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The Beloved Woman, a novel by Kathleen Thompson Norris |
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Chapter 28 |
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_ CHAPTER XXVIII And then suddenly she was delighted to have a friendly little note from Alice, asking her to come to luncheon on a certain December Friday, as there was "a tiny bit of business" that she would like to discuss; Chris was away, she would be alone. Norma accepted with no more than ordinary politeness, and showed neither Wolf nor his mother any elation, but she felt a deep satisfaction in the renewed relationship. On the appointed Friday, at one o'clock, she mounted the familiar steps of the Christopher Liggetts' house, and greeted the butler with a delighted sense of returning to her own. Alice was in the front room, before a wood fire; she greeted Norma with her old smile, and with an outstretched hand, but Norma was shocked to see how drawn and strangely aged the smile was, and how thin the hand! The room had its old scent of violets, and its old ordered beauty and richness, but Norma was vaguely conscious, for the first time, of some new invalid quality of fussiness, of a pretty and superfluous cluttering that had not been characteristic of Alice's belongings a year ago. Alice, too, wore newly a certain stamp of frailty, her always pure high forehead had a faint transparency and shine that Norma did not remember, and the increasing accumulation of pillows and little bookcases and handsome stands about her suggested that her horizon was closing in, that her world was diminishing to this room, and this room alone. The strange nurse who smilingly and noiselessly slipped away as Norma came in, was another vaguely disquieting hint of helplessness, but Norma knew better than to make any comment upon her impressions, and merely asked the usual casual questions, as she sat down near the couch. "How are you, Aunt Alice? But you look splendidly!" "I'm so _well_," said Alice, emphatically, with a sort of solemn thankfulness, "that I don't know myself! Whether it was saving myself the strain of moving to Newport last summer, or what, I don't know. But I haven't been so well for _years_!" Norma's heart contracted with sudden pity. Alice had never employed these gallant falsehoods before. She had always been quite obviously happy and busy and even enviable, in her limited sphere. The girl chatted away with her naturally enough while the luncheon table was arranged between them and the fire, but she noticed that two nurses shifted the invalid into an upright position before the meal, and that Alice's face was white with exhaustion as she began to sip her bouillon. They were alone, an hour later, playing with little boxed ices, when Alice suddenly revealed the object of the meeting. Norma had asked for Chris, who was, it appeared, absent on some matter of business for a few days, and it was in connection with the introduction of his name that Alice spoke. "Chris--that reminds me! I wanted to speak to you about something, Norma; I've wanted to for months, really. It's not really important, because of course you never would mention it any more than I would, and yet it's just as well to have this sort of thing straightened out! Chris told me"--said Alice, looking straight at Norma, who had grown a trifle pale, and was watching her fixedly--"Chris told me that some months before you were married, he told you of some--some ridiculous suspicions we had--it seems absurd now!--about Annie." So that was it! Norma could breathe again. "Yes--we talked about it one morning walking home from church," she admitted. "I don't know whether you know now," Alice said, quickly, flushing nervously, "that there wasn't one shred of foundation for that--that crazy suspicion of mine! But I give you my word--and my mother told me!--that it wasn't so. I don't know how I ever came to think of it, or why I thought Mama admitted it. But I've realized," said Alice, nervously, "that it was a terrible injustice to Annie, and as soon as Chris told me that you knew it--and of course he had _no business_ to let it get any further!--I wanted to set it straight. Poor Annie; she would be perfectly frantic if she knew how calmly I was saddling her with a--a terrible past!" said Alice, laughing. "But I have always been too sensitive where the people I love are concerned, and I blundered into this--this outrageous----" "My aunt had told me that it was not so," Norma said, coolly and superbly interrupting the somewhat incoherent story. "If I ever really believed it----!" she added, scornfully. For her heart was hot with rage, and the first impulse was to vent it upon this nearest of the supercilious Melroses. This was all Alice had wanted then, in sending that little overture of friendship: to tell the little nobody that she was nothing to the great family, after all, to prevent her from ever boasting even an illicit relationship! It was for a formal snub, a definite casting-off, that Norma had been brought all the way from the little green-and-white house in New Jersey! Her eyes grew very bright, and her lips very firm, as she and Alice finished the topic, and she told herself that she would never, never enter the house of Liggett again! Alice, this load off her mind, and the family honour secure, became much more friendly, and she and Norma were talking animatedly when Leslie and Annie came unexpectedly in. They had been to a debutante luncheon, and were going to a debutante tea, and meanwhile wanted a few minutes with dear Alice, and the latest news of Mrs. Melrose, who was in Florida. Aunt and niece were magnificently furred and jewelled, magnificently unaware of the existence of little Mrs. Sheridan