ON the day after Tom was shot, Herbert was waiting in the reception room of the hospital. His hat, stick and gloves lay on the table, and all about him was the odor of all hospitals, of disinfectants and drugs and floor wax, and above all the faint and penetrating sweetness of ether.
Save that he was very pale, he looked much as usual. His tie was carefully tied, his spats and shoes immaculate. Now and then he heard a light footfall in the hall outside and he glanced up. But mostly he just sat, his hands between his knees, and stared at the floor.
When the footsteps passed by he sank back again into a coma of misery. He was too tired to think or to plan any campaign. And after all, what was there to plan? The thing was done.
He had not slept at all. None of them had slept for that matter. At two o'clock in the morning he had drafted that brief announcement to the newspapers:
"Mr. and Mrs. Henry Dowling announce the indefinite postponement of the marriage of their daughter, Miss Katherine Dowling, to Mr. Herbert Forrest."
"Henry had taken the memorandum upstairs for approval, and had come down heavily after a half hour or so.
"It's all right," he said, and with it in his hand had crossed to the window and stood looking out into the night. "Her mother's taking it badly," he said without turning. "She is in a strange frame of mind. Seems to blame herself for it, although God knows"
Herbert pulled himself together.
"If any one is to blame, I am. I knew she cared for him."
"Cared for him! Cared for a fellow who can hardly write his own name?"
Herbert said nothing. The charge was absurd and they both knew it, but it did in a way set forth the hopelessness of the situation as they saw it.
It was after that that Henry announced his future course. So long as Kay remained married to the scoundrel she could not enter his house. He had done his best. He had nothing to reproach himself with. She'd soon get her fill of romance and come crawling home.
"Thank God there will be ways to get rid of the fellow," he said. "But if he thinks he has married into a soft thing he can think again."
But there was something pathetic about Henry, too. Bessie, sitting watching on a sofa, was rather sorry for him. He had been so sure of himself, of his well-organized life, his standing in the community. He had said "thumbs up" or "thumbs down," and all the thumbs in his vicinity had obeyed.
"It's a little soon to think of that," she said, lighting a fresh cigarette. She had smoked steadily all evening. "And it might be worse, you know. They're married, anyhow. What are you really thinking about? What people will say? Well, let them talk, and be damned to them. This is a fifty-fifty proposition. Either Kay will be happy, and I imagine that's what we all want, or she won't, and in that case she can go to Paris and get rid of him. For my part" she hesitated.
"Well, get on with it," said Henry impatiently.
"For my part, I think she would rather be miserable with him than to—well, to be happy with anybody else."
She had meant to say, "to vegetate," but a glance at Herbert had deterred her. She found herself rather admiring Herbert that night. Thank God for good breeding. It was at least a crutch to fall back on, when everything else failed.
"You talk like a fool," said Henry. "Nobody chooses to be miserable."
But she only eyed him. How little he knew about life, really, and especially women. Nobody in love was ever happy. Love was a pain. When it ceased to be a pain it was not love. Contentment, resignation, call it what you liked, but not love. But she took refuge in flippancy.
"It's like the war," she told them. "Why worry? If you're dead, you're dead and won't know about it. If you're not dead—or however the thing goes. We ought to send her some clothes," she added practically.
Some time after midnight Henry went up to bed. Bessie could follow his thoughts as he went, his heavy shoulders bent, the yellow corner of Kay's telegram sticking out of the pocket of his dinner jacket. He had been a good husband and father; he had been upright in business according to his lights, and he had asked very little of life in his declining years; peace and a few friends, the love of his family and the respect of his community. Now they were all gone. Wiped out. She heard him stop at the room where the wedding gifts like small glittering corpses of dead hopes were laid out on their biers, close the door and go on.
Something of all this was running through Herbert's mind as he waited in the anteroom of the hospital, but only as a background to other and bitterer thoughts. If they centered gn himself rather than on Kay, perhaps it was only natural. He had loved her sincerely. There had never been anyone else. He had built all his future about her. He had not even played around like other fellows; not since college anyhow. Now she had destroyed everything. Not everything exactly; he was precise even with himself. Henry had said that the business proposition still stood. But she had hurt him and made him a laughing-stock; she had jilted him at the last moment, an injury and an insult whose stigma would follow him always. He ought to hate her. But he could not hate her. If he did, why was he here? If he could hate her it would be easier.
His thoughts wandered on, to the receipt of Kay's second telegram that morning, that Tom McNair had been shot; to the long journey, sitting in a chair in a parlor car and watching a landscape fly by which had made no impression on his mental retina. Only one thing had registered, and that with a shock he could still feel and suffer from. By a sidetrack just outside of town his train had slowed up, and there beside him, close to him, was the long line of yellow show cars.
In one of those cars, their small windows partly occluded with clothing, their sills littered with jars and bottles, Kay must have spent her wedding night. To his sense of injury was added this insult to his fastidiousness. When she finally came in he was almost startled to find her unchanged, save for her pallor and the deep circles under her eyes.
Neither of them spoke at once, but Herbert was quick to realize that what was a critical meeting for him was to her merely an unimportant incident in a tragic day. There was a curious blankness in her eyes; it struck him later that she had looked at him much as he had looked at the flying landscape that day. And because that first silence and absorption of hers was too painful, he hurried to speak.
