"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.
61
Nothing more, then, for five days. No more visits to the post office. No more idle sittings beside a desk. No more letters sent, no more letters received. Whatever had been said was said, and only the inside of a fireplace knew what that had been.
For five days after that she did not even go out, she took no more walks. She loitered about the rooms, noncommunicative, self-assured. As if waiting for something. As if waiting for an appointed length of time to pass. Five days to pass.
Then on the fifth day, suddenly, without a word, the door of her room opened after long closure and he beheld her coming down the stairs arrayed for excursion. She was carefully dressed, far more carefully, far more exquisitely, than he had seen her for a long time past. She had taken a hot curling iron to her hair; ripples of artifice indented it. Her lips were frankly red, not merely covertly so. As if to meet a different standard than his own. Rouge that did not try to look like nature but tried to look like rouge. Her floral essence was strong to the point of headiness; again a different standard than his own.
She was going out. She made that plain, over and above his own powers of observation. As if she wanted no mistake about it, no hindrance. "I'm going out," she said. "I'll be back soon."
He did not ask her where.
That was about three in the afternoon.
At five she was not back yet. At six. At seven.
It was dark, and he lit the lamps, and they burned their way toward eight. She wasn't back yet.
He knew she hadn't left him; he knew she was coming back. Somehow that wasn't his fear. Something about the way she had departed, the open, ostentatious bearing she had maintained, was enough to tell him that. She would have gone off quietly, or he would not have seen her go off at all, if she were never coming back.
Once he went to her bureau drawer, and from far in the back of it took out the little case, the casket of burned wood, she kept her adornments in. Her wedding band was in there, momentarily discarded. But so was the solitaire diamond ring he had given her in New Orleans the first day of her arrival.
No, she hadn't left him; she was coming back. This was just an excursion without her wedding band.
On toward nine there was a sound at the door. Not so much an opening of it, as a fumbling incompletion of the matter of opening it.
He went out into the hall at last to see. To see why she did not finish coming in, for he knew already it was she.
She was half in, half out, and stopping there, her back sideward against the frame. Apparently resting. Or as if having given up the idea of entering the rest of the way as being too much trouble.
"Are you ill, Bonny ?" he asked gravely, advancing toward her, but not hastily. Rather with a sort of reproachful dignity.
She laughed. A surreptitious, chuckling little sound, exchanged between herself and some alter ego, that excluded him. That was even at his expense.
"I knew you were going to ask me that."
He had come close to her now.
The floral essence had changed, as if from long exposure; fermented; there was an alcohol base to it now.
"No, I'm not ill," she said defiantly.
"Come away from the door. Shall I help you?"
She brushed his offered arm away from her, advanced past him without it. There was a stiffness to her gait. It was even enough, but there was a self-consciousness to it. As if she were saying: "See how well I can walk." She reminded him of a mechanical doll, wound up and striking out across the floor.
"I'm not drunk, either," she said suddenly.
He closed the door, first looking out. There was no one out there. "I didn't say you were."
"No, but that's what you're thinking."