"Oh, lots of things."
"Keep to one, please."
She smiled.
"Which shall it be?"
His eyes lingered upon her in sudden brightness.
"Think of me," he responded.
"I do," returned Mariana, amiably; "but when I think of you I think of Mr. Ardly, and when I think of Mr. Ardly I think of The Gotham, and when I think of The Gotham I think of – Mr. Paul."
"Confound Mr. Paul!" retorted Nevins, crossly.
"Please don't," protested Mariana; and she added, "you know he disapproves of me very much."
"The scoundrel!"
"But a great many people do that."
"The scoundrels!"
"Oh no," said Mariana, plaintively; "it is only your kindness of heart that makes you say so."
He laid down his brush and looked at her.
"My God! – Mariana!" he exclaimed.
"Nevins," said a voice in the doorway.
He turned abruptly. Mariana, behind the curtained easel, paled suddenly.
"I knocked, my dear fellow," the voice went on, "and I thought you answered. So you are alone. I came to look at the portrait."
"I am not alone," returned Nevins, awkwardly; "but come in, a – a – Algarcife."
Mariana rose from behind the easel and came forward. Her face was white, but she was smiling.
"He is painting every one's portrait," she said, "and I am one of everybody." She held out her hand. He took it limply, and it fell from his grasp.
"I beg your pardon," he said; "I did not know."
"Oh, it doesn't matter," responded Mariana. "Please look at the portrait. I want to – to rest."
He turned from her coldly.
"Since Mrs. Gore is so kind," he said to Nevins, "I will look at it. It will only detain you a moment."
He crossed the room and drew aside the curtain from a large canvas, then he fell back from the light and examined it carefully for a few seconds, suggesting an alteration or two, and making a favorable comment.
Mariana followed him with her eyes, her hands clasped before her, her face pallid, and the red of her lips shining like a scarlet thread. "It – it is very like," she said, suddenly.
He bowed quietly, showing a slight surprise, as he might have done at the remark of a stranger. Then he turned to the door.
"I am sorry to have interrupted you," he said. "Good-morning."
When the door closed upon him Mariana stood for an instant with her head bent as if listening to his footsteps on the stairs. Then she turned to Nevins, a smile flashing across her face.
"We must go back to the portrait," she said. "It must be finished quickly – quickly. I am afraid of wrinkles."
CHAPTER IX
Mariana was walking under the elms that skirt the park on Fifth Avenue. It was a mild December morning, and the sunshine fell in silvery waves through the bare branches of trees overhead and rippled lightly across the concrete sidewalk, while the slender shadows of the boughs assumed the effect of irregular lines drawn by crude fingers upon a slate. Far ahead, through the narrowing archway of naked elms, the perspective sloped in gradual incline, blending the changing shades of blue and gray into a vista of pale violet. On the low stone wall to her left the creepers showed occasional splashes of scarlet berries, glowing warm and vivid through the autumnal haze which tinted the atmosphere. December had reverted for a single day into the majesty of dead October.
Mariana walked slowly, the furs, which she found oppressive, open at the throat, and her muff hanging idly from her hand. There was a rapt expression upon her face, and her eyes were sombre. She had the strained and preoccupied air of one whose mind has winged back to long-past days, leaving the body adrift in its relation to present events. All at once a tiny child, rolling a toy along the sidewalk, stumbled and fell before her feet, uttering shrieks of dismay. The incident recalled her to herself, and, as she stooped to lift it, she smiled at the profuse apologies of the nurse. Then she glanced about her, as if uncertain of the number of blocks that she had walked.
