The Wheel of Life Part 20

he protested with bitterness.

"I can be anything," she answered slowly, drawing her gaze with an effort from the fire. "Most women can."

The glory of the morning pa.s.sed from him as suddenly as it had come, and he told himself with the uncompromising desperation of youth that for all he cared now his great play might remain forever in oblivion. Life itself appeared as empty--as futile as his ambition--so empty, indeed, that he began immediately in the elastic melancholy which comes easily at twenty-five--to plan the consoling details of an early death. When he remembered his buoyant happiness of a few hours ago it seemed to him almost ridiculous, and he experienced a curious sensation of detachment, of having drifted out of his proper and peculiar place in life. "I shall never be happy again and I am no longer the same person that I was yesterday--or even a half hour ago," he thought with a determination to be completely miserable. Yet even while the words were in his mind he found himself weighing almost instinctively the literary value of his new emotion, and to his horror the situation in which he now stood began slowly to take a dramatic form in his mental vision. The very att.i.tude into which he had unconsciously fallen--as he paused with his face averted and his hand tightening with violence upon a book he had picked up--showed to his imagination as a bit of restrained emotional acting beyond the footlights.

"Then there's nothing I can do but go straight to the devil," he declared with resolution, and at the same instant he found to his supreme self-contempt that he was wondering how the speech would sound in the mouth of an actor in his drama.

"Or write another play," suggested Laura, while he started quickly and turned toward the door.

"I'll never write another," he said in a voice of gloom, which he tried with all his soul to make an honest expression of his state of mind. "I wish now I hadn't written this one. I wouldn't if I'd known."

"Then it's just as well that you didn't," she returned with a positive motherly a.s.surance. "My poor dear boy," she added soothingly, "you are not the first man of twenty-five who has mistaken the literary mania for the pa.s.sion of love, and I fear that you will not be the last. There seems, curiously enough, to be a strange resemblance between the two emotions. If you'd only look at me plainly without any of your lovely glamour you'll see in a minute what nonsense it all is. Why, you are all the time in your heart of hearts in love with some little blonde thing with pink cheeks who is still at school."

He turned away in a pa.s.sion of wounded pride; then coming back again he stood looking moodily down upon her.

"I'll prove to you if it kills me that I've spoken the truth," he declared, and it seemed to him that the words were not really what he meant to say--that they came from him against his will because he had fitted them into the mouth of an imaginary character.

"Oh, please don't," she begged.

"I suppose I may still see you sometimes?" he enquired.

"Oh, dear, yes; whenever you like."

Then while he stood there, hesitating and indignant, the servant brought her a card, and as she took it from the tray, he saw a flush that was like a pale flame overspread her face.

"It's Mr. Kemper now," she said. "Why will you not stay and be good and forget?"

"I'd rather meet the devil himself at this minute," he cried in a boyish rage that brought tears to his eyes. "It seems to me that I spend half my life getting out of his way."

"But don't you like him?" she enquired curiously. "Every one likes him, I think."

"Well, I'm not every one," he blurted out angrily, "for I think him a consummate, thickheaded a.s.s."

"Good heavens!" she gayly e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "what a character you give him."

Then, as he was leaving the room, she reached out, and taking his hand, drew him against his will, back to his chair. "You shall not go like this--I'll not have it," she said. "Do you think I am a stone that I can bear to spoil all your beautiful triumph. Here, sit down and I promise to make you like both him and me."

As she finished, Kemper came in with his energetic step and his genial greeting, and she introduced the two men with a little flattering smile in Trent's direction. "You have the honour to meet our coming playwright," she added with a gracious gesture, skilfully turning the conversation upon the younger man's affairs, while she talked on with a sweetness which at once distracted and enraged him. He listened to her at first moodily and then with an attention which, in spite of his resolution, was fixed upon the fine points of his play as she made now and then friendly suggestions as to the interpretations of particular lines or scenes. The charming deference in her voice soothed his ruffled vanity and it seemed to him presently that the flattering intoxication of her praise sent his imagination spinning among the stars.

