"I thought perhaps you might be in need of help," he said quietly.
Her lip curled, and her slender wrists grew tense with the strain upon
them.
"For what? John and Patrick can take care of my husband. Mr. Lorimer
is--very ill; but we are quite capable of taking care of him. Why should
I need help?" She watched him in silent hostility. Then, as she saw the
sudden drawing of his lips, her mood changed. This was her friend, the
only friend who was near her and loyal to her. She must not hurt him
with her bitterness, lest he too should fail her, just as Lorimer
already had done. For months, she had unconsciously depended upon his
loyalty. Now she sought it consciously. "What is the use of keeping up
the pretence any longer?" she went on drearily. "You have been with us
day after day; you know how things are going; you know how my husband
has--that he has not always been himself." Even in her desperation, she
still chose her words guardedly. "Do you think I ever could have held
him?"
Slowly Thayer shook his head.
"No," he said in a low voice. "No; you never could have held him. It was
impossible."
"Then why didn't you warn me?" she burst out hotly.
He looked her straight in the eye.
"How could I?"
Her face flushed with the sudden understanding. Then the old dreary note
came back into her voice.
"And you have known from the first that it was all a mistake?"
"Yes."
"And you have let me suffer for it?"
"You are not the only one," he said, almost involuntarily.
Their eyes met, held each other, then dropped apart. Thayer drew a long,
slow breath.
"Mrs. Lorimer--Beatrix--"
She checked him with a gesture.
"Wait! You don't know it all, you can't know. You never knew Sidney
Lorimer as I did, for my Sidney Lorimer never really existed. I
idealized him, half-deified him. The Sidney Lorimer to whom I gave my
love, my very life, was one man; the Sidney Lorimer I married was quite
another. A woman can't love two men totally unlike each other, and yet I
am bound to him, bound down to the day of my death, or of his. We both
come of a long-lived race, and this must go on for years. I have tried
to prevent it, this gradual change in him; but it was impossible. Then I
tried not to see it; but I had to see it. It insisted on itself and on
being seen. I have been watching it, dreading the time when I must admit
it in so many words. I have tried to be loyal to him, God knows!" She
spoke rapidly. Then she checked herself, and the dreary note came again.
"But what is done, is done. I loved one man; I am married to another.
Nothing now can bring back to me the man I used to know, the man I used
to imagine him. Then what will the future amount to? We shall go on
together to the end, two prisoners bound by a chain which only holds us
the tighter and galls us the more, the looser it grows between us. One
doesn't mind the dying; it's the limitless, unchanging years ahead, the
black, blank years that frighten me. How can I escape them?"
In presence of a woman's passionate pain, every man must stand back,
baffled and powerless to help. Thayer had supposed he understood Beatrix
Lorimer as no other man had ever understood her. To his eyes, her
character seemed crystal clear; yet now, in her supreme crisis, the
crystal grew cloudy before his eyes. For long hours, she had gone into
the deep places of her life, had stirred up from its very source the
spring of her being, and the superficial clearness had grown turgid with
the dregs that had lain undisturbed and unsuspected there. Hatred and
black despair were boiling in the heart which Thayer had thought so calm
and cool, so peaceful in its dainty whiteness. Before it, he stood
silent. Was this the true Beatrix Lorimer? The woman he had fancied her
was a spotless white lily. The heart of this one was banded with bars
of flame and gold. The other grew colorless and cold by comparison, and
his hands twitched to pluck this fiery, vivid thing before him and carry
it away out of reach of Lorimer's sodden, defiling touch. What had
Sidney Lorimer, drunkard, profligate that he was, to do with this
high-bred, high-spirited, heart-broken woman? Why not rather he, Cotton
Mather Thayer--He thrust his hands into his pockets and lowered his eyes
to hide the light burning in them.
It seemed to him hours since he had entered the house. In reality, the
time was short. As he had crossed the threshold, Beatrix had raised her
head and looked at him dully. Then her reaction had come. Like the ebb
and flow of the waves, excitement had followed apathy; and, as she had
met his eyes, the wave had risen again and swept her away upon its
tossing crest. Thayer was here at last. He never forgot her, never
forsook her. He had come to her in this moment of her bitterest need,
even as he had come to her many a time in the past. With him, there
could be no need for explanation or preface. Straight from the heart of
her reverie, Beatrix Lorimer had cast her words at him,--
"It has all been a hideous mistake!"
And now she was following them up with the question which, in Thayer's
ears, sounded the dominant note of the temptation that had been pursuing
him during all those months of rigid self-restraint,--
"The black, blank years, how can I escape them?"
For the second time in his life, Thayer grew dizzy with the tingle of
his nerves answering to the shock to his brain. The blood was pounding
across his temples, and his ears rang loudly. Then he lifted his eyes
deliberately and looked Beatrix full in the face. For an instant, he
held her eyes; then she drew away from him. This was not the quiet,
self-contained man upon whom she had leaned for months. This man's eyes
were glowing, his lips quivering, his hands outstretched to meet her
own. No need to tell her what flame had kindled him into such fierce and
burning life. Their eyes met. She drew away; but her glance never
wavered. Without a spoken word, they had come to the pitiless, naked
truth. Wish had answered to wish, and henceforth there could be no
concealments between them. She took a step forward, and for a moment her
fingers rested in the hot hollow of his hand.
