Part 12

The train rumbled through the darkness. The seats held the huddled figures of the company, all as limp as sacks, as oblivion stole upon them. Feet were cocked up; hats were pulled over brows; haggard women, pale men, sprawling in disorder, and through long familiarity as unrestrained as some low, coarse family—sloppy slippers and frank stockings to the garter; unbuttoned collars, unbuttoned vests; dirty cuffs on racks—the squalid evidences of a squalid intimacy.

Looking down at that pure profile, and inhaling with every breath the fragrance of an exquisite young womanhood which would be his so soon to take, and, if he wished, to fling away, shattered and destroyed beyond all mending, Adair felt, with dawning comprehension, and mingled elation and pain, all that had gone to put this creature so infinitely above him.

What care, what money, what anxious thought had been lavished to make her what she was. How incessant the effort; how jealous the guarding through all these years; how elaborate and costly the training to fit her for the proud, high position to which she had been born. It came over him with a strange new perception that the very innocence of her surrender was but another proof of that queenly rearing. She was not of a world where women suspected or bargained. They lived their gracious lives within triple walls, unaware of the sentinels and outposts for ever watching over them. And what were the sensations of the lucky thief, who had closed his fingers on the prize, and run? They were not altogether as joyful as one might have thought. The thief was very much bemused. That trusting head, snuggled against his breast, was causing a curious commotion in the heart beneath.

But he overcame the unmanly weakness. Hell, he would take what the gods had sent him. He hadn't raised a hand to get her; she had thrown herself at him; oh, she knew what she was doing, well enough, though she probably expected him to marry her. Perhaps he would, later on. He wasn't prepared right there to say he wouldn't. But there was plenty of time for that. He hoped she wouldn't turn out to be one of the crying, troublesome kind. Add a Laidlaw Wright father-in-law to that, and one might as well shoot oneself—what with writs, attachments, box-office seizures, injunctions, citations "to show cause," detectives going through your pockets, black eyes, fines, contempt-proceedings—all raining on a fellow in buckets! He smiled grimly at the recollection. No more of that for him.—Well, if she didn't like the other way, she would just have to make the best of it. Her innocence here again would be a great help. The poor little lamb believed every word he said. Besides, with women, kisses could always atone for everything.

The train rumbled on and on. Adair succumbed to a fitful and uneasy slumber, through which there ran a thread of tormenting dreams. He had lost her; they had become separated, and over the heads of a crowd he saw her disappearing in a vortex of hurrying people; he struggled unavailingly to follow, swearing, hitting out, shouldering and elbowing like a madman; the cruel reality of it awakened him to find her sleeping in his arms. He awakened her, too,—roughly,—to share his relief, his joy. He made her hold him round the neck; made her kiss him, all sleepy as she was; crushed and cuddled her in a transport of sudden passion. Then he nodded off again, his lips resting on her silken hair, blissfully content, and no longer afraid to close his heavy lids.

They were bundled off at Ferrisburg at three in the morning, all of them so sodden with sleep that they could scarcely keep their eyes open. A dilapidated bus, and a freckled boy received them, the former representing the Clarendon Hotel, the latter, Miss MacGlidden's theatrical boarding-house. The company divided accordingly, with some grumpy facetiousness, the lesser members trailing away on foot after the boy, the principals climbing into the bus,—the trunks of both stacked high on the platform to await the morning.

The hotel, in spite of its fine name, was a bare, dismal, ramshackle place; and the lowered lights, and uncarpeted floors gave it a peculiarly forbidding air as the doors were unlocked to admit them. Phyllis, clinging to her lover's arm, and overcome with weariness, took little heed of the arrangements being made for their accommodation. She had no idea of the Cyril Adair and wife that was being written almost under her nose. Even when she accompanied Cyril up-stairs at the heels of a yawning darky, she was equally unaware that her room was also to be his. No sleepy child at her father's side could have been more trusting.

The darky shuffled off, leaving them alone together in the big, cold bedroom. Adair took her in his arms, and kissed her, murmuring something that she only half heard and altogether failed to understand. All that she grasped was that he would return in a little while—that she was to undress, and go to bed, while he went down to get his dress-suit case. He opened her own little bag, and laughed as he arranged the contents on the chiffonier, she with blushes, struggling to restrain him. Then he was gone, and when she went to lock the door, she found that the key was gone, also.

