The Breaking Point Part 62

"Poor Bev!" he said. "We've made pretty much a mess of it, haven't we?"

He patted her and let her go, and her eyes followed him as he left the room. The elder brotherliness of that embrace had told her the truth as he could never have hurt her in words. She went back to the chair where he had sat, and leaned her cheek against it.

After a time she went slowly upstairs and into her room. When her maid came in she found her before the mirror of her dressing-table, staring at her reflection with hard, appraising eyes.

Leslie's partner, wandering into the hotel at six o'clock, found from the disordered condition of the room that Leslie had been back, had apparently bathed, shaved and made a careful toilet, and gone out again.

Joe found himself unexpectedly at a loose end. Filled, with suppressed indignation he commenced to dress, getting out a s.h.i.+rt, hunting his evening studs, and lining up what he meant to say to Leslie over his defection.

Then, at a quarter to seven, Leslie came in, top-hatted and morning-coated, with a yellowing gardenia in his b.u.t.tonhole and his shoes covered with dust.

"h.e.l.lo, Les," Joe said, glancing up from a laborious struggle with a stud. "Been to a wedding?"

"Why?"

"You look like it."

"I made a call, and since then I've been walking."

"Some walk, I'd say," Joe observed, looking at him shrewdly. "What's wrong, Les? Fair one turn you down?"

"Go to h.e.l.l," Leslie said irritably.

He flung off his coat and jerked at his tie. Then, with it hanging loose, he turned to Joe.

"I'm going to tell you something. I know it's safe with you, and I need some advice. I called on a woman this afternoon. You know who she is.

Beverly Carlysle."

Joe whistled softly.

"That's not the point," Leslie declaimed, in a truculent voice. "I'm not defending myself. She's a friend; I've got a right to call there if I want to."

"Sure you have," soothed Joe.

"Well, you know the situation at home, and who Livingstone actually is.

The point is that, while that poor kid at home is sitting around killing herself with grief, Clark's gone back to her. To Beverly Carlysle."

"How do you know?"

"Know? I saw him this afternoon, at her house."

He sat still, moodily reviewing the situation. His thoughts were a chaotic and unpleasant mixture of jealousy, fear of Nina, anxiety over Elizabeth, and the sense of a lost romantic adventure. After a while he got up.

"She's a nice kid," he said. "I'm fond of her. And I don't know what to do."

Suddenly Joe grinned.

"I see," he said. "And you can't tell her, or the family, where you saw him!"

"Not without raising the deuce of a row."

He began, automatically, to dress for dinner. Joe moved around the room, rang for a waiter, ordered orange juice and ice, and produced a bottle of gin from his bag. Leslie did not hear him, nor the later preparation of the c.o.c.ktails. He was reflecting bitterly on the fact that a man who married built himself a wall against romance, a wall, compounded of his own new sense of responsibility, of family ties, and fear.

Joe brought him a c.o.c.ktail.

"Drink it, old dear," he said. "And when it's down I'll tell you a few little things about playing around with ladies who have a past. Here's to forgetting 'em."

Leslie took the gla.s.s.

"Right-o," he said.

He went home the following day, leaving Joe to finish the business in New York. His going rather resembled a flight. Tossing sleepless the night before, he had found what many a man had discovered before him, that his love of clandestine adventure was not as strong as his caution.

He had had a shock. True, his affair with Beverly had been a formless thing, a matter of imagination and a desire to a.s.sure himself that romance, for him, was not yet dead. True, too, that he had nothing to fear from d.i.c.k Livingstone. But the encounter had brought home to him the danger of this old-new game he was playing. He was running like a frightened child.

He thought of various plans. One of them was to tell Nina the truth, take his medicine of tears and coldness, and then go to Mr. Wheeler.

One was to go to Mr. Wheeler, without Nina, and make his humiliating admission. But Walter Wheeler had his own rigid ideas, was uncompromising in rect.i.tude, and would understand as only a man could that while so far he had been only mentally unfaithful, he had been actuated by at least subconscious desire.

His own awareness of that fact made him more cautious than he need have been, perhaps more self-conscious. And he genuinely cared for Elizabeth.

It was, on the whole, a generous and kindly impulse that lay behind his ultimate resolution to tell her that her desertion was both wilful and cruel.

Yet, when the time came, he found it hard to tell her. He took her for a drive one evening soon after his return, forcibly driving off Wallie Sayre to do so, and eying surrept.i.tiously now and then her pale, rather set face. He found a quiet lane and stopped the car there, and then turned and faced her.

"How've you been, little sister, while I've been wandering the gay white way?" he asked.

"I've been all right, Leslie."

"Not quite all right, I think. Have you ever thought, Elizabeth, that no man on earth is worth what you've been going through?"

"I'm all right, I tell you," she said impatiently. "I'm not grieving any more. That's the truth, Les. I know now that he doesn't intend to come back, and I don't care. I never even think about him, now."

"I see," he said. "Well, that's that."

But he had not counted on her intuition, and was startled to hear her say:

"Well? Go on."

"What do you mean, go on?"

"You brought me out here to tell me something."

"Not at all. I simply--"

"Where is he? You've seen him."

He tried to meet her eyes, failed, cursed himself for a fool. "He's alive and well, Elizabeth. I saw him in New York." It was a full minute before she spoke again, and then her lips were stiff and her voice strained.

"Has he gone back to her? To the actress he used to care for?"

He hesitated, but he knew he would have to go on.