It was wonderful how cool she felt—how easily she could slip out of his grasp! Any man could be managed like a child if he were really in love with one….
“Don’t be a goose, Peter; do you suppose I’d have kissed you if—”
“If what—what—what?” he mimicked her ecstatically, not listening.
She saw that if she wished to make him hear her she must put more distance between them, and she rose and moved across the room. From the fireplace she turned to add—“if we hadn’t been saying goodbye?”
“Goodbye—now? What’s the use of talking like that?” He jumped up and followed her. “Look here, Undine—I’ll do anything on earth you want; only don’t talk of going! If you’ll only stay I’ll make it all as straight and square as you please. I’ll get Bertha Shallum to stop over with you for the summer; I’ll take a house at Trouville and make my wife come out there. Hang it, she SHALL, if you say so! Only be a little good to me!”
Still she stood before him without speaking, aware that her implacable brows and narrowed lips would hold him off as long as she chose.
“What’s the matter. Undine? Why don’t you answer? You know you can’t go back to that deadly dry-rot!”
She swept about on him with indignant eyes. “I can’t go on with my present life either. It’s hateful—as hateful as the other. If I don’t go home I’ve got to decide on something different.”
“What do you mean by ‘something different’?” She was silent, and he insisted: “Are you really thinking of marrying Chelles?”
She started as if he had surprised a secret. “I’ll never forgive you if you speak of it—”
“Good Lord! Good Lord!” he groaned.
She remained motionless, with lowered lids, and he went up to her and pulled her about so that she faced him. “Undine, honour bright—do you think he’ll marry you?”
She looked at him with a sudden hardness in her eyes. “I really can’t discuss such things with you.”
“Oh, for the Lord’s sake don’t take that tone! I don’t half know what I’m saying…but you mustn’t throw yourself away a second time. I’ll do anything you want—I swear I will!”
A knock on the door sent them apart, and a servant entered with a telegram.
Undine turned away to the window with the narrow blue slip. She was glad of the interruption: the sense of what she had at stake made her want to pause a moment and to draw breath.
The message was a long cable signed with Laura Fairford’s name. It told her that Ralph had been taken suddenly ill with pneumonia, that his condition was serious and that the doctors advised his wife’s immediate return.
Undine had to read the words over two or three times to get them into her crowded mind; and even after she had done so she needed more time to see their bearing on her own situation. If the message had concerned her boy her brain would have acted more quickly. She had never troubled herself over the possibility of Paul’s falling ill in her absence, but she understood now that if the cable had been about him she would have rushed to the earliest steamer. With Ralph it was different. Ralph was always perfectly well—she could not picture him as being suddenly at death’s door and in need of her. Probably his mother and sister had had a panic: they were always full of sentimental terrors. The next moment an angry suspicion flashed across her: what if the cable were a device of the Marvell women to bring her back? Perhaps it had been sent with Ralph’s connivance! No doubt Bowen had written home about her—Washington Square had received some monstrous report of her doings!… Yes, the cable was clearly an echo of Laura’s letter—mother and daughter had cooked it up to spoil her pleasure. Once the thought had occurred to her it struck root in her mind and began to throw out giant branches. Van Degen followed her to the window, his face still flushed and working. “What’s the matter?” he asked, as she continued to stare silently at the telegram.
She crumpled the strip of paper in her hand. If only she had been alone, had had a chance to think out her answers!
“What on earth’s the matter?” he repeated.
“Oh, nothing—nothing.”
“Nothing? When you’re as white as a sheet?”
“Am I?” She gave a slight laugh. “It’s only a cable from home.”
“Ralph?”
She hesitated. “No. Laura.”
“What the devil is SHE cabling you about?”
“She says Ralph wants me.”
“Now—at once?”
“At once.”
Van Degen laughed impatiently. “Why don’t he tell you so himself? What business is it of Laura Fairford’s?”
Undine’s gesture implied a “What indeed?”
“Is that all she says?”
She hesitated again. “Yes—that’s all.” As she spoke she tossed the telegram into the basket beneath the writing-table. “As if I didn’t HAVE to go anyhow?” she exclaimed.
With an aching clearness of vision she saw what lay before her—the hurried preparations, the long tedious voyage on a steamer chosen at haphazard, the arrival in the deadly July heat, and the relapse into all the insufferable daily fag of nursery and kitchen—she saw it and her imagination recoiled.
Van Degen’s eyes still hung on her: she guessed that he was intensely engaged in trying to follow what was passing through her mind. Presently he came up to her again, no longer perilous and importunate, but awkwardly tender, ridiculously moved by her distress.
“Undine, listen: won’t you let me make it all right for you to stay?”
Her heart began to beat more quickly, and she let him come close, meeting his eyes coldly but without anger.
“What do you call ‘making it all right’? Paying my bills? Don’t you see that’s what I hate, and will never let myself be dragged into again?” She laid her hand on his arm. “The time has come when I must be sensible, Peter; that’s why we must say goodbye.”
“Do you mean to tell me you’re going back to Ralph?”
She paused a moment; then she murmured between her lips: “I shall never go back to him.”
“Then you DO mean to marry Chelles?”
“I’ve told you we must say goodbye. I’ve got to look out for my future.”
He stood before her, irresolute, tormented, his lazy mind and impatient senses labouring with a problem beyond their power. “Ain’t I here to look out for your future?” he said at last.
“No one shall look out for it in the way you mean. I’d rather never see you again—”
He gave her a baffled stare. “Oh, damn it—if that’s the way you feel!” He turned and flung away toward the door.
She stood motionless where he left her, every nerve strung to the highest pitch of watchfulness. As she stood there, the scene about her stamped itself on her brain with the sharpest precision. She was aware of the fading of the summer light outside, of the movements of her maid, who was laying out her dinner-dress in the room beyond, and of the fact that the tea-roses on her writing-table, shaken by Van Degen’s tread, were dropping their petals over Ralph’s letter, and down on the crumpled telegram which she could see through the trellised sides of the scrap-basket.
In another moment Van Degen would be gone. Worse yet, while he wavered in the doorway the Shallums and Chelles, after vainly awaiting her, might dash back from the Bois and break in on them. These and other chances rose before