The Happy End Part 25

"Pleasant for you, Morice," Louise explained.

"Things were so comfortable, Rosalie," he protested despairingly. "What in the name of sense made you stir this all up? The governor won't do a tap for us now."

His wife stood by herself, facing the inimical Turnbull front, while Morice wavered between.

"If you'll get along," the former told him, "I can make a living till you come back. We can do without any Trubner money. I'm not a lot at German, but I guess you can understand me," she again addressed August.

"Not that I blame you for the change, such as it is."

"I'll have to go with her," Morice unhappily declared.

August Turnbull's face was stiff with congestion. The figures before him wavered in a sort of fog. He put out a hand, supporting himself on the back of his chair.

"Get out of my house," he repeated in a hoa.r.s.e whisper.

Fortunately Morice's leave had come to an end, and Rosalie and he withdrew in at least the semblance of a normal departure. August's rage changed to an indignant surprise, and he established himself with a rigid dignity on the veranda. There, happening on a cigar that burned badly, he was reduced to a state of further self-commiseration. That is, he dwelt on the general deterioration of the world about him. There was no discipline; there was no respect; authority was laughed at. All this was the result of laxness, of the sentimentality he condemned; a firmer hand was needed everywhere.

He turned with relief to the contemplation of Meta Beggs; she was enormously satisfactory to consider. August watched her now with the greatest interest; he even sat in his wife's room while her companion moved silently and gracefully about. Miss Beggs couldn't have noticed this, for scarcely ever did her gaze meet his; she had a habit of standing lost in thought, her slimness a little drooping, as if she were weary or depressed. She was in his mind continually--Miss Beggs and Emmy, his wife.

The latter had a surprising power to disturb him; lately he had even dreamed of her starving to death in the presence of abundant food. He began to be superst.i.tious about it, to think of her in a ridiculous nervous manner as an evil design on his peace and security. She seemed unnatural with her shrunken face bowed opposite him at the table. His feeling for her s.h.i.+fted subconsciously to hatred. It broke out publicly in sardonic or angry periods under which she would shrink away, incredibly timid, from his scorn. This quality of utter helplessness gave the menace he divined in her its illusive air of unreality. She seemed--she was--entirely helpless; a prematurely aged woman, of the mildest instincts, dying of malnutrition.

Miss Beggs now merged into all his daily life, his very fiber. He regarded her in an att.i.tude of admirable frankness. "Still it is extraordinary you haven't married."

The tide was out, it was late afternoon, and they were walking over the hard exposed sand. Whenever she came on a sh.e.l.l she crushed it with a sharp heel.

"There were some," she replied indifferently.

He nodded gravely. "It would have to be a special kind of man," he agreed. "An ordinary individual would be crushed by your personality.

You'd need a firm hand."

Her face was inscrutable. "I have always had the misfortune to be too late," she told him.

"I wish I had known you sooner!" he exclaimed.

Her arms, in transparent sleeves, were like marble. His words crystallized an overwhelming realization of how exactly she was suited to him. The desire to shut her will in his hand increased a thousandfold.

"Yes," she said, "I would have married you. But there's no good discussing it." She breathed deeply with a sinking forward of her rounded shoulders. All her vigor seemed to have left her. "I have been worried about Mrs. Turnbull lately," she went on. "Perhaps it's my imagination--does she look weaker to you?"

"I haven't noticed," he answered brusquely.

Curiously he had never thought of Emmy as dying; she appeared eternal, without the possibility of offering him the relief of such freedom as yet remained. Freedom for--for Meta Beggs.

"The doctor was at the cottage again Thursday," she informed him. "I didn't hear what he said."

"Humbugs," August Turnbull p.r.o.nounced.

A sudden caution invaded him. It would be well not to implicate himself too far with his wife's companion. She was a far shrewder woman than was common; there was such a thing as blackmail. He studied her privately.

d.a.m.n it, what a pen he had been caught in! Her manner, too, changed immediately, as though she had read his feeling.

"I shall have to go back."

She spoke coldly. A moment before she had been close beside him, but now she might as well have been miles away.

