University of Virginia Library

25. CHAPTER XXV

There was sleet that evening, with a whopping wind, but neither this storm nor that other which so imminently threatened him held place in the consciousness of Bibbs Sheridan when he came once more to the presence of Mary. All was right in his world has he sat with her, reading Maurice Maeterlinck's Alladine and Palomides. The sorrowful light of the gas-jet might have been May morning sunshine flashing amber and rose through the glowing windows of the Sainte-Chapelle, it was so bright for Bibbs. And while the zinc-eater held out to bring him such golden nights as these, all the king's horses and all the king's men might not serve to break the spell.

Bibbs read slowly, but in a reasonable manner, as if he were talking; and Mary, looking at him steadily from beneath her curved fingers, appeared to discover no fault. It had grown to be her habit to look at him whenever there was an opportunity. It may be said, in truth, that while they were together, and it was light, she looked at him all the time.

When he came to the end of Alladine and Palomides they were silent a little while, considering together; then he turned back the pages and said: "There's something I want to read over. This:

He stopped and looked at her.

"You boy!" said Mary, not very clearly.

"Oh yes," he returned. "But it's true—especially my knees!"

"You boy!" she murmured again, blushing charmingly. "You might read another line over. The first time I ever saw you, Bibbs, you were looking into a mirror. Do it again. But you needn't read it—I can give it to you: "A little Greek slave that came from the heart of Arcady!"

"I! I'm one of the hands at the Pump Works—and going to stay one, unless I have to decide to study plumbing."

"No." She shook her head. "You love and want what's beautiful and delicate and serene; it's really art that you want in your life, and have always wanted. You seemed to me, from the first, the most wistful person I had ever known, and that's what you were wistful for."

Bibbs looked doubtful and more wistful than ever; but after a moment or two the matter seemed to clarify itself to him. "Why, no," he said; "I wanted something else more than that. I wanted you."

"And here I am!" she laughed, completely understanding. "I think we're like those two in The Cloister and the Hearth. I'm just the rough Burgundian cross-bow man, Denys, who followed that gentle Gerard and told everybody that the devil was dead."

"He isn't, though," said Bibbs, as a hoarse little bell in the next room began a series of snappings which proved to be ten, upon count. "He gets into the clock whenever I'm with you." And, sighing deeply, he rose to go.

"You're always very prompt about leaving me."

"I—I try to be," he said. "It isn't easy to be careful not to risk everything by giving myself a little more at a time. If I ever saw you look tired—"

"Have you ever?"

"Not yet. You always look—you always look—"

"How?"

"Care-free. That's it. Except when you feel sorry for me about something, you always have that splendid look. It puts courage into people to see it. If I had a struggle to face I'd keep remembering that look—and I'd never give up! It's a brave look, too, as though gaiety might be a kind of gallantry on your part, and yet I don't quite understand why it should be, either." He smiled quizzically, looking down upon her. "Mary, you haven't a 'secret sorrow,' have you?"

For answer she only laughed.

"No," he said; "I can't imagine you with a care in the world. I think that's why you were so kind to me—you have nothing but happiness in your own life, and so you could spare time to make my troubles turn to happiness, too. But there's one little time in the twenty-four hours when I'm not happy. It's now, when I have to say good night. I feel dismal every time it comes—and then, when I've left the house, there's a bad little blankness, a black void, as though I were temporarily dead; and it lasts until I get it established in my mind that I'm really beginning another day that's to end with you again. Then I cheer up. But now's the bad time—and I must go through it, and so—good night." And he added with a pungent vehemence of which he was little aware, "I hate it!"

"Do you?" she said, rising to go to the door with him. But he stood motionless, gazing at her wonderingly.

"Mary! Your eyes are so—" He stopped.

"Yes?" But she looked quickly away.

"I don't know," he said. "I thought just then—"

"What did you think?"

"I don't know—it seemed to me that there was something I ought to understand—and didn't."

