he had been sitting just so in his library with the lamp behind him and the hollow flare of the coals making an excellent starting place for the house which was now so near him that the mere exhibition in shop windows of the stuffs with which it was being modernly renewed, was enough to set him off for it. it was so near now, that since the announcement of their engagement in september, he had moved through all its obligations benumbed by the white, blinding flash thrown backward from its consummating moment, the moment of her cry to him, of their welding at the core of light and harmony, bounded inevitably by the approaching date of marriage. it had been, he recalled on some one of those occasions of social approval by which it appeared engagements in the best society proceeded, that he had sat thus, waiting until the clock ticked on the moment when he might properly join her, sat so full of the sense of her that for the instant he accepted her unannounced appearance at the darkened doorway as the mere extension of[pg 241] his white-heated fancy. the next moment as she charged into the circle of the lamp he saw that the umbra of some strange electrical excitement hung about her. it fairly crackled between them as he rose hurriedly to his feet.
"you have come, eunice! you have come——"
but he saw well enough what she had come for. she laid the case on the table, but as she tugged impatiently at her glove, the fringe of her wrap caught the clasp of it and scattered the jewels on the cloth. she tried then to put the ring beside them, but her hand shook so that it fell and rolled upon the floor behind them. peter picked it up quietly, but he did not offer it to her hand again.
"i have come," said eunice, "to say what in my mother's house i was afraid of being interrupted in saying; what you must see, what my mother won't see."
"i see you are greatly excited about something!"
"i'm not, i'm not.... that is ... i am, but not in the way you think," she was sharp with insistence; "that is what you and[pg 242] mother always say, that i'm nervous or excited, and all the time you don't see."
"what is it i don't see, eunice?"
"that i can't stand it, that i can't go on with it, that it is dreadful to me,—dreadful!"
"what is dreadful?"
"everything, being engaged—being married and giving up...." it was fairly racked out of her by some inward torture to which he had not the key.
"of course, eunice, if you don't wish to be married so soon——" peter was all at sea. he brought a chair for her, and perceiving that he would go on standing as long as she did, she sat upon the edge of it but kept both the arms as a measure of defence. the slight act of doing something for her restored him for the moment to reality; he bent over her. "i've never wanted to hurry you, dearest—— it shall be when you say." she put up her hands suddenly with a shivering movement.
"oh, never, never at all; never to you!"
peter could feel that working its track of desolation inward, but the first instinctive movement of his surface was to close over the[pg 243] wound. he took it as he knew he could only take it: as the explosive crisis of the virginal resistance which he remembered he had heard came to girls when marriage loomed upon them. he took a turn down the room to steady himself, praying dumbly for the right word.
"it isn't as if i didn't respect you"—she was eager in explanation, hurried and stumbling—"as if i didn't know how good you are ... it is only, because we are so different."
"how different, eunice?"
"oh ... older, i suppose." she grew quieter; it appeared on the whole they were getting on. "i care for so many things, you know—dancing—and bridge—young things—and you are always reading and reading. oh! i couldn't stand it."
so it was out now. she was jealous of his books, a little. well, he had been self-absorbed. it occurred to him dimly that the thing to have done if he had known a little more about women, had practised with them, was to have provoked her at this point to the tears which should have sealed the renewal of his claim to her. what he said was, very quietly:[pg 244]
"of course i never meant, eunice, that you shouldn't have everything you want."
"oh," she seemed to have found a suffocating quality in his gentleness, against which she struck out with drowning gestures, "if you could only understand what it would mean to me never to have anybody i liked to talk to about things,—anybody i liked to be with all the time!" she was choked and aghast at the enormity of it.
"but i thought...." peter was not able to go on with that. "isn't there anybody you like to be with, eunice?"
"yes," said eunice. "burton henderson."
mutinous and bright she looked at him out of the chair with a hand on either arm of it poised for flight or defence. after an interval peter heard his own voice out of a fog rising to the conventional utterance.
"of course, if you have learned to love him——"
"i've loved him all the time." she was so bent on making this clear to him that she was careless what went down before her. "from the very beginning," she said, "but he had so[pg 245] little money, and mother ... i promised you, i know, but it's not as if i ever said i loved you."
she should have spared him that! he had not put out a hand to hold her that he should be so pierced through with needless cruelty. but she was bent on clearing her skirts of him.
"do you think," she expostulated to his stricken silence, "that if i'd cared in the least i'd have made it so easy for you? can't you see that it was all arranged, that we jumped at you?" all the time she sat opposite him, thrusting swift and hard, there was no diminution of her appealing beauty, the flaming rose of her cheeks and the soft, dark flare of her hair. as if she felt how it belied at every turn the quality of her unyielding intention, her voice railed against him feverishly. "i suppose you think i'm mercenary, and i thought i was, too. you don't know how people like us need money sometimes. all the things we like cost so—all the real things. and poor mamma, she needed things; she'd never had them, and i thought that i could stand being[pg 246] married to you if i could get them that way.... maybe i could, you know, if you'd been different, more like us i mean. but there was such a lot you didn't understand ... things you hadn't even heard about. i found that out as soon as we were engaged. there wasn't a thing between us; not a thing."
it poured scalding hot on peter's sensitive surfaces: made sensitive by the way in which even in this hour her beauty moved him. he felt tears starting in his heart and prayed they might not come to his face. "so you see as we hadn't anything in common it would be better for us not to go on with it even"—she broke a little at this—"even if there hadn't been anybody else. you see that, don't you?" she dared him to deny it rather than begged the concession of him as she gathered herself for departure.
"i see that."
"you never really belonged to our set, you know——" she rose now and he rose blindly with her; he hoped that she was done, but there was something still. "it hasn't been easy to go through with it.... mother isn't[pg 247] going to make it any easier. it's natural for her to want me to have everything that money would mean, and i thought that if you would just keep away from her ... you owe something to burton and me for what we've been through, i think ... just leave it to me to manage in my own way...."
"i shall never trouble you, eunice."
he came close to her then to open the door, seeing that she was to leave him, and he saw too that she had suffered, was at the very ebb and stony bottom of emotion as she hung for the moment in the doorway searching for some winged shaft of separation that should cut her off from the remotest implication of the situation. she found at last the barbedest. all the succeeding time after he closed the door on her was marked for peter, not by the ticked moments but by successive waves of anguish as that poisoned arrow worked its way to his secret places.
"it isn't as if i had ever loved you; i owe it to mr. henderson to remind you that i never said i did.... you know i never liked to have you kiss me."[pg 248]
he had in the months that succeeded to that last sight of eunice goodward, moments of unbearably wanting to go to her to try for a little to ease his torment in a more tender recognition of it—days when he would have taken from her, gratefully even if she had fooled him and he had seen her do it, whatever would have saved him from the certainty that never even in those first exquisite moments had she been his. the sharp edge of her young sufficiency had lopped off the right limb of his manhood. never, even in his dreams, if life had allowed him to dream again, should he be able to see himself in any other guise than the meagre, austere front which his obligation to his mother and ellen had obliged him to present to destiny. she had beggared him of all those aptitudes for passionate relations, by the faith in which he had kept himself inwardly alive. the capacity for loving died in him with the knowledge of not being able to be loved.
out of the anæsthesia of exhaustion from which italy had revived him, it rolled back upon him that by just the walled imperviousness[pg 249] that shut eunice goodward from the appreciation of his passion, he was prevented now from savilla dassonville.
