"I wish I could have said this better; I do nothing well. If I have hurt you, I am very, very sorry." He strode away toward the garden.
Trying to compose herself, Alice walked to the house. Providentially, Dolly had already started for the field. Summoning a servant, Alice ordered her car and with her head whirling started for home. As she was hurried over the country road her mind gradually righted itself, and strange thoughts ran like lightning flashes through her brain. Reaching home, she hastened upstairs and locked her door.
What startled her most painfully in her reflections was the unwelcome conviction that there was nothing new, nothing surprising in her situation. Nothing, at least, except this violent outburst which she now realized she ought long ago to have foreseen. She was suddenly conscious that she had long known Kimberly loved her, and that one day he would call her to account--for the crime of being loved in spite of herself, she reflected bitterly.
She threw herself on her couch and held her hands upon her burning temples. He had caught her in his arms and forced a kiss upon her. The blood suffused her face at the recollection. Again and again, though she turned from the picture, imagination brought it back. She saw his eyes as he bent over her; the thought of the moment was too much to support. Her very forehead crimsoned as the scene presented itself.
And worse, was the realizing that something of fascination lingered in the horror of that instant of amazement and fear and mad repulsion of his embrace. She hid her face in her pillow.
After a time she grew calmer, and with her racing pulse quieted, her emotion wore itself somewhat out. Saner thoughts a.s.serted themselves.
She felt that she could fight it out. She searched her heart and found no wantonness within it. Strongly a.s.sailed, and not, she felt, through her own fault, she would fight and resist. He had challenged her when he had said it should be fought out. She, too, resolved it should be.
She bathed her forehead, and when she felt sure of herself, rang for Annie. Lunch was served in her room, but she could eat nothing. At moments she felt the comforting conviction of having settled her mind.
Unhappily, her mind would not stay settled. Nothing would stay settled.
No mood that brought relief would remain. The blood came unbidden to her cheeks even while Annie was serving her and her breath would catch at the opening of a door.
When she heard the hum of a motor-car on the open highway her heart jumped. She opened the porch doors and went out to where she could look on the lake. Her eyes fell upon the distant Towers and her anger against Kimberly rose. She resolved he should realize how he had outraged her self-respect. She picked from the troubled current of her thought cutting things that she ought to have said. She despised herself for not having more angrily resented his conduct, and determined, if he dared further persist, to expose him relentlessly to the circle of their friends, even if they were his own relations. There should be no guilty secret between them; this, at least, she could insure.
When the telephone bell rang, Annie answered it. Dolly was calling for Alice and went into a state when told that Alice had come home affected by the heat, and had given up and gone to bed; she hoped yet, Annie said, to be all right for the evening. Fritzie took the wire at Black Rock to ask what she could do, and Annie a.s.sured her there was nothing her mistress needed but quiet and rest.
When the receiver had been hung up the first bridge was crossed, for Alice was resolved above all things not to be seen that night at the dance. When Fritzie came back to Cedar Lodge to dress, Alice was still in bed. Her room was darkened and Annie thought she might be sleeping.
At dinner-time, MacBirney, who had been in town all day, came in to see how she was. She told her husband that he would have to go to Dolly"s with Fritzie.
MacBirney bent over his wife and kissed her, greatly to her mental discomfort. An unwelcome kiss from him seemed to bring back more confusingly the recollection of Kimberly"s kiss, and to increase her perplexities. She detested her husband"s caresses; they meant no real affection and she did not intend he should think she believed they did.
But she never could decide where to draw the line with him, and was divided between a desire to keep him always at a distance and a wish not to seem always unamiable.
Fritzie, after she was dressed, tiptoed in. The room was lighted to show Alice the new gown. It was one of their spring achievements, and Alice raised herself on her pillow to give a complete approval of the effect. "It is a stunning thing; simply stunning. If you would only stop running yourself to death, Fritzie, and put on ten pounds, you would be absolute perfection."
"If I stopped running myself to death what would there be to live for?"
demanded Fritzie, refastening the last pin in her Dresden girdle. "We all have to live for something."
Alice put her hand to her head. "I wonder what I have to live for?"
Fritzie turned sharply. "You? Why nothing but to spend your money and have a good time. Too bad about you, isn"t it? You"ll soon have a million a year for pin-money."