"How is he now?"
"Better, they think. But he is suffering; they say" She put her handkerchief to her lips to steady them. "They say he will live, but he won't be able to ride again. His leg is badly broken. He doesn't know that, of course."
"Still, if he is going to live"
"Yes, of course." She came further into the room, and seemed really to see him for the first time.
"I'm sorry, Herbert. Sorry I've hurt you all. I suppose you don't believe that."
"I believe it," he said carefully, "but that doesn't matter now, does it? The point is, are you sorry for yourself, Kay?"
She shook her head.
"It was not just an impulse, then?"
"Yes, at the last. But it had to be, Herbert. It was stronger than I was. I even think"
"Yes?"
"I don't want to hurt you again."
"I haven't many rights, but I have a right to the truth about this."
"I even think that if we had been married, you and I, and Tom had asked me to go with him, I would have gone just the same."
That shocked him profoundly. It stripped the situation of all the careful disguises he had erected, and reduced it to primitive facts. And this ruthless destruction of his last illusion left him angry and humiliated.
"You don't know what you are saying."
"I didn't want to say it, but it's true."
"Then I wish you would tell me something," he said. "It doesn't pay, where a girl's concerned, to be decent and honest, does it? A man can go along doing his best, and then some handsome good-for-nothing can come along and steal all he has worked to earn; can rob his house and wreck his life! What's the use of it?"
"I don't know," she said helplessly. "I suppose the world couldn't go on without men like you—and father. I've tried to think it out. I don't know, but—of course it pays to be decent."
"It hasn't paid me."
She did not answer that. She made a quick impatient movement.
"Why, when a man comes along who is different, should you immediately say that he is an outsider and must be yellow? Tom's ways may not be your ways, but he is a man, no matter what you may think. Oh, I know what you think," as he made a gesture. "I know, because you and I have been trained in the same school. How a thing is done is more important than the thing itself, I daresay I shall have to fight that all my life. But I am going to fight it. Don't make any mistake about that."
But there was a vein of obstinacy in Herbert.
"The way a thing is done counts too; the small amenities of life are what makes it possible, for our kind anyhow," he said doggedly. "Don't sneer at them, Kay. You're in love now; maybe you think you won't miss all that, but you will. And when that time comes"
"I can come back, I suppose, and be forgiven!"
"You can come back to me," he told her, going pale.
"Good God, Kay," he added. "You have dragged me in the dirt, and still I can say that to you! Some day you will know how much that means. I have my pride, although you may not think so, but I suppose there is such a thing as caring too much to remember pride."
That almost broke down her composure. Since Tom's injury she had neither slept nor eaten, she had hardly dared to think. Her lips trembled.
"I appreciate that more than you can know," she told him. "But I am not a child. I have done this with my eyes open, and I must work it out for myself."
The interview was less painful after that. Her family had taken it badly, and it would be better not to try to see them for a time; her father was bitterly disappointed just now. She only nodded to that. She had no hope of forgiveness, but she said nothing. It was only when Herbert went into his wallet, where his bills were always neatly disposed after the manner of a man who values money, that she flushed and made a gesture of refusal.
"It is not from me," he said. "Mrs. Osborne gave me a check for you, for a thousand dollars. I think she will be hurt if you refuse it."
And after a time she took it, this new Kay who hereafter must think about money, even value it, like Herbert. She stood folding and refolding it in her hands. Tom would not like it, she knew, but then she need not tell Tom. And later on she could draw on it, to ease their way somewhat, to give him time to readjust.
Perhaps if Herbert had gone then, having made his magnanimous gesture, things would have been better between them. But her very acceptance of the check, the thought that she might even then be in need of money, roused his slumbering anger. He picked up his hat and gloves, and stood looking down at her.
"I passed that circus train as I came into town. You can guess how I felt; you among all that rabble, the subject of God knows what cheap talk, spending your wedding night among them! You!"
She flushed painfully.
"I suppose you are entitled to say that, Herbert. But it is not true. I came in the train, but by myself."
"Do you mean that your marriage has not been consummated?" he asked brutally. "Are you trying to tell me that you"
"Exactly that," she said coldly. "And now perhaps you will go away. I am grateful to you. I know what it cost you to come. I am sorry I have hurt you so. But what I have told you does not change things; nothing you can say will change anything."
But he made a desperate effort nevertheless. There could be a divorce, or the marriage could be annulled; that was done all the time. How was McNair to support her, if he could no longer ride? Take a cowboy off a horse and what was he? A field hand! She had married him out of some sort of romantic idea of him, but where was the romance now? And leave that out, if she liked. How would it work out, with her eternally trying to make him like the men she knew, and Tom dragging her down to the level of his own small-town girls.
"Like that Clare whatever her name was," he said contemptuously. "That's the sort he cares about and understands. Either he'll make you like her, or he'll go back to his own kind. Don't forget that. He's had a bad name about women, and that sticks to a man. You'll hold him for a while and then"
"That will be my affair, and his," she said, stony-faced. And turned and went out of the room.