"How you must care!--for I never saw you so dull," was her answer.
"Don"t you see that it"s not too late for me to help you?" And as he continued to stare, she brought out sublimely: "Take the rest--in imagination! Let it at least be of that much use to you. Tell her I lied to her--she"s too ready to believe it! And so, after all, in a sense, I sha"n"t have been wasted."
His stare hung on her, widening to a kind of wonder. She gave the look back brightly, unblushingly, as though the expedient were too simple to need oblique approaches. It was extraordinary how a few words had swept them from an atmosphere of the most complex dissimulations to this contact of naked souls.
It was not in Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate; but something in him cracked with it, and the rift let in new light. He went up to his friend and took her hand.
"You would do it--you would do it!"
She looked at him, smiling, but her hand shook.
"Good-by," he said, kissing it.
"Good-by? You are going--?"
"To get my letter."
"Your letter? The letter won"t matter, if you will only do what I ask."
He returned her gaze. "I might, I suppose, without being out of character. Only, don"t you see that if your plan helped me it could only harm her?"
"Harm _her?_"
"To sacrifice you wouldn"t make me different. I shall go on being what I have always been--sifting and sorting, as she calls it. Do you want my punishment to fall on _her?_"
She looked at him long and deeply. "Ah, if I had to choose between you--!"
"You would let her take her chance? But I can"t, you see. I must take my punishment alone."
She drew her hand away, sighing. "Oh, there will be no punishment for either of you."
"For either of us? There will be the reading of her letter for me."
She shook her head with a slight laugh. "There will be no letter."
Thursdale faced about from the threshold with fresh life in his look.
"No letter? You don"t mean--"
"I mean that she"s been with you since I saw her--she"s seen you and heard your voice. If there _is_ a letter, she has recalled it--from the first station, by telegraph."
He turned back to the door, forcing an answer to her smile. "But in the mean while I shall have read it," he said.
The door closed on him, and she hid her eyes from the dreadful emptiness of the room.
THE QUICKSAND
I
AS Mrs. Quentin"s victoria, driving homeward, turned from the Park into Fifth Avenue, she divined her son"s tall figure walking ahead of her in the twilight. His long stride covered the ground more rapidly than usual, and she had a premonition that, if he were going home at that hour, it was because he wanted to see her.
Mrs. Quentin, though not a fanciful woman, was sometimes aware of a sixth sense enabling her to detect the faintest vibrations of her son"s impulses. She was too shrewd to fancy herself the one mother in possession of this faculty, but she permitted herself to think that few could exercise it more discreetly. If she could not help overhearing Alan"s thoughts, she had the courage to keep her discoveries to herself, the tact to take for granted nothing that lay below the surface of their spoken intercourse: she knew that most people would rather have their letters read than their thoughts. For this superfeminine discretion Alan repaid her by--being Alan. There could have been no completer reward. He was the key to the meaning of life, the justification of what must have seemed as incomprehensible as it was odious, had it not all-sufficingly ended in himself. He was a perfect son, and Mrs. Quentin had always hungered for perfection.
Her house, in a minor way, bore witness to the craving. One felt it to be the result of a series of eliminations: there was nothing fortuitous in its blending of line and color. The almost morbid finish of every material detail of her life suggested the possibility that a diversity of energies had, by some pressure of circ.u.mstance, been forced into the channel of a narrow dilettanteism. Mrs. Quentin"s fastidiousness had, indeed, the flaw of being too one-sided. Her friends were not always worthy of the chairs they sat in, and she overlooked in her a.s.sociates defects she would not have tolerated in her bric-a-brac. Her house was, in fact, never so distinguished as when it was empty; and it was at its best in the warm fire-lit silence that now received her.
Her son, who had overtaken her on the door-step, followed her into the drawing-room, and threw himself into an armchair near the fire, while she laid off her furs and busied herself about the tea table. For a while neither spoke; but glancing at him across the kettle, his mother noticed that he sat staring at the embers with a look she had never seen on his face, though its arrogant young outline was as familiar to her as her own thoughts. The look extended itself to his negligent att.i.tude, to the droop of his long fine hands, the dejected tilt of his head against the cushions. It was like the moral equivalent of physical fatigue: he looked, as he himself would have phrased it, dead-beat, played out. Such an air was so foreign to his usual bright indomitableness that Mrs. Quentin had the sense of an unfamiliar presence, in which she must observe herself, must raise hurried barriers against an alien approach. It was one of the drawbacks of their excessive intimacy that any break in it seemed a chasm.
She was accustomed to let his thoughts circle about her before they settled into speech, and she now sat in motionless expectancy, as though a sound might frighten them away.
At length, without turning his eyes from the fire, he said: "I"m so glad you"re a nice old-fashioned intuitive woman. It"s painful to see them think."
Her apprehension had already preceded him. "Hope Fenno--?" she faltered.
He nodded. "She"s been thinking--hard. It was very painful--to me, at least; and I don"t believe she enjoyed it: she said she didn"t." He stretched his feet to the fire. "The result of her cogitations is that she won"t have me. She arrived at this by pure ratiocination--it"s not a question of feeling, you understand. I"m the only man she"s ever loved--but she won"t have me. What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I"m convinced it all turns on that. If she"d been brought up on Trollope and Whyte-Melville, instead of Tolstoi and Mrs. Ward, we should have now been vulgarly sitting on a sofa, trying on the engagement-ring."
Mrs. Quentin at first was kept silent by the mother"s instinctive anger that the girl she has not wanted for her son should have dared to refuse him. Then she said, "Tell me, dear."
"My good woman, she has scruples."
"Scruples?"
"Against the paper. She objects to me in my official capacity as owner of the _Radiator_."
His mother did not echo his laugh.
"She had found a solution, of course--she overflows with expedients. I was to chuck the paper, and we were to live happily ever afterward on canned food and virtue. She even had an alternative ready--women are so full of resources! I was to turn the _Radiator_ into an independent organ, and run it at a loss to show the public what a model newspaper ought to be. On the whole, I think she fancied this plan more than the other--it commended itself to her as being more uncomfortable and aggressive. It"s not the fashion nowadays to be good by stealth."
Mrs. Quentin said to herself, "I didn"t know how much he cared!" Aloud she murmured, "You must give her time."
"Time?"
"To move out the old prejudices and make room for new ones."
"My dear mother, those she has are brand-new; that"s the trouble with them. She"s tremendously up-to-date. She takes in all the moral fashion-papers, and wears the newest thing in ethics."
Her resentment lost its way in the intricacies of his metaphor. "Is she so very religious?"
"You dear archaic woman! She"s hopelessly irreligious; that"s the difficulty. You can make a religious woman believe almost anything: there"s the habit of credulity to work on. But when a girl"s faith in the Deluge has been shaken, it"s very hard to inspire her with confidence. She makes you feel that, before believing in you, it"s her duty as a conscientious agnostic to find out whether you"re not obsolete, or whether the text isn"t corrupt, or somebody hasn"t proved conclusively that you never existed, anyhow."
Mrs. Quentin was again silent. The two moved in that atmosphere of implications and a.s.sumptions where the lightest word may shake down the dust of countless stored impressions; and speech was sometimes more difficult between them than had their union been less close.
Presently she ventured, "It"s impossible?"
"Impossible?"
She seemed to use her words cautiously, like weapons that might slip and inflict a cut. "What she suggests."