The Wheel of Life Part 22

"Perhaps you did not select your examples very wisely," she remarked.

Her look arrested him as he was about to reply, and he spoke evidently upon the impulse of the moment. "Did Gerty tell you about Madame Alta?"

he enquired.

She shook her head with an evasion of the question, "I don't remember that it was Gerty."

"But you have heard of her?"

"I've _heard_ her," she answered. "It is a very beautiful voice."

He frowned with a nervous irritation, and she saw from his impatient movements that he was under the influence of a disagreeable excitement.

"Well, I was once in love with her," he said bluntly.

She made an indifferent gesture.

"And now I hate her," he added with a sharp intonation.

"Is that the ordinary end of your romances?" she questioned without interest.

"It wasn't romance," he replied bitterly; "it was h.e.l.l."

Again she caught the note of satiety in his voice, and it stirred her to a feeling of sympathy which she despised in herself.

"At least you worked out your own d.a.m.nation," she returned coolly.

"One usually does," he admitted. "That's the infernal part of it. But I'm out of it now," he pursued with an egoism which rejoiced in its own strength. "I'm out of it now with a whole skin and I hope to keep decent even if I don't get to heaven. You might not think it," he concluded gravely, "but I'm at bottom as religious a chap as old John Knox."

"You may be," she observed without enthusiasm, "but it's the kind of religion which impresses me not at all."

"Well, it might have been better," he said, "but I never had a chance.

I've known such devilish women all my life."

Humour shone in her eyes, making her whole face darkly brilliant with expression. "Do you know that you show a decided family resemblance to Adam," she observed.

"It does sound that way," he laughed, "but there's some hard sense in it, after all. A woman has a tremendous effect on a man's life--I mean the woman he really likes."

"Wouldn't it be safer to say the 'women'?" she suggested.

"Nonsense. I was only joking. There is always one who is more than the others--any man will tell you that."

"I suppose any man will--even Perry Bridewell."

"Why not Perry?" he demanded. "You can't imagine how he used to bore the life out of me about Gerty--but Gerty, you know," he added in a burst of confidence which impressed her as almost childlike, "isn't exactly the kind of woman to a--a lift a fellow."

Before his growing earnestness she resorted quickly to the defence of flippancy. "Nor is Perry, I suppose, exactly the kind of man that is lifted," she observed, with a laugh.

He looked at her a moment with a smile which had even then an edge of his characteristic genial irony. "You are the sort of woman who could do that," he said abruptly.

"Could lift Perry? Now, G.o.d forbid!" she retorted gayly.

"Oh, Perry be hanged!" he exclaimed, with the candid ill-humour which, strangely enough, had a peculiar attraction for her. "If I had known you fifteen years ago I might be a good deal nearer heaven than I am to-day."

The charm of his earnestness was very great, and she felt that the sudden sensation of faintness which came over her must be visible in her fluttering eyelids and in her trembling hands.

"I haven't faith in a salvation that must be worked out by somebody else," she said, in a voice she made cold by an effort to render it merely careless.

An instant before he had told himself with emphasis that he would go no further, but the chill remoteness from which she looked at him stirred him to an emotion that was not unlike a jealous anger. She seemed to him then more brightly distant, more sweetly inaccessible than she had done at their first meeting.

"Not even when it is a salvation through love?" he asked impulsively, and at the thought that she was possibly less indifferent than she appeared to be, he felt his desire of her mount swiftly to his head.

Her hand went to her bosom to keep down the wild beating of her heart, but the face with which she regarded him was like the face of a statue.

"No--because I doubt the possibility of such a thing," she said.

"The possibility of my loving you or of your saving me?"

"The possibility of both."

"How little you know of me," he exclaimed, and his voice sounded hurt as if he were wounded by her disbelief.

She raised her eyes and looked at him, and for several seconds they sat in silence with only the little s.p.a.ce between them.

"It is very well," she said presently, "that I believe nothing that you say to me--or it might be hard to divide the truth from the untruth."

"I never told you an untruth in my life," he protested angrily.

"Doesn't a man always tell them to a woman?" she enquired.

For an instant he hesitated; then he spoke daringly, spurred on by her indifferent aspect. "He doesn't when--he loves her."

"When he loves her more than ever," she returned quietly, as if his remark held for her merely an historic interest, "Perry Bridewell loves Gerty, I suppose, and yet he lies to her every day he lives."

"That's because she likes it," he commented, with a return of raillery.

"She doesn't like it--no woman does. As for me I want the truth even if it kills me."

"It wouldn't kill you," he answered, and the tenderness in his voice made her feel suddenly that she had never known what love could be, "it would give you life." Then his tone changed quickly and the old pleasant humour leaped to his eyes, "and whatever comes I promise never to lie to you," he added.

She shook her head. "I didn't ask it," she rejoined, with a sharp breath.

"If you had," he laughed, "I wouldn't have promised. That's a part of the general contrariness of men--they like to give what they are not asked for."

"Well, I'll never ask anything of you," she said, smiling.

"Is that because you want to get everything?" he enquired gayly.

A pale flush rose to her forehead, and the glow heightened the singular illumination which dwelt in her face. "Would the best that you could give be more than a little?"

"It would be more than a woman ever got on earth."