Mrs. Balfame. Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
down the path. There was a street lamp directly in front of the gate. Its light fell on the face of a man emerging from the heavy shadow of the maple trees that bordered the avenue. She recognised her husband's lawyer, Dwight Rush.
"What luck!" he exclaimed boyishly. "Now I shall talk to you for at least five minutes—ten, if you will walk slowly! What are you doing out so late alone?"
Mrs. Balfame glanced apprehensively up and down the street. All the windows were alight, but it was too late in the season for loitering on verandas; even if they met any one, recognition would hardly be possible unless the encounter took place under a street lamp. Moreover, she was one of those women who while rarely terrified when alone became intensely feminine when a man appeared with his archaic right to shield and protect. She smiled graciously.
"You may see me to my gate," she said.
"I should think I might! A pistol at my head wouldn't keep me from walking these few blessed minutes with you. Seriously, it's not safe for you to be out alone like this. There were three burglaries last week, and you are just the woman to have her bag snatched."
She drew closer to him, a faint accent of alarm in her voice.
"I never thought of that. But Anna was called off in a hurry. I am so glad you happened along. Although," primly, "it wouldn't do, you know, for a woman of my age and position to be seen walking alone with a young man at night."
"What nonsense! You are like Cæsar's wife, I guess. Anything you did in this town would seem about right. You've got them all hypnotised, including myself. It's the ambition of my life to know you better," he added in a more serious tone. "Why won't you let me call?"
"It wouldn't do. If I have a nice position it's because I've always been so particular. If I let young men call on me, people would say that I was no better than that fast bunch that tangoes every night and goes to road houses and things." Her voice trailed off vaguely; she really knew very little of the doings of "gay sets," although much in the abstract of a too temperamental world.
She made up her mind to dispose of this misguided young man once for all. She knew that she looked quite ten years younger than her age, and she was well aware that although man's passion might be business his pastime was the hunt.
"I am thankful that I have no grown daughter to keep from running with that bunch," she said playfully. "Of course I might have. I am quite old enough."
He laughed outright. Then he said the old thing which is ever new to the woman, and with a perceptible softening in his hard energetic voice: "I wonder if you really are as conventional—conventionised—as you perhaps think you are? You always give me the impression of being two women, one fast asleep deep down somewhere, the other not even suspecting her existence."
"How pretty!" She smiled with pleasure, and she felt a faint stirring of coquetry, as if the ghost of her youth were rising—that far-off period when she put on her best ribbons and made her best pies to allure the marriageable swains of Elsinore. But she recalled herself quickly and frowned. "You must not say such things to me," she said coldly.
"But I shall, and I will add that I wish you were a widow, or had never been married. I should propose to you this minute."
"That is equivalent to saying that you wish my husband were dead. And he is your friend, too!"
"Your husband is not my friend; he is my employer—upon occasion. At the moment I did not remember who was your husband. Let it go at that."
"Very well."
It was evident that he belonged to the type that found its amusement in making love to married women; but—they were within the rays of a lamp, and sauntering—she looked up at this pleasant exponent indulgently. She was quite safe, and it was by no means detestable at the age of forty-two to be coveted by the cleverest young man in Brabant County.
The smile left her lips and she experienced a faint vibration of the nerves as she met the unsmiling eyes bent close above her own.
Rush was almost drab in colour, but the bones of his face were large and his eyes were deeply set and well apart, intensely blue and brilliant. It was one of those narrow rigid faces the exigencies of his century and country have bred, the jaw long and almost as salient as that of a consumptive, the brow bold, the mouth hard set, the cheeks lean and cut with deep lines, the whole effect not only keen and clever but stronger than any man has consistently been since the world began. The curious contradiction about this type of American face is that it almost invariably looks younger than the years that have contributed to the modelling of it; such men, particularly if smoothly shaven as they usually are, look thirty at forty; even at fifty, if they retain their hair, appear but little older. When Rush's mouth was relaxed it could smile charmingly, and the eyes fill with playfulness and vivacity, just as his strident American voice could move a jury to tears by the tears that were in it.
At this moment all the intensity of which his striking features were capable was concentrated in his eyes.
"I'm not going to make love to you as matters stand," he said, his voice dry with emotion. "But I want you to divorce Dave Balfame and marry me. Sooner or later you will be driven to it—"
"Never! I'll never be a divorced woman. Never! Never!"
His steady gaze wavered and he sighed. "You said that as if you meant it. You think you are intellectual, and you haven't outgrown one of the prejudices of your Puritan grandmothers—who behaved themselves because women were scarce and even better treated than they are now, and because they would have been too mean to spend money on a divorce suit if divorces had come into fashion elsewhere."
"You are far from complimentary!" Mrs. Balfame raised her head stiffly, not a little indignant at this natural display of sheer masculinity. She would have withdrawn her arm and hastened her steps but he held her back.
"I don't mean to be uncomplimentary. Only, you ought to be so much more advanced than you are. I repeat, I shall not make downright love to you, for I intend to marry you one of these days. But I shall say what I choose. How much longer do you think you can go on living like this?—with a man you must despise and from whom you must suffer indignities—and in this hole—"
"You live here—"
"I came back here because I had a good offer and I like the East better than the West, but I have no intention of staying here. I have reason to believe that I shall get into a New York firm next spring; and once started on that race-course I purpose to come in a winner."
"And you would saddle yourself with a wife many years your senior?" she asked wonderingly.
But she thrilled again, and unconsciously moderated her gait still further; they were but a few steps from her home.
"I am thirty-four. I am sorry that I have impressed you as looking too young to be taken seriously, but you will admit that if a man doesn't know his own mind when he is verging toward middle age, he never will. But if I were only twenty-five, it would make no difference. I would marry you like a shot. I never have given a thought to marrying before. Girls don't interest me. They show their hand too plainly. I've always had a sort of ideal and you fill it."
It was characteristic of Mrs. Balfame's well-ordered mind that her intention to murder her husband did not intrude itself into this unique and provocative hour. She had never indulged in a passing desire to marry again, and hers was not the order of mind that somersaults. But she was willing to "let herself go," for the sake of the experience; for the first time in her twenty odd years of married life to loiter in a leafy shadowy street with a man who loved her and made no secret of it.
"I wonder?" She stared up at him, curiosity in her eyes.
"Wonder what?"
"If it is love?"
He laughed unmusically. "I am not surprised that you ask that question—you, who know no more of love than if you had been a castaway on a desert island since the age of ten. Never mind. I've planted a seed. It will sprout. Think and think again. You owe me that much—and yourself.