Life and Gabriella Part 45

She shook her head. "I'm not upset. I'm not feeling it in the least.

Somehow, I can't even realize that I ever knew him. If you told me it was all a dream, I should believe you."

"Well, you're a plucky sort. I could tell that the first minute I saw you."

"It's not pluck. I don't feel things, that's all. I suppose I'm hard, but I can't help it."

"Hard things come useful sometimes; they don't break."

"Yes, I suppose if I'd been soft, I should have broken long ago," she replied almost bitterly.

After putting the plate and cup aside, he sat down by the table, and gazed at her attentively for a long moment. "Well, you look as soft as a white rose anyhow," he remarked with a curiously impersonal air of criticism.

A rosy glow flooded her face. It was so long since any man had commented upon her appearance that she felt painfully shy and displeased.

"All the same I've had a hard life," she returned with pa.s.sionate earnestness. "I married when I was twenty, and seven years later my husband left me for another woman."

"The one in there?"

She shuddered, "Yes, the one in there."

"The darn fool!" he exclaimed briefly.

"There was a divorce, and then I had my two children to support and educate. Because I had a natural talent for dressmaking, I turned to that, and in the end I succeeded. But for ten years I never heard a word of the man I married--until--I met him downstairs--in the street."

"And you brought him in?"

"What else could I do? He was dying."

"Do you know what he was doing out there?"

"He was looking for me, I think. He thought. I would take him in."

"Well, it's strange how things work out," was his comment after a pause.

"There's something in it somewhere that we can't see. It's impossible to reason it out or explain it, but life has a way of jerking you up at times and making you stand still and think. I know I'm putting it badly, but I can't talk--I never could. Words, don't mean much to me, and yet I know--I know--" He hesitated, and she watched his thought struggle obscurely for expression. "I know you can't slip away from things and be a quitter, no matter how hard you try. Life pulls you back again and again till you've learned to play the game squarely."

He was gazing into the fire with a look that was strangely spiritual on his face, which was half in shadow, half in the transfiguring glow of the flames. For the second time she became acutely aware of the hidden subtleties beneath his apparent simplicity.

"I've felt that myself often enough," he resumed presently in a low voice. "I've been pulled up by something inside of me when I was plunging ahead with the bit in my teeth, and it's been just exactly as if this something said: 'Go steady or you'll run amuck and bu'st up the whole blooming show.' You can't talk about it. It sounds like plain foolishness when you put it into words, but when it comes to you, no matter where you are, you have to stand still and listen."

"And is it only when you are running amuck that you hear it?" she asked.

"No, there've been other times--a few of them. Once or twice I've had it come to me up in the Rockies when there didn't seem more than a few feet between me and the sky, and then there was a time out on the prairie when I was lost and thought I'd never get to the end of those darned miles of blankness. Well, I've had a funny road to travel when I look back at it."

"Tell me about some of the women you knew in the West." An insatiable curiosity to hear the truth about his marriage seized her; but no sooner had she yielded to it than she felt an impulsive regret. What right had she to pry into the hidden sanct.i.ties of his past?

A frown contracted his forehead, but he said merely: "Oh, there wasn't much about that," and she felt curiously baffled and resentful. "I think I'll go and take a look in there," he added, rising and walking softly in the direction of the room at the end of the hall.

He was gone so long that Gabriella, crus.h.i.+ng down the revolt of her nerves, went to the door, and opening it very gently, looked cautiously into the room. The window was wide open to the night, where the snow was still falling, and beside the candlestand at the head of the bed the nurse was filling a hypodermic syringe from a teaspoon. By the open window O'Hara stood inhaling the frosty air; and Gabriella crossed the floor so silently that he did not notice her presence until he turned to watch the nurse give the injection.

Then he said in a whisper: "You'd better go out. You can't do any good."

But she made an impatient gesture of dissent, and stopping between the bed and the wall, waited while the nurse bared George's arm and inserted the point of the needle. He was lying so motionless that she thought at first that he was already dead; but presently he stirred faintly, a s.h.i.+ver ran through the thin arm on the sheet, and a low, half-strangled moan escaped from his lips. Had she come upon him in a hospital ward, she knew that she should not have recognized him. He was not the man she had once loved; he was not the father of her children; he was only a stranger who was dying in her house. She could feel nothing while she looked down at him. When she tried to remember her young love she could recall but a shadow. That, too, was dead; that, too, had not left even a memory.

