Eden Part 13

"Yes," he said, as he did so, "yes, Miss Menemon----"

But before he could reach her, Usselex barred the way. "By what right, sir--" he began, very firmly, but Eden interrupted him.

"I told you once that I thought Miss Bolten was interested in him. Let me tell you now he is in love with me."

"Eden, Eden--" her father murmured, reprovingly. Into Usselex' face came an expression that a demon might have envied. For a second he fronted Maule, his hand clenched. Then the fingers loosened again. The demon was transformed into a quiet, self-possessed man, that looked like a monk, a trifle valetudinarian at that.

"Madam," he said, "when a woman speaks in that way to the man whose name she bears, there is but one thing for him to do, and that is to withdraw." He bowed, and without further comment left the room.

"I don't bear your name," Eden called after him, but he had gone. "I don't bear your name; I throw it to the mud from which it sprang."

"And you are right, Miss Menemon," Maule echoed. "You are right to do so." And again he moved to her.

"Don't touch me," the girl cried; she was trembling. Evidently the excitement had been too much for her. "Don't touch me," she repeated; and drawing from him as from a distasteful thing, she added, with a look of scorn that an insulted princess might have exhibited: "Though you have not a lackey's livery, you have a lackey's heart."

"Eden, I beg of you--" Mr. Menemon began. But the girl had turned her back, and divining the uselessness of any admonition, the old gentleman addressed himself to Maule. "You will permit me to say, sir," he continued, "that whatever your motive may have been, and whatever evidence you may have, your announcement might have been conveyed a trifle less unceremoniously. I bid you good afternoon."

"But----"

"I bid you good afternoon."

Maule twirled his moustache for a second, and then, with a glance at Eden, he too left the room.

Hardly had he gone, when Eden threw herself on a lounge. In her ears was the roar of water displaced. The flooring turned from red to black. Then all was still; she had fainted.

XI.

As Eden, through thunderclaps, and zig-zagged flames of light, groped back to consciousness again, it was with the intuition that some calamity was waiting to greet her. Into the depths of her being, a voice which refused to be hushed had been whispering, "Come." And Eden, clinging to the fringes of night, strove to still the call. But the phantom of things that were persisted and overcame her; it loomed abruptly, with arms outstretched, forcing her against her will, to reason with that in which no reason was.

For the moment she was benumbed, out-wearied with effort and enervated by the strain and depletion of force. She wished herself unconscious again, and looked back into the absence of sentiency from which she had issued, as a pilgrim reentering the desert may recall the groves of Mekka and the silence of the Khabian tomb. It had been less a swoon to her than a foretaste of peace, the ant.i.thesis of life compressed into a second; and she longed for a repet.i.tion of the sudden suffocation of its embrace. But memory had got its baton back, and the incidents of the hour trooped before her gaze. She could not be free of them; they beat at her heart, filling her thoughts to fulfillment itself. In their onslaught they brought her new strength, the courage that comes to the oppressed; and rising from the lounge on which she had fallen, she left her father and his ministrations, and redescended into the past with anger for aigrette and hatred for spur.

It was the room that she had occupied during her girlhood to which she then went, and in the presence of the familiar walls, something reminded her of the days in which she had believed that the ign.o.ble bore a stigma on their brow, that infamy of thought or deed left a visible sign. She recalled the old legends with which her childhood had been charmed, the combats of heroes with monsters, the struggles of lords with lies. In those days indeed, evil had been to her an abstraction, a figure of speech beckoned out of the remotest past, and unencounterable as the giant bat that darkened the nights of prehistoric time. Then had come a nearer acquaintance with it, the shudders that chronicles brought, and the intimations of the fabliaux; but still it had been distant, a belonging of the past incompetent of survival. And it was not until within recent years that she learned that it had indeed survived. Even then the tidings that reached her had as much consistency to her mind as the news of cholera in Singapore. She could not picture that Orient port, and the cholera she was sure would never attack her in her father's house.

And now suddenly she was contaminated. She felt as one may feel who had been lured into a lazar of lepers. Turn which way she might she could never wash herself clean. She was degraded in her own sight, and tricked by those whom she had trusted best. And no issue, not one. The dishonor into which she had been trapped was a thing that clamored for redress, and to that clamoring of her heart no answer was vouchsafed. "O G.o.d,"

she moaned, "is justice dead? Where are the thunderbolts you used to wield? Have you wearied of vengeance? have you left it, Jehovah, to us?"

Her forehead was throbbing as it had never throbbed before. Above it each individual hair seemed to be turning red. Her sultry eyes were dilated; she was quivering from shoulder to heel. And as in her restless anger she paced the room, before her on the wall glowed the device her own hands had made--_Keep Yourself Pure_. For a second she stared at it, the color mounting and retreating from her cheeks, and suddenly she tore it down and trampled it under foot.

