Fairfax and His Pride Part 51

He had been awake since dawn, fire in his blood and heart animating his brain and stimulating his creative power. In the early light he had seated himself to make a few sketches, drawing little exquisite studies of her, and the face on the paper was ideal, irritatingly so. The chin and the cheek was young and soft, too youthful for Mrs. Faversham. It suggested Bella.

When he went to see her that afternoon, for the first time he was shown upstairs. Each step was sacred to him as he mounted to the part of the house in which she lived her intimate life. The stairs were marble, covered by thick rugs; the iron bal.u.s.trade had been brought from a chateau in the days of the Revolution. Along the wall at his side hung splendid tapestries, whose colours would have delighted him at another time. But his eyes now were blinded to material things. His soul, heart and nature were aflame, and he walked on air. When he was shown into a small room, Mrs. Faversham's own sitting-room, his agitation was so great that he seemed to walk through a mist.

She was not there. The day was fresh and the wood fire burning across the andirons called to him with a friendly voice. The objects by which she surrounded herself represented a fortune; the clock before him, which marked the hour in which he first came to see his love, had belonged to Marie Antoinette, and it beamed on the lover from its wise old clever face,--crystal water fell noiselessly, as the minutes pa.s.sed, from a little golden mill over which watched two Loves like millers.

There were her books on the table, bound with art and taste. There were her writing things on her desk, and a half-finished letter on the blotter. There was her "chaise-longue" with its protective pillows, its sable cover, and between the lace curtains Antony could see the trees of the park. On the footstool a Pekinese dog sat looking at him malevolently. It lifted its fluffy body daintily and raised its impertinent little face to the visitor. Then a door opened and she came in murmuring his name. Antony, seeing her through a mist of love which had not yet cleared, took her in his arms, calling her "Mary, Mary!" He felt the form and shape of her in his arms. As dream women had never given themselves to him, so she seemed to yield.

When they sat side by side on the little sofa the Pekinese dog jumped up and sat between them. She caressed it with one hand, laying the other on Antony's shoulder.

"I must tell you my life," he said, and his sight cleared as he spoke, and he saw her face transformed by its emotion, her eyes adoring and beautiful, her lips parted as if the breath of life he had given to her left her wondering still.

"Don't tell me of anything to-day."

He took the hand that lay on his shoulder and raised it. "I must tell you now."

"I ask for nothing, Antony. What does the past matter?" She bent forward and kissed him on his eyes. "I would like to think they had never looked at anything before to-day."

He smiled. "But they have looked hard at many things, Mary. They will always look deeply, and I want you to look back with me."

She sighed. "Then, forward with me." The Pekinese dog sprang into her lap. "Go on," she said docilely; "but I am so divinely happy! Why should we think of anything else?"

He brushed away the mist that threatened again to cloud his vision. He took her hand and held it firmly and, lifting up his head, began frankly to tell her of his past.

"I am a Southerner, born in New Orleans...."

As he talked she listened spellbound by his power of narrative. In his speech he was as charming a creator as in his art. She saw the picture of his Louisiana home; she saw the exquisite figure of his mother; she saw the beginning of his genius and his poetic, dreaming years. When he began the more realistic part of his story, talking aloud like this of himself for the first time to a woman he loved, he forgot her entirely, carried back by a strong force to the beginning of his struggles in New York. She listened, unchanged and a little terrified, as he told her of his work in the sculptor's studio, disguising the name of the man for whom he worked. She stopped him, her hand on his. So had she asked previously Cedersholm. Her voice brought him back to the present, to a feeling that for nothing in the world would he tell her yet, and he said "No, no," veiling the fact so that he could not guess, and pa.s.sed over the misery of his master's treachery and his defeat. But through his narrative like a flame, charming, brilliant, vivifying, flashed the personality of Bella, though a child only, still a woman, and again Mary Faversham, with her hand on his stopped him--

"What a bewitching child," she said. "Don't speak of her with such fire.

I believe you loved her! She must be a woman."

Antony stirred. He rose from the divan where he was sitting and crossed over to the fireplace and stood by the eighteenth-century clock where the crystal water fell with the pa.s.sing moments. She looked at him as he stood there, powerfully built, strong, the light of his feeling and of his introspection kindling in his eyes and on his brow. It had been three o'clock when he began his story. The afternoon grew paler, the fire died down to ashes on the little hearth. He took a cigarette from his pocket, lit it and stood smoking a few moments. Then he went in his imagination to Albany and carried his hearer with him, and he began to speak of Molly. He waited for a moment before laying bare to her his intimate life. As he turned and met her eyes, he said--

"I do not know how to tell you this. You must listen as well as you can.

