She opened her dull eyes, so hopeless and so drained, and looked at him.
“Adelaide will be here, in the morning,” he whispered. He kissed her chilled cheek, and then her poor dry lips. She watched him, emptily. He knelt beside her, and spoke in the softest of voices, holding her eyes urgently with his own.
“Lily, my darling, do you hate me so much? Isn’t there any hope for me, with you? I haven’t been much to you. I’ve despised you, cursed you, driven you away. That was my blindness and cruelty. But I suffered, too, for a lie. Can’t you pity and understand a little, Lily?”
She still stared at him, as if he were a stranger, and he had not spoken. But was it his imagination that a faint sparkle of blue light had appeared in the shallow depths of her round and stricken eyes?
He continued: “You’ve loved me, my dearest. I’ve always known it. Is it too much to ask you to believe that I’ve loved you, too, all these years? For it is true. It was only my folly that prevented me from knowing. I’ve wronged you, Lily. But I’ve wronged myself, too. I’ve been worse than a wicked man: I’ve been a fool.” His voice became thick and strangulated. “Lily, do you hear me? I love you. I need you. I want you.”
Her hand stirred. He felt its aimless weak fluttering. He caught it strongly, and held it, then put it to his lips. Something seemed breaking in him, with an unbearable pain.
Her eyes were bright and clear now, and very shining. She was smiling, trying to speak. He bent his head near her mouth, to hear the fumbling words. But all she said was “Johnnie.”
But that was all he needed. He laid his head on the pillow beside hers, and pressed his lips into the soft masses of her hair. Her hand lifted, laid itself on his neck, warmly, protectingly. He heard her sigh, over and over.
Then she tucked his hand under her cheek, and slept again, as simply as a child.
CHAPTER 59
Anthony let himself into his Uncle’s home just when the gray dawn was brightening into pink and hyacinth radiance. The cool and pristine freshness of the morning blew in his weary face as he mounted the steps. There was a silver mist in the bare branches of the trees; the pavements steamed in the first light. He heard the poignant voice of robins on the little plot of grass before the houses, and the thin ecstasy of the sound seemed to pierce his consciousness with unbearable and exquisite pain. Far up the quiet street he heard the rumbling of milk wagons on the cobbles, and the clank of tin vessels echoed up and down. He looked at the silk shrouding of the windows of the mansion; the first rays of light gleamed on the brass door handles and step behind the grillwork The soft and sleeping silence, cool and pure, permeated everything.
He was suddenly conscious of exhaustion, and his hands fumbled with the keys. But he was no longer afraid. The vigil at Adelaide’s bed had been long, but two hours ago her breathing had become easier, and she had slept with more naturalness. He could put his fear for her aside, for he had very unpleasant work to do in the next few hours.
He crept upstairs to his bedroom, undressed, and lay on his bed. He would not be able to sleep, he thought. But the next thing of which he was conscious was the discreet opening of the door, and the appearance of a maid with his breakfast on a tray. The bright sunlight of midmorning was streaming through the curtains. Anthony sat up abruptly, glanced at the clock on the mantel, and saw that it was just after eleven.
When he saw the tray and the demure chambermaid, his brows drew together quickly. He had never missed breakfasting with his father and Richard Gorth unless he was ill. This tray was evidence that the whole house knew that he had been absent the entire night. Now, this was not exactly an unheard-of thing. He had been absent all night during the past year for at least once a month, and when he had appeared at breakfast, no comment had been made, no tray had been brought to his room. Nor had Richard Gorth nor Andrew ever, by so much as a glance, betrayed their knowledge of his discreet disappearances. They accorded him the dignity of being another man.
But now the tray, as it was laid on his knees without comment, had a sharp significance. Some one had directed that he was not to be awakened before the usual breakfast hour. The only conclusion at which he could arrive was that his company was not desired at the usual time, that no one wished to assume, tactfully, that he had been home all night. He found something ominous in the whole situation.
He had a thought. Just as the maid was retreating, he said: “Alice, have Mr. Gorth and Mr. Bollister left for the offices?”
By the girl’s expression, puzzled and mutely excited, he knew the worst, and was not surprised when she answered quickly: “No, Mr. Anthony. They are downstairs in the library, with Mrs. Gorth and Mrs. Bollister.”