Three aspens, standing together in the park, arrested her gaze, and she looked at them with momentary intentness. Their slender bodies shone like leprous fingers, pointing heavenward, and on the topmost point of one a broken spray of frosted leaves shivered whitely. They recalled to her with a shudder the little graveyard on the old plantation, where she had spent her earliest childhood, and she was seized with a spasm of memory. She saw the forgotten and deserted graves, with the rank periwinkle corroding the marble slabs, and she saw the little brown lizards that crept out to bask upon them in the summer sunshine. With the recollection, death appeared to her hideous and loathsome, and she walked on quickly, her eyes on the pavement. A group of street-cleaners were seated against the stone wall, eating their mid-day meal, and she looked at the hunks of bread and ham with a feeling of sympathy for the consumers. Then, as she passed, her thoughts swung to the owner of the house across the way whom she knew, and who was descending the front steps. At Sixty-seventh Street she turned into the park, her eyes drawn by the clump of pines darkly defined against the gray rock beyond. For the second time her errant thoughts went back to her childhood and to the great pine forest where the wind played lullabies through the white heat of August days. She felt a swift desire to throw herself beneath the little alien growth of pine, to lie on the soft grass, which was still like emerald deepened by bluish shadows, and to let the spicy needles fall upon her upturned face.
As she moved onward, a man crossing the park in a rapid walk approached her. It was Father Algarcife, and in a moment their glances met.
He raised his hat, and would have passed on, but she stopped him by a gesture.
"Won't you speak to me?" she asked, and her voice wavered like a harp over which the player has lost control.
As she looked at him she saw that he had grown thinner since she had last seen him, and that his eyes shone with an unnatural lustre.
"What is there for me to say?" he returned, arresting her wavering glance.
Her lips quivered.
"I may go away," she said, "and this is the last chance. There is something I must tell you. Will you turn and walk back with me?"
He shook his head.
"What is the use?" he asked, impatiently. "There is nothing to be said that cannot better be left – unsaid."
"No! No!" she said. "You must not think worse of me than – than I deserve."
He was smiling bitterly.
"What I think of you," he returned, "matters very little." Then the smile passed, and he looked at her gravely. "I have little time," he said. "My days are not my own." And he added, slowly: "If you wish it, I will walk back with you for a short distance."
"Thank you," she replied, and they passed the clump of pines on their way in the park.
For a time they were silent, he was looking ahead, and her eyes followed their shadows as they flitted before her on the ground. The two shadows drew nearer, almost melted into one, and fell away.
Suddenly he turned to her.
"There was something you wished to say?" he asked, as he had asked his parishioners a hundred times; then he added: "Even though it were better left unsaid?"
Her eyes left the shadows, and were raised to his face. She thought suddenly that there was a line of cruelty about his mouth, and shrank from him. Had she really seen that face illuminated by passion, or was memory a lie? She spoke rapidly, her words tripping upon one another.
"I want you to know," she said, "how it happened – how I did it – how – "
He looked at her again, and the mocking smile flamed in his eyes.
"What does it matter how it happened," he questioned, "since it did happen? In these days we have become impressionists in all things – even in our experiences. Details are tiresome." Then, as she was silent, he went on. "And these things are done with. There is nothing between Mrs. – Gore and the Reverend Anthony Algarcife except a meeting in a studio and a morning walk in the park. The air is spring-like."
"Don't," she said, suddenly. "You are hard."
He laughed shortly.
"Hard things survive," he answered. "They aren't easy to smash."
She looked at the shadows and then into his face.
"Have you ever forgiven me?" she asked.
He did not answer.
"I should like to feel," she went on, "that you see it was not my fault – that I was not to blame – that you forgive me for what you suffered."
But he looked ahead into the blue-gray distance and was silent.
"Tell me that I was not to blame," she said, again.
He turned to her.
"It was as much your fault," he said, slowly, "as it is the fault of that feather that the wind is blowing it into the lake. What are you that you should conquer the wind?"
She smiled sadly.
"And you have forgiven me?"
His eyes grew hard and his voice cut like steel.
"No."
"And yet you see that I was not to blame."
He smiled again.
"It is the difference," he answered, "between logic and life. What have they in common?"
She spoke almost passionately. "Do you think that I have not suffered?" she asked. "Do you think that you have had all – all the pain?"
He shook his head.
"I do not suffer," he replied. "My life is calm."
She paid no heed to him.
"I have been tortured," she went on; "tortured night and day with memory – and remorse."
