A SELF-CONSCIOUS WOMAN

Two days later Beth answered a ’phone call from David Cairns.... He was just back from Nantucket ... for a few days.... Very grateful to find her in.... Yes, Vina had come over, too.

Beth was instantly animate. Vina had planned to be gone a month at least.

“I’d like to come over alone first may I, Beth?” Cairns asked.

“Yes.”

“Within a half-hour?”

“Yes.... I shall prepare to listen to great happiness.”

... Beth reflected that she looked a belated forty; that she had lost her charm for the eye of Jim Framtree, who had treated her like a relative. She was ashamed to show her suffering to David Cairns ashamed that she cared but it was part of her. Happiness was in the air. She must listen. She marveled at her capacity to endure....

The dews of joy were upon David Cairns. Between Bedient and Vina, he had been born again. He looked at her as all who knew her did now and then again in silence. It always made her writhe that second stare. It gave her the sense of some foreign evil in her body like the discovery of a malady with its threat of death in every vein.

He told her that Vina and he were to be married at once. Beth gave to the story all that listening could add to the telling of happiness.

“And, David,” she said. “I claim a little bit of credit for this glorious thing

“Credit, Beth!” he said rousingly. “I told Vina I could worship you for it!”

“Don’t, please David. I don’t need it. I’m too happy over you both.... And then, it wasn’t all mine, you know. I think Mr. Bedient saw you together in his mind. I think he meant me to startle you to your real empire

“Did he?” Cairns asked eagerly.

“Hasn’t it turned out perfectly?”

Beth did not miss the gladness which this hint gave him. She knew that Bedient’s thought of it would be like an authority to Vina as well.... She felt herself drawing farther and farther back from the lives of the elect, but joyously she urged David to tell about their house in Nantucket.

“And, Beth,” he said intensely. “That was Bedient’s doing, too. I have all I have seems to be the happiness part.”

“Poor dear boy how hard!”

“...I was telling him how Vina loved Nantucket,” Cairns went on, “some of the rare things she said about the Island and the houses in Lily Lane, and how I planned to go over and find her there this month. He knew we were coming on very well.... One night at the Club, he asked me why I didn’t buy one of those houses in Lily Lane, fix up a studio in one of the upper rooms, and then show it to her some summer morning and let it seep in slowly that it was hers and my heart, too

“Beautiful!” Beth exclaimed. A trace of color came to her face.

“I’m telling it badly. Vina will tell you better. Anyway, he wouldn’t let me go over alone. You remember when we went away together for three or four days early in June?”

“I didn’t know you were you with him?”

“Yes, we went together found the house in Lily Lane

“And he went back to Equatoria right after that?”

Her tone had risen, the words rapid.

“Yes and without letting me know.”

Cairns noted vaguely that Beth’s face seemed farther away.

“David, you were with him those three days, beginning Monday, the first week in June you were with with him ?”

“Every minute, Beth

“David, how did Mrs. Wordling know you were going?”

“Why, Beth, she didn’t. No one knew

“Are you sure? Isn’t there some way she could have heard at the Club?”

He hesitated. He had caught her eyes. They horrified him.... He remembered.

“Why, yes. We were talking it was the night he first spoke of going over to Nantucket with me. Mrs. Wordling was behind at a near table. I told him we’d better talk lower

No sound escaped her. Cairns sprang up at the sight of her uplifted face.... Her eyes turned vaguely toward the door of the little room. He was standing before it. She seemed only to know like some half-killed creature that she was hunted and must hide. She couldn’t pass him into the little room, but turned behind the screen. He did not hear her step, but something like the rush of a skirt, or a sigh.

There was no sound from the kitchenette. Cairns could not think in this furious stress. After a moment he called.

No answer.

It did not occur to him to go to her. Scores of times he had been in the studio, but he had never passed that screen.

He called again.... Not a breath nor movement in answer. He did not think of her as dead, but stricken with some awful madness. She had stood transfixed.... Yet her old authority was about her. He feared her anger.

“Dear Beth, won’t you let me come or do something?... In God’s name what is it?”

He listened intently.

“Beth, I’ll go and get Vina shall I?”

Terrible seconds passed; then her voice came to him trailed forth, high-pitched, slow an eerie thing in his brain:

“I thought I was a good queen, but I have been hard and wicked as hell. I’m Bloody Beth.... He asked for bread and I gave him a stone.... Bloody Beth of the Middle Ages.”

“Beth please!” he cried.

“Go away oh, go away!”

Cairns’ only thought was to bring Vina to her. Some awful hatred for himself came forth from the back room. He turned to the outer door, saying, aloud:

“Yes, Beth, I’ll go.”

The door shut and clicked after him without his touch it seemed very quickly. He descended the steps a sort of slave to the routine of death as one who finds death, must run to perform certain formalities. At the front door he stopped a second or two, as if his name had been called faintly. He thought it a delusion and went out. Crossing the street, he heard it again:

“David!”

It was just enough for him to hear a queer high quality.

He glanced up. Beth was leaning out of the lofty window.... More than ever it was like death to him the old newspaper days when he was first at death the mute face aloft, the gesture, the instant vanishing, when he was seen to comprehend.

Her door was ajar. She called for him to come in, as he halted in the hall. Beth came forth from the little room, after a moment, and stood before him, leaning against the piano. Her face was grayish-white, but she was controlled.

“Once you told me you loved me,” she said. “A happy man should be ready to do something for a woman he once told that.”

“Anything, Beth.”

“It came forth from your happiness so suddenly. You have found me out.... You made me see that I believed the lie of a worthless woman

She halted. The last words had a familiar ring.

“I believed a despicable thing of Andrew Bedient and sent him away.... He must never know. I could not live and have him know that I believed it. I am paying. I shall pay. I only ask you to keep it, forever all that you saw all that was said to-day

“I will keep it, Beth.”

“Even from Vina. Vina is pure. He would read it in her eyes if she knew. I wonder that he loved me.... God!... You have enough of the world left to bury this evil thing for me. I am glad of your happiness.”

“Vina will want to see you to-day.”

“She may come.... You may say I have been ill. It is true.... I shall stay and be with you for your marriage. You want me

“We came back to New York for that.”

“Yes.... And then I shall go away.”

Cairns lingered. “But Beth, Bedient will always love you. He will come back

“It is not the same. You will see when he writes. I made him suffer until a great light came and he is the world’s not mine.”

“Beth,” he said humbly, “you are Absolute!”

“I shall come back strong enough to meet him as one of the world’s women or I shall stay away,” she said.