As Rush closed his own door behind him, his troubled spirit shifted its
load. Indubitably, if Dr. Anna had not met him he should have walked
until exhausted, and then boarded a train somewhere down the line and
arrived in Elsinore dishevelled, haggard, altogether an object of
suspicion. None knew better than he that in a small community the
lightning of suspicion plays incessantly, throwing the faces of innocent
and guilty alike into distorted relief. And he had half expected to find
a newspaper man awaiting him in the hall below.
Before turning on his lights he felt his way to the windows and drew the
curtains close. For all he knew there might be a detective or a reporter
sitting on the opposite fence. His legal mind, deeply versed in criminal
law, fully appreciated his danger and warned him to arm at every point.
The district attorney, one of Balfame's men, clever, ambitious, but too
ill-educated to hope to graduate from Brabant County, or even, political
influence lacking, to climb into the first rank at home, hated the
brilliant newcomer who had beaten him twice during his brief term of
office. That Rush "hailed" originally from the county only added to the
grievance. If Brabant wasn't good enough for him in the first place, why
hadn't he stayed where he was wanted?
But Rush dismissed him from his mind as he remembered uneasily that
Alys Crumley had been sketching out there at the Club while he had been
wrestling with David Balfame. He knew her ambition to get a position on
a New York newspaper as a sketch artist; but the possibility that she
might have guessed the secret of his interest in putting an end to the
scene, or intended to sell her drawing to one of the reporters, would
have given him little uneasiness had the artist not been a young woman
upon whom he had ceased to call some two months since.
He had met Alys Crumley about eighteen months after he had returned to
Brabant County and some three months after he had moved from Dobton to
Elsinore, and at once had been attracted by her bright ambitious mind,
combined with a real personality and an appearance both smart and
artistic.
Miss Crumley prided herself upon being unique in Elsinore, at least, and
although her thick well-groomed hair was dressed with classic severity,
and she wore soft gowns of an indescribable cut in the house, and at the
evening parties of her friends, she was far too astute to depart from
the fashion of the moment in the crucial test of street dress and hat.
In Park Row during her brief sojourn in the newspaper world, she had
commanded attention among the critical press women as a girl who knew
how to dress smartly and yet add that personal touch which, when
attempted by those lacking genius in dress, ruins the effect of the most
extravagant tailor. Miss Crumley by no means patronised these autocrats
of Fifth Avenue; she bought her tailored suits at the ready-made
establishments, but like many another American girl, she knew how to
buy, and above all, how to wear her clothes.
She had taught for several years after graduating from the High School;
then, her nerves rebelling, had abandoned this most monotonous of
careers for newspaper work. To reporting her physique had not proved
equal, and although she would have made an admirable fashion editor
these enviable positions were adequately filled. On the advice of the
star reporter of her paper, Mr. James Broderick, who, with other
newspaper men had been entertained occasionally at tea of a Sunday
afternoon in her charming little home in Elsinore, she had developed her
talent for drawing during the past year; Mr. Broderick promising to
"find her a job" as staff artist when she had improved her technique.
Then Dwight Rush appeared.
Miss Crumley lived with her mother in the family cottage next door to
Dr. Anna's in Elsinore Avenue. Mrs. Crumley, who was the relict of a
G. A. R. had eked out her pension during the schooldays of her daughter
with fine sewing, finding most of her patrons among the newcomers. She
also had cooked for the Woman's Exchange of Brooklyn, besides catering
for public dinners and evening parties. For several years she enjoyed a
complete rest; therefore, when Alys retired temporarily from the office
of provider in order to study art, Mrs. Crumley willingly re-entered the
industrial field. As both the practical mother and the clever daughter
were amiable women it was a harmonious little household that Dwight Rush
found himself drifting toward intimacy with soon after he met the young
lady at a clubhouse dance.
The living-room--Alys long since had abolished the word parlour from her
vocabulary--was furnished in various shades of green as harmonious as
the family temper; there was a low bookcase filled with fashionable
literature, English and American; the magazines and reviews on the table
were almost blatantly "highbrow," and the cool green walls were further
embellished with a few delicate water colours conceived in the back-yard
atelier by an individual mind if executed by a still somewhat halting
brush.
