VII
Madeline’s aunt didn’t believe one word of her niece’s story. Madeline quarreled haughtily and scornfully with her, but in her own heart she couldn’t blame her. She wouldn’t have believed it herself. Getting lost in a motor car with a millionaire! That was simply nonsense.
She lay down on the bed in her dismal little room, as close to despair as she was ever likely to be. One of the girls had come from Compson’s, and her aunt had said she didn’t know where Madeline was.
“I can never go back there!” she thought. “Never, never!”
She might have been mourning for a lost paradise. After all, it was as hard for her to lose her standing among her peers at the chophouse as for a duchess to lose prestige in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair. She had nothing else.
She neither expected nor wished to see Bradley again. He was a sinister mystery to her; she couldn’t understand him at all. She was convinced that he had got lost on purpose. The very fact of his not having tried to make love to her made the case all the more perturbing. He must have some deep design which she could not yet fathom.
He was bad. He drank. He went gladly to road houses where every one was bad, and drank, and danced improperly. His fascination was the fascination of a villain. His whole life must be a phantasmagoria of splendid evil.
As the room grew dark, she shuddered at the very thought of him. She dozed, and dreamed nightmares, and woke and cried and slept again. The blessed security of her honest, hard-working life was gone. She would have to give up her job. She couldn’t face the other girls again. Perhaps she was caught in one of those awful snares elaborately laid by millionaires for the daughters of the poor. Perhaps it was Bradley’s purpose to see that she never got another job—to hound her to the brink of starvation, that she might be obliged to listen to his evil proposals.
“I’d rather die!” she cried to herself with a sob.
There was not a soul in the world to assuage the heartsick young creature, no one to speak a word of common sense or solace. Her preposterous fears were terribly real to her. She had eaten nothing all day. She was exhausted, frightened, inimitably wretched.
She heard her aunt moving about in the kitchen. She knew that nothing on earth could induce the older woman to bring her even a cup of tea, and nothing could persuade her to ask for it.
“Not after what she said!” thought Madeline. “It would choke me!”
She fell asleep again, and was awakened by her aunt’s hand on her shoulder.
“Here’s that Mr. Ritchie,” the aunt announced.
“Well, tell him to go away!” replied Madeline.
“Tell him yourself,” said her aunt promptly. “I guess I got something better to do than carry messages for you!”
Her aunt was a severe, stout, bespec[Pg 100]tacled creature of fifty, a woman of invincible propriety, and Madeline’s conduct had stricken her to the heart. She was as glad to see Ritchie as if he were an angel, because obviously he could remedy all that was wrong; but she had no other way of expressing gratification, affection, or the most profound grief, than by her habitual disagreeableness.
“That’s just like you,” said Madeline.
She rose, too wretched to care how she looked, and went into the lugubrious little parlor where Ritchie waited.
“Well! I thought maybe you were sick,” said he.
“Well, I’m not,” she replied.
There was an awkward silence.
“Well!” he said at last. “Then what about going to the movies?”
Although he refused, as always, to look squarely at her, he had none the less observed her wan and tear-stained face, her untidy hair, her piteous dejection. Something which he imagined to be anger came over him.
“You been out with that feller?” he demanded.
“That’s my business!” returned Madeline valiantly.
“Well, if you—if you had more sense,” he said, and paused. He could not well have been more miserable than he was at that moment, nor could he have concealed it better. “Well!” he said again, with a sort of fury. “All right! It’s nothing to do with me. Go ahead! Suit yourself!”
He drew one of his books from his pocket, opened it, and held it out to her in a shaking hand.
“You can just look at this, if you like,” he said. “I’m going away to-morrow—that’s all I’ve got to say!”
She did look. Heavily underscored were two lines unfamiliar to her, and of striking beauty and significance:
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Mr. Ritchie flung the book down on the table and walked out.