Gordon Makimmon made one step toward her. Lettice held the box in an
extended hand:
"Gordon," she asked, "what was this for? It was in the clothes press last
evening: it couldn't have been there long. You see--it's a little
jewellery box from the post-office; here is the name on the lid. Somehow,
Gordon, finding it upset me; I couldn't stop 'til I'd seen you and asked
you about it. Somehow there didn't seem to be any time to lose. I asked
for you last night in the village, but everybody had gone to the
sap-boiling ... I sat up all night ... waiting ... I couldn't wait any
longer, Gordon, somehow. I had to come out and find you, and everybody had
gone to the sap-boiling, and--"
"Why, Lettice," he stammered, more disconcerted by the sudden loss of
youth from her countenance than by her words; "it wasn't--wasn't much."
"What was it, Gordon?" she insisted.
Suddenly he was unable to lie to her. Her questioning eyes held a quality
that dispelled petty and casual subterfuges. The evasion which he
summoned to his lips perished silently.
"A string of pearls," he muttered.
"Why did you crush the pretty box if they were for--for me or for your
sister, if it was to be a surprise? I can't understand--"
"It, it was--"
"Who were they for, Gordon?"
A blundering panic swept over him; Lettice was more strange than familiar;
she was unnatural; her hair didn't shine in the sunlight streaming into
the shallow, green basin; in the midst of the warm efflorescence she
seemed remote, chill.
"For her," he moved his head toward Meta Beggs.
She withdrew her burning gaze from Gordon Makimmon and turned to the
school-teacher.
"For Miss Beggs," she repeated, "why ... why, that's bad, Gordon. You're
married to me; I'm your wife. Miss Beggs oughtn't ... she isn't anything
to you."
Meta Beggs stood motionless, silent, her red cotton dress drawing and
wrinkling over her rounded shoulders and hips. The necklace hung
gracefully about the slender column of her throat.
The two women standing in the foreground of Gordon Makimmon's vision, of
his existence, summed up all the eternal contrast, the struggle, in the
feminine heart. And they summed up the duplicity, the weakness, the
sensual and egotistical desires, the power and vanity and vain-longing, of
men.
Meta Beggs was the mask, smooth and sterile, of the hunger for adornment,
for gold bands and jewels and perfume, for goffered linen and draperies of
silk and scarlet. She was the naked idler stained with antimony in the
clay courts of Sumeria; the Paphian with painted feet loitering on the
roofs of Memphis while the blocks of red sandstone floated sluggishly down
the Nile for the pyramid of Khufu the King; she was the flushed
voluptuousness relaxed in the scented spray of pagan baths; the woman with
piled and white-powdered hair in a gold shift of Louis XIV; the prostitute
with a pinched waist and great flowered sleeves of the Maison Doree. She
was as old as the first vice, as the first lust budding like a black
blossom in the morbidity of men successful, satiated.
She was old, but Lettice was older.
Lettice was more ancient than men walking cunning and erect, than the
lithe life of sun-heated tangles, than the vital principle of flowering
plants fertilized by the unerring chance of vagrant insects and airs.
Standing in the flooding blue flame of day they opposed to each other the
forces fatally locked in the body of humanity. Lettice, with her unborn
child, her youth haggard with apprehension and pain, the prefigurement of
the agony of birth, gazed, dumb and bitter in her sacrifice, at the
graceful, cold figure that, as irrevocably as herself, denied all that
Lettice affirmed, desired all that she feared and hated.
"Why, that's bad, Gordon," she reiterated, "I'm your wife. And Miss Beggs
is bad, I'm certain of that." A spasm of suffering crossed her face like a
cloud.
"You ought not to have come, Lettice. Lettice, you ought not to have
come," he told her. His dull voice reflected the lassitude that had fallen
upon him, the sudden death of all emotion, the swift extinguishing of his
interest in the world about him; it reflected, in his indifference to
desire, an indifference to Meta Beggs.
"Do you love her, Gordon?" his wife asked.
