The Wheel of Life Part 30

"No, you won't, my dear cousin," he rejoined, "for you'll continue to see yourself in Perry's eyes."

He watched with a sensation of pleasure the graceful shrug of her shoulders under her shapeless coat.

"Oh, there's no chance of that," she a.s.sured him; "he is always in them himself?"

The vague curiosity in his thoughts took form suddenly in words.

"Where's he now, by the way, do you know?"

Her musical, empty laugh was as perfect as the indifferent glance she gave him. "Enjoying himself, I hope," she answered. "He hung around me until I sent him out in the sheer desperation of weariness."

Though her lashes did not quiver, he knew not only that she lied, but that she was perfectly aware of the a.s.surance and extent of his knowledge. The hopeless gallantry of her deception appealed to the fighting spirit in his blood, and he found himself wondering foolishly if Laura could have played with so high an air the part of a neglected wife. To a man of his peculiarly eager temperament there existed a curious fascination in the idea of pus.h.i.+ng to its limit of endurance an unalterable constancy. Would Laura have uttered her futile lies with so exquisite an insolence? or would she have acted in tears the patient Griselda in her closet? The virtue of truthfulness was the one he had most nearly a.s.sociated with her, and it seemed to him impossible that she should stoop to s.h.i.+eld herself behind a falsehood. Yet he could not dispel his curiosity as to how she would act in circ.u.mstances which he felt to be impossible and purely imaginary.

He wanted to speak of her to Gerty, but a restraint that was almost embarra.s.sment kept him silent, and Gerty herself could not be induced to abandon her flippant satirical tone. So Laura was not mentioned between them; and he felt when at last he brought Gerty to her door again that, on the whole, the drive had been a disappointment. He had meant to seek her sympathy with his love for her friend, and instead he had been met by a fine, exquisite edge of cutting humour. For once he had felt the need to be wholly in earnest, and Gerty had taken nothing seriously, least of all the hint which he had dropped concerning the ultimate stability of his emotion. If she had got her heartache from his s.e.x, he saw clearly that she meant to have her laugh on it as well; and the only remark from which she had let fall even momentarily her gay derision was in answer to some phrase of his in which had occurred the name of Roger Adams.

"Roger Adams!" she had echoed with a fleeting earnestness, "do you know I've always had a fancy that he is meant for Laura in another life."

"In another life?" he questioned merrily.

"Oh, things went crosswise here, you see," she answered, "but somewhere else, who knows? They may all be straightened out."

The question of Laura's possible fate in "another life" failed somehow to disturb him seriously; but as he drove presently down the darkening street, under the high electric lights, he found himself wondering vaguely why Gerty had so persistently a.s.sociated her friend with Roger Adams.

CHAPTER X

IN WHICH ADAMS COMES INTO HIS INHERITANCE

Five minutes had hardly pa.s.sed after Laura was alone before the servant brought up the name of Roger Adams, and an instant later he was holding her hand in his cordial grasp. At his appearance she had for a moment a sense of the returning reality of things--the vigour of his hand clasp, the strong, kindly look of his face, the winning, protective tenderness of his smile, these gave her an impression of belonging to the permanent instead of to the merely evanescent part of life. When he sat down in the big leather chair from which Kemper had risen, and removing his gla.s.ses, fixed upon her the attentive gaze of his narrow, short-sighted eyes, she felt immediately the first sensation of peace that she had known for many weeks. His hand, long, heavily veined, muscular, and yet finely sensitive, lay outstretched upon the mahogany lid of her desk, and she found herself presently contrasting it with the square, brown, roughly shaped hand of Kemper. Her senses, her brain, her heart were still full of her lover, yet she was able to feel through some strange enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of her dual nature, that there was a mental directness, an impa.s.sioned morality about the man she did not love in which the man she loved was entirely lacking. But the knowledge of this curiously enough, served to increase rather than to diminish the persistent quant.i.ty of her emotion, and the few minutes during which Kemper had been absent from her had sufficed to exaggerate his image to a statue that was heroic in its proportions. It was as if her heart--she was still lucid enough to think in a figure of speech--were an altar dedicated to the perpetual flame before a deity who had already showed himself to be both terrible and obscure.

Now as she sat looking, with her rapt gaze, at the man before her, she was thinking how absolutely and without reservation was her surrender to those particular qualities which Roger Adams did not represent. Here, at this approaching crisis in her experience, it might have been supposed that her sense of humour would have lent something of its brilliance as a safeguard, but the weakness of her temperament lay in the very fact that her humour entered only into those situations where it could ornament without modifying the actual conditions of thought--that she devoted to her pa.s.sion for Kemper, as to the other merely temporary phenomena of the senses, a large intensity of outlook which only the eternal could support with dignity.

Her gaze dropped back from the heights, and he felt that she became less elusive and more human.

"I've thought of you so often and so much," she remarked with her smile of cordial sweetness.

"Not so often as I've thought of you." He laid, as he spoke, a folded paper upon the desk, "There's an English review of the poems. It's rather good so I thought you might care to see it."

She unfolded the paper; then pushed it from her with an indifferent gesture. "It seems so long ago I can hardly believe I wrote them," she returned, conscious as she uttered the mere ordinary words of a subdued yet singularly vivid excitement, which seemed the softer mental radiance left by an illumination which was past.

