The Girl in His House/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
IN the inner pocket of Bordman's coat Armitage found a bundle of papers, consisting of documents, advices regarding mortgages, a confession which ran about the same as the verbal one, and instructions as to the disposition of the body. Among these papers was a lengthy report from the private detective agency. Armitage then realized how well informed Bordman had been regarding his visits with Doris, his rides with her. No doubt one of the servants was in the employ of the agency.
It was noon of the following day when Armitage got into the smoker of a commutation train. In the baggage-car was a long pine box. Only half an hour's journey out of New York; but it was the longest half-hour Armitage had ever known. He was going to bury Doris's father.
In the little village cemetery he was made cognizant with another phase of Bordman's character—a well-kept grave, with a simple slab of marble above it:
DORIS BORDMAN
Aged Twenty-four
Beloved
The mother of the woman he loved—Doris's mother!
Armitage could not get away from the impression that he was walking and moving in a dream. Nothing that he did was real. Doris's father—a drab little man, who wanted to be handsome and strong! A dozen times Armitage, during the solemn moment when the clods fell upon the pine box—Armitage wanted to cry out for some one to wake him. He could not stand this dream any longer! The irony of it all, and the tremendous burden he must carry henceforth! For Doris must never know. She must go through life weaving the most wonderful romances around a personage that had existed only in her real father's imagination. It was all horribly cruel. He would never be able to approach her on the old footing. He knew that from now on he would have to watch his words carefully, guard his thoughts. A casual word, a careless inflection, and the whole veil might be rended. Doris, tender and lovely!
On the way back to New York Armitage proceeded to destroy the papers, one by one. Bit by bit he cast them forth from the car window. He read the confession through again and again, and was about to rip it in two when he noticed for the first time that something had been pinned to the back.
It was Doris's last letter to her father.
Armitage felt himself torn between the profound tragedy of it and the blinding glory of the revelation. That his eye had seen this letter was plain sacrilege. What to do with it? He could not keep it. He could not tear it up and toss it to the winds—it would be like tearing his heart out. And yet it was his clear duty to destroy anything and everything that might lead to the truth. But he could not destroy this letter, he just could not.
The train was drawing into the Grand Central when he found a solution, the true one. He would put the letter and the confession in one of his lock-boxes at the bank. Some future day, when he and Doris were going down the golden twilight of middle age, he would tell her. It would be impossible to carry such a secret to the grave. Twenty years hence, if he lived, he would tell her. She would understand then. She would forgive. Youth would have been hers in all its glory. He would tell her then—Doris—when the painful recollections of this hour were no more.
Having determined upon this course, Armitage discovered that he was still young. As he stepped out of the Grand Central, into the crisp air and fading sunshine of a winter day, it seemed to him that he had miraculously dropped the pall behind.
The butler smiled pleasantly as he took Armitage's hat and coat.
"There is a fire in the study, sir. Miss Athelstone will be down in a moment."
Armitage went into the study and approached the fire, spreading out his hands toward the heat, for it was now sharp weather outside. It was odd, but he never entered this room without the feeling that he was in the middle of some fantastic dream. He saw the photograph on the mantel. It fascinated him, and by and by he took it down and turned it over. Bits of an old newspaper adhered to the back. The photographer's name was gone. The adoration in the girl's eyes whenever she gazed at this sublime mockery! The full depression of the day rolled tack over his heart. He wanted to lay his head on his arms and weep.
"God help me!" he said, aloud.
"Do you need His help, then?"
He wheeled, thoroughly frightened. He had heard no sound, and here she was, close at his elbow, eying him gravely.
"Don't we always need Him?" he answered. "I was thinking out loud."
He held out his hand rather awkwardly, and as she put hers into it he bent and reverently kissed the hand. Save in light-hearted mockery, he had never kissed a woman's hand before. Perhaps he kissed it because he was in mental terror lest he throw his arms around her and smother her lips. When he raised his head the flurry of passion was gone.
On her part she had taken a deep, quick breath and closed her eyes that she might not see his head so close.
Rather an embarrassing pause followed this demonstration. They were both strangely stirred, not so much by the meeting as by preoccupation.
"And so you have returned?" she said.
"Had to"—with a lame attempt at lightness. How he loved her!
"You went away in a hurry."
"I'm an odd duffer. I do a lot of strange things that nobody else would think of doing. I suppose I haven't got all the way back into my civilization shell."
She took something from the mantel. She held the object out toward him. The expression on her face was puzzling.
"What's this?" he asked.
"It's a glove. Your name is written inside in ink. You left it on the floor of the storeroom."
Thunderstruck, Armitage took the glove and sat down.
"Why?" She covered her eyes for a moment as if to shut out some dread picture. "I . . . I might have killed you! . . . It would have killed me! . . . Why? Haven't I told you—haven't I tried to impress upon you that anything you wanted was yours for the simple asking?"
He sat there, dumb. The glove hypnotized him.
"Whatever was in that safe was yours. All you had to do was to tell me. Why didn't you?"
He wet his lips, but he could not find the words he needed.
"There is some dreadful mystery here. I have felt it all along. You would not have acted thus otherwise. Won't you please tell me?"
"I'd rather not."
"Then there is a mystery?"—quickly.
He twisted and pulled at the glove. Fool! He saw now that he had blundered hopelessly. Had he come to her frankly about the wall safe she would never have known, and now he must tell her, if only in self-defense.
"Yes, there is a mystery, but it really doesn't concern you. That is why I acted as I did. I said nothing because I did not want you to worry. I was waiting against the time when your father came back."
Her father!
"Does Betty know?"
"Yes."
"Tell me."
"Must I?"
"I shall know no rest until you do. This must be cleared up."
