EWING INTERRUPTS
Eleanor Laithe started from a half sleep. She had begun to dream while
still conscious of the library walls, the couch on which she lay, the
curtains swelling in and out of the opened windows with a heated breeze
of late afternoon, the rattle of a wagon through the street, and the
shrilling of boys at a game.
She turned her face from the wall, fixed the pillows more easily under
her head, and stared into the room, her eyes narrowing in calculation as
she went lucidly back for the hundredth time since she had flung herself
there, to check off the details of that half hour with the man who
healed--or did not heal.
She had shrewdly rejected the specialist Birley had named for another
who would not know her. She wanted no mistaken kindness, no polite
reluctance or glossing, and she feared to find this in one who might
regard her as something more than a casual human body in evil case. She
had felt bound to have plain words. She would know what she faced as one
knows heat or cold.
And she had gained the full of her wish. The man had taken her as
casually as she offered herself. His questions were few, his examination
mechanically impersonal, his diagnosis cool and informing. She had felt
herself a culprit, listening to sentence.
"You think I have a year to live?"
"Longer, perhaps, if you take it this way, without worry. Worry eats the
tissue even faster than those little vegetable parasites. I take it you
eliminate worry?" He drew on his gloves.
She smiled now, with pride in her cunning. Her simulation of unconcerned
curiosity had been perfect, as if it were another's wasting body she
brought him. She had hidden all that fond love of life, her life of
action, sensation; of hope ever enlarging, of fruitions certain,
innumerable, and dear. No sign had the practiced eyes read of the inner
rage that maddened her at thought of so much life unlived--life of mirth
and tears, height and depth, grief, ecstasy and common levels. She was
avid of them all, dared them all, wished only to play the game, vaunting
a fine zest for the sport with all its hazards.
She had found in her hour alone there that she did not fear death--only
detested it. She feared it as little as a child fears sleep; hated it as
a child, torn untimely from play, hates to go to bed.
"Longer, perhaps, if you take it this way--eliminate worry." But she
knew she could not take it "this way;" could not give up as this judge
believed she had done. She must rebel to the last. As long as she played
she must play in the true spirit. She might be vanquished, but she would
not debase the sport. She smiled at a reminiscence of her brother's
college life, catching at a phrase. "It seems I'm not a 'quitter,'" she
thought.
Then she halted this race of thought in sudden amusement. She felt her
evening fever rising, the sinister warmth and false glow that burned
like a red flame below the outer corners of her eyes. It had come
earlier than usual, hurried, doubtless, by the very passion of her
rebelling. The man had been right. But she would have no waiting,
half-hearted conflict, for all that.
She sat up quickly. A certain battle was set for this day, one that
would test her gameness. She rose to look at a clock, and knew that
Teevan probably awaited Ewing. But she could be first there, and she
felt equal to the clash. The very fever would sustain her. And she would
be wary once more that day, cunning to learn what she had to oppose.
Then she would be valiant. If the fever only gave her strength, small
matter the fuel that fed it.
She smoothed her hair, flung a scarf over her shoulders, and stepped out
into the early twilight. She felt a slight giddiness as she walked the
short distance to Teevan's door, but she had shrugged this away by the
time she rang the bell. There was a wait, and she rang again. Then, when
she began to fear that she assailed an empty house, she heard rapid
steps; the door swung back, and Teevan himself stood before her, Teevan
jaunty in summer negligee of flannels and silken shirt, who deftly
covered with his froth of gallantry whatever surprise he felt at sight
of her.
"My dear lady! So neighborly of you, and what luck I was in! I'm off
Neville's yacht for the evening only on a bit of business. Come up to my
den. It's stifling down here."
She followed him up the stairs, feeling a reckless strength for combat.
He took her to a room at the front of the house where there was a desk,
a few lounging chairs, and an air of mannish comfort.
"I'll not keep you long, Randall," she said, hesitating at first to sit,
illogically fearing that weakness might seize her if she relaxed her
body. After a moment, however, she took the chair he pushed forward.
"As long as you like, Eleanor. The breeze comes cooler through those
south windows while you're here. Let me offer you a brandy and soda. No?
You'll let me take this alone, then? Thanks! I'm feeling a bit done up
by the heat." He seated himself at the desk, sipped from his glass and
looked a question at her. She debated her beginning.
"It's about Gilbert Ewing."
His dark little eyes narrowed upon her with agreeable interest.
"Ah, to be sure--Ewing."
"You know he's been staying a fortnight with us at Kensington."
