Half an hour later, when Lindley had
gone, Cora closed the front doors in a manner which
drew an immediate cry of agony from the room where
her father was trying to sleep. She stood on tiptoe
to turn out the gas-light in the hall; but for a time
the key resisted the insufficient pressure of her
finger-tips: the little orange flame, with its
black-green crescent over the armature, so maliciously
like the “eye” of a peacock feather, limned
the exquisite planes of the upturned face; modelled
them with soft and regular shadows; painted a sullen
loveliness. The key turned a little, but not
enough; and she whispered to herself a monosyllable
not usually attributed to the vocabulary of a damsel
of rank. Next moment, her expression flashed in
a brilliant change, like that of a pouting child suddenly
remembering that tomorrow is Christmas. The key
surrendered instantly, and she ran gayly up the familiar
stairs in the darkness.
The transom of Laura’s door
shone brightly; but the knob, turning uselessly in
Cora’s hand, proved the door itself not so hospitable.
There was a brief rustling within the room; the bolt
snapped, and Laura opened the door.
“Why, Laura,” said Cora,
observing her sister with transient curiosity, “you
haven’t undressed. What have you been doing?
Something’s the matter with you. I know
what it is,” she added, laughing, as she seated
herself on the edge of the old black-walnut bed.
“You’re in love with Wade Trumble!”
“He’s a strong man,”
observed Laura. “A remarkable throat.”
“Horrible little person!”
said Cora, forgetting what she owed the unfortunate
Mr. Trumble for the vocal wall which had so effectively
sheltered her earlier in the evening. “He’s
like one of those booming June-bugs, batting against
the walls, falling into lamp-chimneys-----”
“He doesn’t get very near
the light he wants,” said Laura.
“Me? Yes, he would like
to, the rat! But he’s consoled when he can
get any one to listen to his awful chatter. He
makes up to himself among women for the way he gets
sat on at the club. But he has his use:
he shows off the other men so, by contrast. Oh,
Laura!” She lifted both hands to her cheeks,
which were beautiful with a quick suffusion of high
colour. “Isn’t he gorgeous!”
“Yes,” said Laura gently, “I’ve
always thought so.”
“Now what’s the use of
that?” asked Cora peevishly, “with me?
I didn’t mean Richard Lindley. You know
what I mean.”
“Yes of course I do,”
Laura said.
Cora gave her a long look in which
a childlike pleading mingled with a faint, strange
trouble; then this glance wandered moodily from the
face of her sister to her own slippers, which she
elevated to meet her descending line of vision.
“And you know I can’t
help it,” she said, shifting quickly to the
rôle of accuser. “So what’s the use
of behaving like the Pest?” She let her feet
drop to the floor again, and her voice trembled a
little as she went on: “Laura, you don’t
know what I had to endure from him to-night.
I really don’t think I can stand it to live in
the same house any longer with that frightful little
devil. He’s been throwing Ray Vilas’s
name at me until oh, it was ghastly to-night!
And then then ”
Her tremulousness increased. “I haven’t
said anything about it all day, but I met him
on the street downtown, this morning ”
“You met Vilas?” Laura
looked startled. “Did he speak to you?”
“`Speak to me!’”
Cora’s exclamation shook with a half-laugh of
hysteria. “He made an awful scene!
He came out of the Richfield Hotel barroom on Main
Street just as I was going into the jeweller’s
next door, and he stopped and bowed like a monkey,
square in front of me, and and he took off
his hat and set it on the pavement at my feet and
told me to kick it into the gutter! Everybody
stopped and stared; and I couldn’t get by him.
And he said he said I’d kicked his
heart into the gutter and he didn’t want it
to catch cold without a hat! And wouldn’t
I please be so kind as to kick ”
She choked with angry mortification. “It
was horrible! People were stopping and laughing,
and a rowdy began to make fun of Ray, and pushed him,
and they got into a scuffle, and I ran into the jeweller’s
and almost fainted.”
“He is insane!” said Laura, aghast.
“He’s nothing of the kind;
he’s just a brute. He does it to make people
say I’m the cause of his drinking; and everybody
in this gossipy old town does say it just
because I got bored to death with his everlasting
do-you-love-me-to-day-as-well-as-yesterday style of
torment, and couldn’t help liking Richard better.
Yes, every old cat in town says I ruined him, and
that’s what he wants them to say. It’s
so unmanly! I wish he’d die! Yes, I
do wish he would! Why doesn’t he
kill himself?”
“Ah, don’t say that,” protested
Laura.
“Why not? He’s threatened
to enough. And I’m afraid to go out of
the house because I can’t tell when I’ll
meet him or what he’ll do. I was almost
sick in that jeweller’s shop, this morning, and
so upset I came away without getting my pendant.
There’s another thing I’ve got
to go through, I suppose!” She pounded the yielding
pillow desperately. “Oh, oh, oh! Life
isn’t worth living it seems to me
sometimes as if everybody in the world spent his time
trying to think up ways to make it harder for me!
I couldn’t have worn the pendant, though, even
if I’d got it,” she went on, becoming
thoughtful. “It’s Richard’s
silly old engagement ring, you know,” she explained,
lightly. “I had it made up into a pendant,
and heaven knows how I’m going to get Richard
to see it the right way. He was so unreasonable
tonight.”
