Waltz Into Darkness (27 page)

"If
he would only have accepted the bribe, I had in mind some desperate
excuse to you--that my purse had been snatched in a crowd, that I'd
dropped the money in the street, after drawing it from the bank; that
my 'sister' had suddenly fallen ill and was without means, and I'd
sent it to her in St. Louis--oh, anything, anything at all, no matter
how thin, how paltry, so long as it was less discreditable than the
reality. Yes, I would have risked your displeasure, your disapproval,
even worse than that, your very real suspicion, if only I was allowed
to keep you for myself as I wanted to, to go on with you."

To
go on with you. He could remember the warmth of her kisses now, the
unbridled gaiety of her smiles. What actress could have played such a
part, morning, noon, and night? Even actresses play but an hour or
two of an evening, have a respite the rest of the time. It must have
been sincere reality. He could remember the look in her eyes when he
took leave of her that last day; a sort of lingering, reluctant
melancholy. (But had it been there then, or was he putting it in
now?)

"That
wouldn't satisfy him, wouldn't do. He wanted all of it, not part.
And, I suppose, there was truly no solution. No matter how large a
sum I would have given him, he would still have thought I was keeping
far more than that myself. He trusted no one--I heard it said of him,
in a quarrel once--not even himself.

"Taking
me at my word, that I loved you, he discovered he had a more powerful
threat to hold over me now. And no sooner had he discovered it, than
he brought it into play. That he would reveal my imposture to you
himself, anonymously, in a letter, if I refused to carry out our
deal. He wouldn't have his money, maybe, but neither should I have
what I wanted. We'd both be fugitives alike, and back where we
started from. 'And if you intercept my letter,' he warned, 'that
won't help you any. I'll go to him myself and make the accusation to
his face. Let him know you're not only not who you claimed, but were
my sweetheart all those years to boot.' Which wasn't true," she
added rather rapidly in an aside. "'We'll see how long he'll
keep you with him then.'

"And
as I left him that day," she went on. "I knew it was no
use, no matter what I did. I knew I was surely going to lose you, one
way or another.

"I
passed a sleepless night. The letter came, all right. I'd known it
would. He was as good as his word, in all things like that; and only
in things like that. I seized it. I was waiting there by the door
when the post came. I tore it open and read it. I can still remember
how it went. 'The woman you have there in your house with you is not
the woman you take her to be, but someone of another name, and
another man's sweetheart as well. I am that man, and so I know what I
am saying Keep a close watch upon your money, Mr. Durand. If you
disbelieve me, watch her face closely when you say to her without
warning, "Bonny, come here to me," and see how it pales.'
And it was signed, 'A friend.'

"I
destroyed it, but I knew the postponement I'd gained was only for a
day or two. He'd send another. Or he'd come himself. Or he'd take me
unaware sometime when I was out alone, and I'd be found lying there
with a knife-hilt in my side. I knew him well; he never forgave
anyone who crossed him." She tried to smile, and failed in the
attempt. "My doll house had come tumbling down all about my
ears.

"So
I made my decision, and I fled."

"To
him."

"No,"
she said dully, almost as if this detail were a matter of
indifference, now, this long after. "I took the money, yes. But
I fled from him just as surely as I deserted you. That small
satisfaction was all I had out of it: he hadn't gained his way. The
rest was ashes. All my happiness lay behind me. I remember thinking
at the time, we formed a triangle, we three, a strange one. You were
love, and he was death--and I was the mid-point between the two.

"I
fled as far away as I could. I took the northbound boat and kept from
sight until it had left New Orleans an hour behind. I went to Memphis
first, and then to Louisville, and at last to Cincinnati, and stayed
there hidden for some time. I was in fear for my life for a while. I
knew he would have surely killed me had he found me. And then one
day, in Cincy, I heard a report from someone who had once known us
both slightly when we were together, that he had lost his life in a
shooting affray in a gaming house in Cairo. So the danger was past.
But it was too late by that time to undo what had been done. I
couldn't return to you any more."

And
the look she gave him was of a poignancy that would have melted
stone.

"I
made my way back South again, now that it was safe to do so, and only
a few weeks ago met this Colonel Worth, and now I'm as you find me.
And that's my story, Lou."

She
waited, and the silence, now that she was through speaking, seemed to
prolong itself into eternity.

He
was looking at her steadfastly, but uttered not a word. But behind
that calm, reflective, judicious front he maintained so stoically,
there was an unguessed turmoil, raging, a chaos, of credulity and
disbelief, accusation and refutation, pro and con, to and fro, and
around and around and around like a whirlpool.

She
took your money, nonetheless; why, if she "loved" you so?
She was about to face the world alone for years to come, she knew
only too well how hard it is for a woman alone to get along in the
world, she'd had that lesson from before. Can you blame her?

How
do you know she didn't cheat the two of you alike; that what it was,
was nothing more than what he accused her of, of running off and
keeping the entire booty for herself, without dividing it with him? A
double betrayal, instead of a single.

At
least she is innocent of Julia's death, you heard that. How do you
know even that? The living, the survivor, is here to tell her side of
the tale to you, but the dead, the victim, is not here to tell you
hers. It might be a different story.

You.
loved her then, you do not question yourself on that. Why then do you
doubt her when she says she loved you then? Is she not as capable of
love as you? And who are you to say who is to feel love, and who is
not? Love is like a magnet, that attracts its like. She must have
loved you, for your love to be drawn to her. Just as you must have
loved her--and you know you did--for her love to be drawn to you.
Without one love, there cannot be another. There must be love on both
sides, for the current to complete itself.

