The Silver Poppy Part 34

"John," she said, in a low half-sob, "you won't--you can't leave me, without a word?"

He drew back from her; he, too, was humbled and broken, but the pride of his youth and the pride of his race still clung to him.

"There is nothing for me to say," he answered, coldly. He asked himself fiercely why he had half-heartedly wished, so many times, to see her but once, before going.

With a sudden impetuous movement she ran to him and flung her arms about him, clinging to him, panting and shaken.

"I love you; oh, I love you!" she cried out, pa.s.sionately, locking each thin arm about his resisting body. He no longer tried to force her away, and she clung to him and cried out again and again: "I love you, my own, I love you!"

Yet he stood unmoved, feeling as though she had long since drained to the bottom his deepest springs of emotion; now he could neither care nor resist.

"I have done wrong," she cried to him, feverishly; "I have made mistakes, and I have suffered, and grown wise! But see, through it all, how humble I have come to be! See how I crawl back to you! It was all vile, that old life of mine, I know!--but I only stumbled into it at first, by the littlest, most miserable chance; and I had to keep it up, to the end! And you couldn't understand that old, ceaseless craving for what it brought, and how the pa.s.sion for that world they thrust me into made me half-blind and half-drunk, and how I had to keep on, and on, and on!"

She tried to draw his face down to her own.

"If you knew what, or how, I have suffered! If you only knew--you'd forgive me! If you could understand how I love you now you would take me back, you would say that never in all the world would you find another love like mine! Oh, it isn't too late! It isn't too late! We have our lives still before us; we have both been living on the north side of life too long; we have been missing all the sun, and warmth, and color.

And you can save me from myself; you were saving me from myself! With you I could begin over again, from the first!"

He broke away from her then, with a vehemence that she had not looked for in him, but still she went on, feverishly: "Oh, you are strong, where I am faltering and weak. I _want_ to be honest, and good, and upright--but from the first they wouldn't let me! Oh, they wouldn't let me!"

"You have lied to me!" he cried out to her, harshly. "You lied to me from the first. You lied to me in the very hour when I asked you for all your open trust. Your life has been a lie! You are a lie--a living lie!"

She tried to m.u.f.fle the words with her hand, but his pa.s.sion swept him on.

"What you are now you'll be to the end! You have gone through life a cheat, an impostor, and you'll be one to the last! Even now you are acting a lie, even _now_, with me!"

He knew it was not the truth he spoke, but he felt safer after flinging it at her.

"No, no," she cried back. "_This_ is no lie! What woman would come and say what I have said? I couldn't ever act a part with you! I have no one but you--I have no one but you!"

As he flung her from him, in his own sudden terror of himself, she fell back and crouched on his trunk, rocking her frail body weakly back and forth, and sobbing over and over again: "Let me go back with you! Oh, have mercy on me, my own, and let me go back with you!"

Then she crept up to him on her knees, and clung to him with her thin, white hands, her eyes streaming with tears.

"I have friends," she went on, hysterically. "I have power and influence! I will work for you; I will slave for you! I will help you on, to the end; I will _make_ you, my own! Only _love_ me, love me! I need your love! You have taught me what it means, and I must have it!

See, see how humbled I am, here, on my knees to you!"

With a sudden pa.s.sionate movement he seized her drooping head between his hands and looked down long and searchingly into her white, tear-stained, up-turned face. His penetrating glance took note, for the first time, of the golden tint in the iris of her gray-green eyes, of the golden tint in her face itself, as if pale gold had been infused under some translucent sh.e.l.l of rose-white. Something in its reckless, wan beauty mounted to his brain intoxicatingly, and with a gasp he broke away from her again. As he fell back from her touch, his foot crushed her copy of The Silver Poppy, and he looked down at it, liberated, remembering how he had flung it there from among his own books, when he had stumbled unexpectedly upon it as upon the hideous sloughed skin of a snake. Intuitively, as she watched him, the woman at his feet saw her last flickering glimmer of hope die away, and then, in her utter despair, she beat her forehead with her hands and flung herself down and sobbed out brokenly that the whole world was against her, that he had trapped and betrayed her into loving him, and that he, and he alone, could save her.

Then, seeing him still obdurate and unmoved, she fell to beating the floor with her clenched fists, raving insanely at his cruelty, imploring him to have pity on her. And again, as her impotent pa.s.sion wore itself out, she lay there sobbing weakly, while he still stood above her, gazing out at the wheeling sea-gulls, into the blue distance beyond the lower Hudson.

Then a bell rang sharply, and she sat up, limp and exhausted, wiping the tears from her swollen face.

Hartley went to the door; a breath of relieving fresh air seemed to break in on him as he opened it. Two uniformed expressmen stood outside, waiting for his baggage. They had witnessed tearful farewells before, and their faces were respectfully expressionless, like masks, while they lifted the larger trunk out through the door and down the hallway.

Cordelia crept brokenly over to the window where Hartley stood, her shaking hands moving and feeling hesitatingly about his averted shoulders, as the hands of the blind do.

"Only kiss me--once!" she whispered, quietly, with a sudden white calm sweeping over her face. "Kiss me--once!"

She lifted her wet face, with its tumbled red-gold hair, up to his. Her eyes were closed, and she clung swaying to his coat-sleeves, waiting.

He looked down at her, swept away from her by a sudden alienating, dispiriting wave of pity, and kissed her with a kiss that seemed to leave her shrouded and coffined.

"Now _go_! Oh, _go_!" she cried out to him quickly, with her face still uplifted, and her eyes still closed.

He turned away from her and crossed the room slowly, waiting to close the door after the expressmen stoically carrying down his remaining trunk. He felt, in that last minute, as he pa.s.sed out, that she was richer by an indeterminate something that he himself had lost, although the sound of her broken sobbing crept out to him through even the closed door.

THE END.