Sally Bishop Part 69

He studied her in amazement. "If it were any other woman than you,"

he said suddenly, "I should think this was a put-up job to compromise me--a cunning, put-up job. But you! It's amazing! I don't understand it. Why, you'd brand yourself to the whole world. It'd be a mill stone round your neck, not a child."

"Don't you think I'm branded plainly enough already? What do you think a man like Devenish thinks of me?"

"Oh, Devenish be d.a.m.ned! There are other men than Devenish in the world. Men who know nothing; men who'd be ready to marry you."

"Yes, I found one--one who thought me everything--everything till I told him."

"You told him?"

"Yes."

"In the name of G.o.d, what for? You must be crazy. What the deuce did you want to tell him for?"

"It was the only fair thing to do," she said quietly.

"Fair? Rot! That's chucking your chances away. That's playing the fool! What's he got to do with your life before you met him?" This was flinging the blame at him.

"Would you rather that the woman you were going to marry kept silent, risked your not finding out afterwards? Would you think she'd treated you fairly if she said nothing, and you were to discover it when it was too late?"

He had no answer. He tried to make one. His lips parted; then, in silence, he turned away.

"It might have made your mind easier," she said quietly, without tone of blame, "but it wouldn't have been fair."

He twisted back. "There's no need for my mind to be made easier,"

he said hardly. "I've treated you fairly from the beginning to the end. I warned you in the first instance; I told you to have no truck with me. I sent you away. You came back. I didn't ask you to come back."

Janet's words flashed across Sally's memory; the words she had said when they were talking over the bangle: "I don't care what you say about that letter, the letter's nothing! It's the gift that's the thing. That's the song of s.e.x if you like, and whether you return it, or whether you don't, you'll answer it, as he means you to."

It was on the edge of her mind to repeat them then to him, but she refrained. It was better then, at that moment, to let him think that he had no cause to blame himself.

"No, my mind's perfectly easy," he added. "Thank G.o.d, I don't pose for a paragon; I've got the beast in me all right, but I've treated you square--absolutely square."

Her fingers clutched. To win her desires she must let him think so.

And perhaps he had treated her square; she supposed he had.

"Then help me not to be lonely now," she begged. She could see the wave of repulsion beat across his face, but even that did not deter her. "Oh, I don't mean that you should come back and live with me,"

she went on. "It isn't for that. You can't--you surely can't hate me as much as all that." It was not in her knowledge to realize that he must love her, greater than he had ever loved, if she were to win.

To the woman needing the child it is the child alone; to the man, the child is only the child when it is his.

"I don't hate you," he said. He picked up his hat from the settee, and her heart dropped to a leaden weight. "You seem to harp on that.

But what you ask, you surely must realize is frankly impossible. I don't wish to be responsible for a child."

"You needn't be responsible," she said eagerly. "You need never see it. You've been generous enough to me in what you've given me. I shan't ask for a penny more--I shan't use the child to extract money from you. You'll never hear from me again. After all, you have loved me," she said piteously. "You did love me once."

He turned angrily away. "My G.o.d!" he exclaimed. "You talk as if you were out of your mind! If I did have a child, I should want to see it. I shouldn't want to be ashamed of it; I shouldn't want to disown it, as you'd have me do."

"Well, then, you might see it as often as you wished."

He strode to the door. She must have it now. He had meant to say nothing, wis.h.i.+ng to save her feelings; but she must have it now.

"Then I'm engaged to be married," he said firmly. "Do you see now that it's impossible?"

She dropped into a chair, staring strangely at his face.

"You--married?" she whispered.

"Yes; and I've no desire to have things cropping up in my life afterwards, just in the way that this Mrs. Priestly in the divorce courts--"

Sally struggled to her feet.

"Mrs. Priestly?"

"Yes; what about her? Do you know her?"

"What do you know about her?" she asked.

"I'm counsel for her husband."

"You're cross-examining her?"

Straight through her mind leapt that scene in the divorce court when she had witnessed his attack upon the miserable woman whom the law had placed out for his feet to trample on.

"Yes," he replied. "What _do_ you know about her?"

She sank back into her chair saying nothing.

"You won't say?"

She shook her head.

"Well, it's of not much interest to me. I shouldn't have you subpoenaed, if you did know anything. You know the case, at any rate.

Well, I don't want that sort of affair in my life; so you never need mention this matter again. I'll come and see you sometimes, if you want me to; but only on condition that we have none of this. When I'm married, of course, then it'll have to stop."

Sally raised her head. Her eyes were burning--her lips were drawn to a thin colourless line.

"You--who never were going to marry!" she shouted. "You who didn't believe in it--who wouldn't fetter yourself with it! Oh, go! Go!"

CHAPTER VI

That same evening there might have been seen two men seated opposite to each other at a small table in the corner of the grill-room of a well-known restaurant. Throughout the beginning of the meal, they laughed and talked amiably to each other. No one took particular notice of them. The waiter, attendant upon their table, leant against a marble pillar some little distance away and surrept.i.tiously cleaned his nails with the corner of a menu-card. A band played on a raised platform in some other part of the room. From where they sat, they could see the conductor leading his orchestra with the swaying of his violin. He tossed his hair into artistic disorder with the violent intensity of feeling as he played, and his fingers, strained out till the tendons between them were stretched like the strings upon which they moved, felt for the harmonics--shrill notes that pierced through the sounds of all the other instruments.

In the midst of the rattling of plates, the coming and going, the buzz of conversation, these two men chatted good-naturedly over their meal. At its conclusion, they ordered coffee, cigars and liqueurs, and leant back comfortably in their chairs. Hundreds of others there, were doing precisely the same as they--thousands of others in all the restaurants in London. There was nothing remarkable about their faces, their dress or their manner until one of them suddenly leant forward across the table, and his expression, from genial amus.e.m.e.nt, leapt in sudden changes from the amazement of surprise to the fierceness of contempt and anger. Some exclamation in the force of the moment probably left his lips, for a woman at a table near by turned in her chair and gazed at them with unconcealed curiosity. She kept strained in that position as he brought down his fist on the table. She could see his fingers gripping the cloth. Then the other man put out his hand with a gesture of restraint.