She lay abed until late, leaving his needs to the tender care of the slovenly woman of all work who came in to clean and cook for them on alternate days, thrice a week. Even this disreputable malaise, which was purely and simply a "head," as they called it, the result of her over-indulgence, he did not tax her with.
When she came down at last to supper with him, she was amiable enough in all conscience. It was as if (he told himself) she had two selves. Her sober self did not know or recall the instinctive animosity her drunken self had unwittingly revealed the night before. Or, if it did, was trying to make amends.
"Did Amelia go ?" she asked. It was a needless question, put for the sake of striking up conversation. The stillness in the kitchen and the fact that no one came in to wait at table, gave its own answer.
"At about six," he said. "She set our places, and left the food warming in there on the stove."
"I'll help you bring it in," she said, seeing him start out to fetch it.
"Are you up to it ?" he asked.
She dropped her eyes at the rebuke, as if admitting she deserved it.
They waited on themselves. She shyly offered the bread plate to him across-table. He pretended not to see it for a moment, than relented, took a piece, grunted: "Thanks." Their eyes met.
"Are you very angry with me, Lou?" she purred.
"Have I reason to be? No one can answer that but yourself."
She gave him a startled look for a moment, as if to say "How much do you know?"
He thought to himself, What other man would sit here like this, meekly holding his peace, knowing what I do? Then he remembered what he himself had told Jardine on that visit to New Orleans: I must do as I must do. I can do no other.
"I was not very admirable," she said softly.
"You did nothing so terrible," he let her know, "once you were back here. You were a little sulky, that was all."
"And I did even less," she said instantly, "before I was back here. It was only here that I misbehaved."
How well we understand one another, he thought. We are indeed wedded together.
She jumped up and came around behind his chair, and leaning over his shoulder, had kissed him before he could thwart her.
His heart, like gunpowder, instantly went up, a flash of flame in his breast, though there was no outward sign to show it had been set off. How cheaply I am bought off, he thought. How easily appeased. Is this love, or is this a crumbling of my very manhood?
He sat there wooden, unmoving, hands to table, keeping them resolutely off her.
His lips betrayed him, though he tried to curb them. "Again," they said.
She lowered her face to his once more, and again she kissed him.
"Again," he said.
His lips were trembling now.
Again she kissed him.
Suddenly he came to life. He had seized her with such violence, it was almost an attack rather than an embrace. He pulled her bodily downward into his lap, and buried his face against hers, hungrily devoured her lips, her throat, her shoulders.
"You don't know what you do to me. You madden me. Oh, this is no love. This is a punishment, a curse. I'll kill any man who tries to take you from me--I'll kill you yourself. And I'll go with you. There shall be nothing left."
And as his lips repeatedly returned to find her, his only words of endearment, spaced each time with a kiss, were: "Damn you! . . . Damn you! . . . Damn you! No man should ever know you!"
When he released her at last, exhausted, she lay there limp, cradled in his arms. On her face the strangest, startled look. As though his very violence had done something to her she had not counted on.
She said, speaking trancelike, and slowly drawing her hand across her brow as if to restore some memory that was necessary to her, and that he had all but seared away, "Oh, Louis, you are not too safe to know yourself. Oh, darling, you almost make me forget--"
And then the crippled, staggering thought died unfinished.
"Forget whom?" he accused her. "Forget what?"
She looked at him dazed, as though not knowing she had spoken, herself. "Forget--myself," she concluded limply.
That is not whom she meant, he told himself with melancholy wisdom. But that word is the true one, nonetheless. I have no real rival, but in her. It is only herself that stands in the way of allowing her to love me.
She did not go out of the house the next day. Again he waited, again he held his breath, but she remained dutifully at hand. The appointment, if there was to be another, still hung fire.
Nor the next, either. The cleaning woman came, and coming down the stairs, he caught sight of them standing close together in the hall, as if they had been secretively conferring together. He thought he saw Bonny hastily fumble with her bodice, as if concealing something she had just received.
She would have carried it off, perhaps, but the Negress made a poor conspirator, she started theatrically back from her mistress, at sight of him, and thus put the thought in his head that something had passed between them.
There are other ways of communicating than by the rendezvous direct, he reminded himself. Perhaps the appointment I have been dreading so has already been kept, right before my eyes, on a mere scrap of paper.
Toward the latter part of their evening meal, that same day, she became noticeably pensive. Again the woman, the go-between of treachery, had gone, again they were alone together.
Her casual remarks, such as any meal shared by any two people is seasoned with, grew more and more infrequent. Soon she was making none at all of her own volition, only answering the ones he made. Presently even this proportion had begun to diminish, he was carrying the entire burden of speech for the two of them. All he got now were absent nods and vague affirmatives, while her thoughts were obviously elsewhere.
Finally it even affected her eating, began to slow and diminish it, so great was her own contemplation of whatever it was that her mind saw before it. And it must have seen something, for the mind by its very nature cannot contemplate vacancy. Her fork would remain in position to detach a portion of food, yet not complete the act for several minutes. Or it would halt in air, midway to her mouth, and again remain that way.
Then, quite as insolubly as it had begun, it had ended again, this abstraction. It was over. Whatever byways her train of thought had wandered down, were now closed off; or else it had arrived at its destination.
Her eyes now saw him when they rested on him.
"Do you recall that night we quarrelled ?" she said, speaking softly. "You said something then about that old insurance policy you once took out when we were living on St. Louis Street. Was that true? Do you really still have it? Or did you just make that up, as you did about there still being money left?"
"I still have it," he said inattentively. "But it has lapsed, for lack of keeping up with the payments."
She was now busily eating, as if to make up for the time she had wasted loitering over her food before. "Is it completely worthless, then ?"
"No, if the back payments were made up it would come into effect again. Not too much time has passed, I think."
"How much would be required?"
"Five hundred dollars," he answered impatiently. "Have we got that much?"
"No," she said docilely, "but is there any harm in asking?"
She pushed her plate back. She dropped her eyes, as if he had rebuffed her, and allowed them to rest on her clasped hands. Then taking one finger in the others, she began slowly to twist and turnabout the diamond ring that had once been his wedding gift to her. She shifted it this way, that, speculatively, abstractedly.
Who could say whether she saw it or not, as she did so? Who could say what she saw? Who could say what her thoughts were? It told nothing. Just a woman's restless gesture with her ring.