His voice was cold, but a sudden anger blazed in his eyes.
"There are drugs for both," he said.
She shivered.
"I have tried to buy happiness as I bought diamonds," she continued. "I have gone from place to place in pursuit of it. I have cheated myself with the belief that I might find it. I did not know that the lack lay in myself – always in myself."
She was silent, and he softened suddenly. "And you have never found it?" he asked. "Of all the things that you craved in youth there is lacking to you now – only your ambition."
She raised her head.
"And love," she finished.
His voice grew hard again.
"We are speaking of realities," he returned, and added, bitterly: "Who should have had love – if not you?"
They had passed the lake, and were walking through the Ramble. The dead leaves rustled beneath their feet.
"It is not true," she said, passionately. "It is false."
"What is false?" he demanded, quietly. "That you have had opportunities for love?"
She did not reply. Her lips were trembling, and her hand played nervously with the ribbon on her muff.
Suddenly she looked up.
"When I left you," she said, slowly, "I went with the opera troupe abroad. For several years I was very successful, and I believed it would end well. I was given a leading part. Then one winter, when we were in Paris, I was taken ill. It was pneumonia. I was very ill, and the pain was frightful. They thought it would go to my heart. But when I grew better the troupe went on. I was left at the hotel, ill and alone – except for one friend – an Englishman – "
He interrupted her harshly.
"You have made a mistake," he said, and his voice was dull and lifeless. "I have no right to know your story. You are not of my parish – nor am I your confessor."
She flinched, but went on steadily, though her tones drooped.
"He had followed me for a long time. He loved me – or thought he did. When I was deserted by the troupe he stayed with me. He paid my bills and brought me back to life. I grew strong again, but – my voice was gone."
She paused as if in pain.
"Sit down," he said.
And they sat down on a bench beneath the naked branches of an oak.
"I was penniless, alone, and very weak. He wanted me even then. At first he did not want to marry me, but when I would not yield, he begged me to come back with him and secure a divorce. I think he was mad with passion."
She hesitated and glanced at him, but he was looking away.
"At last the end came. There was nothing else to do – and I wrote to you."
He moistened his lips as if they were parched from fever.
"Did you get the letter?"
"Yes," he answered, "I got it."
"And you did not answer?"
"What was there for me to say? You were free."
For an instant her eyes blazed.
"You never loved me," she said.
He smiled slightly.
"Do you think so?" he asked.
The anger died from her eyes and she spoke softly.
"I waited for the answer," she said; "waited months, and it did not come. Then I came back. We went out West. A divorce was very easy – and I married him. I owed him so much."
"Yes?"
"It was a mistake. I did not satisfy him. He thought me cold. We quarrelled, and he went to other women. He drank a great deal. I was much to blame, but I could not help it. I hated him. Then his uncle took my part and loved me – God bless him, he was a saint – and kind – oh, so kind. When he died he left me the money, and his nephew and I separated. I have not seen him since."
They were both silent. She could hear his heavy breathing, and her heart throbbed.
"It was all a mistake," she said. "My whole life has been a mistake. But there is no salvation for us who make mistakes."
His eyes grew dark as he looked at her.
"A mistake that one stands by may become the part of wisdom," he said. "Could you not go back to him and begin again?" His face had grown haggard.
Her wrath flamed out.
"If I begin again," she answered, "it must be from the beginning – to relive my whole life."
He looked at her restless hands.
"Then you must look to the future," he said, "since there is no present – and no past."
"There is a past," she returned, passionately.
He shook his head.
"A dead one."
Her mouth shone scarlet in the pallor of her face.
"And shall we forget our dead?" she asked.
His lips closed together with brutal force. His eyes were hot with self-control.
Then he stooped for her muff, which had rolled to the ground, brushing it lightly with his hand. As he gave it to her he rose to his feet.
"Shall we return?" he asked. "It has grown cloudy."
She rose also, but stood for an instant with her hand resting upon the back of the bench. Her lips opened, but closed again, and she turned and walked at his side in silence.
