Phantom Wires | Page 6

a full stop almost before where he
stood. It shuddered and panted there, leviathan-like, and Durkin saw the
sea breeze sway back the canopy drapery.
He followed the direction of the excited young Chicagoan's gaze,
smilingly, now, and with a singularly disengaged mind.
He saw the woman's clear profile outlined against the floating purple
curtain, the quiet and shadowy eyes of violet, the glint of the chestnut
hair that showed through the back-thrust folds of the white silk
automobile veil swathing the small head, and the nervous, bird-like
movement of the head itself.
He did not move; there was no involuntary, galvanic reaction; no
sudden gasp and flame of wonder. He simply held his cigarette still
poised in his fingers, half-way to his lips, with the minutest relaxing of
the smile that still hovered about them, while a dull and ashen grayness
crept into his face, second by waiting second.
It was not until his eyes met hers that he took three wavering and

undecided steps toward her.
With a silent movement--more of warning than of fright, he afterward
told himself--she pressed her gloved fingers to her lips. What her intent
eyes meant to say to him, in that wordless, telepathic message, Durkin
could not guess; all thought was beyond him. But in a moment or two
the roadway cleared, the car shook and plunged forward, the floating
curtains fluttered and trailed behind.
Durkin turned blindly, and pushed and ran and dodged through the
languidly amazed promenaders, following after that sudden and
bewildering vision, as after his last hope in life. But the fine, white,
limestone Riviera dust from the fading car's tire-heels, and the burnt
gases from its engines, were all the road held for him, as it undulated
off into hillside quietnesses.
He heard the young Chicagoan calling after him, breathless and anxious.
But he ran on until he came to a side street, shadowed with garden
walls and villas and greenery. Slipping into this, he immured himself in
the midnight silences, to be alone with the contending forces that tore
at him.
If his companion was right, and such things as this made up Romance,
then, after all, the drama of life had lost none of its bewilderment. For
the woman he had seen between the floating purple curtains was his
own wife.
CHAPTER III
THE SHADOWING PAST
Durkin's first tangible feeling was a passion to lose and submerge
himself in the muffling midnight silences, the silences of those
outwardly quiet gardens at heart so old in sin and pain.
He felt the necessity for some sudden and sweeping readjustment, and
his cry for solitude was like that of the child wounded in spirit, or that
of the wild animal sorely hurt in body. Before he could face life again,

he felt, he had to build up about him the sustaining fabric of some new
and factitious faith.
But as intelligence slowly emerged from the mist and chaos of utter
bewilderment, as reason crept haltingly back to her seat, his first blind
and indeterminate rage fell away from him. His first black and blinding
clouds of suspicion slowly subsided before practical and orderly
question and cross-question. Thought adjusted itself to its new
environment. Painfully, yet cautiously, he directed his ceaseless
artillery of interrogation toward the outer and darker walls of
uncertainty still so blankly confronting him.
It was not that he had been consumed by any direct sense of loss, of
deprivation. It was not that he had feared open and immediate treachery.
If a rage had burned through him, at the sudden and startling sight of
his own wife thus secretly masquerading in an unknown rôle, it was far
from being a rage or mere jealousy and distrust.
They had, in other days, each passed through questionable and perilous
experiences. Both together and alone they had adventured unwillingly
along many of the more dubious channels of life. They had surrendered
to temptation; they had sown and reaped and suffered, and become
weary of it. They had struggled slowly yet stoically up towards
respectability; they had fought for fair-dealing; they had entered a
compact to stand by each other through that long and bitter effort to be
tardily honest and autumnally aboveboard.
What now so disturbed and disheartened him was the sudden sense of
something impending, the vague apprehension of some momentous and
far-reaching intrigue which he could not even foreshadow. And it was
framing itself into being at a time when he had most prayed for their
untrammelled freedom, when he had most looked for their ultimate
emancipation from the claws of that too usurious past.
But, above all, what had brought about the sudden change? Why had no
inkling of it crept to his ears? Why was she, the passionate pleader for
the decencies of life whom