Hasty Wedding

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  He turned rapidly and went out before she could reply. She sat down rather limply in the deep white divan. She was at the same time confused and angry; contrite and pitying. Well, she would go at once.

  She could hear him moving about in the small kitchen down a narrow passage. Mirrors everywhere observed her from dull blue walls. White furniture; white rugs with black stripes, great soft white cushions. Mirrors in tables; tables in mirrors. Accustomed to the comfortable Victorian clutter of the Whipple house, the room seemed to Dorcas vaguely unpleasant, the blue walls pasty, the whites dead and somber, the spaces too empty. Her plain green tweeds were curiously out of place.

  As she was out of place. Well, Ronald would be back immediately. They would have a moment or two of amicable understanding and she would go home. Odd how depressing all that white was. It was so quiet that the sudden sound of a car in the garage below, starting with a series of backfires, seemed near and loud.

  Other times when she had been in the apartment there had been gayety, voices, glitter. Now there was nothing of that. Queer how the mirrors watched her. It was a small apartment. There was a fairly large living room, a bedroom and bath, a narrow hall running parallel to the bedroom wall back to a small kitchen, where just then, unexpectedly, there was a sound, repeated, as if a door had opened and closed.

  Without any reason at all it startled her and she listened. It was not repeated but certainly there was another sound—whispering? No. The sound became more distinct and it was only ice being chipped and dropped into glasses. It must have been the refrigerator door that opened and closed. She sat back again.

  And knew she must go. Then. That very instant. It was the strangest and strongest compulsion, as if someone had spoken to her—urgently and with knowledge.

  Her coat was beside her; it was only a few steps to the door. Departure now would bring things to an end and would spare her any danger of a further scene with Ronald. But she did want desperately to part with him honestly and with friendliness.

  So she hesitated and Ronald returned. He had a tray and glasses filled with ice, a three-cornered bottle and a seltzer bottle.

  He put the tray on the low table before the divan and filled the glasses.

  “One highball,” he said, smiling at her over the seltzer bottle. “One cigarette, then I’ll take you home. Here’s to you, Dorcas. And I—I only want you to be happy.”

  She took the glass he put in her hand. He lifted his own, looked brightly at her over the rim and drank thirstily. “Drink it, Dorcas.” He poured himself another glass, went to the door leading to the passage and closed it and returned to look down at her.

  “I forgot how you hate whisky,” he said. “But honest, Dorcas, there’s not another thing to drink in the place. Drinking doesn’t happen to be one of my failings.” He said the last bitterly and added: “They were all against me, weren’t they, Dorcas? Oh, you needn’t answer. I know. Everybody you knew in all Chicago came to your mother and warned her against me. Rightly perhaps, Dorcas. Except—except I loved you. I still love you. I shall always love you. You can’t stop it——”

  “Ronald, don’t. It—it doesn’t help——”

  “Oh yes, it helps. I’m having the satisfaction of telling you that. I’ll never have it again. Unless—are you going to let me see you after you are married? No! No, of course not. I didn’t think so. You needn’t look like that, as if I’d offended you. You——”

  “Ronald, I’m going now.” He was talking oddly, jerkily, as if he’d already been drinking a great deal. She rose and again that look of something closely akin to despair flashed across his flushed, handsome face.

  “Wait, Dorcas,” he said hurriedly, putting down his glass and reaching for cigarettes. “One last cigarette. Then we’ll go. I promised.” He came to her with the small, mirrored box extended. “Drink the highball, honey. It’ll warm you up before you go out into this fiendish night… I’ll light your cigarette for you.”

  There was a small electric lighter. His hand holding the little torch was altogether steady in spite of his feverish manner.

  She put the cigarette to her lips and accepted the light. The one swallow of whisky and soda had stung her throat and the puff of smoke was bitter and unpleasant. Aware of his sudden silence, she looked up; he was standing above her, his hand still holding the little torch, his eyes very bright and focused oddly, not at her but as if there were something beyond her, over her shoulder, across the room. And as if that something moved a little, for his eyes moved—fixedly and brightly as a cat’s eyes, stalking.