"Well, this is the story. My agent was a dishonest man. When I went away I left him with full powers of attorney. He took all my ready cash, converted the stocks and bonds, and sold this house to you. He took that money also. Legally, before any court in the land, this house and all that's in it are yours."
"But morally?"
"Why bother about that? It was all due to my carelessness. There were mortgages in that wall safe, together with my mother's jewels. You're such a strange, unusual girl, I wasn't sure but you'd run away if I told you. That's all there is to the mystery. He took only half. I am still comfortably situated."
"That wizened little old man who bobbed like a cork on water! And I am really—morally, if not legally—an interloper! All along I sensed something out of the way. Was it you behind those curtains that first night?"
"Yes. But I didn't know then what had happened."
"I must cable Daddy at once."
"No!" There was sweat on his forehead, but it was cold. "I couldn't come back here to live now. I couldn't."
"Why not?"
"Well, I'd always be seeing you in these rooms. In my mind you have become an integral part of the house. It is morally as well as legally yours now. Your father's purchase was made in good faith. You cannot give it back to me now if you wished."
"Everything is in my name. You are like I am; we lie awkwardly and badly. But if I lied it was because I was terribly proud and unhappy. My father! . . . Could you love a shadow man? . . . I have never seen my father. All I have is the photograph and his letters. I have never seen him. Here is the reason." She produced a letter which she held out to him. "All my life I've been living on promises. I have waited and waited . . . all in vain. He never comes. He never comes. He loves me. Oh, I could never doubt that. He loves me, but he never comes." There was a break in her voice, her eyes brimmed and overflowed. "Read it.'
He had gone through so much during the past twenty-four hours that it seemed to Armitage that he had become dehumanized, that he was only a thinking marionette. He took the letter and opened it. For a time there was no sense to the written words under his gaze. He had to summon all his forces to throw off the appalling numbness before the words adjusted themselves into meaning forms.
My Darling,—Your last letter was like a hand squeezing my heart. So you must know the truth! I have always known that this hour must come. A thousand times I have started toward you, only to be dragged back by cowardly—yes, your father, for all his preaching, is a coward!—fear. When I received that photograph of you, I knew that it would be long years before I would have the courage to look upon you. The dread fear that has always been in my heart was realized. You were the reincarnation of your mother. If I looked upon your living face it would kill me. Your mother is ever with me. I am a strange man, a pariah, a wanderer on the face of the earth, homeless and unhappy. It has come to the pass where I dare not look into fires. I am always seeing you and your mother. Your mother died when you were born. But her soul always walks beside me. Am I cruel and selfish? God alone knows. I repeat, a thousand times the father-love has burned furiously in my heart, and I have hastened toward you, only to turn back. I wonder if in all this world there is another man so utterly miserable and accursed? But God always bless you and guard you and make you happy some day as you deserve.
Armitage heard Doris move and looked up. She was standing by the fire, gazing down into it. The photograph on the mantel was missing. From her attitude he judged that she was holding it against her heart.
Men rarely weep, at least rarely from tenderness. The tear-ducts which lead down into the sentimentality in a man's heart seem to dry up after childhood. But as Armitage stared at the letter again the lines with their odd but familiar little curlicues and shaded capitals became grotesquely blurred. He recalled a line in another letter written by this hand. "You were to me a cipher drawn on a blackboard, something visible through the agency of chalk, but representing—nothing." He had almost forgotten one thing—that cable to Progreso. He would send it on the way home. This time to-morrow night Doris would learn that her father was dead. The mockery of it!
He stood up, resolute and masterfully.
"Doris!"
She turned, still clasping the photograph to her heart. There was a brief tableau. What she saw in his face was only a reflection of what he saw in hers.
"Doris, will you marry me?"
"Is it love?"—in a low, wondering whisper.
"Ay, all I am and all I have!"
The photograph slipped to the floor and the letter fluttered down beside it. What followed was one of those indescribably beautiful moments which God permits to fall to the lot of man and woman but once. They were in each other's arms without comprehending how it happened. So they stood for a space, she grasping tensely the sleeve of his coat, he smoothing her hair without consciousness of the act.
"When?" she whispered, presently.
"The first time I saw you, beyond those curtains."
"It is like that. In my heart you were always there, mistily, until I saw you that afternoon at Betty's. I thought you loved the other woman—until I heard you laugh."
He tilted her chin up and looked into her eyes. Then he kissed her—not as he had kissed any woman before. It was less the kiss of a lover than that of a devotee at a shrine. It was something holy, something that breathed of abnegation. And what was that kiss to her? The first in all her recollection that any man had given her.
"I'm so happy, so crazily happy! If you hadn't loved me I'd have died. Always I've hungered for love, and always I've been denied. Your house and mine, forever and forever! God is good. I'm somebody now. I belong!"
Words! thought the man. What a futile thing words were sometimes! So he spoke with his lips and his arms. And all through this lover-hour, great as his love was, he sensed the shadow of the astounding tragedy.
"Oh!" she cried, suddenly breaking away from him.
"What is it?"
"Daddy!" She stooped for the letter and the photograph. Next she seized him by the arm and dragged him over to the lounge, pulling him down beside her. "Don't you see? He'll have to come home now. I'm going to be married!"
Bob Burlingham was right, thought the lover. She was only a fairy, with fairy ideals, condemned to human existence. Ah, and how he loved her!
Once more she caught him by the sleeve, tightly and possessively. He bent his head until it touched hers, and together they watched the bright flames dance in and out the logs.
"Love!" he said, still filled with the warm wonder of it.
"For ever and ever, like in story-books." And she pressed his hand against her cheek and held it there. "I belong!"
THE END