Suddenly he looked at her.
"It is late," he said, "as you doubtless know, and I have neglected a call. May I leave you to go on alone?" Then his voice softened. "Are you ill?" he asked – "or in pain?"
She laughed mirthlessly.
"You are too strong," she returned, "to stoop to irony."
"It was not irony," he answered, gently.
She smiled sadly, her eyes raised.
"Tell me that you will come to see me – once," she said.
He looked at her with sudden tenderness.
"Yes," he answered; "I will come. Good-bye!"
"Good-bye!"
And they went different ways.
CHAPTER X
Mariana went home with throbs of elation in her heart. She was thrilled with a strange, unreasoning joy – a sense of wonder and of mystery – that caused her pulses to quiver and her feet to hasten.
"I shall see him again," she thought – "I shall see him again."
She forgot the years of separation, her past indifference, the barriers between them. She forgot the coldness of his voice and his accusing glance. Her nature had leaped suddenly into fulness, and a storm of passion such as she had never known had seized her. The emotions of her girlhood seemed to her stale and bloodless beside the tempest which possessed her now. As she walked her lips trembled, and she thought, "I shall see him again."
At dinner Miss Ramsey noticed her flushed face, and, when they went into the drawing-room, took her hands. "You are feverish," she said, "and you ate nothing."
Mariana laughed excitedly.
"No," she answered, "I am well – very well."
They sat down together, and she looked at Miss Ramsey with quick tenderness.
"Am I good to you?" she asked. "Am I good to the servants? – to everybody?"
"What is it, dear?"
"Oh, I want to begin over again – all over again! It is but fair that one should have a second chance, is it not?"
Miss Ramsey smiled.
"Some of us never have a first," she said; and Mariana took her in her arms and kissed her. "You shall have yours," she declared. "I will give it to you."
When she went up-stairs a little later she took down an old square desk from a shelf in the dressing-room and brought it to the rug before the fire. Kneeling beside it, she turned the key and raised the narrow lid of ink-stained mahogany. It was like unlocking the past years to sit surrounded by these memories in tangible forms, to smell the close, musty odor which clings about the relics of a life or a love that is dead.
She drew them out one by one and laid them on the hearth-rug – these faded things that seemed in some way to waft with the scent of decay unseizable associations of long-gone joy or sorrow. The dust lay thickly over them, as the dust of forgetfulness lay over the memories they invoked. There was a letter from her mother written to her in her babyhood, and the fine, faded handwriting recalled to her the drooping figure – a slight and passionate woman, broken by poverty and disappointments, with vivacious lips and eyes of honest Irish blue. There was a handful of mouldered acorns, gathered by childish fingers on the old plantation; there was the scarlet handkerchief her mammy had worn, and the dance-card of her first ball, with a colorless silk tassel hanging from one end. Then she pushed these things hastily aside and looked for others, as one looks beneath the sentiments for the passions of one's life. She found a photograph of Anthony, pasted on cheap card-board – a face young and intolerant, with the fires of ambition in the eyes and the lines of self-absorption about the mouth. Still looking at the boyish face, she remembered the man that she had seen that morning – the fires of ambition burned to ashes, the self-absorption melted into pain.
With the photograph still in her hand, she turned back to the desk and took out a tiny cambric shirt with hemstitched edges, upon which the narrow lace was yellow and worn. As the little garment fell open in her lap she remembered the day she had worked the hemstitching – a hot August day before the child came, when she had lived like a prisoner in the close rooms, sewing for months upon the dainty slips, and dreaming in that subconscious existence in which women await the birth of a new life. She remembered the day of its coming, her agony, and the first cry of the child; then the weeks when she had lain watching the dressing and undressing of the soft, round body, and then the moist and feeble clutch upon her hand. She remembered the days when it did not leave her arms, the nights when she walked it to and fro, crooning the lullaby revived from her own infancy, and at last the hours when she sat in the half-darkness and watched the life flicker out from the little bluish face upon the pillow.
"Was that yesterday or eight years ago?"
