The Wheel of Life Part 34

"There's no use trying to persuade me--I can't eat," he said.

"But, my dear son, I fear you'll work yourself into an illness,"

returned Mrs. Trent, with her unshaken calm.

"I don't care," replied the young man desperately, "whether I die now or later, it is all the same."

"I suppose really it is," admitted his mother; but she added after a pause in which she had dipped mildly into a philosophic curiosity, "The way being in love effects one has always seemed to me the very strangest thing in life. I remember your uncle Channing lived exclusively on onions for a whole month after Mattie G.o.dwin refused his offer. Why he selected onions I could never explain," she concluded, "unless it was that he had never been able to endure the taste of them, and he seemed bent upon making himself as miserable as it was possible to be."

While she went on placidly eating her hashed chicken, Trent tossed off a gla.s.s or two of claret, which he was perfectly aware, taken on his empty stomach, would immediately produce a racking headache. Since his pa.s.sion was not sincere, it occurred to him that it might at least become dramatic; but he saw presently, with aggrieved surprise, that the impression made upon his mother by his violent behavior was far slighter than he had brought himself to expect. When next she spoke her thoughts appeared to have strayed utterly from the subject of his appet.i.te.

"I couldn't sleep last night for thinking of that poor Christina Coles,"

she said, "the char-woman told me yesterday that the child had been obliged to go out and p.a.w.n some of her things in order to get the money to pay her room rent."

With a start his mind swung back from the dream life to the actual. He had not seen Christina for more than a week, and the thought of her pierced his heart with a keen reproach.

"Good G.o.d, has it come to that?" he exclaimed.

"What hurts me most is not being able to do anything to help her,"

resumed Mrs. Trent, "she's so proud that I don't dare even ask her to a meal for fear she'll take offence."

"But if it's so bad as that why doesn't she go home--she must have a home."

"Oh, she has--but to go back, she feels, would mean that she's given up, and the char-woman declares that she'll never give up so long as she's alive."

"Well, she's a precious little fool," observed Trent, as he drank an extra gla.s.s of claret.

But the thought of Christina was not to be so lightly put from him, and before the afternoon was over he went up to the eighth landing and knocked in vain at her door. She was still out, as the little pile of rejected ma.n.u.script lying on her threshold bore witness; and he turned away and came down again with a disappointment of which he felt himself to be half ashamed. An hour later he ran against her when he was going out into the street, and as she turned with her constrained little bow and looked at him for an instant with her sincere blue eyes, he was almost overcome by the rush of pity which the sight of her evoked. How pale and thin she had grown! how shabby her little tan coat looked in the daylight; and yet what a charming curve there was to her brown head! He realised then for the first time that brown--warm, living brown with glints of amber--was the one colour for a woman's hair.

The next morning he rushed off indignantly to upbraid Adams.

"The girl's starving, I tell you--we can't let her starve," he exclaimed in an agony of remorse.

"Oh, yes we can," returned Adams with a cheerful brutality which enraged the younger man. "Starving isn't half so bad as writing trash. But you needn't look at me like that," he added, "she doesn't come here any longer now. She told me fiction was the field she meant to dig in."

"Well, you'll kill her among you," was Trent's threatening rejoinder; and filled with a righteous fury against literature he went back again to knock at the door of Christina's empty room. Once his mother came up also, but the girl, it appeared, was always out now, while the rejected ma.n.u.script thickened each morning upon the threshold. Several times Mrs.

Trent arranged a little tray of luncheon and sent it up stairs by the old negro servant, but the message brought back was always that Christina was not at home. And then gradually, as the weeks went by, the dignity and the pathos of her struggle were surrounded in Trent's mind by a romantic halo. Her beauty borrowed from his poetic fancy the peculiar touch of atmosphere it lacked, and his thoughts dwelt more and more upon her slender, girlish figure, her smooth brown hair, and the flower-like sweetness of her face.

Then just as he had grown almost hopeless of ever seeing her again, he found her one evening in the elevator as he went up to his mother's rooms. The touch of her cold little hand on his sent a sudden shock to his heart, and while he looked anxiously into her face, he saw her go deadly pale and bite her lip sharply as if to bring back her consciousness by the sting of pain.

