She took the little girls by the hand and went off, and Blakie stood for a moment, looking after them. Then he went into his private office and shut the door. There was some work he wanted to do before lunch; but he could not do it. The feel of those little hot hands had stirred him intolerably. His children! He loved them so, he wanted them so! His children!
“I’ll never forgive her!” he cried in his heart. “It was a damnable thing to do, to break up their home! They’re worried and puzzled. Poor little kids!”
His life with Katherine had been a misery to him, but he would have endured it all his days rather than hurt his children. It was she who had left her home. She had told him often enough that she “couldn’t stand it,” but he had never expected that.
“Heartless,” she had called him, and “a stiff, solemn prig.” That had been her standard reproach for him—that he was a prig. When, coming home late, he had found the children still up, romping with Katherine and mad with excitement, and he had protested, she had called him a prig. When he had asked her not to come down to breakfast in a dressing gown, and when he had asked her to be more careful of her gossip before the children, she had said the same thing.
He had wanted to give them a normal, decent life, to assure them a good start.
“And, by Heaven, I will!” he thought. “I’ll have them, alone, for half the year. I can give them some sort of idea!”
Then, at the end of his six months, they would go back to Katherine and her careless, rebellious life—breakfast in a dressing gown; old Madge doing the work of the house just as it suited her; the telephone ringing and people dropping in; Katherine, with her shining black hair in a great, untidy knot, sitting at the piano, singing.
He could never think of her singing without a twinge of pain, because of what it had once meant to him—the big, glorious voice that came pouring from her throat without effort; the feeling in it, the pity, the tenderness. “Theatrical,” he had learned to call it, just as he had learned to look upon her beauty with a fastidious detachment. Certainly she was beautiful—a tall, full-bosomed, long-limbed creature, with a lazy grace in every movement, and a face indestructibly lovely, with dark gray eyes, clear, fine features, and a mouth too wide, too generous, unforgetably sweet.
It seemed to him that whatever Katherine took in her careless hands she ruined. She wasted everything. She had had a magnificent career before her, in light opera, and she had thrown it aside to marry him; and now she had thrown him aside, hurt beyond healing. His love for her had been a madness. He had been swept off[Pg 538] his feet, infatuated, desperate; and she had been so kind in the beginning—kinder than any other woman could be.
“Because she had her own way,” he thought.