The Salamander Part 79

Despite his a.s.surance, the next day, after a night of horror, she called up a dozen friends, seeking fruitlessly to learn of the woman. She consulted three of her most particular confidantes as to what course she should adopt. All three agreed on absolute resistance. The first said to her:

"My dear, treat him as a friend. Be sympathetic! Find out who she is.

Point out to him that she is intriguing for his money. Act, not as an enemy, but as an adviser!"

The second added:

"Pretend to consider the proposition; then ask him for a year's delay, for his sake and for yours, to be sure that it is not a pa.s.sing infatuation. In a year, especially if there is no opposition, great changes can take place!"

The third agreed with the others, with this addition:

"In a year he will either grow tired of her, or she will have become his mistress, and he may become thoroughly satisfied with the arrangement.

Whatever you do, delay!"

At four o'clock, as the last adviser was hurrying out, Ma.s.singale entered. She was instantly struck with the intensity of the emotion that consumed him, which laid the telltale shadows of its fatigue in the hollows about his eyes and the stern drawn lines of his mouth.

"Before we go any further," she said carefully, "since I am to be sacrificed, may I at least ask you a few questions?"

"That is fair!" he said, deceived by her tone into a bounding hope that she would consent.

"Are you perfectly sure of this young girl, Harold?"

"Absolutely!"

"Who is she?"

He hesitated a moment.

"She is twenty-two; she is from the Middle West; she has been a little on the stage."

"And you are sure that she is disinterested?"

"Absolutely!"

"You are at the age when men are victims of such infatuations!" she said, looking down. "Perhaps I myself have been to blame! If you will wait a year, be sure, positively sure"--she stopped, blushed red, and said rapidly--"I will try to be to you, Harold, all that you want."

Even in the tensity of the moment, the incongruity of this unexpected solution struck him as so sublimely ludicrous that he laughed aloud.

Also he perceived her maneuver, at once undeceived. She drew herself up, stung to the soul, prey to an anger that swept aside all caution.

"Well, no! I will never consent! You shall never have a divorce so long as I can stop it! Go, live with your mistress."

"She is not my mistress!" he said, white with anger.

"A girl on the stage! You are ridiculous! You will make yourself the laughing-stock of New York, my dear fellow, with your little girl! And you think she loves you? Fool! don't you know what her game is?"

"Don't judge all women by yourself, Clara Bayne!" he said between his teeth, giving her her girlhood name. But instantly, digging his nails in his hands, he said in a different tone: "I beg your pardon! I am very irritated, in a very nervous state. I don't want to lose control of myself! Clara, you are too generous, too honest a woman, deliberately to force her to be my mistress!"

"I force her?" she cried furiously. "If she has taken the love of a married man, she is that already! Let her go on!"

"Do you mean this?" he said sternly.

"I certainly do!"

"You will not give the woman I love and respect the right to be my wife--to love me honestly before the world? Do you mean this?"

"I am your wife, and you shall never take that from me!"

"You have never been my wife!" he cried, beside himself. "You, a pure girl, deliberately set about to win me, as a _cocote_ does! Wife? You have taken my money to pay for your pleasures and your luxuries, and you have not even been my mistress! You a moral woman!"

"How dare you?" she cried, unrecognizable in her rage.

"A last time. Will you permit me to get a divorce?"

"No!" She uttered it as a shriek, fallen back against the wall.

"Then, madam, I will force you to do it!" he exclaimed, slamming his fist on a little table with such violence that it sent a shower of books clattering to the floor.

He left her clinging to the wall, choking with rage, descended to his car, and gave Dodo's address. The interview had left him in just that state of frenzy he needed to do the thing he would have hesitated long to do in his day of calm. The life that he had claimed from his wife rose up doubly precious to him for the proclaiming. He would cut off his wife without a cent; he would force her to sue him for abandonment, if not from shame, from positive necessity. Anyhow, the die was cast! He had cut away from all the old life! He would go with Dodo to-night, racing into the new, as she had wished. After a few months, a year, abroad, traveling in hidden countries, when his wife had come to her senses and procured a divorce, he would marry Dodo. They would not come back to New York, but the world was wide. Marriage exalted everything.

He would not be the first so to do. Abroad, in Paris, London, Rome, such romances were understood. He jumped out and ran hastily up the stairs, knocked, and came tempestuously into the room.

He saw her with hands clasped over her breast, standing tremulously sweet, swaying with fear of his coming. He held out his arms, caught her violently to him, buried his head in the cool regions of her neck, caressed by the fragrant youth of her hair, uttering but one word:

"Come!"

She heard it, rather frightened, alarmed, too, at the personal disorder that shook him like a leaf, alarmed at the man who had at last come to where she had wished him. She said to herself, incredulously, that she was happy--wildly, deliriously happy; and she remained quiet, pa.s.sing her hands soothingly over his bent head, alert, as if listening for some sound in the air.

"You will come?" he said suddenly, holding her from him.

"Yes!" she said in a whisper.

"Now--to-night--far off--with me?"

"Yes! How has it happened?" she said breathlessly. "Why now? Why are you willing, all at once?"

"Because I no longer care for anything else but you!" he cried--"friends, career, reputation. Because I can't live without you, Dodo! Because nothing else in life is life but you! Because I've come to hate it all--the rest! Dodo, I love you! I can't be without you!"

"At last!" she said mechanically, staring at him.

She did not draw away, though his lips sought hers. She longed for that oblivion which had first come to her in his arms, that quieting of the senses that drew the day from before her eyes and closed her ears to all but the faintest, far-off murmurings. She did not resist, but eagerly awaited this masculine mastery that once had awakened all the slumbering pa.s.sionate fires within her. She wanted to forget again, to be overwhelmed, balanced in his arms, a weak contented thing, leaping hungrily to his contact, delirious and on fire. But no such oblivion arrived. She felt herself poignantly awake, curiously, critically conscious of a hundred questions against her brain, wondering at him, at his frenzy--feeling none herself, nor knowing why.

All at once from the other room the voice of Snyder startled them, singing raucously:

"Who are you with to-night, to-night?

Oh, who are you with to-night?

Will you tell your wife in the morning Who you are with to-night?"

He straightened up suddenly, recollecting himself.

"Ah, no! Don't go!" she cried, as she had on that first night when they had been swept together. He seemed so strange to her now! She wanted to have time to know him, this new Ma.s.singale!