"It is I, Craig," Jean called. "Surely you haven't worried?"
The man groaned.
"Worried!" he cried. "What does it all mean, Jean?"
He would have come out to her, but Julie laid a restraining hand on his
sleeve, saying,--
"Keep yourself in hand, Craig dear."
Jean moved quickly down the hall and confronted them.
"What is this mystery?" she demanded. "Did not the servant deliver my
message?"
Mrs. Van Ostade signed for her to enter the library. She passed in with
a bewildered look at Atwood, who walked uncertainly to the fireplace
and stood gazing down into its lifeless grate. His sister shut the door
and put her back against it.
"Didn't you receive my message?" Jean again addressed Craig. "Miss
Hepworth was with you, and I disliked to interrupt. There was no time
for a note. I left too hurriedly."
"With whom?" The question was Julie's and was delivered like a blow.
Jean faced her.
"I went alone," she replied quietly. "Does it matter?"
Mrs. Van Ostade flung out an imperious finger.
"Read that card beside you on the desk," she directed. "'Paul Bartlett,
D.D.S. Crown and bridge work a specialty,' Do you deny meeting that
person to-day?"
"Certainly not. He brought word that a sick friend needed me, and left
immediately afterward."
"And you have not seen him since?"
"No." Her denial rang out emphatically. "Craig," she appealed, "what is
the meaning of this catechism? I have been with Amy ever since I left
the house. She is in great trouble. It is a terrible story."
"It is indeed," struck in Julie. "Do you swallow it, Craig? Can
anybody! Perhaps now you will begin to use the reasoning powers which
your infatuation for this adventuress has clouded. How could you ever
have trusted her! Wasn't the bare fact of the reformatory enough?"
"Craig!" Appeal, reproach, anguish, all blended in that bitter cry.
Atwood disclaimed responsibility with a gesture.
"Your mother," he said.
"Yes; your mother," Julie echoed. "Before she sat ten minutes in this
room she had told all she knew--do you understand me?--_all she knew_!
I was your friend till then. I don't pretend I was not cut to the heart
by Craig's mad marriage. I would have given my right hand to prevent
it. Hadn't I seen you before you ever entered his studio? Didn't I know
how vulgar your associates were? Perhaps your 'Amy' was the drunken
little fool who created a scene in the restaurant where I made your
acquaintance? But I tried to put that out of mind when I accepted the
marriage. I took you into my own home; I hoped to school you to fill
your new place in life worthily."
"And have I not?" Jean interpolated proudly. "Have I shamed you or him?"
Julie scorned reply.
"But I knew nothing of the refuge story," she railed on. "I never
suspected the awful truth when you evaded every question I asked about
your girlhood. I knew your past had been common; I could not dream it
had also been criminal."
"Julie!" Atwood entreated.
"The time has come for plain dealing," she answered him. "You will live
to thank me for opening your eyes."
Jean took a step nearer her accuser.
"Let her go on," she challenged contemptuously. "She only distorts what
I have told you already."
Julie's dark face grew thunderous.
"Do I!" she retorted. "Let us see. What have you told Craig of this man
Bartlett? What have you told him of the flat at the Lorna Doone? Where
are your glib answers now? Can you suppose that, knowing your history,
I would suspect nothing when Satterlee put you out of countenance at
the Copley Studios? A double, indeed! From that moment you avoided
the place. From that moment every shift of yours strengthened my
belief that I had stumbled on one more murky chapter of your life.
Satterlee's memory improved; he recalled your twin's name. Thereafter
my investigations were child's play. Can you, dare you, deny that you
were known at the Lorna Doone as Bartlett's wife?"
Jean's face grew pale; Craig's, her agonized glance perceived, was
whiter still.
"It was a mistake," she answered. "They thought--"
"Ah!" Julie's cry was long-drawn, triumphant. "Do you hear, Craig? She
admits that she was known as Mrs. Bartlett. My poor brother! By her own
confession you have married either a discarded mistress or a bigamist!"
