Then it was over. Dickie was flung out; the door was locked against him and Sylvester came back across the floor.
His collar stood up in a half-moon back of his ears, his hair fell across his forehead, his face was flushed, his lip bled. He had either bitten it himself or Dickie had struck it. But he seemed quite calm, only a little breathless. He was neither snarling nor smiling now. He took Sheila very gently by the wrists, drawing her hands down from her face, and he put her arms at their full length behind her, holding them there.
"You meet Dickie here when you're through work, dream-girl," he said gently. "You kiss Dickie when you leave my Aura, you little beacon light. I've kept my hands off you and my lips off you and my mind off you, because I thought you were too fine and good for anything but my ideal. And all this while you've been sneaking up here to Dickie and Jim and Lord knows who else besides. Now, I am agoin' to kiss you and then you gotta get out of Millings. Do you hear? After I've kissed you, you ain't good enough for my purpose—not for mine."
Gathering both her hands in one of his, he put the hard, long fingers of his free hand back of her head, holding it from wincing or turning and his mouth dropped upon hers and seemed to smother out her life. She tasted whiskey and the blood from his cut lips.
"You won't tell me, anyway, that lie again," he panted, keeping his face close, staring into her wide eyes of a horrified childishness—"that you've never been kissed."
Again his lips fastened on her mouth. He let her go, strode to the door, unlocked it, and went out.
She had fallen to the floor, her head against the chair. She beat the chair with her hands, calling softly for her father and for her God. She reproached them both. "You told me it was a good old world," she sobbed. "You told me it was a good old world."
CHAPTER XV
FLAMES
A hot, dry day followed on the cool dawn. In his room Dickie lay across his bed. The sun blazed in at his single long window; the big flies that had risen from the dirty yard buzzed and bumped against the upper pane and made aimless, endless, mazy circles above and below one another in the stifling, odorous atmosphere. Dickie lay there like an image of Icarus, an eternal symbol of defeated youth; one could almost see about his slenderness the trailing, shattered wings. He had wept out the first shock of his anger and his shame; now he lay in a despairing stupor. His bruised face burned and ached; his chest felt tight with the aching and burning of his heart. Any suspicion of his father's interpretation of his presence in Sheila's room was mercifully spared him, but the knowledge that he had been brutally jerked back from her pure and patient lips, had been ignominiously punished before her eyes and turned out like a whipped boy—this knowledge was a dreadful torture to his pride. Sheila, to be sure, did not love him even a little bit; she had said so. All the longing and the tumult of his heart during these months had made no more impression upon her than a frantic sea makes upon the little bird at the top of the cliff. She had, he must think, hardly been aware of it. And it was such a terrible and frantic actuality. He had fancied that it must have beaten forever, day by day, night by night, at her consciousness. Can a woman live near so turbulent a thing and not even guess at its existence? Her hand against his heart had lain so limp and dead. He hadn't hoped, of course, that she loved him the way he loved. Probably no one else could feel what he felt and live—so Dickie in young love's eternal fashion believed in his own miracle; but she might have loved him a little, a very little, in time—if she hadn't seen him beaten and shamed and cuffed out of her presence like a dog. Now there was no hope. No hope at all. No hope. Dickie rocked his head against his arm. He had told Sheila that he would take care of her, but he could not even defend himself. He had told her that he would die to save her any suffering, but, before her, he had writhed and gasped helplessly under the weight of another man's hand, his open hand, not even a fist…. No after act of his could efface from Sheila's memory that picture of his ignominy. She had seen him twisted and bent and beaten and thrown away. His father had triumphantly returned to reassure and comfort her for the insult of a boy's impertinence. Would Sheila defend him? Would she understand? Or would she not be justified in contemptuous laughter at his pretensions?