The Wheel of Life Part 48

"And the people who live here?--What of them?"

"I like them because they are so near to the ground," she answered, "they've no surface of culture, or personality, or convention to bother one--they've no surface, indeed, of any kind."

"Well, it's all very interesting," he remarked, smiling, "but, in common decency, don't you think you might have sent me word?"

"I never thought of you an instant," she replied.

"You never thought of me in your life," he retorted, "and yet when I say I'm better worth your thinking of than Kemper--G.o.d knows I don't pretend to boast."

A weaker man would have hesitated over the name, but he had seen at the first glance that the way to save her was not by softness, and his lips, after he had uttered the word, closed tightly like the lips of a surgeon who applies the knife.

"Don't speak to me of him!" she cried out sharply, "I had forgotten!"

Her eyes hung upon his in a returning agony, and it was through this agony alone that he hoped to bring back her consciousness of life.

"This is not the way to forget," he answered, "you are not a coward, yet you have chosen the cowardly means. There can he no forgetfulness until you are strong enough to admit the truth to your own heart--to say 'there is no mistake that is final, no wrong done that has power to crush me.'"

"But there is no truth in my heart," she answered, with sudden energy, "it is all a lie--I am a lie all over, and it makes no difference because I have ceased to care. I used to think that people only died when they were put in coffins, but I know now that you can be dead and yet move and walk about and even laugh and pretend to be like all the rest--some of whom are dead also. And I didn't die slowly," she added, with a vague impersonal interest, which impressed him as almost delirious in its detachment, "I wasn't killed in a year, but in a minute. One instant I was quite alive--as alive as you are now--and the next I was as dead as if I had been buried centuries ago."

"And who is to blame for this?" he demanded, white to the lips.

"Oh, it wasn't he--it was life," she went on calmly, "he couldn't help it, nor could I--n.o.body can help anything. Do you understand that?" she asked, with the searching mental clearness which seemed always lying behind her dazed consciousness, "that we're all drawn by wires like puppets, and the strongest wire pulls us in the direction in which we are meant to go? It's curious that I should never have known this before because it has become perfectly plain to me now--there is no soul, no aspiration, no motive for good or evil, for we're every one worked by wires while we are pretending to move ourselves."

"All right, but it's my turn at the wire now," responded Adams, smiling.

At his words she broke out into little hard dry sobs, which had in them none of the softness of tears. "n.o.body is to blame for anything," she repeated, still striving, in a dazed way, to be just to Kemper.

Even more than her face and her voice, this pathetic groping of her reason, moved him into a pa.s.sion of sympathy; and while he looked at her, he resisted an impulse to gather her, in spite of her coldness, against his breast.

"What is it, Laura, that has made you suffer like this?" he asked.

But his words made no impression upon her, perhaps because they could not penetrate the outer husk of deadness which enveloped her.

"Do you know what it is to feel ashamed?" she demanded suddenly, "to feel ashamed, not in a pa.s.sing quiver, but in a settled state every instant that you live? Do you know what it is to have every sensation of your body merged into this one feeling of shame--to be ashamed with your eyes and hands and feet as well as with your mind and heart and soul? I could have stood anything but this," she added, pressing closer against the window.

An exclamation which was almost one of anger burst from him, and going to where she stood, he laid his hand upon her arm as if in the effort to recall her reason by physical force. But with his first touch his grasp lost its energy and grew gentle, for her anguish appeared to him, as he held her, to be only the instinctive crying out of a child that is hurt.

His hold slipped from her arm, and taking her hands, he bent over and kissed them until they lay quiet in his own.

"Laura, do you trust my love for you?" he asked.

"I trust you, yes," she answered, "but not love--it is only one of the wires by which we are moved."

"Trust anything you please about me, so long as you trust--that is all I ask," he let her hands fall from his and looked into her face. "Promise me that you will be here waiting when I return."

"There's no place for me to go--I shall be here," she answered.

Her eyes followed him with a pathetic child-like fear while he crossed the room and went out leaving her alone.

CHAPTER V

BETWEEN LAURA AND GERTY

Did he possess the strength as well as the love that she needed? Adams asked himself a little later as he walked back under the stars. He saw her as he had just left her--wan, despairing; so bloodless that the light seemed s.h.i.+ning through her features, and then he remembered the radiant smile which she had lost, the glorious womanhood obscured now by humiliation. An a.s.surance, in which there was almost exultation, flooded his thoughts, and he was aware that the pa.s.sion he felt for her had been suddenly strengthened by an emotion of equal power--by the longing born in his heart to afford protection to whatever suffered within his sight.

Never for an instant, since he had entered the room where she retreated before him, had he doubted either his appointed mission or his power of renewal. His whole experience, he understood now, had directed him to this hour which he had not foreseen, and the worldly success for which he had once struggled meant to him at last only that he might bring hope where there was failure. Even Connie--her love, her tragic history, her pitiable reliance upon him at the end--showed to him in the aspect of a human revelation--for his fuller understanding of Connie had confirmed him in the patience by which alone he might win back Laura to the happiness which she had lost.

The road stretching ahead of him was no longer obscured, but shone faintly luminous out of the surrounding darkness. Not the future alone but the desert places through which he had come had blossomed, and the beauty which was revealed to him at last was the beauty in all things that have form or being--in the earth no less than in the sky, in the flesh no less than in the spirit, for were not earth and flesh, after all, only sky and spirit in the making? The perfect plan, he had learned, in the end, is not for any part but for the whole.

Across the ferry, he found a cab which took him to Gerty's house, and in response to his message, she came down immediately, looking excited and perturbed, in an evening gown of black and silver.

"Have you brought me news of Laura?" she asked breathlessly. "Perry's dragging me to a dinner, but if she's ill, I can't go--I won't."

"Don't go," he answered, "she's not ill, but if she were it would be better. Will you come with me now and bring her back with you?"

Without replying to his question, she ran from the room and returned, in a moment, wearing a hat and a long coat which covered her black and silver dress.

"The carriage is waiting now," she said, "we can take it and let Perry go to his dinner in a cab."

"But--good Lord, Gerty--what am I to say to them?" demanded Perry while he shook hands with Adams. "I never could make up an excuse in my life, you know."

Then his eyes blinked rapidly and he fell back with merely a muttered protest, for Gerty shone, at the instant, with a beauty which neither he nor Adams had ever seen in her before. The wonderful child quality softened her look, and they watched her soul bloom in her face like a closed flower that expands in sunlight.

"I don't know, my dear," she responded gently, and with her hand on Adams's arm, she ran down the steps and into the carriage before the door. As they drove away, she looked up at him with a tender little smile.

"I am so glad that she has you," she said.

"In having you, she has a great deal more."

"It is you who have done it all--you expected me to have courage, so I have it. Had you expected me to be cowardly, I should have been so."

"Well, I expect you to save her," he answered quietly.

"Does she need it? What was it? What does it mean?"

"You'll know to-night, perhaps. I shall never know, but what does it matter?"

"I saw Arnold to-day," she said, "he is terribly--terribly--" she hesitated for a word, "cut up about it. Yet he swears he can't for the life of him see that he was to blame. Had he been to blame, he says, he would have shot himself."

"Would he?" he remarked indifferently.

"He sails for Europe on Sat.u.r.day--if he hears she's found."

He bit back an exclamation of anger.