Ah, thought Andrew, the judges are in session.
He sent for William, who came in furtive and cringing. It was evident that the old man had had a bad night. He shrank at the sight of Anthony frowning on his pillows. But the young man said equably enough: “Come in, William. Look here, I’m not annoyed with you. How were you to know, anyway, that the young lady was my wife? Under the circumstances,” and he coughed shortly, “you did only what was your duty to do. Stop shaking. Sit down there near me. I want to ask you a few questions.”
William sat down on a chair near by, and pressed his hands on his ancient knees, and gazed at Anthony piteously, and with fear.
“Mr. Anthony, if the young lady had just spoken—I beg your pardon, sir, but the young lady was so—distraught. If she had said: ‘I am Mrs. Anthony Bollister,’ why then, sir, the matter would have been very different”
“Doubtless, doubtless,” replied Anthony, impatiently. “Now, to the questions: When the ladies and Mr. Gorth and Mr. Bollister arrived home last night, what did you say to them?”
The old man’s face became gray and pinched, and he averted his eyes. “I was that excited, sir. I—I thought it was a matter of private knowledge with them—I told them that your lady wife, the former Miss Adelaide Turnbull, had come here for you, had gone away, and that you had left to go to her. Sir,” he added pleadingly, “I had no thought but what they knew, knowing you to be a young gentleman not given to—to—”
“To strange and impulsive things,” finished Anthony, for him. “Yes, I see. For God’s sake, stop looking as if you were about to be hung, William. You know, I ought to thank you. You’ve saved me some awkward preliminary moments and explanations.”
“I thought,” continued William, with more confidence, “that the marriage was being kept quiet, sir, for personal family reasons.” He flushed, and stammered: “I mean—”
So the family feud is common knowledge, thought Anthony. “It Was,” he said, frankly. “It was being kept quiet between Miss Turnbull and myself. No one else knew. Never mind, William. As I said, you’ve saved me some unpleasantness. The family has gotten over the shock by now, without the necessity of me watching the painful process. I don’t like painful situations, William. I’m really a coward, when it comes to them. Love an agreeable atmosphere at all time; saves wear and tear.”
He paused, and smiled. The terror and anxiety of the night had aged him, had made haggard his face, had turned his eyes to steadfast grimness. He reached over to where his damp coat had been thrown over a chair near the bed. He drew out his purse, sought through it for an appropriate bill, and tossed it to William, who gaped at it with incredulous delight.
“You couldn’t,” pursued Anthony, with delicacy, “inform me what the weather is downstairs?”
The old man was beaming with joy. Then he assumed a sober look, and shook his head. “I would say, on the ladies’ part, that it is slightly ominous, sir. The gentlemen, as usual, are more composed.” He continued, tactfully: “I would suggest, Mr. Anthony, that the sooner the situation is confronted, the less—unpleasantness. Ladies gather irritation as time goes on.
“They certainly do,” assented Anthony. He drank his coffee, then threw back the bed clothing. “I’ll go down at once.”
He bathed and dressed, then went downstairs, to
the library. He suppressed an impulse to whistle softly to himself. “Graveyard courage,” he thought.
The library had been appropriately darkened by Mrs. Gorth’s orders, and lamps were lit, though outside the sun was brilliant with spring.
Anthony thrust his pale smiling face into the room, and whispered:
“Is the body properly laid out and ready to be seen?”
The sombre room, vast and beamed of ceiling, lined with dark books, filled with heavy oaken furniture and thick Oriental carpets, was filled with gloomy shadows and denseness. Apart from the ladies waited Mr. Gorth and Andrew. Richard Gorth’s expression was closed and sour, the jowls tight and knotty in the wan lamp light, his fingers tapping the arm of his chair. Andrew sat near him, as languid and graceful as ever, and seemingly bored. But when he saw Anthony in the archway of the room, his narrow eyes glinted with a pale cold light. As for Mrs. Gorth, she alone displayed any violent emotion, and was sobbing rapturously in her handkerchief, and when she discerned Anthony, the look she turned upon him was positively baleful in its loathsome malice. Eugenia, sitting near her husband’s aunt, was pallid, her face very haggard and quiet. She was perfect, as always, reflected Andrew, with a swift look at her. Gowned in severe black, with a fragile white collar at her throat, her hair drawn austerely behind her ears, she was the most formidable personage in the room despite her slightness and quiet straight attitude.
