The Dust Flower. Basil King
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it too. The least he could do to atone for that offense would be to beg her, to implore her on his bended knees, to wear his ring again; and she might not do it even then.
The dramatic experience was worth waiting for, 11 however, and so with spirit churning she leaned her hot brow against the thin, cool flank of Hunt Diedrich’s antelope. She knew by the fierce grinding of his steps on the far side of the room that he hadn’t yet picked up the ring; but there was no hurry as to that. Since she would never, never forgive him for knowing what she thought he didn’t know—forgive him in her heart, that was to say—not if she married him ten times over, or to the longest day he lived, there was plenty of time for reaching friendly terms again. Her anger had not yet blown off, nor had she stabbed him hard enough. As with most people subject to storms of hot temper, stabs, given and received, were all in her day’s work. They relieved for the moment the pressure of emotion, leaving no permanent ill-will behind them.
She heard him come to a halt, but did not turn to look at him.
“So it’s all over!”
As a peg on which to hang a retort the words would serve as well as any others. “It seems so, doesn’t it?”
“And you don’t care whether I go to the devil or not?”
“What’s the good of my caring when you seem determined to do it anyhow?”
He allowed a good minute to pass before saying, “Well, if you don’t marry me some other woman will.”
“Very likely; and if you make her a promise to reform I hope you’ll keep your word.”
“She won’t be likely to exact any such condition.”
“Then you’ll probably be happier with her than you could have been with me.”
12
Having opened up the way for him to make some protest to which she could have remained obdurate, she waited for it to come. But nothing did come. Had she turned, she would have seen that he had grown white, that his hands were clenched and his lips compressed after a way he had and that his wild, harum-scarum soul was worked up to an extraordinary intensity; but she didn’t turn. She was waiting for him to pick up the ring, creep along behind her, and seize the hand resting on the mantelpiece, according to the ritual she had mentally foreordained. But without stooping or taking a step he spoke again.
“I picked up a book at the club the other day.”
Not being interested, she made no response.
“It was the life of an English writing-guy.”
Though wondering what he was working up to, she still held her peace.
“Gissing, the fellow’s name was. Ever hear of him?”
The question being direct, she murmured: “Yes; of course. What of it?”
“Ever hear how he got married?”
“Not that I remember.”
“When something went wrong—I’ve forgotten what—he went out into the street with a vow. It was a vow to marry the first woman he met who’d marry him.”
A shiver went through her. It was just such a foolhardy thing as Rashleigh himself was likely to attempt. She was afraid. She was afraid, and yet reangered just when her wrath was beginning to die down.
13
“And he did it!” he cried, with a force in which it was impossible for her not to catch a note of personal implication.
It was unlikely that he could be trying to trap her by any such cheap melodramatic threat as this; and yet––
When several minutes had gone by in a silence which struck her soon as awesome, she turned slowly round, only to find herself alone.
She ran into the hall, but there was no one there. He must have gone downstairs. Leaning over the baluster, she called to him.
“Rash! Rash!”
But only Wildgoose, the manservant, answered from below. “Mr. Allerton had just left the ’ouse, miss.”
14
Chapter II
While Allerton and Miss Walbrook had been conducting this debate a dissimilar yet parallel scene was enacted in a mean house in a mean street on the other side of the Park. Viewed from the outside, the house was one of those survivals of more primitive times which you will still run across in the richest as well as in the poorest districts of New York. A tiny wooden structure of two low stories, it connected with the sidewalk by a flight of steps of a third of the height of the whole façade. Flat-roofed and clap-boarded, it had once been painted gray with white facings, but time, weather, and soot had defaced these neat colors to a hideous pepper-and-salt.
Within, a toy entry led directly to a toy stairway, and by a door on the left into a toy living-room. In the toy living-room a man of forty-odd was saying to a girl of perhaps twenty-three,
“So you’ll not give it up, won’t you?”
The girl cringed as the man stood over her, but pressing her hand over something she had slipped within the opening at the neck of her cheap shirtwaist, she maintained her ground. The face she raised to him was at once terrified and determined, tremulous with tears and yet defiant with some new exercise of will power.
“No, I’ll not give it up.”
“We’ll see.”
15
He said it quietly enough, the menace being less in his tone than in himself. He was so plainly the cheap sport bully that there could have been nothing but a menace in his personality. Flashy male good looks got a kind of brilliancy from a set of big, strong teeth the whiter for their contrast with a black, brigand-like mustache. He was so well dressed in his cheap sport way as to be out of keeping with the dilapidation of the room, in which there was hardly a table or a chair which stood firmly on its legs, or a curtain or a covering which didn’t reek with dust and germs. A worn, thin carpet gaped in holes; what had once been a sofa stood against a wall, shockingly disemboweled. Through a door ajar one glimpsed a toy kitchen where the stove had lost a leg and was now supported by a brick. It was plain that the master of the house was one of those for whom any lair is sufficient as a home as long as he can cut a dash outside.
Quiveringly, as if in terror of a blow, the girl explained herself breathlessly: “The castin’ director sent for me just as I was makin’ tracks for home. He ast me if this was the on’y suit I had. When I ’lowed it was, he just said he couldn’t use me any more till I got a new one.”
The man took the tone of superior masculine knowledge. “That wasn’t nothin’ but bull. What if he does chuck you? I know every movin’ picture studio round N’York. I’ll get you in somewheres else. Come now, Letty. Fork out. I need the berries. I owe some one. I was only waitin’ for you to come home.”
She clutched her breast more tightly. “I gotta have a new suit anyhow.”
16
“Well, I’ll buy you a new suit when I get the bones. Didn’t I give you this one?”
She continued, still breathlessly: “Two years ago—a marked-down misses’ it was even then—all right if I was on’y sixteen—but now when I’m near twenty-three—and it’s in rags anyhow—and all out of style—and in pitchers you’ve gotta be––”
“They’se plenty pitchers where they want that character—to pass in a crowd, and all that.”
“To pass in a crowd once or twice, yes; but when all you can do is to pass in a crowd, and wear the same old rig