It was only for a moment. However, for Thayer that moment had sufficed
to review a lifetime, to dwell in detail, even, upon the events of the
last fourteen months. In the past, he had done his best to bear himself
as an honest man and a gentleman; and, seen in the light of that past,
the future turned to ashes before him. At best, it was void of honor; at
worst, it was unthinkable. It had not been easy for him to swim against
the tide, to strive, at the expense of his own plans, to rescue Lorimer
from drunkenness and shame. At least, now that for so long a time he had
succeeded in keeping his head above water, he would not wilfully cast
himself upon the first jagged rock in his course. He would not save
Lorimer's honor for the sake of Lorimer's wife, and then deliberately
seek to bring dishonor and shame upon the wife herself. He veiled his
eyes and let his palm drop out from under the pressure of the cold
little fingers.
"It's not necessarily a question of years," he said, after a silence in
which it seemed to him that she must be able to count his heart-throbs.
"Dane told me what the doctor said. He hopes this place will work a
complete cure, and it may not be long before your husband pulls himself
together again."
He had turned a little away from her; but he knew she was still looking
at him. He could feel the pathetic appeal in her eyes, yet he never
wavered. However brutal he might seem to her now, he knew that the hour
would come when she would be grateful to him.
With an effort, she steadied herself.
"I am afraid it is impossible. He has gone too far; the pull now is all
downward."
"What about your hold on him?" Thayer asked quietly.
Beatrix started, as if he had laid a clumsy thumb on an exposed nerve.
"My hold!" she said, with a sudden fierceness. "Do you think that there
is no limit to the help which I must give him?" Then her voice dropped.
"No; I have let go. It is no use. I have done all I can, and now I can
only wait till the play is over and the curtain drops. Perhaps it may
not be so very long, after all. It spoils any tragedy, if the last acts
drag."
He had been fired by her passion; but he had resisted it. Now her
despair unmanned him. It was only the old, old situation: the guiltless
one must suffer for the guilty. The fact in general terms he accepted as
a necessary evil; the particular instance was unbearable. Once more, and
for the last time, the balance wavered; then slowly, steadily it dipped
into position. The tragedy would be no less a tragedy, because a new
hero took the stage for the final acts. He tried to find words to say;
but they refused to come at his bidding. He could only stand mute and
look down at her, as she sat in her old place by the table, with her
head buried in her arms.
The seconds passed and lengthened into minutes. Little by little, the
cold, gray light of the snowy morning was creeping into the room,
dimming the lamplight to pale yellow streaks and filling the place with
a chill, forbidding gloom. The stillness was so absolute that Thayer
could hear his watch ticking in his pocket, could hear the beating of
his own heart. Neither one of them moved, or spoke. In the next room,
there was a faint sound; but they never heeded it. Beatrix's face was
hidden in her arms; Thayer's eyes, turned now to the window, were fixed
upon the pitiless storm outside, while mechanically he sought to adjust
the regular ticking of his watch to the broken rhythm of the Famine
Theme which once more was haunting his brain.
Neither one of them faced the open door; neither one of them saw the
crawling, slinking figure, the pale, fear-stricken face, and the staring
eyes which appeared in the doorway, clung there for a moment and then
vanished again as noiselessly as they had come. Neither of them, had
they seen, could have imagined the fearful interpretation which the
delirium-stricken brain had put upon the silent scene.
The stir in the next room came again. Then it increased until the
cottage echoed with the tumult of struggle and of inarticulate crying.
Above it all, Lorimer's maddened voice rang out in piteous terror,--
"Let me go! I saw him! It's Thayer, and he will kill Beatrix! She is
afraid of him, and she is begging for mercy! He is killing my wife, my
Beatrix! Let me go! Beatrix! Beatrix! Dear girl, I'm coming!"
Beatrix sprang to her feet, as Thayer rushed to the inner room where the
words had ended in a fury of inarticulate shrieks. There was the sound
of a heavy struggle, when it seemed to her that the cottage rocked with
the rocking, writhing bodies of the men just beyond her sight. She dared
not face the scene in all its horror. She stood, erect and alone, in the
middle of the floor, while the struggle slowly died away and the shrieks
sank to the piteous low whimpering of an animal in pain. Then all was
still.
Weak by inheritance, weaker still by dissipation, Lorimer's heart had
yielded to the shock of his imaginary fear; but the last coherent
thought of his distracted brain had been that of protecting love for
Beatrix.
In the gray, cold light, through the silent cottage, the old butler came
to Beatrix's side and gently touched her arm.
"It is over, Miss Beatrix," he said gravely; "and may the good God be
pitiful to us all!"