“Look here—the installment plan’s all right; but ain’t you a bit behind even on that?” (She had brusquely eluded a nearer approach.) “Anyhow, I think I’d rather let the interest accumulate for a while. This is good-bye till I get back from Europe.”
The announcement took her by surprise. “Europe? Why, when are you sailing?”
“On the first of Apriclass="underline" good day for a fool to acknowledge his folly. I’m beaten, and I’m running away.”
She sat looking down, her hand absently occupied with the twist of pearls he had given her. In a flash she saw the peril of this departure. Once off on the Sorceress, he was lost to her—the power of old associations would prevail. Yet if she were as “nice” to him as he asked—“nice” enough to keep him—the end might not be much more to her advantage. Hitherto she had let herself drift on the current of their adventure, but she now saw what port she had half-unconsciously been trying for. If she had striven so hard to hold him, had “played” him with such patience and such skill, it was for something more than her passing amusement and convenience: for a purpose the more tenaciously cherished that she had not dared name it to herself. In the light of this discovery she saw the need of feigning complete indifference.
“Ah, you happy man! It’s good-bye indeed, then,” she threw back at him, lifting a plaintive smile to his frown.
“Oh, you’ll turn up in Paris later, I suppose—to get your things for Newport.”
“Paris? Newport? They’re not on my map! When Ralph can get away we shall go to the Adirondacks for the boy. I hope I shan’t need Paris clothes there! It doesn’t matter, at any rate,” she ended, laughing, “because nobody I care about will see me.”
Van Degen echoed her laugh. “Oh, come—that’s rough on Ralph!”
She looked down with a slight increase of colour. “I oughtn’t to have said it, ought I? But the fact is I’m unhappy—and a little hurt—”
“Unhappy? Hurt?” He was at her side again. “Why, what’s wrong?”
She lifted her eyes with a grave look. “I thought you’d be sorrier to leave me.”
“Oh, it won’t be for long—it needn’t be, you know.” He was perceptibly softening. “It’s damnable, the way you’re tied down. Fancy rotting all summer in the Adirondacks! Why do you stand it? You oughtn’t to be bound for life by a girl’s mistake.”
The lashes trembled slightly on her cheek. “Aren’t we all bound by our mistakes—we women? Don’t let us talk of such things! Ralph would never let me go abroad without him.” She paused, and then, with a quick upward sweep of the lids: “After all, it’s better it should be good-bye—since I’m paying for another mistake in being so unhappy at your going.”
“Another mistake? Why do you call it that?”
“Because I’ve misunderstood you—or you me.” She continued to smile at him wistfully. “And some things are best mended by a break.”
He met her smile with a loud sigh—she could feel him in the meshes again. “IS it to be a break between us?”
“Haven’t you just said so? Anyhow, it might as well be, since we shan’t be in the same place again for months.”
The frock-coated gentleman once more languished from his eyes: she thought she trembled on the edge of victory. “Hang it,” he broke out, “you ought to have a change—you’re looking awfully pulled down. Why can’t you coax your mother to run over to Paris with you? Ralph couldn’t object to that.”
She shook her head. “I don’t believe she could afford it, even if I could persuade her to leave father. You know father hasn’t done very well lately: I shouldn’t like to ask him for the money.”
“You’re so confoundedly proud!” He was edging nearer. “It would all be so easy if you’d only be a little fond of me…”
She froze to her sofa-end. “We women can’t repair our mistakes. Don’t make me more miserable by reminding me of mine.”
“Oh, nonsense! There’s nothing cash won’t do. Why won’t you let me straighten things out for you?”
Her colour rose again, and she looked him quickly and consciously in the eye. It was time to play her last card. “You seem to forget that I am—married,” she said.
Van Degen was silent—for a moment she thought he was swaying to her in the flush of surrender. But he remained doggedly seated, meeting her look with an odd clearing of his heated gaze, as if a shrewd businessman had suddenly replaced the pining gentleman at the window.
“Hang it—so am I!” he rejoined; and Undine saw that in the last issue he was still the stronger of the two.
XVII
Nothing was bitterer to her than to confess to herself the failure of her power; but her last talk with Van Degen had taught her a lesson almost worth the abasement. She saw the mistake she had made in taking money from him, and understood that if she drifted into repeating that mistake her future would be irretrievably compromised. What she wanted was not a hand-to-mouth existence of precarious intrigue: to one with her gifts the privileges of life should come openly. Already in her short experience she had seen enough of the women who sacrifice future security for immediate success, and she meant to lay solid foundations before she began to build up the light superstructure of enjoyment.
Nevertheless it was galling to see Van Degen leave, and to know that for the time he had broken away from her. Over a nature so insensible to the spells of memory, the visible and tangible would always prevail. If she could have been with him again in Paris, where, in the shining spring days, every sight and sound ministered to such influences, she was sure she could have regained her hold. And the sense of frustration was intensified by the fact that every one she knew was to be there: her potential rivals were crowding the east-bound steamers. New York was a desert, and Ralph’s seeming unconsciousness of the fact increased her resentment. She had had but one chance at Europe since her marriage, and that had been wasted through her husband’s unaccountable perversity. She knew now with what packed hours of Paris and London they had paid for their empty weeks in Italy.
Meanwhile the long months of the New York spring stretched out before her in all their social vacancy to the measureless blank of a summer in the Adirondacks. In her girlhood she had plumbed the dim depths of such summers; but then she had been sustained by the hope of bringing some capture to the surface. Now she knew better: there were no “finds” for her in that direction. The people she wanted would be at Newport or in Europe, and she was too resolutely bent on a definite object, too sternly animated by her father’s business instinct, to turn aside in quest of casual distractions.
The chief difficulty in the way of her attaining any distant end had always been her reluctance to plod through the intervening stretches of dulness and privation. She had begun to see this, but she could not always master the weakness: never had she stood in greater need of Mrs. Heeny’s “Go slow. Undine!” Her imagination was incapable of long flights. She could not cheat her impatience with the mirage of far-off satisfactions, and for the moment present and future seemed equally void. But her desire to go to Europe and to rejoin the little New York world that was reforming itself in London and Paris was fortified by reasons which seemed urgent enough to justify an appeal to her father.