In Hal Surtaine"s arms she was playing for another stake. So intent had she been upon her purpose that the guerdon of the modern Venus Victrix, the declaration of the lover, was held in the background of her mind.
For a swift, bewildering moment, she felt his lips upon hers, the gentlest, the tenderest pressure, instantly relaxed: then the sudden knowledge of him for what he was, a loyal and chivalrous gentleman thus beguiled, burned her with a withering and intolerable shame.
Simultaneously she felt her heart go out to him as never yet had it gone to any man, and in that secret shock to her maidenhood, the coquette in her waned and the woman waxed.
She drew back, quivering, aghast. With all the force of this new and tumultuous emotion, she hoped for her own defeat: yearned over him that he should refuse that for which she had unworthily pressed. Yet, such is the perversity of that strange struggle against the great surrender, that she gathered every power of her s.e.x to gain the dreaded victory. By an effort she commanded her voice, releasing herself from his arms.
"Wait. Don"t speak to me for a minute," she said hoa.r.s.ely.
"But I must speak, now,--dear, dearest."
"Am--am I that to you?" The feline in her caught desperately at the opportunity.
"Always. From the first."
"But--you forgot."
"Let me atone with the rest of my life for that treason." He laughed happily.
"You keep your promise, then, to the little girl?" At her feet lay the galley proof. Birdlike she darted down upon it, seized, and tore it half across. "No: you do it," she commanded, thrusting it into his hand.
No longer was he master of himself. The kiss had undermined him. "Must I?" he said.
Victorious and aghast, she yet smiled into his face. "I knew I could believe in you," she cried. "You"re a true knight, after all. I declare you my Knight-Editor. No well-equipped journalistic partnership should be without one."
Perhaps had the phrase been different, Hal might have yielded. So narrow a margin of chance divides the paths of honor and dishonor, to mortals groping dimly through the human maze. But the words were an echo to wake memory. Rugged, harsh, and fine the face of McGuire Ellis rose before Hal. He heard the rough voice, with its undertone of affection beneath the jocularity of the rather feeble pun, and it called him back like a trumpet summons to the loyalty which he had promised to the men of the "Clarion." He slipped the half-torn paper into his pocket.
"I can"t do it, Esme."
"You--can"t--do--it?"
"No." Finality was in the monosyllable.
She looked into his leveled and quiet eyes, and knew that she had lost.
And the demon of perversity, raging, stung her to its purposes.
"After this, you tell me that you can"t, you won"t?"
"Dearest! You"re not going to let it make a difference in our love for each other."
"_Our_ love! You go far, and fast."
"Do I go too far, since you have let me kiss you?"
"I didn"t," she cried.
"Then you meant nothing by it?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "You are trying to take advantage of a position which you forced," she said coldly.
"Let me understand this clearly." He had turned white. "You let me make love to you, in order to entrap me and save your friend. Is that it?"
No reply came from her other than what he could read in compressed lips and smouldering eyes.
"So that is the kind of woman you are." There were both wonder and distress in his voice. "That is the kind of woman for whose promise to be my wife I would have given the heart out of my body."
At this the tumult and catastrophe of her emotion fused into a white hot, illogical anger against this man who was suffering, and by his suffering made her suffer.
"Your wife? Yours?" She smiled hatefully. "The wife of the son of a quack? You do yourself too much honor, Hal Surtaine."
"I fear that I did you too much honor," he replied quietly.
Suffocation pressed upon her throat as she saw him go to the door. For a moment the wild desire to hold him, to justify herself, to explain, even to ask forgiveness, seized her. Bitterly she fought it down, and so stood, with wide eyes and smiling lips. At the door he turned to look, with a glance less of appeal than of incredulity that she, so lovely, so alluring, so desirable beyond all the world, a creature of springtime and promise embowered amidst the springtime and promise of the apple-bloom, could be such as her speech and action proclaimed her.
Hal carried from her house, like a barbed arrow, the memory of that still and desperate smile.
CHAPTER XVII
REPRISALS
Working on an empty heart is almost as severe a strain as the less poetic process of working on an empty stomach. On the morning after the failure of Esme"s strategy and the wrecking of Hal"s hopes, the young editor went to his office with a languid but bitter distaste for its demands. The first item in the late afternoon mail stung him to a fitter spirit, as a sharp blow will spur to his best efforts a courageous boxer. This was a packet, containing the crumbled fragments of a spray of arbutus, and a note in handwriting now stirringly familiar.
I have read your editorial. From a man dishonest enough to print deliberate lies and cowardly enough to attack a woman, it is just such an answer as I might have expected.
ELEANOR S.M. ELLIOT.
At first the reference to the editorial bewildered Hal. Then he remembered. Esme had known nothing of the editorial until she read it in the paper. She had inferred that he wrote it after leaving her, thus revenging himself upon her by further scarification of the friend for whom she had pleaded. To the charge of deliberate mendacity he had no specific clue, not knowing that Kathleen Pierce had denied the authenticity of the interview. He mused somberly upon the venomed injustice of womankind. The note and its symbol of withered sweetness he buried in his waste-basket. If he could but discard as readily the vision of a face, strangely lovely in its anger and chagrin, and wearing that set and desperate smile! Well, there was but one answer to her note. That was to make the "Clarion" all that she would have it not be!
No phantoms of lost loveliness came between McGuire Ellis and his satisfaction over the Pierce _coup_. Characteristically, however, he presented the disadvantageous as well as the favorable aspects of the matter to his employer.
"Some paper this morning!" he began. "The town is humming like a hive."
"Over the Pierce story?" asked Hal.
"Nothing else talked of. We were sold out before nine this morning."
"Selling papers is our line of business," observed the owner-editor.
"You won"t think so when you hear Shad Shearson. He"s an avalanche of woe, waiting to sweep down upon you."
"What"s his trouble? The department store advertising?"
"The Boston Store advertising is gone. Others are threatening to follow.
Pierce has called a meeting of the Publications Committee of the Dry Goods Union. Discipline is in the air, Boss. Have you seen the evening papers?"
"Yes."