IV
"The thirteenth move. Didn't I say it would be unlucky!"
Ikey had fled to the garden, letter in hand, to review the situation. The low clouds threatened rain. But what did that matter? The house stifled her with its large, low, mannish rooms and continued reminder of Arthur Hammond; and she had to think—think—think everything out from the very beginning.
That first evening—when she wakened in the dusk at his side in the automobile and stared bewildered at the dim outline of the low, rambling brown house tucked away among shrubbery under a load of vines—how quick he had been to reassure her, to explain that a friend of his, who had expected to come here with his bride, had had to go to Mexico instead and had asked him to occupy the bungalow until their return. A woman and a Chinaman went with the place; and she would have the run of a large garden. She could get rested there; and he could go to and from town every day.
And the days that followed—how careful he had been; how matter-of-fact and unemotional; never touching her; never making any sudden motion towards her; never referring to that short ten minutes at the clergyman's; never going near the two rooms the respectable English housekeeper had conducted her to that first evening.
"Almost as though he were trying to tame a bird," she had thought half whimsically, after the first days, when the feeling of weariness and fright had worn down and a great relief and great thankfulness had taken its place, that she should never see the boarding-house again with its sneering, insulting landlady, or the office where that man with the eager, shifty, cruel little eyes held rule.
And so she had set herself about it, resolutely, though bewildered, to be an anchor to this big, unemotional young man who had so suddenly come out of the background of her existence and was occupying all possible space immediately behind the footlights.
She did not at all know what an anchor did, or said, or how it acted. But the very perplexity for some reason or other sent her spirits sky-high. And she pottered about the garden with him, and whizzed about the country in the automobile,—it belonged to the same friend who wanted him to look after the place,—and poked about the queer, rambling house, content to see no one else and talk to no one else and amazed at herself that this should be so.
Only once had he made any reference to their situation, when he suggested that it might be as well under the circumstances for her to call him Arthur.
"I shall never call you Arthur. Never," she told him hotly. "I loathe the name. Always have. It sounds so deadly respectable."
"You don't care for respectability?" His tone was so affable.
Ikey considered. "It may have advantages, in some cases. But——"
"Then what am I to be called?"
She might have retorted that she should call him nothing at all: he never addressed her by any name. Instead, she answered, "Boobles."
"Boobles?"
"Boobles," she repeated firmly. And then came laughter. Ikey's rages had a way of breaking up in inconvenient bursts of hilarity these days.
But what difference did that make now? What difference did anything make?
"I don't see," Ikey said to herself desperately, "what makes me so stupid. I'm afflicted with chronic mental nearsightedness. Most distressing. This is really a tragedy I'm mixed up in—a tragedy. And tragedy's a thing I never cared for."
She collapsed miserably on a bench and stared at the letter.
"It's queer how tragedy and going to sea give you the same feeling."
It was not pity—oh, no—that had made him want to marry her. And it was not love. And it was not because he needed an anchor. Not he. He was not that kind. It was simply because she was his opportunity. Yes; that was the word. And she had never suspected.
Not that afternoon in the vacant lot, when he had inquired so exhaustingly as to her bank account.
Not the next week, when he appeared from town in the middle of the afternoon, all unheralded and paler than ordinary, with papers to sign, and the exhilarating news that the insurance companies had paid up, and a new bank-book with her name and comforting fat figures in it.
How desperately glad she had been over that. For hot shame possessed her at her appearance—shabby clothes and hardly any of them, when his ready-made dust-colored garments had immediately been replaced by the well-fitting blue serge that was her special weakness in masculine attire. She had invested heavily in frills and slowly regained her self-respect.
And not when he had appeared with a list of her property—how had he come by that list?—stating that he had made arrangements to lease certain pieces and rebuild at once on the others, and asking her approval of the final arrangements.
She had not suspected him then, either, idiot that she was. She had been too busy being rested, being thankful, being happy in the big garden, tucked away from the people who had failed her and the ghastly city and the memory of its great disaster.
She turned to the letter again. Bixler McFay had always written a good letter. This time he quite surpassed himself.
Heart-broken, unreconciled; his hopes shipwrecked; his faith destroyed. How could she have treated him so? She had been practically engaged to him; and she had left him a prey to every horrible emotion at a time when one word would have put his mind at rest. No clew as to her whereabouts by which he could trace her.
She passed that over with her little crooked, sarcastic smile. She had telegraphed and written both—and the second letter had been registered. He had probably forgotten that little fact. But it was of little consequence now. The sting lay in what followed.
And then what did he learn? the letter inquired. That a man he supposed to be his friend, a fellow he had met daily in Arizona for a couple of months at a time, had systematically pumped him about her; had taken means of ascertaining her financial status, and, recognizing her as his opportunity (that was where the word came from) had rushed off to San Francisco, married her hand over fist, and launched himself as a capitalist—on her capital. And she had allowed it.
The girl dropped the pages in her lap. Her little fist came down on top of them.
"It's a despicable letter," she told herself hotly. "And what he thinks to gain by it, I don't know. He just wants to make trouble.—And he has," she breathed with a downward sigh.
The question was, what to do now. And pride stood at her elbow and pointed out the only course.
This Arthur Hammond, this big, quiet, self-contained, efficient, indifferent young man—whose opportunity she was—must never know that she knew, or, knowing, cared.
That was the only solution. Pride forbade a scene—on his account; on hers; on Bixler McFay's; on everybody's, when it came to that. No one should know—anything.
"After a while I shall get quite old and pin-cushiony," she assured herself, "and pricks won't prick; and nothing will matter. I must be quite affable, and quite indifferent, and always polite—for women are only rude to men they care about." Her lips trembled. "It's all happened before, hundreds of times to hundreds of women—and money is very interesting to men—and there's no reason why this shouldn't happen to you, Ikey, dear—and a hundred of years from now it won't make any difference anyway.
"But I'll never tell him anything again——"
For latterly she had told him many things about herself—young lonesomenesses that nothing could dispel; family hunger for brothers and sisters and all the ramifications of a home; and, half unconsciously, her utter content with the present. She turned hot at the thought of it all.
"But one thing I won't stand." She jumped up and made for the house. "He shan't have my photograph on his dressing-table."
She had seen it there one day on passing his open door, and had wondered, wide-eyed, how he came by it—it was one she had had taken in the East—and had felt unaccountably shy at the thought of asking him about it.
She tore into the house, to get it, to destroy it, to tear it into tiny bits, and trample upon it—at once, without a moment to lose—when, rushing up the porch steps, she collided with the one person of all others she least expected to see.