“No right!” cried Hester, with a half hysterical laugh. “If ever a woman had a right to be jealous of another—”
“No, you’ve not — not the shadow of a right. You know how I’ve loved you for years — well — you know how, and what sort of love there’s been between us. You’re mad to think that anything I’ve done—”
“That’s all your argument — that I’m mad! You say it again and again, as though it comforted you! Yes — I am mad in one way — I’m mad not to hate you ten thousand times more than I do — and I do hate you — for what you’ve done! You’ve torn up my heart by the roots and thrown it to that wretched girl — you’ve twisted, and wrenched, and broken everything that was tender in me, everything that was for you, and was yours — and it won’t grow again! You’ve taken everything — have I ever refused you anything? You’ve taken it all, and I thought that you’d never had it before, and that for its sake you loved me, because I loved you so — that you’d wear me in your heart, and carry me in your hands, and love me all your life — and for that girl, that creature with her grey eyes — oh, what is it? What has she got that I haven’t, and that makes you love her — what? What?”
She covered her eyes with a desperate gesture, and her voice almost broke as she repeated the last word. Below her hand her lips trembled, and Crowdie watched them. Then before she looked at him again, he had passed the chair and was trying to take her in his arms. For an instant she struggled with him, holding her face back from him and thrusting him away. But his small white hands had more strength in them than hers.
“Walter — don’t!” she cried, pushing against him with all her might. “Don’t! Don’t!” she repeated.
But in spite of her, he got near to her face, and kissed her on the cheek. She started violently, and then wrenched herself free.
“How dare you?” she exclaimed, angrily, retreating half across the room with the rush of the effort she had made.
Crowdie laughed, not naturally, and not at all musically. There was a curious hoarseness in the tone, and his eyes glittered.
“And how dare you laugh at me?” she asked, moving still further back, towards the door, as he advanced. “Have you no heart, no feeling — no sense? Can’t you understand how it hurts when you touch me?”
“I don’t want to understand anything so foolish,” answered Crowdie, suddenly growing coldly angry again. “If you’re afraid of me — well, I won’t go near you until you see how silly you are. There’s no other word — it’s silly.”
“Silly! When it’s all my life.” Her voice shook. “Oh, Walter, Walter! You’re breaking my heart!”
A passionate sob struggled with the words, and she fell into a chair by the door, covering her face with her hands again. Then came another sob, and the convulsion of her strength as she tried to choke it down, and it broke the barrier and burst out with a wild storm of scalding tears.
Crowdie was a very sensitively organized man in one direction, but singularly hard to move in another. So long as the passions of others appealed to his own, the response was ready and impulsive. But in him mere sympathy was not easily roused. Once freed from self, his faculties were critical, comparative, quick to seek causes and explain their connection with effects. Hester’s words wakened his love, roused his anger, called out his powers of opposition, and touched him to the quick by turns; but her tears said nothing to him at first, except that she was suffering. He was only with her in happiness, never in unhappiness. He stood still for a moment watching her, and asking himself with considerable calmness what was best to be done.
It is not always easy to judge and decide exactly how far a woman could control herself if she thought it wise to do so, and for that reason the genuineness of her tears often seems doubtful. It would be as fair to doubt that a tortured man suffers if he does not groan in his agony, or because he does.
But although at that moment he felt no sympathy with her, though he loved her in his own way, yet his instinct and experience of women told him that with the tears there must come a change of mood. He went slowly to her side, and though she did not look up he knew that she felt his presence, and would not drive him from her again just then. He bent over her, laying his arm upon her shoulders, and looking at the hands that covered her eyes. He did not speak at once, but waited for her to look up. She was sobbing as though her heart would really break. At last, between the sobs, words began to come at last.
“Oh, Walter, Walter!” she wailed, repeating his name.
“Yes — sweetheart — look at me, dear,” he answered, pressing her to him.
