CHAPTER XXII
For all the rest of that day Frances Candler hated herself, hated Durkin for the mean and despicable paths into which he and his plottings had forced her, hated her sordid and humiliating conquest of the gambler Bryan and his secret.
But most of all she hated what she saw was happening within herself, the insidious and yet implacable hardening and narrowing of all her nature, the accumulating of demeaning and corroding memories, the ripening of a more and more morose self-contempt into a vague yet sullen malevolence of thought and wish.
She told herself, forlornly, that she still would not let her better nature die without a struggle, for all that she had done, and for all that she had been through. What crushed and disheartened her was the conviction that this struggle once more, in the end, would prove a futile one. She was not bad, though, not all bad, like women she had known! She had always aspired and turned toward what was right and good—her spirit cried out desolately. It was not that she had gained anything through all her wrong-doing. From the first, she felt, she had been the tool in some stronger hand; she had been only the leaf on the winds of some darker destiny. At first it had been to live, and nothing more. Now it was to love—only some day to love as she had always hoped to do; not at once to win the crown, but some day to hope to be able to win that crown. For this she was surrendering her womanhood, her integrity of soul, even the last shred of her tattered self-respect.
She would not die in a day, she told herself again, desperately. She would not surrender everything without a struggle. What remained of her scattered legions of honor, she passionately promised herself, would still be gathered together and fostered and guarded.
Above all things, she felt, she needed companionship. Durkin meant much to her—meant far too much to her, for time and time again he had only too easily shattered her card-house of good resolutions. She had blindly submerged herself for him and his efforts. It was not that she stopped to blame or reprove him; her feeling was more one of pity, of sorrow for the unstable and unreconciled nature in the fell clutch of circumstance. Yes, he meant more to her than she dare tell herself. But there were moods and moments when he proved inadequate, and to allow that sad truth to go unrecognized was more than blindness. If only she had, or could have, the friendship of a woman,—that was her oft-recurring thought,—the companionship of one warm nature quick to understand the gropings and aspirations of another. With such a friend, she vaguely felt, things might not yet be so ill with her.
But she knew of none. There was no one, she realized, to whom she could look for help. And she tried to console herself with the bitter unction of the claim that with her the world had always been doggedly unkind and cruel, that with an Æschylean pertinacity, morbidly interpreted as peculiar to her case, fate, or destiny, or the vague forces for which those words stood, had hounded and frustrated her at every turn.
This maddening feeling of self-hate and contempt stayed with her all that day. It made stiflingly hideous and sinister, to her brooding eyes, the over-furnished woman’s pool-room which had once been Penfield’s own, where she counted out her money and placed her bet on the Duke of Kendall. The broken-spirited and hard-faced women who waited about the operator’s wicket, the barrenness and malignity of their lives, the vainly muffled squalidness of that office of envenomed Chance, the abortive lust for gold without labor, the empty and hungry eyes that waited and watched the figure-covered blackboard, the wolf-like ears that pricked up at the report of some belated prey in the distance—it all filled Frances with a new and disheartening hatred of herself and the life into which she had drifted.
“Oh, God!” she prayed silently, yet passionately, while the little sounder in the operator’s stall clicked and sang; “Oh, God, may it turn out that this shall be the last!”
Listlessly she read the messages, as the report for the fifth Aqueduct event of the afternoon began to flash in and the announcer cried out, “They’re off!” Dreamily she interpreted the snatches of information as they came in over the wire: “Scotch Heather leads, with White-Legs second!” “Scotch Heather still leading at the quarter, and Heart’s Desire pressing White-Legs close.” “Heart’s Desire leads at the half, with the Duke of Kendall second.” “White-Legs, the Duke of Kendall, and Heart’s Desire bunched at the turn.” “Duke of Kendall holds the rail, with Heart’s Desire and White-Legs locked for second place.” Then, for a minute or two, silence took possession of the little brass sounder. Then thrilled out the news: “The Duke of Kendall wins!”
Frances quietly waited, amid the hubbub and crowding and commotion, until the wire report had been duly verified and the full returns posted.
Then, when the little window of the paying clerk slid open for the making of settlements, she deposited her ticket, and quietly asked to have it in hundreds.
Her slip read for two hundred dollars on the Duke of Kendall at odds of fifty to one.
“I guess this shop shuts up mighty soon, on this kind of runnin’,” said the paying clerk sourly, after consulting with his chief, and flinging her money through his little wicket at her. She counted it methodically, amid the gasps and little envious murmurs of the women at her elbow, and then hurried from the room.
“Well, you ought to be happier-looking!” snarled a painted woman with solitaire diamond earrings, as Frances hurried down the half-lighted stairway to the street.
There the woman who ought to be happy signaled moodily for a taxi-cab, and drove straight to Durkin’s apartments.
She flung the pile of bills at him, in a heap before his astonished eyes.
“There it is,” she said, with shaking hands and quivering lips, flashing at him a look in which he could see hatred, contempt, self-disgust and infinite unhappiness.
“There it is!” she called out to him, shrilly. “There it is—all you wanted, at last, and I hope it will make you happy!”
She tore the veil she had dragged from her head between her two distraught hands and flung it from her, and then fell in the other’s arms and wept on his shoulder like a tired child, convulsively, bitterly, hopelessly.