Hasty Wedding Read Online Free PDF Page B

cheap and false. I’ll never remember you again with anything but loathing. I thought it was real—the way you felt. I thought you——”
    “Stop that. Don’t be a fool, Dorcas. Or a silly, stupid child. After all, tomorrow you’re to be married; you ought not to be so disturbed by a little love-making tonight. Besides, it’s me you’re going to marry.”
    She jerked on her coat. She wouldn’t reply, wouldn’t listen. He lay back against the deep divan, watching her with a curious lassitude and assurance. Apparently he was going to let her go without further words. Well, that was good. She turned toward the door without speaking—caught a glimpse of her own disheveled hair in a mirror above a white face and blazing eyes and a mouth heavily painted with new and unfamiliar lipstick. Where was her hat?
    She whirled back. It lay on the divan where it had fallen during that absurd struggle with Ronald. Again, sharply and with fury in her gesture, she snatched the hat. And again reached the door without a backward glance when Ronald laughed.
    It was a singular kind of laugh, slow and easy and assured, but it had no mirth in it.
    Something chill and a little frightened stirred suddenly below her rage. She turned to look at him again and he said, smiling:
    “You can’t leave, darling. I’ve been a thorough, complete scoundrel and locked the door. I’m not going to open it until—to quote again from the fine old melodramas from which I have lavishly borrowed—until you are mine.”
    Scorn and rage and that chill thing stirring below.
    “Ronald, don’t be such a complete idiot. Open the door.”
    “No, my sweet.”
    “Ronald, you can’t possibly be serious. This is preposterous.”
    “Yes, isn’t it. I tried to think of some other way. Really I did, darling. But after all, it does work now and then, you know. Or might when women are worth the trouble. As you are, darling. As you——” He was rising slowly from the divan. Certainly he was going to open the door. Certainly it was a poor idea of a joke. Suppose—suppose it wasn’t? With the sharp irrelevance of a nightmare she thought of the bridesmaids arriving in yellow chiffons at St Chrystofer’s and the bride shut up in an apartment with a man who’d taken leaves of his senses.
    Ronald came nearer. “As you are worth it, sweet,” he said and reached behind her. Incredibly he touched the electric light switch and the chill stirring thing away back in her mind leaped to terror as he found her in the tumultuous, frantic darkness.
    A telephone was ringing. She knew that.
    It rang again and again, somewhere away from that hot, panting area of struggle, somewhere off in the thick darkness. She knew when he suddenly left her, so suddenly and savagely relinquishing her that she almost fell. She heard him groping in the darkness; then he found a table lamp and turned on the light. She had one glimpse of his face above the light—foreshortened as he bent downward—the face of a man she had never seen, with mirrors all around and a blank white door behind him.
    The telephone pealed demandingly. He found it at last on a table and thrust it over savagely so it fell on the floor and was disconnected.
    Dorcas reached the door and it was not locked at all. She pulled the door open and all her life afterward remembered the sound of it as it closed, shutting off Ronald’s voice.
    Ten minutes later, on Lake Shore Drive, she hailed a cruising taxi and gave the driver her address. It seemed to her that he looked at her curiously. But why not? A girl wandering around alone in the street in weather like that. Or was it because he noted something of the agitation she felt?
    She huddled back in a corner of the seat. It must have turned much colder, for she was trembling all over. She had to lock her teeth together. She tried to count and draw long breaths; one, two, three, inhale—one, two, three, exhale.
    She was still counting when they reached the Whipple house, which