One Man in His Time Part 33

As she approached the club at the corner she saw Benham come out of the door; and stopping the car she waited, smiling, until he joined her.

While she watched him cross the pavement, she rejoiced in the thoroughbred fineness and thinness of his appearance--in his clear-cut Roman features and in the impenetrable reticence of his expression. Yes, she loved him as well as she could love any man; and that, she told herself, with a touch of cynical amus.e.m.e.nt, was just so much and no more, just enough to bring happiness, but not enough to bring pain.

"I'll take you home," she said, as he reached her, and there seemed to her something delightful and romantic in this accidental meeting.

"What luck!" The severity melted from his features while he took his place beside her. "I was thinking only this morning that I owe a sacrifice to the G.o.d of chance. May I tell the man to drop me at my rooms?"

She nodded, watching him contentedly while he spoke to the chauffeur and then turned to look at her with his level impersonal gaze. Happiness had brought the youth back to her face. Her hair swept like burnished wings under her small close hat, and the eyes that she raised to his were dark and splendid. There was about her always in moments of happiness the look of a beauty too bright to last or to grow old; and now, in this last romance of her life, she appeared to be drenched in autumn suns.h.i.+ne.

"One does want to make sacrifices," she answered. "That is the penalty of joy. One can scarcely believe in it before it goes."

"Well, I believe in this. You are very lovely. Where have you been?"

"To the Governor's. I wanted to speak to Patty. I feel sorry for Patty to-day. I feel sorry for almost every one," she added, with an enchanting smile, "except myself."

"And me. Surely you don't waste your pity on me? But what of Miss Vetch?

Hasn't she her own particular happiness?"

"I wonder--" Then, without finis.h.i.+ng her sentence, she left the subject of Patty because she surmised from Benham's tone that he would not be sympathetic. "I had a long talk with the Governor. John, what do you think will come of the strike?"

He answered her question with another. "What did he tell you?"

"Nothing except that the men have a right to strike if they wish to."

He laughed. "Well, that's safe enough. But don't talk of Vetch. I dislike him so heartily that I have a sneaking feeling I may be unjust to him."

It was so like him, that fine impersonal sense of fairness, that her eyes warmed with admiration. "That is splendid," she responded. "It is just the kind of thing that Vetch could never feel." Suddenly she knew that she was ashamed of having believed in Vetch when she contrasted him with John Benham. How could she have imagined for an instant that the Governor could stand a comparison like this?

He pressed her hand as the car stopped before the apartment house where he lived. "In a few hours I shall see you again," he said; and his voice, in its eagerness, reminded her of the voice of Kent Page when he had made love to her in her girlhood. Ah, she had learned wisdom since then! Just so much and no more, that was the secret of happiness. Give with the mind and the heart; but keep always one inviolable sanct.i.ty of the spirit--of the buried self beneath the self.

The streets were almost deserted; and as the car went on, Corinna thought that she had never seen the city look so fresh and charming.

Through the long green vista of the trees, there was a s.h.i.+mmer of silver air, and wrapped in this sparkling veil, she saw the bronze statues and the ardent glow of the sunset. Everything at which she looked was steeped in a wonderful golden light; and this light seemed to come, not from the burning horizon, but from the happiness that flooded her thoughts. She saw the world again as she had seen it in her first youth, suffused with joy that was like the vivid freshness of dawn. The long white road, the arching trees, the glittering dust, the spring flowers blooming in gardens along the roadside, the very faces of the people who pa.s.sed her; all these things at which she looked were illuminated by this radiance which seemed, in some strange way, to s.h.i.+ne not without but within her heart. "It is too beautiful to last," she said to herself in a whisper. "It is youth, more beautiful even than the reality, come back again for an hour--for one little hour before it goes out for ever."

Then, because it seemed safer as well as wiser to be practical, to discourage wild dreaming, she tried to direct her thoughts to insignificant details. Yet even here that rare golden light penetrated to the innermost recesses of her mind; and each drab uninteresting fact glittered with a fresh interest and charm. "I forgot to order that cretonne for the porch," she thought disconnectedly, in an endeavour to conciliate the Fates by pretending that life was as commonplace as it had always been. "That black background with the blue larkspur is pretty--and I must have the porch furniture repainted the blue-green that they do so well in Italy. That reminds me that Patty must be the belle of the dance in her green dress. I shall see that she has no lack of partners--at least I can manage that;--if I cannot make her happy. I am sorry for the child--if only Stephen--but, no--I left the book I was reading in the shop. What was the name of it? Silly and sentimental! Why will people always write things they don't mean and know are not true about love? Yes, the black background with the blue larkspur was the best that I saw. I wonder what I did with the sample. Oh, why can't everybody be happy?"

The car turned out of the road into the avenue of elms, which led to the Georgian house of red brick, with its quaint hooded doorway. In front of the door there was a flagged walk edged with box; and after the car had gone, Corinna followed this walk to the back of the house, where rows of white and purple iris were blooming on the garden terrace. For a moment she looked on the garden as one who loved it; then turning reluctantly, she ascended the steps, and entered the door which a coloured servant held open.

"A lady's in there waiting for you," said the man, who having lost the dialect, still retained the dramatic gestures of his race. "She would wait, and she says she can't go without seeing you."

With a faintness of the heart rather than the mind, Corinna looked through the doorway, and saw the face of Alice Rokeby glimmering narcissus white in the dusk of the drawing-room.

