There were the same low night lights burning as before, and she wasn't back yet. Her presence was in the air, he thought, in faded sachet and in the warm, quilted voluptuousness the closedfor-hours room breathed. He couldn't have come any nearer to her than this; only her person itself was absent. Her aura was in here with him, and seeming to twine ghost-arms about his neck from behind. He squared his shoulders, as if to free them, and twisted his neck within his collar.
He stood at the window for a while, safely slantwise out of sight, staring ugly-faced at the moonlight, his face pitted like a smallpox victim's by the pores of the lacework curtain. Below him there was the sloping white shed of the veranda roof, like a tilted snowbank. Beyond that, the smooth black lawns of the hotel grounds. And off in the distance, coruscating like a swarm of fireflies, the waters of the inlet. Overhead the moon was round and hard as a medicinal lozenge. And, to him, as unpalatable.
Turning away abruptly at last, he retired deeper into the room, and selecting a chair at random, sank into it to wait. Shadow, the way he happened to be sitting, covered the upper part of his face, running across it in an even line, like a mask. A mask inscrutable and grim and without compunction.
He waited from then on without a move, and the night seemed to wait with him, like an abetting conspirator eager to see ill done.
Once toward the end he took out his watch and looked at it, dipping its face out into the moonlight. Nearly a quarter after twelve. He had been in here three full hours. They'd stayed the evening out without him at the supper pavilion. He clapped the watch closed, and it resounded bombastically there in the stillness.
Suddenly, as if in derisive answer, he heard her laugh, somewhere far in the distance. Perhaps coming up in the lift. He would have known it for hers even if he hadn't seen her in the alcove at the restaurant earlier tonight. He would, he felt sure, have known it for hers even if he hadn't known she was here in Biloxi at all. The heart remembers.
38
He jumped up quickly and looked around. Strangely enough, for all the length of time he'd been in the room, he'd made no plans for concealment, he had to improvise them now. He saw the screen there, and chose that. It was the quickest and most obvious method of effacing himself, and she was already nearing the door, for he could hear her voice now, merrily saying something, close at hand in the hallway.
He spread the screen a little more, squaring its panels, so that it made a sort of hollow pilaster protruding from the wall, and got in behind there. He could maintain his own height, he found, and still not risk having the top of his head show. He could see through the perforated, lacelike, scrolled woodwork at the top, his eyes came up to there.
The door opened, and she had arrived.
Two figures came in, not one; and advancing only a step or two beyond the doorway, almost instantly blended into one, stood there locked in ravenous embrace in the semishadow of the little foyer. A gossamer piquancy of breath-borne champagne or brandy reached him, admixed with a little perfume. His heart drowned in it.
There was no motion, just the rustle of pressed garments.
Again her laugh sounded, but muffled, furtive, now; lower now that it was close at hand than it had been when at a distance outside.
He recognized the colonel's voice, in a thick whisper. "I've been waiting for this all evening. My li'l girl, you are, my li'l girl."
The rustling strengthened to active resistance.
"Harry, that's enough now. I must wear this dress again. Leave me at least a shred of it."
"I'll buy you another. I'll buy you ten."
She broke away at last, light from the hallway came between their figures; but the embrace was still locked about her like a barrelhoop. Durand could see her pushing the colonel's arms perpendicularly downward, unable to pry them open in the usual direction. At last they severed.
"But I like this one. Don't be so destructive. I never saw such a man. Let me put the lights up. We mustn't stand here like this."
"I like it better as it is."
"I've no doubt!" she said pertly. "But up they go just the same."
She entered the room itself now, and went to the night light, and it flared from a spark to a sunburst at her touch. And as the light bathed her, washing away all indistinctness of outline and of feature, she glowed there before him in full life once more, after a year and a month and a day. No longer just a cameo glimpsed through a parted curtain, a disembodied laugh down a hallway, a silhouette against an open door; she was whole, she was real, she was she. She broke into bloom. In all her glory and her ignominy; in all her beauty and all her treachery; in all her preciousness and all her worthlessness.
And an old wound in Durand's heart opened and began to bleed all over again.
She threw down her fan, she threw down her shoulder scarf; she drew off the one glove she had retained and added that to the one she had carried loose, and threw them both down. She was in garnet satin, stiff and crisp as starch, and picked with scrolls and traceries of twinkling jet. She took up a little powder-pad and touched it to the tip of her nose, but in habit rather than in actual application. And her courtier stood there and watched her every move, idolizing her, beseeching her, with his greedy smoking eyes.
She turned to him at last, offhandedly, over one shoulder. "Wasn't it too bad about poor Florrie? What do you suppose became of the young man you arranged to have her meet?"
"Oh, blast him!" Worth said truculently. "Forgot, maybe. He's no gentleman. If I run into him again, I'll cut him dead."
She was seeing to her hair now. Touching it a bit, without disturbing it too much. Gracefully crouching a trifle so that the top of the mirror frame could encompass it comfortably. "What was he like ?" she asked idly. "Did he seem well-to-do? Would we-would Florrie, I mean--have liked him, do you think ?"
"I hardly know him. Name was Randall or something. I've never seen him spend more than fifty cents at a time for a whiskey punch."
"Oh," she said on a dropping inflection, and stopped with her hair, as if losing interest in it.
She turned and moved toward him suddenly, hand extended in parting gesture. "Well, thank you for a congenial evening, Harry. Like all your evenings it was most delectable."
He took the hand but kept it within his two.
"Mayn't I stay just a little while longer? I'll behave. I'll just sit here and watch you."
"Watch me! "she exclaimed archly. "Watch me do what? Not what you'd like to, I warn you." She pushed him slightly, at the shoulder, to keep the distance between them even.
Then her smile faded, and she seemed to become thoughtful, ruefully sober for a moment.
"Wasn't it too bad about poor Florrie, though?" she repeated, as though discovering some remaining value in the remark that had not been fully extracted the first time.
"Yes, I suppose so," he agreed vaguely.
"She took such pains with her appearance. I had to lend her the money for the dress."
Instantly he released her. "Oh, here. Let me. Why didn't you tell me this sooner ?" He busied himself within his coat, took out his money-fold, opened and busied himself with that.
She darted a quick glance down at it, then the rest of the time, until he had finished, looked dreamily past him to the rear of the room.
He put something in her hand.
"Oh, and while I think of it--" he said.
He fumbled additionally with the pocketbook, put something further into her uncooperative, yet unresistant, hand.
"For the hotel bill," he said. "For the sake of appearance, it's better if you attend to it yourself."
She circled, swept her back toward him. Yet scarcely in offense or disdain, for she said to him teasingly: "Now don't look. At least, not over my left shoulder."