Friendship and Folly: A Novel

by Maria Louise Pool

To this remark Lawrence made no reply. The two were walking now towards the Ponce. Unconsciously Lawrence hastened his steps.

When the door had closed upon them in their own apartments, Prudence suddenly turned to her husband, flung her arms about his neck, and pressed her head against his breast. She sobbed; she clung to him as if she could never let him go; and when he sat down with her held close in his arms, she lifted her tear-wet face, put a hand under his chin, and held his face away while she looked long and tenderly into his eyes.

How could he have been so angry? How could he ever forget for a moment the look he saw on her face now?

These were the questions he was asking himself, while his heart beat with the old rapture, the old intensity of joy in her presence.

"You ought not to be cruel to me," she murmured, after awhile. Then, with a long, quivering breath, her head sank on his shoulder, and the two sat silent.

At last Lawrence became aware that his wife had fallen asleep. He looked down at her with inexpressible tenderness. He lightly kissed her forehead. He was already telling himself that he had been harsh, brutal. Was she never to speak to any one save him?

But, though he thought thus, though the burden in his arms was so unutterably dear to him, he had a conviction that he should not be able to refrain from returning to the subject of Meramble. Things were not yet satisfactorily settled. Lawrence could not understand how any self-respecting man could be willing that any of his womankind should be more than barely civil to a person like Meramble. Even women here in St. Augustine, who skimmed very near the fence that separated the respectable from those that were not respectable, stopped at Meramble. Some of them looked over the fence longingly, for Meramble was said to be mysteriously entertaining, and charmingly devoted when he chose to be so. And there was about his appearance something that seemed a cross between a man of the world and a bandit. And he could sing; why, those who had heard him averred that even Mario could never have so "charmed with a tenor note the souls in purgatory" as could this man.

Still, Meramble was "in society" and yet was only tolerated. The stories about him perhaps made him more interesting, while they made people afraid. The men nodded distantly at him; what friends he found were women who would not be thought intimate with him, but who would not cut him dead, on "account of his brigand face," their husbands said.

It may be permitted to remark here that the time when a man thinks he has been "harsh and brutal" is the time when his wife can most easily "twist him about her finger."

When Prudence woke, ten minutes later, she found Lawrence sitting motionless lest he should disturb her. She opened her eyes and gazed sleepily at him for an instant. Then she smiled and nestled still nearer to him.