“Was he cross about Mr. Corliss monopolizing
you?”
“Oh, you know how he is,”
said Cora. “He didn’t speak of it
exactly. But after you’d gone, he asked
me ” She stopped with a little
gulp, an expression of keen distaste about her mouth.
“Oh, he wants me to wear my
ring,” she continued, with sudden rapidity:
“and how the dickens can I when I can’t
even tell him it’s been made into a pendant!
He wants to speak to father; he wants to announce
it. He’s sold out his business for what
he thinks is a good deal of money, and he wants me
to marry him next month and take some miserable little
trip, I don’t know where, for a few weeks, before
he invests what he’s made in another business.
Oh!” she cried. “It’s a horrible
thing to ask a girl to do: to settle down just
housekeeping, housekeeping, housekeeping forever in
this stupid, stupid town! It’s so unfair!
Men are just possessive; they think it’s loving
you to want to possess you themselves. A beautiful
`love’! It’s so mean! Men!”
She sprang up and threw out both arms in a vehement
gesture of revolt. “Damn ’em, I wish
they’d let me alone!”
Laura’s eyes had lost their
quiet; they showed a glint of tears, and she was breathing
quickly. In this crisis of emotion the two girls
went to each other silently; Cora turned, and Laura
began to unfasten Cora’s dress in the back.
“Poor Richard!” said Laura
presently, putting into her mouth a tiny pearl button
which had detached itself at her touch. “This
was his first evening in the overflow. No wonder
he was troubled!”
“Pooh!” said Cora.
“As if you and mamma weren’t good enough
for him to talk to! He’s spoiled.
He’s so used to being called `the most popular
man in town’ and knowing that every girl on Corliss
Street wanted to marry him ”
She broke off, and exclaimed sharply: “I
wish they would!”
“Cora!”
“Oh, I suppose you mean that’s the reason
I went in for him?”
“No, no,” explained Laura hurriedly.
“I only meant, stand still.”
“Well, it was!” And Cora’s
abrupt laugh had the glad, free ring fancy attaches
to the merry confidences of a buccaneer in trusted
company.
Laura knelt to continue unfastening
the dress; and when it was finished she extended three
of the tiny buttons in her hand. “They’re
always loose on a new dress,” she said.
“I’ll sew them all on tight, to-morrow.”
Cora smiled lovingly. “You
good old thing,” she said. “You looked
pretty to-night.”
“That’s nice!” Laura
laughed, as she dropped the buttons into a little
drawer of her bureau. It was an ugly, cheap, old
bureau, its veneer loosened and peeling, the mirror
small and flawed a piece of furniture in
keeping with the room, which was small, plain and
hot, its only ornamental adjunct being a silver-framed
photograph of Mrs. Madison, with Cora, as a child of
seven or eight, upon her lap.
“You really do look ever so pretty,” asserted
Cora.
“I wonder if I look as well
as I did the last time I heard I was pretty,”
said the other. “That was at the Assembly
in March. Coming down the stairs, I heard a man
from out of town say, `That black-haired Miss Madison
is a pretty girl.’ And some one with him
said, `Yes; you’ll think so until you meet her
sister!’”
“You are an old dear!”
Cora enfolded her delightedly; then, drawing back,
exclaimed: “You know he’s gorgeous!”
And with a feverish little ripple of laughter, caught
her dress together in the back and sped through the
hall to her own room.
This was a very different affair from
Laura’s, much cooler and larger; occupying half
the width of the house; and a rather expensive struggle
had made it pretty and even luxurious. The window
curtains and the wall-paper were fresh, and of a quiet
blue; there was a large divan of the same colour; a
light desk, prettily equipped, occupied a corner;
and between two gilt gas-brackets, whose patent burners
were shielded by fringed silk shades, stood a cheval-glass
six feet high. The door of a very large
clothes-pantry stood open, showing a fine company of
dresses, suspended from forms in an orderly manner;
near by, a rosewood cabinet exhibited a delicate collection
of shoes and slippers upon its four shelves.
A dressing-table, charmingly littered with everything,
took the place of a bureau; and upon it, in a massive
silver frame, was a large photograph of Mr. Richard
Lindley. The frame was handsome, but somewhat
battered: it had seen service. However,
the photograph was quite new.
There were photographs everywhere photographs
framed and unframed; photographs large and photographs
small, the fresh and the faded; tintypes, kodaks,
“full lengths,” “cabinets,”
groups every kind of photograph; and among
them were several of Cora herself, one of her mother,
one of Laura, and two others of girls. All the
rest were sterner. Two or three were seamed across
with cracks, hastily recalled sentences to destruction;
and here and there remained tokens of a draughtsman’s
over-generous struggle to confer upon some of the
smooth-shaven faces additional manliness in the shape
of sweeping moustaches, long beards, goatees, mutton-chops,
and, in the case of one gentleman of a blond, delicate
and tenor-like beauty, neck-whiskers; decorations
in many instances so deeply and damply pencilled that
subsequent attempts at erasure had failed of great
success. Certainly, Hedrick had his own way of
relieving dull times.
