Читать книгу The Argonauts of North Liberty - Bret Harte - Страница 3

Mrs. Blandford entered the side door boldly. Luckily for her, the austerities of the Sabbath were manifest even here; the bar-room was closed, and the usual loungers in the passages were absent. Without risking the recognition of her voice in an inquiry to the clerk, she slipped past the office, still muffled in her veil, and quickly mounted the narrow staircase. For an instant she hesitated before the public parlor, and glanced dubiously along the half-lit corridor. Chance befriended her; the door of a bedroom opened at that moment, and Richard Demorest, with his overcoat and hat on, stepped out in the hall.

With a quick and nervous gesture of her hand she beckoned him to approach. He came towards her leisurely, with an amused curiosity that suddenly changed to utter astonishment as she hurriedly lifted her veil, dropped it, turned, and glided down the staircase into the street again. He followed rapidly, but did not overtake her until she had reached the corner, when she slackened her pace an instant for him to join her.

“Lulu,” he said eagerly; “is it you?”

“Not a word here,” she said, breathlessly. “Follow me at a distance.”

She started forward again in the direction of her own house. He followed her at a sufficient interval to keep her faintly distinguishable figure in sight until she had crossed three streets, and near the end of the next block glided up the steps of a house not far from the one where he remembered to have left Blandford. As he joined her, she had just succeeded in opening the door with a pass-key, and was awaiting him. With a gesture of silence she took his hand in her cold fingers, and leading him softly through the dark hall and passage, quickly entered the kitchen. Here she lit a candle, turned, and faced him. He could see that the outside shutters were bolted, and the kitchen evidently closed for the night.

As she removed the veil from her face he made a movement as if to regain her hand again, but she drew it away.

“You have forced this upon me,” she said hurriedly, “and it may be ruin to us both. Why have you betrayed me?”

“Betrayed you, Lulu—Good God! what do you mean?”

She looked him full in the eye, and then said slowly, “Do you mean to say that you have told no one of our meetings?”

“Only one—my old friend Blandford, who lives—Ah, yes! I see it now. You are neighbors. He has betrayed me. This house is—”

“My father’s!” she replied boldly.

The momentary uneasiness passed from Demorest’s resolute face. His old self-sufficiency returned. “Good,” he said, with a frank laugh, “that will do for me. Open the door there, Lulu, and take me to him. I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done, my girl, nor need you be. I’ll tell him my real name is Dick Demorest, as I ought to have told you before, and that I want to marry you, fairly and squarely, and let him make the conditions. I’m not a vagabond nor a thief, Lulu, if I have met you on the sly. Come, dear, let us end this now. Come—”

But she had thrown herself before him and placed her hand upon his lips. “Hush! are you mad? Listen to me, I tell you—please—oh, do—no you must not!” He had covered her hand with kisses and was drawing her face towards his own. “No—not again, it was wrong then, it is monstrous now. I implore you, listen, if you love me, stop.”

He released her. She sank into a chair by the kitchen-table, and buried her flushed face in her hands.

He stood for a moment motionless before her. “Lulu, if that is your name,” he said slowly, but gently, “tell me all now. Be frank with me, and trust me. If there is anything stands in the way, let me know what it is and I can overcome it. If it is my telling Ned Blandford, don’t let that worry you, he’s as loyal a fellow as ever breathed, and I’m a dog to ever think he willingly betrayed us. His wife, well, she’s one of those pious saints—but no, she would not be such a cursed hypocrite and bigot as this.”

“Hush, I tell you! WILL you hush,” she said, in a frantic whisper, springing to her feet and grasping him convulsively by the lapels of his overcoat. “Not a word more, or I’ll kill myself. Listen! Do you know what I brought you here for? why I left my—this house and dragged you out of your hotel? Well, it was to tell you that you must leave me, leave HERE—go out of this house and out of this town at once, to-night! And never look on it or me again! There! you have said we must end this now. It is ended, as only it could and ever would end. And if you open that door except to go, or if you attempt to—to touch me again, I’ll do something desperate. There!”

