"Please listen: I came to this place to make a quick end to my troubles--but I"ve changed my mind about that, now. What"s happened in this room has made me see that n.o.body has any right to--hasten things.
But I mean to leave the country--immediately--and let death find me where it will. I shall leave behind me a name and a little money, neither of any conceivable use to me. Will you take them, employ them to make your life what it was meant to be? It"s a little thing, but it will make me feel a lot more fit to go out of this world--to know I"ve left at least one decent act to mark my memory. There"s only this far-fetched chance--I _may_ live. It"s a million-to-one shot, but you"ve got to bear it in mind. But really you can"t lose--"
"Oh, stop, stop!" she implored him, half hysterical. "To think of marrying to benefit by the death of a man like you--!"
"You"ve no right to look at it that way." He had a wry, secret smile for his specious sophistry. "You"re being asked to confer, not to accept, a favour. It"s just an act of kindness to a hopeless man. I"d go mad if I didn"t know you were safe from a recurrence of the folly of this afternoon."
"Don"t!" she cried--"don"t tempt me. You"ve no right.... You don"t know how frantic I am...."
"I do," he countered frankly. "I"m depending on just that to swing you to my point of view. You"ve got to come to it. I mean you shall marry me."
She stared up at him, spell-bound, insensibly yielding to the domination of his will. It was inevitable. He was scarcely less desperate than she--and no less overwrought and unstrung; and he was the stronger; in the natural course of things his will could not but prevail. She was little more than a child, accustomed to yield and go where others led or pointed out the path. What resistance could she offer to the domineering importunity of a man of full stature, arrogant in his strength and--hounded by devils? And he in the fatuity of his soul believed that he was right, that he was fighting for the girl"s best interests, fighting--and not ungenerously--to save her from the ravening consequences of her indiscretion!
The bald truth is, he was hardly a responsible agent: distracted by the ravings of an ego mutinous in the shadow of annihilation, as well as by contemplation of the girl"s wretched plight, he saw all things in distorted perspective. He had his being in a nightmare world of frightful, insane realities. He could have conceived of nothing too terrible and preposterous to seem reasonable and right....
The last trace of evening light had faded out of the world before they were agreed. Darkness wrapped them in its folds; they were but as voices warring in a black and boundless void.
Whitaker struck a match and applied it to the solitary gas-jet. A thin, blue, sputtering tongue of flame revealed them to one another. The girl still crouched in her arm-chair, weary and spent, her powers of contention all vitiated by the losing struggle. Whitaker was trembling with nervous fatigue.
"Well?" he demanded.
"Oh, have your own way," she said drearily. "If it must be...."
"It"s for the best," he insisted obstinately. "You"ll never regret it."
"One of us will--either you or I," she said quietly. "It"s too one-sided. You want to give all and ask nothing in return. It"s a fool"s bargain."
He hesitated, stammering with surprise. She had a habit of saying the unexpected. "A fool"s bargain"--the wisdom of the sage from the lips of a child....
"Then it"s settled," he said, business-like, offering his hand. "Fool"s bargain or not--it"s a bargain."
She rose una.s.sisted, then trusted her slender fingers to his palm. She said nothing. The steady gaze of her extraordinary eyes abashed him.
"Come along and let"s get it over," he muttered clumsily. "It"s late, and there"s a train to New York at half-past ten, you might as well catch."
She withdrew her hand, but continued to regard him steadfastly with her enigmatic, strange stare. "So," she said coolly, "that"s settled too, I presume."
"I"m afraid you couldn"t catch an earlier one," he evaded. "Have you any baggage?"
"Only my suit-case. It won"t take a minute to pack that."
"No hurry," he mumbled....
They left the hotel together. Whitaker got his change of a hundred dollars at the desk--"Mrs. Morten"s" bill, of course, included with his--and bribed the bell-boy to take the suit-case to the railway station and leave it there, together with his own hand-bag. Since he had unaccountably conceived a determination to continue living for a time, he meant to seek out more pleasant accommodations for the night.
The rain had ceased, leaving a ragged sky of clouds and stars in patches. The air was warm and heavy with wetness. Sidewalks glistened like black watered silk; street lights mirrored themselves in fugitive puddles in the roadways; limbs of trees overhanging the sidewalks shivered now and again in a half-hearted breeze, pelting the wayfarers with miniature showers of lukewarm, scented drops.
