Infatuation
little remained of the night. There was sawdust on the floor,
spittoons, scraps of sausage-rind; the air stank stalely of beer and
spirits; the single gas-jet, turned very low, flickered over the nude
women that decorated the mean, fly-blown walls, and flickered, too, over
a man, half-slumbering in a chair, who, but glimmeringly to himself, had
taken the turning road of his life.
*CHAPTER XVII*
The sensation of most runaway couples, after filling up a blank form,
and having a marriage service gabbled over them by a shabby stranger in
a frock-coat, is one of unmixed astonishment at the facility of the
whole proceeding. A dog-license is no harder to obtain, and the
formalities attending vaccination are even greater.
Phyllis emerged from the Reverend Josiah Lyell's with a ring on her
finger, and a cardboard certificate on which the Almighty, angels, and
forked lightning were depicted above her name and Adair's. The first
discussion of their married life was what to do with this monstrosity.
Phyllis was for tearing it up, but Adair, superstitiously afraid of bad
luck, insisted stoutly on its being retained.
"I'll hide it at the bottom of my trunk," he said.
They returned to the carriage, which was awaiting them as composedly as
though nothing in particular had happened in the ten-minute interval.
Adair wished to take a drive before going back to the hotel, thinking
that the air and repose would be soothing for their nerves,--but to his
surprise Phyllis demurred.
"I've been married your way," she said, "now you must come and be
married mine."
"Yours, Phyllis?"
"Yes, tell him to drive to a Catholic church."
He gave the order good-humoredly. "Aren't you satisfied?" he asked.
"Do you want more angels and forked lightning?"
"You see, I've always been a sort of Catholic," she explained. "Not a
good Catholic, but a poor little straggler, galloping on half a mile
behind, like a baby sheep that's got left. I've never liked the
confession part of it, but really, Cyril, there's a sort of whiff of
Heaven about a Catholic church that I need occasionally. It's just as
though you were awfully hungry, and went in to smell a beautiful dinner
a long way off!"
"All right, Phyllis, if we are going to get married we might as well do
it thoroughly," assented Adair. "If you think that beautiful dinner
will help us any, let's go and smell it by all means."
As kind fate would have it, it was rather an attractive church, and
better still it was altogether deserted. The autumn sunshine was
streaming through stained-glass windows; a faint perfume of incense
lingered in the air; the peace and solitude gave an added dignity to the
altar, with its suffering pale Christ, its tall candles, its effulgent
brasses gleaming in the rosy light. Phyllis made Adair kneel at her
side, and holding his hand tightly in hers, prayed silently with
downcast eyes, and the least quiver of a smile at the corner of her
lips.
On their way out they stopped at the font. She crossed herself, touched
her fingers to the water, and scattered some drops on Adair's face.
"That's that you will always love me," she said, with captivating
solemnity, "that's that you will always be true to me; and that's
that--I may die first!"
Adair dabbled his own hand in the holy water, as though the act had a
religious significance, "Oh, God," he said, looking up in all
seriousness, "if there is a God--take care of this sweet wife of mine,
and guard her from every harm; and if there isn't, I swear by this I am
going to do it myself just as well as I know how!"
They kissed each other, and were about to go, when Phyllis noticed the
poor-box. She slipped off her best ring, a little diamond such as girls
are permitted to wear, and unhesitatingly dropped it in. Adair, caught
by the picturesqueness of the offering, would have sacrificed his
horseshoe pin had he not been prevented.
"No, that's too pretty," she cried jealously. "Haven't you something you
don't like that God _would_?"
A little rummaging discovered a gold pencil-case which seemed to fulfill
this demand--at least on Adair's side--and it forthwith followed the
ring. Then they sought the open air.
"Now, at last I feel really married," said Phyllis gaily, as they
climbed back into the carriage. "What a strange, dizzy, _safe_ sort of
feeling it gives one. And just think I could hug you right now before
the driver, and that old lady with the basket, and that little boy
blowing his baby brother's nose--and nobody could say Boo!"
She alarmed Adair by pretending to carry the hugging into effect until
he tried to push her away, and told her to behave. She replied with a
delighted, bubbling outcry over her new freedom: "Oh, but I'm married
now, and can do just what I like, and can have breakfast in bed with you
every morning, and put my shoes out with yours to be blacked, and I'm
Mrs. Adair, and have a wedding-ring, and a certificate with forked
lightning on it!" She exultantly popped up her feet on the seat in
front, showing a shocking amount of black silk stocking with a bravado
that made him grab at her skirt to pull it down; and in the ensuing romp
there was more silk stocking still, and so much happy laughter on her
part, and scandalized protestation on his that the driver turned round,
and they were all but disgraced.
The narrowness of the escape sobered her, and for the rest of the drive
she was demureness itself. What a joy it was to recline with half-shut
eyes, and let the air fan away all the troubled memories of the night
before! Mind and body craved repose, and mind and body found it in the
cradle-like movement of the carriage. Adair was very tired, too, and
willing enough to share his pretty companion's mood. Deliciously
conscious of each other, though more asleep than awake, they abandoned
themselves to the fresh bright morning, and breathed in deep drafts of
contentment.