He nodded a gracious assent, still waiting, still veiled with an effect
that aroused all her caution.
"He came back to town yesterday."
"He must have enjoyed the place immensely. I'm nowhere so strongly
reminded of rural England, saving the architecture, of course. Ewing
painted, doubtless?"
"Oh, no, he did nothing. He played with my sister, chiefly. Virginia
took him about. They were inseparable. He had heart for nothing but
her--no work, nothing else." She had deliberately lengthened the speech,
wishing him not to see that she watched for an opening. Teevan seemed to
feel a leading. He searched her face as he asked:
"They liked each other immensely, eh?"
"Oh, yes, I couldn't tell you----"
He felt the weariness of her tone, almost a faintness. The color burned
darkly high on her cheeks, her eyes showed an exotic and painful
splendor. He suddenly saw that she must have sustained some blow; that
her luster was a fevered glitter sad and terrible, and that she was
nerving herself to some ordeal. He sank back in his seat, all acuteness.
Had she betrayed herself in the beginning, struck open the secret for
him by her first words? A jealous woman, then--a flouted woman come to
turn on the man? It was no conclusion to leap at; rather a piquant
suspicion to verify.
He set his glass down and picked up a slender-bladed dagger from the
desk before him, absently bending the steel. He knew they were both
veiled for the moment. His eyes challenged her to open speech of Ewing
as he held the dagger up to her and said lazily, "A beauty,
that--undoubted Toledo work. Picked it up in a shop at Newport
yesterday. They knew how to temper steel in those days. See its edge--"
He tore a bit of paper from a pad and slashed it into strips, his eyes
rising to hers at each cut, interrogatory, through the complacence of a
man exhibiting a fine property.
"Randall, you've been friendly with him, and yet you know who he is;
you've known it a long time. And you--you _can't_ like him."
He still toyed with his plaything, prickling its needle-like point into
the pad of paper under his hand. Then he turned on her with a sudden,
insinuating droop of the eyelids.
"Very well--and you've been friendly with him, say until two weeks ago.
And you're no longer so. I name no reason. But you detest him now. Am I
wrong? Can I still read a woman?" He leaned toward her, peering nearer
with each query. He meant them to be like thrusts of the dagger which
he now threw on the desk. Her eyes fell in unfeigned confusion under his
look, her mind running many ways to come on the meaning beneath this
preposterous guess. She looked up to him, seeking a hint, but his eyes
were inscrutable, his mouth set in a sagacious smile, intimating,
accusing. She looked down again, suddenly feeling it wise to let him
think as he did--whatever absurd thing it might be. She sighed deeply,
relaxed in her chair and met his eyes again. Teevan beheld a woman
defenseless to his insight; one too proud to confess in words, but too
weak, too vindictive, perhaps, to attempt denial.
"I see, my girl--don't trouble to speak." He replenished his glass from
the decanter. He was delighted with his penetration; pleased, also, to
believe that here was an ally, if one should be needed. He glanced at
her again. She sat silent and drooping.
"You did well to come to me, Eleanor. I fancy you'll be interested to
know what our young friend is about to encounter."
"Oh, I shall, I shall! Tell me, please." He smiled at her eagerness, so
poorly subdued, recording in a mental footnote the viperish fury of a
woman in her plight. Still, he thought she carried it off rather well.
There had been need for his keenness to read her secret.
"I'll tell you, my girl, and I'm jolly glad to find some one who can
enjoy it with me. What am I going to do with him?" He rose and paced the
room for so long a time that she felt she could not bear it. She was
about to speak when he abruptly halted and faced her with a petrifying
burst of malignance. "What am I going to do with him?--wring him, wreck
him, choke him, fling the fool back on his dung heap to rot!" She
stared at him, panting; then, summoning all her ingenuity she smiled
slowly above the sickening fear that had rushed over her. Teevan glowed.
That smile of hers--he could detect something relentless in it--was a
tribute to his prowess no less than a confirmation of his power to read
her.
"I don't understand," she half whispered, still with that restrained
fierceness that gave him joy.
"Of course you don't. Am I to be read as a primer? I'm subtler, I trust,
than an earthquake, a cyclone, a deluge. You don't understand, but you
shall." He paced the floor again with a foppish air of pride. "Ah, it
has worked so beautifully. Really, I've regretted there was no one I
could let in to enjoy a work of art with me. But you, I see, will have
the taste to applaud it, Nell, now that your eyes are opened. Oh, the
thing has gone ideally! Only applause was lacking."
