Part 46 (1/2)

She laughed, in spite of herself, at the new light in which he was showing himself. But, the moment after, she ceased to laugh; for, with an audacity he had not believed himself capable of, Maurice took the arm that was lying next him, and, midway between wrist and elbow, put his lips to it, kissing it several times, in different places.

Taken unawares, Louise was helpless. Then she freed herself, ungently.

”No, no, I won't have it. Oh, how can you be so foolis.h.!.+ My gloves--where is my glove? Pick it up, and give it to me--at once!”

He groped on the dusty floor; the veins in his forehead hammered. She had moved to a distance, and now stood busy with the gloves; she would not look at him.

In the uneasy silence that ensued, Herries opened the door: a moment later, they went out together. Maurice remained standing until he saw them appear below. Then he dropped back into his seat, and covered his face with his hands.

He did not regret what he had done; he did not care in the least, whether he had made her angry with him or not. On the contrary, the feeling he experienced was akin to relief: disapproval and mortification, jealousy and powerlessness--all the varying emotions of the evening--had found vent and alleviation in the few hastily s.n.a.t.c.hed kisses. He no longer felt injured by her treatment of him: that hardly seemed to concern him now. His sensations, at this minute, resolved themselves into the words: ”She is mine, she is mine!” which went round and round in his brain. And then, in a sudden burst of clearness, he understood what it meant for him to say this. It meant that the farce of friends.h.i.+p, at which he had played, was at an end; it meant that he loved her--not as. .h.i.therto, with a touch of elegiac resignation--but with a violence that made him afraid. If seemed incredible to him now that he had spent two months in close fellows.h.i.+p with her: it was ludicrous, inhuman. For he now saw, that his ultimate desire had been neither to help her nor to restore her to life--that was a comedy he had acted for the benefit of the traditions in his blood. Brutally, at this moment, he acknowledged that he had only wished to hear her voice and to touch her hand: to make for himself so indispensable a place among the necessities of her life that no one could oust him from it.--Mine--mine! Instinct alone spoke in him to-night--that same blunt instinct which had reared its head the first time he saw her, but which, until now, he had kept under, like a medieval ascetic. No reason came to his aid; he neither looked into the future nor did he consider the past: he only swore to himself in a kind of stubborn wrath that she was his, and that no earthly power should take her from him.

One by one the slow-dragging hours wore away. The dancers' ranks were thinned; but those who remained, gyrated as insensately as ever. There was an air of greater freedom over the ball-room. The chaperons who, earlier in the evening, had sat patiently on the red velvet sofas, had vanished with their charges, and, in their train, the more sedate of the company: it was past three o'clock, and now, every few minutes, a cloaked couple crossed a corner of the hall to the street-door.

When Maurice went downstairs, he could not find Louise, and some time elapsed before she and Herries emerged from the supper-room. Although the lines beneath her eyes were like rings of hammered iron, she danced anew, went on to the very end, with a few other infatuated people.

Finally, the tired musicians rose stiffly to pack their instruments; and, with a sigh of exhaustion, she received on her shoulders the cloak Maurice stood holding.

They were among the last to leave the hall; the lights went out behind them. Herries walked a part of the way home with them, and talked much and idly--ineffable in his self-conceit, thought Maurice. But Louise urged him on, saying wild, disconnected things, as if, as long as words were spoken, it did not matter what they were. Again and again her laugh resounded: it was hoa.r.s.e, and did not ring true.

”She has had too much champagne,” Maurice said to himself, as he walked silent at her side.

In the ROSSPLATZ, Herries, who was in a becoming fur cap, and a coat with a fur-lined collar, took a circ.u.mstantial leave of her. He raised both her hands to his lips.

”To the memory of those divine waltzes--our waltzes!” he said sentimentally. ”And to all the others the future has in store for us!”

She left her hands in his, and smiled at him.

”Till to-morrow then,” said Herries. ”Or shall you forget your promise?”

”It is you who will forget--not I.”

After this, Maurice and she walked on alone together. It was that dreariest of all the hours between sunset and dawn, when it is scarcely night any longer, and yet not nearly day. The crisp frost of the previous evening had given place to a bleak rawness; the day that was coming would crawl in, lugubriously, unable to get the better of the darkness. The houses about them were wrapped in sleep; they two were the only people abroad, and their footsteps echoed in the damp streets.

But, for once, Louise was not affected by the gloom of her surroundings. She walked swiftly, and her chief aim seemed to be to render any but the most trival words impossible. Now, however, her strained gaiety had the aspect of a fever; Maurice believed that, for the most part, she did not know what she was saying.

Until they stood in front of the house-door, she kept up the tension.

But when the young man had fitted the key in the lock and turned it, she looked at him, and, for the first time this night, gave him her full attention.

”Good night--my friend!”

She was leaning against the woodwork; beneath the lace scarf, her eyes were bent on him with a strange expression. Maurice looked down into them, and, for a second or two, held them with his own, in one of those looks which are not for ordinary use between a man and a woman. Louise s.h.i.+vered under it, and gave a nervous laugh; the next moment, she made a slight movement towards him, an involuntary movement, which was so imperceptible as to be hardly more than an easing of her position against the doorway, and yet was unmistakable--as unmistakable as was the little upward motion with which she resigned herself at the outset of a dance. For an instant, his heart stopped beating; in a flash he knew that this was the solution: there was only one ending to this night of longing and excitement, and that was to take her in his arms, as she stood, to hold her to him in an infinite embrace, till his own nerves were stilled, and the madness had gone from her. But the returning beat of his blood brought the knowledge that a morrow must surely come--a morrow for both of them--a cold, grey day to be faced and borne. She was not herself, in the bonds of her unnatural excitement; it was for him to be wise.

He took her limply hanging hand, and looked at her gravely and kindly.

”You are very tired.”

At his voice, the wild light died out of her eyes; she seemed to shrink into herself. ”Yes, very tired. And oh, so cold!”