Hasty Wedding Read Online Free PDF Page A

needn’t look like that, as if I’d offended you. You——”
    “Ronald, I’m going now.” He was talking oddly, jerkily, as if he’d already been drinking a great deal. She rose and again that look of something closely akin to despair flashed across his flushed, handsome face.
    “Wait, Dorcas,” he said hurriedly, putting down his glass and reaching for cigarettes. “One last cigarette. Then we’ll go. I promised.” He came to her with the small, mirrored box extended. “Drink the highball, honey. It’ll warm you up before you go out into this fiendish night… I’ll light your cigarette for you.”
    There was a small electric lighter. His hand holding the little torch was altogether steady in spite of his feverish manner.
    She put the cigarette to her lips and accepted the light. The one swallow of whisky and soda had stung her throat and the puff of smoke was bitter and unpleasant. Aware of his sudden silence, she looked up; he was standing above her, his hand still holding the little torch, his eyes very bright and focused oddly, not at her but as if there were something beyond her, over her shoulder, across the room. And as if that something moved a little, for his eyes moved—fixedly and brightly as a cat’s eyes, stalking.
    It was a fantastic impression but so strong that she put down her glass and turned. There was, of course, nobody. Unless—unless the blank white door leading to the kitchen passage had just closed.
    “What is it, Dorcas? What’s wrong?”
    “That—door—moved.” She was still staring at it. Had it moved? But it couldn’t have.
    “Oh, nonsense!”
    “Yes, I saw it, Ronald. I’m sure—or at least I thought——”
    “Do you mean to say you saw it move?”
    “N-no. Not exactly. But——”
    “Oh, come, Dorcas! Don’t be a dear little silly. How could the door move? It’s fast shut and there’s no one but you and me in the whole apartment. No one.”
    She looked perplexedly at the wide, blank white panels. Certainly the door did not move now; certainly that split second during which she saw—or thought she saw—the door barely tremble into place had been an illusion. All those mirrors about the room were deceiving as to perspective and motion. She could see herself and Ronald standing above her at a dozen different angles and views.
    And she was to go. Now.
    She half rose and reached for her coat and Ronald put his hand on her shoulder lightly but held her in her seat.
    “Ronald——”
    “Yes, dear little Dorcas. When you’ve finished your cigarette. I’m giving you up for a lifetime, my darling, but not until”—he glanced at the small clock on a table across the room, a blue-faced clock with stars on it and white hands, tipped in stars—“not until nine o’clock. At least ten minutes more. It will take you that long to finish your cigarette. And your whisky.”
    The hand on her shoulder, curiously, annoyed her. She moved away from him to the other end of the divan and as she did so he sat down beside her.
    “Listen, Dorcas,” he began. “There are some things I want to say to you. Don’t get upset but please listen to me.” He paused, turning his glass in his fingers, watching it with absent, bright eyes. “In the first place you don’t love Jevan.”
    “Don’t talk yet, I want to finish. You don’t love him. I love you and you—you love me, my dear. I know you do. I know in a hundred ways. I—well, this is the point: now that it has come right down to marrying him you don’t want to. I know that too. That’s one of the reasons I waited until now. So long as the marriage was far enough in the future you yielded to your mother. I’m not blaming you, my darling, for listening to what they told you of me. Too much of it perhaps, was true. Was true, Dorcas— is true no longer, since met you.”
    He paused again. Dorcas made a motion to speak and stopped. He was talking calmly and with a kind of reasonableness and everything he said, Dorcas