  It was a fantastic impression but so strong that she put down her glass and turned. There was, of course, nobody. Unless—unless the blank white door leading to the kitchen passage had just closed.

  “What is it, Dorcas? What’s wrong?”

  “That—door—moved.” She was still staring at it. Had it moved? But it couldn’t have.

  “Oh, nonsense!”

  “Yes, I saw it, Ronald. I’m sure—or at least I thought——”

  “Do you mean to say you saw it move?”

  “N-no. Not exactly. But——”

  “Oh, come, Dorcas! Don’t be a dear little silly. How could the door move? It’s fast shut and there’s no one but you and me in the whole apartment. No one.”

  She looked perplexedly at the wide, blank white panels. Certainly the door did not move now; certainly that split second during which she saw—or thought she saw—the door barely tremble into place had been an illusion. All those mirrors about the room were deceiving as to perspective and motion. She could see herself and Ronald standing above her at a dozen different angles and views.

  And she was to go. Now.

  She half rose and reached for her coat and Ronald put his hand on her shoulder lightly but held her in her seat.

  “Ronald——”

  “Yes, dear little Dorcas. When you’ve finished your cigarette. I’m giving you up for a lifetime, my darling, but not until”—he glanced at the small clock on a table across the room, a blue-faced clock with stars on it and white hands, tipped in stars—“not until nine o’clock. At least ten minutes more. It will take you that long to finish your cigarette. And your whisky.”

  The hand on her shoulder, curiously, annoyed her. She moved away from him to the other end of the divan and as she did so he sat down beside her.

  “Listen, Dorcas,” he began. “There are some things I want to say to you. Don’t get upset but please listen to me.” He paused, turning his glass in his fingers, watching it with absent, bright eyes. “In the first place you don’t love Jevan.”

  “Don’t talk yet, I want to finish. You don’t love him. I love you and you—you love me, my dear. I know you do. I know in a hundred ways. I—well, this is the point: now that it has come right down to marrying him you don’t want to. I know that too. That’s one of the reasons I waited until now. So long as the marriage was far enough in the future you yielded to your mother. I’m not blaming you, my darling, for listening to what they told you of me. Too much of it perhaps, was true. Was true, Dorcas—is true no longer, since met you.”

  He paused again. Dorcas made a motion to speak and stopped. He was talking calmly and with a kind of reasonableness and everything he said, Dorcas told herself, was true. Yet mainly she was aware of an increasing uneasiness. Of the mirrors. Of the white, blank door behind her.

  “But now that your marriage is so near you, you realize the truth, Dorcas. Well then …” He put down the glass, turned to her and took her hands. “Why go on with it?”

  “The wedding——”

  “The wedding! Don’t go through with it. People will wonder and exclaim but will forget.”

  “But—but I—my mother——”

  “She has lived her life. She can’t live your life.”

  “Jevan——”

  “Listen to me. Does he love you?”

  She hesitated, held by the glowing brightness of his eyes, thinking confusedly of Jevan, of the man
beside her, of her own uncertainties, of the door behind her which had not moved.

  “Does he love you? Do you love him, Dorcas?” Again leaning close to her, holding her hands tightly, he waited, furiously intent. And again answered for her: “No. For you love me, Dorcas. And you must marry me. Now. Tomorrow.”

  His face was flushed; his bright eyes shining; his hands feverish in their grip. And something was wrong about the still, watchful room.

  “No. No, I can’t.”

  “Why not? You love me; why marry him? It’s impossible, Dorcas. You must come with me.”

  No time to think this thing out. No time to analyze. No time to do anything but pull your hands away and shrink back into the corner of the divan and look swiftly around the room. No one was there of course. No one but Ronald and herself. “No, no, Ronald.”

  “Why? Why?”

  “Because—oh, I can’t, Ronald. I simply can’t. You must not ask me——”

  His face was a dark, angry crimson.

