AT the head of the stairway Eris, carrying her suitcase and make-up box, encountered Flynn, the voluble door-keeper, coming upstairs.
“Miss Odell,” he began, half way up, “the same gentleman that tillyphoned you is downstairs askin’ for you with a taxi-cab. I wouldn’t leave him come up after what the Governor told me. ‘No, sir,’ says I, ‘ye can’t see Miss Odell. I have me orders,’ says I, ‘and I’m door watch here,’ says I, ‘and whin the Governor says to me, “Flynn, do this; Flynn, do that,” be gob it’s meself that does ut!’ Was I right, Miss Odell?”
“I couldn’t see any newspaper man now,” she assented, nervously.
“So I told Mr. Annan, Miss,” commented the door-keeper, relieving her of her baggage.
“Was it he who telephoned? I—I understood it was a Herald man——”
She continued on down the stairs, followed volubly by Flynn. Outside the barred gate she saw Annan standing beside a taxi-cab. Flynn opened the wicket. She went out.
“I didn’t know it was you,” she said. “They misinformed me. I’m so sorry.”
The girl looked white and tired. One shoulder of her frail summer gown was torn to the elbow and there were red bruises on the skin already turning darker.
“What is the matter?” he demanded bluntly, retaining the nervous hand she had offered and touching her torn sleeve with the other.
She noticed the damage, then, for the first time; the hot colour swept her face.
“An accident,” she murmured. “The place is impassable—a jungle of lumber and knocked-down sets.... Will you please drive me home, Barry?”
“Where is Mr. Smull?”
She lifted her gaze to the man beside her, then calmly turned to Flynn and bade him place her luggage in the taxi. Something in Annan’s eyes had alarmed her.
“Is Smull here?” he repeated.
She did not answer.
An instant vision of Smull’s heavy black pistol and a swift intuition that Smull was capable of using it on anybody except himself,—these thoughts paralysed her tongue.
She looked dumbly at Annan. The stillness of his drawn face terrified her.
“Barry, come with me——”
“Wait a moment,” he said, but she caught his hands desperately.
“Help me,” she whispered, “I need you. I tell you I need you——”
“I’m going to help you.”
“Barry! You will destroy me!”
She meant that he would destroy himself, but intuition shaped her speech.
“I want you to take me home,” she said.... “It is the first thing I ever asked of you. Will you do it?”
“Could you wait till I—speak—to Smull?”
“No. Take me now!”
He hesitated. She had clasped his arm. Her weight on it was heavy; her face had grown deadly pale. He looked at her closely; looked down at her torn sleeve.
“Is—is it anything that he did?” he demanded harshly.
She put out one hand blindly, reaching for the cab door; wrenched it open; sagged heavily on his arm. He almost lifted her into the vehicle; and she crumpled up in the corner, her eyes closing.
Annan spoke to the driver, cast a quick, grim look at the gate, then turned and jumped into the cab.
“Now,” he said, drawing her head to his shoulder, “we won’t talk until we get home. If you feel faint we can stop at a chemist’s. Lie quietly, dear.”
She lay against his shoulder, perfectly inert—so still that, at moments, he leaned over to see her face, fearing she had fainted.
Neither uttered a word. His thoughts had made glimmering slits of his eyes and had set the hard muscles working around his jaws.
But all the girl thought of was to get him away from that heavy black pistol and from the man whose neck had swollen red behind the ears.
For suddenly in that moment when she had seen that terrifying expression on Annan’s face, a new and vital truth had flashed clear as crystal in her brain. She saw it; saw through it; knew it for Truth.
With her, Truth was always final. It settled everything for her in whom no tiniest seed of self-deception ever had germinated.
And Eris knew now that whatever became of her career, this man beside her, who was her lover, was something more, too. He was a care. He was a responsibility. He was something to be defended; something to be guided.
For in that instant of fear in his behalf her whole being responded with passionate solicitude.
Now she was beginning to comprehend that this solicitude for him must always be hers while life endured; that the overwhelming instinct to defend, protect, guide the man who must always be a boy for her, dominated all else; and would always rule her every thought and motive; her every plan, every action.
She was beginning to understand that she must have her way with him as a mother with her son; that, to do so, she must contrive, scheme, prepare, foresee, and above all, love.
