Shadows of Flames: A Novel

VIII

He had put all his will into that grip upon himself when he went forward. But now as he stood looking down at her, and saw the tears on her lashes, his heart seemed a white-hot weight that dropped him to his knees beside her. He did not dare touch her, but he grasped the arms of her chair with both hands, his vivid young face close to hers.

"Oh, my Beautiful...." he stammered. "What are you crying for? Who has hurt you?"

It was amazingly startling to have this impassioned young Greek rush like a faun out of the winter night and hurl himself at her knees, just when she had been thinking of him as forgetful of her and hundreds of miles distant. She managed another smile, keeping her hand on Dhu's head. The collie sat stolidly between them, pressing, jealously, closer to his mistress.

"No one has hurt me.... It's nothing.... Nothing but foolishness ... contemptible foolishness...."

"You were lonely?"

"I was just silly.... Get up, dear child."

"I'm not a 'child'.... I'm a man who loves you.... And I shall not get up ... not until you tell me what is troubling you...."

"Dear Morris ... do you call this being 'good'?"

"No. I call it being what I can't help being.... Do you think I can see tears in your eyes and play good little Harry?... I can't stand your tears.... They make me wild ... quite wild. Don't play with me.... Don't laugh...."

He caught her hand suddenly, pressing it against his breast.

"Feel that...." he stammered. "Can you laugh at that?"

The violent young heart drummed against her hand pressed down upon it by both his.

"It's an Idolater...." he went stammering on, his voice low and thick with the swift heart-beats. "Each throb worships you.... And you tell me to be 'good'.... You tell me that!"

The dog growled suddenly. It was a low, menacing rumble deep in his chest. His eyes were fixed on Sophy.

"Be quiet ... lie down, Dhu," she said, glad for an excuse of speaking normally. "Lie down!" she repeated sharply, as the dog remained motionless. He withdrew his head unwillingly from her knee, and subsided on the rug near her feet. Now his gold eyes were fixed on Loring. A rim of milky jade showed beneath them. There was suspicion and cold anger in their gaze.

Sophy was hemmed in by those quivering arms that did not touch her, but whose vibration she felt through the wood of the old chair. Loring's face was rapt and wild. He was "out of himself"—terribly close to her in his fanatic mystery of adoration.

"Why should you mind?" his words came racing breathlessly. "What I offer you isn't common or unclean.... I think of you as Catholics think of Mary...."

"My dear...." whispered Sophy. He hypnotised her with the tremendous intensity of his emotion. It poured on her from his dark, bold eyes that had a wild timidity even in their boldness.

The same inanity of mind that had assailed her that day in the October woods, under his first outburst, again made her feel at a loss. She could not think of the right words to say. She drew back as far as she could from him in the deep chair. Her bosom rose and fell uncertainly. He moved her ... he confused her. She did not quite know what it was that he made her feel. The scent of horse and leather and winter fields was still fresh upon him. This scent confused her more. It was the sharp scent of vigorous manhood in her quiet room, with its warm fragrance of green wood and rose-geranium. It made her nervously aware of herself and of him.

"Dear Morris ... please get up...." she urged, making a great effort to be natural. "I can't think with you kneeling there like that.... You confuse me...."

"I don't want you to think.... I want you to feel.... I want to confuse you.... I want you to feel something of what I'm feeling.... Yes, something of it ... something at least...."

"Don't...!" she murmured.

Her brow contracted, as if with pain. Yet she tried to smile. She was quite pale. So was Loring. But he did not move. His thirsty eyes drank and drank of her face.

"Oh, you wonder...!" he whispered hurryingly. "You wonder of the world.... Rose of the World!..."

Suddenly he dropped his head, and began kissing the velvet of her gown. She felt these kisses through the velvet—swift, wild, hurried—like the alight and flight of birds. His passion seemed winged like birds. And these wings beat about her, softly reckless and confusing. All Venus's doves seemed loosed in the firelit room. The air was thick with the throb of their pinions. Outside thrummed the deep, harsh chords of the winter wind. Outside was cold, clear space—a frost of stars—the free, unloving wind....

She bent forward, quite desperate to feel herself thus stirred. With her slender, strong hands she lifted his head by force from her knee ... tried to put him from her.... She wanted to be stern. She knew well that her greatest weakness was in dealing with love. She had always temporised. She could never quite get her own consent to be harsh with love of any kind. Even now she could not be as stern as she wished to be.

"Morris ... really ... you must not.... I can't have this...." she said brokenly.

He did not yield to her restraining touch, but leaned against her hands—seized them in his own, pressing down his face into them. She felt his lips quivering on them. Her palms quickened with those trembling lips.

Again the collie growled.

"There! You see...." she exclaimed nervously; "even Dhu is vexed with you.... Do you want me to be really angry with you?... Yes—I shall be really angry if you keep this up any longer.... I shall be angry ... Morris!"

But he crouched before her, grasping the folds of her gown in both hands. He even laughed a little, tossing back his short locks, that had been rumpled against her knee.

"Be angry, then...." he murmured. "Be angry.... What do the famishing care for anger?... Yes.... I thirst for you.... I don't hunger for you.... There's nothing so gross as hunger in my longing.... But I thirst.... I thirst.... Oh, Beautiful!... Be kind.... What is it to you if I worship you?... Can the wind kindle the moon? You should have seen the poor, mad wind trying to kindle her, as I did, when I rode here to you this night!... He raved at her as I rave at you.... And she was just like you—oh, so like you!... Cold, white, still, superior ... far off there in a heaven of her own ... like you.... He couldn't reach her.... Couldn't warm her.... Like me with you...."

