In the beginning, these were times brimful of happiness for Norma. She
would meet Chris far down town, among the big, cold, snowbound
office-buildings, and they would loiter for two hours at some
inconspicuous table in a restaurant, and come wandering out into the
cold streets still talking, absorbed and content. Or she would rise
before him from a chair in one of the foyers of the big hotels, at tea
time, and they would find an unobserved corner for the murmur that rose
and fell, rose and fell inexhaustibly. Tea and toast unobserved before
them, music drifting unheard about them, furred and fragrant women
coming and going; all this was but the vague setting for their own
thrilling drama of love and confidence. They would come out into the
darkness, Norma tucking herself beside him in the roadster, last
promises and last arrangements made, until to-morrow.
Sometimes the girl even accompanied him to Alice's room, to sit at the
invalid's knee, and chatter with a tact and responsiveness that Alice
found an improvement upon her old amusing manner. So free was Norma in
these days from any sense of guilt that she felt herself nothing but
generous toward Alice, in sparing the older woman some of the excess of
joy and companionship in which she was so rich.
But very swiftly the first complete satisfaction in the discovery of
their mutual love began to wane, or rather to be overset with the
difficulties by which Norma, and many another more brilliant and older
woman, must inevitably be worsted. Her meetings with Chris, innocent and
open as they seemed, were immediately threatened by the sordid danger of
scandal. To meet him once, twice, half-a-dozen times, even, was safe
enough. But when each day of separation became for them both only an
agony of waiting until the next day that should unite them, and when all
Norma's self-control was not enough to keep her from the telephone
summons that at least gave her the sound of his voice, then the world
began to be cognizant that something was in the air.
The very maids at Mrs. Melrose's house knew that Miss Sheridan was never
available any more, never to be traced to the club, to young Mrs.
Liggett's, or to Mrs. von Behrens's house, with a telephone message or
an urgent letter. Leslie knew that Norma hated girls' luncheons; Annie
asked Hendrick idly why he supposed the child was always taking long
walks--or saying that she took long walks--and Hendrick, later
speculating himself as to the inaccessibility of Chris, was perhaps the
first in the group to suspect the truth.
A quite accidental and innocent hint from Annie overwhelmed Norma with
shame and terror, and she and Chris, in earnest consultation, decided
that they must be more discreet. But this was slow and difficult work,
after the radiant first plunge into danger. Despite their utmost
resolution, Chris would find her out, Norma would meet him halfway, and
even under Leslie's very eyes, or in old Mrs. Melrose's actual presence,
the telephone message, or the quicker signals of eyes and smile, would
forge the bond afresh.
Even when Norma really did start off heroically upon a bracing winter
walk, determined to shake off, in solitude and exercise, the constant
hunger for his presence, torturing possibilities would swarm into her
mind, and weaken her almost while she thought them banished. She could
catch him at his club; she might have just five minutes of him did she
choose to telephone.
Perhaps she would resist the temptation, and go home nervous,
high-strung, excitable--the evening stretching endlessly before
her--without him. Aunt Annie and Hendrick coming, Leslie and Acton
coming, the prospect of the decorous family dinner would drive her
almost to madness. She would dress in a feverish dream, answer old Mrs.
Melrose absently or impatiently, speculating all the time about him.
Where was he? When would they meet again?
And then perhaps Leslie would casually remark that Chris had said he
would join them for coffee, or Joseph would summon her gravely to the
telephone. Then Norma began to live again, the effect of the lonely walk
and the heroic resolutions swept away, nothing--nothing was in the world
but the sound of that reassuring voice, or the prospect of that ring at
the bell, and that step in the hall.
So matters went on for several weeks, but they were weeks of increasing
uneasiness and pain for Norma, and she knew that Chris found them even
less endurable than she. The happy hours of confidence and happiness
grew fewer and fewer, and as their passion strengthened, and the
insuperable obstacles to its natural development impressed them more and
more forcibly, miserable and anxious times took their place. Their love
was no sooner acknowledged than both came to realize how mad and
hopeless it was, and that no reiteration of its intensity and no
argument could ever give them a gleam of hope.
If Norma had drifted cheerfully and recklessly into this situation, she
paid for it now, when petty restrictions and conventions stung her like
so many bees, and when she could turn nowhere for relief from constant
heartache and the sickening monotony of her thoughts. She could not have
Chris; she could not give him up. Hours with him were only a degree more
bearable than hours without him.
When he spoke hopefully of a possible change, of "something" making
their happiness possible, she would turn on him like a little virago.
