The Flower Brides (98 page)

“Of course!” said Camilla quickly in a sympathetic tone. “Please don’t feel you must tell me anything more. I quite understand that it must make you very unhappy to speak of it. I am sure Miss York would not have spoken of it if she had known.”

Whitlock wasn’t so sure of that, but he did not say so. He paused again painfully and then said, “No, I would rather tell you. Now that you know of her existence, you should know all about her.”

“I don’t see why, Mr. Whitlock. I am just your secretary. It isn’t customary for businessmen to tell their private affairs to their secretaries.”

She tried to turn the matter off lightly, but Whitlock persisted in watching her gloomily and went on.

“You are far more than a secretary, Camilla,” he said feelingly. “You surely know that. You cannot have failed to see that. You must know what a comfort you have been to me in my loneliness—”

“Oh, Mr. Whitlock!” protested Camilla, deeply troubled by his tone and endeavoring with all her might to refuse to understand his meaning, “I’m glad if I have helped at all. I was only trying to do my duty. One doesn’t know how those around us are suffering, of course.”

Whitlock gave her a quick, keen glance. Was she really as dull of comprehension as she seemed?

“You see,” he said, dropping his glance for a moment and placing the tips of his fine long fingers together, “my wife was a spoiled child. That was about the truth of the matter. She was determined to have her own way in everything. She had been petted and humored, and she expected me to do the same by her that her parents had done.”

Something in the black look that came over his face at the memory gave Camilla a swift revelation of what it might be to live under the domination of this man, who could be so gentle and fascinating when he chose and yet so overbearing when the whim took him. She shuddered at what might have been her fate if she had gone on a little longer. Even if there had been no wife in the future, his nature would have been the same. But aloud she only said, “That was hard for you both!”

His face hardened at that.

“It was certainly hard for me!” he said uncompromisingly.

“It must be very hard when a home is broken up!” moralized Camilla, loathing herself for the smugness of the remark yet unable to think of anything else appropriate to say.

“Get rid of the idea that she was a martyr,” said Whitlock brusquely. “She had her own way. She’s living with her father in his palatial mansion. She has everything she wants. I am the one that is cast out. I have done everything that I could to make her see where she was wrong and make her come back to her home and her responsibilities, and she has refused. Now I think it is time to think of myself. I have refused to get a divorce, feeling that she might weaken, but my life is going on, and I am alone. There has been no one to understand me, no one to cheer me when I come back from a hard day!”

He paused a moment, and Camilla gazed at him in troubled silence.

“Until you came, Camilla—!” His voice softened, and he gave her suddenly one of those deep, possessive looks, those smiles that had puzzled her often before and now filled her with a new kind of alarm.

“Oh, please,” she said in a distressed tone, “I’m glad if I have helped in any way. But I’m not the one to do anything much. If someone—something—could only bring you two together again! It must be so very hard for all of you. In spite of disagreement, it can’t be happy for any of you to be apart! You belong together! It’s what God wants
—expects
of you! And—your little girl! How dreadful for her not to have any father and for you not to see her every day and watch her grow up! My father was so much to me. I wouldn’t give up the precious memory I have of him for anything!”

The man almost squirmed away from her words.

“Yes, of course, there’s that,” he said almost roughly. “But then, she’s having every luxury, more than I could give her. She isn’t really missing anything. It’s I that am starved for human sympathy—until you came, and—and then I began to feel that there might still be a little brightness left for me on earth if—”

Suddenly Miss York appeared in the doorway, and her pleasant, hearty voice boomed into the atmosphere so tense and strained, seeming to clear away the morbidness and bring a fresh breath to Camilla. “Well, I just looked in to see whether you two were done with those letters. If you are, I wonder if I could get your help for a minute or two, putting up this awkward old picture. I can’t seem to hang it alone. Mr. Whitlock, you used to be handy around the house, I remember. Would you mind lifting the picture while I twist the wire to shorten it? These ceilings are so low that the cord is too long.”