He broke off, a spasm marring the excited beauty of his face.

"Oh, don't I know I can't warm you...!" he cried. "Not if I bathed you in my heart's blood—it would slip from you like a red sunset from the moon. White Wonder ... cold Moon-Woman!... Now I know what Endymion felt.... I know—I know...."

Sophy sat gazing at him, fascinated. She was lapped in a sort of wonder. Here was Love at his miracles again. Could this be "Morry" Loring—keen sportsman, crack polo player—this frantic young Rhapsodist at her knee, talking poetry as though it were his native tongue? He seemed unreal to her. She, herself, seemed unreal. He rushed on:

"Yes, yes!... You've called me Endymion in mockery. But I am Endymion.... Did you know that when you mocked me?... Did you know that I am really the man that drew down the Lady Moon?..."

He laughed again. He was so amazingly beautiful as he crouched there, laughing with love in the firelight, that Sophy quivered with it. She felt dazed. She felt some one other than herself. She began to feel that there was a stranger within her—a woman she had never known. Some one wild and shy and spun of moonbeams—a sort of fairy-Sophy that this ecstatic youth was moulding out of dream-stuff—that was coming into ensorceled life under his touch as Galatea softened from marble into flesh under the caresses of Pygmalion....

She felt as if she must break away from him—escape from the sound of his feverish, flooding words—and that bold-timidity of his eyes that so fascinated her. She tried to rise, but he hemmed her in, with his arms upon her chair, encircling yet not touching her.

He laughed very low now—it was like a sort of sobbing.

"Oh, Selene.... Selene.... Selene...." he murmured. "Let yourself be loved ... with worship ... always with worship. I will never forget that you are a goddess, too.... But you shall never be lonely again ... if you will only bend to me.... There'll never be tears in your beautiful eyes again.... And you were lonely—you know you were.... It's lonely work, Selene, shining alone in the roof of heaven...."

Sophy put up her hands to her temples, pressing the hair back from her face. Her dilated eyes looked dazed.

"I ... I think you're not quite yourself to-night...." she stammered. There was certainly some spell upon her. She strove against it—but weakly, like one striving to wake from an overpowering dream.

He gave that low laugh that so confused her.

"I'm not myself...." he said. "Haven't I told you that I am Endymion?..."

He leaned towards her. His face grew soft and timorous. She felt his hand go stealing to her hair. One heavy lock had fallen loose. He drew it to him, buried his face in it and shivered from head to foot. Sophy sat gazing down at him. Her heart began beating strangely. The curve of the brown head bending near her breast struck her suddenly with a sharp tenderness. She touched it softly with her finger tips. At the touch of her fingers he trembled again—then looked up—that wild shyness still in his subdued eyes.... His hand slipped from her hair upon her neck. He knelt up and his quivering hand drew her gently towards him....

"This once ... only this once...." he pleaded, whispering ... "to remember all my life.... I will shut my eyes.... Selene.... You can think that I am sleeping ... as on Latmos...."

That thrall held Sophy—that and some wild, half-lawless romance in her own nature. It was as though reason forsook her. A veil woven of wind and firelight and the soft dreaminess of youthful passion floated between her and reality—shut her in from past and future—filmed about her like the pale smoke from an enchanter's fire.... She let herself be drawn towards that eager flower of the young, thirsty mouth. Nearer ... nearer.... Far, far away, a fine, chill voice said: "No. This you must not do...."

She heard it as the fainting hear their names called. An instant—then the young lips touched hers—delicately—clung trembling.... A thrill as in dreams—unreal, etherealised—ran through her.... This kiss was divine. Like nectar this kiss was to them both—long, miraculous, and mystically impassioned, as a kiss on the wild moors of elf-land....

When they came to themselves, they were leaning cheek to cheek, hand in hand, gazing into the fire which had glowed down to molten jewels. The wind harped round the quiet house, now low, now loud. A mouse, darting like a wee, grey fish, along the wainscoting, grew ever bolder. Presently he scampered across the train of Sophy's gown—then played upon the hearth-rug. The collie twitched his ruffled legs nervously as he lay sleeping. But those two did not move. For long, long minutes they sat there motionless, cheek to cheek, hand in hand, gazing into the fire....

IX

As in a trance himself, he had fetched Proud Aleck from the old stable. The horse had nickered when he heard him coming. In the fragrant darkness of the stable, Loring had thrown an arm over the bay's neck. "You brought me to her this night...." he whispered. He drew the horse's muzzle towards him, and pressed his lips to the broad front. He continued for some moments leaning against the great horse that quivered with impatience to be gone. He felt faint and languid. It was as if he had really been only mortal and she a goddess. His mortality seemed to fail under the bliss of this contact with immortality. It was as though sudden godhead had been bestowed on him and his flesh were consuming under it into a finer essence.

There was no pride as yet in his wonder. That beautiful humility of real love still held him. He was not even exultant that his "will" had won at last. He did not feel as though he had conquered but as though some great Winged Victory had caught him up and set him on this height, with its veil of golden mist. It was not the kingdoms of the earth that were offered him—but the kingdoms of the air ... starry places ... Diana's cloud-land ... hanging-gardens of the gods....

