Part 31 (1/2)

Suzee frowned and then smiled.

”I do not like such long words. I do not understand you when you talk like that; but I love you, Treevor, so, so much.”

The misty light of dawn was rolling over 'Frisco when I shewed Suzee her own room, where according to the pact with the manager, she was to sleep.

She s.h.i.+vered as we went into it.

”Oh, Treevor, what a great big room,” she said; ”I am frightened at it. Won't you stay with me? Or let me be in yours?”

”I said you should sleep here,” I answered; ”so you must. Jump into bed quick and go to sleep; you will soon forget the size of the room.

I am dead tired now, I must go and get some sleep myself. Good-night, dear.”

I kissed her and went back to the sitting-room. The morning light struggling with the artificial fell on the table with its scattered plates and gla.s.ses, and on her little trunk and the unpacked silken clothes.

I turned out the lights and drew up the blinds, and stood looking out.

The waves of soft white fog filled the empty streets. All was quiet, white, in the dawn.

I had said I was tired, yet now sleep seemed far from my eyes, and my mind flew out over intervening s.p.a.ce to Viola, longing to find her, wherever she was.

Where would she be? I could imagine her waking with this same dawn in her calm, innocent bed, and gazing, too, into this white light, and longing for me. Surely she would be that? The words of her letter came back to me: the time would pa.s.s ”slowly as a winter night to me, your Viola.”

She was right. Nothing could divide us permanently, really. Perhaps even Death would be powerless to do that.

I had a dissatisfied feeling with myself. Would it have been better, I asked myself, to have waited through this year alone, since nothing could really satisfy or delight me in her absence? What was the good, after all, of chasing the mere shadow of the joy I had with her?

But, strangely enough, I felt that Viola had no wish that I should pa.s.s this mysterious year of separation she had imposed upon us, alone.

She had confessed her inability to share my love with any other. The incident of Veronica had made that clear; but now that she chose to deny herself to me she seemed rather to wish than otherwise that I should seek adventures, experiences elsewhere. And I felt indefinitely, yet strongly, that the more I could crush into this year of life and of artistic inspiration, especially the latter, the happier she would feel when we met.

Perhaps she wished to tire me with lesser loves, certain that her own must prevail against them. Perhaps she had even left me solely for this, with this idea. Knowing herself unable to bear the pain of infidelity to her when she was present, yet, accepting it as tending to some ultimate psychological end, she had withdrawn herself from me.

I remembered she had said once to me:

”I would so much rather be a man's last love, the crowning love of his life, the one whose image would be with him as he pa.s.sed from this world, than his first; poor little toy of his youth, forgotten, unheeded, effaced by the pa.s.sions of his life at the zenith.”

Perhaps, ... but, ah! what was the use of speculation when it might all be wrong?

Some reason was there, guiding that subtle mystery of her brain, and I, if I fulfilled her expressed wishes, was doing the utmost to carry out that plan of hers which I could not yet understand.

A feeling of excessive weariness invaded me, mental and physical, and as the light grew stronger, breaking into day, I went to my own room to sleep.

As soon as I woke I got up and went to look at my new possession. To my surprise the room seemed empty. I looked round. No Suzee. I went up to the bed. It had apparently not been slept in, but two of the blankets had been pulled off and disappeared.

As I stood by the bedside, wondering what had become of her, I felt a soft kiss on my ankles and, looking down, there she was, creeping out from under the bed with one of the blankets round her. Her hair was a lovely undisarranged ma.s.s; but the rosebuds in it were dead, and it was dusty. Her face looked like white silk in its youthful pallor. She smiled up delightedly at me and crawled out farther from the bed valance.

”What are you doing down there?” I asked. ”Wasn't the bed comfortable?”

”Oh yes, Treevor, underneath I was very comfortable and warm. You see, I have always been accustomed to something over my head, and in this room the ceiling is such a long way off.”

She got up and stood before me, her rounded shoulders and sweetly moulded arms shewing above the blanket.