  “Don’t just repeat that over and over again, Dorcas. Of course you can. Who’s going to stop you? Who can stop you?”

  “I—I can’t. It’s too late. Everything’s ready. I can’t—I’m going now. I must go.” She tried to rise. And he caught her suddenly again in his arms, suddenly and closely so she could not move, and the reasonableness in his voice departed. He cried:

  “You are not! You are going to stay here! We’ll elope tonight if you like. I don’t care when. Or where. We can drive to Waukegan or Crown Point and be married tonight. But you’re going to marry me, Dorcas. You don’t love him. You love me. You—you wouldn’t have come here with me if you hadn’t loved me. Not the night before your wedding.”

  “No—no, Ronald! Let me go!” The sudden, sharp violence of compulsion in her voice seemed to reach him, for he said more quietly: “Very well.” His arms dropped and she was on her feet and he looked at her and said: “I’ll kill myself, Dorcas, rather than lose you.”

  He said it unexpectedly, looking up at her with those bright secret eyes. It ought to have moved her. It did move her but inexplicably not to compassion; instead to sudden mysterious rage.

  “It’s all very neat,” she cried in sharp fury. “Young man’s apartment; liquor and love-making; suicide threats; Waukegan or Crown Point or else. Oh, Ronald, how—how childish of you to stage such a trite little scene!”

  He lay back against the divan staring fixedly up at her. His handsome face was still a little flushed; he was smiling rather gently but there was again in his bright eyes a queer, unfathomable look of calculation.

  Dorcas was too angry—angry with herself, angry with Ronald—to notice that look. She went around the low table and snatched her coat. There wasn’t any room for composure or dignity or poise; she was thoroughly in a rage and hated herself more than she hated Ronald. She took her coat with the gesture of a shrew and cried sharply: “You’ve spoiled everything. I came here because I”—(Because she loved him? Because all during that month of absence she had grown more and more convinced that she loved him?)—“because I wanted to see you again. Because I wanted us to remember each other kindly and as friends. You’ve spoiled everything. You’ve made it cheap and false. I’ll never remember you again with anything but loathing. I thought it was real—the way you felt. I thought you——”

  “Stop that. Don’t be a fool, Dorcas. Or a silly, stupid child. After all, tomorrow you’re to be married; you ought not to be so disturbed by a little love-making tonight. Besides, it’s me you’re going to marry.”

  She jerked on her coat. She wouldn’t reply, wouldn’t listen. He lay back against the deep divan, watching her with a curious lassitude and assurance. Apparently he was going to let her go without further words. Well, that was good. She turned toward the door without speaking—caught a glimpse of her own disheveled hair in a mirror above a white face and blazing eyes and a mouth heavily painted with new and unfamiliar lipstick. Where was her hat?

  She whirled back. It lay on the divan where it had fallen during that absurd struggle with Ronald. Again, sharply and with fury in her gesture, she snatched the hat. And again reached the door without a backward glance when Ronald laughed.

  It was a singular kind of laugh, slow and easy and assured, but it had no mirth in it.

  Something chill and a little frightened stirred suddenly below her rage. She turned to look at him again and he said, smiling:

  “You can’t leave, darling. I’ve been a thorough, complete scoundrel and locked the door. I’m not going to open it until—to quote again from the fine old melodramas from which I have lavishly borrowed—until you are mine.”

  Scorn and rage and that chill thing stirring below.

  “Ronald, don’t be such a complete idiot. Open the door.”

  “No, my sweet.”

  “Ronald, you can’t possibly be serious. This is preposterous.”

  “Yes, isn’t it. I tried to think of some other way. Really I did, darling. But after all, it does work now and then, you know. Or might when women are worth the trouble. As you are, darling. As you——” He was rising slowly from the divan. Certainly he was going to open the door. Certainly it was a poor idea of a joke. Suppose—suppose it wasn’t? With the sharp irrelevance of a nightmare she thought of the bridesmaids arriving in yellow chiffons at St Chrystofer’s and the bride shut up in an apartment with a man who’d taken leaves of his senses.