Whitlock rose stiffly, severely, and followed the nurse into the room across the hall, doing what was asked of him without a word, his face like a thundercloud all the while, and then when it was done he turned to Camilla.

“I’ll say good night,” he said stiffly. “I must get these letters into the mail!” (Although Camilla knew quite well those letters weren’t important at all.) “I’ll see you on Monday about the rest!” he added significantly and, taking his hat and coat, departed without a word or even a glance in Miss York’s direction.

“H’m!” remarked that good woman significantly. “Grumpy as ever, I see!” Then she added, “He had the sweetest little wife I ever saw, and he treated her like the very dust under his feet. I’m not surprised she couldn’t stand it. But I guess he can be nice in the office, can’t he?”

“Yes, he can be nice,” said Camilla thoughtfully. “He has really been very kind to both of us girls in the office.”

Miss York eyed her keenly and said no more, and they spent a very happy evening getting Miss York’s room settled, but nothing more was said about Mr. Whitlock.

Camilla, however, was much disturbed in mind, though she managed an eager interest in Miss York’s room that well covered her troubled thoughts. But when Monday morning came she went down to the office in great trepidation.

Whitlock, however, gave no sign of anything out of the ordinary. He was gravely courteous and quiet during the morning, with even more than usual of his brusque abstraction. Marietta sensed it at once when she came in and snapped into her work with a frightened vigor that warmed Camilla’s worried soul.

It was not until noon when Whitlock sent Marietta out for her lunch that he unbent and spoke to Camilla.

“Now,” he said, looking up with a relaxing of his grim dignity, “I want to talk to you, Camilla. Thank goodness we shan’t be interrupted here, except by the telephone, for nearly an hour.”

Camilla swung her swivel chair around from her desk, a startled look in her eyes, although she had been quite expecting something all the morning.

“Move your chair over here near me where you always take dictation. I don’t want to have to talk very loud.”

Camilla moved her chair to her usual place, innocently carrying her pad and pencil as she usually came for dictation.

She tried to look up composedly but met one of those possessive glances that had come to seem so frightening.

“Camilla,” he said, “I have been utterly miserable all night.” His eyes certainly attested to his words. “I haven’t been able to sleep. I have thought and thought until I am nearly crazy. I felt that we should talk it over and decide what we ought to do.”

“We?” said Camilla, opening her eyes wide in alarm.

“Yes, Camilla, I felt that you had the right to make the final decision.”

“Decision? I don’t understand, Mr. Whitlock.”

“Why, decision as to how we ought to move, you and I. You know, of course, that I have been loving you all winter! And I thought that I had reason to believe that you felt the same way.”

He reached out his hand and covered hers with a warm, soft, tender grasp. Camilla started out of her chair aghast and drew her hands quickly from under his clasp.

“Mr. Whitlock!” she exclaimed in no uncertain tones. “You had no right to love me! How could you have thought that I had any such feeling? How dreadful! How perfectly
terrible
for you, a married man, to feel that way!”

There were tears in Camilla’s eyes, and her face was white and drawn. She turned away from the desk and stood over by the mantel.

But Whitlock got up and came over beside her. “Don’t speak that way, Camilla! Don’t weep. I cannot bear to see you suffer, too. You don’t know how it tears my heart! You little, beautiful, lovely darling. Oh, I love you, love you,
love
—!”

“Stop!” cried Camilla. “It is disgusting to me to hear you say that! It is unholy! You humiliate me!”

“No, Camilla, you mustn’t feel that way, dearest. You don’t know how I love you, how I long—oh, how my hungry arms long to hold you close! Just once, Camilla, let me feel your heart against mine. We have a right to that! Just to put my lips on yours—”

His arms went out to embrace her, and there was passion in his glance, but suddenly Camilla sprang away from him and went and stood over by the door.

“Don’t you dare touch me!” she cried, and her eyes flashed fire. “Mr. Whitlock, I didn’t think you were a man like this! I never would have come here to work if I had known that you would dare talk to me like that! My mother would never have invited you to dinner. We thought you were simply being kind to us for the sake of our old friends at home. I thought you respected me!”