"No, I don't," he answered, perceptibly impatient at the question.
"Do you like her better than you like me?"
The palpable answer to her query, that he thought of himself more than
either, evaded him. "I don't like her better than I like you," he repeated
baldly.
Lettice turned to the other woman. "There's not much you can say," she
declared, "caught like this trying to steal somebody's husband. And you
set over a school of children!"
"I don't choose to be," Meta Beggs retorted. "I hate it, but I had to
live. If you hadn't had all that money to keep you soft, yes, and get you
a husband, you would have had to fight and do, too. You might have been
teaching a roomful of little sneaks, and sick to death of it before ever
you began ... or you might be on the street--better girls have than you."
"And you bought her a necklace, Gordon, her--"
All that he now desired was to get Lettice safely home. Another wave of
pain rose whitely over her countenance. "Come on, Lettice," he urged;
"just step into the buggy." He waved toward the vehicle, toward the
peacefully grazing horse, Mrs. Caley sitting upright and sallow.
"And take him right along with you," Meta Beggs added; "your money's tight
around his neck."
Resentment at the implied ignominy penetrated his self-esteem.
"We're going right on now, Lettice," he continued; "we must drive as
careful as possible."
"I don't know that I want you," his wife articulated slowly.
"You can decide that later," he returned; "we're going home first."
She relaxed her fingers, and dropped the pasteboard box on the turf. She
stood with her arms hanging limply, breathing in sharp inspirations. She
gazed about at the valley, the half-distant maple grove: suddenly the
youth momentarily returned to her, the frightened expression of a child
abruptly conscious of isolation in an alien, unexpected setting.
"Gordon," she said rapidly, "I had to come--find you ... something--" her
voice sharpened with apprehension. "Tell me it will be all right. It
won't ... kill me." She stumbled toward him, he caught her, and half
carried her to the buggy, where he lifted her over the step and into the
seat. A red-clad arm was supporting her on the other side: it was Meta
Beggs.
"You drive," he directed Mrs. Caley. He held Lettice with her face hidden
against his shoulder. The valley was refulgent with early summer, the
wheat was swelling greenly, the meadows, threaded by shining streams were
sown with flowers, grazed by herds of cattle with hides like satin, the
pellucid air was filled with indefinite birdsong. The buggy lurched over a
hillock of grass, his wife shuddered in his arms, and an unaccustomed,
vicarious pain contracted his heart. Where the fields gave upon the road
the buggy dropped sharply; Lettice cried out uncontrollably. He cursed
Mrs. Caley savagely under his breath, "Can't you drive," he asked; "can't
you?"
The ascent to the crown of the ridge was rough, but beyond, winding down
to the Greenstream valley, it was worse. The buggy, badly hitched, bumped
against the flank of the horse, twisted over exposed boulders, brought up
suddenly in the gutters cut diagonally by the spring torrents. Gordon
Makimmon forgot everything else in the sole desire to get Lettice safely
to their house. He endeavored, by shifting her position, to reduce the
jarring of the uneven progress. He realized that she was in a continual
agony, and, in that new ability to share it through the dawning
consciousness of its brute actuality in Lettice, it roused in him an
impotent fury of rebellion. It took the form of an increasing passion of
anger at the inanimate stones of the road, against Mrs. Caley's meager
profile on the dusty hood of the buggy. He whispered enraged oaths, worked
himself into an insanity of temper. Lettice grew rigid in his arms. For a
while she iterated dully, like the beating of a sluggish heart
"bad ... bad ... bad." Then dread wiped all other expression from her
face; then, again, pain pinched her features.
The buggy creaked down the decline to their dwelling. Gordon supported
Lettice to their room; then he stood on the porch without, waiting. The
rugged horse, still hitched, snatched with coarse, yellow teeth at the
grass. Suddenly Mrs. Caley appeared at a door: she spoke, breaking the
irascible silence of months, dispelling the accumulating ill-will of her
pent resentment, with hasty, disjointed words:
"... quick as you can ... the doctor."