"He must have enjoyed the place immensely. I"m nowhere so strongly reminded of rural England, saving the architecture, of course. Ewing painted, doubtless?"
"Oh, no, he did nothing. He played with my sister, chiefly. Virginia took him about. They were inseparable. He had heart for nothing but her--no work, nothing else." She had deliberately lengthened the speech, wishing him not to see that she watched for an opening. Teevan seemed to feel a leading. He searched her face as he asked:
"They liked each other immensely, eh?"
"Oh, yes, I couldn"t tell you----"
He felt the weariness of her tone, almost a faintness. The color burned darkly high on her cheeks, her eyes showed an exotic and painful splendor. He suddenly saw that she must have sustained some blow; that her l.u.s.ter was a fevered glitter sad and terrible, and that she was nerving herself to some ordeal. He sank back in his seat, all acuteness.
Had she betrayed herself in the beginning, struck open the secret for him by her first words? A jealous woman, then--a flouted woman come to turn on the man? It was no conclusion to leap at; rather a piquant suspicion to verify.
He set his gla.s.s down and picked up a slender-bladed dagger from the desk before him, absently bending the steel. He knew they were both veiled for the moment. His eyes challenged her to open speech of Ewing as he held the dagger up to her and said lazily, "A beauty, that--undoubted Toledo work. Picked it up in a shop at Newport yesterday. They knew how to temper steel in those days. See its edge--"
He tore a bit of paper from a pad and slashed it into strips, his eyes rising to hers at each cut, interrogatory, through the complacence of a man exhibiting a fine property.
"Randall, you"ve been friendly with him, and yet you know who he is; you"ve known it a long time. And you--you _can"t_ like him."
He still toyed with his plaything, p.r.i.c.kling its needle-like point into the pad of paper under his hand. Then he turned on her with a sudden, insinuating droop of the eyelids.
"Very well--and you"ve been friendly with him, say until two weeks ago.
And you"re no longer so. I name no reason. But you detest him now. Am I wrong? Can I still read a woman?" He leaned toward her, peering nearer with each query. He meant them to be like thrusts of the dagger which he now threw on the desk. Her eyes fell in unfeigned confusion under his look, her mind running many ways to come on the meaning beneath this preposterous guess. She looked up to him, seeking a hint, but his eyes were inscrutable, his mouth set in a sagacious smile, intimating, accusing. She looked down again, suddenly feeling it wise to let him think as he did--whatever absurd thing it might be. She sighed deeply, relaxed in her chair and met his eyes again. Teevan beheld a woman defenseless to his insight; one too proud to confess in words, but too weak, too vindictive, perhaps, to attempt denial.
"I see, my girl--don"t trouble to speak." He replenished his gla.s.s from the decanter. He was delighted with his penetration; pleased, also, to believe that here was an ally, if one should be needed. He glanced at her again. She sat silent and drooping.
"You did well to come to me, Eleanor. I fancy you"ll be interested to know what our young friend is about to encounter."
"Oh, I shall, I shall! Tell me, please." He smiled at her eagerness, so poorly subdued, recording in a mental footnote the viperish fury of a woman in her plight. Still, he thought she carried it off rather well.
There had been need for his keenness to read her secret.
"I"ll tell you, my girl, and I"m jolly glad to find some one who can enjoy it with me. What am I going to do with him?" He rose and paced the room for so long a time that she felt she could not bear it. She was about to speak when he abruptly halted and faced her with a petrifying burst of malignance. "What am I going to do with him?--wring him, wreck him, choke him, fling the fool back on his dung heap to rot!" She stared at him, panting; then, summoning all her ingenuity she smiled slowly above the sickening fear that had rushed over her. Teevan glowed.
That smile of hers--he could detect something relentless in it--was a tribute to his prowess no less than a confirmation of his power to read her.
"I don"t understand," she half whispered, still with that restrained fierceness that gave him joy.
"Of course you don"t. Am I to be read as a primer? I"m subtler, I trust, than an earthquake, a cyclone, a deluge. You don"t understand, but you shall." He paced the floor again with a foppish air of pride. "Ah, it has worked so beautifully. Really, I"ve regretted there was no one I could let in to enjoy a work of art with me. But you, I see, will have the taste to applaud it, Nell, now that your eyes are opened. Oh, the thing has gone ideally! Only applause was lacking."
"I don"t understand, Randall." She could hardly manage the words. She was afraid her heart would beat them into some wild cry of impatience.
"You shall--you shall." He gazed meditatively at her. "Yes, and you"ll have to know it all to understand perfectly, even my--my humiliation."
He unlocked the door of a closet and brought out something she did not recognize until he had placed it across the arms of a chair and stepped back. It was the portrait of Ewing"s mother. His face was contorted now in a most unpleasant sneer.
"There"s the _motif_." He resumed his seat at the desk, facing the picture. The sneer had gone, and whatever dignity of soul was in him sounded in the next words.
"You can"t know what that meant to me when I saw it, when I knew who had done it, when I thought of the creature who carried it about parading his own shame and hers--and _mine_!"
"I think I can understand that, Randall."
"You can"t, I say. No woman could. You can"t begin to know the humiliation, how it tore me, knowing this fellow walked the earth at all, a nameless sp.a.w.n, holding my shame over me--over _me_! threatening every instant to cover me again with it. As if I"d not survived enough!