Loring was rapt into the ecstatic state of "conversion."... He was experiencing all the giddily rapturous throes and exquisite frenzies of what is known as "revelation"—only its cause was not divine but human love. He moved in a vision of clear light. Like Sophy, he was a stranger to himself, yet he felt that this new self was not really the stranger, but that old self which lay dark and shrivelled at the roots of being, like the husk of a seed, from which has sprung the triumphing blossom.... He rode home as on a wind of dreams. The splendid moon, now soaring in mid-heaven, seemed set there as a symbol for him, and him alone. "Selene.... Selene.... Selene...." went the hoofs of the great, red horse, like the strokes of a Rhapsodist, beating time to the music in his heart....

And Sophy, too, was all be-glamoured. She had heard the fairy-harp, she had listened to music blown from the land of Heart's Desire. Ior, the fairy chief, had kissed her eyes and lips. She was amazed, bemused—deep down in her heart there was a great fear. Yet there was joy also. Not the sane joy of everyday ... but a fragile, iridescent trembling as of a dewy gossamer spun between the lintels of the door of Dreams. She was afraid to move lest she should destroy this delicate, fine-spun joy. Beyond its veil glimmered the wings of golden dreams. She knew well how Diana must have felt after she had kissed the sleeping shepherd.

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 shell of years—a pearl released, a pearl bathed in seas of wonder.

Back to her earliest girlhood she was washed ... back, back to that shore 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 cocked, 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 assure 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 Phœnix ... the ashes of her life were only a soft, pale nest from which she had risen thus glorious. Or no—the Dark Goddess 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 God, 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 God!... 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, shining 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 reassurance 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 gods 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, impassable 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 Cæsar——"

"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.

"Then," said Sophy, looking away from him, "you must think of last night as ... as a 'Twelfth Night's' madness. Very sweet.... Yes, beautiful in its way ... but just a moment's dream.... When you ... really love some one ... you will know that it was only a dream...."

"'When I really love some one'?"

"Yes."

"You think that?"

"Yes."

"Would you mind looking at me?"

"No...."

But her eyes wavered, and the soft red ran up again into her face, as she met that young, keen look, all fierce with wounded love.

"How dare you say that I do not love you really?" he demanded, his voice shaking with passion. "Even Selene didn't trample on Endymion——"

She went pale.

"My dear...."

"How can you call me 'your dear,' and yet set your foot down like that—hard—right on my bare heart! How can you suggest that my love for you is not real?"

He flung his arm about her suddenly—caught both her hands in his.

"Listen...." he said. "Perhaps because I bring you worship, too, you think that I don't love you with man's love.... But it's because I love you so madly that I bring you worship. I wouldn't soil the soles of your shoes with what most men call love. I never believed in this kind ... this that I feel for you. But, by God! I've found it is real! It only kneels because it's so strong. Because it's so strong, it has reverence. Do you understand? Now give me your lips to worship. Don't waste them in words. You needn't fear my kisses ... white Moon. I wouldn't sully you with base fire."

He had drawn her to her feet. He held her crushed against him. His face was white and fine with purifying fire.

Sophy felt awe steal over her. This was no boy that held her. His love made him her equal. And he offered her what she had craved without knowing it—the fire of love tempered with adoration.

"Give me your lips, my Wonder ... my white Wonder!" he was commanding, yet there was also pleading in his voice. "Give me your lips, that I may show you how I love you ... not with gross hunger, but with thirst ... divine thirst...."

That golden trance crept over her, as on the night before. Her head lay drowned in its thick hair against his breast. He stooped slowly, marvelling at the rapt beauty of her white, upturned face. Like a face coming slowly towards her through deep waters, his face bent nearer. There was that fine, quivering touch upon her lips—then their mouths melted into one....

This kiss was no less marvellous than their first had been. But it held this difference: With it she yielded herself consciously, though against her judgment.

They stood there tranced, after this long kiss was over, as they had sat hand in hand the evening before.

He said shakenly at last:

"'Too young'?... 'Too young'—am I? God!—I feel as though I had been from everlasting...."

X

Sophy, as it were, got her head above those heavy, golden waves. She gasped deep of the fresh air of reason. She would not sink down to this strange, love-lighted underworld without a final struggle for freedom, for the clear daylight of common sense. He had to listen to much plain speaking. Sometimes he sulked, sometimes fumed; usually he ended by laughing with that low laughter against which she felt so oddly helpless. There is nothing in the world more disconcerting than this low, mocking laughter of love that knows itself stronger than reason. In vain Sophy pointed out to him the difference in their ages, in their tastes (this he furiously denied). She sternly bade him listen while she read aloud from books that were her daily food. He listened with heroism.

But one evening over Plotinus he actually nodded. They had been hunting. The geranium-scented warmth of her study, the soft crackle of the fire, her lulling contralto voice as she read aloud to him the words of the mystic whom he privately thought "a hipped old Johnny" because he was so ashamed of having a body that he wouldn't tell his birth-date ... (How Loring despised him for this denial of ruddy life!)—these things, together with the deep comfort of the old, leather armchair in which he sat, caused him to doze pleasantly. He woke with a jerk, at the sudden stopping of her voice. Her grey eyes were fixed on him over the volume of Plotinus, cool and smiling.

