Shadows of Flames Part 73

She was like one in some old-time fable, who gives a wanderer a cup of water, and, lo! after drinking, the wanderer shakes back his cloak of hodden-grey, and it is Eros himself glowing against the twilight--she had entertained, unawares, the mightiest angel of them all. The soft, electric plumes of Love had folded down upon her. She was smothered in his sparkling wings, yet this lovely death only released her to new life. It was only her self of later years that was dying softly. She felt herself gleaming, slipping from the hard sh.e.l.l of years--a pearl released, a pearl bathed in seas of wonder.

Back to her earliest girlhood she was washed ... back, back to that sh.o.r.e where all is dream and miracle.... When she had loved Cecil, she had not been so young; she was younger now than when she had wept over her first lover's death. She was not only young--she was youth itself.

She was not standing outside the door of dreams as she had fancied, but within it. That trembling, iridescent gossamer of joy shut out reality--the past, the future--shut her in with the lovely serving-maidens, dreams fulfilled.... It seemed to her that all the poetry of the world was flowering in her heart. Her breast felt full of roses ... red and white roses of love for every mood....

Her little travelling clock struck twelve. It seemed like the voice of a malicious fairy rousing her from her too lovely trance. She started up.

The collie sprang up with her, and stood alert, ears c.o.c.ked, eyes upon her face. She looked about her dazedly. The room was not the same. It gazed back at her with a new expression. She felt as if bodily she, too, had grown different--were looking at the old, familiar objects from a child's stature. The plants in the windows seemed larger. They were like a fairy forest. As the firelight caught the crimson and purple bells of the fuchsias, they seemed to sway--to ring forth a faint, wild music....

She put her hands to her face. This racing of her fancy was like a light fever. And now when she glanced up again, she saw the fuchsias like strange insects flying among their leaves. Their scarlet stamens were like the frail legs of wasps drooped for flight.... She went up and touched one softly, to a.s.sure herself that it was a flower. Fuchsias were never like other flowers to her after that night.

She broke one off and took it with her upstairs. Her bedroom also greeted her with a new look. The fire was almost out. She kneeled down to mend it. As the flame sprang to life again beneath her fingers, she thought of "The Witch of Atlas": ".... Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is...." She knew. She knelt there, adoring the delicate flame, purest and fiercest of elements. Yes--fire was purity itself. This lovely fire in her own heart purified her. She was a Phoenix ... the ashes of her life were only a soft, pale nest from which she had risen thus glorious. Or no--the Dark G.o.ddess had lain her on the coals of pain ... now she was immortal. This white flame within her was immortality....

She slept fitfully but deliciously that night. Every little while she would start awake. It was as if he spoke to her, saying: "Wake, beloved--I, too, am wakeful...." It was delicious to wake thus and drift delicately backward on the tide of dreams into that haven of light, rapturous sleep. Love hummed about her like a fairy bee and stung reason to numbness. All night long, sleeping or waking, phantasy rocked her softly. The warm, firelit air seemed abeat with the wings of the white doves of Venus....

When she woke fully next morning, Sophy thought at first that she had been dreaming. Then all came back to her. She started up in bed. Fright seized her--sheer, panic-terror. What had she done and felt? What had come to her?...

Mammy Nan had kindled a roaring fire, and thrown wide the shutters. The brilliant January sun streamed over the carpet. The sky was blue and bitter, without a cloud. Naked and unashamed, the bold winter morning glared in upon her. She shrank from it, feeling small and frightened like a child stripped for a bath in the ocean which it sees for the first time.

What had come to her?... Then she recalled the delicate clinging of that young, ardent mouth, and her own blood submerged her, pulsing in one shamed wave from head to feet.... She would not think. She sprang from bed and plunged into the icy water of her morning bath that was all netted with sunbeams. She dressed without knowing that she dressed. All the time she kept saying within herself, "What has come to me?... What has come to me?"

She went to the window--stared up at the cloudless blue that seemed to swim with crystal beads as she gazed.

"My G.o.d, what has happened to me?... What is this that has happened to me?" she asked. Lacing her fingers hard together, she kept murmuring: "What is it?... My G.o.d!... what is it?"

She felt ridiculous and abased in her own sight; but the glamour was stealing over her again. "It is impossible ... utterly impossible!" she kept telling herself. Yet at the bottom of it all, s.h.i.+ning up through darkling depths, was that fairy-gold of joy, like the gold crown on the head of the frog in the folk tale. Recalling this old fable of her childhood, she laughed unwillingly. It was a wry laugh, indeed. "Yes,"

she told herself, "a frog with a gold crown--that is what this craziness amounts to.... I am ridiculous ... ridiculous...!" She looked harshly at her reflection in the mirror. "You are ridiculous," she said to it.

But there was more than her own absurdity to think of--there was Loring.