Good G.o.d! was I to go through it again, and know that this puling whelp was the instrument--a thing to torture me, hold me up to ridicule, to make men smile and t.i.tter and mock me in club corners? Wasn"t _her_ insult enough? Must she breed obscene things to echo it?" He groaned and turned away with a gesture of warding off. In the mist of her besetment the woman found herself thinking that the fine little hands in this gesture should have been lace-beruffled at the wrist. He was the figure of stabbed vanity, the bleeding c.o.xcomb. He flung an arm toward the picture with bitter vehemence.
"Ah, my lady! my fine, loose lady, with your high talk and your low way!
I hope you"ve watched me with those painted eyes of yours. Did you think I"d never strike back?"
"But now, Randall--_how_?" He replenished his gla.s.s and turned slowly away from the picture.
"How, indeed? That"s where you meet me at last. Not every one could have carried it through, but it was simple for me. Difficult in a way, yes.
It"s been hard to stomach the fool, with his conceit and his whining.
Oh, he fancies himself tremendously, for all his ways of a holy innocent, his d.a.m.ned airs of a sugar-candy Galahad. But I"ve won him, I tell you, by that very innocence of his. I"m the one soul in the world he truly reveres. His sun rises and sets in me. And now he"s where I want him. I"ve worn out his hope, kept him from doing the thing he wanted to do, kept him on the edge of despair out of respect and fear and love of me. The beggar _has_ a certain devilish sort of genius, but he doesn"t know where it lies, and I"ve taken precious good care he shouldn"t find out. Oh, but I"ve had a rich time of it--disgusting and rich. Nearly a year it is now that he"s led me this dance, but I"ve hooked him beautifully, and to-night I"ll pull him in." She had been watching the play of spite on his face, and it was with difficulty that she moistened her lips to say:
"But what will you do to-night--what can you say?"
"Everything I"ve laid a train for saying, this year past. Tell him how I despise him for his empty pretensions, his constant, wretched failures.
Show him to himself as a conceited dawdler and a cheat who has lived on my bounty--oh, I saw to that--a cheat who has defrauded me of time and money and faith in man. Never fear but I"ll know the things to say. I"ve told them to _her_ often enough." He thrust viciously at the portrait.
"And you"ll hear it all, my Lady Disdain, with your face to the wall to hide its belated blushes."
Again she tried to speak but her lips were dry. At last she achieved a few rather husky words.
"Randall, if you please, might I have a gla.s.s of something--water, I"d like."
"To be sure, my child. You"re certain you won"t join me in a brandy and soda? No? I"ll get you something below."
She clutched at the moment to quiet, if she could, that tumult of heart and brain. Her mind dwelt chiefly on Ewing"s dejection as she had left him the day before. Teevan came back, bearing a carafe and a bottle of soda water. She drank a gla.s.s of the water greedily, and murmured her thanks as he gave her more. It refreshed her and she seemed to feel a renewal of strength. Her fever was heating her brain to wild activity.
She felt a crazy desire to cool her head, to lean it against snow or cold metal. She thought fleetingly of cold things she had touched, of marble, icicles, a bra.s.s rail with frost on it. She was goading her mind for a way to reach Teevan. She drank the second gla.s.s of water, and again he refilled it, protesting against so poor a tipple as he took more brandy for himself.
She watched him narrowly as he prepared his drink. The decanter was so low that she thought he must be feeling what he had taken, and she wondered if it might not have softened him, released some generosity in his poor soul.
"You must have suffered, Randall, in all this. But won"t it hurt you still more, doing what you mean to do--when you make _him_ suffer?"
"His suffering!" He waved a deprecating hand. "What can he suffer compared to me? Disgust I"ve suffered, yes, and mortification. He could feel nothing approaching that if I flayed him here. Why, Nell, I pulled a rose from its bush this morning in Neville"s garden, and crushed a worm crawling on its stem. A poor, tiny green thing, yet it had lived, and had its successes and failures after a fashion. But you can"t imagine its actual suffering in death to equal my own mere disgust at crushing it."
The brandy had not softened him, she thought. Could it have made him cautious?
"Have you never suspected, Randall, that there may be a sleeping fighter in him?" There was a glitter in her tormented eyes, a sudden fierce wish to behold battle between this puny insulter and Ewing aroused to his might.
"Bah! a fighter!" He snapped contemptuous fingers. "There"s the look in his eye sometimes, but I"ve disarmed him. He _can"t_ fight me, his benefactor, his best friend. Never fear; he"ll wilt, wither, shrivel up.
Oh, trust me for that. And suppose the impossible, suppose the worm turns in some fit of wormish desperation. I"ve the _coup_, have I not?
You know what his mother is to him, a d.a.m.ned romantic memory of pure womanhood and all that rot. Suppose him capable of so much as an eye-flash of defiance. Why, then, my child, he"ll know who--he"ll know _what_--his mother was; and he"ll know my right to describe her. He"ll know what _he_ is. And the words won"t puzzle him: he"ll need no lexicon--crisp, Anglo-Saxon words. Do you think that will leave any fight in him--her shame and his? By Gad! Nell, it"s too good to keep from him. He shall have it anyway, though I"d meant to keep it back for my own sake. But that shall be the clincher. Before her face there I"ll tell him what she was."
"Not that, Randall, surely not that!" Her veil of calmness had flown on the wind of his hate. She knew she must reveal herself. Her words had been so near a cry that he turned on her in amazement.
"Listen, Randall, don"t--don"t do that. Let him off. I promise to take him away. It"s all true; you"ve handled him well, and you can break him now--but don"t. Please, please let him go. I"ll take him away, I tell you. I promise he shall never bother you again."
He looked at her, incredulous.
"You"re asking me to consider _him_--really?"
"No, no--to consider me. Please, please listen--please consider me."
"But you--I thought you----"