Part 14 (1/2)
She hesitated, gracefully lowering her potent gaze.
”Probably,” Lee Randon added keenly, ”it was to happen because you were so excessively beautiful.” There was no reply to this. ”I don't need to tell you,” he admitted, ”that I did my best to discourage him; and I pointed out that the time must come when you would fancy, no, need, someone else.”
”Oh, that was cruel!” she cried softly; ”and it isn't, it won't be true.
Do you think, just because I happen to be an actress, that I can't be faithful?”
”It is all a question of degree,” he instructed her, ”of talent or genius. Talent may be faithful to a number of things--a man or a country or even an ideal; but the only fidelity of genius is to itself.”
”I hadn't thought of that,” she reflected, sadly.
”Why should you?” he demanded; ”you are being natural; I am the disturbance, the conventional voice sentimentally reading from the call book. But you don't have those in moving pictures: it would be a sentimentally stupid director. You must believe me: your acting will always be incomprehensible to Peyton: he will approve of the results and raise h.e.l.l--for the comparatively short time he will last--with the means. Tell me this: together with his conviction that you'd carry the stage up into heaven, didn't he speak of your retiring?”
The faint smile about her lips was a sufficient answer. That smile, he recognized, pensive and unlingering, served a wide and practical variety of purposes. ”In the end,” he insisted, ”Peyton will want to take you to a home in a correct suburb; that conception he'll never get away from.”
She answered:
”And what if I liked that, wanted it? You mustn't think my life is entirely joyful.”
”I don't,” he as promptly a.s.sured her; ”but you will never get away from it; you will never sit contentedly through long afternoons playing bridge; you're cursed, if you want to call it that.”
”I saw Peyton's child,” she said at a tangent. ”He had hold of the nurse's ap.r.o.n in such a funny decided fist. I wanted to hug him, but I remembered that it wasn't the thing to do. She has that,” a shade of defiance darkened her voice at her reference to Claire.
”Babies are no longer overwhelmingly important,” Lee retorted; ”not in the face of emotion itself; they have become a sort of unavoidable, almost an undesirable by-product.”
”They won't be with me,” Mina Raff promised.
It was evident to him that she saw herself in the role of a mother; her face had a tender maternal glamour, her eyes were misted with sentiment; a superb actress. ”A baby of my own,” she whispered; ”a baby and a house and Peyton.”
”Nothing duller could be imagined.” Momentarily he lost his self-restraint. ”You have something inimitable, supremely valuable, and you are dreaming like a rabbit. If you must be a mother, be that one on the screen, for the thrilling of millions of limited minds.”
”He seemed to like me.” She had paid no attention to him, back again in the thought of the Morrises' son.
”If he did,” Lee dryly added; ”he will very soon get over it; Ira won't love you conspicuously.”
”Why--why that never entered my head,” Mina was startled; ”but, yes, how could he? And I can't bear to have anyone, the most insignificant person alive, hate me. It makes me too wretched to sleep. They will have to understand, be generous; I'll explain so it is entirely clear to them.”
Her voice bore an actual note of fear, her delicate lips trembled uncontrollably.
”You can't blame them, Ira and his mother, if they refuse to listen.
Eastlake as a town will dispense with you; and Claire's family--it is really quite notable--will have their say wherever they live, in Charleston and London and Spain. When Ira is grown up and, in his turn, has children, they will be very bitter about your memory. However, publicly, I suppose it will do you more good than harm. The public loves such scandal; but, with that advertis.e.m.e.nt, the other will continue. It isn't logical, I'll admit; except for Claire I should support you. That is where, and only where, I am dragged into your privacy. And, too, for your sake, it would have been better if you had hit on a different sort of man, one without the background of such stubborn traditions. You will have to fight them both in him--where they, too, may come to blame you--and about you. There is a strain of narrow intolerance through all that blood.”
Mina Raff's eyes fluttered like two clear brown b.u.t.terflies which, preparing to settle, had been rudely disturbed. Then her mouth was compressed, it grew firm and firmer, obdurate; as though an internal struggle, evident in her tense immobility, had been decided against what was being powerfully urged upon her. A conviction that here, too, finally, he had failed, was in possession of Lee Randon, when he saw the determination drain from her face: it a.s.sumed a child's expression of unreasoning primitive dread. She drew a hand across her forehead.
”I shall have to think,” she told him; ”I am very much upset. It makes me cold, what you said. Why did you come to New York and talk to me like this? Oh, I wish Peyton were here; he'd answer you; he isn't a coward like me.”
”Since you are so tired, and I've been so very objectionable, I think perhaps you had better go back to your hotel,” Lee proposed. ”It's after ten.” She rose immediately, but had to remain until the waiter was summoned with their account. In her limousine she seemed smaller, more lost in her fate and money, than before. She resembled a crushed and lovely flower; and Lee reflected that it was a shame no one was there to revive her. Mina Raff, at the Plaza, insisted, holding his hand in a mingled thoughtfulness and pictorial misery, on sending him to the Groves'; and his last glimpse of her, over his shoulder, was of a slight figure hurled into upper expensive mansions by an express elevator.
A car not the Groves' was outside their house; and, as Lee was pa.s.sing the drawing-room doors, William Grove called him in. He found there a Dr. Davencott and his wife, obviously on terms of close intimacy with the house. The physician was a thickly-built man with an abrupt manner continually employed in sallies of a vigorous but not unkindly humor.
Lee gathered that his practice was large and select; and he quickly saw the reason, the explanation, of this: Dr. Davencott had carried the tonic impatience of earlier years among inconsequential people into a sphere where bullying was a novelty with a direct traceable salutary effect. But whatever harshness was visible in him was tempered by his wife, who was New England, Boston itself, at its best. She had a grave charm, a wit, rather than humor, which irradiated her seriousness, and gave even her tentative remarks an air of valuable finality.
To this Mrs. Grove contributed little. She practically avoided speaking to Lee Randon; and he was certain that she was, cheaply and inexcusably, offended at him. Then, in moving, her gaze caught his, their eyes held fixed; and, as he looked, the expression he had seen on her face that afternoon in the library, drawn and white with staring black eyes, came upon her. It amazed him so much that he, too, sat regarding her in an intentness which took no account of the others. One of Mrs. Grove's hands, half hidden in green tulle, was clenched. She breathed in an audible sigh and, with what appeared to be a wrenching effort, turned from him to the general conversation.