Phases of an Inferior Planet Part 19

"Why, certainly! Am I the man to fail?"

"I don't know," commented Father Speares--"I don't know. I never thought of you in that light, somehow. But if I can help you, remember that you were once my boy."

Anthony held out his hand quickly, his voice trembling.

"You are generous--generous as you have always been, but--I am all right."

They parted, Algarcife turning into a cross street. He walked slowly, and the hara.s.sed lines did not fade from his mouth. He seemed to have grown older within the last few months, and the fight he was making had bowed his shoulders and sown the seeds of future furrows upon his face.

At the corner he bought a box of sardines and a pound of crackers for Mariana, who liked a late supper. Then he crossed to The Gotham and ascended the stairs.

He found Mariana in a dressing-sack of pink flannel, sitting upon the bed, and engaged in manufacturing an opera-bonnet out of a bit of black gauze and a few pink rose-buds. She was trying it on as he entered, and, catching sight of him, did not remove it as she raised her hand warningly. "Tell me if it is becoming before you kiss me," she commanded, pressing her thimble against her lips.

Anthony drew back and surveyed her.

"Of course it is," he replied; "but what is it, anyway?"

Mariana laughed and leaned towards him.

"A bonnet, of course; not a coal-scuttle or a lamp-shade."

Then she took it from her head and held it before her, turning it critically from side to side.

"Don't you think it might have a few violets against the hair, just above the left temple? I am sure I could take some out of my last summer's hat."

She left the bed and stood upon a chair, to place the bonnet in a box upon the top of the wardrobe. "As a scientific problem it should interest you," she observed. "I created it out of nothing."

Anthony caught her as she descended from the chair.

"As a possible adornment for your head it interests me still more," he replied.

"Because you haven't been married long enough to discover what an empty little head it is?"

"Because it is the dearest head in the world, and the wisest. But what a thriftless house-keeper, not to have set the table!" A door had been cut into his study, and he glanced through. "Do you think you are still below Mason and Dixon's line, where time is not recognized?"

"I forgot it," said Mariana; "but there isn't any bread, so you must go after it. Oh, you didn't get sardines again, did you? I said potted ham--and it is really a very small chicken they sent us."

"Well, no matter. It might have been a chop. By the way, I met Mr.

Speares--"

"Father Speares," corrected Mariana.

"Mr. or Father, he's a nice old chap, isn't he?"

"He's a saint," said Mariana. Then she grew serious. "If you could have gone into the Church--honestly, I mean--how pleased he would have been, dearest."

"Yes; but I couldn't, you know, and if I had I could not have married you. He is High Church, you see. Celibacy is his pet inst.i.tution."

Mariana colored. "Then I am glad you didn't." She flung herself upon him; then, drawing back, added, wistfully, "But you wouldn't have been poor."

"Do you find it so hard?"

"I hate it--for you. You work so hard. And I can't help you."

"My beloved!"

"I mind it most for you. But, of course, I feel badly when the washer-woman comes and there isn't any money--and I should like to have some gloves--"

"You shall have them, my darling. Why didn't you tell me?"

Mariana leaned upon his breast and swept her loosened hair across his arm. "It doesn't matter very much," she answered. "If I were starving and you kissed me I should forget it." And she added, with characteristic inconsequence: "Only I haven't been out for several days because I didn't have any."

"You shall have them to-morrow. Is there anything else, dearest?"

"Nothing!" laughed Mariana.

She went to the mirror and began coiling her hair. From the gla.s.s her eyes met Anthony's, and she threw him a smiling glance.

"I have been reading one of your books," she said, pointing with the brush; "there it is."

Anthony lifted the volume from the bureau and grew serious. "Mill?" he observed. "It is a good start. Every woman should know political economy. I am glad it interests you."

"I haven't gone beyond the first page yet," returned Mariana, putting up both hands to fluff her aureole, and pausing to run her fingers over her eyebrows in the attempt to narrow them. "There was something in the first page about 'a web of muslin,' and, somehow, it suggested to me the idea of making that bonnet. Odd, wasn't it? And I am so glad I read it, for I am sure I should never have thought of the bonnet otherwise--and it is becoming."

"But you like Mill?"

"Oh yes," said Mariana; "I find him very suggestive."

CHAPTER XIII

Anthony and Mariana founded their life together upon well-worn principles. They accepted in its entirety the fallacy that love is a self-sustaining force, independent of material conditions.

"So long as we love each other," Mariana declared, "nothing matters."

And Anthony upheld this declaration. To Algarcife those first months of intimate a.s.sociation were inexpressibly fresh and inspiriting. That acute sense of nearness to Mariana supplied what had been a void in his existence, and he looked back upon the time he had spent without her as a colorless stretch of undifferentiated days.

And yet, with a feminine presence beside him, work was less easy. In the evenings, when Mariana followed him to his study and seated herself in a rocking-chair beneath the lamplight, he sometimes experienced a vague recognition of its inappropriateness. He found the old absorption to have grown intractable, and the creak of Mariana's rocker, or the low humming of her voice, was sufficient to surprise in him that repressed irascibility from which he had never been able to shake himself free.

Even in the midst of his pa.s.sionate delight in her, a profound melancholy would seize him at times, and he would find the cravings of his intellectual nature hara.s.sed by the superficial tenor of his daily employment. Again, as Mariana sat in the lamplight, her swift fingers busy with some useless bit of millinery, he would regard her with a sudden tightening of his pulses, and a thrill of fear at the prospect of a coming separation. The droop of her head, the contour of her face where the bone of her chin was accentuated by thinness, the soft line of throat above the full collar, the nimbus of hair s.h.i.+ning in the light, the fall of her skirt, the slender slippered feet, aroused in him a tumultuous sense of possession. He would turn from his writing to rest upon her a warm and magnetic glance, before which her lowered lashes would be lifted, her pensive lips break into a smile.

Then, again, the instinct for solitude, which his years of study had intensified, would reawaken, and the creaking of the rocker would act as an irritant upon his nerves.

It was at such a moment that Mariana had looked up and spoken, the bright inflection of her voice aggravating the interruption.

"Anthony!"