Cora turned up the lights at the sides
of the cheval-glass, looked at herself earnestly,
then absently, and began to loosen her hair.
Her lifted hands hesitated; she re-arranged the slight
displacement of her hair already effected; set two
chairs before the mirror, seated herself in one; pulled
up her dress, where it was slipping from her shoulder,
rested an arm upon the back of the other chair as,
earlier in the evening, she had rested it upon the
iron railing of the porch, and, leaning forward, assumed
as exactly as possible the attitude in which she had
sat so long beside Valentine Corliss. She leaned
very slowly closer and yet closer to the mirror; a
rich colour spread over her; her eyes, gazing into
themselves, became dreamy, inexpressibly wistful,
cloudily sweet; her breath was tumultuous. “`Even
as you and I’?” she whispered.
Then, in the final moment of this
after-the-fact rehearsal, as her face almost touched
the glass, she forgot how and what she had looked
to Corliss; she forgot him; she forgot him utterly:
she leaped to her feet and kissed the mirrored lips
with a sort of passion.
“You darling!”
she cried. Cora’s christening had been
unimaginative, for the name means only, “maiden.”
She should have been called Narcissa.
The rhapsody was over instantly, leaving
an emotional vacuum like a silence at the dentist’s.
Cora yawned, and resumed the loosening of her hair.
When she had put on her nightgown,
she went from one window to another, closing the shutters
against the coming of the morning light to wake her.
As she reached the last window, a sudden high wind
rushed among the trees outside; a white flare leaped
at her face, startling her; there was a boom and rattle
as of the brasses, cymbals, and kettle-drums of some
fatal orchestra; and almost at once it began to rain.
And with that, from the distance came
a voice, singing; and at the first sound of it, though
it was far away and almost indistinguishable, Cora
started more violently than at the lightning; she
sprang to the mirror lights, put them out; threw herself
upon the bed, and huddled there in the darkness.
The wind passed; the heart of the
storm was miles away; this was only its fringe; but
the rain pattered sharply upon the thick foliage outside
her windows; and the singing voice came slowly up
the street.
It was a strange voice: high-pitched
and hoarse and not quite human, so utter
was the animal abandon of it.
“I love a lassie, a bonnie,
bonnie lassie,” it wailed and piped, coming
nearer; and the gay little air wrought to
a grotesque of itself by this wild, high voice in
the rain might have been a banshee’s
love-song.
“I love a lassie, a
bonnie, bonnie lassie.
She’s as pure as the
lily in the dell ”
The voice grew louder; came in front
of the house; came into the yard; came and sang just
under Cora’s window. There it fell silent
a moment; then was lifted in a long peal of imbecile
laughter, and sang again:
“Then slowly, slowly rase she
up And slowly she came nigh him, And when
she drew the curtain by `Young man
I think you’re dyin’.’”
Cora’s door opened and closed
softly, and Laura, barefooted, stole to the bed and
put an arm about the shaking form of her sister.
“The drunken beast!” sobbed
Cora. “It’s to disgrace me! That’s
what he wants. He’d like nothing better
than headlines in the papers: `Ray Vilas arrested
at the Madison residence’!” She choked
with anger and mortification. “The neighbours ”
“They’re nearly all away,”
whispered Laura. “You needn’t fear ”
“Hark!”
The voice stopped singing, and began
to mumble incoherently; then it rose again in a lamentable
outcry:
“Oh, God of the fallen, be Thou
merciful to me! Be Thou merciful merciful merciful”
. . .
“MERCIFUL, MERCIFUL, MERCIFUL!”
it shrieked, over and over, with increasing loudness,
and to such nerve-racking effect that Cora, gasping,
beat the bedclothes frantically with her hands at each
iteration.
The transom over the door became luminous;
some one had lighted the gas in the upper hall.
Both girls jumped from the bed, ran to the door, and
opened it. Their mother, wearing a red wrapper,
was standing at the head of the stairs, which Mr.
Madison, in his night-shirt and slippers, was slowly
and heavily descending.
Before he reached the front door,
the voice outside ceased its dreadful plaint with
the abrupt anti-climax of a phonograph stopped in
the middle of a record. There was the sound of
a struggle and wrestling, a turmoil in the wet shrubberies,
branches cracking.
“Let me go, da ”
cried the voice, drowned again at half a word, as
by a powerful hand upon a screaming mouth.
The old man opened the front door,
stepped out, closing it behind him; and the three
women looked at each other wanly during a hushed interval
like that in a sleeping-car at night when the train
stops. Presently he came in again, and started
up the stairs, heavily and slowly, as he had gone
down.
“Richard Lindley stopped him,”
he said, sighing with the ascent, and not looking
up. “He heard him as he came along the street,
and dressed as quick as he could, and ran up and got
him. Richard’s taken him away.”
He went to his own room, panting,
mopping his damp gray hair with his fat wrist, and
looking at no one.
Cora began to cry again. It was
an hour before any of this family had recovered sufficient
poise to realize, with the shuddering gratitude of
adventurers spared from the abyss, that, under Providence,
Hedrick had not wakened!