She had to consider him. And at the mere thought of him, again came that frantic blush submerging her. What so ravaged her was the thought that this wild, unreal feeling could not be love. Then she had kissed him, had let him kiss her unworthily. She felt as though falling headlong down abysses in her own nature of which she had never dreamed. Had she, then, a wanton streak in her? Was she of that most contemptible breed of mature women who like to scorch themselves delicately at the fires of youth?

This so horrified her that she dropped into a chair, feeling physically faint. She sat there so long that Mammy Nan put her head in at the door and said severely: "Miss Sophy, yo' coffee's gettin' corpse-cold. Dee bell done rang twict...."

Sophy obeyed the stern voice of Mammy Nan, from the instinct of a hectored childhood. She rose at once and went meekly to drink the coffee that she did not want. She actually ate a waffle under the tyrannical gaze of her old nurse. It was like trying to swallow a bit of flannel.

She rebelled suddenly, and, laying down her knife and fork, said: "I'm not hungry this morning, Mammy--I can't eat."

With this she went to her study--and found Loring standing before the fire. How it happened, Sophy could not tell; but like a homing-pigeon she went to him, and her head was on his breast, and his arms around her without a word spoken. And as his arms went round her, she knew suddenly that she was deathly tired. She also knew quite simply that, ridiculous, impossible, fantastic as it might be, she loved him. This knowledge was so soothing after the terrible idea that had come to her a little while ago--the sick fear that her kiss had been only of the senses, no matter how superfined--that she leaned against him in a sort of rapture of repose. For the moment she was safe--afterwards the deluge. This rea.s.surance of her finer nature made all else seem trivial for the time being. She loved him. She, the mature, bitterly experienced woman, loved this youth! Well--it was ridiculous, but it was not unworthy. The higher G.o.ds might laugh, but they could not turn from her in disgust.

"My Beautiful ... _my_ Beautiful!..." Loring was murmuring, his lips against her hair.

That keen, fresh, wholesome scent of horse and leather and outer air brought the past night back to her in one blinding flare. She stood so silent that he began to laugh, low and nervously.

"I didn't sleep a wink all night, Selene.... I was with you in some queer way. Did you feel me?... Or ... did you sleep?"

"No, dear...."

His arms tightened.

"Did love keep you awake too, my Beautiful--love ... for me?"

It was a whisper.

Sophy withdrew herself from his arms. She sank into the deep chair where she had been sitting last evening, and, as then, he came and knelt beside her. His eyes went thirstily to hers, and as she met those bold, soft eyes, the scarlet leaped to her face.

"Oh! ... like a little girl...." he cried, enchanted. "You blush for me like any little girl...."

Sophy blushed deeper still. Her voice faltered with shame for her own foolishness of belated love. She really thought herself middle-aged at thirty. The four years' difference in her age and Loring's seemed to her an absurd, impa.s.sable gulf. This sense of shame braced her to reason with him.

"Morris...." she began.

He broke into that low, exultant laughter which so confused her.

"Oh, little girl!" he cried again. "She is so young this morning that she lisps.... She calls me 'Morrith.'" And indeed Sophy had lisped over his name as she sometimes lisped in moments of excitement. She was overwhelmed to feel another blush suffuse her. She bit her lip--tried to frown, looking away from him into the fire. He continued laughing. His laughter stirred the hair on her bent neck. Unwillingly she, too, began to laugh. But this laughter was very near to tears. That subtle essence of herself which she had imparted to him made him suddenly grave.

"What is it, my Wonder?" he asked softly. "I am listening...."

"Then ... dear...." she said very low, "this ... that has happened is ... beautiful ... but ... but it is only a dream.... We ... we must wake now...."

"Bend down and see...." he whispered. "I am not dream-stuff, Beautiful.

Bend down to me again ... as last evening...."

"No, my dear ... no and no...."

"Then I must reach to you...."

She felt the flutter of his lips at her mouth's edge. She drew aside, holding him from her. The words came quick and short.

"It is absurd. I am too old ... you are too young.... Heaven and earth would laugh at us.... I am a woman who has lived through horrors ...

yes, horrors.... You are just at the beginning...."

"Yes ... just at the beginning--with you, my Wonderful!"

"My dear, dear boy...."

"'Boy' for your whim.... 'Man' to love you...."

"Oh, be reasonable!..."

"I wouldn't be reasonable for the throne of Caesar----"

"You _must_ be serious.... You _must_ let me talk seriously with you.

I.... I shall be offended if you do not. I shall think your love is only froth."

This brought him upright, a queer gleam in his eyes.

"Well, then...." he said. It was his Marmion tone. It implied, "Come one, come all; this rock shall fly from its firm base as soon as I."

"Go on, please...." he added, as she did not at once speak.