"You see?" she said. "What rouses my soul puts you to sleep!"

Loring had looked at her sombrely.

"I'll tell you what I think," he had said at last. "I think you fence yourself about with these old philosopher Johnnies because you're afraid of love. That's what I think, Beautiful."

Sophy had coloured, which always delighted him. He felt that he had won when her blood rose at his words.

She pointed out to him the complications that would arise in their life together, from the fact that Bobby would have to be educated in England.

"I couldn't possibly let him go there alone," she said. "His grandmother dislikes me, as I've told you. She'd do all in her power to wean him from me. And it's absolutely right and necessary that he should grow up an Englishman...."

"He can grow up a Timbuctooan, for all I care," Loring had replied, unmoved. "I've always wanted to hunt in the 'Shires. We can have a country place near Melton...."

"You'd expatriate yourself?" Sophy asked severely.

"Nonsense, Diana! You're too Olympian sometimes. Good Americans can live all over the place and still feel that 'little old New York is good enough for them.'"

"There's another thing," Sophy had retorted: "I am sure that I shan't care for New York—and as ... well, as Mrs. Loring, I should have to live there...."

"Only a bit in the winter. And it would do you good, Beautiful. You like homage—you know you do. You'd be first and beautifulest there. Thank God, I'm so rotten rich!... You'll queen it, I can tell you."

"Are you so rich, Morris?"

"I am—rather. Why?"

"Because that's another thing.... I hate this over-richness of some Americans. I feel as if my throat and eyes were full of gold-dust when I'm with them. I don't mean I'm such a goose as to despise money—but I do hate this ... this sort of golden Elephantiasis that deforms so many Americans...."

Loring gazed up at her with wondering adoration.

"By George!" he said humbly, "it's downright awe-inspiring to feel that you don't care a hang for my being rich. That you only care ... what little you do care ... for me, myself."

"'King Midas has the ears of an ass,'" Sophy had laughed, pulling the one next her.

He had responded only too quickly to this slight caress. She had to put both hands to her face to shield herself from his eager kisses.

"Ah, dearest—be kind.... Do.... Ah, do!" he had pleaded. But she had said, "No.... I shall be sensible—if that's being unkind.... I won't be rushed into elf-land by the hair of my head. I.... I won't be ... honeyfuggled...."

And they had laughed together.

Sophy finally got quite desperate with the fruitless struggle against him and against herself. She banished him ruthlessly for two weeks. He rebelled in vain. "I must have this time quite to myself," she told him. "I must think things out ... alone."

Loring found himself frantic thus exiled to the Macfarlanes, cut off from his heart's desire by six country miles as by the powers of darkness. He fled to Florida for a fortnight's tarpon-fishing. Then came her letters. He thought he should go mad over those letters. She played on him like the wind on water. Now he was all melting ripples under her delicate words—now some phrase sent his passion leaping mountain-high.... In the last letter she said: "Come back to me.... I miss you as the rose misses the honey from her heart ... as the stem misses the gathered flower.... I crave you as a sail might crave the wild wind that gives it life. Dear ... my dearest.... I know now why the 'wisdom of men is foolishness to God.'... God is Love ... my wisdom is foolishness to Love.... So I give you my foolish wisdom for a carpet under your feet. And my wise foolishness I give you for a seal upon your heart.... But myself I cannot give you, for I was yours when Love spread the foundations of the world...."

For she had found when Loring was far from her that "her heart was within him." She found the plain, wheaten bread of Philosophy dreary fare without the honey of romance. Poetry fled from her like a wild, shy bird, that would only come to one call. With his name she could lure it. She wrote page after page of love-verse as a sort of bridal offering for his return. She knew that there was madness in her mood, but it seemed a high and holy sort of frenzy—like the spiritual dementia that sends martyrs singing to the pyre. So she sung amid the flames that so exquisitely consumed her. For this was not a usual passion that she felt for Loring. She would have preferred that their love-life should be one long, ecstatic betrothal. She would have liked to give him the flower of love without its fruit. Yet his love was so different from all other loves that she had known ... it was so finely winged—so woven with adoration ... so fresh as with the dews of youth's first dawn; in her the answering love was so immaculate, veiled with imagination as for a first communion; all was so beautifully and perfectly harmonious between them, that she could not imagine discord ever following on this enchanted symphony.

And granted that their tastes were not always the same ... granted that she was older, that he seemed but a boy to her at times—must love mean oneness in all things? Was not oneness of heart and spirit enough? And was not woman immemorially older than man—the first created, but not the first conceived?—Did not the Christian faith give even God a mother, as if Divinity itself must needs be child of the eternal feminine?

And because the great, tender mother in her cherished Loring, the shy, wild lover in her only loved him more.

XI

"That's a pity, I admit," he said rather lamely. Like Charlotte, he had very old-fashioned notions about the desirability—almost the necessity—of a husband's being the elder of his wife. It shocked his fixed ideals, when brought face to face with it in this plump manner, that Sophy should be her lover's senior by four years.

Charlotte's fly-away eyebrows came down and joined.

"It's a tragedy and it's a shame!" said she.

"No, no ... no, no," almost coaxed the Judge. "Not a shame, Chartie—a pity if you like.... Yes ... it certainly is a pity—but...."

