The Wheel of Life Part 33

He leaned back closing his eyes; and immediately, without warning and against his will, there rose before him the seductive face of Madame Alta, and he recalled her exquisite voice, with its peculiar high note of piercing sweetness. Then he remembered his wife, and, one by one, the other women whom he had loved and forgotten or merely forgotten without loving. They meant so little in his existence now, and yet once, each in her own bad time had engrossed utterly his senses. In what rare quality of sentiment could this love differ from those lesser loves that had gone before?

But he was not given to introspection, and so the disturbing question left him almost as readily as it had come. When one attempted to think things out, there was no hope of escaping the endless circle with a clear head. No, he wasn't a.n.a.lytical, thank Heaven!

While he was still rejoicing in what he called his "practical turn of mind," he remembered suddenly an appointment at his club which he had made a week ago and then overlooked in the absorbing interest of his engagement.

"By Jove, you'll get me into an awful sc.r.a.pe some day," he remarked cheerfully as he hurried into his overcoat. "I might have lost fifty thousand dollars by letting this thing slip."

His manner had changed completely with the awakened recollection; and finance in all its forms--the look of figures, the clink of coin--had a.s.sumed instantly the position of romance in his thoughts. For the moment Laura was crowded from his mind, and she recognised this with a pang sharp and cold as the thrust of a dagger.

"If you only knew how much you'd nearly cost me," were his last words as he ran down the steps.

At the corner he met Gerty's carriage and in response to her inviting gesture, he gave an order to the coachman as he sprang inside.

"Well, this is a G.o.dsend," he observed with a grateful sigh while he wrapped the fur rug carelessly about him. "A drive with a pretty woman leaves a surface car a good many miles behind. And you are unusually pretty this morning," he commented with a touch of daring gallantry.

"I ought to be," returned Gerty defiantly, "for heaven knows I take trouble enough about it. Oh, I _am_ glad to see you!" she finished gayly, "how is Laura?"

He met her question with his genial smile. "She makes a pretty good pretence at happiness," he answered.

"And so she's really over head and ears in love?"

"Does it surprise you that she should find me charming?" he asked, laughing.

She nodded with unshaken candour.

"I was never so much surprised in all my life."

If his smile was ready it did not fail to betray a touch of vanity that was almost childlike.

"And yet there was a time when you yourself rather liked me," he retorted with his intimate and penetrating glance.

"Was there?" She avoided his look though her tone was almost insolent, "my dear fellow, I never in my life liked you better than I like you at this minute--but we are speaking now of Laura's liking not of mine. Oh, Arnold, Arnold, I am in a quake of fear."

"About Laura? Then get over it and don't be silly."

"And you are honestly and truly and terribly in earnest?"

"My dear girl, I'm going to marry her--isn't that enough? Does a man commit suicide except when he's sincere?"

Her shallow cynicism had dropped from her now, and she turned toward him with an unaffected anxiety in her face.

"Then it will last--it must."

"Last!" An expression of irritation showed in his eyes, and he shrugged his shoulders with an impatient movement. "Of course it won't last--nothing does. If you want the eternal you must seek it in eternity."

"So in the end it will be like--all the others?"

Because the question annoyed him he responded to it with a frankness that was almost brutal. "Everything is like everything else," he returned, "there's nothing new, least of all in the emotions."

For a minute she looked at him in silence while the steady green flame appeared to him to grow brighter in her eyes. Was it contempt or curiosity that he saw in her face?

"Poor Laura!" she said at last very softly. "Poor happy Laura!"

At her words his dissenting laugh broke out, but he showed by his animated glance a moment later that it was of herself rather than of Laura that he was thinking.

"Is it such a terrible fate, after all, to become my wife?" he enquired.

His look challenged hers, and lifting her insolent bright eyes, she returned steadily the smiling gaze he bent upon her.

"Oh, dear me, yes," she answered merrily, "it is almost if not quite as bad as being Perry's." The carriage had stopped at the door of his club, and his mind was already at work over the approaching interview.

"Well, you escaped the lesser for the greater ill," he responded pleasantly, as he gave her hand a careless parting pressure.

PART III

DISENCHANTMENT

CHAPTER I

A DISCONSOLATE LOVER AND A PAIR OF BLUE EYES

With that strange hunger of youth for the agony of experience, Trent allowed the news of Laura's engagement to plunge him into an imaginary despondency which was quite as vivid as any reality of suffering. For a week he persistently refused his meals, and he was even seized with a kind of moral indignation when his perfectly healthy appet.i.te a.s.serted itself at irregular hours. To eat with a broken heart appeared to him an act of positive brutality; and yet he was aware that, in spite of the sting of his wounded pride, the tragic ending of his first romance produced not the slightest effect upon his physical enjoyment. It was an instance where a purely ideal sentiment struggled against a perfectly normal const.i.tution.

"You could never have cared for me, of course I always knew that," he remarked one day to Laura, "but I can't help wis.h.i.+ng that you hadn't fallen in love with anybody else."

From the bright remoteness of her happiness she smiled down upon him.

"But doesn't such a wish as that strike you as rather selfish?"

"I don't care--I want you back again just as you used to be--and now,"

he added bitterly, "you've even given up your writing."

"I shall never write again," she answered, quietly, without regret. It was a truth which she felt only intuitively at the time, for her reason as yet had hardly taken account of a fact that was perfectly evident to the subtler perceptions of her feeling. She would never write again--her art had been only the exotic flowering of a luxuriant imagination and she had lost value as a creative energy while she had gained in experience as a human soul.

"I was too young, that was the trouble," pursued Trent, "there were five years between us."

"My dear boy," she laughed merrily, "there was all eternity."

His bitterness, he felt, grew heavily upon him while he watched her. A new beauty had pa.s.sed into her face; the mystery of a thousand lives was in her look, in her gestures, in her voice; and she appeared to him not as herself alone, but as the embodied essence of all former loves of which he had dreamed--of all the enchanting dead women of whom the poets wrote. Then he thought of Arnold Kemper, with his exhausted emotions, his superficial cleverness, his engrossing middle-age, and especially of his approaching baldness. Was love, after all, he questioned, only a re-quickened memory in particular brain cells as modern scientists believed? Was physical heredity, in truth, the fulfilling of the law of life? and was the soul merely a series of vibrations by which matter lived and moved?

All the way home his angry scepticism boiled over in his thoughts, and at the luncheon table, a little later, he met his mother's placid enquiries with an explosion of boyish despair.