Part 26

"Why, let's see how you look; I hain't had a fair peep at you, yet." As if with the notion of affording a relief to the strain of the situation, he advanced, and lifted his hand toward the low-burning chandelier.

"Stop!" cried Cornelia. "Are you staying here--in this house?"

"Well, I inferred that I was, from a remark that I made."

"Then I'm going away instantly. I will tell Mrs. Montgomery, and I will go to-night."

"Why, Nie!"

"Hush! Don't you--don't dare to speak to me! Oh, you--you----" She could not find a word that would express all her loathing of him, and her scorn of herself in the past for having given him the hold upon her that nothing appeared to have loosed. She was putting on a bold front, and she meant to keep her word, but if she left that house, she did not know where, in the whole vast city, she should go. Of course she could go to Charmian Maybough; but besides bring afraid to venture out after dark, she knew she would have to tell Charmian all about it; or else make a mystery of it; there was nothing, probably, that Charmian would have liked better, but there was nothing that Cornelia would have liked less. She wanted to cry; it always seems hard and very unjust to us, in after life, when some error or folly of our youth rises up to perplex us; and Cornelia was all the more rebellious because the fault was not wholly hers, or not even largely, but mostly her dear, innocent, unwise mother's.

Mr. Dickerson dropped his hand without turning up the gas; perhaps he did not need a stronger light on Cornelia, after all. "Oh, well! I don't want to drive you out of the house. I'll go. I've got my grip out here in the hall. But see here! I told Mrs. Montgomery we hailed from the same place--children together, and I don't know but what cousins--and how glad I was to find you here, and now if I leave---- Better let me stay here, over night, anyhow! I'm off on the road to-morrow, anyway. I won't trouble you; I won't, indeed. Now you can depend upon it. Word's as good as my bond, if my bond ain't worth a great deal. But, honor bright!"

Cornelia's heart, which stood still at the threat she made, began to pound in her breast. She panted so that she could hardly speak.

"Will you call me by my first name?" she demanded.

"No. You shall be Miss Saunders to me till you say when."

"And will you ever speak to me, or look at me, as if we were ever anything but the most perfect strangers?"

"It'll be a good deal of a discount from what I told Mrs. Montgomery, but I guess I shall have to promise."

"And you will go in the morning?"

"Sure."

"How soon?"

"Well, I don't like a very early breakfast, but I guess I can get out of the house by about nine, or half-past eight, maybe."

"Then you may stay." Cornelia turned and marched out of the parlor with a state that failed her more and more, the higher she mounted toward her room. If it had been a flight further she would have had to crawl on her hands and knees.

At first she thought she would not go down to dinner, but after a while she found herself very hungry, and she decided she must go for appearance sake at any rate. At the bottom of her heart, too, she was curious to see whether that little wretch would keep his word.

He was the life of the table. His jokes made everybody laugh; it could be seen that he was a prime favorite with the landlady. After the coffee came he played a great many tricks with knives and forks and spoons, and coins. He dressed one of his hands, all but two fingers, with a napkin which he made like the skirts of a ballet-dancer, and then made his fingers dance a hornpipe. He tried a skirt-dance with them later, but it was comparatively a failure, for want of practice, he said.

Toward Cornelia he behaved with the most scrupulous deference, even with delicacy, as if they had indeed met in former days, but as if she were a person of such dignity and consequence that their acquaintance could only have been of the most formal character. He did it so well, and seemed to take such a pleasure in doing it that she blushed for him. Some of the things he said to the others were so droll that she had to laugh at them. But he did not presume upon her tolerance.

XXIII.

The false courage that supported her in Dickerson's presence left Cornelia when she went back to her room, and she did not sleep that night, or she thought she did not. She came down early for a cup of coffee, and the landlady told her that Mr. Dickerson had just gone; he wished Mrs. Montgomery to give Cornelia his respects, and apologize for his going away without waiting to see her again. He had really expected to stay over till Monday, but he found he could save several days by taking the Chicago Limited that morning. Mrs. Montgomery praised his energy; she did not believe he would be on the road a great while longer; he would be in the firm in less than another year. She hinted at his past unhappiness in the married state, and she said she did hope that he would get somebody who would appreciate him, next time. There did not seem to be any doubt in her mind that there would be a next time with him.

Cornelia wanted to ask whether she expected him back soon; she could not; but she resolved that whenever he came he should not find her in that house. She thought where she should go, and what excuse she should make for going, what she should tell Charmian, or Mr. Ludlow, if she ever saw him again. It seemed to her that she had better go home, but Cornelia hated to give up; she could not bear to be driven away. She went to church, to escape herself, and a turmoil of things alien to the place and the hour whirled through her mind during the service; she came out spent with a thousand-fold dramatization of her relations to Mr. Dickerson and to Mr. Ludlow. She sat down on a bench in the little park before the church, and tried to think what she ought to do, while the children ran up and down the walks, and the people from the neighboring East Side avenues, in their poor Sunday best, swarmed in the square for the mild sun and air of the late October. The street cars dinned ceaselessly up and down, and back and forth; the trains of the Elevated hurtled by on the west and on the east; the troubled city roared all round with the anguish of the perpetual coming and going; but it was as much Sunday there as it would have been on the back street in Pymantoning where her mother's little house stood. The leaves that dripped down at her feet in the light warm breaths of wind passing over the square might have fallen from the maple before the gate at home. The awful unity of life for the first time appeared to her. Was it true that you could not get away from what you had been? Was that the meaning of that little wretch's coming back to claim her after he had forfeited every shadow of right to her that even her mother's ignorance and folly had given him? Then it meant that he would come back again and again, and never stop coming. She made believe that if she looked up, she should now see him actually coming down the path toward her; she held her eyes fixed upon the ground at her feet, and then it seemed to her every moment that he was just going to take the seat next her. The seat was already taken; a heavy German woman filled it so solidly that no phantasm could have squeezed in beside her. But the presence of Dickerson became so veritable that Cornelia started up breathless, and hurried home, sick with the fear that she should find him waiting for her there.

She was afraid to go out the next morning, lest she should meet him on the street, though she knew that by this time he was a thousand miles away.

At the Synthesis she was ashamed to let Charmian think that her absent and tremulous mood had something to do with Ludlow; but she was so much more ashamed of the shabby truth that she would have been willing to accept the romance herself. This was very dishonest; it was very wicked and foolish; Cornelia saw herself becoming a guilty accomplice in an innocent illusion. She found strength to silence Charmian's surmise, if not to undeceive her; she did her best; and as the days began to remove her farther and farther from the moment of her actual encounter with Dickerson, her reason came more and more into control of her conscience. She tried not to be the fool of a useless remorse for something she was at least not mainly to blame for. She had to make the struggle alone; there was no one she could advise with; her heart shut when she thought of telling any one her trouble; but in her perpetual reveries she argued the case before Ludlow.

It seemed to her as if he had come to render her a final judgment when his name was sent up to her room, that Saturday afternoon which ended the longest week of her life. She went down, and found him alone in the long parlor, and it was in keeping with her fantastic prepossession that he should begin, "I wonder how I shall say what I've come for?" as if he would fain have softened her sentence.

He kept her hand a moment longer than he need; but he was not one of those disgusting people who hold your hand while they talk to you, and whom Cornelia hated. She did not now resent it, though she was sensible of having to take her hand from him.

"I don't know," she answered, with hysterical flippancy. "If I did I would tell you."