"I don't understand, Randall." She could hardly manage the words. She
was afraid her heart would beat them into some wild cry of impatience.
"You shall--you shall." He gazed meditatively at her. "Yes, and you'll
have to know it all to understand perfectly, even my--my humiliation."
He unlocked the door of a closet and brought out something she did not
recognize until he had placed it across the arms of a chair and stepped
back. It was the portrait of Ewing's mother. His face was contorted now
in a most unpleasant sneer.
"There's the _motif_." He resumed his seat at the desk, facing the
picture. The sneer had gone, and whatever dignity of soul was in him
sounded in the next words.
"You can't know what that meant to me when I saw it, when I knew who
had done it, when I thought of the creature who carried it about
parading his own shame and hers--and _mine_!"
"I think I can understand that, Randall."
"You can't, I say. No woman could. You can't begin to know the
humiliation, how it tore me, knowing this fellow walked the earth at
all, a nameless spawn, holding my shame over me--over _me_! threatening
every instant to cover me again with it. As if I'd not survived enough!
Good God! was I to go through it again, and know that this puling whelp
was the instrument--a thing to torture me, hold me up to ridicule, to
make men smile and titter and mock me in club corners? Wasn't _her_
insult enough? Must she breed obscene things to echo it?" He groaned and
turned away with a gesture of warding off. In the mist of her besetment
the woman found herself thinking that the fine little hands in this
gesture should have been lace-beruffled at the wrist. He was the figure
of stabbed vanity, the bleeding coxcomb. He flung an arm toward the
picture with bitter vehemence.
"Ah, my lady! my fine, loose lady, with your high talk and your low way!
I hope you've watched me with those painted eyes of yours. Did you think
I'd never strike back?"
"But now, Randall--_how_?" He replenished his glass and turned slowly
away from the picture.
"How, indeed? That's where you meet me at last. Not every one could have
carried it through, but it was simple for me. Difficult in a way, yes.
It's been hard to stomach the fool, with his conceit and his whining.
Oh, he fancies himself tremendously, for all his ways of a holy
innocent, his damned airs of a sugar-candy Galahad. But I've won him, I
tell you, by that very innocence of his. I'm the one soul in the world
he truly reveres. His sun rises and sets in me. And now he's where I
want him. I've worn out his hope, kept him from doing the thing he
wanted to do, kept him on the edge of despair out of respect and fear
and love of me. The beggar _has_ a certain devilish sort of genius, but
he doesn't know where it lies, and I've taken precious good care he
shouldn't find out. Oh, but I've had a rich time of it--disgusting and
rich. Nearly a year it is now that he's led me this dance, but I've
hooked him beautifully, and to-night I'll pull him in." She had been
watching the play of spite on his face, and it was with difficulty that
she moistened her lips to say:
"But what will you do to-night--what can you say?"
"Everything I've laid a train for saying, this year past. Tell him how I
despise him for his empty pretensions, his constant, wretched failures.
Show him to himself as a conceited dawdler and a cheat who has lived on
my bounty--oh, I saw to that--a cheat who has defrauded me of time and
money and faith in man. Never fear but I'll know the things to say. I've
told them to _her_ often enough." He thrust viciously at the portrait.
"And you'll hear it all, my Lady Disdain, with your face to the wall to
hide its belated blushes."
Again she tried to speak but her lips were dry. At last she achieved a
few rather husky words.
"Randall, if you please, might I have a glass of something--water, I'd
like."
"To be sure, my child. You're certain you won't join me in a brandy and
soda? No? I'll get you something below."
She clutched at the moment to quiet, if she could, that tumult of heart
and brain. Her mind dwelt chiefly on Ewing's dejection as she had left
him the day before. Teevan came back, bearing a carafe and a bottle of
soda water. She drank a glass of the water greedily, and murmured her
thanks as he gave her more. It refreshed her and she seemed to feel a
renewal of strength. Her fever was heating her brain to wild activity.
She felt a crazy desire to cool her head, to lean it against snow or
cold metal. She thought fleetingly of cold things she had touched, of
marble, icicles, a brass rail with frost on it. She was goading her mind
for a way to reach Teevan. She drank the second glass of water, and
again he refilled it, protesting against so poor a tipple as he took
more brandy for himself.
She watched him narrowly as he prepared his drink. The decanter was so
low that she thought he must be feeling what he had taken, and she
wondered if it might not have softened him, released some generosity in
his poor soul.
"You must have suffered, Randall, in all this. But won't it hurt you
still more, doing what you mean to do--when you make _him_ suffer?"
