“But I must see her, and at once!” he told the impassive clerk.
It would be possible in twenty minutes, was the second message that came down to him.
Frances engaged—and not able to see him! The very idea of it startled and enraged him. Who had the right to stand between them?—he demanded of himself, with irrational fierceness. And out of the very midst of his soft and consuming eagerness to see her sprang up a mad fire of jealousy and uncertainty. Who was there, he again demanded of himself,—who was there that could come in this way between Frances Candler and himself, at such a time and under such circumstances? After all, her career was one of open and continuous deception. There was MacNutt! And Ottenheimer! And a dozen more! She made it her business to deceive and dupe others, so artfully, so studiously, so laboriously—why would she not use her tools on him as well? Was she, indeed, as open and candid as he had taken her to be?—she, with all her soft little feline graces, and with all that ambiguous and unknown past of hers!
And yet he remembered how she had held out against him, how he, with his laxer code, had often hurt and wounded every feeling of her sensitive nature. Even before this he had tried to argue that crime in one phase of life implied moral weakness in all other phases of that same career. Yet there she obdurately though pantingly stood, unyielding, stanch, clean of mind and life, a woman of stern honor—and through it all an adventuress and a robber! A black-leg with the conscience of a schoolgirl!—and he laughed inwardly and bitterly at the cheap irony of it all.
His icy and exacting scrutiny of her, as he stepped into her private room, sapped all the warmth out of her greeting. She had thrown on a loose-fitting dressing-gown of pale blue, which showed the white fulness of her arms and throat and darkened the violet of her brooding and seemingly unsatisfied eyes. She was more than beautiful, Durkin had told himself, with a little gulp of anguish. But why had the corroding poison of criminal inclination been poured into a glass so tinted and fragile and lovely to the sight! For there, as he looked at her with still angry and suspicious eyes, he realized, for the first time, just what she was to him, just how completely and implacably she had subjugated him.
“What is it?” she demanded, with a sudden little flutter of fear, standing halfway across the room.
“Who was in this room with you?” he demanded.
She studied his face for a moment or two, slowly shaking her head from side to side. He noticed the tumbled wealth of her glinting chestnut hair, here and there almost a golden red, and again a gulp of anguish swelled at his throat. It was no wonder that MacNutt had good use for her.
“Who has been up here with you?” he repeated miserably, but inexorably.
She seemed to sigh a little, and then her slow English laugh melted out through the room. It was a quiet and sorrowful little laugh, but it shattered the tragedy from the overstrained moment.