  Ronald came nearer. “As you are worth it, sweet,” he said and reached behind her. Incredibly he touched the electric light switch and the chill stirring thing away back in her mind leaped to terror as he found her in the tumultuous, frantic darkness.

  A telephone was ringing. She knew that.

  It rang again and again, somewhere away from that hot, panting area of struggle, somewhere off in the thick darkness. She knew when he suddenly left her, so suddenly and savagely relinquishing her that she almost fell. She heard him groping in the darkness; then he found a table lamp and turned on the light. She had one glimpse of his face above the light—foreshortened as he bent downward—the face of a man she had never seen, with mirrors all around and a blank white door behind him.

  The telephone pealed demandingly. He found it at last on a table and thrust it over savagely so it fell on the floor and was disconnected.

  Dorcas reached the door and it was not locked at all. She pulled the door open and all her life afterward remembered the sound of it as it closed, shutting off Ronald’s voice.

  Ten minutes later, on Lake Shore Drive, she hailed a cruising taxi and gave the driver her address. It seemed to her that he looked at her curiously. But why not? A girl wandering around alone in the street in weather like that. Or was it because he noted something of the agitation she felt?

  She huddled back in a corner of the seat. It must have turned much colder, for she was trembling all over. She had to lock her teeth together. She tried to count and draw long breaths; one, two, three, inhale—one, two, three, exhale.

  She was still counting when they reached the Whipple house, which loomed high and dark into the squally, gusty night.

  CHAPTER 4

  LUCKILY THERE WAS MONEY in her pocket; barely enough for the driver and a small tip. As she turned from the taxi some oddly repetitive experience caught at her; a car was just turning the corner ahead of the taxi and it was going slowly, as if it were in second gear. As if, then, it had been either idling or stopped at the Whipple drive. But no one would be calling just then. Then she knew why it had seemed a familiar and repeated experience: twice before that night she had been aware of a car driving slowly along the street. That was all.

  She went into the house, grateful for the solidity of the door and the indescribably familiar fragrances of the old house.

  No one was in the hall, though lights were burning, and she saw no one on the stairs.

  No one in the upper hall either, though as she opened her own door some instinct compelled her to turn quickly to look again down the hall. It
was, however, dimly lighted and stretched away into quiet, apparently empty shadows, and if it had been a sound that caught her attention it was not repeated. Her room was like a haven and it was blessedly warm, yet long after she had gone to bed she was still cold and shaken and confused. But she was mainly terribly tired, too tired to think, too tired to analyze. Too tired even to exorcise a queer, cold horror.

  She left the bedside light burning. She had turned it off once but the moment darkness enfolded her she was back at the door of Ronald’s apartment with the mirrors watching her and the blank white door seeming about to close itself. She put a desperate little hand into the darkness and turned on the light again, sighing shakily as her own familiar room came mellowly into view and she lay there keeping her eyes fastened on the tall mahogany bedpost until from desperate weariness she went to sleep. Once during the night, however, she must have dreamed, for she was conscious suddenly, strugglingly, of the white door. Only now and to her half-awakened consciousness it had something horrible and terrifying about it and instead of closing it was about to open.

  She turned, twisted, escaped the dream, if dream it was and not awakening, and went to sleep again.

  Morning dawned cold and gray with a vicious wind off the lake.

  There was an early bustle in the Whipple house, though Dorcas heard none of it. Among the several servants there was none who remembered any other Whipple wedding and only one or two who had been in the Whipple house for more than a few years, but still the event was of sufficient and distracting importance. But Sophie had given orders and the bustle did not extend itself to the front part of the second floor. So while the front steps were being scrubbed and the two cars given a glistening rub in the big garage, while flowers and boxes from the caterers arrived in a steady and increasingly heavy stream at the back door and telegrams and last-minute packages at the front door, there was still only the faintest echo of all that activity in the big, silent rooms on the second floor where Cary and Dorcas slept. Sophie was up at six, neat and smart and trim in a brown knitted dress, superintending.