Kemper listened to it all with an intelligent and animated interest, and when he spoke, as he did from time to time, it was to put a sympathetic question which dismissed Trent's darling prejudice into the region of departed errors. To have held out against the singular attraction of the man, would have been, Trent thought a little later, the part of a perverse and stiffnecked fool. It was not only that he succ.u.mbed to Kemper's magnetism, but that he recognised his sincerity--his utter lack of the dissimulation he had once believed him to possess. Then, as Kemper sat in the square of sunlight which fell through the bow window, Trent noticed each plain, yet impressive detail of his appearance. He saw the peculiar roughness of finish which lent weight, if not beauty, to his remarkably expressive face, and he saw, too, with an eye trained to attentive observation, that the dark brown hair, so thick upon the forehead and at the back of the neck, had already worn thin upon the crown of the large, well-turned head. "In a few years he will begin to be bald," thought the younger man, "then he will put on gla.s.ses, and yet these things will not keep him from appealing to the imaginary ideal of romance which every woman must possess. Even when he is old he will still have the power to attract, if he cannot keep the fancy." But the bitterness had gone out of his thoughts, and a little later, when he left the house and walked slowly homeward, he discovered that a hopeless love might lend a considerable sweetness to a literary life. After all, he concluded, one might warm oneself at the flame, and yet neither possess it utterly nor be destroyed.

His mother sat knitting by the window when he entered the apartment, and he saw that the table was already laid for dinner in the adjoining room.

"I ordered dinner a little earlier for you," she explained as she laid aside the purple shawl while the ball of yarn slipped from her short, plump knees and rolled under the chair in which she sat. Never in his recollection had he seen her put aside her knitting that the ball did not roll from her lap upon the floor, and now as he stooped to follow the loosened skein, he wondered vaguely how she had been able to fill her life with so trivial and monotonous an employment.

"I wish you could get out," he said, as he sat down on a footstool at her feet and leaned his head affectionately against her knees. "I don't believe you've had a breath of air for a month."

"Why, I never went out of doors in the snow in my life," she responded, "at least not since I was a child--and it always snows here except when it rains. Do you know," she pursued, with one of her mild glances of curiosity through the window, "I can't imagine how the people in that big apartment over there ever manage to get through the day. Why, the woman stays in bed every morning until eleven o'clock and then the maid brings her something like chocolate on a tray. She wears such beautiful wrappers, too, I really don't see how she can be entirely proper, and then she seems to fly in such rages with her husband. There are some children, I believe," she went on with increasing animation, "but they are never allowed to set foot in her room, and this afternoon when she dressed to go out I saw her try on at least four different hats and every single one of them green."

"Poor creature!" observed Trent, with a laugh, "it must be worse than living under the omnipresent eye of Providence. By the way, I told the man to come up and have a look at the radiator. Did he do it?"

She laid her large, plump hand upon his head with a touch that was as soft as her ball of yarn.

"The manager came himself," she replied, "but we got to talking and after I found out how much trouble he had had in life--he lost his wife and two little boys all in one year--I didn't like to say anything about the heating. I was afraid it would hurt his feelings to find I had a complaint to make--he seemed so very nice and obliging. And, after all,"

she concluded amiably, "the rooms do get quite warm, you know, just about the time we are ready to go to bed, so all I need to do is to wear my cloak a little while when I first get up in the morning. It will be a very good way to make some use of it, for I never expect to go out of doors again in this climate."

"You'll have to go once," he said gayly, "to the first rehearsal of my play. You can't afford to miss it."

"Oh, I'll m.u.f.fle up well on that occasion," she answered. "Did you see Mr. Benson this morning? and what did he say to you?"

"A great deal--he was quite enthusiastic--for _him_, you know."

"I wonder what he is like," she murmured with her large, sweet seriousness. "Is he married, and has he any children?"

"I didn't investigate. You see I was more interested in my own affairs.