Charlotte's very apprehension for her sister made her bitter.

"It's just another of Sophy's tragic mistakes," said she. "I did think that awful experience had cured her of making mistakes."

Her husband looked at her rather whimsically from under the fluff of smoky black that he had forgotten to smooth down again.

"Are you so doggone sure of making no more mistakes till you die, old lady?"

Charlotte jerked a snarled place from her black curls by main force. She did not even notice the acute pain, so great was her agitation over what she considered this last dire error of her sister.

"That's not the point," she said firmly. She pinned up the now carded mass with two long, silver hairpins as she had done every night for twenty years, then went into her especial dressing-closet to fetch her night-gown.

It was the evening of the fateful day on which Sophy had announced her coming marriage to Loring, and husband and wife were preparing for sleep, in the big, friendly room which they shared together. In this room were two large, old-fashioned closets, each having its window, its washstand, and its array of pegs whereon to hang the simple and more necessary pieces of wearing apparel.

As Charlotte emerged again, attired in her nainsook gown that ended in decent frills at neck and wrist, the Judge in his turn strode into his sanctuary. He was in search of one of those old-fashioned garments which Charlotte had been so reluctant to lend Loring on the occasion of his first visit.

While she waited for him to appear again, she sat down at a little table near one of the windows, and began arranging what she called her "night-basket." She was the most methodical and orderly of souls, and into this little hamper went her watch, her handkerchief, a bit of "camphor-ice" for her lips, and a box of matches.

The moon was at its full again, and as she sat, sorting these familiar articles, she could see the white blur of Sophy's gown in one of the hammocks, and hear the soft undertone of voices, as she and her lover talked together.

"Just run along, you and Joe, Charlotte, dear," Sophy had said. "We'll come in by the time you're ready to put out the lights."

"And here," reflected Charlotte, frowning towards the hammocks, "it's eleven o'clock, and Joe and I nearly ready for bed, and she isn't even thinking of coming in!"

Her mood was such as in a vigorous, old-fashioned mother means a sound spanking for the offending child. And Charlotte felt that in some sort Sophy was her child, and dearly would she have liked to spank her.

Here Judge Macon came forth again, looking somewhat like the sheeted dead in the extreme length of his linen garment, and armed with a large, palmetto fan. He drew up a rocking-chair, and glancing out of the window towards the culprits, said just a trifle sheepishly, to his wife's acute ears:

"Let's give 'em as long as we can, old lady. Lovers on an old Virginia lawn in the moonlight! It's enough to soften the cockles of a stoic's heart."

Charlotte unbendingly smoothed out a bit of tin-foil and wrapped the piece of camphor-ice in it.

"The cockles of the heart, and the apple of the eye have always seemed absurd figures of speech to me," she then remarked, putting the unguent into her basket.

Judge Macon tried to take one of her hands, but she withdrew it and firmly wound up her watch before wrapping it in her handkerchief and laying it beside the camphor-ice.

"Come, old lady," wheedled her softer-natured mate, "what's the matter? Do you really foresee disaster?"

"Joe," replied Charlotte, clasping her hands over the handle of the little basket, and looking sternly at him, "can you, a man who has sat on the Virginia bench for over twenty years, seriously ask me such a question?"

"Why the Virginia bench, particularly, honey?" asked he, and from under his shaggy brows came a droll gleam.

But Charlotte was not to be wheedled.

"I merely mentioned your office," said she, "to recall to you that as a Judge you've had more opportunity than most to realise the rarity of happy marriages."

The Judge in his unofficial capacity whistled softly at this Addisonian language, but Charlotte went on undisturbed.

"I ask you," she continued, "as a Judge—what chances do you consider that those two"—she waved one hand towards the hammocks—"have of real happiness?"

Her husband rocked for a moment before replying, fanning himself with the round, yellow disk that glistened in the moonlight (Charlotte had blown out the candle for fear of midges).

At last he said seriously:

"You married me, my dear, and I am sixteen years older than you, yet I think we've been pretty happy."

"Oh, how like a man that is!" cried Charlotte, jumping up in her exasperation, so that the carefully packed little hamper was upset, and the two white-clad figures had to grovel for its contents on all fours in the moonlight. As Charlotte's curly head came near his during this operation, the Judge promptly kissed it, and Charlotte, much disconcerted, scrambled to her feet again, exclaiming: "Joe! how can you be so silly at our time of life?"

But the Judge only laughed, and pulled her down on his linen clad knees, demure frills, "night-basket" and all.

"See here, madam," he demanded, "what do you mean by saying I'm 'like a man'?"

Charlotte laughed in spite of herself.

"I meant it was like a man to take the very reverse of Sophy's case as an example," she said, putting her arm about his neck as they rocked gently together, and rubbing her cheek against his. "Don't you see? It's quite, quite different with us. Why your being my elder, by so many years, only makes me look up to you...."

"'Look up to me!'" echoed he, with a burst of Homeric mirth. Charlotte clapped her hand over his mouth. "Sssh!" she warned. "They'll hear you. They'll think we're laughing at them."

"Poor things," said he, sobered. "It seems mighty sad to think of two lovers being afraid of being laughed at."

"It is sad," said Charlotte. "You think I'm cross about it, Joe, but I could cry about it this minute."

She dropped her head on his shoulder, and her other arm went round his neck.

