"Won't you let me come in?"

Dodo was human, and the offense against her had been the blackest in the Salamander code. She felt no softness in her heart. After what she had done, the old confidential relations could never be renewed: what was the use of pretending? So she answered coldly:

"Why? There was no excuse for what you did--absolutely none!"

Winona, very calm, reflected a moment; then she answered abruptly:

"I know! I'm not asking forgiveness!" And, with a decision that astonished Dodo, she entered, saying, "No one will come--for half an hour at least? I've got something I must talk out, you're the only human being, Dodo--I must talk to some one, or I shall go mad!"

The obstinate reckless force in her words and gestures completed Dodo's astonishment. Instead of a suppliant, Winona had a.s.sumed control of the situation. She hesitated, on the point of an angry refusal. But Winona had not come to ask for forgiveness--for what then? She turned on her heel, sat down and folded her arms aggressively, looking her sternest.

Winona immediately placed herself before her, never avoiding her gaze, speaking abruptly, as if in a hurry, with hard cruel notes in her voice:

"Dodo, you were the only true friend I had in the world; you did everything for me; and I tried to take from you a man who means nothing to you. You have a dozen,--twenty, if you wish,--and I had none! I was desperate! I'm saying no more--what's the use? You wouldn't forgive me--I wouldn't if I were you; and, if you did, would that change matters? No! Some day--you will see matters differently." She stopped at an angry gesture of negation from the seated girl, and repeated, with a smile full of bitterness: "Some day--yes, remember what I say!" For a moment, through the hardness of her mood, a little bit of the old Winona appeared, gentle and tender, as she looked down with the first trace of remorse; but she crushed it immediately, and continued almost mechanically, as if reciting a piece committed to memory:

"What I tell you now, I tell you because you are the only one I can trust, and because, no matter what's happened, you are the one I want to understand. I have been married for five years!"

At this incredible announcement Dodo let her arms fall, half rising from her seat, open-mouthed.

"Married!"

"Five years!" Winona repeated, shrugging her shoulders. "Legally, that's all. Don't interrupt me; I want to get it over. I lived in a G.o.d-forsaken fishing village on the Maine coast--G.o.d-forsaken eight months of the year, waking up in the summer for a few city folks, second-cla.s.s, who'd come down for three months, four months, to keep us going the rest of the year. Father was a decent sort, sea captain, fussing about a couple of cat-boats in the summer, lazy, but kind. My mother was a devil if ever there was one; but she worked hard, washing, cooking. She couldn't read or write. Why he married her--don't know!

Because she got him with her good looks, probably, the looks she pa.s.sed down to my sister and me! There were eight in the family, and we were the eldest--village belles. Morals weren't any too strict there; lord, why should they be? With everything gone to rot, no hope, no life, just existing, dragging through one month after another--sleet, ice and wind, and nothing ahead but to get old! All right, when you didn't know that something else existed over on the mainland! That was the trouble! They educated us--sent us over for a year's high school at New Bedford, to stay with an aunt.

"New Bedford! Lord, I thought it was a wonderland then; Boston and New York couldn't be any finer. Then she brought us back, to help in the living, to wait on the table when the boarders came, to end up by marrying--work for some man who'd sit around, to be fed and clothed, to have his house cleaned--children and all the rest."

She stopped a moment, frowning, and Dodo, overwhelmed at this picture of isolation and drudgery, that started before her eyes in the gesture and the voice of the girl, who seemed to have returned to it all, exclaimed:

"But why tell me?"

Without noticing the interruption, Winona continued, speaking as if to herself, seemingly unconscious of Dodo's presence:

"New Bedford and summer boarders! That was the whole trouble! I was eighteen, sister twenty, and the village belles! We used to get out of the windows, nights, and steal off for a dance, every chance we got.

Lord! it was innocent enough, considering what the other girls were doing; but she--the mother--whenever she'd catch us, she used to go stark out of her mind, swear we were disgracing her, bringing shame on the family, insinuating--well, everything! That wasn't all! She tied us up and beat us with a strap--yes, just that!--until she couldn't beat or shriek at us any more. But that didn't stop us! It only made us hate everything--her, the home, the life! Once she beat my sister so that they had to call in a doctor. The next week she ran off--disappeared."

Winona drew a long breath, and her arm swept toward the trackless city, lowering at their window-sides: "Never a word. G.o.d knows! The worst, I guess--here, perhaps--somewhere!

"She wanted me to go with her; I hadn't the nerve. Besides, there was a city fellow, clerk in a shoe store, who was taken with me, and I thought--I was sure--would marry me and get me out of it. But nothing ever came of that. After my sister went, she, the mother, never beat me again. Father had had some words with her, I guess. Only it was worse!

She had bars put in my window, and she never let me out of her sight in summer. When she went to bed she locked me in herself. She swore she'd keep me, at least, an honest girl. Two years of that. G.o.d knows how many times I thought of ending it all!

"Then there was an old fellow from the city, who had come down ten years before, and stayed. Been a gentleman, or something near it. Drink was the trouble--but a quiet sort of an old bachelor. Took over the little ramshackle store, living by himself with a regiment of cats. There'd been something back in his life--scandal about something or other: none of us ever got the truth, but it took the ambition out of him. He didn't care. He rather liked the old hole, I think. The store, you know, was the social center. Anyhow, he got sort of hold of himself, and prospered.

"Now, what I did, I did myself. I made him fall in love with me--oh, it wasn't difficult! I'd known for a long time what was back of his eyes; only--well, I was the belle, and every one was after me, and he'd sense enough to know that a prize like that wasn't for him, at fifty-five.