She took off her hat, her cloak, her bodice, and with no light save a pair of wretched candles began to brush her unloosened hair. A terrible misgiving was stealing over her which she tried to allay by prolonging this familiar task. The missing key, the talk of coming back—what was she to think? A deadly fear struck at her heart. It was not all for her honor. There was more at stake than even that—the greater disaster of Adair's unworthiness. Could this be the love for which she had abandoned everything? Was it all a lie, a fraud, a trick? She suddenly seemed to lose the strength to stand, sinking into the nearest, chair, huddled and trembling.

No, no, he could not be so inconceivably base. She was wrong. His love was as real as hers. He was incapable of such coldblooded premeditation. Everything she had was his. It was not that. The thought of giving herself to him had filled her with an unreasoning joy. But to be cheated, to barter her life, her soul in exchange for his pretense—oh, she would have rather died! She would have starved for him, would have sold the clothes off her back for him, would have borne unflinchingly odium, contempt, disgrace, asking only that he love her well. But without that—! It was for him to choose; she had no resistance left; but if it were, indeed, all a lie she would kill herself the next day. One could outlive many things, but not that. There are some cheats that leave one with no redress save death.

She heard his step in the corridor; heard the door softly open; looked up with dilating eyes to learn her fate. The words Adair meant to say never were said. He stopped, staring down at her with a gaze as questioning as her own. It was one of those instants that decide eternities. All that she had thought, all that she had dreaded were articulate in the piteous face she raised to his. It was a look, which, mysteriously, for that perceptive instant was open for him to read.

"They have got me a room on the other side of the house," he said, "but I had to come back first to say good night." He ran over to her, kissed her lightly on her bared shoulder, pressed a great handful of her hair across his lips, and hurried away before temptation could overmaster him.

There was no one to be found anywhere, but he remembered the stove still burning in the bar-room, and the empty chairs gathered socially about it. Thither he made his way through the silent office and corridors, and drawing his cheap fur coat close about him, settled himself to pass what little remained of the night. There was sawdust on the floor, spittoons, scraps of sausage-rind; the air stank stalely of beer and spirits; the single gas-jet, turned very low, flickered over the nude women that decorated the mean, fly-blown walls, and flickered, too, over a man, half-slumbering in a chair, who, but glimmeringly to himself, had taken the turning road of his life.

CHAPTER XVII

The sensation of most runaway couples, after filling up a blank form, and having a marriage service gabbled over them by a shabby stranger in a frock-coat, is one of unmixed astonishment at the facility of the whole proceeding. A dog-license is no harder to obtain, and the formalities attending vaccination are even greater.

Phyllis emerged from the Reverend Josiah Lyell's with a ring on her finger, and a cardboard certificate on which the Almighty, angels, and forked lightning were depicted above her name and Adair's. The first discussion of their married life was what to do with this monstrosity. Phyllis was for tearing it up, but Adair, superstitiously afraid of bad luck, insisted stoutly on its being retained.

"I'll hide it at the bottom of my trunk," he said.

They returned to the carriage, which was awaiting them as composedly as though nothing in particular had happened in the ten-minute interval. Adair wished to take a drive before going back to the hotel, thinking that the air and repose would be soothing for their nerves,—but to his surprise Phyllis demurred.

"I've been married your way," she said, "now you must come and be married mine."

"Yours, Phyllis?"

"Yes, tell him to drive to a Catholic church."

He gave the order good-humoredly. "Aren't you satisfied?" he asked. "Do you want more angels and forked lightning?"

"You see, I've always been a sort of Catholic," she explained. "Not a good Catholic, but a poor little straggler, galloping on half a mile behind, like a baby sheep that's got left. I've never liked the confession part of it, but really, Cyril, there's a sort of whiff of Heaven about a Catholic church that I need occasionally. It's just as though you were awfully hungry, and went in to smell a beautiful dinner a long way off!"

"All right, Phyllis, if we are going to get married we might as well do it thoroughly," assented Adair. "If you think that beautiful dinner will help us any, let's go and smell it by all means."