"His suffering!" He waved a deprecating hand. "What can he suffer
compared to me? Disgust I've suffered, yes, and mortification. He could
feel nothing approaching that if I flayed him here. Why, Nell, I pulled
a rose from its bush this morning in Neville's garden, and crushed a
worm crawling on its stem. A poor, tiny green thing, yet it had lived,
and had its successes and failures after a fashion. But you can't
imagine its actual suffering in death to equal my own mere disgust at
crushing it."
The brandy had not softened him, she thought. Could it have made him
cautious?
"Have you never suspected, Randall, that there may be a sleeping fighter
in him?" There was a glitter in her tormented eyes, a sudden fierce wish
to behold battle between this puny insulter and Ewing aroused to his
might.
"Bah! a fighter!" He snapped contemptuous fingers. "There's the look in
his eye sometimes, but I've disarmed him. He _can't_ fight me, his
benefactor, his best friend. Never fear; he'll wilt, wither, shrivel up.
Oh, trust me for that. And suppose the impossible, suppose the worm
turns in some fit of wormish desperation. I've the _coup_, have I not?
You know what his mother is to him, a damned romantic memory of pure
womanhood and all that rot. Suppose him capable of so much as an
eye-flash of defiance. Why, then, my child, he'll know who--he'll know
_what_--his mother was; and he'll know my right to describe her. He'll
know what _he_ is. And the words won't puzzle him: he'll need no
lexicon--crisp, Anglo-Saxon words. Do you think that will leave any
fight in him--her shame and his? By Gad! Nell, it's too good to keep
from him. He shall have it anyway, though I'd meant to keep it back for
my own sake. But that shall be the clincher. Before her face there I'll
tell him what she was."
"Not that, Randall, surely not that!" Her veil of calmness had flown on
the wind of his hate. She knew she must reveal herself. Her words had
been so near a cry that he turned on her in amazement.
"Listen, Randall, don't--don't do that. Let him off. I promise to take
him away. It's all true; you've handled him well, and you can break him
now--but don't. Please, please let him go. I'll take him away, I tell
you. I promise he shall never bother you again."
He looked at her, incredulous.
"You're asking me to consider _him_--really?"
"No, no--to consider me. Please, please listen--please consider me."
"But you--I thought you----"
"Randall"--she had regained a little of her first coolness--"I'm done
for. I found that out to-day. I've a year to live, at most. A scant
year, if it's to be like this. Try to grasp it. I've wanted so much, had
so little of life. But, I must go, they tell me. Can you understand what
that means, as well as I understood what this meant to you--a sentence
of death, a few little months to snatch at happiness?"
He stared at her uncertainly, but half comprehending. She saw that the
drink was affecting him at last. His eyes were dulled, his face had lost
its centered look.
"Going to die, Eleanor? Die in a year? What rot! Don't talk rot. Nobody
dies in a year." He spoke carefully, with a deliberate attack on each
word, as if he mistrusted his tongue.
"But it's true, Randall, I swear it's true. Can you understand?"
"Understand?" he repeated, and through her tense absorption she was
astonished to see on his face an incredible look of pity. "Understand?
Why, of course! And it's too bad, my girl. Poor Eleanor! Die in a
year--why wouldn't I understand? But never mind"--he seemed to search
clumsily for words of cheer. "Death isn't anything but an incident in
the scheme of life--a precious contemptible one, I've no doubt. We live,
and that's a little thing--but death's littler. I dare say we live as
long as we need to. Who was the old chap--Plotinus, wasn't
it?--conceived the body to be a penitential mechanism for the soul? All
the better if we expiate early. Gad! I must have had a quantity of
things to atone for--though I'm really younger than you may think, Nell.
Poor girl--poor girl!" He brightened as he drained his glass to her.
"Here's to you, wherever you are. Come, be cheerful anyway. What was it
struck in my mind yesterday?--a sentence from one of Arbuthnot's letters
to Swift--just the meat for you--'A reasonable hope of going--a
reasonable hope of going to a good place and an absolute certainty of
leaving a bad one.' That's the sentiment--keep it in mind, my dear."
She was nerving herself to new appeals, half fearing she could not hold
his attention. She seized on that unprecedented look of compassion.
"But, Randall, you'll let him off--let him off for me--for my sake." In
her eagerness she rose and fluttered to the desk, standing before him.
He whirled his chair about, and the look of commiseration had gone.