Whitlock stood white and shaken across the room from her, looking at her sternly.

“You misunderstand me,” he said hoarsely. “I mean you no disrespect. I want to marry you as soon as I can get a divorce. When I said I wanted to discuss the matter with you, I merely meant whether we should go on for a while and keep our love between ourselves or whether I should come out in the open and ask my wife for a divorce. I can easily do that, you know, for it was she who left me.”

“Mr. Whitlock, I don’t know what you mean, keep our love between ourselves. I have no love for you, and you have no right to love me nor to tell me so. And even if I could ever care for you that way I would
never
marry a divorced man. It’s not right!”

“Oh, now, Camilla,” he pleaded, “don’t say that! It is all right and quite respectable for people to remarry after divorce. Everybody is doing it today.”

“Not Christians!” said Camilla quietly. “Not born-again ones. It would never be right in my eyes, and I do not believe it would be in God’s eyes. He has given only one cause for divorce and not any for remarriage as long as both husband and wife are living. But we do not need to discuss that. Even if you had never been married and did not need a divorce to set you free, I could never marry you. I do not love you and never did. And the fact that you could say what you have just said to me this afternoon has almost made me hate you.”

“What have I said, Camilla, that has made you so angry?” he pleaded, giving her a self-righteously innocent glance.

“You have confessed an unlawful love for me!” declared Camilla, her eyes flashing anew at the memory. “A love you had no right to even recognize in your heart, much less allow and foster. Oh, if I had had any such idea when you first began to show me kindness, I would never have looked at you again.”

“Forgive me, Camilla,” he said almost humbly, “you do not know the heart of a man when he loves.”

“Well, I hope I never may know, then, if it is unholy like that. A good man would have torn it out and uprooted it and fled from anything that would have reminded him of it!” Camilla’s tongue was sharp, and her tone was hard and bright. How she despised the man, and yes, despised herself, too, for not having foreseen such a possibility and guarded herself and him against it. Even if he hadn’t been married, she had never really seriously considered him in the light of a lover. Not even when her mother warned her the other night had it seemed at all possible that such a thing could be. She had been to blame, perhaps, in going out with him those few times, in welcoming him to the house, and in using him as a sort of mild entertainment to keep herself from thinking of another man whose bright personality had been obsessing her. Oh, how wrong she had been! She hadn’t meant to play the game of hearts the way the world was playing it.

Suddenly she lifted honest eyes to his angry, mortified ones.

“If I have inadvertently done anything to lead you on to this,” she said earnestly, “I most humbly ask your pardon! I did not dream that you meant anything like this in the kindness you showed me. I am ashamed that you could even think I had cared for you that way. I
never did
!”

He was still so long that she wondered if she would have to speak first, and then he lifted his eyes again to hers.

“You didn’t, Camilla,” he owned. “You are a good girl. I appreciate your goodness. But you are somewhat fanatical in your ideas about divorce, you must own that. It’s not your fault, of course. Your mother has trained you that way, and, of course, she’s not so much to blame. It belonged to her day, and she has lived up to what she was taught. But the world has made progress today. It has gone far from narrow-minded precepts that did well enough for a former generation. What kind of a God would it be that condemned two people, utterly unmated, hating each other, making each other miserable, to live their lives out together?”

“Living their lives out apart is one thing,” said Camilla, with conviction, “and either of them marrying someone else is another. Mr. Whitlock, the world may change and progress as you call it, but God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and God’s principles never change, in spite of the world’s fashions. But I can’t discuss this with you anymore. I wish you would go back to your work and let me go back to mine and forget all this awful hour—if we can!”

“Yes—if we
can
!” said Whitlock bitterly. “Camilla you could not talk so severely of right and wrong if you loved me as I love you. You see, this is the first time I have ever really loved a woman. I have seen in you the ideal woman of my life, and I have laid all at your feet. You could not treat me this way if you loved me as I hoped you did.”

“Perhaps not!” said Camilla. “But you see,
I don
’
t
.”