"Don't," said the Judge softly. "Don't you cry, honey, whatever you do."

Charlotte from her refuge in his strong neck spoke passionately. Her warm breath tickled him almost beyond endurance, but he held her and suffered in silence with the true martyr spirit of the husband who is born and not made.

"Oh, Joe," she murmured vehemently; "you're not a woman, so you can't see it all as I see it. Now, perhaps, it's all right, but in a few years ... just a few years.... Oh, my poor Sophy! The grey hairs ... will come ... then wrinkles.... Little by little, little by little, there, under his eyes—his hateful young eyes—she will grow old. She will look like his mother when she's fifty and he's only forty-five!"

"No, no, lady-bird, really you exaggerate!" slipped in the Judge.

"This can't be exaggerated!" said Charlotte. "It can't be—— Shakespeare couldn't exaggerate it!"

"He's got a right smart gift that way, honey," slipped in the Judge again.

Charlotte didn't hear him. She sat up, much to his relief, and putting her hands on his shoulders looked at him solemnly.

"Joe," she said, "you're a man, so you don't know about one of the worst tragedies in a woman's life—the tragedy of the hand-glass!"

"The what?" asked her husband.

"The hand-glass, Joe. That little innocent looking bit of silver-framed glass that you think I only use to do my hair with. Oh, some great poet ought to write an ode to a woman with her hand-glass! Talk of 'Familiars,' of 'Devils'—there's no Imp out of Hell...."

"Charlotte!" cried her astounded husband.

"I said out—of—Hell," repeated she firmly—"there's no Imp so cunning, so malicious, so brutal as a woman's hand-glass. First, like all devils, it begins by flattering her—when she's young. Then suddenly, one day, after long years of cunning flattery—suddenly—like that!..." She snapped her fingers in his still more surprised face.... "Like that!—the hateful thing tells her the truth—that she is growing old! Oh, just a shadow here—a line there—the first grey hair—— Nothing really—only—from that day, on and on and on relentlessly, the message, the odious message never stops! Oh, if anything ought to be buried with a woman, like her wedding ring, it ought to be her hand-glass—for it's been just as much a part of joy and pain as the ring has!"

She stopped, out of breath, and her husband, rather subdued yet trying to make light of it, hugged her and said: "Seems to me, Sophy oughtn't to claim all the laurels. Seems to me you're a right elegant little poetess yourself!"

Charlotte extricated herself from this frankly marital embrace, and pushing the curls out of her eyes went on, too excited and in earnest to heed this funny little compliment.

"That's what I see for Sophy!" she said. "The tragedy of the hand-glass—the tragedy of love in her case. For that boy can't love her soul and mind as he ought to—and what soul he's got she's given him—for the time being. He's just a walking mirror—a reflection of her. Sophy doesn't dream it—nor he—of course. But I can see it. Love does that sometimes. Oh, you needn't grin, Joe!—I watch life though I do live in the country the year round. Sophy's just a woman Narcissus. She's in love with her own reflection in Morris Loring. And some day she'll want to draw him from that dream-pool. Then she'll find empty wetness in her hands ... just tears...."

She broke off almost in tears herself. Suddenly she caught her husband's head to her breast:

"Oh," she cried, "I do thank God that you are bald, Joe, and sixteen years older than I am!"

"Lord love us!" exclaimed the Judge, bursting into inextinguishable mirth this time, "I reckon that's the funniest prayer of thanksgiving that ever went up to the Throne of Grace!"

XII

There had been a storm the night before, and the sea made a marvellous, heroic music among the rocks. Mrs. Loring laid the open letter on her knee, and her light, bright blue, short-sighted eyes gazed wistfully towards the sound. Storms both in Nature and in human passions, when distant enough, had always possessed a strange charm for her, the charm of printed perils to minds congenitally timorous. She knew Sophy's history and had read her poems when they first came out, with that same sense of one enjoying a tempest in mid-ocean from the staunch deck of a liner. In her case temperament was the liner—though she had always felt in some inmost recess of her being, known only to herself and her Creator, that, given the circumstances, she, too, might have been a centre of tumult. And sometimes, gazing from the safe, close-curtained windows of her present personality—the result of many careful, cautiously repressed years—she wondered if the mistake makers, the convention breakers, had not the best of it after all? Repentance must be a wonderful emotion—that upheaving, ecstatic repentance that follows big sins. So unconsciously and typically New England was Grace Loring, that she could not think of splendid crime without following it up in her mind by repentance even more gorgeous.

As Mrs. Loring sat there, with her son's letter on her lap, her sister, Mrs. Charles Horton, came out of the house with a novel in her hand and joined her.

"Still brooding over Morry's letter, Grace?" Mrs. Horton asked in a brusque voice, sitting down beside her.

Mrs. Loring withdrew her vague, handsome eyes from the sea, and looked quietly and directly at her sister.

"I'm not brooding, Eleanor," she said gently.

"Well, what then?" asked Mrs. Horton.

Mrs. Loring glanced at the letter through her face-à-main as though consulting it, then said in the same tranquil tone:

"I think I was rather admiring them both."

"What rubbish you talk sometimes, my dear Grace!" exclaimed her sister explosively.

