Linda Lee, Incorporated Part 19

And then by a miracle of will-power she managed to master her nerves and, putting aside her horror and humiliation, took thought quickly and clearly.

"All I wan' you to do ish remember, if Mis.h.i.+sh Druce asks if you've seen me, you never heard of me, don' know me 'tall--shee, Jim, shee what I mean?"

As Lucinda drew near the porter must have guessed who she was, for he spoke to Bellamy in a low voice, and the latter swung round with startled eyes and a dropping jaw. She closed her fingers on his wrist and put all her strength into their grasp.

"Come, Bel," she said clearly and not unkindly. "Please don't keep me waiting. The car is here, we're going home."

For a moment the balance wavered, then Bel's eyes fell, and she knew she had won.

"Oh, a'right," he mumbled with strange docility. "Didn' know you were waitin', Linda. Get ri' in the car--be with you in jush a minute."

"No," she said firmly--"you're coming with me now."

She drew him away. He yielded without remonstrance, permitted her to lead him to the door of the car, stumbled in on his knees, and crawled up to the seat. Lucinda followed, the door closed behind her with a clap sweeter than music in her hearing, and with purring gears the car shot out of range of those leering faces.

Lucinda had forgotten Dobbin as utterly as if she had never known him.

Bellamy lay in a loose slouch, breathing heavily. The pa.s.sing lights revealed the stupidity of his congested features. His eyes were half-closed, he seemed to be asleep.

Cringing as far away from him as she could, Lucinda dug nails into her palms to keep from giving over body and mind to the dominion of hysteria. She saw nothing of the streets through which they pa.s.sed, knew no thought other than to preserve her self-control.

When at length the car stopped, she jumped out and, leaving Bellamy to the care of the chauffeur and footman, ran up to her room. The maid waiting there she dismissed for the night in half a dozen words whose decision sent the woman from her in astonishment.

Alone, her first move was to secure the door communicating with Bel's rooms. Then she threw herself upon the bed and lay listening to the noise on the stairway of voices and stumbling feet. The door between the hall and Bel's rooms banged. She heard him maundering incoherently to his valet for a time, a long time; the valet seemed to be trying to make him listen to reason and failing in the end. The neck of a decanter chattered against the rim of a gla.s.s, there was a lull in the murmur of voices, then a thick cry and the thud of a fall. After that the quiet was little disturbed by the valet's labours with the body of the drunkard. Eventually the man went out and closed the door. In the subsequent silence the clock downstairs chimed twelve.

Lucinda rose then, and changed to her simplest street suit.

For half an hour or so she was busy at desk and dressing-table, packing a checque book and her jewels with other belongings in a small handbag.

She did not falter once or waste a single move through indecision.

Indeed, it did not once occur to her that there was anything to be done but what she meant to do.

Shortly after one o'clock she left Bel snoring, crept down the stairs and with infinite stealth let herself out to the street.

n.o.body saw her go, neither did she hesitate as she turned her back upon the home that had till then held for her every precious thing in life.

XIV

Spurred by irrational fear lest Bellamy wake up, discover her flight, and give chase, Lucinda made in haste for Fifth avenue; but had not taken half a dozen steps when a cab slid up to the curb by her side, its driver with two fingers to his cap soliciting a fare. He seemed Heaven-sent. Lucinda breathed the first address that came to mind--"Grand Central, please"--hopped in, and shrank fearfully away from the windows.

On second thought, the destination she had named seemed a sensible choice. Any one of the several hotels which tapped the railroad terminal by subway would take her in for the night. In the morning she would be better able to debate her next step. At present she felt hopelessly incapable of consecutive thought.

At the station a negro porter with a red cap opened the cab door and took possession of her single piece of luggage, and when she had paid off the taxi and looked to him in indecision, prompted her with: "What train was yo' wis.h.i.+n' to tek, ma'm?"

An instant later Lucinda was wondering why she had replied: "The first train for Chicago, please." She knew no reason why she should have named Chicago rather than any other city where she was unknown and where, consequently, she might count on being free to think things out in her own time and fas.h.i.+on.

"Ain't no Chicago train befo' eight-fo'ty-five tomorrow mawnin', ma'm."

"Very well. I'll go to a hotel for tonight."

"Yes'm. W'ich hotel, Commodo', Biltmo', Belmont?"

Lucinda settled on the Commodore, because it was the largest of the three and she would be lost in the mult.i.tude of its patrons.

She registered as _Mrs. L. Druce_, _Chicago_, and, before proceeding to her room, arranged to have the head porter purchase her ticket and reservation the first thing in the morning.