It is life, you know, and there are many kinds."

Antony, absorbed in his speech, forgot her entirely. He told her of Molly Shannon with a tenderness that would have moved any woman. When he closed the chapter of his married life, with his last words a silence fell, and he saw that she was moved beyond what he had dreamed she would be. He went back to her, waited a moment, then sat down and put his arm around her.

"That is my past," he murmured. "Can you forget what there is in it of defeat and forget its sorrow?"

She kissed him and murmured: "I love you the better for it. It seems you have come to me through th.o.r.n.y ways, Antony. Perhaps I can make you forget them."

He did not tell her that she would. Even in this moment, when she was in his arms, he knew that in her there would be no such oblivion for him.

The marks were too deep upon him. He felt them now. With what he had been saying, there came back to him a sense of the tremendous burden he had borne when poor, a sense of the common burden we all bear and which in the heart of the poet nothing ever entirely lifts.

"Listen," he said urgently and with a certain solemnity. "Any other man would speak to you about nothing but love. I can do it some day perhaps too easily, but not now, for this is our beginning and between us both there must be nothing to conceal." He thought she started a little, and said hastily: "I mean, nothing for our souls to hide. What I have told you is my life, but it does not end there. I adore my work. I am a worker born, I don't know how much of one, but I must give my time and my talent to it."

"I know, I know," she breathed. "Do you think I don't realize it, Antony? Do you think I don't adore you for it? Why, it is part of what makes me love you."

"That is all," he said. "I could no more emanc.i.p.ate myself from my work than I can from my ideals; they are part of me. I am perfectly poor."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, softly, "don't, don't speak of that."

He turned his fine eyes on her with a light in them whose courage and beauty she did not understand.

"Why not speak of it?" he asked quietly. "I am not ashamed of the fact that I have no money. Such as money is, I shall make it some day, and I shall not value it then any more than I do now. It is necessary, I begin to see, but only that. Its only importance is the importance we give to it: to keep straight with our kind; to justify our existence, and," he continued, "to help the next man."

His face took a firmer expression. More than in his recitation of his life he seemed to forget her. As he said so, his arms fell a little way away from her--she grew cold--he seemed a stranger. Only for a moment, however, for he turned, put out his arms, and drew her to him. He kissed her as he had not kissed her yet, and after a few moments said--

"Mary, I bring you my talent, and my manhood, and my courage--nothing else--and I want it to be enough for you."

She said that it was. That it was more than enough.

Fairfax sighed, his arms dropped, he smiled and looked at her, and said--

"I wonder if it is?" He glanced round the room quietly, with an arrogance of which he was unconscious. "You must give all this up, Mary."

"Must I?" She flushed and laughed. "You mean to say you want me to come to Bohemia?"

"I want you to live as I can live," he said, "share what I must have ...

that is, I should ask you that if you married me now ..."

He watched her face. It was still illuminated. Her love for him was too vital to be touched by this proposition which she did not wholly understand.

"Most men shrink," Fairfax said, "from taking the woman they love from her luxuries. I believe that I shall not be poor very long. It will be a struggle. If you marry me now, you will share it with me, otherwise ..."

He waited a moment.

And she repeated: "Otherwise, Antony?"

"I shall go away," he answered, "and not come back again until I am rich and great."

CHAPTER XVII

After he had left her he was dazed and incredulous. His egoism, his enthusiasm, his idea of his own self-sufficiency seemed preposterous. A man in love should entertain no idea but the thought of the woman herself. He began to chafe at poverty which he had a.s.sured her made no difference to him. Did he wish to live again terrible years of sacrifice and sordidness? If so, he could not hope a woman accustomed to luxury would choose to share his struggle. He was absurd.

"Money," Dearborn said, regarding his shabby cuffs, "opens many doors. I am inclined also to think that it shuts many doors. You remember the Kingdom of Heaven and the needle's eye; but," he continued whimsically, "I should not think of comparing Mrs. Faversham to a camel, Tony!"

"Don't be an a.s.s," said Antony, proudly. "Mrs. Faversham and I feel alike about it. Money will play no part in our mutual future." And, as he said this, was sure neither of her nor of himself.

"Under which circ.u.mstances," said his companion, "I shall offer you another cup of coffee and tell you my secret. Going with my play to London is not the only one. I am in love. When you have drunk your coffee we'll go home. Potowski is going to play for us, and he is going to bring his wife at last."

The two friends sat that evening in a corner of a cafe on the Boulevard Montparna.s.se. There were Bohemians around them at their table, and they themselves were part of that happy, struggling world. Dearborn dropped his voice, and said softly to Fairfax--