Well, the rest isn't important; besides, it was easy. He got infatuated, as I meant, and when it was time I made a bargain. I had talked him into believing I would have a career; only it wasn't that--I wanted to get away! And one afternoon in December, with the snow piling up against the door, when we were alone in his store, I made my bargain--over the counter just like any other sale.

"He was to supply me with money for three years, and at the end of that time, if I was a success, he was to join me; if I failed, I was to go back, forget and take up the old life again. It sounds queer perhaps; as a matter of fact, I played many scenes before I got him to that. I was clever then; I was only twenty-one! Then--well, I'd put the longing for me into him, and it was a bargain like any other. I wanted five years, but he stuck for three. I wanted an engagement only, but, though he was crazy for me, he was too canny. So we compromised: I met him in Boston, and we were married secretly, and I left him the same day. He took me to the train and put me on board, shaking like a fever, looking at me with eyes big as saucers.

"That was four years ago. I did not go back, and he stopped sending me money. I wrote him a hundred lies--told him I must have another year by myself, that I had a big opportunity, that I was sure to succeed, that he had not given me enough time, every excuse. But he stopped my money short, told me when I was ready I'd got to come to him--"

She stopped, drew in her breath, and then burst out fiercely:

"G.o.d! I may be a wicked woman, but how I have waited, how I have prayed, to be delivered from him! Yes, prayed on my knees for him to die--to make me free, to give me a chance! But what's the use? I thought I was so clever! Clever?... I'm a stupid little fool! Career? I haven't the ghost of a show! I know it now! There's no more hoping! I've had chance after chance; what good did they do me? That last one--that opened my eyes! Blainey's right; he didn't mince words. It was what I needed; it convinced me! But, G.o.d! if he would only die!"

Dodo had sat breathlessly, even shrinking back in her chair, before these pa.s.sions in the raw, flung out without pretense of concealment, horror-stricken.

"But what will you do then?" she cried, terrified at the expression in Winona's eyes.

The girl's eyes came to hers, cold, resolved, disdainful; but she did not reply. A horrible thought suddenly possessed Dodo, as of an ominous echo out of her own past.

"You won't go back!" she cried, shuddering.

"Go back to that? To that loneliness, that starvation, that slavery, after knowing this?" she cried furiously, clenching her fist and starting back. Then she caught herself, looked away, and presently turned, calm, with a light of bitter mockery on her set face. "No! That is one thing I won't do!"

She dropped her fist, which had been pressed to her throat, with a short rough gesture of finality, and went directly to her door.

"Whether you come to forgive me or not," she said, "if I ever can help you, Dodo, save you from anything, come to me!"

And without waiting for an answer, she closed and locked the door.

For minute on minute Dodo remained as she had sprung up, her chin in her hand, her knuckles pressed tensely against the sharp contact of her teeth, thinking, hesitating, torn by conflicting impulses. Had Winona dramatized her story, as she herself had done a hundred times? Was it all true, or only half true? If it were true, then what had she sought with Peavey, if not to be his wife--what, then? Only Peavey could tell her, make her certain of the truth or falsity of this story. And yet, there were accents, cries of the soul, despair of the eyes, that were too poignantly felt to be counterfeited! Dodo tiptoed to the door, listening. From the other side came the regular tread of a pacing step, regular and nervous; but of weeping no sound! She remained still a moment, her hand pressed to her breast, irresistibly drawn to belief.

Had Winona opened the door at the moment, she would have caught her in her arms.

Then she remembered Lindaberry, staring into the horror of the night--into the long wakeful darkness; and she said to herself, as she departed hurriedly:

"To-morrow I will go to her. It can not be a lie!"

She found Lindaberry flushed with a sudden fever, that burned brightly on his worn cheeks and in the luminous brilliant eyes, which scarcely recognized her. Doctor Lampson was there. It was an attack of influenza, brought on by exposure and the drain on his vitality, which might be serious in his present condition.

She remained obstinately all night, sharing the watches with Clarice.

The fever, which flared up fiercely at first, subsided somewhat with the coming of the day, leaving him quiet, but in a dangerously weak condition. When again she had the opportunity to return to her room, she remembered Winona. The fear of what might happen to the wasted man at whose bedside she had watched, the cleansing of the spirit which the single thought of death had brought, had washed away all bitterness. She opened the door with longing, her arms ready. The room was empty, the bed untouched! In the center a trunk stood locked and corded. When she returned again in the afternoon, even the trunk had disappeared. Miss Pim, who arrived with professional, calculating eye, answered her outpouring of questions by a magnificent gesture of disdain.

"Said she was going to a house-party--for a week. That's what she _said_! H'm, I've got the trunk, if I haven't got two weeks' board! We shall see what we shall see! _I_ have my suspicions!"

CHAPTER XXV

During the days in which Lindaberry lay weak and shattered, slowly struggling back to strength and a new grip on things, some perverse spirit seemed to actuate Dodo in her att.i.tude toward Ma.s.singale. She had remained without seeing him for forty-eight hours after Christmas, refusing to make the advance when he had stayed away. Feeling a need of retaliation, she went to luncheon twice with Harrigan Blood in the short hours in which she absented herself from the sick-room. When finally, the third day, Ma.s.singale capitulated and came to see her, she treated him with the greatest indifference, inventing new stories, incredible, but galling to his pride.

"Why didn't you come?" he said, without preliminaries.

"I have other friends and other engagements!" she said, shrugging her shoulders. "Besides, I have resolved to make it easier for you."

"For me?"

"To be just a father confessor!" she said maliciously.

He had no answer that he could phrase, so he waited, staring at his boot in perplexity, aware of the lights that were dancing in her roguish eyes.