Sally Bishop Part 20

"I'd like to hear you two argue. She thinks just the opposite. She thinks--"

"I never argue with a woman," Traill interrupted.

"You think so poorly of us?" She tried to say it with spirit--struck the flint in her eyes, contracted her lips to the hard, thin line.

"As women? No--the very best." Her looks did not worry him. Water pouring over marble runs off as smoothly. "You want to be judged as men--you never will be till you can cut your hair short and dress the part. Clothes have the deuce of a lot to do with it. I can love a woman, but, my G.o.d, I can't argue with her."

He leant back to let Berthe put the plates of soup before them, and Sally watched his face. It was very hard--high cheek-bones from which the flesh drooped in hollows to the jaws, the grey eyes well set, neither deep nor prominent, but flinching at nothing. There was no great show of intellectuality in the forehead--it was broad, smooth, but not high; yet none of the features were small. The jaw was square, the upper lip long. At one end the mouth seemed to bend upwards in a twist of irony, rather than humour, and the lips themselves were thin--lips that could cut each word to a point if they chose, before they uttered it, a mouth by no means sensitive to the hard things it could speak.

To Sally it both feared and fascinated. Whenever he was not looking, she could not take her eyes away. In the pictures in her mind, it showed itself most often in ironic rage; yet he could look at her with an expression that wooed the softest of thoughts in her heart.

Then she felt a slave, and would have given him the world, held in her fingers, the gift would have seemed so small.

He looked up quickly from his plate--all motions of his head were alert. "Why don't you begin your soup?" he asked.

She laughed quietly, and commenced at once with childlike obedience.

"Has Mr. Arthur said anything to you since?" he inquired presently.

For a short moment she hesitated--then she admitted it.

"When?"

"Monday evening."

"Oh--the day you had lunch with me."

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

Again she hesitated.

"What right have I to ask--eh?" he interrupted before she could frame the words to reply. "Isn't that what you're sticking over? Of course I've no right but interest. You brought me the interest, you know--but I apologize for it all the same. Berthe!"

"Oui--Monsieur."

"Maquereaux grilles; and I want something to drink."

Berthe went to the bottom of the stairs, leaning on the third step with her hand and calling up to the room above.

"Alexandre!"

"Why does she do that?" inquired Sally.

"She's calling for Alexandre, the waiter who runs out across the street--obediently but slowly--with your pennies to buy your wine.

They don't have a license here."

Alexandre made his appearance with a big red cardboard cover in his hand, which looked as if it held a copy of a weekly paper. This was the wine list. Traill gripped it from him, giving the number almost at the same moment.

Alexandre waited patiently for a moment, then deferentially suggested that he should be given the money, having received which, the little staircase swallowed up his tall, thin body again. It was all like playing at keeping restaurant, only everything worked without a hitch, which would never have happened if it had really been only a game.

"I apologize," Traill repeated, when Alexandre had disappeared.

"But there's no need to," said Sally, quickly. "I think it's very kind of you to take the interest that you do. And I suppose"--her eyes roamed plaintively round the room, rather than at that moment meet his; "I suppose I should have told you without your asking."

"Why?" he leaned a little forward.

"I don't know. Because I wanted to, I expect."

Her eyes fell to the table. She made tiny pellets of bread between her fingers and placed them one by one in a row, knowing that his eyes were searching through her. In that little moment, the silence vibrated with the current of their thoughts. Traill pulled himself together--laying hand upon anything that came within his reach.

"Look at this knife," he said in a dry voice, picking up the nearest to him. "Ever seen such a handle? it's shrunk in the wash." The bone handle of it was bent round, twisted like a ram's horn. "I generally get this about once a week. It's an old friend by this time."

She looked at it, scarcely seeing, and forced a smile that could not quite remove the furrow of silent intensity from her brows. Traill saw that. He could not take his eyes from her face. Her almost childish pa.s.sivity was like a slow and heavy poison in his blood.

It crept gradually and gradually through the veins, leaving fire wherever it touched.

Alexandre came back with the wine, and broke the spell of it. He spread the change out on the table, and the sound of it then, at that moment, was like the breaking of a thousand little pieces of gla.s.s, over which his presence walked with clumsy feet.

"Well, what did Mr. Arthur say?" Traill asked when Alexandre had disappeared again and Berthe had brought them their second course.

Sally looked up and smiled at his encouragement, a smile that lit through him. He could feel it dancing in his eyes.

"He asked me if I had made up my mind," she replied.

"Made up your mind to marry him?"

"Yes."

The pause was heavy, it seemed to swing against them.

"And you? What did you say?"

He tried to conceal the burning of his interest to know. His voice was steady--each note of each word quiet, true, subdued; but when the brain is tautened, vibrating as was his, it gives out of itself unconsciously. She felt the strain in her mind as well, just as though a wire, drawn out, were stretched between them. She heard the note, half-dominant in his speech. However quiet his voice, he could not dull her ears to that.

"Oh, I told him I couldn't; it was impossible. I don't love him, I never should love him. How could one take a step like that on no other basis than wanting a home? What a home it would be! I should be miserable."

These were her beliefs. She placed love before everything--lifted it to the altar as you raise a saint and wors.h.i.+pped with bent knees and silently moving lips. To understand the great-hearted love of a greatly loving woman, you must know the joy of greatly giving. She loves to give; she gives to love. Out of her breast, out of her heart, with arms laden to the breaking--dragged down by the weight of her gifts, she will give, and give, and give, holding nothing back, grudging nothing, forgetting all she has ever given in the blind joy of what is left to be bestowed. This, when it comes to a woman, is what she means by love as she kneels down in the silent chapel of her own heart and wors.h.i.+ps. This was the pa.s.sion as Sally understood it. Her whole desire was to give, and to Mr. Arthur she could have given nothing.

"What did he say?" asked Traill, quietly. A man always speaks somewhat in awe, somewhat in deference, of another whose hopes have been flung to the ground; speaks of him as if he were a prisoner in a condemned cell--fool enough no doubt, but made a man again by the meeting of his fate. "What did he say?" he repeated.

Across Sally's mind pictures were rus.h.i.+ng in kaleidoscope. The remembrance of Mr. Arthur as he had left her at the door and turned away, shuffling his steps along the pathway--the sight of Janet and herself, with heads raised from the pillow, listening to the m.u.f.fled, disordered sounds in the next room--the recollection of Mr. Arthur's face the next morning as she had pa.s.sed him in the hall, the eyes dull--steam, as it were, upon a window-pane--and the unhealthy shadows beneath. He had grudged her a good morning, but that was all, and she had scarcely seen him since then. He had been out every evening.

"He said very little," she replied, "but I know he felt it very much."

"How do you know?"

"Well, that night when he came in--" the words refused utterance.

She looked up quaintly, appealing to him, desiring to be understood without further explanation.