For four months Rush had been a constant visitor at the cottage. Miss
Crumley, who was as progressively modern as an automobile factory, was
full of enthusiasm at the moment for the cult of sexless friendship
between a man and a maid. She had considered James Broderick at one time
as a likely partner for a philosophic romance (the adjective Platonic
was out of date; moreover, it implied that the cult was not as modern as
its devotees would wish it to appear); but the brilliant (and handsome)
young reporter not only was very busy but of a mercurial and uncertain
temperament. Nor did he appear to be a youth of lofty ideals; from
certain remarks, uttered casually, to make matters worse, Alys was
forced to conclude that he despised the man who "wasted his time" only
less than he despised the "chaser." If pretty, interesting, and
unnotional girls came his way and liked him enough, that was "all to the
good"; a busy newspaper man at the beck and call of a city editor had no
time for studying over the map of a girl's soul, the lord knew; but if a
girl wasn't a "dead game sport," then the sooner a man left the field to
some one with more time, or a yearning for matrimony, the better. These
remarks had been deliberately thrown out by the canny Mr. Broderick, who
liked "the kid" and didn't want her to "get in wrong" (particularly
with himself as he enjoyed both her society and the artistic
living-room--and Mrs. Crumley's confections) but who saw straight
through Alys' shifting modernities to the makings of a fine primitive
female.
But Rush was no student in sex psychology. He took Miss Crumley on her
face value; delighted in finding a comfortable friend of the counter
sex, and was more than amenable to her desire to cultivate in him a
taste for modern literature; since his graduation he had hardly opened
anything but law books, legal reviews, and the daily newspaper. She read
aloud admirably--particularly plays--and he liked to listen; and as she
convinced him that he was missing a good part of life, it was not long
before he was buying for leisurely midnight consumption such work of the
fashionable writers as was stimulating and intellectual, and at the same
time sincere.
She also took him over to several symphony concerts, and often played
classic selections to him in the twilight. He had no objection to music,
as it either spurred his mind into fresh activity upon problems
besetting it, or soothed him into slumber. He loved the little room with
the soft green shadows; it reminded him of the woods, of which he still
was passionately fond; and he found it both homelike and safe. Other
houses in Elsinore, larger and more luxurious, were homelike enough, but
too often were graced by marriageable daughters, who "showed their
hand." Rush was as little vain and conceited as a man may be, but he was
well aware that eligible men in Elsinore were few, and that everybody
must know that his intake, already large, must increase with the years.
But--as the wise Mr. Broderick would have predicted had he not been
interested elsewhere during this period--the tension grew too strong for
Alys Crumley. Nervous and high-strung, with her reservoir of human
emotions undepleted by even a hard flirtation since her early youth,
idealistic, romantic, and imaginative, she began to realise that with
each long uninterrupted evening--Mrs. Crumley was the most tactful of
parents--she was growing more femininely sensitive to this man's
magnetism and charm, to his quick responsive mind, to the mobility under
the surface of his lean hard face, to the suggestion of indomitable
strength which was the chief characteristic of the new American race of
men.
It was not long before she was exaggerating every attractive attribute
he possessed until he no longer seemed what he was, a fine specimen of
his type, but a glorified superbeing and the one desirable man on earth.
Her sense of superiority over this "rather crude Western specimen who
knew nothing but his job," and to whom she could teach so much, had
protected her for a time, held her femaleness and imagination in
abeyance, but insensibly his sheer masculinity swamped her, left her
without a rock but pride to cling to.
It was then that she showed her hand.
For a time after her discovery she was merely furious with herself; she
was twenty-six and no weakling, neither sentiment nor passion should
master her. But this phase was brief. Infatuation is not cast out either
by reason or pride, and very soon her mind opened to the insidious
whisper: "Why not?" What was the career of staff artist, full of
liberty, excitement, and good fellowship as it might be, to marriage
with an ambitious man capable of inspiring the wildest love? Sooner or
later had she not intended to make just such a marriage?
From this inception her deductions followed in logical feminine
sequence. If she loved him with a completeness which was both preadamic
and neoteric, it was of course because he was consumed with a similar
passion; in other words he was her mate. He might be too comfortable and
content to have realised it so far, but only one awakening was possible,
and hers was the entrancing part to reveal him to himself.
