The porter, interrogated, was not sure. He himself had received nothing for the lady, but in his absence his subordinate might have sent a letter upstairs.
Darrow and Sophy mounted together in the lift, and the young man, while she went into her room, unlocked his own door and glanced at the empty table. For him at least no message had come; and on her threshold, a moment later, she met him with the expected: “No—there’s nothing!”
He feigned an unregretful surprise. “So much the better! And now, shall we drive out somewhere? Or would you rather take a boat to Bellevue? Have you ever dined there, on the terrace, by moonlight? It’s not at all bad. And there’s no earthly use in sitting here waiting.”
She stood before him in perplexity.
“But when I wrote yesterday I asked them to telegraph. I suppose they’re horribly hard up, the poor dears, and they thought a letter would do as well as a telegram.” The colour had risen to her face. “That’s why I wrote instead of telegraphing; I haven’t a penny to spare myself!”
Nothing she could have said could have filled her listener with a deeper contrition. He felt the red in his own face as he recalled the motive with which he had credited her in his midnight musings. But that motive, after all, had simply been trumped up to justify his own disloyalty: he had never really believed in it. The reflection deepened his confusion, and he would have liked to take her hand in his and confess the injustice he had done her.
She may have interpreted his change of colour as an involuntary protest at being initiated into such shabby details, for she went on with a laugh: “I suppose you can hardly understand what it means to have to stop and think whether one can afford a telegram? But I’ve always had to consider such things. And I mustn’t stay here any longer now—I must try to get a night train for Joigny. Even if the Farlows can’t take me in, I can go to the hoteclass="underline" it will cost less than staying here.” She paused again and then exclaimed: “I ought to have thought of that sooner; I ought to have telegraphed yesterday! But I was sure I should hear from them today; and I wanted—oh, I DID so awfully want to stay!” She threw a troubled look at Darrow. “Do you happen to remember,” she asked, “what time it was when you posted my letter?”
VII
Darrow was still standing on her threshold. As she put the question he entered the room and closed the door behind him.
His heart was beating a little faster than usual and he had no clear idea of what he was about to do or say, beyond the definite conviction that, whatever passing impulse of expiation moved him, he would not be fool enough to tell her that he had not sent her letter. He knew that most wrongdoing works, on the whole, less mischief than its useless confession; and this was clearly a case where a passing folly might be turned, by avowal, into a serious offense.
“I’m so sorry—so sorry; but you must let me help you…You will let me help you?” he said.
He took her hands and pressed them together between his, counting on a friendly touch to help out the insufficiency of words. He felt her yield slightly to his clasp, and hurried on without giving her time to answer.
“Isn’t it a pity to spoil our good time together by regretting anything you might have done to prevent our having it?”
She drew back, freeing her hands. Her face, losing its look of appealing confidence, was suddenly sharpened by distrust.
“You didn’t forget to post my letter?”
Darrow stood before her, constrained and ashamed, and ever more keenly aware that the betrayal of his distress must be a greater offense than its concealment.
“What an insinuation!” he cried, throwing out his hands with a laugh.
Her face instantly melted to laughter. “Well, then—I WON’T be sorry; I won’t regret anything except that our good time is over!”
The words were so unexpected that they routed all his resolves. If she had gone on doubting him he could probably have gone on deceiving her; but her unhesitating acceptance of his word made him hate the part he was playing. At the same moment a doubt shot up its serpent-head in his own bosom. Was it not he rather than she who was childishly trustful? Was she not almost too ready to take his word, and dismiss once for all the tiresome question of the letter? Considering what her experiences must have been, such trustfulness seemed open to suspicion. But the moment his eyes fell on her he was ashamed of the thought, and knew it for what it really was: another pretext to lessen his own delinquency.
“Why should our good time be over?” he asked. “Why shouldn’t it last a little longer?”
She looked up, her lips parted in surprise; but before she could speak he went on: “I want you to stay with me—I want you, just for a few days, to have all the things you’ve never had. It’s not always May and Paris—why not make the most of them now? You know me—we’re not strangers—why shouldn’t you treat me like a friend?”
While he spoke she had drawn away a little, but her hand still lay in his. She was pale, and her eyes were fixed on him in a gaze in which there was neither distrust or resentment, but only an ingenuous wonder. He was extraordinarily touched by her expression.
“Oh, do! You must. Listen: to prove that I’m sincere I’ll tell you…I’ll tell you I didn’t post your letter…I didn’t post it because I wanted so much to give you a few good hours…and because I couldn’t bear to have you go.”
He had the feeling that the words were being uttered in spite of him by some malicious witness of the scene, and yet that he was not sorry to have them spoken.
The girl had listened to him in silence. She remained motionless for a moment after he had ceased to speak; then she snatched away her hand.
“You didn’t post my letter? You kept it back on purpose? And you tell me so NOW, to prove to me that I’d better put myself under your protection?” She burst into a laugh that had in it all the piercing echoes of her Murrett past, and her face, at the same moment, underwent the same change, shrinking into a small malevolent white mask in which the eyes burned black. “Thank you—thank you most awfully for telling me! And for all your other kind intentions! The plan’s delightful—really quite delightful, and I’m extremely flattered and obliged.”
She dropped into a seat beside her dressing-table, resting her chin on her lifted hands, and laughing out at him under the elf-lock which had shaken itself down over her eyes.
Her outburst did not offend the young man; its immediate effect was that of allaying his agitation. The theatrical touch in her manner made his offense seem more venial than he had thought it a moment before.
He drew up a chair and sat down beside her. “After all,” he said, in a tone of good-humoured protest, “I needn’t have told you I’d kept back your letter; and my telling you seems rather strong proof that I hadn’t any very nefarious designs on you.”
She met this with a shrug, but he did not give her time to answer. “My designs,” he continued with a smile, “were not nefarious. I saw you’d been through a bad time with Mrs. Murrett, and that there didn’t seem to be much fun ahead for you; and I didn’t see—and I don’t yet see—the harm of trying to give you a few hours of amusement between a depressing past and a not particularly cheerful future.” He paused again, and then went on, in the same tone of friendly reasonableness: “The mistake I made was not to tell you this at once—not to ask you straight out to give me a day or two, and let me try to make you forget all the things that are troubling you. I was a fool not to see that if I’d put it to you in that way you’d have accepted or refused, as you chose; but that at least you wouldn’t have mistaken my intentions.—Intentions!” He stood up, walked the length of the room, and turned back to where she still sat motionless, her elbows propped on the dressing-table, her chin on her hands. “What rubbish we talk about intentions! The truth is I hadn’t any: I just liked being with you. Perhaps you don’t know how extraordinarily one can like being with you…I was depressed and adrift myself; and you made me forget my bothers; and when I found you were going—and going back to dreariness, as I was—I didn’t see why we shouldn’t have a few hours together first; so I left your letter in my pocket.”