"Very," replied Pauline, with a struggle to smile.
"What a child you look! It seems absurd that you are a married woman.
Why, you haven't your full growth yet." And on an impulse of intuitive
sympathy Mrs. Fanshaw pressed her arm, and Pauline was suddenly filled
with gratitude, and liked her from that moment.
Alone in her sitting-room at the hotel, she went up to the mirror over
the mantel, and, staring absently at herself, put her hands up
mechanically to take out her hat-pins. "No, I'll keep my hat on," she
thought, without knowing why. And she sat, hat and wrap on, and looked
at a book. Half an hour, and she took off her hat and wrap, put them
in a chair near where she was sitting. The watched hands of the clock
crawled wearily round to half-past one, to two, to half-past two, to
three--each half-hour an interminable stage. She wandered to the
window and looked down into empty Fifth Avenue. When she felt that at
least an hour had passed, she turned to look at the clock
again--twenty-five minutes to four. Her eyes were heavy.
"He is not coming," she said aloud, and, leaving the lights on in the
sitting-room, locked herself in the bedroom.
At five o'clock she started up and seized the dressing-gown on the
chair near the head of the bed. She listened--heard him muttering in
the sitting-room. She knew now that a crash of some kind had roused
her. Several minutes of profound silence, then through the door came a
steady, heavy snore.
The dressing-gown dropped from her hand. She slid from the bed, slowly
crossed the room, softly opened the door, looked into the sitting-room.
A table and a chair lay upset in the middle of the floor. He was on a
sofa, sprawling, disheveled, snoring.
Slowly she advanced toward him--she was barefooted, and the white
nightgown clinging to her slender figure and the long braid down her
back made her look as young as her soul--the soul that gazed from her
fixed, fascinated eyes, the soul of a girl of eighteen, full as much
child as woman still. She sat down before him in a low chair, her
elbows on her knees, her chin supported by her hands, her eyes never
leaving his swollen, dark red, brutish face--a cigar stump, much
chewed, lay upon his cheek near his open mouth. He was as absurd and
as repulsive as a gorged pig asleep in a wallow.
The dawn burst into broad day, but she sat on motionless until the
clock struck the half-hour after six. Then she returned to the bedroom
and locked herself in again.
Toward noon she dressed and went into the sitting-room. He was gone
and it had been put to rights. When he came, at twenty minutes to one,
she was standing at the window, but she did not turn.
"Did you get my note?" he asked, in a carefully careless tone. He went
on to answer himself: "No, there it is on the floor just where I put
it, under the bedroom door. No matter--it was only to say I had to go
out but would be back to lunch. Sorry I was kept so late last night.
Glad you didn't wait up for me--but you might have left the bedroom
door open--it'd have been perfectly safe." He laughed good-naturedly.
"As it was, I was so kind-hearted that I didn't disturb you, but slept
on the sofa."
As he advanced toward her with the obvious intention of kissing her,
she slowly turned and faced him. Their eyes met and he stopped
short--her look was like the eternal ice that guards the pole.
"I saw you at the theater last night," she said evenly. "And this
morning, I sat and watched you as you lay on the sofa over there."
He was taken completely off his guard. With a gasp that was a kind of
groan he dropped into a chair, the surface of his mind strewn with the
wreckage of the lying excuses he had got ready.
"Please don't try to explain," she went on in the same even tone. "I
understand now about--about Paris and--everything. I know that--father
was right."
He gave her a terrified glance--no tears, no trace of excitement, only
calmness and all the strength he knew was in her nature and, in
addition, a strength he had not dreamed was there.
"What do you intend to do?" he asked after a long silence.
She did not answer immediately. When she did, she was not looking at
him.