She knew that while by no means a beauty, she was as far from
commonplace in colouring at least as in style. Her eyes were an odd
opaque olive, their tint so pronounced that it seemed to invade the pale
ivory of her skin and the smooth masses of her hair. It was a far more
subtle face than American women as a rule possess, and the eyes in spite
of a curious inscrutability that might mean anything were capable of a
play of lights directed from a battery more archaic than modern; and
late one evening after she had read him an impassioned drama (ancient)
and there was a dusky rose in either cheek, she turned them on.
Rush immediately took fright. She had not roused a responsive spark of
passion in him. Moreover, he was now haunted continually by the image of
a sweet, remote, and (to him) far more mysterious woman, whom he
worshipped as the ideal of all womanhood.
There was none of the old time American suavity about Rush. He was
abrupt, forthright, and impatient. But he was kind and innately
chivalrous. He "let Miss Crumley down" as gently as he could; but he
let her down. No doubt of that. In less than a week she faced the
bewildering fact that a man could strike loose a woman's emotional
torrents while his own depths awaited the magical touch of another. It
was incredible, preposterous.
For a time Alys, in the privacy of her atelier, raged like a fury. She
cursed Rush, particularly when engaged in a violent struggle with the
pride which alone held her from grovelling at his feet.
She was further incensed that he had revealed her to herself as a mere
morbid unsatisfied girl, whose quarter of a century should be crowned by
a little family of three; and at last she doubted if she had ever loved
him at all. That she had been a mere female principle unable to escape
its impersonal destiny disgusted her with life, but it served to restore
her balance and philosophy.
Being a girl of brains and character she emerged from the encounter with
pride still crested in the eyes of the man; and if his image was too
deeply stamped into her imagination to prevent a recurrence of wild
desire whenever she was so imprudent as to let her mind wander, she
remembered that all great physical upheavals are followed by many minor
shocks, and waited with what patience she could command for full
delivery.
Of the sanguinary condition of the battle ground in his young friend's
soul Rush had a mere glimpse before she took heed and dissembled. He
assumed that she either had fallen in love with him after the fashion of
girls when they saw too much of a man, or that she was eager to marry
and improve her condition. He reproached himself for thoughtlessness,
renounced the long evenings in the pretty room with a sigh, and in his
bachelor quarters read the books of her choice. He had a very kindly
feeling for her, for he knew that he owed her a debt; if he had not met
the other woman--who could tell? Moreover, as he conceived it to be his
duty to shield her from spiteful comment, he danced with her in public
and joined her on the street whenever they met.
But if he knew nothing of the intricate and interminable ramifications
of sex psychology, the infinite variety of moods peculiar to a woman in
love, he was well enough aware that love is easily turned to hate,
particularly when vanity has been deeply wounded; and although he had
conceived a high esteem for Alys Crumley's character during the weeks of
their intimacy, he knew that men had been mistaken in their estimate of
women before this, and that if she discovered that he loved another
woman she might be capable of taking the basest revenge.
It was possible that she was the noblest of her sex, and he hoped she
was, but as he considered her that night, he realised that it behooved
him to walk warily nevertheless. By the time he could marry Enid
Balfame, or even betray his desire to marry her, this crime would have
passed into county history. Of the real danger he never thought.
The vision evoked of Alys Crumley was accompanied by that of her home,
and he looked round his stark bachelor quarters with a sigh.
The untidy sitting-room was crowded with law books and legal reviews;
the maid had given it up in despair long since, and only swept out the
ashes daily and dusted once a week.
In the small bedroom was an iron bed like a soldier's; neckties hung
from the chandelier; on the bureau and table beside the bed were more
books, several by the young British authors of the moment for whom Miss
Crumley had communicated some of her rather perfunctory enthusiasm.
He flung his clothes all over the room as he undressed. He hated
bachelor quarters. Six months hence he would be the master of a home as
exquisite as the woman he loved. Balfame! The man was dead, but as Rush
thought of him his face turned almost black and his hands tingled and
clenched. It would be long before he could hear that name mentioned
without a hot uprush of hatred and loathing. But it subsided and he took
a bath and "turned in."