CHAPTER XIX

THE SIXTH SENSE

As Corinna went forward, with that strange premonitory chill at her heart, it seemed to her that all the fragrance of the garden floated toward her with a piercing sweetness that was the very essence of youth and spring. Through the wide-open French windows she could see the garden terrace, the pale rows of iris, and the straight black cedars rising against the pomegranate-coloured light of the afterglow. A few tall white candles were s.h.i.+ning in old silver candlesticks; but it was by the vivid tint in the sky that she saw the large, frightened eyes of the woman who was waiting for her.

"If I had only known you were here, I should have hurried home," began Corinna cordially. Drawing a chair close to her visitor, she sat down with a movement that was protecting and rea.s.suring. Her quick sympathies were already aroused. She surmised that Alice Rokeby had come to her because she was in trouble; and it was not in Corinna's nature to refuse to hear or to help any one who appealed to her.

Alice threw back her lace veil as if she were stifled by the transparent mesh. "In the shop there are so many interruptions," she answered. "I wanted to see you--" Breaking off hurriedly, she hesitated an instant, and then repeated nervously, "I wanted to see you--"

Corinna smiled at her. "Would you like to go out into the garden? May is so lovely there."

"No, it is very pleasant here." Alice made a vague, helpless gesture with her small hands, and said for the third time, "I wanted to see you--"

"I am afraid you are not well." Corinna spoke very gently. "Perhaps it is not too late for tea, or may I get you a gla.s.s of wine? All winter I've intended to go and inquire because I heard you'd been ill. It has been so long since we really saw anything of each other; but I remember you quite well as a little girl--such a pretty little girl you were too.

You are ever so much younger, at least ten years younger, than I am."

As she rippled on, trying to give the other time to recover herself, she thought how lovely Alice had once been, and how terribly she had broken since her divorce and her illness. She would always be appealing--the kind of woman with whom men easily fell in love--but one so soon reached the end of mere softness and prettiness.

"Yes, you were one of the older girls," answered Alice, "and I admired you so much. I used to sit on the front porch for hours to watch you go by."

"And then I went abroad, and we lost sight of each other."

"We both married, and I got a divorce last year."

"I heard that you did." It seemed futile to offer sympathy.

"My marriage was a mistake. I was very unhappy. I have had a hard life,"

said Alice, and her lower lip, as soft as a baby's, trembled nervously.

How little character there was in her face, how little of anything except that indefinable allurement of s.e.x!

"I know," responded Corinna consolingly. She felt so strong beside this helpless, frightened woman that the old ache to comfort, to heal pain, was like a pang in her heart.

"Everything has failed me," murmured Alice, with the restless volubility of a weak nature. "I thought there was something that would make up for what I had missed--something that would help me to live--but that has failed me like everything else--"

"Things will fail," a.s.sented Corinna, with sympathy, "if we lean too hard on them."

A delicate flush had come into Alice's face, bringing back for a moment her old flower-like loveliness. Her fine brown hair drooped in a wave on her forehead, and beneath it her violet eyes were deep and wistful.

"What a beautiful room!" she said in a quivering voice. "And the garden is like one in an old English song."

"Yes, I hardly know which I love best--my garden or my shop."

The words were so far from Corinna's thoughts that they seemed to drift to her from some distant point in s.p.a.ce, out of the world beyond the garden and the black brows of the cedars. They were as meaningless as the wind that brought them, or the whirring of the white moth at the window. Beneath her vacant words and expressionless gestures, which were like the words and gestures of an automaton, she was conscious of a profound current of feeling which flowed steadily between Alice Rokeby and herself; and on this current there was borne all the inarticulate burden of womanhood. "Poor thing, she wants me to help her," she thought; but aloud she said only: "The roses are doing so well this year. They will be the finest I have ever had."

Suddenly Alice lowered her veil and rose. "I must go. It is late," she said, and held out her hand. Then, while she stood there, with her hand still outstretched, all that she had left unspoken appeared to rush over her in a torrent, and she asked rapidly, while her lips jerked like the lips of a hurt child, "Is it true, Corinna, that you are going to marry John Benham?"

For an instant Corinna looked at her without speaking. The sympathy in her heart ceased as quickly as a fountain that is stopped; and she was conscious only of that lifeless chill with which she had entered the room. Now that the question had come, she knew that she had dreaded it from the first moment her eyes had rested on the face of her visitor, that she had expected it from the instant when she had heard that a woman awaited her in the house. It was something of which she had been aware, and yet of which she had been scarcely conscious--as if the knowledge had never penetrated below the surface of her perceptions. And it would be so easy, she knew, to evade it now as she had evaded it from the beginning, to push to-day into to-morrow for the rest of her life.

Nothing stood in her way; nothing but that deep instinct for truth on which, it seemed to her now, most of her a.s.sociations with men had been wrecked. Then, because she was obliged to obey the law of her nature, she answered simply, "Yes, we expect to be married."

A strangled sound broke from Alice's lips, but she bit it back before it had formed into a word. The hand that she had thrown out blindly fell on the fringe of her gown, and she began knitting it together with trembling fingers. "Has he--does he care for you?" she asked presently in that hurried voice.

For the second time Corinna hesitated; and in that instant of hesitation, she broke irrevocably with the past and with the iron rule of tradition. She knew how her mother, how her grandmother, how all the strong and quiet women of her race would have borne themselves in a crisis like this--the implications and evasions which would have walled them within the garden that was their world. Her mother, she realized, would have been as incapable of facing the situation as she would have been of creating it.