As kind fate would have it, it was rather an attractive church, and better still it was altogether deserted. The autumn sunshine was streaming through stained-glass windows; a faint perfume of incense lingered in the air; the peace and solitude gave an added dignity to the altar, with its suffering pale Christ, its tall candles, its effulgent brasses gleaming in the rosy light. Phyllis made Adair kneel at her side, and holding his hand tightly in hers, prayed silently with downcast eyes, and the least quiver of a smile at the corner of her lips.

On their way out they stopped at the font. She crossed herself, touched her fingers to the water, and scattered some drops on Adair's face. "That's that you will always love me," she said, with captivating solemnity, "that's that you will always be true to me; and that's that—I may die first!"

Adair dabbled his own hand in the holy water, as though the act had a religious significance, "Oh, God," he said, looking up in all seriousness, "if there is a God—take care of this sweet wife of mine, and guard her from every harm; and if there isn't, I swear by this I am going to do it myself just as well as I know how!"

They kissed each other, and were about to go, when Phyllis noticed the poor-box. She slipped off her best ring, a little diamond such as girls are permitted to wear, and unhesitatingly dropped it in. Adair, caught by the picturesqueness of the offering, would have sacrificed his horseshoe pin had he not been prevented.

"No, that's too pretty," she cried jealously. "Haven't you something you don't like that God would?"

A little rummaging discovered a gold pencil-case which seemed to fulfill this demand—at least on Adair's side—and it forthwith followed the ring. Then they sought the open air.

"Now, at last I feel really married," said Phyllis gaily, as they climbed back into the carriage. "What a strange, dizzy, safe sort of feeling it gives one. And just think I could hug you right now before the driver, and that old lady with the basket, and that little boy blowing his baby brother's nose—and nobody could say Boo!"

She alarmed Adair by pretending to carry the hugging into effect until he tried to push her away, and told her to behave. She replied with a delighted, bubbling outcry over her new freedom: "Oh, but I'm married now, and can do just what I like, and can have breakfast in bed with you every morning, and put my shoes out with yours to be blacked, and I'm Mrs. Adair, and have a wedding-ring, and a certificate with forked lightning on it!" She exultantly popped up her feet on the seat in front, showing a shocking amount of black silk stocking with a bravado that made him grab at her skirt to pull it down; and in the ensuing romp there was more silk stocking still, and so much happy laughter on her part, and scandalized protestation on his that the driver turned round, and they were all but disgraced.

The narrowness of the escape sobered her, and for the rest of the drive she was demureness itself. What a joy it was to recline with half-shut eyes, and let the air fan away all the troubled memories of the night before! Mind and body craved repose, and mind and body found it in the cradle-like movement of the carriage. Adair was very tired, too, and willing enough to share his pretty companion's mood. Deliciously conscious of each other, though more asleep than awake, they abandoned themselves to the fresh bright morning, and breathed in deep drafts of contentment.

On their return to the hotel, the carriage stopped and Tommy Merguelis jumped up on the step. His perennial grin, and withered, foolish face was not unclouded by a certain anxiety. He dropped a bunch of roses into Phyllis' lap, with an awkward compliment which got as far as she was a rose herself, and then ended midway with a terrified giggle.

"I'm awful sorry," he said, addressing Adair, "but you're wanted at the theater, Mr. Adair, and I've been chasing around after you for the last half-hour. They want you to rehearse right off with Miss Clarke, and coach her a bit in the business."

"Why, what's the matter with De Vere?" asked Adair, surprised.

A slight glaze seemed to spread itself over the grin.

"She won't be in the bill for a day or two," said Tommy. "She's been suddenly taken awful bad." He paused, seeking a decorous name for the attack in question, and finally veiled it in the obscurity of a foreign language: "A crisis de nerves," he added.

"Oh, tantrums?" said Adair in a plainer tongue. "What a confounded nuisance!"

"She kept yelling and yelling until we got the doctor," went on Tommy; "and then on top of that Miss Clarke had to get into a hair-pulling match with Miss Larkins—and so I think you had better hurry, Mr. Adair, if there's to be anything doing to-night."

"Great Lord, I think so, too!" cried the latter, to whom, like all stars, the evening performance was next to a religion. "You go on to the hotel," he went on, turning to Phyllis, "and make yourself as comfortable as you can." The vexation in his voice was even a better apology than the one in words. "I'm damned sorry," he said. "It's the most infernal shame. Forgive me, Phyllis, please do, and try not to mind."