of East Orange. Norma knew in a second that the social ripples had closed over her head; she was of no further possible significance in the life of either. Leslie was pretty, bored, ill-tempered; Annie her usual stunning and radiantly satisfied self. The conversation speedily left Norma stranded, the chatter of engagements, of scandals, of new names, was all strange to her, and she sat through some ten minutes of it uncomfortably, longing to go, and not quite knowing how to start. She said to herself that she was done with the Melroses; never--never--never again would even their most fervently extended favour win from her so much as a civil acknowledgment! There was a step in the hall, and a voice that drove the blood from Norma's face, and made her heart begin the old frantic fluttering and thumping. Before she could attempt to collect her thoughts, the door opened, and Chris came in. He came straight to Alice, and kissed her, holding her hand as he greeted Annie and Leslie. Then he came across the hearthrug, and Norma got to her feet, and felt that his hand was as cold as hers, and that the room was rocking about her. "Hello, Norma!" he said, quietly. "I didn't expect to find you here!" "You haven't seen her since she was married, Chris," Alice said, and Chris agreed with a pleasant "That's so!" He sat down, and Norma, incapable of any effort, at least until she could control the emotion that was shaking her like a vertigo, sank back into her own chair, unseeing and unhearing. The gold clock on the mantel ticked and tocked, the other three women chatted and laughed, and Chris contributed his share to the general conversation. But Norma's one desperate need was for escape. He made no protest when she said hasty farewells, but when she had gone rapidly and almost blindly down the stairway, and was at the front door, she found him beside her. He got into his fur-collared coat, picked up his hat, and they descended to the sidewalk together, in the colourless, airless, sunless light of the winter afternoon. "Get in my car!" Chris said, indicating the roadster at the curb. The girl without a word obeyed. His voice, the motion of his clean-cut mouth, the searching glance of his quick, keen eyes, acted upon her like a charm. Alice--Wolf--every thing else in the world vanished from her thoughts, or rather had never been there. She was drinking again the forbidden waters for which she had thirsted, perhaps without quite knowing it, so long. The strangeness, the strain, the artifice of the last eight months fell from her like a spell; she was herself again, comfortable again, poised again, thrilling from head to heels with delicious and bubbling life--ready for anything! Now that they were alone she felt no more nervousness; he would speak to her when he was ready, he could not leave her without speaking. Norma settled back comfortably in the deep, low seat, and glanced sidewise at the stern profile that showed between his high fur collar and the fur cap he had pulled well down over his ears. The world seemed changed to her; she had wakened from a long dream. "No--not the old house!" she presently broke the silence to tell him. "I go to New Jersey." He had been driving slowly out Fifth Avenue, now he obediently turned, and threaded his way through the cross-street traffic until they were within perhaps a hundred feet of the entrance to the New Jersey subways. Then he ran the car close to the curb, and stopped, and for the first time looked fully at Norma, and she saw his old, pleasant smile. "Well, and how goes it?" he asked. "How is Wolf? Tell me where you are living, and all about it!" Norma in answer gave him a report upon her own affairs, and spoke of Aunt Kate and Rose and Rose's children. She did not realize that a tone almost pleading, almost apologetic, crept into her eager voice while she spoke, and told its own story. Chris watched her closely, his eyes never leaving her face. All around them moved the confusion and congestion of Sixth Avenue; overhead the elevated road roared and crashed, but neither man nor woman was more than vaguely conscious of surroundings. "And are you happy, Norma?" Chris asked. "Oh, yes!" she answered, quickly. "You are a very game little liar," he said, dispassionately. "No--no, I'm not blaming you!" he added, hastily, as she would have spoken. "You took the very best way out, and I respect and honour you for it! I was not surprised--although the possibility had never occurred to me." Something in his cool, almost lifeless tone, chilled her, and she did not speak. "When I heard of it," Chris said, "I went to Canada. I don't remember the details exactly, but I remember one day sitting up there--in the woods somewhere, and looking at my hunting knife, and looking at my wrist----" He looked at his wrist now, and her eyes followed his. "--and if I had thought," Chris presently continued, "that a slash there might have carried me to some region of peace--where there was no hunger for Norma--I would not have hesitated! But one isn't sure--more's the pity!" he finished, smiling with eyes full of pain. Norma could not speak. The work of long months had been undone in a short hour, and she was conscious of a world that crashed and tumbled in utter ruin about her. "Well, no use now," Chris said. He folded his arms on his chest, and looked sternly away into space for a minute, and Norma felt his self-control, his repression, as she would have felt no passionate outburst of reproach. "But there is one thing that I've wanted for a long time to tell you, Norma. If you hadn't been such a little girl, if you had known what life is, you could not have done what you did!" "I suppose not," she half-whispered, with a dry throat, as he waited for some sign from her. "No, you couldn't have given yourself to any one else--if you had known," Chris went on, as if musing aloud. "And that brings me to what I want to say. Marriage lasts a long, long time, Norma, and even you--with all your courage!