And, above everything, even love,—if truly in her life this man had become the passion paramount—she must be prepared to give. And supreme, even above love and above giving, she must give up!
She lay unstirring on his shoulder, her lids drooping, thinking, understanding, searching, accepting.
It had happened. It was true. Chiefest of all in life, and suddenly, and in the twinkling of an eye, had become the passionate necessity for the happiness and well-being of this man.
And she knew that she would give her life without a second’s hesitation to protect his. And she knew that in her heart, her mind, her soul, he came first. And all that even most remotely pertained to him. And then, only, came herself. Which was her career. The career, hardly begun, to which she had dedicated all the best in her of belief and effort. The career which, germinating, had filled her ardent heart of a child, which had budded in girlhood, and was in earliest blossom, now. The career for which she had so gratefully gone shabby, had starved, had slept under the stars in public parks.
Lying there on his breast she felt it slipping away—slipping through her slender fingers on his breast. And if, for an instant, her small fingers clutched at what was slipping through them, it was his coat she grasped. And held, tightly, knowing now what truly was her goal and what above all else she must hold her whole life through.
“Dear,” he said gently, “we are here. Do you feel strong enough to stand, or shall I carry you?”
If her smile were faintly wise it also was tenderly ironical. God knew—and had whispered to her—who it was between these two who would do the carrying; and who it would be who was carried by the stronger.
“Darling,” she murmured, “you’re so funny. I only needed a nap because I didn’t sleep last night.”
“Have you really been asleep, Eris?”
“Well, I had visions, anyhow. Please pay this frightfully expensive taxi and carry up my luggage, because Hattie has left and I’m going to cook our dinner.”
They climbed the bare and poorly lighted stairs. Eris fumbled for her keys, selected the right one, and opened the door. The whole place was sweet with the scent of flowers.
As always, the girl’s gratitude was out of all proportion for anything offered her; and now, in the living-room, she stood enchanted, gazing at the flowers, touching them here and there with finger tip and lip.
“Oh,” she murmured, “you are so sweet to me, Barry.... And you must have brought them and arranged them while I was out.” She turned, happily, and took both his hands. And saw the darkness of impending trouble in his clouded face.
“Darling?” she exclaimed.
“It’s nothing, Eris.... That miserable wench of yours lied about you.... I suppose I’d better tell you——”
“What did she say, dear?”
“That—I can’t!—and it was a damned lie——”
“Perhaps it wasn’t. Tell me.”
“I’m ashamed to.... She said a man was here—all night——”
“Oh,” she said disdainfully, “that was my husband. He pretended to be ill and starving and I let him in. When he got inside he tried to bully me. So I locked my door; and in the morning I turned him out.”
In the girl’s healthy and flushed contempt, making of a sinister situation only a squalid commonplace, the boy’s formless fears—all the tragic perplexity faded, burned out in a wholesome rage.
But into her grey eyes came the swift shadow of anxiety again and she took hold of him, impulsively, by both elbows.
“What am I going to do with you!” she cried in tender exasperation. “Will you smooth out that scowl and mind your business, darling? I can manage my own affairs. I’ve never been afraid of anything—except to-day. My only fear in the world is that you’ll get into mischief——”
“Well, do you think I’m going to sit still and let——”
“Will you mind your adorable business, Barry? You worry me. You’re on my mind. I’ve got to marry you as soon as I can I realise that——”
He caught her in his clasp, fiercely.
“You will!”
“I’ve got to——”
“You promise?”
“Good heavens, yes!” she looked up at him, laughing.
Suddenly her eyes filled. She tore his arms away and took him to her breast in a fiercer, closer clasp. Then the long tension broke with her cry:
“Barry—Barry,” she breathed brokenly, “you belong to me—you’re my boy! You’re all I ever owned in all my life that really belonged to me.... I—I had a—a heifer”—she was laughing hysterically—“but I had to sell her—and they kept the money....”
She clung to him, strained him to her in an abandon of long-pent need, incoherent between convulsive tears and the sobbing laughter that shook her slender body:
“You want me, you need me, don’t you, Barry? You’re lonely. No boy ever should be lonely. It is the wickedest thing in the world—that any child should ever be lonely for need of love.... You are a child! Mine! You’re all I care about.... And I’m going to marry you because you want me to—because we both want to—Barry, my darling—my boy who belongs to me——”