The flush was still on Charley’s face when the door opened slowly, and
a lady dressed in heliotrope silk entered, and came forward. Without a
word Charley rose, and, taking a step towards her, offered a chair;
at the same time noticing her heightened colour, and a certain rigid
carriage not in keeping with her lithe and graceful figure. There was no
mistaking the quiver of her upper lip--a short lip which did not hide a
wonderfully pretty set of teeth.
With a wave of the hand she declined the seat. Glancing at the books and
papers lying on the table, she flashed an inquiry at his flushed face,
and, misreading the cause, with slow, quiet point, in which bitterness
or contempt showed, she said meaningly:
“What a slave you are!”
“Behold the white man work!” he said good-naturedly, the flush passing
slowly from his face. With apparent negligence he pushed the letter
and the books and papers a little to one side, but really to place them
beyond the range of her angry eyes. She shrugged her shoulders at his
action.
“For ‘the fatherless children and widows, and all that are desolate and
oppressed?’” she said, not concealing her malice, for at the wedding
she had just left all her married life had rushed before her in a swift
panorama, and the man in scarlet had fixed the shooting pictures in her
mind.
Again a flush swept up Charley’s face and seemed to blur his sight. His
monocle dropped the length of its silken tether, and he caught it and
slowly adjusted it again as he replied evenly:
“You always hit the nail on the head, Kathleen.” There was a kind of
appeal in his voice, a sort of deprecation in his eye, as though he
would be friends with her, as though, indeed, there was in his mind some
secret pity for her.
Her look at his face was critical and cold. It was plain that she was
not prepared for any extra friendliness on his part--there seemed no
reason why he should add to his usual courtesy a note of sympathy to
the sound of her name on his lips. He had not fastened the door of the
cupboard from which he had taken the liqueur, and it had swung open a
little, disclosing the bottle and the glass. She saw. Her face took on a
look of quiet hardness.
“Why did you not come to the wedding? She was your cousin. People asked
where you were. You knew I was going.”
“Did you need me?” he asked quietly, and his eyes involuntarily swept
to the place where he had seen the heliotrope and scarlet make a glow of
colour on the other side of the square. “You were not alone.”
She misunderstood him. Her mind had been overwrought, and she caught
insinuation in his voice. “You mean Tom Fairing!” Her eyes blazed. “You
are quite right--I did not need you. Tom Fairing is a man that all the
world trusts save you.”
“Kathleen!” The words were almost a cry. “For God’s sake! I have never
thought of ‘trusting’ men where you are concerned. I believe in no
man”--his voice had a sharp bitterness, though his face was smooth and
unemotional--“but I trust you, and believe in you. Yes, upon my soul and
honour, Kathleen.”
As he spoke she turned quickly and stepped towards the window, an
involuntary movement of agitation. He had touched a chord. But even as
she reached the window and glanced down to the hot, dusty street, she
heard a loud voice below, a reckless, ribald sort of voice, calling to
some one to, “Come and have a drink.”
“Billy!” she said involuntarily, and looked down, then shrank back
quickly. She turned swiftly on her husband. “Your soul and honour,
Charley!” she said slowly. “Look at what you’ve made of Billy! Look at
the company he keeps--John Brown, who hasn’t even decency enough to keep
away from the place he disgraced. Billy is always with him. You ruined
John Brown, with your dissipation and your sneers at religion and
your-’I-wonder-nows!’ Of what use have you been, Charley? Of what use to
anyone in the world? You think of nothing but eating, and drinking, and
playing the fop.”
He glanced down involuntarily, and carefully flicked some cigarette-ash
from his waistcoat. The action arrested her speech for a moment, and
then, with a little shudder, she continued: “The best they can say of
you is, ‘There goes Charley Steele!’”
“And the worst?” he asked. He was almost smiling now, for he admired her
anger, her scorn. He knew it was deserved, and he had no idea of making
any defence. He had said all in that instant’s cry, “Kathleen!”--that
one awakening feeling of his life so far. She had congealed the word on
his lips by her scorn, and now he was his old debonair, dissipated self,
with the impertinent monocle in his eye and a jest upon his tongue.
“Do you want to know the worst they say?” she asked, growing pale to
the lips. “Go and stand behind the door of Jolicoeur’s saloon. Go to any
street corner, and listen. Do you think I don’t know what they say? Do
you think the world doesn’t talk about the company you keep? Haven’t I
seen you going into Jolicoeur’s saloon when I was walking on the other
side of the street? Do you think that all the world, and I among the
rest, are blind? Oh, you fop, you fool, you have ruined my brother,
you have ruined my life, and I hate and despise you for a cold-blooded,
selfish coward!”
He made a deprecating gesture and stared--a look of most curious
inquiry. They had been married for five years, and during that time they
had never been anything but persistently courteous to each other. He had
never on any occasion seen her face change colour, or her manner show
chagrin or emotion. Stately and cold and polite, she had fairly met his
ceaseless foppery and preciseness of manner. But people had said of her,
“Poor Kathleen Steele!” for her spotless name stood sharply off from his
negligence and dissipation. They called her “Poor Kathleen Steele!” in
sympathy, though they knew that she had not resisted marriage with the
well-to-do Charley Steele, while loving a poor captain in the Royal
Fusileers. She preserved social sympathy by a perfect outward decorum,
though the man of the scarlet coat remained in the town and haunted the
places where she appeared, and though the eyes of the censorious world
were watching expectantly. No voice was raised against her. Her cold
beauty held the admiration of all women, for she was not eager for men’s
company, and she kept her poise even with the man in scarlet near her,
glacially complacent, beautifully still, disconcertingly emotionless.
