Part 52 (1/2)
”I'm sure I wish you every happiness. Only--”
He paused.
”Please finish.”
”Nothing--except that you will leave me with an unpleasant sense of having been made a fool of.”
She rose, flicked her cigarette into the fire and then turned as if about to speak. But thought better of it. There was a long silence.
”Pierre de Folligny and I are friends of long standing,” she said at last. ”One marries some day. Why not an old friend? The age of madness pa.s.ses--I am almost thirty and I have lived--much. It is time--” she finished wearily, ”time that I married again. We understand each other perfectly.” A smile slowly dawned and broke.
”What one wants in a husband is not so much a rhapsodist as a rhymester, not so much a lover as a walking-gentleman--Pierre is that, you know.”
She sighed again and rose.
”It was very sweet of you to come in, John. Don't misunderstand me again. _That_--” and she paused to give the word emphasis, ”is all over. I'm quite safe as a _confidante_. Hermia has treated you very badly, I think. I'd like to tell her so--No? Well, good-bye. Do come in again. I want you to know Pierre better. He really is all that a walking-gentleman should be.”
He laughed and kissed her fingers, and in a moment had gone.
Olga Tcherny stood immovable where he had left her, one foot upon the fender, her gaze upon the fire. After a time she stretched forth her fingers to the blaze. All over! She straightened slowly and caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror. The firelight gleamed under her brows, brought out with unpleasant sharpness the angle of her jaw and touched the bones of her cheek caressingly. She looked again, the truth compelling her, and then buried her face in her arm. The truth--middle age, had set its first mark upon her. The sallow fingers of Time had touched her lightly, more as a warning than as a prophecy, painted with a reluctant brush a deeper tone into the shadows, a higher note in the lights, had brushed in haltingly the false values that now mocked at her. Time! She seemed to count it by her heart-throbs.
She walked across the room and stood before the portrait John Markham had painted of her. The face gazed out from its shadows, its eyes met hers for a moment, then looked through her and beyond, eyes which looked, yet saw not, eyes deep and inscrutable, seers of visions, bathed in memories which would not sink into oblivion. Her eyes he had painted carefully. For him it seemed the rest of the face had been a blank. The nose, the chin, were hers, and the mouth--the lips, a scarlet smudge of illusiveness. They were hers, too. He had had difficulty with her lips, painting and repainting them. They had puzzled him. ”The eyes we are born with,” he had said--how well she remembered it now! ”The lips are what we make ourselves.” At last he had painted them in quickly--almost brutally and let them be. They seemed to mock at her now--to contradict the meaning of the eyes--which would not, could not, smile.
Hermia had scoffed at this portrait because it was not ”pretty.” There was something bigger than mere prettiness here. He had painted the soul of her, reading with his art what had been hidden from the man, as he had strayed through the labyrinth of her thoughts viewing the blighted blossom of her girlhood and wifehood and the neglected garden of her maturity. As she viewed the portrait now in the light of time and event, she saw, more clearly than ever, her soul and body as Markham had seen it. He had painted her as he would have painted character--an old man or an old woman, searching for shadows rather than lights, seeking the anatomy of sorrow rather than that of joy--had made her the subject of a cool and not too flattering psychological investigation. Was this how he had always seen her? This far-looking, inscrutable, satiated woman of the world, who peered forth into the future, from the dull embers of the past--a being whose physical beauty was rather suggested than expressed--whose loveliness lay in what she might have been rather than in what she was? He had always thought of her thus?
She rubbed her eyes and looked again. Not, not always. She remembered now--he couldn't have painted her as he had painted others--as he had painted a while ago the portrait of Phyllis Van Vorst--carelessly, contemptuously. He had probed deeply--painted form his own deeps.
They had been very close together in those hours, mentally, spiritually, and only the barrier she herself had raised prevented their physical nearness. That, too, she could have had?
A mist fell across the canvas and Hermia's vision interposed, rosy and careless, her braggart youth triumphant.