Thus it was that she drove to the hotel alone, while Adair and Tommy strode off to quiet the tempest in the theater, and start a tedious and prolonged rehearsal with Miss de Vere's understudy.

Phyllis went to her room, and found one alleviation of its loneliness in examining that mysterious object, her wedding-ring. It was so strange, so unfamiliar, so charged with significance and finality. Just a trifling hoop of gold, and yet with what myriad meanings. Probably in days gone by, when of brass or iron it was riveted on the neck, little brides mirrored themselves in pools with a similar awe at their altered state, and a similar questioning of the unknown future.

For better or worse, for good or evil, her life was linked to Adair's beyond all recalling, and the emblem of their compact glittered on the hand she gazed at so long and earnestly.

But you can not hypnotize yourself for ever with a wedding-ring—even one not two hours old. There was another matter that called more insistently for her attention. Cyril had promised her two hundred and fifty dollars for her clothes, and it behooved her to get pen and ink, and begin making her calculations. This she did with much erasing, much crinkling of girlish brows—with a profound, wise-baby expression as though all the world were at stake. There was a delicious immodesty in spending Adair's money for such laced and ribboned femininities—nightgowns, stockings, chemises, and what she wrote down ambiguously as "those things," and colored as she wrote it. How thrilling it was, and how exquisitely shocking! Oh, dear, what nice ones they would have to be,—twenty-five dollars gone for six in the twinkling of an eye, for surely economy here would be a crime, men being notoriously fond of—

"Mrs. Adair?"

Her new name was so unfamiliar that she hesitated before answering: "Come in."

"A gentleman to see you, Mrs. Adair."

The door opened, and there on the threshold stood her father! His face was white, his eyes morose and sunken, his whole air so formidable that in the first shock of recognition Phyllis could do no more than stare at him in terror.

"May I enter?" he asked, in that deeper intonation of his which he never used except under some special stress. As he spoke he looked about sharply, and with a bristling hostility as though expecting to discover a second occupant of the room.

"Mr. Adair isn't here," she said, answering the silent question. "I am all alone, Papa."

She would have kissed him, but he brushed past her to a chair, and seated himself heavily, laying his silk hat and his gloves on the floor beside him. Thus stalwartly in possession of the chamber, he appeared more formidable than ever, and the deliberate gaze he bent on Phyllis was masterful and menacing.

"So you've gone and thrown away your life," he said at last. "Forgive me, my dear, if I am not able to congratulate you upon it."

"I married Mr. Adair this morning, if that's what you mean." She hardly knew how to say more without adding to her offense. Her father was bound to put her in the wrong whatever reply she made. A terrible hopelessness weighed her down, and crushed the unspoken appeal on her lips.

"Thrown away like that," he repeated, with a gesture. "You, who had everything; you, with beauty, position, money, brains—my God, the folly of it—the cruel, wicked, heartless folly of it!"

"Don't, Papa!" she pleaded. "It's done, and so what's the good of wounding me now?"

"Done!" he cried out bitterly. "That depends on what you mean by the word. I will call it done in six months when you will leave him for good, and he will name his price for a divorce. That's the way adventurers marry money nowadays. They enjoy the girl till they are tired of her, and then sell!"

Phyllis struggled to keep her composure under the affront. "You are very unjust," she returned in a low voice that trembled in spite of herself. "You are determined to think the worst of him, and make it impossible for us ever to be friends. But you are wrong, Papa. He's not an adventurer, nor anything like it. Surely I ought to know better than you, and if I have been willing to love him, and marry him—"

"Oh, I'm not going to argue with you about him," interrupted Mr. Ladd harshly. "You believe in him now, of course. One can't reason with lunatics, and I shan't try. I'll give you six months—perhaps even less—and then I want you to remember what I am saying to you now."

"That you were right?"—Her voice was scornful.—"Oh, Papa, this is unworthy of you."

"Phyllis," he retorted, "that's the last thing on earth I would ever say to you. If you should come back to me disillusioned, broken, utterly weary of the muddle you have made of it all, you will find everything unchanged between us and the whole matter as ignored as though it had never been. That's what you are to remember—that my heart and my purse will never be closed against you."