The Dust Flower. Basil King
was dumb. Thirty seconds at least went by, and he had made no response.
65
“Aren’t you glad?”
“I—I could have been glad—if—if I’d known you were going to do it.”
“And now you know that it’s done.”
He repeated in his lifeless voice, “Yes, now I know that it’s done.”
“Well?”
Again he was silent. Two or three times he tried to find words, producing nothing but a stammering of incoherent syllables. “I—I can’t talk about it here, Barbe,” he managed to articulate at last. “You must let me come round and see you.”
It was her voice now that was dead. “When will you come, Rash?”
“Now—at once—if you can see me.”
“Then come.”
She put up the receiver without saying more. He knew that she knew. She knew at least that something had happened which was fatal to them both.
She received him not in the drawing-room, but in a little den on the right of the front door which was also alive with Miss Walbrook’s modern personality. A gold-colored portière from Albert Herter’s looms screened them from the hall, and the chairs were covered with bits of Herter tapestry representing fruits. A cabinet of old white Bennington faience stood against a wall, which was further adorned with three or four etchings of Sears Gallagher’s. Barbara wore a lacy thing in hydrangea-colored crêpe de chine, loosely girt with a jade-green ribbon tasselled in gold, the whole bringing out the faintly Egyptian note in her personality.
66
They dispensed with a greeting, because she spoke the minute he crossed the threshold of the room.
“Rash, what is it? Why couldn’t you tell me on the telephone?”
He wished now that he had. It would have saved this explanation face to face. “Because I couldn’t. Because—because I’ve been too much of an idiot to—to tell you about it—either on the telephone or in any other way.”
“How?” He thought she must understand, but she seemed purposely dense. “Sit down. Tell me about it. It can’t be so terrible—all of a sudden like this.”
He couldn’t sit down. He could only turn away from her and gulp in his dry throat. “You remember what I said—what I said—yesterday—about—about the—the Gissing fellow?”
She nodded fiercely. “Yes. Go on. Get it out.”
“Well—well—I’ve—I’ve done that.”
She threw out her arms. She threw back her head till the little nut-brown throat was taut. The cry rent her. It rent him.
“You—fool!”
He stood with head hanging. He longed to run away, and yet he longed also to throw himself at her feet. If he could have done exactly as he felt impelled, he would have laid his head on her breast and wept like a child.
She swung away from him, pacing the small room like a frenzied animal. Her breath came in short, hard pantings that were nearly sobs. Suddenly she stopped in front of him with a sort of calm.
67
“What made you?”
He barely lifted his agonized black eyes. “You,”
She was in revolt again. “I? What did I do?”
“You—you threw away my ring. You said it was all—all over.”
“Well? Couldn’t I say that without driving you to act the madman? No one but a madman would have gone out of this house and—” She clasped her forehead in her hands with a dramatic lifting of the arms. “Oh! It’s too much! I don’t care about myself. But to have it on your conscience that a man has thrown his life away––”
He asked meekly, “What good was it to me when you wouldn’t have it?”
She stamped her foot. “Rash, you’ll drive me insane. Your life might be no good to you at all, and yet you might give it a chance for twenty-four hours—that isn’t much, is it?—before you—” She caught herself up. “Tell me. You don’t mean to say that you’re married?”
He nodded.
“To whom?”
“Her first name is Letty. I’ve forgotten the second name.”
“Where did you find her?”
“Over there in the Park.”
“And she went and married you—like that?”
“She was all alone—chucked out by a stepfather––”
She burst into a hard laugh. “Oh, you baby! You believed that? The kind of story that’s told by nine of the––”
BY THE TIME HE HAD FINISHED, HIS HEART WAS A LITTLE EASED AND SOME OF HER TENDERNESS BEGAN TO FLOW TOWARD HIM
68
He interrupted quickly. “Don’t call her anything, Barbe—I mean any kind of a bad name. She’s all right as far as that goes. There’s a kind that couldn’t take you in.”
“There’s no kind that couldn’t take you in!”
“Perhaps not, but it’s the one thing in—in this whole idiotic business that’s on the level—I mean she is. I’d give my right hand to put her back where I found her yesterday—just as she was—but she’s straight.”
She dropped into a chair. The first wild tumult of rage having more or less spent its force, she began, with a kind of heart-broken curiosity, to ask for the facts. She spoke nervously, beating a palm with a gold tassel of her girdle. “Begin at the beginning. Tell me all about it.”
He leaned on the mantelpiece, of which the only ornaments were a child’s head in white and blue terra cotta by Paul Manship, balanced by a pair of old American glass candlesticks, and told the tale as consecutively as he could. He recounted everything, even to the bringing her home, the putting her in the little, back spare-room, and her adoption by Beppo, the red cocker spaniel. By the time he had finished, his heart was a little eased, and some of her tenderness toward him was beginning to flow forth. She was like that, all wrath at one minute, all gentleness the next. Springing to her feet, she caught him by the arm, pressing herself against him.
“All right, Rash. You’ve done it. That’s settled. But it can be undone again.”
He pressed her head back from him, resting the 69 knot of her hair in the hollow of his palm and looking down into her eyes.
“How can it be undone?”
“Oh, there must be ways. A man can’t be allowed to ruin his life—to ruin two lives—for a prank. We’ll just have to think. If you made it worth while for her to take you, you can make it worth while for her to let you go. She’ll do it.”
“She’d do it, of course. She doesn’t care. I’m nothing to her, not any more than she to me. I shan’t see her any more than I can help. I suppose she must stay at the house till—I told Steptoe to look after her.”
She took a position at one end of the mantelpiece, while he faced her from the other. She gave him wise counsel. He was to see his lawyers at once and tell them the whole story. Lawyers always saw the way out of things. There was the Bellington boy who married a show-girl. She had been bought off, and the lawyers had managed it. Now the Bellington boy was happily married to one of the Plantagenet Jones girls and lived at Marillo Park. Then there was the