There was no stopping him. With a heavy crooked cane in his strong hand and the perspiration running from his handsome face, he staggered toward the spot where I was sitting. And yet, though he had raised his stick to strike the chandelier above the next table and had let out a yelp of childish delight before he saw me, I had felt no fear of him.
I can tell you, the effect of the meeting of our eyes was astonishing. I’m thinking there wasn’t a muscle in his body that did not pull at him to straighten him up, to take off his hat, to bend him a little backward, as if he had thrust his face among thistles.
As I sat there, looking at those brown eyes of his and listening to his frightened, heavy breathing, I knew well enough I had come to a place where my road of life split and ran in two directions. There are things we know, not by thought or reason or culture, but by the instincts, I’m thinking, that Heaven has put into us along with the rest of the animals. And he knew it, too, perhaps, for he saw me leaning forward on my elbows and a little white and scared of something that can’t be put into words at all, and it sobered him, I can tell you.
“What are you doing here?” he said, as though he had known me these six thousand years.
Silly fool that I was, the color came rushing up into my face and I feared to speak. Believe it or not as you like, I could see Welstoke’s thin lips saying, “Though your nose and your eyes is very refined, it’s your manner of speech as discloses you, my poor dear,” and I was silent as a stone, for I thought him a fine gentleman.
“Do you disapprove of me?” says he.
I smiled, I suppose, but my lips only moved. And a look of pain came into his face.
“Somewhere else—some other time,” he rather whispered. “God knows how. But you will remember Monty Cranch. It’s not soon you’ll be forgetting him, girl.”
With that he turned and walked out of the place as straight as an arrow, and his words were true—as true as death. And though it was all many years ago, I can tell you, it seems to me now that I can hear the water lapping in the canal outside the lattice and see the wind nodding the flowers on the table that were mocking me—a nosegay one minute, and the next a bouquet for a tomb of something gone and buried. Nor from then to now have I opened these lips to tell living soul of that meeting.
Life kept on as it had been going, with many things sliding in and out, but they have nothing to do with what is hanging over us now. Welstoke and I finally came to America, however, and then luck began to turn. There is a great joke behind the scenes of the little dramas of each of us, and the old lady, who had laid her hand on many a twisted wrist or swollen elbow, began with a joint in her thumb and in six months’ time was a hundred shapes with the rheumatism. She was all out of scandals and blackmail then, and lay in bed with her own self coming out, in evil curses for pain and her losses on ’Change, and slow horses, and she who had claptrapped thousands was caught herself by a slick brown man who called himself a Hindoo Yogi and treated her by burning cheap incense in a brass bowl, and a book of prayer that he called the “Word of Harmonious Equilibrium.”