"What am I?" Joan cut in quickly.
Fowey choked again, with a gesture of impotent exasperation.
"You," he almost shouted--"you"re the woman I love and who"s driving me mad--mad I tell you!"
"Hubert! You mean that? You really love me?"
"You know I do. You know I"m crazy about you. Haven"t you seen it from the first?"
Hesitating, Joan experienced a sense of one in deep waters. There was a sound as that of distant surf in her ears. All through her body pulses were throbbing madly.
She struggled still a little, instinctively; but Fowey advantaged himself of that instant of indecision. He held her in his arms, now; her face was stinging beneath his kisses.
Almost unconsciously, she lifted her arms and clasped them round his neck, drawing his face to hers.
"You poor kid!" she murmured fondly, her eyes closed.... "You poor kid...."
x.x.xVI
Without knowing how she had come there, Joan found herself standing beside the outer doorway, in the narrow hall; one hand hugging about her the kimono she must have s.n.a.t.c.hed up by instinct, while yet not fully wakened, the other hand fumbling with the lock; sleep clouding her brain like a fog, fatigue weighting her eyelids and chaining her limbs, panic hammering in her bosom.
Overhead the doorbell was ringing imperatively, without interruption, even as it must have been ringing for many minutes before she was consciously awake.
Dimly she felt that this alarm by night must portend something strange and terrible.
And still she held her hand, wondering. Who could it be? Not Quard: for she had seen him leave New York. Never Marbridge: that were unthinkable!
Hattie Morrison, perhaps.... And that meant....
The bell ground on implacably.
At length she found courage to adjust the chain-bolt and open the door to the limit permitted by that guard.
In the outer hallway a gas-jet burned, turned low, diffusing just enough illumination to show her the figure, somehow indefinitely familiar in spite of its style, of a man in a chauffeur"s uniform: a young and wiry man clothed in khaki coat and breeches and leather leggins, and wearing a cap with visor shadowing heavily his narrow, sharp-featured countenance.
As the door opened he removed his finger from the bell-push, and drove home recognition with his voice.
"Miss Thursby live here? I got a message for her."
Joan gasped: "Butch!"
"It"s me, all right," her brother admitted crisply in his well-remembered tone of irony. "You certainly are one sincere little sleeper. I been ringing here--"
"How did you get in?"
"Rang up the janitor--if _that_ matters. Lis"n: you betta hustle into your clothes quick "s you can if you wanta get home in time to say good-bye to the old woman."
"Mother!" Joan shrilled. "What--what"s the matter--?"
"Dyin"," Butch told her briefly and without emotion. "She said she wanted to see you. So get a move on. My car"s waitin", and I da.s.sent leave it alone. Hustle--y" understand?"
"Yes, yes!" Joan promised with a sob. "I"ll hurry, Butch--"
"See you do, then!"
The boy swung about smartly and disappeared down the well of the stairway.
Joan closed the door, and leaned against it, panting. Suppose he had wanted to come in!...
For the moment, this was her sole coherent thought.
Then, rousing, she crept stealthily back to the darkened bedroom, gathered up her clothing with infinite precautions against noise, and returned to the sitting-room to dress in feverish haste....
There was an open taxicab waiting in front of the door. As she came out, Butch bent over and cranked the motor. Straightening up, he waved her curtly into the body of the car.
"Jump in and shut the door," he ordered briefly, climbing into the driver"s seat.
"But--Butch--"
"Doncha hear me? Get in and shut that door. We got no time to waste chinnin" here."
Abashed and frightened, the girl obeyed.
Immediately Butch had the cab in motion, tearing eastward at lawless speed through streets whose long ranks of yawning windows, seen fugitively in the formless dusk of early morning, seemed to look down leering, as if informed with terrible intelligence.
She shut out the sight of them with hands that covered her face until the swift rush of cool air steadied and sobered her, so that she grew calmer in the knowledge that, in veritable fact (and this was all that really mattered) "n.o.body knew"....
Then, sitting up, she composed herself, and with deft fingers completed the adjustment of her garments. By the time she had finished her toilet, aided by a small mirror inset between the forward windows, Butch was stopping the cab before the East Seventy-sixth Street tenement.
Bending back, he unlatched the door and swung it open.
"You go on up," he ordered. "I"ll be around before long--gotta run this machine back to the garage."
Joan stepped quickly to the sidewalk, and shut the door.
"All right," she responded, and added, almost timidly, avoiding her brother"s eyes: "Thank you, Butch."
He grunted unintelligibly and, as Joan moved up the stoop, threw in the power again and drew swiftly away down the street.
For an instant Joan held back in the vestibule, sickened to recognize anew the home of dirt and squalor she had fled, a long lifetime since, it seemed, and struggling with almost invincible repugnance for the ordeal awaiting her at the head of those five weary flights.
Then, more through instinct than of her will, her finger pressed the call-b.u.t.ton beneath the Thursby letter box.
The latch clicked. She pushed the door open, moved reluctantly into the shadows and addressed herself wearily to the stairs, inhaling with a keen physical disgust the heavy and malodorous atmosphere in which her youth had been shaped toward womanhood.