Her head rested against him as she sobbed. Then one hand left her eyes and sought his hand, but was instantly withdrawn again. He found it and brought it, resisting but a little, to his lips. In all such actions he had the gentleness, almost boyish, which some women love so well, and which is so kingly in the very strong — for they say that it is sweeter to be caressed by the hand that could kill, than by one that at its worst and strongest could only scratch.
Presently she uncovered her eyes and looked up to his face, and the sobbing almost stopped. Her cheeks were flushed through their whiteness and were wet, and her eyes were dark and shadowy, but the light in them was not hard. The tide of anger had ebbed as the tears flowed, and its wave was far off.
“Tell me you really love me, dear,” she said, still tearfully.
“Ah, sweet! You know I do — I love you — so! Is that right? Doesn’t it ring true now?” He laughed softly, looking into her face. “When did I ever sing false?”
A shade of returning annoyance passed over her features, as her brow contracted at the allusion to his singing, and though she still allowed her head to rest against his side, her face was turned away once more.
“Don’t speak of singing, dear,” she said, trying to smile, though he could not see whether she did or not.
“No, darling — forgive me. I’ll never speak of it again. I’ll never sing again as long as I live, if you don’t want me to.”
“I didn’t mean that,” she answered. “It’s only now — till I forget. And, Walter, dear — I don’t want you to promise it any more — I’d rather not, really.”
Still she turned away, but he bent over, drawing her closer to him, and he lifted her face with his hand under her chin. The eyelids drooped as she suffered her head to fall back over his arm, and she shut out the sight of his eyes from her own. He murmured soft words in his low voice, in golden tones.
“Darling — precious — sweet one!”
And he repeated the words and others, as her features softened, and her parted lips smiled at his. And still he pressed her to him, and spoke to her, and looked at her with burning eyes. So they might have been reconciled then and there, had Fate willed it. But Fate was there with her little creeping hand full of the tiny mischief that decides between life and death when no one knows.
Fate willed that at that moment Crowdie should be irritated by something in his throat. Just as he was speaking so softly, so sweetly that the exquisite sound almost lulled her to sleep, while the passionate tears still wet her cheek, — just as his face was near hers, he felt it coming, insignificant in itself, ridiculous by reason of the moment at which it came, yet irresistible in its littleness. He struggled against it, and grew conscious of what he was saying, and his voice lost its passionate tenderness. He strove to fight it down, that horrible little tickling spasm just in the vocal chords, for he knew how much it might mean both to her and to him, that her forgiving mood should carry them both to the kiss of peace. But Fate was there, irresistible and little, as surely as though she had stalked gigantic, sword in hand, through the door, to smite them both. In the midst of the very sweetest word of all, it came — the word rang false, he turned his face away and coughed to clear his throat. But the false note had rung.
Hester sprang to her feet, and thrust him from her. To her it had all been false, — the words, the tone, the caresses. How could a man in the earnestness of passi
on, midway in love’s eloquence, wish to stop — and cough? She did not think nor reason, as she turned upon him in the anguish of her disappointment.
“How could I believe you — even for a moment?” she cried, standing back from him. “Oh, what an actor you are!”
But he had not been acting, save that he had done what his instinct had at first told him was wisest, in beginning to speak to her when she had burst into tears. With the first word, the first caress, with the touch of her, and the sweet, unscented, living air of her, the passion that had truly ruled his faultful life for years took hold of him with strength and main, and rang the leading changes of his being. And then she broke it short.
As he stood up before her, he shook with emotion stronger than hers, such as women rarely feel, and such as even strong men dread. Unconsciously he held out his hands towards her and uttered a half articulate cry, trying once more to catch her in his arms.
“Kiss me — love me — oh, Hester!”
But he met her angry eyes, for she had lost the hand of reality in the labyrinth of her own imaginings and disappointments and jealousies, and she knew no longer the good from the evil, nor the truth from the acted lie.
“No — you’re acting,” she answered, cruelly — trying to be as cruel as the hurt she felt.