Mrs. Horton was short, brune, and rather plump. She had small, chestnut-brown eyes, and rough, strong, crinkly dark hair. She was in every way the opposite of her tall, distinguished, rather hushed sister. Her manner of thinking and speaking was blunt and straightforward. Mrs. Horton had no half-tones—she was like some effective national flag, all clearly defined blocks of frank, crude colour.

"Are you going to write and remonstrate with that young fool, or are you going to sit by and see him smash his life like crockery?" she said abruptly.

Charles Horton had been a Californian and a man of exuberant vitality and speech. His wife, who had loved him and admired him for every contrast to the contained people among whom she had been brought up, had adopted something of his vigorous way of expressing himself.

"Are you?" she repeated.

It was not Mrs. Loring's way to evade things, but she was so really interested in Eleanor's point of view that instead of answering this question she said:

"What are your reasons for inferring that Morris is ruining his life?"

Mrs. Horton tossed her book aside, and clasped her crisp, capable looking little brown hands about one knee.

"'Reasons'!" said she. "Aren't facts enough for you? Isn't a love-sick boy of twenty-six who marries a woman years older pretty well smashing things up for himself?"

"Sophy Chesney is only thirty, Eleanor."

"Oh, what a hair-splitter you are, Grace! Four years' difference on the wrong side—the woman's side, is a big chasm ... say what you will."

"There have been very happy marriages of that sort, Eleanor, and with far greater difference in age. There was Miss Thackeray's marriage with Mr. Ritchie——"

"Oh, do go on!" said Mrs. Horton, with an outward snuffing of contemptuous breath. "Give us some more specimens from literature—George Eliot and Mr. Cross for example."

Mrs. Loring put up her face-à-main again and looked curiously at her sister.

"Why are you so vexed, Eleanor?" she asked mildly. "After all, it's a brilliant marriage for Morris in a way—Sophy Chesney is a very distinguished woman. Had you ... er ... plans for Morris?"

Mrs. Horton blushed. She had thought that Morris might marry her step-daughter Belinda some day, but she had never admitted this even to herself. Grace's random shot hit home. She retorted rather gruffly:

"Can't a woman take an interest in her own nephew, without being accused of scheming?"

"Oh ... 'scheming'.... My dear Eleanor!" protested her sister.

"The fact is," pursued Mrs. Horton, "I take the common-sense view of the case and you the sentimental one. Linda!... What on earth have you been doing to look so hot?"

This last sentence was addressed to her step-daughter, Belinda Horton, who came racing up the verandah steps, her blowze of red-brown hair blowing out behind her, and a tennis racquet in her hand. Belinda was a triumphantly beautiful hoyden of sixteen, despite a slight powdering of freckles and a tiny silvery scar through one raven black eyebrow, the result of trying to equal a boy cousin on the trapeze when she was nine years old. Her great, rich, challenging red-brown eyes, and her defiant yet sweet-tempered mouth, the up-curve of her round chin, the tilt of her nose, the way her head sat on her shoulders as though some artist-god had flung it there with careless mastery, like a flower—her lovely, long, still-growing body which had never known the "awkward age"—all these things made even the most collected gasp a little when Belinda first rushed upon their sight.

She now dropped upon the steps, near Mrs. Loring, pushed the sleeves of her blouse still higher on her cream-white arms, and flourishing the racquet at her step-mother, said in the rich, throaty voice of a pigeon in the sun:

"What do I look as if I'd been doing? Playing the organ?"

"Linda! Don't talk in that slangy way."

Belinda showed her teeth, beautifully white if a trifle too large, in the frankest grin.

"'Playing the organ' isn't slang, Mater."

Mrs. Horton returned her look severely.

"It's the way you say things that make them sound like slang—isn't it, Grace?" she ended, appealing to her sister.

Mrs. Loring smiled very kindly.

"It's the fashion to be slangy nowadays, Eleanor."

Belinda's eyes shot garnet sparkles at her mother. She patted Mrs. Loring's blue batiste skirt approvingly with her racquet.

"That's one for you, Mater!" she cried joyously, then to Mrs. Loring, "You're always perfectly bully to me, Aunty Grace!"

The idea of applying the term "bully" to that over-refined, softly majestic figure in its cane chair would have abashed any one less daring than Belinda. But Mrs. Loring seemed not to mind in the least. She knew that Belinda was "bad form." Belinda knew it herself. "Some people are born 'bad form,'" she used to say with her wide, lovely grin. "That's me."

In tapping her aunt's skirt with her racquet, she had dislodged Morris's letter. It slipped to the floor beside her, and lifting it to hand it back, she recognised his writing.

"Hullo!" she cried. "What's Morry writing such a screed about? He hates writing long letters like the devil."

"Belinda!" from Mrs. Horton.

"All right, Mater—not till next time."

Then she turned again to her aunt, frankly curious.

"What is he writing about, Aunt Grace? Not in a scrape, I hope—the admirable Morry!"

"He wrote to announce his engagement, Belinda," said Mrs. Loring.

Belinda sat stock still for a moment. Then she said:

"Who is it?"

"A Mrs. Chesney—a very unusual woman. She wrote a remarkable book once under her maiden name, Sophy Taliaferro."

Belinda sprung to her feet.

"Why, I've read some poems by a Sophy Taliaferro," she exclaimed. "Red-hot stuff they were, too!"

"Linda! I forbid you to speak in that way," said her mother.