Yet if he despaired, tears would come to Norma's eyes, and she would beg
him almost angrily to change his tone, or she would disgrace them both
by beginning to cry.
Norma grew thin and fidgety, able to concentrate her mind on
nothing, and openly indifferent to the society she had courted so
enthusiastically a year ago. It was a part of her suffering that she
grew actually to dislike Alice, always so suave and cheerful, always so
serenely sure of Chris's devotion. What right had this woman, who had
been rich and spoiled and guarded all her life, to hold him away from
the woman he loved? Chris had been chained to this couch for years,
reading, playing his piano, infinitely solicitous and sympathetic. But
was he to spend all his life thus? Was there to be no glorious
companionship, no adventure, no deep and satisfying love for Chris, ever
in this world? Norma wished no ill to Alice, but she hated a world that
could hold Alice's claim legitimate.
"Why should it be so?" she said to Chris one day, bitterly. "Why, when
all my life was going so happily, did I have to fall in love with you, I
wonder? It could so easily have been somebody else!"
"I don't know!" Chris answered, soberly, flinging away his half-finished
cigarette, and folding his arms over his chest, as he stared through a
screen of bare trees at the river. It was a March day of warm airs and
bursting buds; the roads were running water, and every bank and meadow
oozed the thawing streams, but there was no green yet. Chris had come
for the girl at three o'clock, just as she was starting out for one of
her aimless, unhappy tramps, and had carried her off for a
twenty-five-mile run to the quiet corner of the tavern's porch in
Tarrytown where they were having tea. "I suppose that's just life.
Things go so rottenly, sometimes!"
Norma's eyes watered as she pushed the untasted toast away from her,
cupped her chin in her hands, and stared at the river in her turn.
"Chris, if I could go back, I think I'd never speak to you!" she said,
wretchedly.
"You mustn't say that," he reproached her. "My darling; surely it's
brought you some happiness?"
"I suppose so," Norma conceded, lifelessly, after a silence. "But I
can't go on!" she protested, suddenly. "I can't keep this up! I suppose
I've done something very wicked, to be punished this way. But, Chris, I
loved you from the very first day I ever saw you, in Biretta's
Bookstore, I think. I can't sleep," she stammered, piteously, "and I am
so afraid all the time!"
"Afraid of what?" the man asked, very low.
She faced him, honestly.
"You know what! Of you--of me. It can't go on. You know that. And
yet----" And Norma looked far away, her beautiful weary eyes burning in
her white face. "And yet, I can't stop it!" she whispered.
"Oh, Chris, don't let's fool ourselves!" she interrupted his protest
impatiently. "Weeks ago, _weeks_ ago!--we said that we would see each
other less, that it would taper off. We tried. It's no use! If we were
in different cities--in different families, even! I tell myself that it
will grow less and less," she added presently, as the man watched her in
silence, "but oh, my God!--how long the years ahead look!"
And Norma put her head down on the table, pressed her white fingers
suddenly against her eyes with a gesture infinitely desolate and
despairing, and he knew that she was in tears. Then there was a long
silence.
"Look here, Norma," said Chris, suddenly, in a quiet, reasonable tone.
"I am thirty-eight. I've had affairs several times in my life, two or
three before I married Alice, two or three since. They've never been
very serious, never gone very deep. When we were married I was
twenty-four. I know women like to pretend that I'm an awful killer when
I get going," he interrupted himself to say boyishly, "but there was
really never anything of that sort in my life. I liked Alice, I remember
my mother talking to me a long time, and telling me how pleased everyone
would be if we came to care for each other, and--upon my honour!--I was
more surprised than anything else, to think that any one so pretty and
sweet would marry me! I don't think there's a woman in the world that I
admire more. But, Norma, I've lived her life for ten years. I want my
own now! I want my companion--my chum--my wife. I've played with women
since I was seventeen. But I never loved any woman before. Norma,
there's no life ahead for me, without you. And there's no place so
far--so lonely--so strange--but what it would be heaven for me if you
were there, looking at me as you are now, and with this little hand
where it belongs! My dear, the city is a blank--the men I meet might
just as well be wooden Indians; I can't breathe and I can't eat or
sleep. Get better? It gets worse! It can't go on!"
She was crying again. They were almost alone now. A red spring sun was
sinking, far down the river, and all the world--the opposite shores, the
running waters of the Hudson--was bathed in the exquisite glow. Norma
fumbled with her left hand for her little handkerchief, her right hand
clinging tight to Chris's hand.
