Part 29 (1/2)
”I . . . did,” imitating her tone and hesitance. It was the wisest thing he could have done, for it relaxed the nerves of both of them.
Elsa smiled, smiled and forgot the substance of all her rehearsals, forgot the letter of credit, warm with the heat of her heart. ”I am a pagan,” she confessed.
”And I am a barbarian. I ought to be horribly ashamed of myself.”
”But you are not?”
For a moment their eyes drew. Hers were like dark whirlpools, and he felt himself drifting helplessly, irresistibly. He dropped his hands upon the railing and gripped; the illusion of fighting a current was almost real to him. Every fiber in his body cried out against the struggle.
”No, not in the least,” he said, looking toward the sunset. ”Fighting is riff-raff business, and I'm only a riff-raffer at best.”
”Rather, aren't you Paul Ellison, brother, twin brother, of the man I said I was going home to marry?”
How far away her voice seemed! The throb in his forehead and the dull ache over his heart, where some of the sledge-hammer blows had gone home, he no longer felt.
”Don't deny it. It would be useless. Knowing your brother as I do, who could doubt it?”
He remained dumb.
”I couldn't understand, just simply couldn't. They never told me; in all the years I have known them, in all the years I have partly made their home my own, there was nothing. Not a trinket. Once I saw a camera-picture. I know now why Arthur s.n.a.t.c.hed it from my hand. It was you. You were bending over an engineer's tripod. Even now I should have doubted had I not recalled what you said one day on board, that you had built bridges. Arthur couldn't build anything stronger than an artist's easel. You are Paul Ellison.”
”I am sorry you found out.”
”Why?”
”Because I wanted to be no more than an incident in your life, just Parrot & Co.”
”Parrot & Co.!”
It was like a caress; but he was too dull to sense it, and she was unconscious of the inflection. The burning suns.h.i.+ne gave to his hair and beard the glistening of ruddy gold. Her imagination, full of unsuspected poetry at this moment, clothed him in the metals of a viking. There were other whirlpools beside those in her eyes, but Elsa did not sense the drifting as he had done. It was insidious.
”An incident,” she repeated.
”Could I be more?” with sudden fierceness. ”Could I be more in any woman's life? I take myself for what I am, but the world will always take me for what I have done. Yes, I am Paul Ellison, forgotten, I hope, by all those who knew me. Why did you seek me that night? Why did you come into my life to make bitterness become despair? The blackest kind of despair? Elsa Chetwood, Elsa! . . . Well, the consul is right. I _am_ a strong man. I can go out of your life, at least physically. I can say that I love you, and I can add to that good-by!”
He wheeled abruptly and went quickly down the gallery, bareheaded, without any destination in his mind, with only one thought, to leave her before he lost the last shreds of his self-control.
It was then that Elsa knew her heart. She had spoken truly. She was a pagan: for, had he turned and held out his hands, she would have gone to him, gone with him, anywhere in the world, lawfully or unlawfully.
XIX
TWO LETTERS
Elsa sang. She flew to her mirror. The face was hers and yet not hers. Always her mirror had told her that she was beautiful; but up to this moment her emotion had recorded nothing stronger than placid content. Now a supreme gladness filled and tingled her because her beauty was indisputable. When Martha came to help her dress for dinner, she still sang. It was a wordless song, a melody that every human heart contains and which finds expression but once. Elsa loved.
Doubt, that arch-enemy of love and faith and hope, doubt had spread its dark pinions and flown away into yesterdays. She felt the zest and exhilaration of a bird just given its freedom. Once she slipped from Martha's cunning hands and ran out upon the gallery.
”Elsa, your waist!”
Elsa laughed and held out her bare arms to the faded sky where, but a little while since, the sun had burned a pathway down the world. All in an hour, one small trifling s.p.a.ce of time, this wonderful, magical thing had happened. He loved her. There had been hunger for her in his voice, in his blue eyes. Presently she was going to make him feel very sorry that he had not taken her in his arms, then and there.