"I wonder why it should seem long to you," said Adams slowly. "I remember you used to complain that one was obliged to fly through phases of thought in order to test them all."

"I'm not sure that I want to test them all now," she replied. "When one gets to a good place one would better stop and rest."

"Then you are in a good place?" he asked, looking at her intently from his short-sighted eyes, which appeared to contract and narrow since he had taken off his gla.s.ses.

"I don't know," she evaded the question with a smile, "but if I am, I warn you, I shall stand still and rest."

He laughed softly. "I dare say you're right, if there's such a state as rest on the earth," he answered.

The cheerful sound of his voice brought the tears suddenly to her eyes, and she remembered a man whom she had once seen in a hospital, smiling after a frightful accident through which he had pa.s.sed.

"Are you yourself so tired?" she asked.

"I?" he shook his head. "Oh, I was using the glittering generalities again."

"And yet you seldom take even the smallest of vacations," she insisted.

"One doesn't need it when one is broken in as I am. There's a joy in getting one's work behind one that the luxury of idleness does not know."

"All the same I wish you'd stop awhile." Then she gave him one of her long, thoughtful looks and spoke with the beautiful, vibrant note in her voice which he had called its "Creole quality." "We have been such old, such close, such dear friends," she went on, "that I wonder if I may tell you how profoundly--how sincerely--"

She faltered and he took up her unfinished sentence with the instinct to put her embarra.s.sment at ease. "I knew it all along, G.o.d bless you," he said. "One feels such things, I think."

"One ought to," she responded.

"It's been hard," he pursued frankly; and she was struck by the utter absence of picturesqueness, of the whining tone of the victim in his treatment of the situation. There was no appeal to her sympathy in his manner, and he impressed her suddenly as a man who had come into possession of a power over the results of events if not over the pa.s.sage of events themselves. "It's been harder, perhaps, than I can say--poor girl," he added quickly.

With a start she sat erect in her chair. "And you can stop to think of her?" she demanded.

The hand lying on the arm of his chair closed and unclosed itself slowly, without effort. "Can't you?" he asked abruptly.

"Not sincerely, not naturally," she answered. "I think of you."

She saw a spasm of pain pa.s.s suddenly into his face, a too ardent leaping, as it were, of the blood.

"You would understand things better," he said presently, after a pause in which she felt that she had witnessed a quick, sharp struggle, "if you had ever watched the slow moral poisoning of cocaine--or had ever been," he added with a harsh, grating sound in his usually quiet voice, "at the mercy of such a d.a.m.ned brute as Brady."

His sudden rage shook her like a strong wind, and she liked him the better for his relapse into an elemental pa.s.sion in the cause of righteousness.

"I'm glad you cursed him," she remarked simply. "I like it!"

He smiled a little grimly. "So do I."

"And yet how terrible it is," she said, with an effort to work herself into a sentiment of pity for Connie which she did not feel. "It makes the whole world look full of horror."

"Well, it's a comfort to think I never argued that it wasn't a hard road," he returned, with the whimsical humour which seemed only to deepen her sense of tragedy. "I've merely maintained that the only excuse for living is to make it a little easier."

He rose as he spoke and held out his hand with a smile. "So long as you're happy, don't bother to think of me," he said; "but if there ever comes a time when you need a sword-arm, let me know."

Would she ever find that she had need of him? he asked himself presently as he walked rapidly homeward through the streets. Was it in the remotest probability of events that he should ever know the delight of putting forth his full strength in her service? Like a beautiful dream the thought stayed by him for many minutes, and his mind dwelt upon it as upon some rare, cherished vision that lies always behind the actual energies of life. He thought of her dark, eloquent eyes, of the imaginative spirit in her look, and of that peculiar blending of strength with sweetness which he had found in no woman except herself.

It was a part of the power she exercised that in thinking of her the physical images appeared always to express a quality that was not in themselves alone.

Then, because he must let her go forever, he set himself patiently to detach her presence from his memory. To think of her had become, he knew, the luxury of weakness, and in order to test his strength for renouncement, he brought his mind deliberately to bear upon the immediate necessity before him. It was useless to say to himself that he could as soon give up his dream as his desire. The endurance of his will, he realised, was equal to whatever sacrifice he was called upon to make and live.

"I can do without--take this--take all and leave me nothing," he had said in the hour of his deepest misery; and with the knowledge of his strength to renounce all that which lay outside himself had come also the knowledge of his power to possess whatever was within his soul. Life was forfeiture and he had given up the world that he might gain himself.

Since the night when he had distractedly sought G.o.d through the city, he had become gradually aware that he moved in the midst of a large unspeakable peace, for in willing as G.o.d willed he had entered, he found, into a happiness which was independent and almost oblivious of the external tragedy in which he lived. Neither sickness nor poverty, nor the shame of Connie's sin, nor the weakness of his own flesh, had power to separate him from the wisdom which had come to him under the eyes of the harlot at the crossing. In seeking the essential thing he had wandered for years in a circle which had led him back at last to his own soul. Beyond this, he saw there was little further to be lost and nothing to be learned. "Give me more light, my G.o.d!" he had prayed in agony of spirit; and the answer had come in a mental illumination which had made the crooked places plain and the obscure meanings clear. At last he was happy, for at last he had learned that the man who loses all else and has G.o.d possesses everything.