CHAPTER XXVIII
“Surely this is Indian Summer—strayed or stolen!” said Frank one morning a few days later, as she wheeled Durkin and his big arm-chair into the sunlight by the open window.
His arm was healing slowly, and his strength was equally slow in coming back to him. Yet she was not altogether unhappy during those fleeting days of work and anxiety.
Her darkest moments were those when she saw that Durkin was fretting over the loss of his ill-gained fortune, burning with his subterranean fires of hatred for MacNutt, and inwardly vowing that he would yet live to have his day.
She was still hoping that time, the healer, would in some way attend to each of his wounds, though that of the spirit, she knew, was the deeper of the two. Yet from day to day she saw that his resentment lay sourly embedded in him, like a bullet; her only hope was that what nature could neither reject nor absorb it would in due time encyst with indifference. So if she herself became a little infected with his spirit of depression, she struggled fiercely against it and showed him only the cheeriest inglenooks of her many-chambered emotions.
“See, it’s almost like spring again!” she cried joyously, as she leaned over his chair and watched the morning sunlight, misty and golden on the city house-tops.
The window-curtains swayed and flapped in the humid breeze; the clatter of feet on the asphalt, the rumble of wheels and the puff and whir of passing automobiles came up to them from the street below.
“It seems good to be alive!” she murmured pensively, as she slipped down on the floor and sat in the muffled sunlight, leaning against his knees. There was neither timidity nor self-consciousness in her attitude, as she sat there companionably, comfortably, with her thoughts far away.
For a long time Durkin looked down at her great tumbled crown of chestnut hair, glinting here and there with its touch of reddish gold. He could see the quiet pulse beating in the curved ivory of her throat.
She grew conscious of his eyes resting on her, in time, and turned her face solemnly up to him. He held it there, with the oval of her chin caught in the hollow of his hand.
“Frank, there’s something I’m going to ask you, for the twentieth time!”
She knew what it was even before he spoke. But she did not stop him, for this new note of quiet tenderness in his voice had taken her by surprise.
“Frank, can’t you—won’t you marry me, now?”
She shook her head mournfully.
“Isn’t it enough that I’m near you and can help you, and that we can both still go and come as we want to?”
“No, I get only the little fragments of your life, and I want all of it. If you can’t do it willingly, of course, it’s as silly for me to demand it as to try to nail that sunbeam down to the floor there! But tell me, has there ever been another?”
“No, never, Jim!” she cried. “There was never any one who could make me so happy—and so miserable,—who could make me so unsatisfied with myself and with my life!”
He studied her upturned face. In it he imagined he could see all the old opposition of the dual and strangely contending nature. About the shadowy eyes seemed to lurk the weariness and the rebelliousness of the inwardly pure woman who had been driven to face life in its more dubious phases, the woman who had broken laws and essayed great hazards with him. Yet about the fresh young mouth remained all the pride and virginal purity of the woman whose inward life was till virginal and pure. In this, he felt, lay the bitterest thing of all. She was still a good woman, but the memory of how, through the dark and devious ways of the career that seemed to have engulfed her, she had fought and struggled for that almost incongruous purity of mind and body, remained to him a tragic and autumnal emblem of what her unknown earlier, April-like goodness of girlish soul must have been. He sighed as he thought of it, before he began to speak again, for it gave him the haunting impression that he had been cheated out of something; that the beauty and rapture of that Aprilian girlhood should have been his, and yet had eluded him.
“Even though there had been another,” he went on quietly, “I don’t believe it would count. Isn’t it strange how we all beat and flutter and break our wings around a beautiful face! One face, just a little softer, one woman’s eyes, just a little deeper, and one voice, a little mellower; and dear me, dear me—how this wayward mortal passion of ours throbs and beats and surges about it! One beautiful face, and it sends world-history all awry, and brings out armies and changes maps, and makes men happy or miserable, as it likes!”
“That’s the first time I ever knew you were a poet!” she cried in almost a coo of pride.
His hand lay heavily on her crown of tumbled gold hair. “Won’t you marry me?” he asked again, as quietly as before.
“Oh, Jim,” she cried, “I’m afraid of it! I’m afraid of myself, and of you!”
“But see what we’ve been through together—the heights and the depths. And we never hated each other, there!”
“But there were times, I know there were times when you might have, if you were tied to me! We were each free to go and come. But it’s not that, Jim, I’m so afraid of. It’s the keeping on at what we have been doing, the danger of not keeping decent, of getting our thoughts and feelings deadened, of getting our hearts macadamized. That’s why I could never marry you until we are both honest once more!”
“But if I do try to get decent—I can’t promise to turn angel all at once, you know!—if I do try to be decent, then will you marry me, and help me along?”
“I don’t look for miracles,—neither of us can be all good, anyway; it’s the trying to be good!”
“But we have tried—so often!”
“Who was it said that the Saints were only the sinners who kept on trying?”
“Wasn’t there a bishop in your family?” he asked, with a quizzical little upthrust of his mouth corners.
“A bishop?” she asked, all gravity.
“There must have been a bishop, somewhere—you take to preaching so easily!”
“It’s only to make it easier for you,” she reproved him. Then she added drearily, “Heaven knows, I’m not self-righteous!”
“Then take me as I am, and you will be making it easier for me!”
“I could, Jim, if I thought you would begin by doing one thing.”
“And that is?”
“Not try to get even with MacNutt.”
She could feel the galvanic movement of uncontrol that sped down his knees.
“When that damned welcher gives me back what is mine, fair and square and honest, then he can go his way and I’ll go mine—but not before!”
“But, was it fair and square and honest?”
“About as much so as most of the money people get—and I’m going to have it!”
“And that means going back to all the old mean, humiliating ways, to the old, degrading dodges, and the old, incessant dangers!”
“But it’s ours, that money—every cent of it—it’s what we’ve got to have to start over again with!”
“Then you will scheme and plot and fight for it? And keep on and on and on, struggling in this big quicksand of wrong-doing, until we are deeper than ever?”
“Do you forgive MacNutt?”
“No, I do not! I can’t, for your sake. But I would rather lie and scheme and plot myself than see you do it. A woman is different—I don’t know how or why it is, but in some way she has a fiercer furnace of sacrifice. If her wickedness is for another, her very love burns away all the dross of deceit and selfishness!”
“I hate to hear you talk that way, when you know you’re good and true as gold, through and through. And I want you to be my wife, Frank, no matter what it costs or what it means.”
“But will you make this promise?”
“It’s—it’s too hard on you! Think of the grind and the monotony and the skimping! And besides, supposing you saw a chance to get the upper hand of MacNutt in some way, would you fold your hands and sigh meekly and let it slip past?”
“I can’t promise that I would! But it’s you I’m afraid of, and that I’m trying to guard and protect and save from yourself!”
She caught up his free hand and held it closely in her own.
“Listen,” he broke in irrelevantly, “there’s a hurdy-gurdy somewhere down in the street! Hear it?”
The curtains swayed in the breeze; the street sounds crept to them, muffled and far away.
“Can’t you promise?” she pleaded.
“I could promise you anything, Frank,” he said after a long pause. “Yes,” he repeated, “I promise.”
She crept closer to him, and with a little half-stifled, half-hungry cry held his face down to her own. He could feel the abandon of complete surrender in the most intimate warmth of her mouth, as it sought and clung to his own.
When her uplifted arms that had locked about his neck once more fell away, and the heavy head of dull gold sank capitulatingly down on his knee, the hurdy-gurdy had passed out of hearing, and the lintel-shadow had crept down to where they sat.