As she bent there above him she made an effort to remember what he had once been, to recall his face as she had first seen it, to revive the burning radiance of that summer when they had been lovers. But a gray veil of forgetfulness wrapped the past; and her mind, when she tried to bring back the emotions of seventeen years ago, became vacant. For so long she had stoically put the thought of that past out of her life, that when she returned to it now, she found that only ashes remained.

Then a swift stab of pity pierced her heart like a blade, and she saw again, not George her lover, not George her husband, but the photograph Mrs. Fowler had shown her of the boy in velvet clothes with the wealth of curls over his lace collar. So it was that boy who lay dying like a stranger in the bed of his son!

She turned hurriedly and went out without speaking, without looking back when she opened the door.

"If one could only understand it," she said aloud as she entered the sitting-room; and then, with a start of surprise, she realized that O'Hara had followed her. "You walked so softly I didn't hear you," she explained.

"The rugs are thick, and I have on slippers. My boots were soaking when I came in, and I'd just taken them off when you called."

They sat down again in front of the fire; and while she stared silently at the flames, with her chin on her hand and her elbow on the arm of the chair, he burst out so unexpectedly that she caught her breath in a gasp:

"You didn't know that I was married, too, did you?" His words, and even more than his words, his voice, filled with suppressed emotion, awoke her from her reverie in which she had been dreaming of Arthur.

She smiled evasively, remembering her promise to Mrs. Squires.

He hesitated again, and then spoke with an effort. "Well, it was h.e.l.l!"

he said grimly.

"I know"--she was very gentle, full of understanding and sympathy--"but you went through it bravely."

"I stuck to her." His hand clenched while he answered. Then, after a pause in which she watched him struggle against some savage instinct for secrecy, he added quietly: "If she were alive to-day, I'd be sticking to her still."

"You must have loved her." It was all she could think of to say, and yet the words sounded trite and canting as soon as she had uttered them.

Lifting his head quickly, he made a contemptuous gesture of dissent.

"No, it wasn't that. I never loved her, except, perhaps, just at the first. But there's something that comes before love, I guess. I don't know what it is, but there's something. It may be just plain doggedness, but after I married her there wasn't anything on top this earth that could have made me give up and let go. As soon as I found what I was up against--it was morphine--I knew I'd either got to fight it out or be a quitter, and I've never been a quitter. Until she got so bad she had to be shut up I kept a home for her out there in Colorado, and I lived with her in h.e.l.l as long as she wasn't too bad to be out of a hospital. Then I brought her on here and we found a private place down on Long Island where she stayed till she died--"

"And you still saw her?"

"Except when I was out West, and that's where I was most of the time, you know. My work was out there, and there's nothing like h.e.l.l behind you to keep you running. I made piles of money those years. That's all I ever cared for about money--just making it. I'd fight the devil to get it, but after I've once got it, I'll give it to the first fool who comes begging. But the getting of it is great."

"How long did it last?"

"My marriage? Going on eighteen years. She was down on Long Island for the last ten of them."

"Then you lived with her eight. Was she always--always-"

"Took it before I ever married her, and I found it out in a month. She wasn't so much to blame as you might think," he pursued thoughtfully.

"You see she had a tough time of it, and she was little and weak, and everything was against her. She came out West first to teach school, and then she got mixed up with some skunk of a man who pretended to marry her when he had a wife living in Chicago, and after that I guess she went on taking a dope just to keep up her spirits and ease the pain of some spinal trouble she'd had since she was a child. There was nothing bad in her--she was just weak--and I began to feel sorry for her, and so I did it. If I had it to do over again, I'm not so sure I'd act differently. She was a poor little creature that didn't have any man to look after her, and I was just muddling along anyway, thinking about money. Heaven knows what would have become of her if I hadn't happened along when I did."

He had lifted his head toward the light, while he ran his hand through his hair, and again she saw the look, so like spiritual exaltation, transfigure his face. Before this man, who had sprung from poverty and dirt, who had struggled up by his own force, overcoming and triumphing, fighting and winning, fighting and holding, fighting and losing, but always fighting--before this man, who had been born in a cellar, she felt suddenly humbled. Without friends, without knowledge, except the bitter knowledge of the streets, he had fought his fight, and had kept untarnished a certain hardy standard of honour. Beside this tremendous achievement she weighed his roughness, his ignorance of books and of the superficial conventions, and she realized how little these things really mattered--how little any outside things mattered in the final judgment of life. She thought of George, dying a drunkard's death in the room at the end of the hail--of George whose way had been smoothed for him from birth, who had taken everything that he had wanted.

"I wish there was something I could do for you--something to help you,"

she said impetuously. "But I never saw any one who seemed to need help so little."

His face brightened, and she saw that her words had brought a touching wistfulness into his eyes.