"When I married you--across the river from Battle Field," she said, "I
committed a crime against my father and mother. This is--my
punishment--the beginning of it. And now--there'll be
the--the--baby--" A pause, then: "I must bear the consequences--if I
can. But I shall not be your wife--never--never again. If you wish me
to stay on that condition, I'll try. If not--"
"You MUST stay, Pauline," he interrupted. "I don't care what terms you
make, you must stay. It's no use for me to try to defend myself when
you're in this mood. You wouldn't listen. But you're right about not
going. If you did, it'd break your father's and mother's hearts. I
admit I did drink too much last night, and made a fool of myself. But
if you were more experienced, you'd--"
He thought he had worked his courage up to the point where he could
meet her eyes. He tried it. Her look froze his flow of words. "I
KNOW that you were false from the beginning," she said.
"The man I thought you were never existed--and I know it. We won't
speak of this--ever--after now. Surely you can't wish me to stay?"
And into her voice surged all her longing to go, all her hope that he
would reject the only terms on which self-respect would let her stay.
"Wish you to stay?" he repeated. And he faced her, looking at her, his
chest heaving under the tempest of hate and passion that was raging in
him--hate because she was defying and dictating to him, passion because
she was so beautiful as she stood there, like a delicate, fine
hot-house rose poised on a long, graceful stem. "No wonder I LOVE
you!" he exclaimed between his clenched teeth.
A bright spot burned in each of her cheeks and her look made him redden
and lower his eyes.
"Now that I understand these last five months," she said, "that from
you is an insult."
His veins and muscles swelled with the fury he dared not show; for he
saw and felt how dangerous her mood was.
"I'll agree to whatever you like, Pauline," he said humbly. "Only, we
mustn't have a flare-up and a scandal. I'll never speak to you again
about--about anything you don't want to hear."
She went into her bedroom. When, after half an hour, she reappeared,
she was ready to go down to lunch. In the elevator he stole a glance
at her--there was no color in her face, not even in her lips. His rage
had subsided; he was ashamed of himself--before her. But he felt
triumphant too.
"I thought she'd go, sure, in spite of her fear of hurting her father
and mother," he said to himself. "A mighty close squeak. I was
stepping round in a powder magazine, with every word a lit match."
In January she sank into a profound lassitude. Nothing interested her,
everything wearied her. As the time drew near, her mother came to stay
with her; and day after day the two women sat silent, Mrs. Gardiner
knitting, Pauline motionless, hands idle in her lap, mind vacant. If
she had any emotion, it was a hope that she would die and take her
child with her.
"That would settle everything, settle it right," she reflected, with
youth's morbid fondness for finalities.
When it was all over and she came out from under the opiate, she lay
for a while, open-eyed but unseeing, too inert to grope for the lost
thread of memory. She felt a stirring in the bed beside her, the
movement of some living thing. She looked and there, squeezed into the
edge of the pillow was a miniature head of a little old man--wrinkled,
copperish. Yet the face was fat--ludicrously fat. A painfully homely
face with tears running from the closed eyes, with an open mouth that
driveled and drooled.
"What is it?" she thought, looking with faint curiosity. "And why is
it here?"
Two small fists now rose aimlessly in the air above the face and
flapped about; and a very tempest of noise issued from the sagging
mouth.
"A baby," she reflected. Then memory came--"MY baby!"
She put her finger in the way of the wandering fists. First one of
them, then the other, awkwardly unclosed and as awkwardly closed upon
it. She smiled. The grip tightened and tightened and tightened until
she wondered how hands so small and new could cling so close and hard.
Then that electric clasp suddenly tightened about her heart. She burst
into tears and drew the child against her breast. The pulse of its
current of life was beating against her own--and she felt it. She
sobbed, laughed softly, sobbed again.
Her mother was bending anxiously over her.
"What's the matter, dearest?" she asked. "What do you wish?"
"Nothing!" Pauline was smiling through her tears. "Oh, mother, I am SO
happy!" she murmured.
And her happiness lasted with not a break, with hardly a pause, all
that spring and all that summer--or, so long as her baby's helplessness
absorbed the whole of her time and thought.