The Wheel of Life Part 21

Christina continued to regard him, as she had done from the first, with her sincere, unsmiling eyes, but he saw a flush rise slowly to her face in a wave of colour, turning the faint pink in her cheeks to crimson.

"I am very much obliged to her," she said, in her fresh attractive voice, "but I am just in the middle of a story and I cannot break off just now. I write," she added positively, "every evening."

As she finished she picked up some closely written sheets from the desk and held them loosely in her hand, enforcing by a gesture the unalterableness of her decision. "I hope you will give her my love--my dear love," she said presently, with girlish sweetness, "and tell her how sorry I am that it is impossible."

"You are writing stories, then--still?" he asked, lingering in the face of her evident desire to be rid of him.

"Oh, yes, I write all the time--every day."

"But do you find a market for so many?"

She shook her head: "The beginning is always hard--have you never read the lives of the poets? But when one gives up everything else--when one has devoted one's whole life--"

Knowing what he did of her mistaken ambition, her fruitless sacrifices, the thing appeared to him as a terrible and useless tragedy. He saw the thinness of her figure, the faint lines which her tireless purpose had written upon her face--and he felt that it was on the tip of his tongue to beg her to give it up--to reason with her in the tone of a philosopher and with the experience of the author of an accepted play.

But presently when he spoke, he found that his uttered words were not of the high and ethical character he had planned.

"She will be very much disappointed, I know," he said at last; and though he told himself that a great deal of good might be done by a little perfectly plain speaking, still he did not know how to speak it nor exactly what it would be.

"Thank her for me--I--I should love to see her oftener if I had the time--if it were possible," said Christina. And then he went to the door because he could think of no excuse sufficient to keep him standing another minute upon the hearthrug.

"I hope you will remember," he said from the threshold, "that we are always down stairs--at least my mother is--and ready to serve you at any moment in any way we can."

The a.s.surance appeared to make little impression upon her, but she smiled politely, and then closing the door after him, sat down to eat her dinner of cold bread and corned meat.

CHAPTER IV

TREATS OF THE ATTRACTION OF OPPOSITES

As soon as Trent had left the room Laura felt that the silence became oppressive and constrained. For the first time in her life she found herself overwhelmed with timidity--with a fear of the too obvious word--and this timidity annoyed her because she was aware that she no longer possessed the strength with which to struggle against it. That it was imperative for her to lighten the situation by a trivial remark, she saw clearly, yet she could think of nothing to say which did not sound foolish and even insincere when she repeated it in her thoughts. Had she dared to follow her usual impulse and be uncompromisingly honest, she would have said, perhaps: "I am silent because I am afraid to speak and yet I do not know why I am afraid, nor what it is that I fear." In her own mind she was hardly more lucid than this, and the mystery of her heart was as inscrutable to herself as it was to Kemper.

Then, presently, a rush of anger--of hot resentment--put courage into her determination, and raising her head, with an impatient gesture, she looked indifferently into his face. He was still sitting in the square of sunlight, which had almost faded away, and as she turned toward him, he met her gaze with his intimate and charming smile. Though his words were casual usually and uttered in a tone of genial raillery, this smile, whenever she met it, seemed to give the lie to every trifling phrase that he had spoken. "What is the use of all this ridiculous fencing when you fill my thoughts and each minute of the day I think only of you," said his look. So vivid was the impression she received now, that she felt instantly that he had caressed her in his imagination. Her heart beat quickly, while she rose to her feet with an indignant impulse.

"What is it?" he asked and she knew from his voice that he was still smiling. "What is the matter?"

Picking up his typewritten ma.n.u.script, she returned with it to her chair, drawing, as she sat down, a little farther away.

"I merely wanted to look over this," she returned, "Mr. Trent interrupted me in my reading."

"Then you've something to thank him for," he remarked gayly, and added in the same tone, "I noticed that he is in love with you--and I am beginning to be jealous."

For an instant she looked at him in surprise; then she remembered his affected scorn of what he called "social cowardice"--his natural or a.s.sumed frankness--and she shook her head with a laugh of protest.

"He in love! Well, yes, he's in love with his imagination. He's too young for anything more definite than that."

"A man is never too young to fall in love," he retorted, "I had it at least six times before I was twenty-one."

The laughter was still on her lips. "You speak as if it were the measles."

"It is--or worse, for when you've pulled through a bad attack of the measles you may safely count yourself immune. With love--" he shrugged his shoulders.

"Do you mean," she asked lightly, "that one can keep it up like that--forever."

He shook his head.

"Oh, I think a case is rare," he replied, "after seventy-five. One usually dies by then."

"And is there never--with a man, I mean--really one?"

"Oh, Lord, yes, there's always one--at a time."

His laughing eyes were probing her, and as she met them, questioningly, she found it impossible to tell whether he was merely jesting or in deadly earnest. With the doubt she felt a sharp p.r.i.c.k of curiosity, and with it she realised that in this uncertainty--this flas.h.i.+ng suggestion of all possibilities or of nothing--dwelt the singular attraction that he had for her--and for others. Was he only superficial, after all? Or did these tantalising contradictions serve to conceal the hidden depths beneath? Had she for an instant taken him entirely at his word value, she knew that her interest in him would have quickly pa.s.sed--but the force which dominated him, the lurking seriousness which seemed always behind his laughter, the very largeness of the candour he displayed--these things kept her forever expectant and forever interested.

"I hate you when you are like this," she exclaimed, almost indignantly.

"A woman always hates a man when he tells her the truth," he retorted.

"She has a taste for sweets and prefers falsehood."

"It may be the truth as you have seen it," she answered, "but that after all is a very small part of the whole."

"It's big enough at least to be unpleasant."

"Well, it's your personal idea of the truth, all the same," she insisted, "and you can't make it universal. It isn't Gerty's for instance."

"You think not?" he made a face of playful astonishment. "Well, how about its. .h.i.tting off our friend Perry?"

"Perry!" she replied disdainfully. "Do you know if he weren't so simple, I'd detest him."

"But why?" His eyebrows were still elevated.

"Because he thinks of nothing under the sun but the sensations of his great big body."

"Well, that may not be magnificent," he paraphrased gayly, "but it is man."

"Then, thank heaven, it isn't woman!" she exclaimed.

"Do you mean to tell me," he leaned forward in his chair and she was conscious suddenly that he was very close to her--closer, in spite of the intervening s.p.a.ce, than any man had ever been in her life before, "do you honestly mean to tell me that women are different?"

The expression of his face altered as it always did before an approaching change in his mood, and she saw in it something of the satiety--the moral weariness--which is the Nemesis of the soul that is led by pleasure. It was at this moment that she felt an exquisite confidence in the man himself--in the man hidden behind the cynicism, the affectation, the utter vanity of words.

"Oh, they can't devote themselves to their own sensations when they have to think so much of other people's," she responded merrily; and she felt again the strange impulse of retreat, the prompting to fly before the earnestness that appeared in his voice. While he was flippant, her intuitions told her that she might be serious, but when the banter pa.s.sed from his tone, she turned to it instinctively as to a defence.

"But those that I have known"--he stopped and looked at her as if he weighed with an experienced eye the exact effect of his words.

She laughed, but it was a laugh of irritation rather than humour.