He wondered what Damoclean sword of retribution, from out of the past, hung over her suspended there.
"We'll stay down here, then," he said, without hesitation. "It's closer to them, and we'll have to keep moving about more often. But I want to please you. What about Mobile or Birmingham, then; those are large enough towns to lose ourselves in."
She made her choice with a pert little nod. "Mobile for now. I'll begin to pack at once."
She stopped again in a moment, holding some article in her hands, and drew close to him once more. "How different this is from last night. Do you remember? Then it was an arrest. Now it is a honeymoon."
"The beginning of a new life. Everything new. New plans, new hopes, new dreams. A new destination. A new you. A new I."
She crept into his arms, looked up at him, her very soul in her eyes. "Do you forgive? Do you take me back?"
"I never met you before last night. There is no past. This is our real wedding day."
The "tiger-arms" showed their stripes, went around her once more.
"My Lou," she sobbed ecstatically.
"My Jul--"
"Careful, there," she warned, with finger upright to his lips.
"My Bonny."
41
Mobile, then.
They went to the finest hotel there, and like the bride and groom they were in everything but count of time, they took its finest suite, its bridal suite. Chamber and sitting room, height of luxury, lace curtains over the windows, maroon drapes, Turkish carpeting thick on the floors, and even that seldom-met-with innovation, a private bath of their own that no one else had access to, complete with clawlegged tub enamelled in light green.
Bellhops danced attendance on them from morning to night, and all eyes were on them every time they came and went through the public rooms below. The petite blonde, always so dainty, so exquisitely dressed, with the tall dark man beside her, eyes for no one else. "That romantic pair from--" Nobody knew just where, but everybody knew who was meant.
More than one sigh of benevolent regret swept after them.
"I declare, it makes me feel a little younger just to look at them."
"It makes me feel a little sad. Because we all know that it cain't last. They're bound to lose it 'fore long."
"But they've had it."
"Yes, they've had it."
Every sprightly supper resort in town knew them, every gay and brightly lighted gathering place, every theatre, public ball, entertainment, minstrelsy. Every time the violins played, somewhere, anywhere, she was in his arms there, turning in the endless, fevered spirals of the waltz. Every time the moon was full, she was in his arms there, somewhere, in a halted carriage, heads close together, sweetness of magnolia all around, gazing up at it with dreamy, wondering eyes.
But they were right, the musers and the sighers and the castasides in the hotel lobby. It lasts such a short time. It comes but once, and goes, and then it never comes again. Even to the upright, to the blessed, it never comes again. And how much less likely, to the hunted and the doomed.
But this was their moment of it now, this was their time for it, their share: Durand and his Julia. (Julia, for love's first thought is its lasting one, love's first name for itself, is its true one.) The sunburst of their happiness. The brief blaze of their noon.
Mobile, then, in the flood tide of their romance; and all was rapture, all was love.
42
Without raising her eyes, she smiled covertly, showing she was well aware that his gaze was lingering on her, there in the little sitting room outside their bedroom. Studying her like an elusive lesson; a lesson that seems simple enough at first glance, but is never to be fully learned, though the student goes back to it again and again.
"What are you thinking ?" she teased, keeping her eyes still downcast.
"Of you."
She took that for granted. "I know. But what, of me ?"
He sat down beside her, at the foot of the chaise longue, tilted his knee, hugged it, and cast his eyes upon her more speculatively than ever. Shaking his head a little, as if in wonderment himself, that this should be so.
"I used to want what they call a good wife. That was the only kind I ever thought I'd have. A proper little thing who'd sit demurely, working a needle through a hoop, both feet planted on the floor. Head submissively lowered to her task, who'd look up when I spoke and 'Aye' and 'Nay' me. But now I don't. Now I only want a wife like you. With yesterday's leftover dye still on her cheeks. With the tip of her bent knee poked brazenly through her dressing gown. With cigar ashes on the floor about her. Jeering at a man in their most private moments, egging him on, then ridiculing him, rather than swooning limp into his arms." He shook his head, more helplessly than ever. "Bonny, Bonny, what have you done to me? Though I still know you should be like that, like those others are, I don't want anyone like that any more. I've forgotten there are any. I only want you; bad as you are, heartless as you are, exactly as you are, I only want you."
Her tarnished golden laughter welled up, showered down upon the two of them like counterfeit coins.
"Lou, you're so gullible. There aren't two kinds of women; there never were, there never will be. Only one kind of woman, one kind of man-- And both of them, alike, not much good." Her laughter had stopped; her face was tired and wise, and there was a little flicker of bitterness, as she said the last.
"Lou," she repeated, "you're so--unaware."
"Are you sure that's the word you had in mind?"
"Innocent," she agreed.
"Innocent?" he parried wryly.
"A woman's innocence is like snow on a hot stove; it's gone at the first touch. But when a man is innocent, he can have had ten wives, and he's as innocent at the end of them all as he was at the beginning. He never learns."
He shivered feverishly. "I know you drive me mad. At least I've learned that much."
She threw herself backward on the couch, her head hanging over so that she was looking behind her toward the ceiling, in a sort of floundering luxuriance. She extended her arms widely upward in a greedy, grasping, ecstatic V. Her voice was a dreamy chant of longing.
"Lou, buy me a new dress. All white satin and Chantilly lace. Lou, buy me a great big emerald for my pinkey. Buy me diamond drops for my ears. Take me out in a carriage to twelve o'clock supper at some lobster palace. I want to look at the chandelier lights through the layers of colored liqueurs in a pousse café. I want to feel champagne trickle down my throat while the violins play gypsy music. I want to live, I want to live, I want to live! The time is so short, and I won't get a second turn--"
Then, as her fear of infinity, her mistrust that Providence would look out for her if left to its own blind course-for it was that at bottom, that and nothing else--were caught by him in turn, and he was kindled into a like fear and defiance of their fate, he bent swiftly toward her, his lips found hers, and her litany of despair was stilled.
Until, presently, she sighed: "No, don't take me anywhere-- You're here, I'm here- The champagne, the music are right here with us-- Everything's here-- No need to look elsewhere--"
And her arms dropped, closed over him like the trap they were.
43
Presently they quitted their suite in the hotel and rented a house. An entire house, for their own. A house with an upstairs and down.
It was at her suggestion. And it was she who engaged the agent, accompanied him to view the several prospects he had to offer, and made the final selection. An "elegant" (that was her word for it) though rather gingerbready affair on one of the quieter residential streets, tree flanked. Then all he had to do was sign the necessary papers, and with but a coaxing smile or two from her, he did so, with the air of a man fondly indulging a child in her latest whim. A whim that, he suspects, tomorrow she will have tired of; but that, while it remains valid, today, he has not the heart to refuse her.