"All right, Mater—but they were red-h—.... All right, I won't then. But, Aunt Grace, it couldn't be that Sophy Taliaferro—she must be a hundred!"

"No—only thirty," said Mrs. Loring, smiling again.

"My Gawd!" cried Belinda, pronouncing the sacred name grotesquely so as to take off the edge of her irreverence. She dropped back upon the steps, and sat staring open-mouthed at her aunt. "He's gone nutty!" she added, closing her lips with a snap. Then she sprang up again and stamped her foot.

"You've got to save him!" she cried, tears of rage in her eyes. "It isn't fair!— She's roped him in!— Morry is just at the age to do such rotten foolishness!— Thank God, this is a Land of Divorce!——"

"Belinda!"

"Yes—thank God for it!— And I wish trial marriage was here, too!"

"Belinda!"

"Oh, stuff, Mater! Haven't you read Ellen Key—she'd make you sit up!"

Mrs. Horton got up, went to the girl, and grasped her firmly by the shoulder. She was a determined little woman when roused and Belinda recognised the expression in her eyes. She looked up at her, sulky but silent for the moment.

"Listen to me," said her step-mother. "I will not have you talking in this manner. How dare you read Ellen Key, and—and poems that I've never given you?"

Belinda's radiant grin shone out again in spite of her.

"Oh, cut it out, Mater," she said amiably. "I hooked Roderick Random and Boccaccio when I was twelve—but you needn't worry. They made me sick—what I could understand of them. Yes, Mater—I've naturally got what they call a 'clean mind'—nastiness never would attract me. But this is a new age beginning, and a new sort of girl is beginning, too, and she wants to know what's what about everything, and— I'm her!" she wound up defiantly.

Mrs. Loring had put up her face-à-main, and earnestly regarded the girl's face during this speech. She had again that sensation of watching an interesting tempest from safe decks.

"I shall send you to school in France this winter," said Mrs. Horton grimly. "If you're so bent on acquiring knowledge it shall be given to you in ordered doses."

"All right, Mater!" said Belinda. Then she flung her racquet viciously on the steps, and groaned, thrusting her hands in the thick, red-brown clusters on either side of her face:

"French schools or not, Morry is a damn fool!" said she.

Then Mrs. Horton rose in all the severity of step-motherhood.

"You shall go to bed this instant!" said she, pointing. "You shall have only soup for dinner. You shall not leave these grounds for a week. Nor play tennis—nor go sailing."

"I couldn't very well go sailing in the grounds," said Belinda, with inextinguishable pertness. But she rose, and went upstairs to bed as the maternal finger indicated, making hideous, gargoylish faces all the way, which she did not dare turn to deliver.

And once, alone in her bedroom, having slammed the door so that the cottage jarred with it, she flung herself face down upon the floor, and sobbed furiously. With one clenched hand she beat the matting near her head. She strangled with this violent sobbing. Her whole body heaved with it.

"O God ... punish him!" choked Belinda. "O God ... help me to get even with him some day ... somehow...."

She rose after a half-hour of this frantic weeping; and, hiccoughing with spent grief, like a passionate child, went and unlocked a little drawer. She took out a photograph of Morris. Under it was written in her black, loopy handwriting, "My Hero and my Love." She gazed a moment at his face, all distorted and magnified by her tears; then she deliberately spat upon it, tore it in pieces, and ground them under her heel. "I hate you.... I hate you.... Beast!... Pig!... Liar!" choked the little fury. All at once, down she flopped, her skirt making a "cheese" about her, and gathered the desecrated morsels to her lips.

"Oh ... oh...." she moaned. "My heart is broken ... it's broken...."

Balling the fragments in her fist, and still seated on the floor, she shook her fist with the rags of love in it, at the empty air.

"I'll get even with you, Morry...." she said between her teeth, as though he were present in person. "I'll get even with you ... if I have to wait till I'm thirty!... Oh, I know you!... You dared to kiss me ... like that...." Her face flamed at the memory. "And then ... in less than a year ... oh!... But if you tired of me ... after just one kiss ... you'll tire of her ... after some hundreds.... Then, Mr. Morry...." Her beautiful face was quite savage—a woman's jealous face under the childish mop of hair—"then I'll be waiting! In two years I'll be eighteen.... I'll give you just two years ... then my innings begin...."

Belinda knew well that she was beautiful. She had known it supremely when she tempted Morris to kiss her—for she had tempted him—but then she loved him wildly. She was morally a little Oriental—with all her passions at white heat though she was but a schoolgirl. She had thought that his kiss meant that he loved her in like wise. He had been sorry the moment the kiss was over. But then—she had really tempted him beyond endurance, and he had always thought she had the most kissable mouth in the world. Besides, just at that psychological moment he happened to be bored to desperation. He had been spending the two weeks at Nahant that his mother always exacted from him in the summer. It was the only thing that she ever did exact from him, but they always seemed interminable. Then had come Belinda, tempting him with her passionate, sparkling eyes, and the desireful red fruit of her mouth ... fruit cleft for kisses....

He had hurried away the next day. He was honestly ashamed of that sensual kiss laid on a school-girl's lips. She was only fifteen then. He raged at himself and at her, too. "Kitten Cleopatra," he called her in his thought. "Amorous little devil— Jove! I pity her husband...."

For he never realised for an instant that the girl was really in love with him.