36
He had at first no very clear concept of what he meant to do. The black fog of hate that filled his mind clouded all plans and purposes. Instinct alone had kept him from rushing in through those curtains, not calculation.
Alone. Alone he must have her, where no onlookers could save her. He wanted no hot-mouthed denunciation, quickly over. What was one more denunciation to her? Her path must have been strewn with them already. He wanted no public wrangle, in which her coolness and composure would inevitably have the better of him. "I've never seen this man before. He must be mad!" One thing and one alone he wanted, one thing alone he'd have. He wanted her death. He wanted the few moments just ahead of it to be between the two of them alone.
He stood for a while outside their hotel, hers and Worth's, to calm himself, to compose himself. Stood with his back to it, looking out to seaward. And as he stood, motionless, inscrutable of attitude in all else, over and over and over again he brought his hand down upon the wooden railing. At stated intervals, like a pestle, pulverizing his intentions, grinding them fine.
Then it slackened, then it stopped. He was ready.
He turned abruptly and went into the brightly lighted lobby of the place, purposefully yet not too hurriedly. He went undeviatingly toward the desk, stopped before it, drummed his fingernails upon its white-veined black marble top to hasten the clerk's attention.
Then when he had it: "I'm a friend of Colonel Worth's. I've just left him and his party at the Grotto."
"Yes, sir. Can I be of service?"
"One of the young ladies with us--I believe she's stopping here-- found the evening chillier than she expected it to be. She's sent me back for her scarf. She explained to me where it's to be found. May I be allowed to go up and fetch it for her?"
The clerk was professionally cautious. "Could you describe her to me?"
"She's blonde, and a rather small little person."
The clerk's doubts vanished. "Oh, that's the colonel's fiancée. Miss Castle. In Room Two-six. I'll have a bellboy take you up immediately, sir."
He jarred a bell, handed over a key with the requisite instructions.
Durand was taken up to the second floor, in a ponderous latticework elevator, its shaft transparent on all sides. He noted that a staircase coiled around this on the outside, rising as it rose, attaining the same destination at last. He noted that, well and grimly.
They went down a hall. There was a brief delay as the bellboy fitted key to door and tried it. Then as the door opened, the most curious sensation that he had ever had swept over Durand. It was as though he were near her all over again. It was as though she had just this moment stepped out of the room on the far side as he entered it on the near. She was present to every faculty but vision. Her perfume still lay ghostly on the air. He could feel her at the ends of all his pores. A discarded taffeta garment flung over the back of a chair rustled again as she moved, in memory, in his ears.
It whipped his hate so, it steeled him to his purpose. He made no false step, wasted not a move. He went about it as one stalks an enemy.
The bellboy had remained deferentially beside the open door, allowing him to enter alone. He remained, however, in a position from which he could watch what Durand was about.
"She must be mistaken," Durand said plausibly, for the other's benefit but as if speaking to himself. "I don't see it over the chair." He raised the taffeta underslip, replaced it again. "It must be in one of these bureau drawers." He opened one, closed it again. Then a second.
The bellboy was watching him now with the slightly anxious air of a hen having its nest searched for eggs.
"Women never know where they leave things, did you ever notice ?" Durand said to him in man-to-man confidence.
The boy grinned, flattered at being included into a stage of experience which he had not yet reached of his own efforts.
Durand, secretly desperate, at length discovered something in the third drawer, withdrew a length of flimsy heliotrope voile, sufficient at least for the purposes of his visit if nothing else.
"This, I guess," he said, concealing a relieved smile at his good fortune.
He closed the drawer, came back toward the door, stuffing it into his side pocket.
The boy's eyes, inevitably, were on his prodding hand. His were on the edge of the door, turned inward so that it faced him. It had, above the latch-tongue, a small rounded depression. A plunger, controlling the lock. Just as his own room door, in the other building, had. He had counted on that.
Before the boy was aware of it, Durand had relieved him of the duty of reclosing the door; grasping it by its edge, not its knob, directly over the plunger, and drawing it closed after the two of them.
He had, while doing so, changed the plunger, pressing it in, leaving the door off-lock and simply on-latch no matter whether a key was used or not.
He then allowed the boy to complete his appointed task of turning the key, extracting it and once that was done, distracted him from testing it further by having a silver half-dollar extended in his hand for him.
They went down together, the boy all smiles and congenitally unable to harbor suspicion of anyone who tipped so lavishly. Durand smiling a little too, a very little.
He nodded his thanks to the clerk as he went by, tapped his pocket to show him that he had secured what he'd come for.
There wasn't a glint of pity in the stars over him as he came out into the open night and his face dimmed to its secretive shade. There wasn't a breath of tenderness in the humid salt breeze that came in from the Gulf. He'd have her alone, and no one should save her. He'd have her death, and nothing else would do.
37
He went from there to his own room, unlocked his traveling bag, and took out the pistol. The same pistol that one night in New Orleans he'd told Aunt Sarah he would kill her with. And now, it seemed, the time was near, was very near. He cracked it open, though he knew already it was fully charged; and found that it was. Then he sheathed it in the inside pocket of his coat, which was deep and took it up to the turn of the butt and held it securely.
He looked down and noted the heliotrope scarf dangling from his side pocket, and in a sudden access of hate he ripped it out and flung it on the floor. Then he ground his heel into the middle of it, and kicked it away from him, like something unclean, unfit to touch. His face was putrefied with the hate that reeks from an unburied love.
He tweaked out the gaslight, and the greenish-yellow cast of the room turned to moonlight tarnished with lampblack. He stood there in it for a moment, half-man, half-shadow, as if gathering purpose. Then he moved, the half of him that was man became shadow, the half that was shadow became man, as the window beams rippled at his passage. There was a flicker of citron from the lighted hall outside, as he opened the door, closed it after him.
He went up the stairs to the second floor without meeting anybody, and the hubbub of voices from the several public parlors on the main floor grew fainter the farther he ascended. Until at last there was silence. He quitted the staircase at the second, and followed the corridor along which the page had led him before, with its flower-scrolled red carpeting and walnut-dark doors. Here for the first time he nearly met mischance. A lady coming out of her room caught him midway along it, too far advanced to turn hack. Her eyes rested on him for an instant only, then she passed him with discreetly downcast gaze, as befitted their distinction of gender, and the rustle of her multi-layered skirts sighed its way along the passage. He gave her time to turn and pass from sight at the far end, stopping for a moment opposite a door that was not his destination, as if about to go in there. Then swiftly going on and making for the door he had in mind, he cast a quick precautionary look about him, seized the knob, gave it a rapid turn, and was in. He closed it after him.