"I'm still your husband, and you're not leaving this house."
"Who's to stop me? You?" She threw back her head and shrieked to the ceiling with wild laughter. "You're not man enough, you haven't got the--"
They both ran suddenly for the door, from their two varying directions. He got there first, put his back to it, blocked it.
She raised diminutive fists, battered futilely at his chest, aimed the points of her shoes at his insteps.
"Get out of my way. You can't stop me."
"Get back from this door, Bonny."
The blow, when it came, was as unexpected to him as it must have been to her. It was like a man swiping at a mosquito, before he stops to think. She staggered back, turned as she fell, and toppled sideward onto the bench that sat before her dressing table, the lower part of her body trailing the floor.
They looked at each other, stunned.
His heart, wrung, wanted to cry out "Oh, darling, did I hurt you?" but his stubborn lips would not relay the plea.
The room seemed deathly still, after the clamorous discord that had just filled it. She had become noticeably subdued. Her only reproach was characteristic. It was, rather, a grudging backhand compliment. As she picked herself stiffly up, she mouthed sullenly: "It's a wonder you were man enough to do that much. I didn't think you had it in you."
She came toward the door again, but this time with all antagonism drained from her.
He eyed her under narrowed, ,warning lids.
"Let me get to the bathroom," she said with sulky docility. "I need to put cold water on my face."
When he came up again later from below, she had dragged her bed things out of their room and into the spare bedroom at the back of the hall up there.
60
About four or five days later, he was returning toward the house from one of his walks--walks which had become habitual by now-- when suddenly her figure came into view far ahead of him, some two or three road crossings in advance, but going the same way he was, down the same mottled tunnel made by the overhanging shade trees.
The distance was so great and the figure was so diminished by it, and above all the flickering effect given off by the alternating sun and shade falling over it made it so blurry in aspect, that he could not be altogether sure it was indeed she. Yet he thought he knew her gait, and when someone else had passed her he could tell by that yardstick she was small in proportion to others and not just because of the distance alone, and above all the coloring of the dress was the same as the one he had last seen her in when he'd left the house an hour before: plum serge. In short, there was too much overall similarity; he felt sure it was Bonny.
It was useless to have hailed her; she would not have heard, she was too far ahead. The separation was too great even for him to have hoped to overtake her within a worthwhile time by breaking into a run; she would have been almost back at their own door by the time he had done so. Moreover, there was no reason for undue haste, no emergency, he would see her soon enough, and besides he was somewhat fatigued from his recent walk and disinclined to run just them.
She had not been in sight only a moment before, and the point at which she had suddenly appeared was midway between two of the intervening road crossings, so he surmised she must have emerged from some doorway or establishment at approximately that location just as he caught sight of her.
When he had gained the same general vicinity himself, in due course, he turned to look sideward, out of what was at first merely superficial curiosity, as he went past, to see where it was she had come from, what it was she had been about. Always presuming that it had been she.
Superficial curiosity became outright surprise at a glance, and halted him in his tracks. The building flanking him was the post office. Immediately adjoining it, it is true, was a rather shabbylooking general-purpose store, but since there were several others of the same kind, and far more prepossessing looking, closer at hand to where they lived, it seemed hardly likely she would have put herself out to come all the way to this one. It must have been the post office she had quitted.
There was no reason for her to seek it out but one: subterfuge. There was a mailbox for the taking of their letters on the selfsame street with them; there was a carrier for the bringing of their letters who went past their very door. And what letters did they get anyway? Who knew they were here? Who knew who they were?
Uneasy now, and with the new-found sunlight dimming behind a scurrying of advance clouds, he had turned and gone in before even considering what he was about to do. And then once in, wished he hadn't, and tried to turn about and leave again. But uneasiness proved stronger than his reluctance to spy upon her, and forced him at last to approach the garter-sleeved clerk behind a wicket bearing the legend "General Delivery."
"I was looking for someone," he said shamefacedly. "I must have--missed her. Has there been a little blonde lady--oh, no higher than this--in here within the past few minutes?"
He remembered that day he had taken her to the bank with him in New Orleans. She must have had the same effect in here just now. She would be remembered, if she'd been in at all.
The clerk's eyes lit up, as with an afterglow. "Yes, sir," he said heartily. "She was at this very window just a few minutes ago." He spruced up one of his arm bands, then the other. "She was asking for a letter."
Durand's throat was dry, but he forced the obstructive question from it. "And did she-- Did you have one for her?"
"Sure enough did." The clerk wagged his head in reflective admiration, made a popping sound with his tongue against some empty tooth-shell in his mouth. "'Miss Mabel Greene,' "he reminisced. "She must be new around here, I don't recall ever--"
But Durand wasn't there anymore.
She was in the ground-floor sitting room. Bonnet and stole were gone, as if she had never had them on. She was standing before the center table frittering with some flowers that she had put there in a bowl the day before, some jonquils, withdrawing those that showed signs of wilting. There was a scorched, cindery odor in the air, as if something small had burned a few moments ago; his nostrils became aware of it the moment he entered.