“Let us have some light in the damned room,” said Andrew, quietly, and rose with swift grace to draw back the curtains. The sunlight assaulted the duskiness of the library like noisy shouts, and the lamps flickered, turned yellow. The sun streamed over the carpets, picking out vivid jade green and crimson tints, brightening bowls of flowers on the tables, glancing back from the scrolled gold edges of the portraits on the walls, turning the backs of hundreds of books to rich and ruddy colours. All these things impinged sharply on Anthony’s awareness. He walked into the room, chose a chair not too close to any one. He looked from one formidable face to the other, and waited.
No one spoke for a long time. Every eye was fixed on him. And then, all at once, Richard Gorth’s harsh pale lips twitched; he coughed; stared down at his feet. Andrew regarded his son in icy immobility, without expression. He wore a most dangerous aspect, without violence. Mrs. Gorth sobbed aloud.
“Oh, the disgrace!” she moaned.
But Eugenia did not move. Her face became paler than ever, and quite old.
“This isn’t a Star Chamber, nor the Inquisition,” said Andrew at last, with a light gesture of his bloodless hand. “Suppose, Tony, that you give us the whole story.”
His manner was cool and reasonable, but the pale glint in his eyes did not abate.
“Shut up,” said Richard Gorth to his wife, as her moans gained in intensity. His voice was savage, full of murderous contempt. Eugenia moved slightly on her chair, moistened lips that were as smooth and cold as stone.
“There isn’t much to say,” Anthony said, very composedly. There was no bravado in his words, no defiance. He looked steadily at his father. “I met Adelaide when she was a child. I didn’t see her for years. Then I met her again on the street, when she was about fourteen. That was before her sister Lavinia’s marriage to Rufus Hastings.”
“And thereafter, you met her clandestinely?” said Andrew. “In a disgraceful and furtive manner? That is in accord with the general Turnbull character.”
Anthony flushed. A vein beat in his forehead, but he retained his composed tone. “You are quite wrong. I’ve seen Adelaide less than half a dozen times since I first met her. But from the beginning, I’ve wanted her. There was nothing sly or secretive about the whole thing. We met accidentally. I asked her to meet me casually, but she did not. It was I who looked for her, walked past her home many times on the chance that she would appear. Sometimes I even thought she had seen me, and so would come out into the street. She had a strange loyalty to her dear Papa.” He paused. His face darkened, tightened. Andrew observed this with a curious relief and secret satisfaction, and these mounted when Anthony continued:
“I discovered, not from what the poor little creature said, but from others, and my own infrequent observations, that the child was persecuted, and hated by her father, that he treated her abominably.” He paused, then added in a low but penetrating voice, and each word came from him with bitter significance, though he did not look at his mother: “I think I know the reason, though apparently the drunken fool did not. I think that Adelaide reminds him of some one—a woman. She is slight and small; I doubt if you have seen her. She is very fragile, but full of steel. She is a pale girl, very quiet and composed, with character and dignity. I know only one thing for certain: she resembles, remarkably, some one whom I know also, and know very well.”
Eugenia uttered no sound, but the air about her appeared to take on disorder and confusion, and appalled awareness. As for Andrew, his thin hand clenched on the arm of his chair; he did not look at his wife. He regarded his son with intense fixity, and an unfathomable look caused his eyes to draw closer together.
“I think,” pursued Anthony, “that this woman—perhaps—was one Turnbull hated. I think he inflicted on Adelaide the cruelties he’d like to inflict on this—person. Whether she—or, perhaps, he—had ever really wronged him or not, I don’t know. That is unimportant. But the cruelty was there, the sadism, the irresponsible violence of the whole man. Her life was a curse to the poor child. Instinctively, she understood him. She knows him to be vulnerable and impotent, for all his wild bluster, and the things he thinks he has accomplished. I think she is the only one who ever really cared for him.