Jean's brain whirled. That passion could put such a monstrous
construction on her conduct, passed belief.
"Lies!" she gasped.
"Prove them false!"
"Lies, cruel lies!"
Atwood sprang to her side.
"I could not believe them, Jean," he cried. "You are too honest, too
pure--"
"Prove them false!" Julie challenged again.
Jean turned her back upon her.
"This is between you and me, Craig," she pleaded, struggling for
self-control. "I am the honest woman you have always believed me. I
have concealed nothing shameful. My only thought was to spare you pain.
You shall know now, everything; but it is a story for your ears alone.
It concerns us only, dear, our happiness, our love."
He cast a look of entreaty at Julie, who met it with an acid smile.
"You are wax in her hands," she taunted. "She can cajole you into
thinking black is white."
"No, no," he protested. "You are unjust to her, Julie. I know her as
you cannot. She is the soul of truth."
Jean's heart leaped at his words.
"God bless you for that!" she exclaimed. "Let her hear, then! Why
should I fear her now?"
The dentist's attentions at the boarding-house, their walks and
theater-goings, his help when the department store cast her out,
their engagement, the taking and furnishing of a flat, the apparition
of Stella, the confession and the crash--all she touched upon
without false shame, without attempt to gloss her free agency and
responsibility. She dealt gently with Paul, magnifying his virtues,
palliating his great fault, bearing witness to the sincerity of his
remorse. But Craig she could not spare, pity him as she might. She saw
his drawn face wince as if under bodily pain, and before she ended he
was groping for a chair. She perceived, as she had feared, that an
ideal was gone from him, perhaps the dearest ideal of all; yet she did
not realize what a blow she had struck this stunned, flaccid figure
with averted head, till, breaking the long silence which oppressed the
room when she had done, he asked,--
"Did you love this man, Jean?"
She weighed her answer painfully.
"Not as we know love, Craig," she said.
"You would have sold yourself for a home--for a flat in the Lorna
Doone! Where was your remembrance of the birches then?"
She forgave the words in pity for the pain which begot them. She forgot
Julie. Nothing in life mattered, if love were lost. A great devouring
fear lest he slip from her drove her forward and flung her kneeling at
his side.
"You were with me always, Craig, always," she said brokenly. "Is it
too hard to believe? If you try to paint an ideal and the picture
falls short, does that make your ideal less dear? What hope had I
ever to meet you again? How could I dream that I stood for more in
your thoughts than a heedless fugitive of whom you were well rid? You
could not know that you had given me courage for the guardhouse and
the prison; made me strive to become the girl you thought me; changed
the whole trend of my foolish life! How then have I been unfaithful?
Was it treachery to you, whom I never looked to see again, that when a
good man--yes; at heart, Paul is a good man--offered me a way of escape
I should take it? You ask me if I would have sold myself for a home,
for that poor little flat in the Lorna Doone whose cheapness I never
appreciated till to-night--I answer no. I know now that I did not love
him; but I did not know it then. It was left for you to teach me."
He made no response when she ceased. His hands lay nerveless under
hers; his eyes still brooded on the fireless hearth. So for a hundred
heart-beats they remained together.
"You believe me, Craig?"
"Yes," he wrenched forth at last.
Jean slowly withdrew her hands.
"But you cannot wholly forgive?"
He had no answer.
"I can say no more," she added, rising; and came again face to face
with Julie, who made way for her at the door. "I leave your house
to-morrow, Mrs. Van Ostade. If I could, I would go to-night."
Free of gnawing secrecies at last! The thought brought a specious sense
of peace. Julie's yoke broken! Her step on the stair grew buoyant. The
battle desired by MacGregor had been fought. Precipitated by causes
with which neither had reckoned, waged with a fierce heat alien to art,
Craig's emancipation had nevertheless been at stake. The break had
come, and it was beyond remedy. He must cleave to his wife.