On their return to the hotel, the carriage stopped and Tommy Merguelis
jumped up on the step. His perennial grin, and withered, foolish face
was not unclouded by a certain anxiety. He dropped a bunch of roses
into Phyllis' lap, with an awkward compliment which got as far as she
was a rose herself, and then ended midway with a terrified giggle.
"I'm awful sorry," he said, addressing Adair, "but you're wanted at the
theater, Mr. Adair, and I've been chasing around after you for the last
half-hour. They want you to rehearse right off with Miss Clarke, and
coach her a bit in the business."
"Why, what's the matter with De Vere?" asked Adair, surprised.
A slight glaze seemed to spread itself over the grin.
"She won't be in the bill for a day or two," said Tommy. "She's been
suddenly taken awful bad." He paused, seeking a decorous name for the
attack in question, and finally veiled it in the obscurity of a foreign
language: "A crisis de nerves," he added.
"Oh, tantrums?" said Adair in a plainer tongue. "What a confounded
nuisance!"
"She kept yelling and yelling until we got the doctor," went on Tommy;
"and then on top of that Miss Clarke had to get into a hair-pulling
match with Miss Larkins--and so I think you had better hurry, Mr. Adair,
if there's to be anything doing to-night."
"Great Lord, I think so, too!" cried the latter, to whom, like all
stars, the evening performance was next to a religion. "You go on to
the hotel," he went on, turning to Phyllis, "and make yourself as
comfortable as you can." The vexation in his voice was even a better
apology than the one in words. "I'm damned sorry," he said. "It's the
most infernal shame. Forgive me, Phyllis, please do, and try not to
mind."
Thus it was that she drove to the hotel alone, while Adair and Tommy
strode off to quiet the tempest in the theater, and start a tedious and
prolonged rehearsal with Miss de Vere's understudy.
Phyllis went to her room, and found one alleviation of its loneliness in
examining that mysterious object, her wedding-ring. It was so strange,
so unfamiliar, so charged with significance and finality. Just a
trifling hoop of gold, and yet with what myriad meanings. Probably in
days gone by, when of brass or iron it was riveted on the neck, little
brides mirrored themselves in pools with a similar awe at their altered
state, and a similar questioning of the unknown future.
For better or worse, for good or evil, her life was linked to Adair's
beyond all recalling, and the emblem of their compact glittered on the
hand she gazed at so long and earnestly.
But you can not hypnotize yourself for ever with a wedding-ring--even
one not two hours old. There was another matter that called more
insistently for her attention. Cyril had promised her two hundred and
fifty dollars for her clothes, and it behooved her to get pen and ink,
and begin making her calculations. This she did with much erasing, much
crinkling of girlish brows--with a profound, wise-baby expression as
though all the world were at stake. There was a delicious immodesty in
spending Adair's money for such laced and ribboned
femininities--nightgowns, stockings, chemises, and what she wrote down
ambiguously as "those things," and colored as she wrote it. How
thrilling it was, and how exquisitely shocking! Oh, dear, what nice
ones they would have to be,--twenty-five dollars gone for six in the
twinkling of an eye, for surely economy here would be a crime, men being
notoriously fond of--
"Mrs. Adair?"
Her new name was so unfamiliar that she hesitated before answering:
"Come in."
"A gentleman to see you, Mrs. Adair."
The door opened, and there on the threshold stood her father! His face
was white, his eyes morose and sunken, his whole air so formidable that
in the first shock of recognition Phyllis could do no more than stare at
him in terror.
"May I enter?" he asked, in that deeper intonation of his which he never
used except under some special stress. As he spoke he looked about
sharply, and with a bristling hostility as though expecting to discover
a second occupant of the room.
"Mr. Adair isn't here," she said, answering the silent question. "I am
all alone, Papa."
She would have kissed him, but he brushed past her to a chair, and
seated himself heavily, laying his silk hat and his gloves on the floor
beside him. Thus stalwartly in possession of the chamber, he appeared
more formidable than ever, and the deliberate gaze he bent on Phyllis
was masterful and menacing.
"So you've gone and thrown away your life," he said at last. "Forgive
me, my dear, if I am not able to congratulate you upon it."
"I married Mr. Adair this morning, if that's what you mean." She hardly
knew how to say more without adding to her offense. Her father was
bound to put her in the wrong whatever reply she made. A terrible
hopelessness weighed her down, and crushed the unspoken appeal on her
lips.
"Thrown away like that," he repeated, with a gesture. "You, who had
everything; you, with beauty, position, money, brains--my God, the folly
of it--the cruel, wicked, heartless folly of it!"
"Don't, Papa!" she pleaded. "It's done, and so what's the good of
wounding me now?"
"Done!" he cried out bitterly. "That depends on what you mean by the
word. I will call it done in six months when you will leave him for
good, and he will name his price for a divorce. That's the way
adventurers marry money nowadays. They enjoy the girl till they are
tired of her, and then sell!"
Phyllis struggled to keep her composure under the affront. "You are
very unjust," she returned in a low voice that trembled in spite of
herself. "You are determined to think the worst of him, and make it