Phases of an Inferior Planet Part 20

Algarcife turned towards her, his pen raised as if in self-defence.

"When did you begin to love me?"

The pen was lowered, Algarcife smiled. "In the beginning," he answered; then he frowned, his tone grew captious. "I can't, Mariana," he protested--"I really can't. I must get this work over."

"You are always working."

"Heaven knows, I am! If I weren't, we would starve."

"It is horrible to be poor."

"We don't improve matters by exclaiming over them. On the contrary, you will prevent my getting this article off to-night, and we will be a few dollars the poorer."

"You never talk to me. You are always working."

She spoke pettishly, with an impulse to exasperate.

"Mariana!"

Mariana threw aside her work and clasped her hands. Her face was upturned, her head supported by the back of the chair. He could see the violet shadow which rested like a faint suffusion where the heavy hair swept from behind her ear.

Suddenly her head was lowered, and the mellow lamplight irradiated across the pallor of her face.

"Of course I know you are working for me," she said, "but I had rather have less labor and more love."

"I love you as much when I am working for you as when I am shouting it in your ear."

"But I like to hear it."

"I love you. Now be quiet."

Mariana came and leaned over him. She put her arms about his shoulders and rested her head upon them. There was a sob in her voice. "Let me help you," she said. "It is so hard to sit still and do nothing, while you are killing yourself. Let me help you."

Anthony turned and caught her, and she lay limp and motionless in his embrace. He kissed her with sudden pa.s.sion.

"You help me by living," he said, "by breathing, by being near me, by giving yourself to me unreservedly. Without you I lived but half a life--without you, now that I have had you, I should go to pieces--absolutely. I love you as a man loves once in a thousand years.

But we must live, and I must work."

He released her and went back to his writing, while Mariana, in pa.s.sionate elation, picked up Mill's _Political Economy_, and fell to studying.

It was shortly after this that she sought to turn her own talents to financial results. With this end in view she invested her pocket-money in a yard or so of white linen and a ma.s.s of colored silks, and wove a garland of nasturtiums around a centre-piece intended to decorate a dinner-table. When it was finished she was seized with a fit of sanguineness, and as she rinsed it in a dozen different waters to insure whiteness, she calculated what the annual products of her labor would amount to. "If I manage to do one a month," she remarked, pressing the centre-piece lightly between her moistened hands, "and say I get about fifteen dollars for each one, I should soon have quite a little income; twelve times fifteen is--how much, Anthony?"

"More than I am going to let you work for," replied Algarcife. "Your eyes have been red ever since you started that confounded table-cover.

It is the very last."

Mariana placed one finger to her lips, and then applied it lightly to the iron she held in her hand. "I do hope I won't scorch it," she observed. "Oh, do give me that blanket! It must be ironed on a blanket to make the flowers stand out. Aren't they natural?"

She lifted her heated face and glanced at him for approbation.

"I feel like plucking them," returned Algarcife. "Don't tire yourself.

Good-bye." And he pa.s.sed into the next room and closed the door.

Mariana ironed the centre-piece, wrapped it in yellow tissue-paper, and carried it to an exchange for women's work around the corner. It was placed in a gla.s.s-case amid a confusion of similar articles, where it languished for the s.p.a.ce of several months. At the end of that time she redeemed it.

The failure of the enterprise precipitated an attack of hysteria, which spent itself in Anthony's arms and left her resigned and exhausted.

"I can't do anything to help you," she observed, hopelessly. "I hoped to clear at least fifteen dollars from that centre-piece, and, instead, I lost five. I shall always be an enc.u.mbrance."

"You are my beloved counsellor."

"My love isn't of much use, and you never take my advice."

"But I like to listen to it."

Mariana rested her head upon his shoulder and closed her eyes.

"I am only a luxury," she said, "like wine or cigars, but it wouldn't be pleasant to dispense with me, would it?"

"It would be death."

She sighed contentedly, her hand wandered across his brow. There was a faint, magnetic force in her finger-tips which left a burning sensation like that caused by a slightly charged electric current.

"I made you marry me, you know," she remarked, complacently, "so I am glad you don't regret it."

"Nonsense," remonstrated Algarcife, his lips upon her hair, the warm contact of her body inducing a sense of nearness. "I married you by force. I quite took your breath away. If you had resisted, I should have had you whether or no."

"Oh, but I did make you," returned Mariana. "But there was nothing else to do. I couldn't possibly have gone home, and I did love you so distractedly."

"As you do now."

"As I do now. Of course I must have known that rus.h.i.+ng to you that night with the letter was just like a proposal of marriage."

"It was, rather," concluded Algarcife.

"But you needn't have married me unless you wanted to," urged Mariana.

"There was Mr. Paul--"

Anthony laughed. "I was a vicarious sacrifice," he declared, "to insure the peace of Mr. Paul."

The next day Algarcife received an unexpected sum of money, and they agreed to celebrate their rising fortunes by a night at the opera. It was "Tannhauser," and Mariana craved music.

"I am afraid it is improvident," Anthony, whom the opera bored, remarked, dubiously; then looking into Mariana's wistful face, he recanted. "It doesn't matter," he added. "A little extravagance won't affect the probability of future starvation. We will go."

And they went. Mariana wore her freshest gown and the little bonnet with the knot of violets above the left temple. She was in her gayest mood, which was only dampened in a slight degree by the odor of the benzine clinging to her newly cleaned gloves.

As she leaned against the railing in the fifth gallery, gazing plaintively down into the pit, she looked subtle and seductive--like a creation in half-tones, swept by fugitive lights and shadows. The pallor of her face was intensified, her radiant lips compressed, and the green flame in her glance scintillated beneath luxurious lashes. Anthony, fastening upon her contented eyes, wondered at the singular charm which she radiated. Small, slight, insignificant, and charged with imperfections as she was, her very imperfections possessed the fascination of elusiveness. Her radiance was intensified in the memory by the plainness succeeding it; the sensitive curve of her nostrils was heightened in effect by the irregularity of feature, and the angular distinctness of the bones of her chin emphasized the faint violet shadows suffusing the hollows. Had her charm been less impalpable it would have lost its power. The desire of beauty might have satiated itself in a dozen women, or of amativeness in a dozen others, but Mariana fascinated instinctively, and her spell was without beginning in a single attribute and without end in possession.

As she sat there in the fifth gallery, drinking with insatiable thirst the swelling harmony, her emotional nature, which a.s.sociation with Algarcife had somewhat subdued, was revivified, and she pressed Anthony's responsive hand in exaltation. The music reverberating round her brought in its train all those lurid dreams which she had half forgotten, and the dramatic pa.s.sion awoke and burned her pulses. She felt herself invigorated, swept from the moorings of the commonplace, and subverted by the scenic intensity before her. She felt taller, stronger, fuller of unimpregnated germs of power, and, like an infusion of splendid barbaric blood, there surged through her veins a flame of color. With a triumphant crash of harmonious discord, she felt that the artistic instinct was stimulated from its supineness, and the desire to achieve was aglow within her. The electric lights beneath the brilliant ceiling, the odor of hot-house flowers, the music sweeping upward and bearing her on its swelling tide, acted upon her overwrought sensibilities like an intoxicant. She drew near to Anthony; her lips quivered.