"Now, Norma, I've been thinking," the man said, in a matter-of-fact
tone, after a pause. "The first consideration is, that this sort of
thing can't go on!"
"No; this can't go on!" she agreed, quickly. "Every day makes it more
dangerous, and less satisfying! I never"--her eyes watered again--"I
never have a happy second!" she said.
Chris looked at her, looked thoughtfully away.
"The great trouble with the way I feel to you, Norma," he said, quietly,
"is that it seems to blot every other earthly consideration from view. I
see nothing, I think nothing, I hear nothing--but you!"
"And is that so terrible?" Norma asked, touched, and smiling through
tears.
"No, it is so wonderful," he answered, gravely, "that it blinds me. It
blinds me to your youth, my dear, your inexperience--your faith in me!
It makes me only remember that I need you--and want you--and that I
believe I could make you the happiest woman in the world!"
The faint shadow of a frown crossed her forehead, and she slowly shook
her head.
"Not divorce!" she said, lightly, but inflexibly. They had been over
this ground before. "No, there's no use in thinking of that! Even if it
were not for Aunt Alice, and Aunt Marianna, other things make it
impossible. You see that, Chris? Yes, I know!"--she interrupted herself
quickly, as Chris protested, "I know what plenty of good people, and the
law, and society generally think. But of course it would mean that we
could not live here for awhile, anyway! No--that's not thinkable!"
"No, that's not thinkable," he agreed, slowly; "I am bound hand and
foot. It isn't only what Alice--as a wife--claims from me. But there are
Acton and Leslie; there is hardly a month that my brother doesn't
propose some plan that would utterly wreck their affairs if I didn't put
my foot down. They're both absolute children in money matters; Judge Lee
is getting old--there's no one to take my place. Your Aunt Marianna,
too; I've always managed everything for her. No; I'm tied."
His voice fell. For awhile they sat silent, in the lingering, cool
spring twilight, while the red glow faded slowly from the river, and
from the opposite banks where houses and roofs showed between the bare
trees.
"But what can we do, Norma? I've tried--I've tried a thousand times, to
see the future, without you. But I simply can't go on living on those
terms. There's nothing--nothing--nothing! I go to the piano, and before
I touch a note, the utter blank futility of it comes over me and sickens
me! It's the same in the office, and at the club; I seem to be only half
alive. If it could be even five years ahead--or ten years ahead--I would
wait. But it's never--never. No hope--nothing to live for! Life is
simply over--only one doesn't die."
The girl had never heard quite this note of despair from him before, and
her heart sank.
"You are young," he said, after a minute, and in a lighter tone, "and
perhaps--some day----"
"No, don't believe that, Chris," Norma said, quietly. And with a gesture
full of pain she leaned her elbow on the table, and pressed her hand
across her eyes. "There will never be anybody else!" she said. "How
could there be? You are the only person--like yourself!--that I have
ever known!"
The simplicity of her words, almost their childishness, made Chris's
eyes smart. He bit his lips, trying to smile.
"It's too bad, isn't it?" he said, whimsically.
Norma flung back her head, swallowing tears. She gathered gloves and
hand-bag, got to her feet. He followed her as she walked across the
darkening porch. They went down to the curving sweep of driveway where
the car waited, the big lighted eyes of other cars picking it out in the
gloom. The saturated ground gave under Norma's feet, the air was soft
and full of the odorous promise of blossom and leaf. A great star was
trembling in the opal sky, which still palpitated, toward the horizon,
with the pale pink and blue of the sunset. Dry branches clicked above
their heads, in a sudden soft puff of breeze.
Norma, as she tucked herself in beside Chris, felt emotionally
exhausted, felt a sudden desperate need for solitude and silence. The
world seemed a lonely and cruel place.
Almost without a word he drove her home, to the old Melrose house, and
came in with her to the long, dim drawing-room for a brief good-night.
He had not kissed her more than two or three times since the memorable
night of the dress rehearsal, but he kissed her to-night, and Norma felt
something solemn, something renunciatory, in the kiss.
They had but an unsatisfactory two or three minutes together; Mrs.
Melrose might descend upon them at any second, was indeed audible in the
hall when Chris said suddenly:
"You are not as brave--as your mother, Norma!"
She met his eyes with something like terror in her own; standing still,
a few feet away from him, with her breath coming and going stormily.
"No," she said in a sharp whisper. "Not _that_!"
