as if the dead woman were
more certainly between them now, keeping them apart, than ever before.
The silence fell again; then suddenly Christine moved to the door.
Jimmy caught her hand.
"Where are you going? Don't be a little fool. It's ever so late; you
can't leave the hotel to-night."
"I am not going to stay here with you." She did not look at him; did
not even faintly guess how much he was longing for a kind word, a
little sympathy. He had had the worst shock of his inconsequent life
when, in reply to that urgent summons, he had raced round to Cynthia
Farrow's flat, and found that he was too late.
"She died ten minutes ago."
Only ten minutes! Jimmy had stared blankly at the face of the weeping
maid, and then mechanically taken his watch from his pocket and looked
at it. Only ten minutes! If he had not had to hang about for a taxi
he would have been in time to have seen her.
Now he would never see her again; as yet he had had no time in which to
analyse his feelings; he was numbed with the shock of it all; he
listened like a man in a dream to the details they told him. It passed
him by unmoved that she had been in Mortlake's car when the accident
occurred; it had conveyed nothing to his mind when they told him that
the only words she had spoken during her brief flash of consciousness
had been to ask for him.
As he stood there in the familiar scented pink drawing-room, his
thoughts had flown with odd incongruity to Christine.
She would be kind to him--she would be sorry for him; his whole heart
and soul had been on fire to get back to her--to get away from the
harrowing silence of the flat which had always been associated in his
mind with fun and laughter, and the happiest days of his life.
A fur coat of Cynthia's lay across a chair-back; so many times he had
helped her slip into it after her performance at the theatre was ended.
He knew so well the faint scent that always clung to it; he shuddered
and averted his eyes. She would never wear it again; she was dead! He
wondered what would become of it--what would become of all her clothes,
and her jewelry and her trinkets.
Suddenly, in the middle of more details, he had turned and rushed
blindly away. It was not so much grief as a sort of horror at himself
that drove him; he felt as if someone had forced him to look on a past
folly--a folly of which he was now ashamed.
He had thought of Christine with a sort of passionate thankfulness and
gratitude; and now there was nothing but dislike and contempt for him
in her brown eyes. Somehow she seemed like a different woman to the
one whom he had so lightly wooed and won such a little while ago. She
looked older--wiser; the childishness of her face seemed to have
hardened; it was no longer the little girl Christine who faced him in
the silent room.
He broke out again urgently:
"Don't be absurd, Christine. I won't have it, I tell you, I forbid you
to leave the hotel. After all, you're my wife--you must do as I wish."
She seemed not to hear him; she stood with her eyes fixed straight in
front of her.
"Please let me go."
"Where are you going? You're my wife--you'll have to stay with me."
His hand was on the door handle now; he was looking down at her with
haggard eyes in his white face.
"Let's begin all over again, Christine. I've been a rotter, I know;
but if you'll have a little patience--it's not too late--we can patch
things up, and--and I'll promise you----"
She cut him short.
"You are saying this because she is dead. If she were living you would
not care what I did, or what became of me." Suddenly her voice changed
wildly. "Oh, let me go--let me _go_!"
For a moment their glances met, and for the first time in his spoilt
and pampered life Jimmy Challoner saw hatred looking at him through a
woman's eyes. It drove the hot blood to his head; he was unnerved with
the shock he had suffered that evening. For a moment he saw the world
red; he lifted his clenched fist.
"Go, then--and a damned good riddance!"
"Jimmy!" Her scream of terror stayed his hand, and kept him from
striking her. He staggered back, aghast at the thing he had so nearly
done.
"Christine--Christine----" he stammered; but she had gone. The
shutting and locking of her bedroom door was his only answer.