Part 35 (1/2)

”Yes--but I am not in the balance,” observed Celia, quietly. ”That is where you have made your mistake.”

Theron laid aside his hat. Women were curious creatures, he reflected.

Some were susceptible to one line of treatment, some to another. His own reading of Celia had always been that she liked opposition, of a smart, rattling, almost cheeky, sort. One got on best with her by saying bright things. He searched his brain now for some clever quip that would strike sparks from the adamantine mood which for the moment it was her whim to a.s.sume. To cover the process, he smiled a little. Then her beauty, as she stood before him, her queenly form clad in a more stiffly fas.h.i.+onable dress than he had seen her wearing before, appealed afresh and overwhelmingly to him. He rose to his feet.

”Have you forgotten our talk in the woods?” he murmured with a wooing note. ”Have you forgotten the kiss?”

She shook her head calmly. ”I have forgotten nothing.”

”Then why play with me so cruelly now?” he went on, in a voice of tender deprecation. ”I know you don't mean it, but all the same it bruises my heart a little. I build myself so wholly upon you, I have made existence itself depend so completely upon your smile, upon a soft glance in your eyes, that when they are not there, why, I suffer, I don't know how to live at all. So be kinder to me, Celia!”

”I was kinder, as you call it, when you came in,” she replied. ”I told you to go away. That was pure kindness--more kindness than you deserved.”

Theron looked at his hat, where it stood on the carpet by his feet. He felt tears coming into his eyes. ”You tell me that you remember,” he said, in depressed tones, ”and yet you treat me like this! Perhaps I am wrong. No doubt it is my own fault. I suppose I ought not to have come down here at all.”

Celia nodded her head in a.s.sent to this view.

”But I swear that I was helpless in the matter,” he burst forth. ”I HAD to come! It would have been literally impossible for me to have stayed at home, knowing that you were here, and knowing also that--that--”

”Go on!” said Celia, thrusting forth her under-lip a trifle, and hardening still further the gleam in her eye, as he stumbled over his sentence and left it unfinished. ”What was the other thing that you were 'knowing'?”

”Knowing--” he took up the word hesitatingly--”knowing that life would be insupportable to me if I could not be near you.”

She curled her lip at him. ”You skated over the thin spot very well,”

she commented. ”It was on the tip of your tongue to mention the fact that Father Forbes came with me. Oh, I can read you through and through, Mr. Ware.”

In a misty way Theron felt things slipping from his grasp. The rising moisture blurred his eyes as their gaze clung to Celia.

”Then if you do read me,” he protested, ”you must know how utterly my heart and brain are filled with you. No other man in all the world can yield himself so absolutely to the woman he wors.h.i.+ps as I can. You have taken possession of me so wholly, I am not in the least master of myself any more. I don't know what I say or what I do. I am not worthy of you, I know. No man alive could be that. But no one else will idolize and reverence you as I do. Believe me when I say that, Celia! And how can you blame me, in your heart, for following you? 'Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy G.o.d my G.o.d; where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me!'”

Celia shrugged her shoulders, and moved a few steps away from him.

Something like despair seized upon him.

”Surely,” he urged with pa.s.sion, ”surely I have a right to remind you of the kiss!”

She turned. ”The kiss,” she said meditatively. ”Yes, you have a right to remind me of it. Oh, yes, an undoubted right. You have another right too--the right to have the kiss explained to you. It was of the good-bye order. It signified that we weren't to meet again, and that just for one little moment I permitted myself to be sorry for you. That was all.”

He held himself erect under the incredible words, and gazed blankly at her. The magnitude of what he confronted bewildered him; his mind was incapable of taking it in. ”You mean--” he started to say, and then stopped, helplessly staring into her face, with a dropped jaw. It was too much to try to think what she meant.

A little side-thought sprouted in the confusion of his brain. It grew until it spread a bitter smile over his pale face. ”I know so little about kisses,” he said; ”I am such a greenhorn at that sort of thing.

You should have had pity on my inexperience, and told me just what brand of kiss it was I was getting. Probably I ought to have been able to distinguish, but you see I was brought up in the country--on a farm.

They don't have kisses in a.s.sorted varieties there.”

She bowed her head slightly. ”Yes, you are ent.i.tled to say that,” she a.s.sented. ”I was to blame, and it is quite fair that you should tell me so. You spoke of your inexperience, your innocence. That was why I kissed you in saying good-bye. It was in memory of that innocence of yours, to which you yourself had been busy saying good-bye ever since I first saw you. The idea seemed to me to mean something at the moment. I see now that it was too subtle. I do not usually err on that side.”

Theron kept his hold upon her gaze, as if it afforded him bodily support. He felt that he ought to stoop and take up his hat, but he dared not look away from her. ”Do you not err now, on the side of cruelty?” he asked her piteously.

It seemed for the instant as if she were wavering, and he swiftly thrust forth other pleas. ”I admit that I did wrong to follow you to New York.

I see that now. But it was an offence committed in entire good faith.

Think of it, Celia! I have never seen you since that day--that day in the woods. I have waited--and waited--with no sign from you, no chance of seeing you at all. Think what that meant to me! Everything in the world had been altered for me, torn up by the roots. I was a new being, plunged into a new existence. The kiss had done that. But until saw you again, I could not tell whether this vast change in me and my life was for good or for bad--whether the kiss had come to me as a blessing or a curse. The suspense was killing me, Celia! That is why, when I learned that you were coming here, I threw everything to the winds and followed you. You blame me for it, and I bow my head and accept the blame. But are you justified in punis.h.i.+ng me so terribly--in going on after I have confessed my error, and cutting my heart into little strips, putting me to death by torture?”