"No, no, no! You can't understand, Nell. I couldn't let him off if I
wanted to. It's fate, its retribution--the sins of the father--it's
scriptural, I tell you--" His eyes were gleaming again with steely
implacability.
"But for me, Randall, for my sake, for me alone--not thinking of him?"
"Ah, lady, set me a harder task, but one of dignity--as difficult, as
dangerous as you like, so it has some dignity. But not that. Here"--he
gracefully extended the handle of the dagger to her--"slay me an' you
will--the blade is keen--a toy, but deadly--I'll die smiling if you
wish. But don't ask for that cub's happiness. Don't rob me of my pay,
Nell, my pay for all I've endured from him, his boastings and
snivelings, and his detestable handshakes. Don't talk rot, I say,
even if you must die."
Again she set herself to plead, desperation feeding the fire in her head
until she knew not her words. She was conscious only of a torrent of
speech, coaxing, imploring, wheedling, even threatening. But all she
evoked was the steady, smiling negative, his head shaken unwittingly to
the rhythm of her phrases.
She stopped at last, panting, striving to keep back the passionate words
of entreaty that still formed, crushing them down in a maddened
consciousness of their impotence. She stared wildly, feeling only a
still stubborn determination. Ewing would soon come--yet it seemed that
she had no resource save appeal. She felt this and raged against it,
striding away from Teevan across the room. For the first time in her
gentle life she was feeling the sensation she thought a man must feel in
fighting. She had an impulse to strike blindly, to wound, to beat down
with her hands. Without volition she measured her antagonist and
wondered deliriously if she could throw him to the floor. He seemed so
small to her, and hateful--hateful and small enough to kill. She closed
her eyes to shut him out, but opened them again quickly, for everything
rocked in the darkness. She incessantly pictured this creature, naked in
his poverty of manhood, smiling up at Ewing, the friendly one, who stood
bowed down, blighted and broken of heart. Sometimes Ewing had his arm
over his face, and she felt that he would never take it away--move on
thus forever, like a figure in an anguished dream.
Constantly beside her thoughts, like a little refrain, went the
remembrance that she had brought him there, torn him from his youth and
splendid dreams to give him to this--she the betrayer! The fever waxed,
the tortured blood trampled in her head like hurrying hoofs.
But she could not strike Teevan, extinguish him with blows, and she set
herself again to play the beggar. And she could not beg across the room.
Bit by bit she crept to the entreated one, her great eyes full of flame
and fear, and laid pitiful hands on his shoulder. Still the shaken head
met her, the icy smile, the dulled eyes.
"No good talking, Nell! No good! You mortify me, my word you do. Demand
something great, something to task a man; ask me----"
Again he picked up the dagger with a return to that extravagant air of
the sighing gallant.
"--here, I point it to my heart, see! A mere thrust--your beautiful hand
is still equal to it. I'd be proud of the blow. I'd give you my life
gladly--but not my self-respect. You're too stunning a woman, Nell, to
waste yourself on that cub--a woman to die for indeed. You were never
finer than at this moment." In the excess of his emotion he threw an arm
about her waist. She started back but he held her.
"Never finer, Nell, on my soul--too fine for that damned----"
She put out her hands in an instinctive, shuddering movement of
repulsion. Still he clung to her, muttering his insupportable phrases.
He clung and she could not release herself without doing what she had
thought was impossible--exert her unused hands in striking, thrusting,
beating off. She hesitated: she did not like to touch him. He looked
very small and low in his chair. How low he seemed from her dizzy
height! And yet he held so well. His voice came faintly, too, as if from
afar, floating up faint and hateful. So he would hold Ewing and slay him
with his voice. He was playing with the dagger again and proffering his
heart with maudlin eyes. Prisoning her still with his right arm, he took
her hand in his left and clumsily set it on the dagger's hilt.
"It would be a sweet death, Nell. Press home!" He drew her closer, so
that she staggered on his shoulder. "Gad! your eyes are fine. What a
woman you are! Too great, Nell, for that beaten whelp, even before he
took to your sister----"
She gave a desperate little cry and struck out to free herself. It was
hardly more than a gesture to have him away, but she was conscious, with
a lightning shock, that the blade moved under her hand. She heard
Teevan's shrill scream of fright and pain----
"You're killing me--you're killing me!"
But she saw only Ewing with covered face, and pushed the harder, lost to
all but her blind sense of opposition. Then she heard a new note in
Teevan's cry.
"Ewing! Ewing!"
She turned quickly, while Teevan retreated round a corner of the desk,
snarling his rage--turned to see Ewing.