Her tears fell fast upon the tiny shirt, and she folded it and laid it away with the photograph and the other relics – laid away side by side the relics and the recollections covered with dust.
She rose to her feet and carried the desk back to its place in the dressing-room. In a moment she returned and stood silently before the fire, her hand resting upon the mantel-piece, her head leaning upon her arm. She was thinking of the two things a woman never forgets – the voice of the man she has loved and the face of her dead child.
But when she went to bed an hour later there was a smile on her lips.
"I shall see him again," she said. "Perhaps to-morrow."
The next day she went to Nevins's studio and sat for the portrait. Her face was aglow and she talked nervously. He noticed that she started at a noise on the stair, and that her attention wandered from his words. He made daring, if delicate, love to her, but she seemed oblivious of it, and, when she rose to go, remarked that he was depressed. In return, he observed that she was feverish, and advised consulting her physician. "Your eyes are too bright," he said. "What is it?"
"Your reflected brilliancy, perhaps."
"By no means. The lustre is too unnatural."
"Then it is sleeplessness. I lay awake last night."
"Anything the matter? Can I help you?"
She shook her head, smiling.
"I am adjusting a few difficulties," she answered; "chiefly matrimonial, but they belong to my cook."
He looked at her attentively.
"Don't worry," he said. "It is not becoming. The flush is all right, but in time it will give place to discontent. You will sow perplexities to reap – "
"Furrows," finished Mariana. Then she nodded gayly. "What a pessimist you are!" she said. "No, I am going to use the best cosmetic – happiness."
And she lifted her skirts and descended the stairs.
That afternoon she remained in-doors, wandering aimlessly from room to room, opening a book to turn a page or two and to throw it aside for another.
In the evening she went out to dinner, and Ryder, who was among the guests, remarked that he had never seen her in better form. "If there was such a thing as eternally effervescent champagne, I'd compare you to it," he said. "Are you never out of spirits?"
She looked at him with sparkling eyes. "Oh, sometimes," she responded; "but as soon as I discover it, I jump in again."
"And I must believe," he returned, his gaze warming, "that your element is one that cheers but not inebriates."
"You are very charitable. I wonder if all my friends are?"
He lowered his voice and looked into her eyes. "Say all your worshippers," he corrected, and she turned from him to her left-hand neighbor.
She laughed and jested as lightly as if her heart were a feather, and went home at last to weep upon her pillow.
For the next few days she lived like one animated by an unnatural stimulant. She talked and moved nervously, and her eyes shone with suppressed excitement, but she had never appeared more brilliant, and her manner was charged with an irresistible vivacity. To Miss Ramsey she was unusually gentle and generous.
Each morning, on rising, the thought fired her, "He may come to-day"; each night the change was rung to, "He may come to-morrow"; and she would toss feverishly until daybreak, to dress and meet her engagement, with a laugh upon her lips. To a stranger she would have seemed to face pain as she faced joy, with a dauntless insolence to fate. To a closer observer there would have appeared, with the sharper gnawing at her heart, the dash of a freer grace to her gestures, a richer light to her eyes. It was as if she proposed to conquer destiny by the exercise of personal charm.
At the end of the week she came down to luncheon one day with a softer warmth in her face. When the meal was over she went up to her room and called her maid. "I want the gray dress," she said; but when it was laid on the bed she tossed it aside. "It is too gloomy," she complained. "Bring me the red;" and from the red she turned to the green.
She dressed herself with passionate haste, arranging and rearranging the coil of her hair, and altering with reckless fingers the lace at her throat. At last she drew back from the glass, throwing a dissatisfied glance at her reflection – at the green-clad figure and the small and brilliant face, surmounted by its coils of shining brown. Then she added a knot of violets to the old lace on her breast, and went down-stairs to walk the drawing-room floor. An instinctive belief in his coming possessed her. As she walked slowly up and down on the heavy carpet, the long mirrors suspended here and there threw back at her fugitive glimpses of her moving figure. In the dusk of the room beyond she saw herself irradiated by the glimmering firelight.