"Aren't
you going to say something to me, Lou?"

"What
is there to say?"

"I
can't tell you that. It must come from you."

"Must
it?" he said drily. "And if there is nothing there to give
you, no answer

"Nothing,
Lou ?" Her voice took on a singsong timbre. "Nothing?"
It became a lulling incantation. "Not even a word?" Her
face rose subtly nearer to his. "Not even--this much?" He
had seen pictures, once, somewhere, of India, of cobras rising from
their huddles to the charmer's tune. And like one of those, so
sleekly, so unguessably, she had crept upward upon him before he knew
it; but this was the serpent charming the master, not the master the
serpent. "Not even--this ?"

Suddenly
he was caught fast, entwined with her as with some treacherous tropic
plant. Lips of fire were fused with his. He seemed to breathe flame,
draw it down his windpipe into his breast, where the dry tinder of
his loneliness, of his long lack of her, was kindled by it into
raging flame, that pyred upward, sending back her kiss with insane
fury.

He
struggled to his feet, and she rose with him, they were so
interlocked. He flung her off with all the violence he would have
used against another man in full-bodied combat; it was needed,
nothing less would have torn her off.

She
staggered, toppled, fell down prone, one arm alone, thrust out behind
her, keeping one shoulder and her head upward a little from the
floor.

And
lying there, all rumpled and abased, yet somehow she had on her face
the glint of victory, on her lips a secretive smile of triumph. As
though she knew who had won the contest, who had lost. She lolled
there at her ease, too sure of herself even to take the trouble to
rise. It was he who wallowed, from chair back to chair back,
stifling, blinded, like something maimed; his ears pounding to his
own blood, clawing at his collar, as if the ghosts of her arms were
still there, strangling him.

He
stood over her at last, clenched hand upraised above his head, as if
in threat to strike her down a second time should she try to rise.
"Get yourself ready!" he roared at her. "Get your
things! Not that nor anything else will change it! I'm taking you
back to New Orleans!"

She
sidled away from him a little along the floor, as if to put herself
beyond his reach, though her smirk denied her fear; then gathered
herself together, rose with an innate grace that nothing could take
from her, not even such violent downfall.

She
seemed humbled, docile to his bidding, seemed resigned; all but that
knowing smile, that gave it the lie. She made no further importunity.
She swept back her hair, a lock of which had tumbled forward with her
fall. Her shoulders hinted at a shrug. Her hands gave an empty slap
at her sides, recoiled again, as if in fatalistic acceptance.

He
turned his back on her abruptly, as he saw her hands go to the
fastenings at the side of her waist, already partly sundered.

"I'll
wait out here in this little entryway," he said tautly, and
strode for it.

"Do
so," she agreed ironically. "It is some time now that we
have been apart."

He
sat down on a little backless wall-bench that lined the place, just
within the outer apartment door.

She
came slowly over after him and slowly swung the second door around,
the one between them, leaving it just short of closure.

"My
windows are on the second floor," she reassured him, still with
that overtone of irony. "And there is no ladder outside them. I
am not likely to try to escape."

He
bowed his head suddenly, as sharply as if his neck had fractured, and
pressed his two clenched hands tight against his forehead, through
the center of which a vein stood out like whipcord, pulsing and
throbbing with a congestion of love battling hate and hate battling
love, that he alone could have told was going on, so still he
crouched.

So
they remained, on opposite sides of a door that was not closed. The
victor and the vanquished. But on which side was which?

A
drawer ticked open, scraped closed again, behind the door. A whiff of
fresh essence drifted out and found him, as if skimmed off the top of
a field of the first flowers of spring. The light peering through
from the other side dimmed somewhat, as if one or more of its
contributing agents had been eliminated.

Suddenly
he turned his head, finding the door had already been standing open a
second or two before his discovery of it. She was standing there in
the inviting new breadth of its opening, one arm to door, one arm to
frame. The foaming laces that cascaded down her were transparent as
haze against the light bearing directly on her from the room at her
back. Her silhouette was that of a biped.

Her
eyes were dreamy-lidded, her half-smile a recaptured memory of
forgotten things.

"Come
in, Lou," she murmured indulgently, as if to a stubborn little
boy who has put himself beyond the pale. "Put out the light
there by you and come into your wife's room."

39

A
sound at the door awoke Durand. It was a delicate sort of tapping, a
coaxing pit-pat, as if with one fingernail.

As
his eyes opened he found himself in a room he had difficulty
recalling from the night before. The cooling silvery-green of
lowburning night lights was no longer there. Ladders of fuming Gulf
Coast sunlight came slanting through the slits of the blinds, and
formed a pattern of stripes across the bed and across the floor. And
above this, there was a reflected brightness, as if everything had
been newly whitewashed; a gleaming transparency.

It
was simply that it was day in a place that he had last seen when it
was night.

He
thought he was alone at first. He backed a hand to his drugged eyes,
to keep out some of the overacute brilliancy. "Where am I?"

Then
he saw her. Her cloverleaf mouth smiled back at him, indirectly, via
the surface of the mirror she sat before. Her hand sought her bosom,
and she let it linger there a moment, one finger pointing upward, one
inward as if toward her heart. "With me," she answered.
"Where you belong."