Alice shook her head. "A dozen millions a year would not interest me, Fritzie."
Fritzie laughed. "Don"t be too sure, my dear; not too sure. Well,"
Fritzie"s hands ran carefully over her hair for the last time, "there are a lot of men coming over from the Sound to-night. I may meet my fate!"
"I wish you may with all my heart, Fritzie. Why is it fates always come to people that don"t want them?"
"Don"t you believe it," cried Fritzie, "they do want them."
"They don"t--not always."
"Don"t you ever believe it--they only say they don"t or think they don"t!" she exclaimed, with accustomed vehemence.
Alice moved upon her pillow in impatient disapproval. "I hope you"ll have a good time to-night."
MacBirney was ready and Fritzie joined him. The house grew quiet after they left. Annie brought up a tray and Alice took a cup of broth. She did not long resist the drowsiness that followed. She thought vaguely for a moment of a prayer for safety. But her married life had long excluded prayer. What good could come of praying to be kept unharmed while living in a state that had in itself driven her from prayer?
That, at least, would be too absurd, and with a dull fear gnawing and dying alternately at her heart she fell asleep.
CHAPTER XXIII
At noon next day MacBirney, seeking his wife, found her in her dressing-room. She had come from the garden and stood before a table filled with flowers, which she was arranging in vases.
"I"ve been looking for you." MacBirney threw himself into a convenient chair as he spoke. "Robert Kimberly is downstairs."
"Mr. Kimberly? To see you, I suppose."
"No, to see you."
"To see _me_?" Alice with flowers in her hand, paused. Then she carried a vase to the mantel-piece. "At this time of day?"
"Well--to see us, he says."
She returned to the table. "What in the world does he want to see us about?"
MacBirney laughed. "He says he has something to say to both of us. I told him I would bring you down."
A breath would have toppled Alice over. "I can"t dress to go down now,"
she managed to say. "It may be something from Dolly. Ask him to give you any message he has."
Walking hurriedly to the mantel with another jar of roses, she found her fear extreme. Could it be possible Kimberly would dream of saying to her husband what he had said to her yesterday? She smothered at the thought, yet she knew his appalling candor and felt unpleasantly convinced that he was capable of repeating every word of it. The idea threw her into a panic. She resolved not to face him under such circ.u.mstances; she was in no position to do so. "Tell him," she said abruptly, "that as much as I should like to hear what he has to say, he will have to excuse me this morning."
"He offered to come this evening if you preferred."
"We have other guests to-night," returned Alice coldly. "And I can"t be bothered now."
"Bothered?" echoed MacBirney with sarcasm. "Perhaps I had better tell him that."
"By all means, if you want to," she retorted in desperation. "Tell him anything you like."
Her husband rose. "You are amiable this morning."
"No, I am not, I"m sorry to say. I am not quite well--that is the real truth and must be my excuse. Make it for me or not as you like."
MacBirney walked downstairs. After an interminable time, Alice, breathing more freely, heard Kimberly"s car moving from the door. When she went down herself she watched narrowly the expression of her husband"s face. But he was plainly interested in nothing more serious than Fritzie"s account of the country dance. When Alice ventured to ask directly what Kimberly"s messages were, he answered that Kimberly had given none. With Fritzie, Alice took a drive after luncheon somewhat easier in mind. Yet she reflected that scarcely twenty-four hours had pa.s.sed and she already found herself in an atmosphere of suspense and apprehension from which there seemed no escape.
While she was dressing that night, flowers from The Towers" gardens were brought to Cedar Lodge in boxfuls, just as they had regularly been sent the year before--roses for the tables, violets for Alice"s rooms, orchids for herself. If she only dared send them back! Not, she knew, that it would make any difference with the sender, but it would at least express her indignation. She still speculated as to whether Kimberly would dare to tell her husband and upon what would happen if he should tell him.
And her little dream of publicity as an antidote! What had become of it already? So far as Kimberly was concerned, she now firmly believed he was ready to publish his att.i.tude toward her to the world. And she shrank with every instinct from the prospective shame and humiliation.
The water about her seemed very deep as she reflected, and she felt singularly helpless. She had never heard of a situation just such as this, never imagined one exactly like it. This man seemed different from every other she had ever conceived of; more frankly brutal than other brutes and more to be dreaded than other men.