"Back ?" she said friendlily, turning her face over-shoulder to him, then back to the flowers once more.
He inhaled twice in rapid succession, in quite involuntary confirmation of the foreign odor.
Though she was not looking at him, she must have heard. Abruptly she quitted the flowers, went to the window, and raised it generously. "I was just smoking a cigar in here," she said, unasked. "It needs airing."
There was no trace of the remnants of one, on the usual salvers she used.
"I threw it out the window unfinished," she said. She had gone back to the flowers again. "It was quite unfit. They're making them more poorly all the time."
But the effluvia of her own cigars had never bothered her until now. And this was not the aromatic vestiges of tobacco, it was the more acrid pungency left behind by incinerated paper.
I'll know she lies now, I'll know, he thought mournfully. She cannot evade this. Ah, why do I ask her? Why must I seek my own punishment? But the question was already out and uttered, he could not have held it back had his tongue been torn from its roots a moment later.
"Was that you I saw on the street just now?"
She took a moment to answer; though how could she be uncertain, if she had just returned? She took out one more flower. She turned it about by its stem, studying it for faults. She put it down. Then she turned about and faced him, readily enough. She saw his eyes rest for a moment on her plum-serge costume. It was only then she answered.
"Yes."
"Where were you, to the post office?"
Again she took a moment. As though visualizing the topography of the vicinity she had recently been in, reminding herself of it.
"I had an errand," she said, steadily enough. "There was something I needed to buy."
"What ?" he asked.
She looked down at the flowers. "A pair of garden shears, to clip the stems of flowers."
She had chosen well. They would sell those in a general store. And there had been a general store next to the post office.
"And did you ?"
"They had none on hand. They offered to send away for some, but I told them it was not worth the trouble."
He waited. She intended to say nothing more.
"You didn't go to the post office ?"
But in the repetition of the question itself, in fact in its first asking, lay by indirection her answer. He realized that himself. By the very fact of asking, he apprised her that he knew she had.
"I did step into the post office," she said negligently. "It comes to me now. I had forgotten about it. To buy stamps. They are in my purse now. Do you wish to see them?" She smiled, as one who is prepared for all eventualities.
"No," he said unhappily. "If you say you bought stamps, that ends it."
"I think I'd better show them to you." Her voice was neither injured nor hostile; rather, whimsical, amused. As one who patiently endures another's foibles, forgives them.
She opened the receptacle, took out its change purse, showed him two small crimson squares, adhering on a perforated line.
He scarcely looked. She could have bought those a half-hour ago. She could have had them for a month.
"The man said he had given you a letter."
"He did ?" Her brows went up facetiously.
"I described you to him."
"He did," she said coolly.
"It was addressed to Mabel Greene."
"I know," she agreed. "That is why I returned it to him. He mistook me for somebody else. I stopped for a moment, close to his window, without noticing where I was, while I was putting the stamps away. My back was to him, you see. He suddenly called out: 'Oh, Miss Greene, I have a letter for you,' and thrust it out at me. He took me so by surprise that I took it in my hand for a moment without thinking. Then I said, 'I am not Miss Greene,' and handed it back to him. He apologized, and that ended it. Although on second thought, I don't think his mistake was an honest one. I think he was trying to--" she modulated her voice in reluctant delicacy "--flirt with me. He promptly tried to strike up a conversation with me, by starting to tell me how much I resembled this other person. I simply turned my head away and walked on."
"He didn't say you had returned it."
"But I say I did." There was no resentment in her voice, no emotion whatever. "And you have the choice there: which one of us to believe."
He hung his head. He'd lost the battle of wits, as he might have known he would. She was absolutely without consciousness of guilt. Which did not mean she was without guilt, but only without the fear that usually goes with it and helps unmask it. He could have brought her face to face with that clerk, and the situation would not have altered one whit. She would have flung back her denial into the very face of his affirmation, trusting that to weaken first of the two.
On her way out of the room, she let her hand trail, almost fondly, across the breadth of his back.
"You don't trust me, do you, Lou ?" she said quite neutrally.
"I want to."
She shrugged, in the doorway, as she went out. "Then do so, that is all you have to do. It's simple enough."
She went up the stairs, in leisurely complacency. And though he couldn't see her face, he had never been surer of anything than that it bore on it a smile of the same leisurely complacency just then, to match her pace.
He flung himself down at a crouch before the fireplace, made rapid circling motions with his hands over its brick flooring. There was some brittle paper-ash lying on its otherwise scoured, blackened surface; very little, not enough to make a good-sized fistful. He turned up a piece that had not been consumed, perhaps because it had been held by the burner's fingers to the last. It was a lower corner, nothing more; two straight edges sheared off transversely by an undulant scorched line.
It bore a single word, in conclusion. "Billy." And even that was not wholly intact. The upper closure of the "B" had been opened, eaten into by the brown stain of flame.