The Great Amulet | Page 9

you push me too far. For I tell you frankly, I don't care enough for you to stand this sort of treatment at your hands."
The counter-stroke stung like a lash. The lines about his mouth hardened, and he straightened himself sharply.
"Pity you were not more frank with me twenty-four hours ago. Then we might both have been spared this morning's ironical service. However, the thing is done now. . . ."
"Indeed, it's not done!" she flashed out defiantly. "I have no notion of being your wife on sufferance, I assure you. We are only on the threshold as yet. We need not go a step farther unless we choose. And after what you have said to me, . . . I do not choose."
For an instant the man was stunned into silence; then, in a desperate impulse, took a step towards her.
"Quita, . . . you don't realise what you are saying? Nothing can alter the fact that we are man and wife, now and always."
She motioned him from her with an imperious gesture.
"Don't touch me, please. I do realise, perfectly, that we are not free to make any more dangerous experiments. But we are at least free to live and work independently of one another. Of course I know that you can compel me to remain with you,"--her colour deepened on the words.--"But I know also that you have too much chivalry, too much pride, to force yourself upon me against my wish."
"By God, yes!" he answered from between his teeth. "And . . . what is your wish, may I ask?"
For the first time she hesitated, and lowered her eyes.
"I believe our wishes are identical," she said.
"No need to trouble about mine. You can put them out of court altogether."
His tone spurred her to instant decision.
"My wish is to go back to Zermatt at once, by the funicular; and . . . that we should not see one another again. I will accept nothing from you. I can earn my own living, as I have done till now. Thank God, Michael is too blessedly Bohemian to make a fuss, or be horrified at things. He will simply be overjoyed to get me back."
She turned from him hastily; and he stood, like a man paralysed, watching her go. On the threshold of the bedroom door she looked back.
"Don't think of writing to me, or of trying to patch up a reconciliation between us," she said on a softened note. "Mended things are never reliable. I can neither forget nor forgive what you have said to me to-day, and when you have had time to think things over, you will probably feel thankful that I had the courage to leave you."
The soft closing of the door roused him, and he sprang forward with her name on his lips. Then Pride gripped him; Pride, and the habit of self-mastery hammered into him by his redoubtable uncle. The fact that our spirits thus live and work, deathlessly, in the lives and hearts of those with whom we have come into contact, is a form of immortality too seldom recognised by man.
In the silence that followed, Lenox looked blankly round the empty room:--the room where they should have spent their first evening together. Then the irony, the finality of it all, overwhelmed him, and he sank upon the nearest chair. "What have I done? . . . My God, what have I done?" he breathed aloud. And it is characteristic of the man that, for all his grinding sense of injury, he blamed himself more bitterly than he blamed his wife.
His eye fell on the letter, which, had it contained a bombshell, could scarce have wrought more damage in so short a space of time. Tearing it across and across, he flung it into the fire, and derived a gloomy satisfaction from watching it burn. But though paper and ink were reduced to ashes, neither fire nor steel could annihilate the winged words, thoughtlessly penned, that had altered the course of two lives.
Footsteps in the bedroom brought Lenox again to his feet.
He flung the door open, expecting--he knew what.
An apathetic hotel porter was removing Quita's trunk: and nothing that had been said or done in the last half-hour had hurt him so keenly as this insignificant item:--the touch of commonplace that levels all things.
With a gesture he indicated his own portmanteau. "Take that also," he said, and strode out of the room.
At least he had the right to shield her from comment. To all appearance they must leave the place together! and he settled his account with the smiling manageress, adding simply: "Madame has had bad news."
He took a later train down the hill; deposited his trunk in a hotel bedroom; and spent his wedding-night under the stars; walking, ceaselessly, aimlessly, to deaden