If the message had concerned her boy her brain would have acted more quickly. She had never troubled herself over the possibility of Paul’s falling ill in her absence, but she understood now that if the cable had been about him she would have rushed to the earliest steamer. With Ralph it was different. Ralph was always perfectly well—she could not picture him as being suddenly at death’s door and in need of her. Probably his mother and sister had had a panic: they were always full of sentimental terrors. The next moment an angry suspicion flashed across her: what if the cable were a device of the Marvell women to bring her back? Perhaps it had been sent with Ralph’s connivance! No doubt Bowen had written home about her—Washington Square had received some monstrous report of her doings!… Yes, the cable was clearly an echo of Laura’s letter—mother and daughter had cooked it up to spoil her pleasure. Once the thought had occurred to her it struck root in her mind and began to throw out giant branches. Van Degen followed her to the window, his face still flushed and working. “What’s the matter?” he asked, as she continued to stare silently at the telegram.
She crumpled the strip of paper in her hand. If only she had been alone, had had a chance to think out her answers!
“What on earth’s the matter?” he repeated.
“Oh, nothing—nothing.”
“Nothing? When you’re as white as a sheet?”
“Am I?” She gave a slight laugh. “It’s only a cable from home.”
“Ralph?”
She hesitated. “No. Laura.”
“What the devil is SHE cabling you about?”
“She says Ralph wants me.”
“Now—at once?”
“At once.”
Van Degen laughed impatiently. “Why don’t he tell you so himself? What business is it of Laura Fairford’s?”
Undine’s gesture implied a “What indeed?”
“Is that all she says?”
She hesitated again. “Yes—that’s all.” As she spoke she tossed the telegram into the basket beneath the writing-table. “As if I didn’t HAVE to go anyhow?” she exclaimed.
With an aching clearness of vision she saw what lay before her—the hurried preparations, the long tedious voyage on a steamer chosen at haphazard, the arrival in the deadly July heat, and the relapse into all the insufferable daily fag of nursery and kitchen—she saw it and her imagination recoiled.
Van Degen’s eyes still hung on her: she guessed that he was intensely engaged in trying to follow what was passing through her mind. Presently he came up to her again, no longer perilous and importunate, but awkwardly tender, ridiculously moved by her distress.
“Undine, listen: won’t you let me make it all right for you to stay?”
Her heart began to beat more quickly, and she let him come close, meeting his eyes coldly but without anger.
“What do you call ‘making it all right’? Paying my bills? Don’t you see that’s what I hate, and will never let myself be dragged into again?” She laid her hand on his arm. “The time has come when I must be sensible, Peter; that’s why we must say goodbye.”
“Do you mean to tell me you’re going back to Ralph?”
She paused a moment; then she murmured between her lips: “I shall never go back to him.”
“Then you DO mean to marry Chelles?”
“I’ve told you we must say goodbye. I’ve got to look out for my future.”
He stood before her, irresolute, tormented, his lazy mind and impatient senses labouring with a problem beyond their power. “Ain’t I here to look out for your future?” he said at last.
“No one shall look out for it in the way you mean. I’d rather never see you again—”
He gave her a baffled stare. “Oh, damn it—if that’s the way you feel!” He turned and flung away toward the door.
She stood motionless where he left her, every nerve strung to the highest pitch of watchfulness. As she stood there, the scene about her stamped itself on her brain with the sharpest precision. She was aware of the fading of the summer light outside, of the movements of her maid, who was laying out her dinner-dress in the room beyond, and of the fact that the tea-roses on her writing-table, shaken by Van Degen’s tread, were dropping their petals over Ralph’s letter, and down on the crumpled telegram which she could see through the trellised sides of the scrap-basket.
In another moment Van Degen would be gone. Worse yet, while he wavered in the doorway the Shallums and Chelles, after vainly awaiting her, might dash back from the Bois and break in on them. These and other chances rose before her, urging her to action; but she held fast, immovable, unwavering, a proud yet plaintive image of renunciation.
Van Degen’s hand was on the door. He half-opened it and then turned back.
“That’s all you’ve got to say, then?”
“That’s all.”
He jerked the door open and passed out. She saw him stop in the anteroom to pick up his hat and stick, his heavy figure silhouetted against the glare of the wall-lights. A ray of the same light fell on her where she stood in the unlit sitting-room, and her reflection bloomed out like a flower from the mirror that faced her. She looked at the image and waited. Van Degen put his hat on his head and slowly opened the door into the outer hall. Then he turned abruptly, his bulk eclipsing her reflection as he plunged back into the room and came up to her.
“I’ll do anything you say. Undine; I’ll do anything in God’s world to keep you!”
She turned her eyes from the mirror and let them rest on his face, which looked as small and withered as an old man’s, with a lower lip that trembled queerly….
XXI
The spring in New York proceeded through more than its usual extremes of temperature to the threshold of a sultry June.
Ralph Marvell, wearily bent to his task, felt the fantastic humours of the weather as only one more incoherence in the general chaos of his case. It was strange enough, after four years of marriage, to find himself again in his old brown room in Washington Square. It was hardly there that he had expected Pegasus to land him; and, like a man returning to the scenes of his childhood, he found everything on a much smaller scale than he had imagined. Had the Dagonet boundaries really narrowed, or had the breach in the walls of his own life let in a wider vision?
Certainly there had come to be other differences between his present and his former self than that embodied in the presence of his little boy in the next room. Paul, in fact, was now the chief link between Ralph and his past. Concerning his son he still felt and thought, in a general way, in the terms of the Dagonet tradition; he still wanted to implant in Paul some of the reserves and discriminations which divided that tradition from the new spirit of limitless concession. But for himself it was different. Since his transaction with Moffatt he had had the sense of living under a new dispensation. He was not sure that it was any worse than the other; but then he was no longer very sure