Too excited for sleep, she began at once her preparations for quitting
Julie's hateful roof, and one after another overcame the obstacles
which packing in the small hours entailed. Each overflowing chair,
every yawning door and drawer, testified the increased complexity
of her life and the bigness of her task. The bride of a single
dinner-dress had become under Craig's lavish generosity the mistress of
great possessions. There were gowns of many uses and many hues; hats
and blouses in extravagant number; shoes--a little regiment of shoes
aligned neatly in their trees; costly trifles for her desk; books and
pictures in breath-taking profusion.
She now remembered that her one trunk, with Craig's many upon which
she depended, was stored on the top floor, and she debated whether to
wake one of the servants or await her husband's help. In the end she
did neither. She disliked Mrs. Van Ostade's servants, one and all,
suspecting them of tale-bearing, and after a vain wait for Craig, who
still lingered below, she went about the business for herself. It
was a difficult matter to accomplish without rousing the house, and
when, after much travail of mind and disused muscle, she effected the
transfer of her own trunk, she was tempted to do what she could with
it and let her other belongings follow as they might. This course,
also, she rejected. Nothing except a complete evacuation would satisfy,
and she craved the joy of leaving Julie's bridal gift conspicuously
unpacked.
By three o'clock all was done, and as she flung herself wearily upon
her bed she heard Craig's leaden step mount the stair. He entered
their living-room, which, save for one or two small articles he would
scarcely miss, she had not dismantled, switched on the electricity, and
after a pause closed the door of the dressing-room connecting with the
darkened chamber where she lay. Jean heard him light a cigarette and
drop heavily into a chair, which he abandoned almost at once to pace
the floor. The sound of his pacing went on and on, varied only by the
scrape of matches as he lit cigarette after cigarette, the penetrating
oriental scent of which began in time to seep into her own room and
infect her with his unrest.
She took alarm to find him so implacable. Did his sister sway him
still? Had Julie poisoned the truth with the acid of her hate? Might
she lose him after all? She could scarcely keep herself from calling
his name. And the monotonous footfall went on and on, on and on,
trampling her heart, grinding its iteration into her sick brain. Then,
when it seemed endurable no longer, it became a sedative, and she slept
to dream that she was a new inmate of Cottage No. 6, with a tyrannous,
vindictive matron whose face was the face of Julie Van Ostade.
She stirred with the day and lay with shut eyes, tasting the blissful
reality of familiar things. This was no cell-like room, no refuge
pallet. She had only to stretch out her hand--thus--to the bed beside
her own, and touch--? Nothing! Craig's bed stood precisely as the maid
had prepared it for his coming. Was he pacing yet? She listened, but
no sound came. Creeping to the living-room door she listened again;
then turned the knob. Empty! The untouched pillows of the divan, the
overflowing ash-tray, the lingering haze, bespoke an all-night vigil.
He had not only let the sun go down upon his wrath, he had watched it
rise again! An answering glow kindled in her bruised pride.
Left rudderless by his silence, she cast about eagerly for some new
plan of action while she dressed. Last night she had meant to order
her things sent to the studio until they could plan the future, but
that course seemed feasible no longer. She searched her pocketbook for
funds and found only tickets for a popular comedy. She smiled upon them
grimly. Comedy, forsooth! Here was more comic stuff--the screaming
farce of woman's lot! Flouted, she had no choice but to fold her hands
and wait while the dominant male in his wisdom decided her destiny.
At her accustomed hour she touched the bell for her coffee, and with
sharpened observation saw at once that, unlike other days, the tray
held but a single service.
"Mr. Atwood breakfasted downstairs?" she said carelessly.
The maid's eyes roved the dissipated scene of Atwood's reflections and
lit upon a strapped trunk which Jean had for convenience pulled into
the dressing-room.
"Yes," she answered. "Mr. Craig came down very early."
"Did he go out?"
"More than an hour ago."
Jean let the coffee go cold and crumbled her toast untasted. How could
she endure this passivity! Must she forever be the spectator? Amidst
these drab reveries her eyes rested for some minutes upon the topmost
of the morning papers, which the maid had brought as usual with the
breakfast, before one of its by no means modest head-lines resolved
itself into the words,--