She turned, threw herself upon the couch and buried her head, her fingers clenched, in the pillows. She made no sound and lay so immovable that one might have thought she was sleeping. But her blood was coursing madly and her pulses throbbed a wrist and neck. She had been true to her better self--with Markham--and her idealism had brought her only this void of barren regret. Whichever way she looked into the past or into the future, the vista was empty; behind her only the echoes of voices and a grim shape or two; before her--vacancy. She had bared her soul to Markham, there in the Square, torn away the veil of her pride and let him know the truth. Why, G.o.d knew. She had been mad. She had believed the worst of Hermia and of him, and had offered herself to him that he might judge between them--her heart and Hermia's, her mind, her body and Hermia's. Was her own face no longer fair that he should have looked at her so curiously and turned away with Hermia's name on his lips, Hermia's image in his heart? A doubt had crept into her mind and lingered insidiously. Hermia innocent!
She was beginning to believe it now. In spite of the d.a.m.ning facts she had discovered, the evidence of Madam Bordier and Monsieur Duchanel, of the peasant women at Tillires and of Pierre de Folligny, the testimony of Hermia's pale face at the shooting lodge at Alenon and of her confession which she had not thought of doubting, the belief had slowly gained force in her mind that Markham had not lied to her. She found confirmation of it in Hermia Challoner's disappearance in France, in her att.i.tude toward Markham and in the announcement of her engagement to another man. Markham could not guess, as she did now, that this was only a _ruse de femme_, born of the access of timidity at the discovery of her indiscretion and the consciousness that she had gone too far with Markham, who must be punished for his share in her downfall. It seemed pitifully clear now.
Olga's bitterness choked and whelmed her. It seemed even worse that Hermia should be innocent. She dared not think of the picture she had made in Markham's mind when she had thrown herself into the scales that he might weigh their frailties and compare them. Hermia innocent! How Olga hated her for it, and for her youth and beauty. They mocked and derided the tender flame that she had nourished, which now glowed ineffectually as in another, a greater light. She hated Hermia for all the things that she herself was not.
Lucidity came to her slowly. After a long while she raised a disordered face and leaned her chin upon her hands, staring at the dying log. She had promised him not to speak. She could not. She had even promised to persuade De Folligny to silence. Had he mentioned the incident already? She did not know. He was not by nature a gossip, but Hermia had not been too tactful and it was a good story--the sanct.i.ty of which, upon the mind of a man of De Folligny's temperament, might not be impressive. She would keep her promise to Markham and persuade Pierre to silence. No one should know by word of mouth--
Olga started up, her eyes wide open, staring at the opposite wall, where there hung a colored print of a woodland scene by Morland, and a smile slowly grew at one end of her lips, a crooked smile, that might have been merely quizzical, had not the impression been unpleasantly modified by the narrowing eyes and the tiny wrinkle that suddenly grew between her brows.
”I will do it,” she muttered. ”It may be amusing.”
CHAPTER XXVI
MRS. BERKELEY HAMMOND ENTERTAINS
The heritage of the world comes at last to the pachyderms. Fate is never so unkind as to those who blindly resist her and into the lap of stoic and unimpressionable she pours the horn of plenty.
Trevelyan Morehouse had gone through life on the low gear. In fact he had no change of gears and needed none. He never ”hit it up” on the smooth places or burned out his tires on the rough ones, and was therefore always to be found in perfect repair. He was a good hill climber and had a way of arriving at his destination no matter how difficult the going. When others pa.s.sed him he let them go, and plodded on after them with solemn a.s.surance, his gait so leisurely that rapid travelers had the habit of regarding his conservatism with undisguised contempt. And yet his perseverance, though inconspicuous, was singularly effective. He had won his way into the sanctorum of a big corporation and his advice, though never brilliant, was always sane and peculiarly reliable. He did not mind rebuffs and was so indifferent to indignities that people had ceased to offer them.
Socially he could always be trusted to do the usual thing in the usual way and was therefore always much in demand by hostesses who required conventional limitations. In a word he was ”the excellent Trevelyan.”
and the adjective fitted him as snugly as it did the well-known comestible with which it had come to be so comfortably and freely a.s.sociated. His excellence lay largely in the fact that he did not excel. He was content with his subordinate capacity, wise in his confidence that all things would come to him in the end, if he only waited long enough.
The same rules which he found so successful in business he now applied to his affair of the heart, and plodded off in the wake of the fast flying Hermia, imperturbable and undismayed. His flowers had been sent to her with the regularity of the clock, his visits carefully timed, and his proposals renewed with a well-bred ardor. He had waited patiently through Hermia's short and sportive attachment for ”Reggie”