Turning away from the centre of the town, they traversed slowly long streets of residences set well back behind decent lawns. Warm lamplight mocked them from a hundred homely windows. They pa.s.sed few people--a pair of lovers; three bareheaded giggling girls in short, light frocks strolling with their arms round one another; a scattering of men hurrying home to belated suppers.
The girl lagged with weariness. Awakening to this fact, Whitaker slackened his impatient stride and quietly slipped her arm through his.
"Is it much farther?" she asked.
"No--not now," he a.s.sured her with a confidence he by no means felt.
He was beginning to realize the tremendous difficulties to be overcome.
It bothered him to scheme a way to bring about the marriage without attracting an appalling amount of gratuitous publicity, in a community as staid and sober as this. He who would marry secretly should not select a half-grown New England city for his enterprise....
However, one rarely finds any really insuperable obstacles in the way of an especially wrong-headed project.
Whitaker, taking his heart and his fate in his hands, accosted a venerable gentleman whom they encountered as he was on the point of turning off the sidewalk to private grounds.
"I beg your pardon," he began.
The man paused and turned upon them a saintly countenance framed in hair like snow.
"There is something I can do for you?" he inquired with punctilious courtesy.
"If you will be kind enough to direct me to a minister...."
"I am one."
"I thought so," said Whitaker. "We wish to get married."
The gentleman looked from his face to the girl"s, then moved aside from the gate. "This is my home," he explained. "Will you be good enough to come in?"
Conducting them to his private study, he subjected them to a kindly catechism. The girl said little, Whitaker taking upon himself the brunt of the examination. Absolutely straightforward and intensely sincere, he came through the ordeal well, without being obliged to disclose what he preferred to keep secret. The minister, satisfied, at length called in the town clerk by telephone; who issued the license, pocketed his fee, and, in company with the minister"s wife, acted as witness....
Whitaker found himself on his feet beside Mary Ladislas. They were being married. He was shaken by a profound amazement. The incredible was happening--with his a.s.sistance. He heard his voice uttering responses; it seemed something as foreign to him as the voice of the girl at his side. He wondered stupidly at her calm--and later, at his own. It was all preposterously matter-of-fact and, at the same time, stupidly romantic. He divined obscurely that this thing was happening in obedience to forces nameless and unknown to them, strange and terrific forces that worked mysteriously beyond their mortal ken. He seemed to hear the droning of the loom of the Fates....
And they were man and wife. The door had closed, the gate-latch clicked behind them. They were walking quietly side by side through the scented night, they whom G.o.d had joined together.
Man and wife! Bride and groom, already started on the strangest, shortest of wedding journeys--from the parsonage to the railroad station!
Neither found anything to say. They walked on, heels in unison pounding the wet flagstones. The night was sweet with the scent of wet gra.s.s and shrubbery. The sidewalks were boldly patterned with a stencilling of black leaves and a milky dappling of electric light. At every corner high-swung arcs shot vivid slants of silver-blue radiance through the black and green of trees.
These things all printed themselves indelibly upon the tablets of his memory....
They arrived at the station. Whitaker bought his wife a ticket to New York and secured for her solitary use a drawing-room in the sleeper.
When that was accomplished, they had still a good part of an hour to wait. They found a bench on the station platform, and sat down. Whitaker possessed himself of his wife"s hand-bag long enough to furnish it with a sum of money and an old envelope bearing the name and address of his law partner. He explained that he would write to Drummond, who would see to her welfare as far as she would permit--issue her an adequate monthly allowance and advise her when she should have become her own mistress once more: in a word, a widow.
She thanked him briefly, quietly, with a constraint he understood too well to resent.
People began to gather upon the platform, to loiter about and pa.s.s up and down. Further conversation would have been difficult, even if they had found much to say to one another. Curiously or not, they didn"t.
They sat on in thoughtful silence.
Both, perhaps, were sensible of some relief when at length the train thundered in from the East, breathing smoke and flame. Whitaker helped his wife aboard and interviewed the porter in her behalf. Then they had a moment or two alone in the drawing-room, in which to consummate what was meant to be their first and last parting.
"You"ll get in about two," said Whitaker. "Better just slip across the street to the Belmont for to-night. To-morrow--or the day after--whenever you feel rested--you can find yourself more quiet quarters."