The talkers

There had come into Stuart’s voice a hint of anxiety in these days when he greeted Gilda over the telephone. It was always the same eager, boyish question: “Are you all right, dear?” And a swift breath of relief when reassured.

The girl had taken up her music again, vocal and piano, and, three times a week, she had an Italian lesson as corollary to vocal cultivation.

A visit with Stuart to an exquisite loan exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum gave birth to an artistic impulse in the girl. The needle-work on the French renaissance furniture thrilled her; she ardently desired to learn the art; and she discovered a place on Fifth Avenue where instruction was given in gros point and petit point—where canvas was supplied, designs furnished and stamped.

Often, now, she sat by the window, her oval frame on her knees, an array of rainbow tinted skeins of silk at her elbow, embroidering with dull-tipped needle.

It was slow, minute, painstaking work, but Gilda, quite mad about it already, nourished a plan to tell in petit point the deathless story of Eros and Psyche.

The girl had copied designs filched bodily from every available source; and, determined upon covering two chairs, a sofa, and a footstool—none of these period pieces yet acquired—regarded her dismaying programme with mingled excitement and despair.

“After all,” she ventured to Stuart, “we have a whole lifetime before us. Princesses used to sit in turrets and peg away at a lifetime’s work without impatience.”

She showed him the designs she had copied and tinted—delicate panels from the industrious Angelica, from Fuseli via Bartolozzi, even from Flaxman transposed into Bartolozzian terms—lovely, pastel tinted designs in regulation cartouches.

“You’re terrifyingly clever,” he said. “I wonder,” he added, smilingly uneasy, “what you ever saw in a lumber merchant to attract you.”

“Don’t be silly, Stuart.”

“I’m not going to be. But I’m wondering a little——”

“Piffle, darling. I was taught to draw by various teachers in various convents. That’s where I learned to play, also. No girl could escape. Whether one wished it or not one was compelled to produce designs, tint them with watercolours. I could have learned petit point from the sisters; I did learn ordinary embroidery, crochet, the simple tapestry stitch. I don’t want you to think me talented.”

“Well,” he said, “music, design—any artistic manual dexterity is utterly beyond me—any creative talent or any interpretive one.”

“What I do is nothing,” she said, smilingly occupied with her needle.

“You’re better read than I am, too,” he went on. “You’ve read more widely in standard literature. You’re familiar with things I’ve merely heard of. I don’t know what the devil I learned at Harvard. I’ve brought nothing away with me.”

“You’ve brought away an unspoiled boy—with a blond head—and the perfect equipment of all that is ideal in manhood,” she said, keeping her eyes on her embroidery.

He bent and kissed her where, at the nape of the neck, the hair grew soft as pale red-gold.

“I’d better read up on art and things,” he said, “or there’ll be silences at the breakfast table some of these days.”

“I hope there’ll be too many children for that,” she murmured, intent on her needle.

The boy laughed and she flushed at her temerity, but the former, thrilled by the picture, took her small, smooth hand and rested his lips on it.

“All the same,” he said, “I don’t want to be the only dumb creature at breakfast, Gilda. You are far more cultivated than I and it worries me now and then.”

She laughed: “I’m glad of it. I don’t wish you to be too sure of me. You made me love you far too easily to suit my feminine complacency.”

“Wasn’t it inevitable, dear?” he asked, so seriously that the girl laughed again.

“Of course, blaming destiny softens the shameful fact that I no sooner beheld you than I seized you.”

Her eyes sparkled, her colour glowed, her hair seemed a living flame enveloping the dainty head lowered above her embroidery, where the needle flashed in her white fingers.

Presently her expression altered; she said gravely:

“Love,” she said, “necessarily originates in propinquity. But I do not believe I ever could have loved any other man.”

Then, with a swift upward glance, and laughing again: “So you see, dear, lumber merchant or prince of the blood, it made no difference in my destiny. It was to be you. It is you. And I think you’d better tell me something about your pine trees and your business so that I may enjoy it with you.”

He remained silent and preoccupied for a while, then: “Gilda, I’ve got to go to Heron Nest for a few days. Will you come as my guest?”

“Darling! I couldn’t, in your parents’ absence.”

“Aren’t we engaged?” he insisted stubbornly.

“How can we be when I’m already married?”

“I don’t see why you can’t come.”

“It wouldn’t be well for me if I ever marry you. It isn’t going to be easy, anyway. I realise that.”

He shrugged his indifference and impatience. The least conceited of men thinks himself sufficient compensation for troubles shared.