“And so, knowing of the—lack of compatibility between her family and ours, she avoided me. Only last Sunday I saw her, after a long interval. I think it must be almost two years since last I saw her. I then persuaded her to marry me. And so, we were married yesterday morning. She would not go with me. She must return to her darling Papa, she said. There was some trouble, some ruin, perhaps, hanging over his damned head.”
At this, Andrew and Richard Gorth appeared to turn to him quickly, though, in fact, they hardly moved. Anthony watched them closely a moment, then continued:
“And I have strong reason, perhaps strong surety, that she is right, though I laughed at her in the beginning. Something was told me last night which made me believe that there is a real plot against him, that he is now completely ruined. By his daughters’ husbands.”
“Impossible,” said Richard Gorth, hoarsely. He coughed heavily. He rubbed his hand over his mouth, glanced at Andrew.
Anthony’s eyes narrowed subtly; he tried not to smile. He shrugged. “Nevertheless, it is true.
“Last night, it seems, the whole plot was exposed, without the apparent understanding of that stupid fool, Turnbull. But Adelaide saw it. She came to me for help. What wild scheme she had in mind, how she could possibly conceive I could save her darling Papa, I don’t know. She came here; I wasn’t at home, as you know. The worst part of the whole thing was that she was sickening with lung fever. After she left this inhospitable house, she ran to another friend. There she collapsed. I went looking for her. First of all—I went to Turnbull.”
He paused. Now electricity crackled in the room. Even Mrs. Gorth halted her mechanical and continued moaning. Anthony, out of his compassion, did not look at his mother. He fixed his attention upon his father and Gorth. The two men were sitting up in their chairs now, bent stiffly towards him, their faces illumined by the sunlight. Then, very slowly, very cruelly, Andrew began to smile. The smile was evil and incandescent in his pale eyes.
“Yes?” he said, softly. “You saw Turnbull? He knew you?” He did not glance at Eugenia, but he saw her rigidly lifted hands, risen just an inch or two above her knees, as if they had frozen in the midst of a distracted gesture.
“Yes,” said Anthony, shortly, now disgusted at the trick he had employed to distract his parents’ attention from his marriage. “At least, he stared at me like a petrif
ied bull. I didn’t leave him in doubt. I told him. I demanded my wife.”
“And,” said Andrew, with even more softness, “what did he say then?”
Anthony hesitated. He was infuriated against himself. He could not stomach the evil in his father’s eyes, the sudden dark wide smile of Richard Gorth, the sudden gloating malignance of Mrs. Gorth, the sudden awful frozenness of his mother.
“Well, I’ll give the devil his due. My identity, my revelation of my marriage to his daughter, didn’t seem to impress him very much. I gathered that he was in a state about her disappearance. This confused me a little. I’d have thought him just angrily indifferent. Then I remembered that Adelaide had told me that she and her mother were quite devoted to each other, that her mother had been victimized by Turnbull almost as much as she had been victimized. It must have been something else which had awakened him. Or, perhaps, he was afraid that Adelaide would run about the city, crying out that her sister’s husbands had robbed him, or ruined him. He couldn’t stand that, you know. At any rate, he looked at me in a confused and broken state, tried to speak to me, and then went away with Hastings to look for Adelaide. I went with Pat Brogan.”
“My God,” whispered Andrew. Now the evil was sharp, vivid, on his features. It was a very ugly expression, with something of exultation and huge mirth in it.
No one looked, with a strange mercy, at Eugenia, except Mrs. Gorth. She had the aspect of death itself. Her full white lids half dropped over her eyes. Her mouth had fallen open a little as if she was unconscious. But she sat as straight and still as before, and her hands now lay on her black silk knees, palm up, in an attitude of prostration.
“I found Adelaide,” concluded Anthony, hurriedly, “at the home of that slimy scoundrel, Wilkins, whom she calls ‘Uncle Bob.’ Wilkins is in a murderous state, I assure you. I shouldn’t wonder if he had something to do with the whole thing about Turnbull, in the beginning. And I shouldn’t wonder if his attention isn’t now set on Hastings and Brogan—” He halted, alarmed and enraged at his indiscretion. He had been lavishly throwing sops to his father and Gorth, with a craven desire to placate them, perhaps to draw them with him into some inner satisfaction and amusement. He hated himself. Then he shrugged, sullenly, without an abatement, however, of his inner digust and aversion for himself.
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