Her face came nearer still, slowly, uncertainly; like that of one dipping toward a new experience, feeling her way. Something had happened to it, was happening to it; he had never seen it so soft before. It was as if he were seeing another face, never born, peering shyly through the mask that had stifled it all these years; the face that should have been hers, that might have been--but that never had. The face of the soul, before the blasts of the world had altered it beyond recognition.
It came close to his, falteringly, through strange new latitudes of emotion, never traveled before.
There were tears in her eyes. It was no illusion; he saw them.
"Will a little love do, Lou ?"
"Any amount."
"Then there was a moment in which I loved you. And this is it."
And the kiss, unforced, unsolicited, had all the bitter sweetness, the unattainable yearning, of a love that might have been. And he knew, his heart knew, it was the first she had ever really given him.
"That was enough," he smiled, content. "That was all I've ever wanted."
Claiming her hand, holding it in his, he fell into an uneasy sleep, a fever oblivion, for a while.
When he awoke, the dregs of daylight were settling in the west, like a fine white ash; the day was past. Her hand was still in his, and she was sitting there, her face toward him. She seemed not to have moved in all those hours, to have endured it, this thing new to her--pain for someone else's sake--without demur; to have kept her vigil with no company other than the sight of his deathbound face--and whatever thoughts that had brought her.
He released her hand. "Bonny," he sighed, agonized. "Get me another of those tonics, now. I am ready for it. It's better--that you do, I think--"
Involuntarily, she drew her head back sharply for a moment. Held her gaze to his. Then at last inclined it again to where it had been before.
"Why do you ask for it now? I haven't offered it."
"I'm in pain," he said simply. "I can't endure much more of it." And turned a little this way, then turned a little that. "If not in kindness, then in charity--"
"Later," she said evasively. "Don't talk that way, don't say such things."
Sweat started out on his face. His breath hissed through his nostrils. "When I did not want them, you urged them on me-- Now that I plead with you, you deny me--" He heaved his body upward, then allowed it to fall back again. "Now, Bonny, now; I can't bear any more. This is as good a time as any. Why wait for the night to be further advanced? Oh, spare me the night, Bonny, spare me the night It is so long--so dark--so lonely--"
She stood slowly, absently rubbing her frozen hand. Then with even greater slowness moved toward the door. She opened it, then stopped there to look back at him. Then went out.
He heard her going down the stairs. And twice he heard her stop, as though impulse had flagged; and then go on again, as she fanned it back to life once more.
She was gone about ten minutes in all. Ten minutes of hell, while flames licked at him all over.
Then presently the door opened and she had returned. She was carrying it in her hand. She came to him and set it down upon the stand, a little to the side of him, beyond easy reach.
"Don't-- Not yet--" she said in a stifled voice, when he tried to reach for it. "Let it wait a while. A little later will do."
She lit the lamp, and then went over by the fireplace to fling the match away. Then she remained there by it, looking down into it. He knew she was not looking at anything there was there before her to see; she was in a revery that saw nothing.
His revery, on its part, saw everything. Everything again. Again he waltzed with her at Antoine's on their wedding night--"A waltz in sunlight, love; in azure, white and gold." Again her playful query sounded through their marriage door-- "Who knocks" "Your husband." Again she stood revealed against the lighted midnight entryway--"Come into your wife's bedroom, Louis." Again they walked the seafront promenade at Biloxi, arm in arm, and the breeze swept off his hat, and she laughed to see him chase it, herself a spinning cyclorama of windswept skirts. Again he raised his arms above her sleeping form to let hundred dollar bills flutter down upon it. Again--
Again, again, again--for the last time.
The truly cruel part of death is not the end of the body; it is the expiration of all memories.
A bright light, like a hot, flickering, yellow star, burned through the ghostly mesh of his death dreams. He looked over and she was standing sideward to the fireplace, holding a burning brand outthrust toward it in her hand. Yet not a stick or twig; it was a scroll of tightly furled paper. And as the flame slowly slanted upward toward her hand, she deftly reversed it, taking it now by the charred end that had already been consumed and allowing the other to burn.
Then threw it down at last, and thrusting out her foot, trod upon its remnants here and there and the next place with little pats of finality.
"What are you doing, Bonny?" he whispered feebly.
She did not turn her head, as if it were of no consequence to her whether or not he had seen. "Burning a paper."
"What paper ?"
Her voice had no tone. "A policy of insurance--upon your life-- payable for twenty thousand dollars."
"It was not worth the trouble. It lacked force, I told you that."
"It was in force again just now. I pledged my ring and made up the payments."
Suddenly he saw her cover her face with the flats of her hands as if, even after having burned it, she still could not bear the remembered aftersight of it.
He sighed, but without much emotion. "Poor Bonny. Did you want the money that badly? I would have--" He didn't finish it.
He lay there for a moment or two after that, inert.
"I'd better drink this now," he said softly, at last.
He strained until his arm could reach the glass. He clasped it, took it up.
64
Suddenly she had turned, thrown herself toward him. He hadn't known the human form could move so quickly. But she was so deft, she was so small. Her hand flashed out, a white missile before his face. The tumbler was gone from his grasp. Glass riddled on the floor somewhere offside beyond his ken.
Her face seemed to melt into shapeless weeping lines, like a face seen through rain running down a pane. She caught him to her convulsively, crushing his face against her soft breast. He hadn't known her embrace could hold that much strength. She'd never loved him enough to exert it to the full before.
"Oh, merciful God," she cried out wildly. "Look down and forgive me! Stop this terrible thing, turn it back, undo it! Lou, my Lou! Only now I see it I Oh, my eyes are open, open now at last! What have I done?"
She dropped to her knees before him, as she had that night in Biloxi when they first came together again. But how different now; how false, how studied her pleas, her posture then, how inconsolable her passion of remorse now, a veritable paroxysm of penitence, that nothing, no word of his, could assuage.
Her sobbing had the wild, panting turbulence of a child's, strangling her words, rendering her almost incoherent. Perhaps this was a child crying now, a newborn self in her, a little girl held mute for twenty years, only now belatedly finding voice.
"I must have been mad-- Out of my mind-- How could I have listened to such a scheme? But when I was with him, I saw only him, never you-- He brought out that old bad self in me-- He made wrong things seem right, or just something to snicker at--"
Her fingers, pleading, traced the outlines of his face; trembling, felt of his lips, of his lidded eyes, as if seeking to restore them to what they had been. Nothing, no voracious kisses seeking him out everywhere, no splurge of teardrops falling all over him, could bring him back.
"I've killed you! I've killed you!"