Lost Ecstasy/Chapter 27
IT is probable that Henry Dowling would have accepted Kay's death with submission and Christian fortitude, would have pictured her, or tried to do so, among the blessed company of the saints, and—having been thus assured of the impeccable nature of her surroundings—have settled down to tender memories and a cherished grief. But she had left no such solace. By sheer violence alternating with cold contempt he bore down Katherine's feeble arguments.
"All we have! Of course she's all we have! You don't think that helps matters, do you? She knew that, and yet she chose this circus clown, this farm yokel, this"
Or again, in a more temperate mood:
"She'll come back; don't worry about that. I only hope to God she doesn't come back pregnant and expect us to raise the fellow's child. That's what usually happens."
He faced his world with suspicion and distrust. Not that he had ever been too sanguine about it; it had a way of enjoying the discomfiture of others. And who should know that better than Henry himself? But he carried it rather far, even for him, held his head very high and took to watching the faces of the men he met on the streets, in business, at his clubs. One or two of them, absently passing him by at that time, were bewildered to find that they had somehow incurred his enmity.
He had made a new will.
"Not a dollar of my money to my daughter's husband," he said, setting his jaw. "If she leaves him and divorces him all right; if not"
The estate was to go in trust to his wife, and later to his old university.
"I know those fellows," he said grimly. "If she tries to break the will they'll fight her to kingdom come. Charities are different; they can't very well bid too hard, and anyhow they haven't the guts." He had got that word from Bessie.
Immediately Bessie Osborne made a will of her own, and having done so wandered into his office and told him about it. After which she proceeded to inspect herself in a small mirror, and waited for the storm to break with her usual placidity. It did break, and in the midst of it he looked up to find her making the most hideous grimaces at him. He was startled into silence.
"Sorry!" she said, smiling at him. "I'd forgotten my facial exercises for today. Toning the muscles, you know. Well, go on."
He never quite recovered his former speed after that. When she got up to go she might have been listening to a rather stupid lecture, for all the effect it had had on her. She drew her wrap about her and picked up her bag.
"How splendid it must be always to know you are right!" she said brightly. "You and God Almighty—like old what's his name, the Kaiser." She surveyed him. "It's rather a pity I got all father's humor and his wickedness, isn't it, and you only got his virtues. A little sin would have helped you, Henry."
Then she wandered out.
But if she had her father's humor and what she called his wickedness, she also had a bit of that clear hard brain of his which had mixed up men, their actions and reactions, to the making of his fortune. She knew that her check had not been cashed, and that Kay had been right about her cowboy. Then the fellow must have more than a handsome face. He certainly had the intestinal investiture Henry had referred to.
But Bessie's sympathies at that time were divided. Herbert had come out of the affair with a dignity she had hardly expected. He had neither withdrawn himself nor assumed an attitude of artificial indifference. Now and then she saw him on the golf links, apparently intent on his game, or even once in a while at a club dance. If he added little to the gayety at such times, he never had done so. He was as carefully dressed as ever, as temperate, as courteous. She knew her brother had carried out his promise and that he had been moved up in the business somewhere, and she sometimes wondered if Herbert was finding consolation in that.
Then one night she had a talk with him, and liked him better than she ever had, as a result. She found him alone on the terrace of the club lighting a cigarette, and promptly appropriated both it and him.
"I haven't seen you for ever so long. Why don't you stop in?"
He lighted another cigarette for himself before he answered.
"I couldn't come whining for sympathy, and I was afraid that's what I would do."
"Nonsense! It's better to talk these things out. That's good modern psychology."
But with the door opened in that fashion he seemed to have little to say.
"I haven't anything buried, I think. I've tried to believe that I want her to be happy, but I can't. I suppose what I really want is for the whole thing to go smash, so that she'll come back again. Then I wonder what my own reactions would be if she did come back. You can't tell, you knew." His voice trailed off vaguely, as though he was reviewing some old and painful train of thought. "It isn't only because she's been married, or not entirely. It's because she stood us up, McNair and me, side by side, and—he was the better man. For her anyhow."
"It wasn't as deliberate as that, Herbert."
