The Destroying Angel

"Oh, yes, yes!" she agreed passionately.

"And you have youth, health, years of life before you!"

He sighed inaudibly…

"You wouldn't say that, if you understood."

"There are worse things to put up with than youth and health and the right to live."

"But – how can I live? What am I to do?"

"Have you thought of going home?"

"It isn't possible."

"Have you made sure of that? Have you written to your father – explained?"

"I sent him a special delivery three days ago, and – and yesterday a telegram. I knew it wouldn't do any good, but I … I told him everything. He didn't answer. He won't, ever."

From what Whitaker knew of Thurlow Ladislas, he felt this to be too cruelly true to admit of further argument. At a loss, he fell silent, knitting his hands together as he strove to find other words wherewith to comfort and reassure the girl.

She bent forward, elbows on knees, head and shoulders cringing.

"It hurts so!" she wailed … "what people will think … the shame, the bitter, bitter shame of this! And yet I haven't any right to complain. I deserve it all; I've earned my punishment."

"Oh, I say – !"

"But I have, because – because I didn't love him. I didn't love him at all, and I knew it, even though I meant to marry him…"

"But, why – in Heaven's name?"

"Because I was so lonely and … misunderstood and unhappy at home. You don't know how desperately unhappy… No mother, never daring to see my sister (she ran away, too) … my friendships at school discouraged … nothing in life but a great, empty, lonesome house and my father to bully me and make cruel fun of me because I'm not pretty… That's why I ran away with a man I didn't love – because I wanted freedom and a little happiness."

"Good Lord!" he murmured beneath his breath, awed by the pitiful, childish simplicity of her confession and the deep damnation that had waited upon her.

"So it's over!" she cried – "over, and I've learned my lesson, and I'm disgraced forever, and friendless and – "

"Stop right there!" he checked her roughly. "You're not friendless yet, and that nullifies all the rest. Be glad you've had your romance and learned your lesson – "

"Please don't think I'm not grateful for your kindness," she interrupted. "But the disgrace – that can't be blotted out!"

"Oh, yes, it can," he insisted bluntly. "There's a way I know – "

A glimmering of that way had only that instant let a little light in upon the darkness of his solicitous distress for her. He rose and began to walk and think, hands clasped behind him, trying to make what he had in mind seem right and reasonable.

"You mean beg my father to take me back. I'll die first!"

"There mustn't be any more talk, or even any thought, of anything like that. I understand too well to ask the impossible of you. But there is one way out – a perfectly right way – if you're willing and brave enough to take a chance – a long chance."

Somehow she seemed to gain hope of his tone. She sat up, following him with eyes that sought incredulously to believe.

"Have I any choice?" she asked. "I'm desperate enough…"

"God knows," he said, "you'll have to be!"

"Try me."

He paused, standing over her.

"Desperate enough to marry a man who's bound to die within six months and leave you free? I'm that man: the doctors give me six months more of life. I'm alone in the world, with no one dependent upon me, nothing to look forward to but a death that will benefit nobody – a useless end to a useless life… Will you take my name to free yourself? Heaven my witness, you're welcome to it."

"Oh," she breathed, aghast, "what are you saying?"

"I'm proposing marriage," he said, with his quaint, one-sided smile. "Please listen: I came to this place to make a quick end to my troubles – but I've changed my mind about that, now. What's happened in this room has made me see that nobody has any right to – hasten things. But I mean to leave the country – immediately – and let death find me where it will. I shall leave behind me a name and a little money, neither of any conceivable use to me. Will you take them, employ them to make your life what it was meant to be? It's a little thing, but it will make me feel a lot more fit to go out of this world – to know I've left at least one decent act to mark my memory. There's only this far-fetched chance – I may live. It's a million-to-one shot, but you've got to bear it in mind. But really you can't lose – "

"Oh, stop, stop!" she implored him, half hysterical. "To think of marrying to benefit by the death of a man like you – !"

"You've no right to look at it that way." He had a wry, secret smile for his specious sophistry. "You're being asked to confer, not to accept, a favour. It's just an act of kindness to a hopeless man. I'd go mad if I didn't know you were safe from a recurrence of the folly of this afternoon."

"Don't!" she cried – "don't tempt me. You've no right… You don't know how frantic I am…"

"I do," he countered frankly. "I'm depending on just that to swing you to my point of view. You've got to come to it. I mean you shall marry me."

She stared up at him, spell-bound, insensibly yielding to the domination of his will. It was inevitable. He was scarcely less desperate than she – and no less overwrought and unstrung; and he was the stronger; in the natural course of things his will could not but prevail. She was little more than a child, accustomed to yield and go where others led or pointed out the path. What resistance could she offer to the domineering importunity of a man of full stature, arrogant in his strength and – hounded by devils? And he in the fatuity of his soul believed that he was right, that he was fighting for the girl's best interests, fighting – and not ungenerously – to save her from the ravening consequences of her indiscretion!

The bald truth is, he was hardly a responsible agent: distracted by the ravings of an ego mutinous in the shadow of annihilation, as well as by contemplation of the girl's wretched plight, he saw all things in distorted perspective. He had his being in a nightmare world of frightful, insane realities. He could have conceived of nothing too terrible and preposterous to seem reasonable and right…

The last trace of evening light had faded out of the world before they were agreed. Darkness wrapped them in its folds; they were but as voices warring in a black and boundless void.

Whitaker struck a match and applied it to the solitary gas-jet. A thin, blue, sputtering tongue of flame revealed them to one another. The girl still crouched in her arm-chair, weary and spent, her powers of contention all vitiated by the losing struggle. Whitaker was trembling with nervous fatigue.

"Well?" he demanded.

"Oh, have your own way," she said drearily. "If it must be…"

"It's for the best," he insisted obstinately. "You'll never regret it."

"One of us will – either you or I," she said quietly. "It's too one-sided. You want to give all and ask nothing in return. It's a fool's bargain."

He hesitated, stammering with surprise. She had a habit of saying the unexpected. "A fool's bargain" – the wisdom of the sage from the lips of a child…

"Then it's settled," he said, business-like, offering his hand. "Fool's bargain or not – it's a bargain."

She rose unassisted, then trusted her slender fingers to his palm. She said nothing. The steady gaze of her extraordinary eyes abashed him.

"Come along and let's get it over," he muttered clumsily. "It's late, and there's a train to New York at half-past ten, you might as well catch."

She withdrew her hand, but continued to regard him steadfastly with her enigmatic, strange stare. "So," she said coolly, "that's settled too, I presume."