The girl looked at him sweetly but very soberly, her needle idle: the boy, boy-like, was busy thinking how he could have his way.

“It isn’t your house, yet; it’s your father’s and mother’s,” she reminded him.

“And I’m going to marry you! What of it? If I wait a million years I’m going to marry you.”

She shook her head: “It doesn’t alter things.”

“I want you to see the place——”

“I want to see it.”

“Really, Gilda, it’s rather nice in its way—nothing very grand, you know—but homelike. All my childhood, boyhood, was centered there.... Oh, come on up! There are only a few snuffy old servants at Heron Nest——”

“I’ll go up with you if you like, but it wouldn’t do for me to stay overnight.”

“Why not! Good Lord, if we’d wanted to get into mischief——”

“I know. But I shall not sleep at Heron Nest until the master of the house asks me.... Even if I were unmarried I ought not to. But probably I would,” she added.

“Do you mean to leave me there and come back alone to town?”

“There is nothing else for me to do, dear.”

“I wonder,” he mused, “if I hadn’t better telegraph dad and mother that I’m engaged to you——”

“Can’t you remember that I’m married!” she exclaimed in dismay.

“Oh, the devil! Well——” he drew a long, unhappy breath; “Well then, Gilda, I’ll wire Heron Nest to expect us for lunch——”

“No, no, no! I won’t touch your father’s bread and salt in his absence and without his knowledge. Don’t ask me, Stuart. A roof means something definitely personal to me.... My father’s roof meant it.... The roofs of relatives offered to me as shelter mean more to me than I am willing to give for offered sanctuary. No! I’ll go anywhere else with you. If it’s indiscreet, reckless, nevertheless I’m not afraid. But eat and sleep, unasked, under your father’s roof, I will not.”

Again he remained silent, busy with another train of ideas.

“All right, Gilda. I know what we’ll do. We’ll go to Heron Nest, look over things, take the train that same evening for our timber lands, and have a wonderful two weeks together in the wilds!”

The girl gazed at him amazed and disconcerted, but enthusiasm was firing him; he was ravished by the idea, and he painted an enchanted picture of the trip.

“Why not?” he exclaimed. “I’ve got to go anyway. We know we’re quite all right together. Nobody can misunderstand us because there’ll be nobody there except lumber-jacks, bosses, river-drivers—a lot of Indians, Kanucks, native mountaineers.

“I tell you it will be heavenly,” he cried, “—just you and I, Gilda, and the forest. I’ll choose your outfit for you; I’ll wire ahead and make arrangements. I’ll have Leggett put up a brand new log camp for us and stock it from the store.”

“You are inviting me to disappear with you?” she asked, bewildered.

“For ten days, dearest. Can you stand me ten days?”

The girl nodded. “It isn’t that I don’t want to go. I do. I’m going with you. I’m just trying to comprehend our doing it.”

“It is like an enchanting dream, isn’t it?” he said, delighted. “I’ve been dreading it—not the work, but being away from you. It never occurred to me to ask you to go.”

“Probably,” she said, with faint sarcasm, “it would have occurred to me. All our improprieties seem to originate with me——”

He caught her in his arms.

“They do,” she insisted, breathlessly. “So I’m rather glad that this imprudence originated in your own blond head.... Darling, be careful of my needle——”

It was something new to wait for, to plan for as the winter drew toward its end.

On Saturday afternoons they haunted those fascinating shops on Fifth Avenue and Madison which are devoted to sporting outfits—new and wondrous sources of delight to Gilda, who stood in ecstasy before racks full of skis and snow-shoes, hung over glass cases brilliant with troutflies, glittering with reels and lures of metal and mother-of-pearl.

With Stuart she pored over the mechanism of guns, or compared fashions in hunting knives, or switched delicate rods of lance-wood or split-cane to test their stiffness, limberness, resiliency.

They looked at everything whether needed by them or not—at saddles, stirrups, polo mallets, golf-clubs. And as for sport clothes, he would have given her more costumes than the Empress of India, so adorable was she in knickers, in rough kilts and sleeveless jackets, in the hundred and one delightful confections invented for the outdoor convenience and adornment of healthy girlhood.

Those were sparkling, halcyon afternoons when he came uptown early and met her at the Ritz for luncheon.

Nothing untoward marred them; of weather they were scarcely conscious, and it might rain or snow, or the sun might shine for all those two noticed such eccentricities of Mama Nature.