"You are ill," he said eagerly; "don't deny it, for haven't I eyes? Yes, you must, you shall come with me in to mother."

Even then she would have turned proudly away, but with his impulsive, lover's sympathy he led her from the elevator upon the landing on which he lived. "She is waiting for you--she wants you," he urged with pa.s.sion; "and can't you see--oh, Christina, I want you, too!"

But his fervour only left her the more cold and shrinking, and she shook her head with a refusal that was almost angry.

"How dare you? Why did you make me come out?" she asked. "I must go back--I am not well--oh, I must go back!"

Over the angry tones of her voice he saw her entreating eyes s.h.i.+ning like wet flowers, and as he looked into them it came to him in a revelation of knowledge that the meaning of everything that had been was made clear at last. He knew now why he had succeeded where Christina had failed--he knew why Laura had refused his love, and why, even in his misery, her refusal had left his heart untouched. And beyond all these things, he realised that now his boyhood was over and that from the experience of this one moment he had become a man.

CHAPTER II

THE DEIFICATION OF CLAY

Not until a month after the announcement of Laura's engagement did she come face to face for the first time with the ugly skeleton which lies hidden beneath the most beautiful of dreams. The spring had pa.s.sed in a troubled rapture; and it was on one of the bright, warm days in early June that she found awaiting her on the hall table when she came in from her walk a letter addressed in a strange handwriting and bearing a strange foreign postmark. Beside this was a note from Kemper explaining a broken engagement of the day before; and she read first her lover's letter, which ended, as every letter of his had ended since the beginning of their love, "Yours with my whole heart and soul, Arnold."

With an emotion which repet.i.tion could never deaden, she stooped to kiss the last sentence he had written, before she turned carelessly to take up the strange foreign envelope, which she had thrown, with her veil and gloves, on the chair at her side. For a moment she pondered indifferently the address; then, almost as she broke the seal, the first words she read were those which lay hidden away in the love letter within her hand, "Yours with my whole heart and soul, Arnold."

In her first shock, even while the blow still blinded her eyes, she turned to seek wildly for some possible solution; and it was then that she discovered that the letter, in Kemper's handwriting, was addressed evidently to some other woman, since it bore the date of a day in June just three years before she had first met him. Three years ago he had declared himself to belong, heart and soul, to this other woman; and to-day, with no remembrance in his mind, it seemed, of that former pa.s.sion, he could repeat quite as ardently the old threadbare avowal.

How many times, she asked herself, had he used that characteristic ending to his love letters?--and the thing appeared to her suddenly to be the veriest travesty of the perfect self-surrender of love.

She was a woman capable of keen retrospective jealousy, and as she sat there, beaten down from her winged ecstasy by the blow that had struck at her from the silence, she told herself pa.s.sionately that her life was wrecked utterly and her brief happiness at an end. Then, with that relentless power of intellect, from which her emotions were never entirely separated, she began deliberately to disentangle the true facts from the temporary impulses of her jealous anger.

"I am wounded and yet why am I wounded and by what right?" she demanded, with a pathetic groping after the self-condemnation which would acquit her lover, "he has lived his life, I know--I have always known it--and his letter has only brought forcibly before me a fact which I have accepted though I have not faced it." And it occurred to her, with the bitter sweetness of a consoling lie, that he could not have been false to her three years ago, since he was not then even aware of her existence. To dwell on this thought was like yielding to the power of an insidious drug, and yet she found herself forcing it almost deliriously against her saner judgment. "How could he wrong me so long as I was a stranger to him?" she repeated over and over. "On the day that he first loved me, his old life, with its sins and its selfish pleasures, was blotted out." But her conscience, even while she reasoned, told her that love could possess no power like this--that the man who loved her to-day, was the inevitable result of the man who had loved other women yesterday, and that there was as little permanence in the prompting of mere impulse as there was stability in change itself.