--may find that you've promised more than you can perform! The time may come---- "Norma, I hope it won't!" he interrupted himself to say, bitterly. "I try to hope it won't! I try to hope that you will come to love him, my dear, and forget me! But if that time does come, what I want you to remember is this afternoon, and sitting here with me in the car, and Chris telling you that whenever--or wherever--or however he can serve you, you are to remember that he is living just for that hour! There will never be any change in me, Norma, never anything but longing and longing just for the sight of you, just for one word from you! I love you, my dear--I can't help it. God knows I've _tried_ to help it. I love you as I don't believe any other woman in the world was ever loved! So much that I want life to be good to you, even if I never see you, and I want you to be happy, even without me!" He had squared about to face her, and as the passionate rush of words swept about her, Norma laid her little gloved hand gently upon his big one, and her blue eyes, drowned in sudden tears, fixed themselves in exquisite desolation and despair upon his face. Once or twice she had whispered "I know--I know!" as if to herself, but she did not interrupt him, and when he paused he saw that she was choked with tears, and could not speak. "The mad and wonderful sacrifice you made I can't talk about, Norma," he said. "Only an ignorant, noble-hearted little girl like you could have done that! But that's all over, now. You must try to make your life what they think it is--those good people that love you! And I'll try, too!--I do try. And you mustn't cry, my little sweetheart," Chris added, with a tenderness so new, and so poignantly sweet, that Norma was almost faint with the sheer joy of it, "you mustn't blame me for just saying this, this once, because it's for the last time! We mustn't meet----" His voice dropped. "I think we mustn't meet," he repeated, painfully and slowly. "No!" she agreed, quickly. "But you are to remember that," Chris reiterated, "that I am living, and moving about, and going to the office, and back to my home, only because you are alive in the world, and the day may come when I can serve you! Life has been only that to me, for a long, long time!" For a long minute Norma sat silent, her dark lashes fallen on her cheek, her eyes on the hand that she had grasped in her own. "I'll remember, Chris! Thank you, Chris!" she said, simply. Then she raised her eyes and looked straight at him, with a childish little frown, puzzled and bewildered, on her forehead, and they exchanged a long look of good-bye. Chris raised her hand to his lips, and Norma very quietly slipped from her seat, and turned once to smile bravely at him before she was lost in the swiftly moving whirlpool of the subway entrance. She was trembling as she seated herself in the train, and moved upon her way scarcely conscious of what she was doing. But Chris did not move from his seat for more than an hour. Norma went home, and quickly and deftly began her preparations for dinner. Inga had been married a few weeks before, and so Norma had no maid. She put her new hat into its tissue paper, and tied a fresh checked apron over her filmy best waist, and stepped to and fro between stove and dining table, as efficient a little housekeeper as all New Jersey could show. Wolf came home hungry and good-natured, and kissed her, and sat at the end of her little kitchen table while she put the last touches to the meal, appreciative and amusing, a new magazine for her in the pocket of his overcoat, an invitation from his mother for dinner to-morrow night, and a pleasant suggestion that he and she wander up Broadway again and look in windows, after his mother's dinner. They talked, while they dined, of the possibility of the California move, and Wolf afterward went down to the furnace. When the fire was banked for the night, he watched the last of the dinner clearance, and they went across the cold dark strip of land between their house and a neighbour's, to play three exciting rubbers of bridge. And at eleven Wolf was asleep, and Norma reading again, or trying to read. But her blood was racing, and her head was spinning, and before she slept she brought out all her memories of the afternoon. Chris's words rang in her heart again, and the glances that had accompanied them unrolled before her eyes like some long pageant that was infinitely wonderful and thrilling. Leslie and Annie and Alice might snub her, but Chris--their idol, the cleverest and most charming man in all their circle!--Chris loved her. Chris loved her. And--from those old dreamy days in Biretta's Bookstore, had she not loved Chris? Another morning came, another night, and life went its usual way. But Norma was wrapped in a dream that was truly a pillar of cloud by day, and of flame by night. She was hardly aware of the people about her, except that her inner consciousness of happiness and of elation gave her an even added sweetness and charm, made her readier to please them, and more anxious for their love. Wolf almost immediately saw the change, but she did not see the shadow that came to be habitual in his young face, nor read aright his grave eyes. She supposed him perhaps unusually busy, if indeed she thought of him at all. Like her aunt, and Rose, and the rest of her world, he was no more now than a kindly and dependable shadow, something to be quickly put aside for the reality of her absorbing friendship for Chris. _ |
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