"Perhaps not, but that doesn't help, does it? He had some attraction for her that I didn't have. Not just looks, probably. She's too intelligent for that. Something fundamental, like—like a chemical affinity. That sounds queer, but you know what I mean."
Bessie nodded.
"Cause of all the trouble in the world," she said succintly. "Cyrano, for instance!"
"Cyrano had a mind."
"Don't be too sure McNair hasn't. He's nobody's fool, I imagine."
"A man who spends his life among cattle!"
"Well, it takes brains to raise cattle," she said shrewdly. "My father did it, you know."
He had no answer to that, and she left him there lighting a fresh cigarette. The match flare showed him white and absorbed.
Perhaps had Katherine been in better health she would have asserted herself more, but she was overborne by her husband's anger and too weak to combat it. She was a sick woman, more ill than even Henry knew, or perhaps he would not have kept Kay's letter from her, or forbidden her to write. She had accepted this pronunciamento as she had accepted others during all her married life, but her obedience this time was helped by her ignorance. She did not know where Kay was; before Bessie's visit she had known none of the details of Tom's injury; and even Bessie could only say that they meant to go West, that they had apparently no plans. At night, sleepless in her bed, she composed touching little epistles full of the things she had always been too shy to say, but with the morning her courage and her strength departed, and there was Henry, grimly insistent on her silence and even watching her with furtive suspicious eyes.
There had been a terrible day when Nora, red-eyed and smelling of moth preventive, came into her bedroom and handed a bunch of keys to Henry.
"That's all, is it?" he inquired. "You haven't left anything out?".
"You can come and look," said Nora with a sort of suppressed savagery. "And here's the list."
That had been Kay's clothes. The presents had been sent back long ago.
Life went on for her. People came and went. Sometimes she went downstairs and served tea, and it was quite like old times—without Kay, of course. The Sargent painting of Kay in her presentation clothes still hung on the wall; Henry had thought it would be conspicuous to remove it, but when he was in the room Katherine did not look at it. Little things like that upset him those days.
Now and then she was ill. Terribly ill. A pain began in her chest and ran down her left arm, her heart beat like a fluttering bird, and a cold sweat broke out all over her. It terrified her. She could stand the pain better than the terror. Then it would pass, and there would be Henry, strangely gentle and very pale. That would have been the time to talk to him about Kay, but she was always too weak to speak. And when she tried to he would bend over her, still white and shaken, and say:
"Hush now. Don't talk. Just close your eyes and rest."
The terror was that she would die before she had said to Kay the things she had been too shy to say all those years.
Then one day Henry opened his copy of the Ursula paper—his subscription had not yet run out—and read that Tom McNair had come back bringing a wife with him, "the late Miss Katherine Dowling." He rang for Rutherford and ordered the paper taken out and destroyed, and that night in his library he wrote a letter by hand, and marked it personal and confidential.
My dear Tulloss: Probably long before this you have learned what has occurred in my family. I need not enlarge on it. You will know what a shock and disappointment we have had. Scandal, too, I regret to say, but that is comparatively unimportant.
Before I make the request which is the purpose of this letter, let me make my position clear. I do not regard my daughter's marriage to this cowboy as a permanent thing. I know her. It is the result of a brief infatuation, of romantic nonsense picked up by her God knows how last summer, and of her own imagination. I fancy, too, that the stimulation of the altitude—but that is not pertinent. As I say, I know her. She has always had everything, and more. She is both fastidious and luxurious. If this fellow has not already destroyed her illusions about him he soon will. Her pride will carry her on for a time after that, but not long.
It is with this conviction that I am writing you. I want you to be cruel to be kind. She may come to you, or he may, for help of some kind. I am asking you to refuse any such application if it is made. Believe me, I have given this careful thought. I am fully convinced that her entire future life will depend on the position we take now.
I understand that McNair has been injured and is not likely to be able to go back to his old employment. He may have had a little money when they started back to Ursula, but probably not much. When this is exhausted the real test will come, and it is of that time that I am writing you now. I beg you to stand by me.
My regards to Mrs. Tulloss. I am sorry to say that my wife is far from well. It looks like angina pectoris, and we are gravely concerned.
Sincerely yours,
Henry Dowling.