Lodusky Part 7

"What is it," she asked when he at last confronted her, "that ails ye?"

She uttered the words in a half whisper, as if she had not the power to speak louder, and he saw the hand hanging at her side close itself.

"What is it--that ails ye?"

He waited a few seconds before he answered her.

"Look at me," he said at last, "and see."

She did look at him. For the s.p.a.ce of ten seconds their eyes were fixed upon each other in a long, bitter look. Then her little bundle dropped on the ground.

"Ye've went back on me," she said under her breath again. "Ye've went back on me!"

He had thought she might make some pa.s.sionate outcry, but she did not yet. A white wrath was in her face and her chest heaved, but she spoke slowly and low, her hands fallen down by her side.

"Ye've went back on me," she said. "An' _I knew ye would_."

He felt that the odor of his utter falseness tainted the pure air about him; he had been false all round,--to himself, to his love, to his ideals,--even in a baser way here.

"Yes," he answered her with a bitterness she did not understand, "I've gone back on you." Then, as if to himself, "I could not even reach perfection in villainy."

Then her rage and misery broke forth.

"Yer a coward!" she said, with gasps between her words. "Yer afraid! I'd sooner--I'd sooner ye'd killed me--_dead!_"

Her voice shrilled itself into a smothered shriek, she cast herself face downward upon the earth and lay there clutching amid her sobs at the gra.s.s.

He looked down at her in a cold, stunned fas.h.i.+on.

"Do you think," he said hoa.r.s.ely, "that you can loathe me as I loathe myself? Do you think you can call me one shameful name I don't know I deserve? If you can, for G.o.d's sake let me have it."

She struck her fist against the earth.

"Thar wasn't a man I ever saw," she said, "that didn't foller after me, 'n' do fur me, 'n' wait fur a word from me. They'd hev let me set my foot on 'em if I'd said it. Thar wasn't nothin' I mightn't hev done--not nothin'. An' now--an' now "--and, she tore the gra.s.s from its earth and flung it from her.

"Go on," he said. "Go on and say your worst."

Her worst was bad enough, but he almost exulted under the blows she dealt him. He felt the horrible sting a vague comfort. He had fallen low enough surely when it was a comfort to be told that he was a liar, a poltroon, and a scoundrel.

The sun had been down an hour when it was over and she had risen and taken up her bundle.

"Why don't ye ask me to forgive ye?" she said with a scathing sneer.

"Why don't ye ask me to forgive ye--an' say ye didn't mean to do it?"

He fell back a pace and was silent. With what grace would the words have fallen from his lips? And yet he knew that he had not _meant_ to do it.

She turned away and at a distance of a few feet stopped. She gave him a last look--a fierce one in its contempt and anger, and her affluence of beauty had never been so stubborn a fact before.

"Ye think ye've left me behind," she said. "An' so ye hev--but it aint fur allers. The time'll come when mebbe ye'll see me ag'in."

He returned to New York, but he had been there a week before he went to Rebecca. Finally, however, he awoke one morning feeling that the time had come for the last scene of his miserable drama. He presented himself at the house and sent up his name, and in three minutes Rebecca came to him.

It struck him with a new thrill of wretchedness to see that she wore by chance the very dress she had worn the day he had made the sketch--a pale, pure-looking gray, with a scarf of white lace loosely fastened at her throat. Next, he saw that there was a painful change in her, that she looked frail and worn, as if she had been ill. His first words he scarcely heard and never remembered. He had not come to make a defense, but a naked, bitter confession. As he made it low and monotonously, in brief, harsh words, holding no sparing for himself, Rebecca stood with her hand upon the mantle looking at him with simple directness. There was no rebuke in her look, but there was weariness. It occurred to him once or twice and with a terribly humiliating pang, that she was tired of him,--tired of it all.

"I have lost you," he ended. "And I have lost myself. I have seen myself as I am,--a poorer figure, a grosser one than I ever dreamed of being, even in the eyes of my worst enemy. Henceforth, this figure will be my companion. It is as if I looked at myself in a bad gla.s.s; but now, though the reflection is a pitiable one, the gla.s.s is true."

"You think," she said, after a short silence, "of going away?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"To Europe."

"Oh," she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, with a soft, desperate sound of pain.

His eyes had been downcast and he raised them.

"Yes," he said, mournfully. "We were to have gone together."

"Yes," she answered, "together."

Her eyes were wet.

"I was very happy," she said, "for a little while."

She held out her hand.

"But," she added, as if finis.h.i.+ng a sentence, "you have been truer to me than you think."

"No--no," he groaned.

"Yes, truer to me than you think--and truer to yourself. It was I you loved--I! There have been times when I thought I must give that up, but now I know I need not. It was I. Sometime, perhaps,--sometime,--not now"--

Her voice broke, she did not finish, the end was a sob. Their eyes rested upon each other a few seconds, and then he released her hand and went away.

He was absent for two years, and during that time his friends heard much good of him. He lived the life of a recluse and a hard worker. He learned to know his own strength, and taught the world to recognize it also.

At the end of the second year, being in Paris, he went one night to the _Nouvelle Opera_. Toward the close of the second act he became conscious of a little excited stir among those surrounding him. Every gla.s.s seemed directed toward a new arrival who stood erect and cool in one of the stage-boxes. She might have been Cleopatra. Her costume was of a creamy satin, she was covered with jewels, and she stood up confronting the house, as it regarded her, with _sang froid_.

Lennox rose hurriedly and left the place. He was glad to breathe the bitterly cold but pure night air. She had made no idle prophecy. He had seen her again!

There hung upon the wall of his private room a picture whose completion had been the first work after his landing. He went in to it and looked at it with something like adoration.

"'Sometime'" he said, "perhaps now," and the next week he was on his way home.