She laughed and met his wondering gaze again frankly. "My eyes are pleased," she said. "I'm glad that you miss me a little after you go."

"But to-morrow's coming faster than other days if you'll let it," he said.

She inclined her head. "Yes. I'll—'let it'!"

"Going to church," said Bibbs. "It is going to church when I go with you!"

She went to the front door with him; she always went that far. They had formed a little code of leave-taking, by habit, neither of them ever speaking of it; but it was always the same. She always stood in the doorway until he reached the sidewalk, and there he always turned and looked back, and she waved her hand to him. Then he went on, halfway to the New House, and looked back again, and Mary was not in the doorway, but the door was open and the light shone. It was as if she meant to tell him that she would never shut him out; he could always see that friendly light of the open doorway—as if it were open for him to come back, if he would. He could see it until a wing of the New House came between, when he went up the path. The open doorway seemed to him the beautiful symbol of her friendship—of her thought of him; a symbol of herself and of her ineffable kindness.

And she kept the door open—even to-night, though the sleet and fine snow swept in upon her bare throat and arms, and her brown hair was strewn with tiny white stars. His heart leaped as he turned and saw that she was there, waving her hand to him, as if she did not know that the storm touched her. When he had gone on, Mary did as she always did—she went into an unlit room across the hall from that in which they had spent the evening, and, looking from the window, watched him until he was out of sight. The storm made that difficult to-night, but she caught a glimpse of him under the street-lamp that stood between the two houses, and saw that he turned to look back again. Then, and not before, she looked at the upper windows of Roscoe's house across the street. They were dark. Mary waited, but after a little while she closed the front door and returned to her window. A moment later two of the upper windows of Roscoe's house flashed into light and a hand lowered the shade of one of them. Mary felt the cold then—it was the third night she had seen those windows lighted and the shade lowered, just after Bibbs had gone.

But Bibbs had no glance to spare for Roscoe's windows. He stopped for his last look back at the open door, and, with a thin mantle of white already upon his shoulders, made his way, gasping in the wind, to the lee of the sheltering wing of the New House.

A stricken George, muttering hoarsely, admitted him, and Bibbs became aware of a paroxysm within the house. Terrible sounds came from the library: Sheridan cursing as never before; his wife sobbing, her voice rising to an agonized squeal of protest upon each of a series of muffled detonations— the outrageous thumping of a bandaged hand upon wood; then Gurney, sharply imperious, "Keep your hand in that sling! Keep your hand in that sling, I say!"

"Look!" George gasped, delighted to play herald for so important a tragedy; and he renewed upon his face the ghastly expression with which he had first beheld the ruins his calamitous gesture laid before the eyes of Bibbs. "Look at 'at lamidal statue!"

Gazing down the hall, Bibbs saw heroic wreckage, seemingly Byzantine— painted colossal fragments of the shattered torso, appallingly human; and gilded and silvered heaps of magnificence strewn among ruinous palms like the spoil of a barbarians' battle. There had been a massacre in the oasis —the Moor had been hurled headlong from his pedestal.

"He hit 'at ole lamidal statue," said George. "Pow!"

"My father?"

"Yesshu! Pow! he hit 'er! An' you' ma run tell me git doctuh quick 's I kin telefoam—she sho' you' pa goin' bus' a blood-vessel. He ain't takin' on 'tall now. He ain't nothin' 'tall to what he was 'while ago. You done miss' it, Mist' Bibbs. Doctuh got him all quiet' down, to what he was. Pow! he hit 'er! Yessuh!" He took Bibbs's coat and proffered a crumpled telegraph form. "Here what come," he said. "I pick 'er up when he done stompin' on 'er. You read 'er, Mist' Bibbs—you' ma tell me tuhn 'er ovuh to you soon's you come in."

Bibbs read the telegram quickly. It was from New York and addressed to Mrs. Sheridan.