Some hours later she was awakened by a cramp in one of her arms and found that she had fallen asleep while sitting on the edge of her bed.

In a daze she finished undressing, and sleep again overwhelmed her like a dense, warm, obliterating cloud.

It seemed but a minute or two before she was being scolded awake by the shrewish tongue of the telephone by the head of the bed, to hear a dispa.s.sionate voice recite the information that it was seven o'clock, the hour at which she had asked to be called.

She felt as if she had not slept at all.

Again, in the train, the aching misery of heart and mind could not prevent her nodding and drowsing all morning long; and after a meal of railroad food by way of luncheon, she gave up trying to stave off the needs of a highly organized nature fatigued by inordinate strains, called the porter, had him make up the lower berth in her drawing-room, and went to bed.

In the neighborhood of midnight she woke up to discover, first by peering out under the edge of the window-shade at concrete platforms bleakly blue and bare in the glare of unseen lamps, then by consulting a timetable, that the train was in Cleveland.

As it pulled out again, she resigned herself to the inescapable. Rested, her mind clear and active, and with nothing to do but think for eight hours more, she must go down into the h.e.l.l appointed.

Nor was she spared any portion of its torments. Successively and in concert, vanity wounded to the quick, sickening self-pity, and implacable, grinding regret laid hold on her heart and soul and worried them till she had to bury her face in the pillow and sink her teeth into it to keep from screaming.

It was cruel enough to have loved and lost, but to have lost and still to love seemed punishment intolerable. The shameful knowledge that body and spirit still hungered for the man who had served both so shabbily ate into her amour-propre like a corrosive acid.

To her agonized imagination she figured in the semblance of a leaf hara.s.sed by that high wind of fatality which latterly had swept into and through her life with Bel, driving them asunder; a leaf torn from the homely branch that had given it life and nurtured it, a leaf hunted helplessly into strange ways and corners, even now being hounded on and on.... And to what end?...

She burned with resentment of her persecution by those unknown powers whose ill-will she had not wittingly done anything to invite, she writhed in the exasperation bred of her impotence to placate them or withstand their oppression.

A lull fell at last in the transports of her pa.s.sion, she lay quite still, and her mind too grew calm in awareness of the quiet, resolute mustering of all her forces to wrest from malicious chance and circ.u.mstance the right to live a life of her own choosing; as if her soul, drawing strength from new-found knowledge of its indestructible integrity, lifted up its head and with calm eyes challenged Fate.

Her paroxysms were now spent and ended, the past had been put definitely behind her, it was with the future alone that she had need to be concerned.

She addressed herself to the task of taking stock of Lucinda Druce, the woman all alone, her condition and resources, and of trying to map out for her a new and independent existence that would prove somehow livable.

If she had not succeeded in this undertaking when the train breathed its last weary puffs under the echoing gla.s.s canopy of the La Salle Street station, success was not forfeited, it was but deferred. There was so much to be taken into consideration, she could not yet see further than tomorrow, if so far. Certain immediate steps were indicated to her intelligence as requisite and reasonable; whither they would lead she could by no means guess.

Bred on the Atlantic seaboard, she knew more of Europe than of the United States west of the Alleghenies. Chicago to her was a city that once had burned to the ground because a cow kicked over a lighted lamp; a city famous for great winds, something known as "the Loop," something hardly less problematic called "stock-yards." The name of a hotel, too, the Blackstone, had found lodgment in her memory.

The short drive in a yellow taxicab from the station to the hotel through a labyrinth of back streets a-brawl with traffic, failed to register any impressions other than of cobblestones, blasphemous truck drivers, street-cars pounding and clanging, begrimed buildings, endless columns of self-absorbed footfarers. The hotel itself seemed in grateful contrast, it might have been one of her own New York. Only the view from her rooms, many stories above the street, of a public park bleached, frost-bitten, desolate, and slashed by a black railroad cutting, and beyond this a vast expanse of tumbled waters, slate-grey flecked with white, blending with a grim grey sky, drove home the fact that her first uncertain gropings toward a new life were to be framed in a foreign, and to her perceptions an unfriendly, environment.

But she turned from the window with the light of battle in her eyes.

Nature was wasting its effects, she was not to be disheartened by an ill-dispositioned day.

After breakfast she went out to do a little necessary shopping, and spent the morning and most of her cash in hand as well in department stores which she was unreasonably surprised to find differed not materially from establishments of the same character in the East, save in the crowds that thronged them, drab rivers of people persistently strange in her sight.

But the experience served to remind her that she had more material problems to solve than those provided by her inner life. She found herself running short of ready money and with a checque-book valueless unless she were willing to prove her ident.i.ty as the wife of Bellamy Druce.