And she stared hardly at him. But even as she looked, a deep, purple flush rose in his white cheeks, and overspread his face, even to his forehead, and darkened all his features. And his eyes turned upwards in their sockets, as he fell forward against her, with wet, twisted lips and limp limbs — a hideous sight for woman or man to look upon.
She uttered a low, broken cry as she caught him in her arms, and he dragged her down to the floor by his weight. There he lay, almost black in the face, contorted and stiffened, yet not quite motionless, but far more repulsive by the spasmodic and writhing motion of his body than if he had lain stiff and stark as a dead body.
She had seen him thus once before now, on a winter’s night, upstairs in the studio. She did not know that it was epilepsy. She knelt beside him, horror-struck, now, for a few moments. It seemed worse in the evening glow than it had looked to her before, under the soft, artificial light in the great room.
She only hesitated a few seconds. Then she got a cushion and thrust it under his head, using all her strength to lift him a little with one arm as she did so. But she knew by experience that the unconsciousness would last a long time, and she was glad that it had come at once. On the first occasion the convulsion that preceded it had been horrible. Her own face was drawn with the anguish of intense sympathy, and she felt all the horror of her last cruel words still ringing in her ears.
She did not rise from her knees, but bent over him, and looked at him, seeing himself, as she dreamed him, through the mask of his hideous face. She touched his hands, and tried to draw them out of their contortion, but the in-turned thumbs and stiffened joints were too rigid for her to move. But she lifted his body again, straining her strength till she thought his weight must tear the slight sinews of her arms at the elbow, and she tried to turn his head to a comfortable position on the silken pillow, and stroked his silk-fine hair with gentle hands. As she did her best for him, her throat was parched, and she felt her dry lips cleaving to her teeth, and the sight of her eyes was almost failing, being burned out with horror. But no tears came to put out the fire.
At last she rose to her feet, steadying herself against the chair in which she had last sat, for she was dizzy with pain and with bending down. She gazed at him an instant; then turned and went and closed the open windows, and pulled down the shades and drew the thick curtains together. After that, groping, she found matches and lit one candle, and set it so that the light should not fall upon his eyes, if by any chance their conscious sight returned. Then she looked at him once more and left the room, softly closing the door behind her, and turning the key with infinite pains, lest any servant in the house should hear the sound. She took the key with her and went upstairs.
CHAPTER XXXI.
KATHARINE WAS SINCERELY distressed by the result of her interview with Hester, and she walked slowly homeward, thinking it all over and asking herself whether she had left undone anything which she ought to have done. But as she thought, it was always the last scene which rose before her eyes, and she saw distinctly before her Hester’s white face staring at her through the open doorway. There was a great satisfaction in feeling sure that she had been wholly innocent in the matter of Crowdie’s kissing her hand; yet felt that the resentment Hester had shown on re-entering the room had not been anything different in its essential nature from the coldness she had already shown when Katharine had spoken of renewing their friendship. But the young girl could not understand either, though the supposition that Hester must be jealous of her thrust itself upon her forcibly.
Ralston helped her. He had asked for her at the house in Clinton Place, and having been told that she was still out, he had hung about the neighbourhood in the hope of meeting her, and had been at last rewarded by seeing her coming towards him from the other side of Fifth Avenue. In a moment they met.
“Oh, I’m so glad to see you, Jack, dear!” she cried as she took his hand. “I’ve got such lots to tell you!”
“So have I,” answered Ralston. “Where shall we go? Should you like to walk?”
“Yes — in some quiet place, where we can talk, and not meet people, and not be run over too often.”
“All right,” answered John. “Let’s go west. There are lots of quiet streets on that side, and it’s awfully respectable. The worst that can happen to us will be to meet Teddy Van De Water looking after his tenants, or Russell Vanbrugh going to administer consolation to the relations of his favourite criminal. Something’s happened, Katharine,” he added suddenly, as they turned westward, and the strong evening light illuminated her features through her veil. “I can see it in your face.”