They did not know that the poise with her was to an extent as much a
pose as Charley’s manner was to him.
“I hate you and despise you for a cold-blooded, selfish coward!” So that
was the way Kathleen felt! Charley’s tongue touched his lips quickly,
for they were arid, and he slowly said:
“I assure you I have not tried to influence Billy. I have no remembrance
of his imitating me in anything. Won’t you sit down? It is very
fatiguing, this heat.”
Charley was entirely himself again. His words concerning Billy Wantage
might have been either an impeachment of Billy’s character and, by
deduction, praise of his own, or it may have been the insufferable
egoism of the fop, well used to imitators. The veil between the two,
which for one sacred moment had seemed about to lift, was fallen now,
leaded and weighted at the bottom.
“I suppose you would say the same about John Brown! It is disconcerting
at least to think that we used to sit and listen to Mr. Brown as he
waved his arms gracefully in his surplice and preached sentimental
sermons. I suppose you will say, what we have heard you say before,
that you only asked questions. Was that how you ruined the Rev. John
Brown--and Billy?”
Charley was very thirsty, and because of that perhaps, his voice had an
unusually dry tone as he replied: “I asked questions of John Brown; I
answer them to Billy. It is I that am ruined!”
There was that in his voice she did not understand, for though long used
to his paradoxical phrases and his everlasting pose--as it seemed to her
and all the world--there now rang through his words a note she had never
heard before. For a fleeting instant she was inclined to catch at some
hidden meaning, but her grasp of things was uncertain. She had been
thrown off her balance, or poise, as Charley had, for an unwonted
second, been thrown off his pose, and her thought could not pierce
beneath the surface.
“I suppose you will be flippant at Judgment Day,” she said with a bitter
laugh, for it seemed to her a monstrous thing that they should be such
an infinite distance apart.
“Why should one be serious then? There will be no question of an alibi,
or evidence for the defence--no cross-examination. A cut-and-dried
verdict!”
She ignored his words. “Shall you be at home to dinner?” she rejoined
coldly, and her eyes wandered out of the window again to that spot
across the square where heliotrope and scarlet had met.
“I fancy not,” he answered, his eyes turned away also--towards the
cupboard containing the liqueur. “Better ask Billy; and keep him in, and
talk to him--I really would like you to talk to him. He admires you so
much. I wish--in fact I hope you will ask Billy to come and live with
us,” he added half abstractedly. He was trying to see his way through
a sudden confusion of ideas. Confusion was rare to him, and his senses,
feeling the fog, embarrassed by a sudden air of mystery and a cloud of
futurity, were creeping to a mind-path of understanding.
“Don’t be absurd,” she said coldly. “You know I won’t ask him, and you
don’t want him.”
“I have always said that decision is the greatest of all qualities--even
when the decision is bad. It saves so much worry, and tends to health.”
Suddenly he turned to the desk and opened a tin box. “Here is further
practice for your admirable gift.” He opened a paper. “I want you to
sign off for this building--leaving it to my absolute disposal.” He
spread the paper out before her.
She turned pale and her lips tightened. She looked at him squarely in
the eyes. “My wedding-gift!” she said. Then she shrugged her shoulders.
A moment she hesitated, and in that moment seemed to congeal. “You need
it?” she asked distantly.
He inclined his head, his eye never leaving hers. With a swift angry
motion she caught the glove from her left hand, and, doubling it back,
dragged it off. A smooth round ring came off with it and rolled upon the
floor.
Stooping, he picked up the ring, and handed it back to her, saying:
“Permit me.” It was her wedding-ring. She took it with a curious
contracted look and put it on the finger again, then pulled off the
other glove quietly. “Of course one uses the pen with the right hand,”
she said calmly.
“Involuntary act of memory,” he rejoined slowly, as she took the pen
in her hand. “You had spoken of a wedding, this was a wedding-gift,
and--that’s right, sign there!”
There was a brief pause, in which she appeared to hesitate, and then she
wrote her name in a large firm hand, and, throwing down the pen, caught
up her gloves, and began to pull them on viciously.
“Thanks. It is very kind of you,” he said. He put the document in the
tin box, and took out another, as without a word, but with a grave face
in which scorn and trouble were mingled, she now turned towards the
door.
“Can you spare a minute longer?” he said, and advanced towards her,
holding the new document in his hand. “Fair exchange is no robbery.
Please take this. No, not with the right hand; the left is better
luck--the better the hand, the better the deed,” he added with a
whimsical squint and a low laugh, and he placed the paper in her left
hand. “Item No. 2 to take the place of item No. 1.”
She scrutinised the paper. Wonder filled her face. “Why, this is a
deed of the homestead property--worth three times as much!” she said.
“Why--why do you do this?”
“Remember that questions ruin people sometimes,” he answered, and
stepped to the door and turned the handle, as though to show her out.
She was agitated and embarrassed now. She felt she had been unjust, and
yet she felt that she could not say what ought to be said, if all the
rules were right.
“Thank you,” she said simply. “Did you think of this when--when you
handed me back the ring?”
“I never had an inspiration in my life. I was born with a plan of
campaign.”
“I suppose I ought to--kiss you!” she said in some little confusion.
“It might be too expensive,” he answered, with a curious laugh. Then he
added lightly: “This was a fair exchange”--he touched the papers--“but I
should like you to bear witness, madam, that I am no robber!” He opened
the door. Again there was that curious penetrating note in his voice,
and that veiled look. She half hesitated, but in the pause there was a
loud voice below and a quick foot on the stairs.
“It’s Billy!” she said sharply, and passed out.