He wants Katie Hanska to take the leading part. You may have seen her picture--it was in one of the magazines I brought you."

"Did you enquire anything about her?" she asked earnestly, "I mean about her character and her bringing up. I couldn't bear to have the part played by any but a pure woman, and they tell me that so many actresses aren't--aren't quite that. Before you consent I hope you'll find out very particularly about the life she has led."

"Oh, I dare say she's all right," he remarked, with the affectionate patience which was one of his more amiable characteristics. "At any rate she has the mettle for the role."

"I hope she's good," said his mother softly, and she added after a moment, "do you remember that poor Christina Coles I was telling you about not long ago?"

"Why, yes," replied Trent; "the pretty girl with the blue eyes and the uncompromising manner? What's become of her, I wonder?"

"I fear," began his mother, while she lowered her voice and glanced timidly around as if she were on the point of a shameful disclosure, "I honestly fear that she is starving."

"Starving!" exclaimed St. George, in horror, and he sprang to his feet as if he meant to plunge at once into a work of rescue. "Why, how long has she been about it?"

"I know she has stopped coming to see me because her clothes are so shabby," returned Mrs. Trent, with what seemed to him a calmness that was almost cruel, "and the charwoman tells me that she lives on next to nothing--a loaf of baker's bread and a bit of cheese for dinner. It takes all the little money she can rake and sc.r.a.pe together to pay her room rent--for it seems that the papers have stopped publis.h.i.+ng her stories."

"For G.o.d's sake, let's do something--let's do it quickly," exclaimed Trent, in an agony of sympathy.

"I was just thinking that you might run up and see if she would come down to dine with us," said the old lady; "it really makes me miserable to feel that she doesn't get even enough to eat."

"Why, I'll go before I dress--I'll go this very minute," declared the young man. "Shall I tell her that we dine in half an hour or do you think, if she's so very hungry, you might hurry it up a bit?"

"In half an hour--she'll want a little time," replied his mother, and she added presently, "but she's so proud, poor thing, that I don't believe she'll come."

The words were said softly, but had they been spoken in a louder tone, Trent would not have heard them for he had already hastened from the room.

In response to his knock, Christina opened her door almost immediately, and when she recognised him a look of surprise appeared upon her face.

"Won't you come in?" she asked, drawing slightly aside with a politeness which he felt to be an effort to her, "my room is not very orderly, but perhaps you will not mind?"

She wore a simple cotton blouse, the sleeves of which were a little rumpled as if they had been rolled up above her elbows, and her skirt of some ugly brown stuff was shabby and partly frayed about the edges--but when she looked at him with her sincere blue eyes, he forgot the disorder of her dress in the touching pathos of her gallant little figure. She was very pretty, he saw, in a fragile yet resolute way--like a child that is possessed of a will of iron--and because of her prettiness he found himself resenting her literary failures with an acute personal resentment. The tenderness of his sympathy seemed to increase rather than diminish his hopeless love for Laura, and while he gazed at Christina's flower-like eyes and smooth brown hair, which shone like satin, there stole over him a poetic melancholy that was altogether pleasant. It was as if he had suddenly discovered a companion in his unhappiness, and he thought all at once that it would be charming to pour the sorrows of his love into the pretty ears hidden so quaintly under the smooth brown hair. Love, at the moment, appeared to him chiefly as something to be talked about--an emotion which one might turn effectively into the spoken phrase.

She drew back into the room and he followed her while his sympathetic glance dwelt upon the sleeping couch under its daytime covering of cretonne, upon the small gas stove on which a kettle boiled, upon the cupboard, the dressing table, the desk at which she wrote, and the torn and mended curtains before the single window. Though she neither apologised nor showed in her manner the faintest embarra.s.sment, he felt instinctively that her fierce maidenly pride was putting her to torture.

"I came with a message from my mother," he hastened to explain as he stood beside her on the little strip of carpet before the gas stove, "she sends me to beg that you will dine with us this evening as a particular favour to her. She is so much alone, you know, that a young visitor is just what she needs."