The hands of the clock upon the mantel travelled slowly round the lettered face. As she watched it she felt a sudden desire to shake them into swiftness. She touched the clock and drew back, laughing at her childishness. A carriage in the street caught her ears and she went to the window, glancing through the half-closed curtains. It passed by. Then a tall, black figure turning the corner arrested her gaze, and her heart leaped suddenly. The figure came on and she saw that it was an elderly clergyman with white hair and a benevolent face. She was seized with anger against him, and her impatience caused her to press her teeth into her trembling lip. In the street a light wind chased a cloud of dust along the sidewalk until it danced in little eddying waves into the gutter. An organ-grinder, passing below, looked up and lifted his hand. She took her purse from the drawer of the desk and threw him some change; but when the broken tune was ground out she shook her head and motioned him away. The sound grated upon her discordant nerves.
She left the window and crossed the room again. The hands of the clock had made a half-hour's progress in their tedious march.
A book of poems lay on the table, and she opened it idly, her mental fever excited by the lighter words of one who had sounded the depths and sunk beneath.
"If Midge will pine and curse its hours away,
Because Midge is not everything – for aye,
Poor Midge thus loses its one summer day,
Loses its all – and winneth what, I pray?"
She threw the book aside and turned away – back to the window where there was dust and wind – back into the still room where the monotonous tick of the clock maddened her quivering mood. She walked to and fro in that silent waiting which is the part of women, and beside which the action of battle is to be faced with a song of thanksgiving.
The trembling of her limbs frightened her, and she flung herself upon a divan. The weakness passed, and she got up again. Another half-hour had gone.
All at once there was a ring at the bell. For an instant she felt her heart contract, and then a delirious dash of blood through her veins to her temples. Her pulses fluttered like imprisoned birds.
A footstep crossed the hall, and the door of the drawing-room opened.
"Mr. Ryder!"
She wavered for an instant and went forward to meet him with an hysterical laugh. Her eyes were like emeralds held before a blaze, and the intense, opaline pallor of her face was warm as if tinged by a flame.
He took her outstretched hand hungrily, his face flushing until the purplish tint rose to his smooth, white forehead.
"Were you expecting me?" he asked. "I would sell my soul to believe that you were – with that look in your eyes."
She shook her head impatiently.
"I was not," she answered. "I was expecting no one. It is very warm in here – that is all."
He looked disappointed.
"Have you ever expected me?" he questioned, moodily – "or thought of me when I was not with you?"
She smiled. "Oh yes!" she returned, lightly. "When I had a note from you saying that you were coming."
He set his teeth.
"You are as cruel as a – a devil, or a woman," he said.
"What you call cruelty," she answered, gently, "is merely a weapon which we sometimes thrust too far. When you talk to me in this way, you force me to use it." And she added, flippantly, "Some day I may thrust it to your heart."
"I wish to God you would!"
But she laughed merrily and led him to impersonal topics, talking rapidly, with a constant play of her slim, white hands. She allowed him no time for protestations. It was all bright, frivolous gossip of the day, with no hint of seriousness. As she talked, there was no sign that her ears were straining for an expected sound, or her flesh quivering with impatience.
At last he rose to go.
"You are the only woman I know," he remarked, as he looked at her with his easy and familiar glance, "who is never dull. How do you manage it?"
"Oh, it is not difficult," she answered. "To laugh is much easier than to cry."
"And much more agreeable. I detest a woman who weeps."
Her brilliant laugh rang out.
"And so do I," she said.
When he had gone, and the house door had closed after him, she crossed to the heavily hanging curtains, pushed them aside, and looked out.
Only dust and wind and gray streets and the sound of the footsteps of a passer-by. From out the blue mist a single light burst, then another and another. She held her head erect, a scornful smile curving her lips.
Again the bell rang, and again she quivered and started forward, listening to the steps that crossed the hall. The door opened.
"Mr. Buisson!"
She hesitated a moment, and then went forward with the same cordial gesture of her cold, white hand.