“Yes,” answered Katharine. “I want to tell you. I’ve had such a time with Hester! You don’t know!”
“Tell me all about it.”
They walked along, and Katharine told her story with all the details she could remember, doing her best to make clear to him what was by no means clear to herself. When she had finished, she looked at John interrogatively.
“That fellow Crowdie’s a brute!” he exclaimed, with energy.
“Well — I don’t like him, you know. But was it so very bad? Tell me, Jack — you’re my natural protector.” She laughed happily. “It’s your business to tell me what’s right and what’s wrong. Was it so very bad of him to kiss my glove after he’d buttoned it? I almost boxed his ears at the time — I was so angry! But I want to be fair. Was it exactly — wrong? I wish you’d tell me.”
“Wrong? No; it wasn’t exactly wrong.” Ralston paused thoughtfully. “Kissing women’s hands is one of those relative things,” he continued. “It’s right in one part of the world, it’s indifferent in another, and it’s positively the wrong thing to do somewhere else — whatever it’s meant to mean. We don’t do that sort of thing much over here. As he did it, I suppose it was simply the wrong thing to do. At least, I want to suppose so, but I can’t. The man’s half in love with you, you know.”
“Oh, nonsense, Jack! It’s only because we dislike him so. If ever a man was in love with his wife, he is.”
“Yes, I know,” answered Ralston, in the same thoughtful tone. “That’s quite true. But it doesn’t prevent him from being half in love with lots of other women at the same time. It’s not the same thing. Oh, yes! he loves Hester. She’s quite mad about him, of course. We all know that, in the family. But Crowdie’s peculiar — and it’s not a nice peculiarity, either. One sees it in his manner somehow, and in his eyes. I can’t exactly explain it to you. He admires every woman who’s beautiful, and it’s a little more than admiration. He has a way with him which we men don’t like. And when he does such things as he did to-day there’s always a suggestion of something disagreeable in his way of doing th
em, so that if they’re not positively wrong, they’re not positively innocent. They’re on the ragged edge between the two, as Frank Miner says.”
“I think it’s more in the way he looks at one than in anything else,” said Katharine. “He has such a horrid mouth! But it’s absurd to say that he’s in love with me, Jack.”
“Oh, no, it’s not! That night at aunt Maggie’s, when he sang, you know — it was for you and nobody else. What a queer evening that was, by the way! There were five of us men there, all in love with you in one way or another.”
“Jack! It’s positively ridiculous! The idea of such a thing!”
“Not at all. There was Ham, in the first place. You admit that he’s one, don’t you?”
“I suppose I must, since he proposed,” answered Katharine, reluctantly, and turning her face away.
“And you’re not going to deny Archie Wingfield?” Ralston tried to see her eyes. “I’m sure he’s offered himself.”
Katharine said nothing, but John saw through her veil and was sure that a little colour rose in her face.
“Of course!” he said. “That’s two of them. And Crowdie’s three. I count him. And you mustn’t forget me. I’m what they call in love with you, I suppose. That’s four.”
Katharine smiled, and glanced at him, looking away again immediately.
“At least,” she said, “you’ll leave me dear old Mr. Griggs—”
“Griggs!” laughed Ralston. “He’s the worst of the lot. He’s madly, fearfully, desperately, fantastically in love with you.”
“Jack! What do you mean?” Katharine laughed, but her face expressed genuine surprise. “Not that I should mind,” she added. “Dear old man! I’m so fond of him!”
“Well — he returns your fondness with interest. He makes no secret of it to anybody, because he’s old, or says he is, — but he’s old like an old wolf. I like him, too. He goes about saying that you’re his ideal of beauty and cleverness and soul — and good taste. Oh, Griggs!” He laughed again. “He’s quite off his head about you! He’ll put you into one of his books if you’re not careful. I should like to see your father’s expression if he did.”
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 750