In those days late in winter another matter became apparent—more so every day they dared believe. And finally it became certain that longer and longer periods of time were elapsing between those dreaded hours when the dark change came over the girl and all the old unreal terror and bewilderment and despair overwhelmed them and left them exhausted, crushed, spiritually prostrate under the vast menace of destruction.

Such trouble seldom threatened them now. And, thinking of it, half fearfully, sometimes the boy wondered whether the grim vitality, now burning low in Sadoul, had anything to do with its infrequency—whether the will to suggest was becoming impaired.

For it was plain to him that Sadoul was ill. Even had he not witnessed that scene in the laboratory earlier in the winter, the physical alteration in Sadoul’s features had now become sufficiently ominous.

Gilda noticed it, but attributed it to Sadoul’s habits, not surmising the truth. She expressed her concern to Sadoul in a guarded, aloof way, never certain that her sympathy might not be mistaken by him and his ever smouldering and passionate tyranny blaze out anew.

But in these days she found Sadoul unusually silent, less saturnine, and frequently so tired that the weariness in voice and manner seemed a sort of gentleness which she was scarcely able to associate with the man.

But she soon learned of her mistake when she ventured an appeal to his generosity in behalf of their common and unhappy marital situation. For instantly the old passion flamed in his ravaged face and he swore that he would tolerate no legal separation, no other man as far as she ever could be concerned.

“You will come back to me some day,” he said. “There is no other destiny for you. It matters nothing if we die. Ultimately you will come back.... Or I’ll fetch you.”

“You never had me, Sadoul.”

“I shall have you absolutely. You’ll come of your own accord or I’ll go and get you.... Wherever you are.... Wherever I am.”

“I am sorry you believe that,” she said gently.

He muttered unintelligibly. He seemed suddenly fatigued. She had been writing automatically for him, sheet after sheet of matter which proved meaningless to her in a normal state.

For half an hour or more she had been sitting there at his desk in the part of the laboratory reserved for him, her head resting on a pillow laid on the desk, her right hand flying over the pad from which he removed each sheet as it was covered.

He, now that she was awake, had been reading over what she had written, striving to identify the controlling intelligence, certain that the written matter never originated in her or in himself.

Gilda never displayed any curiosity concerning what her subconscious self did for him. She displayed none now, tranquilly satisfied that she had helped him in accumulating data for future research.

Resting in her chair, idly playing with her pencil, she looked at the changed face of the man rather sadly. Already he was growing gray at the temples; his face, always thin, had grown unpleasantly bony; and his waxen hands were the hands of a big skeleton under a drawn membrane of colourless skin.

He continued to look over the sheets she had written, making marginal notes now and then. His under lip sagged. Noticing it, she also saw a fleck of blood on it.

Catching her eye, made suspicious perhaps, he wiped his mouth with a handkerchief already spotted with dark stains.

“Have you hurt yourself?” she asked.

He said he had bitten his lip, and went on reading, holding the handkerchief to his face.

Gilda consulted her wrist watch.

“I have a vocal lesson in half an hour,” she said, rising.

“You mean an engagement with Sutton,” he sneered.

“I mean a lesson,” she retorted, disdainfully.

“A love-lesson?”

“No. But suppose I had,” she said with cold resentment.

“It wouldn’t do you any good. Or him. You’re married and he’s a snob.”

“I am wondering,” she said, exasperated, “whether I shall trouble myself any further to help your research work.... I need not sacrifice my time by coming here and enduring your bad temper. I don’t know why I do it, either.”

“I do. You belong to me and you know it.”

The very devil gleamed in her eyes:

“I know to whom I belong,” she said in a sort of whisper, “and he can have me any time—a word, a touch—a look from him is enough.... I don’t know why I have any pity left for you, any feeling except indifference.”

“You feel the tie,” he said.

“That civil ceremony—when you confused me, used your power of suggestion on a bewildered, subconscious mind? Do you think that mockery of a marriage ceremony is any tie?”

“It is one strand in the occult bond.”

“There is no bond!” she said violently, “—no accord, no sympathy, not a wisp or shred to tie me to you except brief memories of a brilliant mind perverted—rare intervals of mental pleasure—pity for you who might have been a friend and who so ruthlessly plotted my destruction!”

She turned and went to the door. He sat looking at her.

“I am deeply sorry for you,” she said. “Good-bye.”

He said in a weary voice: “So you must go to your love-lesson.”

“That will be later, I hope,” she flashed.

He nodded: “Later. Much later.... After you and I are dead.... Then, the first lesson. A lesson in love.... Our first.... Good-night, Gilda.”