"Vengeance is there," she cried; and without even the hesitation of a hesitation she bent over a table, and finding a sheet of paper, she scrawled across it--_In telling you of Maule's love for me I omitted to tell you of my own for Adrian._ This she addressed and then rang the bell.

And as she stood waiting for a servant to come, there was a rap on the door and her father entered. He looked at her for an instant and rubbed his hands. "It is chilly here, Eden," he said; "had you not better come down-stairs?"

"Is it worth while? It must be late. Where is Parker? has she not come with my things?"

"Yes; it is almost six o'clock. Parker--"

"Six! I thought it was midnight. How long have I been here?"

"Three or four minutes at most. I had a note to write. So soon as I could do so I followed you at once. You are quite yourself again, Eden, are you not?"

"I can understand," mused Eden, "that there are years that count double when there are moments that prolong themselves as have these." "Yes,"

she answered, aloud. "I am better. I will come with you."

She picked up the message she had written and left the room. In the hallway was the servant for whom she had rung. "Take this to Fifth Avenue," she said. "There is no answer, but see that it is delivered in person."

XII.

"It is pleasanter here, is it not, Eden?" Mr. Menemon asked, when they reached the sitting-room. "It makes one think of old times, doesn't it?

Do you remember--" And Mr. Menemon rambled on with some anecdote of days long past.

Eden gazed at him wonderingly. His words pa.s.sed her by unheeded. It was bewildering to her that he could accept the tragedy so lightly, and as he spoke she kept repeating to herself that Virginius was part of a world long dead and derided. Truly, she could not understand. He seemed conscious of no wrong doing. The position in which she was placed excited him so little that he was able to discourse in plat.i.tudes. She was not wife nor maid nor widow, and for the man who had taken her from her home and inflicted on her a wrong that merited the penitentiary, her father expressed no indignation, no sorrow even. He did not even attempt to condole with her. And it was to him she had turned. Truly, she was helpless indeed. Yet still she gazed at him, expectant of some sudden outbreak, some storm of anger which, though it parodied her own, would at least be in unison with it. Her fingers were restless and her mouth was parched, a handkerchief which she held she twisted into coils, it seemed to her that were no word of sympathy forthcoming she would suffocate, as the traveler in the desert gasps beneath the oppression of fair and purple skies.

And still Mr. Menemon rambled on. "I should have gone to his funeral,"

he said, "had you not come in. He is to be buried in Was.h.i.+ngton I hear.

Well, well! he was a brave man and a staunch friend. Yes, he was all of that. Really, Eden, I ought to have gone. I suppose they will escort the body to the station. Did you hear the drums when you went up-stairs? It makes a man of my age feel that his turn may be next."

Mr. Menemon crossed the room and looked out of the window. "See, Eden,"

he continued; "there must be a whole regiment. Not his own, though. The better part of that went down at Gettysburg. You remember, don't you----"

With this Mr. Menemon turned with a haste he strove to conceal. "It's almost dinner time," he added, inconsequently. "I will just change my coat." And immediately he left the room.

For a moment Eden thought she heard his voice in the hall. Then all was still again. She was wholly alone. She envied her father's friend who lay in some catafalque across the square. And presently the sense of desolation grew so acute that she threw herself prostrate on the lounge, and clasping a cus.h.i.+on in her arms, she buried her face in its silk.

From the square beyond came a m.u.f.fled roll, and on her shoulder the touch of a hand. It was her father, she was sure. She half turned, her cheeks wet with tears. "What is it?" she sobbed. "Father----"

"It is I, Eden." And through a rift of understanding there filtered the sound of Usselex's voice. With the flutter of a bird surprised, she looked up. She started, and would have risen, but the hand weighed her down. She tried to move, and raising her arm as though to s.h.i.+eld her eyes from some distasteful sight, suddenly she extended it, and motioned him back.

"Eden," he began.

"Don't speak to me!" she cried; and shaking herself from his hold, she stood up and dashed the tears away. "Don't speak to me!" she repeated; "and if anywhere within the purlieus of your being there is a spark of shame, leave me, and never----"

"Eden, you are unjust."

"Ah, I am unjust, am I not? I am unjust, because I believed in you. I am unjust, because I discover you in some coa.r.s.e intrigue, I am unjust, because I thought myself your wife. I am unjust, am I? Did you get my note? Is it for that that you are here?"

"Eden, if you will listen a moment----"

"I have listened too long. Where is my father? Why is it you pursue me here? Are you not satisfied with your work? You meet a girl who only wishes to trust, and before her eyes you unroll a panorama of deceit.

Oh! you chose her well----"