out her hand.
“Give them to me, please.”
“Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie—” Andora, still on her knees, continued to hold back the packet, her pale face paler with anger and compassion. “Lizzie, they’re the letters I used to post for you—_the letters he never answered!_ Look!”
“Give them back to me, please.”
The two women faced each other, Andora kneeling, Lizzie motionless before her, the letters in her hand. The blood had rushed to her face, humming in her ears, and forcing itself into the veins of her temples like hot lead. Then it ebbed, and she felt cold and weak.
“It must have been some plot—some conspiracy!” Andora cried, so fired by the ecstasy of invention that for the moment she seemed lost to all but the esthetic aspect of the case.
Lizzie turned away her eyes with an effort, and they rested on the boy, who sat at her feet placidly sucking the tassels of the bag. His mother stooped and extracted them from his rosy mouth, which a cry of wrath immediately filled. She lifted him in her arms, and for the first time no current of life ran from his bodyinto hers. He felt heavy and clumsy, like some one else’s child; and his screams annoyed her.
“Take him away, please, Andora.”
“Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie!” Andora wailed.
Lizzie held out the child, and Andora, struggling to her feet, received him.
“I know just how you feel,” she gasped out above the baby’s head.
Lizzie, in some dark hollow of herself, heard the echo of a laugh. Andora always thought she knew how people felt!
“Tell Marthe to take him with her when she fetches Juliet home from school.”
“Yes, yes.” Andora gloated over her. “If you’d only give way, my darling!”
The baby, howling, dived over Andora’s shoulder for the bag.
“Oh,
Andora, from the door, cried out: “I’ll be back at once. Remember, love, you’re not alone!”
But Lizzie insisted, “Go with them—I wish you to go with them,” in the tone to which Miss Macy had never learned the answer.
The door closed on her outraged back, and Lizzie stood alone. She looked about the disordered room, which offered a dreary image of the havoc of her life. An hour or two ago everything about her had been so exquisitely ordered, without and within; her thoughtsand emotions had lain outspread before her like delicate jewels laid away symmetrically in a collector’s cabinet. Now they had been tossed down helter-skelter among the rubbish there on the floor, and had themselves turned to rubbish like the rest. Yes, there lay her life at her feet, among all that tarnished trash.
She knelt and picked up her letters, ten in all, and examined the flaps of the envelops. Not one had been opened—not one. Asshe looked, every word she had written fluttered to life, and every feeling prompting it sent a tremor through her. With vertiginousspeed and microscopic vision she was reliving that whole period of her life, stripping bare again the black ruin over which the drift of three happy years had fallen.
She laughed at Andora’s notion of a conspiracy—of the letters having been “kept back.” She required no extraneous aid in deciphering the mystery: her three years’ experience of Deering shed on it all the light she needed. And yet a moment before shehad believed herself to be perfectly happy! Now it was the worstpart of her anguish that it did not really surprise her.
She knew so well how it must have happened. The letters hadreached him when he was busy, occupied with something else, and had been put aside to be read at some future time—a time which nevercame. Perhaps on his way to America, on the steamer, even, he had met “some one else”—the “some one” who lurks, veiled and ominous, in the background of every woman’s thoughts about her lover. Or perhaps he had been merely forgetful. She had learned from experience that the sensations which he seemed to feel with the most exquisite intensity left no reverberations in his mind—thathe did not relive either his pleasures or his pains. She needed no better proof of that than the lightness of his conduct toward hisdaughter. He seemed to have taken it for granted that Juliet would remain indefinitely with the friends who had received her after her mother’s death, and it was at Lizzie’s suggestion that the littlegirl was brought home and that they had established themselves at Neuilly to be near her school. But Juliet once with them, he became the model of a tender father, and Lizzie wondered that he had not felt the child’s absence, since he seemed so affectionately aware of her presence.
Lizzie had noted all this in Juliet’s case, but had taken for granted that her own was different; that she formed, for Deering, the exception which every woman secretly supposes herself to formin the experience of the man she loves. Certainly, she had learned by this time that she could not modify his habits, but she imagined that she had deepened his sensibilities, had furnished him with an “ideal”—angelic function! And she now saw that the fact of her letters—her unanswered letters—having, on his own assurance, “meant so much” to him, had been the basis on which this beautiful fabric was reared.
There they lay now, the letters, precisely as when they had left her hands. He had not had time to read them; and there had been a moment in her past when that discovery would have been thesharpest pang imaginable to her heart. She had traveled far beyond that point. She could have forgiven him now for having forgottenher; but she could never forgive him for having deceived her.
She sat down, and looked again vaguely about the room. Suddenly she heard his step overhead, and her heart contracted. She was afraid he was coming down to her. She sprang up and bolted the door; then she dropped into the nearest chair, tremulous and exhausted, as if the pushing of the bolt had required an immense muscular effort. A moment later she heard him on the stairs, andher tremor broke into a cold fit of shaking. “I loathe you—I loathe you!” she cried.
She listened apprehensively for his touch on the handle of the door. He would come in, humming a tune, to ask some idle question and lay a caress on her hair. But no, the door was bolted; she was safe. She continued to listen, and the step passed on. He had not been coming to her, then. He must have gone down-stairs to fetchsomething —another newspaper, perhaps. He seemed to read little else, and she sometimes wondered when he had found time to store the material that used to serve for their famous “literary” talks. The wonder shot through her again, barbed with a sneer. At that moment it seemed to her that everything he had ever done and beenwas a lie.
