She nodded, then turned to Blake with a look of entreaty, "P-please
don't kill yourself, dear? I couldn't help it."
"Why, you poor frightened little thing! I'm delighted! I am indeed," he
told her, reassuringly.
"Don't you care? Aren't you going to storm and--and raise the dickens?"
she queried. "Maybe this is your way of hiding your despair?"
"Not at all. I'm glad--so long as you're happy."
"And you're not mad with anguish nor crushed with--Why, the idea! I'm
perfectly _furious!_ I ran away because I was afraid of you, and I
haven't seen my husband once, not once, do you understand, since we
were married. Oh, you--_brute!_"
By this time Dreux had recovered his power of speech, and yelled in
furious voice:
"Who is the reptile?"
There came a timid rap, the office door opened, and Lecompte Rilleau
inserted his head, saying gently:
"Me! I! I'm it!"
Blake rose so suddenly that his chair upset, whereupon Rilleau, who saw
in this abrupt movement a threat, propelled himself fully into view,
crying with determination:
"Here! Don't you touch her! She's mine! You take it out of me!"
Blake's answering laugh seemed so out of character that the bridegroom
took it as merely a new phase of insanity, and edged in front of his
wife protectingly.
"I wanted to come in at first and break the news, but she wouldn't let
me," he explained.
"You have a weak heart. You--you mustn't fight!" implored Myra Nell;
but Lecompte only shrugged.
[Illustration: "P-PLEASE DON'T KILL YOURSELF, DEAR? I COULDN'T HELP IT"]
"That's all a bluff." Then to Norvin: "I'll admit it _was_ a mean
trick, and I guess my heart really might have petered out if she'd
married you; but I'm all right now, and you can have satisfaction."
"I don't know whether to be angry or amused at you children," Norvin
told them. "Understand, once for all, that our engagement wasn't
serious. There have been a lot of mistakes and
misunderstandings--that's all. Now tell us how and when this all
happened."
"Y-yes!" echoed Bernie, who was still dazed.
Myra Nell seemed more chagrined than relieved.
"It was perfectly simple," she informed them. "It happened during the
Carnival. I--never heard a man talk the way he did, and I was really
worried about his heart. I said no--for fifteen minutes, then we
arranged to be married secretly. When it was all over, I was frightened
and ran away. You're such a deep, desperate, unforgiving person,
Norvin. I--I think it was positively horrid of you."
"Good Lord!" breathed her brother. "What a perverted sense of
responsibility!"
"Are we forgiven?"
"It's all right with me, if it is with Norvin," said Bernie, somewhat
doubtfully.
"Forgiven?" Blake took the youthful pair by the hands, and in his eyes
was a brightness they had never seen. "Of course you are, and let me
tell you that you haven't cornered all the love in the world. I've
never cared but for one woman. Perhaps you will wish me as much
happiness as I wish you both?"
"Then you have found your Italian girl?" queried Myra Nell, with
flashing eagerness.
"Vittoria!"
"Vittoria!" Miss Warren shrieked. "Vittoria--a _countess!_ So, she's
the one who spoiled everything?"
"Gee! You'll be a count," said Rilleau.
There followed a period of laughing, incoherent explanations, and then
the beaming bridegroom tugged at Myra Nell's sleeve, saying:
"Now that it's all over, I'm mighty tired of being a widower."
She flung her arms about his neck and lifted her blushing face to his,
explaining to her half-brother, when she could:
"I don't know what you'll do without some one to look after you,
Bernie, but--it's perfectly grand to elope."
Dreux rose with a grin and winked at Norvin as he said:
"Oh, don't mind me. I'll get along all right." And seizing his hat he
rushed out with his thin face all ablaze. When Blake was finally alone,
he closed his desk and with bounding heart set out for the foreign
quarter. His day had dawned; he could hardly contain himself. But, as
he neared his goal, strange doubts and indecisions arose in his mind;
and when he had reached Oliveta's house he passed on, lacking courage
to enter. He decided it was too soon after the tragedy at the parish
prison to press his suit; that to intrude himself now would be in
offensively bad taste. Then, too, he began to reason that if Margherita
had wished to see him she would have sent for him--all in all, the hour
was decidedly unpropitious. He dared not risk his future happiness upon
a blundering, ill-timed declaration; therefore he walked onward. But no
sooner had he passed the house than a thousand voices urged him to
return, in this the hour of the girl's loneliness, and lay his devotion
at her feet. Torn thus by hesitation and by the sense of his
unworthiness, he walked the streets, hour after hour. At one moment he
approached the house desperately determined; the next he fled, mastered
by the fear of dismissal. So he continued his miserable wanderings on
into the dusk.