A moment later she was flying upstairs, her blue eyes still dilated with
fright, her face pale, and her senses rocking. Unseeing, unhearing, she
reached her own room, paced it distractedly, moving between desk and
dressing-table, window and bed, like some bewildered animal. Sometimes
she put her two hands over her face, the spread fingers pressed against
her forehead. Sometimes she stood perfectly still, arms hanging at her
sides, eyes blankly staring ahead. Once she dropped on her knees beside
the bed, and buried her burning cheeks against the delicate linen and
embroideries.
Regina came in; Norma made a desperate attempt to control herself. She
saw a gown laid on the bed, heard bath water running, faced her own
haggard self in the mirror, as she began dressing. But when the maid was
gone, and Norma, somewhat pale, but quite self-possessed again, was
dressed for dinner, she lifted from its place on her book-shelf a little
picture of Chris and herself, taken the summer before, and studied it
with sorrowful eyes.
He had been teaching her to ride, and Norma was radiant and sun-browned
in her riding-trousers and skirted coat, her cloud of hair loosened, and
her smart little hat in one hand. Chris, like all well-built men, was
always at his best in sports clothes; the head of his favourite mare
looked mildly over his shoulder. Behind the group stretched the
exquisite reaches of bridle-path, the great trees heavy with summer
foliage and heat.
Norma touched her lips to the glass.
"Chris--Chris--Chris!" she said, half aloud. "I love you so--and I have
brought you, of all men, to this! To the point when you would throw it
all aside--everything your wonderful and generous life has stood
for--for me! God," said Norma, softly, putting the picture down, and
covering her face with her hands, "don't let me do anything that will
hurt him and shame him; help me! Help us both!"
A few minutes later she went down to dinner, which commenced
auspiciously, with the old lady in a gracious and expansive mood, and
her guests, old Judge Lee and his wife, and old Doctor and Mrs. Turner,
sufficiently intimate, and sufficiently reminiscent, to absolve Norma
from any conversational duty. The girl could follow her own line of
heroic and resolute thought uninterruptedly.
But with the salad came utter rout again, and Norma's colour, and heart,
and breath, began to fluctuate in a renewed agony of hope and fear. It
was only Joseph, leaning deferentially over Judge Lee's shoulder, who
said softly:
"Mr. Christopher Liggett, Judge. He has telephoned that he would like to
see you for a moment after dinner, and will be here at about nine
o'clock."
The dinner went on, for Norma, in a daze. At a quarter to nine she went
upstairs; she was standing in the dark upper hallway at the window when
Chris came, saw him leave his car, and come quickly across the sidewalk
under the bare, moving boughs of the old maples. She was trembling with
the longing just to speak to him again, just to hear his voice.
She went to her room, rang for Regina, meditating a message of
good-night that should include a headache as excuse. But before the maid
came she went quickly downstairs, and into his presence, as
instinctively as a drowning man might cling to anything that meant
air--just the essential air. They could not exchange a word alone, but
that was not important. The one necessity was to be together.
Before ten o'clock Norma went back to her room. She undressed, and put
on a loose warm robe, and seated herself before the old-fashioned
fireplace. When Regina came, she asked the girl to put out all the
lights.
Voices floated up from the front hall: the great entrance door closed,
the motors wheeled away. The guests were gone--Chris was gone. Norma
heard old Mrs. Melrose come upstairs, heard her door shut, then there
was silence.
Silence. Eleven struck from Madison Tower; midnight struck. Even the
streets were quieter now. The squares of moonlight shifted on Norma's
floor, went away. The fire died down, the big room was warm, and dim,
and very still.
Hugged in her warm wrap, curled into her big chair, the girl sat like
some tranced creature, thinking--thinking--thinking.
At first her thoughts were of terror and shame. In what fool's paradise
had she been drifting, she asked herself contemptuously, that she and
Chris, reasonable, right-thinking man and woman, could be reduced to
this fearful and wretched position, could even consider--even name--what
their sane senses must shrink from in utter horror! Norma was but
twenty-two, but she knew that there was only one end to that road.
So that way was closed, even to the brimming tide that rose up in her
when she thought of it, and flooded her whole being with the ecstatic
realization of her love for Chris, and of what surrender to him would
mean.
That way was closed. She must tell herself over and over. For her own
sake, for the sake of Aunt Kate and Aunt Marianna, for Rose even, she
must not think of that. Above all, for his sake--for Chris, the fine,
good, self-sacrificing Chris of her first friendship, she must be
strong.
And Norma, at this point in her circling and confused thoughts, would
drop her face in the crook of her bent arm, and the tears would brim
over again and again. She was not strong. She could not be strong. And
she was afraid.