Then he began to speculate, as he cooled, over the trouble up yonder. A whole city burning? They would surely get it under control. He began to think of the isolation; the telegraph wires all down. That might happen anywhere! He walked to the door and looked thoughtfully at the company’s big water-tower. That wasn’t such a bad idea! He picked up his hat, and went out.
CHAPTER XV
THE WRONG MAN
MRS. Hardin heard from every source but the right one that Rickard had returned. Each time her telephone rang, it was his voice she expected to hear. She began to read a meaning into his silence. She could think of nothing else than the strange coincidence that had brought their lives again close. Or was it a coincidence? That idea sent her thoughts far afield.
She was thinking too much of him, for peace of mind, those days of waiting, but the return of the old lover had made a wonderful break in her life. Her eyes were brighter; her smile was less forced. She spent most of her days at the sewing-machine. A lot of lace was whipped on to lingerie frocks of pale colors. She was a disciple of an eastern esthete. “Women,” he had said, “should buy lace, not by the yard, but by the mile.”
She had attended his lectures while in New York, acquiring a distaste for all her possessions. He had taught her to disdain golden-oak, to fear bric-à-brac, to forswear all vivid colors. She could see no charm in the tailor-made girl, in Innes’ trig shirt-waists and well-cut skirts. The yellow khakis always outraged her sense of beauty. The girl’s ideas on fitness would have shocked and wounded her.
As her fingers worked among the laces and soft mulls, her mind roved down avenues that should have been closed to her, a wife. She would have protested, had any one accused her of infidelity in those days, yet day by day, she was straying farther from her husband’s side. She convinced herself that Tom’s gibes and ill-humor were getting harder to endure.
It was inevitable that the woman of harem training should relive the Lawrence days. The enmity of those two men, both her lovers, was pregnant with romantic suggestion. The drama of desert and river centered now in the story of Gerty Hardin. Rickard, who had never married! The deduction, once unveiled, lost all its shyness. And every one saw that he disliked her husband!
She knew now that she had never loved Tom. She had turned to him in those days of pride when Rickard’s anger still held him aloof. How many times had she gone over those unreal hours! Who could have known that his anger would last? That hour in the honeysuckles; his kisses! None of Hardin’s rougher kisses had swept her memory of her exquisite delight—delirious as was her joy, there was room for triumph. She had seen herself clear of the noisy boarding-house. Herself, Gerty Holmes, the wife of a professor; able to have the things she craved, to have them openly; no longer having to scheme for them.
It was through Rickard’s eyes that she had seen the shortcomings of the college boarding-house. She had acquired a keen consciousness of those quizzical eyes. When they had isolated her, at last, appealing to her sympathy or amusement, separating her from all those boisterous students, her dream of bliss had begun.
In those days, she had seen Hardin through the eyes of the young instructor, younger by several years than his pupil. Her thud of disappointed anger, of dislike, when the face of Hardin peered through the leafy screen! To have waited, prayed for that moment, and to have it spoiled like that! There had been days when she had wept because she had not shown her anger! How could she know that everything would end there; end, just beginning! Her boarding-house training had taught her to be civil. It was still vivid to her, her anxiety, her tremulousness—with Hardin talking forever of a play he had just seen; Rickard growing stiffer, angrier, refusing to look at those lips still warm with his kisses!