V

The fuse of the electric light in the dining room burned out, and dinner proceeded with only the illumination of the silk-hooded candles. In the subdued glow Meta Beggs was infinitely attractive. His wife's place was empty. Miss Beggs had brought apologetic word from Emmy that she felt too weak to leave her room. A greater degree of comfort possessed August Turnbull than he had experienced for months. With no one at the table but the slim woman on the left and himself a positive geniality radiated from him. He pressed her to have more champagne--he had ordered that since she preferred it to Rhine wine--urged more duckling, and ordered the butler to leave the brandy decanter before them.

She laughed--a rare occurrence--and imitated, for his intense amus.e.m.e.nt, Mrs. Frederick Rathe's extreme cutting social manner. He drank more than he intended, and when he rose his legs were insecure. He made his way toward Meta Beggs. She stood motionless, her thin lips like a thread of blood on her tense face.

"What a wife you'd make!" he muttered.

There was a discreet cough at his back, and swinging about he saw a maid in a white starched cap and high cuffs.

"Excuse me, sir," she said; "Mrs. Turnbull wants to know would you please come up to her room."

He swayed slightly, glowering at her with a hot face in which a vein throbbed persistently at his temple. Miss Beggs had disappeared.

"Very well," he agreed heavily.

Mounting the stairs he fumbled for his cigar case, and entered the chamber beyond his, clipping the end from a superlative perfecto.

Emmy was in bed, propped up on a bank of embroidered pillows. A light from one side threw the shadow of her head on a wall in an animated caricature of life.

"I didn't want to disturb you, August."

Her voice was weak and apologetic. He stood irritably beside her.

"It's hot in here." His wife at once detected whatever a.s.saulted his complete comfort. She fell into a silence that strained his patience to the utmost.

When at last she spoke it was in a tone of voice he had never heard from her--impersonal, with at the same time a note of fear like the flutter of a bird's wing.

"The doctor has been here two or three times lately. I didn't want to bother you, and he said----"

She broke off, and her hand raised from her side in a gesture of seeking. He held it uncomfortably, wis.h.i.+ng that the occasion would speedily end.

"August, I've--I've got to leave you."

He did not comprehend her meaning, and stood stupidly looking down at her spent face. "I'm going to die, August, almost any time now. I wanted to tell you first when we were quietly together; and then Louise and Bernard must know."

His sensations were so confused, the mere shock of such an announcement had so confounded him that he was unable to penetrate the meaning of the sudden expansion of his blood. His attention strayed from the actuality of his wife to the immaterial shadow wavering on the wall. There Emmy's profile, grotesquely enlarged and sharpened, grimaced at him. August Turnbull's feelings disentangled and grew clearer, there was a conventional memory of his wife as a young woman, the infinitely sharper realization that soon he must be free, a vision of Meta Beggs as she had been at dinner that night, and intense relief from nameless strain.

He moved through the atmosphere of suspense that followed the knowledge of Emmy's condition with a feeling of being entirely apart from his family. Out of the chaos of his emotions the sense of release was most insistent. Naturally he couldn't share it with any one else, not at present. He avoided thinking directly of Meta Beggs, partly from the shreds of the superst.i.tious dread that had once colored his att.i.tude toward his wife and partly from the necessity to control what otherwise would sweep him into a resistless torrent. However, most of his impatience had vanished--a little while now, and in a discreet manner he could grasp all that he had believed so hopelessly removed.

Except for the occasions of Louise's informal presence he dined alone with Miss Beggs. They were largely silent, attacking their plates with complete satisfaction. On the day of her monthly payment he drew the check for a thousand dollars in place of the stipulated hundred, and gave it to her without comment. She nodded, managing to convey entire understanding and acceptance of what it forecast. Once, at the table, he called her Meta.

She deliberated a reply--he had asked her opinion about British bottled sauces--but when she answered she called him Mr. Turnbull. This, too, pleased him. She had an unerring judgment in the small affairs of deference. Dinner had been better than usual, and he realized he had eaten too much. His throat felt constricted, he had difficulty in swallowing a final gulp of coffee; the heavy odors of the dining room almost sickened him.

"We'll get out on the beach," he said abruptly; "a little air."

They proceeded past the unremitting sprinklers on the strip of lawn to the wide gray sweep of sand. At that hour no one else was visible, and a new recklessness invaded his discomfort. "You see," he told her, "that bad luck of yours isn't going to hold."