So the voice within her spoke through the intolerable clearness of her intellect; and in her frantic desire to drown the thing it uttered, she repeated again and again the empty words which her heart prompted. Yet she knew even though she urged the falsehood upon her thoughts, that it was less her argument that pleaded for Kemper than the memory of a look in his face at animated instants, which rose now before her and appealed disturbingly to her emotions.

Three ways of conduct were open to her, she saw plainly enough. Wisdom suggested that she should not only put the letter aside, but that she should banish the recollection of its existence from her life. But, while she admitted that this would be the most courageous treatment of the situation, she recognised perfectly that to act upon such a decision was utterly beyond her strength. Though she were to destroy the object, was the memory of it not seared indelibly into her brain? and would not this memory return to embitter long afterward her happiest moments?

"When he kisses me I shall remember that he has kissed other women and I feel that I shall grow to hate him if he should ever write to me again in those lying words." But she knew intuitively that he would use the same ending in his next letter, and that she would still be powerless to hate him, if only because of his disturbing look, which came back to her whenever she attempted to judge him harshly. "I might really hate him so long as he was absent from me, and yet if he came again and looked at me in that way for a single instant, I know that, in spite of my resolution, I would throw myself into his arms." And she felt that she despised herself for a bondage against which she struggled as hopelessly as a bird caught in a fowler's net.

Of the two ways which remained to her, she chose, in the end, the course which appeared to her to be the least ungenerous. She would not read the letter--the opening and the closing sentences she had seen by accident--for, when all was said, it had not been written for her eyes; and it struck her, as she brooded over it, that there would be positive disloyalty in thus stealing in upon the secrets of Kemper's past. No, she would place it in his hands, she determined finally, still unread; and in so doing she would not only defeat the purpose of the sender, but would prove to him as well as to herself that her faith in him was as unalterable as her love. After all to trust was easier than to distrust, for the brief agony of her indecision had brought to her the knowledge that the way of suspicion is the way of death.

And so when he came a little later she gave the letter, at which she had not again looked, into his hands. "Here is something that reached me only this morning," she said. "It is not worth thinking of, and I have read only the first and the last sentence."

At her words he unfolded the paper, throwing a mere casual glance, as he did so, upon the thin foreign envelope, which appeared to convey to him no hint of its significant contents.

Then, after a hurried skimming of the first page, he turned back again and carefully studied the address in a mystification which was pierced presently by a flash of light.

"By Jove, so she's heard it!" he exclaimed; and the instant afterward he added in a kind of grudging admiration, "Well, she's a devil!"

The incident appeared suddenly to engross him in a manner that Laura had not expected, and he stooped to examine the postmark with an attention which gave her, while she watched him, a queer sense of being left out quite in the cold.

"But why, in thunder, should she care?" he demanded.

"She?" there was no trouble in her voice, only an indifferent question.

"Oh, it's Jennie Alta, of course--she's perfectly capable of such a thing." Then, reaching out, he drew Laura into his arms with a confidence which had the air, she thought, of taking the situation almost too entirely for granted--of accepting too readily her att.i.tude as well as his possession of her. "My darling girl, what a regular brick you are!" he said.

Though she realised, as he spoke, that this was the reward of her silence and her struggle, she told herself, in the next breath that, in some way, it was all inadequate. She had expected more than a phrase, and the very fact that the note of earnestness was absent from his voice but made her desire the sound of it the more pa.s.sionately. Again she felt the baffled sensation which came to her in moments of their closest intimacy. Had his soul, in truth, eluded her for the last time? And was there in the profoundest emotion always a distance which it was forever impossible to bridge? Yet the uncertainty, the very lack of a fuller understanding only added fervour to the pa.s.sion that burned in her heart.

"It's all over now, so we may as well warm ourselves by the failure of her deviltry," he observed presently, as he flung the crumpled paper into the fire. "I'm downright sorry she'll never know how little harm she's done."

"It might, I suppose, have been worse," suggested Laura.

"Well, I suppose so--and you mean me to believe that you didn't even read it?" he enquired with tender gayety.

She gave him her eyes frankly as an answer to his appeal for faith. "Why should I? I love you," she replied.