V
It was a quarter to three. The storm had rolled and clacked above the sleeping town and countryside. The office had been lighted by swift and vivid whips of electric violence. The deluge of nocturnal rain had washed the earth cool and pure again. Steadily in a corner trough outside, an eaves spout emptied with a singing sound,—even as the deserted streets ran mud and rivulets.
The girl still lay in Nathan’s arms. She had not moved. Neither had moved. The boy’s muscles ached. The air was horribly stuffy, almost sickish. Morning would come now—was coming—swiftly.
“Carrie,” said the boy huskily, “there’s a lot we owe to ourselves—to our own—happiness! In fourteen months I’ll be of age. Fourteen months can be a long, long time—or awful, awful short. Suppose, dear, you do as your grandfather wishes—go back to Ohio. Stay there—as best you can. Live as I’ll be living—for the day I’m twenty-one. On that day you and I’ll be married. That’s how much I love you, dear!”
The girl sensed rebuke in his pronouncement. Her face burned. Unconsciously she shrank away. She wholly lacked the capacity to appreciate the depth of the lad’s great affection or the worth of his soul thereby disclosed. The lad went on quickly:
“Go away as if we didn’t mind—as if we agreed to the separation. But I’ll find some one in town to whom you can mail your letters—who’ll slip them safely to me without dad knowing. We can write——”
“Nathan, are you so weak, so under your father’s thumb, that you’re afraid to outwit him?”
“No,” the other whispered. “I’m not.” And he spoke the truth. “I love you, dear. I told you that before.”
“Do you think it’s easy for me to go?” The girl’s voice was tight with pain. What was it she feared? What had happened that night, affecting them both so vitally?
“No easier than it is for me to stay. It’s always hardest for the one who stays, Carrie!”
“You’re a man! Such things mean more to a woman than a man.” They had both traveled far from the night they had talked drivel in the Cuttner sitting room.
“It seems to me the right thing to do, Carrie. There’s really nothing else!”
The girl left his arms. She went to the door. With hands on hips, she stood looking out.
“I see—you don’t love me—as much as I thought you did!” she said bitterly.
“Carrie!” The boy’s cry rang sharp. “Don’t say that! Don’t!”
“What else can I say?”
“Carrie! I——”
“Let’s go home, Nathan. It must be almost morning!”
He came around in front of her. He laid tender hands upon her shoulders. He forced her to look up into his drawn young face.
She suffered it, yet brokenly. She had lifted back a veil from the vestal treasures of her Inner Shrine and he had mocked those treasures somehow. So she believed.
“Carrie,” he promised, “I’ll wait for you, I’ll work for you, I’ll plan for you, I’ll bend all my effort and all my life to make you happy. And it will be very sweet when it comes, dear,—very sweet.”
Her eyes blinked at him several times in the dusk. She turned her face away without answering, off toward that distant arc lamp across the acres of rain-washed rushes.
“I’ll go!” she said in a strained voice. Then she hung her head suddenly.
Nathan raised her face again and drew her to him. Their lips met. But the perturbed boy suddenly shuddered. Carol’s lips were cold, unresponsive.
The boy’s joints were stiff. There was a bitter, brackish taste in his mouth. His head throbbed from lack of sleep. But from his finger he slipped a small bloodstone ring he had purchased the week following the “strike” with the first big money he had ever owned. He found the girl’s left hand. It was cold, lifeless. But the ring fitted her finger. He kissed it.
“Let it stay there dear—until—until——”
The girl turned away. At the door again she stood looking out. Around and around on her finger she turned the ring.