She threw him off again and stepped back, strangely beautiful in the loosened shackles of her long repressed human emotion. It was as if the passion-rent robes of the priestess had laid bare the flesh of the woman dazzling and victorious. Demorest was fascinated and frightened.

“Then you do not love me?” he said with a constrained smile, “and I am a fool?”

“Love you!” she repeated. “Love you,” she continued, bowing her brown head over her hanging arms and clasped hands. “What then has brought me to this? Oh,” she said suddenly, again seizing him by his two arms, and holding him from her with a half-prudish, half-passionate gesture, “why could you not have left things as they were; why could we not have met in the same old way we used to meet, when I was so foolish and so happy? Why could you spoil that one dream I have clung to? Why didn’t you leave me those few days of my wretched life when I was weak, silly, vain, but not the unhappy woman I am now. You were satisfied to sit beside me and talk to me then. You respected my secret, my reserve. My God! I used to think you loved me as I loved you—for THAT! Why did you break your promise and follow me here? I believed you the first day we met, when you said there was no wrong in my listening to you; that it should go no further; that you would never seek to renew it without my consent. You tell me I don’t love you, and I tell you now that we must part, that frightened as I was, foolish as I was, that day was the first day I had ever lived and felt as other women live and feel. If I ran away from you then it was because I was running away from my old self too. Don’t you understand me? Could you not have trusted me as I trusted you?”

“I broke my promise only when you broke yours. When you would not meet me I followed you here, because I loved you.”

“And that is why you must leave me now,” she said, starting from his outstretched arms again. “Do not ask me why, but go, I implore you. You must leave this town to-night, to-morrow will be too late.”

He cast a hurried glance around him, as if seeking to gather some reason for this mysterious haste, or a clue for future identification. He saw only the Sabbath-sealed cupboards, the cold white china on the dresser, and the flicker of the candle on the partly-opened glass transom above the door. “As you wish,” he said, with quiet sadness. “I will go now, and leave the town to-night; but”—his voice struck its old imperative note—“this shall not end here, Lulu. There will be a next time, and I am bound to win you yet, in spite of all and everything.”

She looked at him with a half-frightened, half-hysterical light in her eyes. “God knows!”

“And you will be frank with me then, and tell me all?”

“Yes, yes, another time; but go now.” She had extinguished the candle, turned the handle of the door noiselessly, and was holding it open. A faint light stole through the dark passage. She drew back hastily. “You have left the front door open,” she said in a frightened voice. “I thought you had shut it behind me,” he returned quickly. “Good night.” He drew her towards him. She resisted slightly. They were for an instant clasped in a passionate embrace; then there was a sudden collapse of the light and a dull jar. The front door had swung to.

With a desperate bound she darted into the passage and through the hall, dragging him by the hand, and threw the front door open. Without, the street was silent and empty.

“Go,” she whispered frantically.

Demorest passed quickly down the steps and disappeared. At the same moment a voice came from the banisters of the landing above. “Who’s there?”

“It’s I, mother.”

“I thought so. And it’s like Edward to bring you and sneak off in that fashion.”

Mrs. Blandford gave a quick sigh of relief. Demorest’s flight had been mistaken for her husband’s habitual evasion. Knowing that her mother would not refer to the subject again, she did not reply, but slowly mounted the dark staircase with an assumption of more than usual hesitating precaution, in order to recover her equanimity.

The clocks were striking eleven when she left her mother’s house and re-entered her own. She was surprised to find a light burning in the kitchen, and Ezekiel, their hired man, awaiting her in a dominant and nasal key of religious and practical disapprobation. “Pity you wern’t tu hum afore, ma’am, considerin’ the doins that’s goin’ on in perfessed Christians’ houses arter meetin’ on the Sabbath Day.”

“What’s the difficulty now, Ezekiel?” said Mrs. Blandford, who had regained her rigorous precision once more under the decorous security of her own roof.

“Wa’al, here comes an entire stranger axin for Squire Blandford. And when I tells he warn’t tu hum—”