Twilight was settling when Margherita Ginini finished her packing. The
big living-room was stripped of its furnishings; trunks and cases stood
about in a desolate confusion. There was no look of home or comfort
remaining anywhere, and the whole house echoed dismally to her
footsteps. From the rear came the sound of Oliveta's listless
preparations.
Pausing at an open window, Margherita looked down upon the street which
she had grown to love--the suggestion of darkness had softened it,
mellowed it with a twilight beauty, like the face of an old friend seen
in the glow of lamplight. The shouting of urchins at play floated
upward, stirring the chords of motherhood in her breast and emphasizing
her loneliness. With Oliveta gone what would be left? Nothing but an
austere life compressed within drab walls; nothing but sickness and
suffering on every side. She had begun to think a great deal about
those walls of late and--The bells of a convent pealed out softly in
the distance, bringing a tightness to her throat. In spite of herself
she shuddered. Those laughing children's voices mocked at her empty
life. They seemed always to jeer at that hungry mother-love, but never
quite so loudly as now. She remembered surprising Norvin Blake at play
with these very children one day, and the half-abashed, half-defiant
light in his eyes when he discovered her watching him. Thinking of him,
she recalled just such another twilight hour as this when, in a whirl
of shamed emotion, she had been compelled to face the fact of her love.
A sudden trembling weakness seized her at the memory, and she saw again
those cold gray walls, which never echoed to the gleeful crowing of
babes or the thrilling merriment of little voices. In that brief hour
of her awakening life had opened gloriously, bewilderingly, only to
close again, leaving her soul bruised and sore with rebellion.
She crossed the floor listlessly in answer to a knock, for the repeated
attentions of her neighbors, although sincere and touching, were
intrusive; then she fell back at sight of the man who entered.
The magic of this evening hour had brought him to her in spite of all
his fears; but his heart was in his throat, and he could hardly manage
a greeting. As he passed the threshold of the disordered room he looked
round him in dismay.
"What is this?" he asked.
"Oliveta is going home to Sicily. It is our parting."
"And you?"
"To-morrow--I go to the Sisters."
"No, no!" he cried, in a voice which thrilled her. "I won't let you.
For hours I've been trying to come here--Dearest, don't answer until
you know everything. Sometimes I fear I was the one who was dreaming at
that moment when you confessed you loved me, for it is all so
unreal--But my love is not unreal. It has lived with me night and day
since that first moment at Terranova--I couldn't speak before, but all
these years seem only hours, and I've been living in the gardens of
Sicily where you first smiled at me and awoke this love. You asked me
to take no part--I had to refuse--I've tried to make a man of myself,
not for my own sake, not for what the world would say, but for you--"
In the tumult of feeling that his words aroused she held fast to one
thought.
"What--what about Myra Nell?" she gasped.
"Myra Nell is married!"
The curling lashes which had lain half closed during his headlong
speech flew open to display a look of wonderment and dawning gladness.
"Yes," he reiterated. "She is married. She has been married ever since
the Carnival, and she's very happy. But I didn't know. I was tied by a
miserable misunderstanding, so I couldn't come to you honestly until
today. And now--I--I'm--afraid--"
"What do you fear?" she heard herself say. The breathless delight of
this moment was so intense that she toyed with it, fearing to lose the
smallest part. She withheld the confession trembling upon her lips
which he was too timid to take for granted, too blind to see.
"Can you take me, in spite of my wretched cowardice back there in
Sicily? I would understand, dear, if you couldn't forget it, but--I
love you so--I tried so hard to make myself worthy--you'll never know
how hard it was--I couldn't do what you asked me, the other day, but,
thank God, my hands are clean."
He held them out as if in evidence; then, to his great, his
never-ending surprise, she came forward and placed her two palms in
his. She stood looking gravely at him, her surrender plain in the curve
of her tremulous lip, the droop of her faltering, silk-fringed lids.
Knowledge came to him with a blinding, suffocating suddenness which set
his brain to reeling and wrung a rapturous cry from his throat.
After a long time he felt her shudder in his arms.
"What is it, heart of my life?" he whispered, without lifting his lips
from her tawny cloud of hair.
"Those walls!" she said. "Those cold, gray walls!"
A sob rose, caught, then changed to a laugh of deep contentment, and
she nestled closer.
Children's voices were wafted up to them through the fragrant, peaceful
dusk, and the two fell silent again, until Oliveta came and stood
beside them with her face transfigured.
"God be praised!" said the peasant girl, as she put her hands in
theirs. "Something told me I should not return to Sicily alone."