Part 26 (1/2)

”Happier? Well, perhaps, but I hardly a.n.a.lysed the impression she produced. There was a change in her, that was all I saw.”

”Did she speak to you, I wonder, of her book?”

Adams laughed softly. ”She spoke of it to say that she was tired of it,”

he answered, ”but that is only the inevitable reaction of youth--it's a part of the universal rhythm of thought, nothing more.”

Mr. Wilberforce shook his head a little doubtfully. ”I wish I could feel so confident,” he returned, while a quick impatience--almost a contempt awoke in Adams' mind. Was it possible that this man beside him, with his white hairs, his blanched skin, his benign old-world sentiments, was, like Trent, a mere wors.h.i.+pper of the literary impulse in its outward accomplishment? Did he love the poet in the woman rather than the woman in the poet? As Adams turned to look at him, he thought, not without a certain grim humour, that he beheld another victim to the vice of sentimentality; and in his mental grouping he placed his companion among those who, like Connie, were in bondage to the images of their imaginations.

”And yet even if she should cease to write poems she will always live one,” he added lightly.

”Yes, she will still be herself,” agreed Mr. Wilberforce, but his words carried no conviction of comfort; and when he turned at the corner to take his car, it was with the air of a man oppressed by the weight of years.

When Adams reached home he found Connie, dressed in her blue velvet with the little twinkling aigrette, on the point of starting for an afternoon drive with her nurse in the Park. The events of the night had been entirely effaced from her mind by the newer interests of the day; and as he looked at her in amazement, it seemed to him that she bore a greater resemblance to the rosy girl he had first loved than she had done for many weary and heart-sick months. When he left her, presently, to go back to his office, it was with a feeling of hopefulness which entered like an infusion of new blood into his veins. The relapse might have been, after all, less serious than he had at first believed, and Connie's cure might become soon not only a beautiful dream, but an accomplished good. He thought of the sacrifices he had made for it--not begrudgingly, but with a generous thankfulness that he had been permitted to pay the cost--thought of the sleepless nights, the neglected work, the nervous exhaustion which had followed on the broken laws of health. At the moment he regretted none of these things, because the end, which he already saw foreshadowed in his mental vision, seemed to him to be only the crowning of his last few weeks. Even the bodily and moral redemption of Connie appeared no longer difficult in the illumination of his mood; for his compa.s.sion, in absorbing all that was vital in his nature, seemed possessed suddenly of the effectiveness of a dynamic force.

”Already she is better,” he thought, hopefully; ”I see it in her face--in her hands even, and when she is entirely cured the craving for excitement will leave her and we shall be at peace again. Peace will be very like happiness,” he said to himself, and then, with the framing of the sentence, he stopped in his walk and smiled. ”Peace is happiness,”

he added after a moment, ”for certainly pleasure is not.” With the words he remembered the bitter misery of Connie who had lived for joy alone--the utter disenchantment of Arnold Kemper, who had made gratified impulse the fulfilling of his law of life. Back and forth swung the oscillation between fugitive desire and outward possession--between the craving of emptiness and the satiety of fulfilment--and yet where was the happiness of those who lived for happiness alone? Where was even the mere animal contentment? ”Is it only when one says to Fate 'take this--and this as well--take everything and leave me nothing. I can do without'--that one really comes into the fulness of one's inheritance of joy? Was this what Christ meant when he said to His disciples 'Seek ye first the Kingdom of G.o.d and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you?' In renunciation was there, after all, not the loss of one's individual self, but the gain of an abundance of life.”

The afternoon pa.s.sed almost before he was aware of it, and when he finished his work and drew on his overcoat, he saw, as he glanced through his office window, that it was already dusk. As he reached the entrance to the elevator, he found Perry Bridewell awaiting him inside, and he kept, with an effort, his too evident surprise from showing in his face.

”Why, this is a treat that doesn't happen often!” he exclaimed with heartiness.

”I was pa.s.sing and found you were still here, so I dropped in to walk up with you,” explained Perry, but there was a note in his voice which caused the other to glance at him quickly with a start.

”Are you ill, old man?” asked Adams, for Perry appeared at his first look to have gone deadly white. ”Is there anything that I can do? Would you like to come up and talk things over?”

Perry shook his head with a smile which cast a sickly light over his large, handsome face. ”Oh, I'm perfectly well,” he responded, ”I need to stretch my legs a bit, that's all.”

”You do look as if you wanted exercise,” commented Adams, as they left the building; ”too much terrapin has put your liver wrong, I guess.”

At the corner, they pa.s.sed a news-stand, and as Adams stopped for his evening paper, he noticed again the nervous agony which afflicted Perry during the brief delay.

”Look here, what's up, now?” he enquired, holding his paper in his hand when they started on again, ”are you in any trouble and can I help to get you out? I'll do anything you like except play the gallant, and I only draw the line at that because of my temperamental disability. So, something _is_ wrong?” he added gayly, ”for you haven't even observed the pretty woman ahead there in the pea-green bonnet.”

”Oh, I'm not in any mess just now,” replied Perry, with a big, affectionate shake like that of a wet Newfoundland dog.

Adams threw a keener glance at him. ”No sc.r.a.pe about a woman, then?” he asked, with the tolerant sympathy which had made him so beloved by his own s.e.x.

”Oh, Lord, no,” e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Perry, with a fervour too convincing to be a.s.sumed.

”And you haven't lost in Wall Street?”

”On the other hand I made a jolly deal.”

”Well, I give it up,” remarked Adams cheerfully; then as he spoke, the glare from an electric light fell full upon the headlines of the folded paper in his hand, and he came to a halt so sudden that Perry, falling back to keep step with him, felt himself spinning like a wound up top.

”My G.o.d!” said Adams, in a voice so low that it barely reached Perry's ears. An instant later a quick animal pa.s.sion--the pa.s.sion of the enraged male--entered into his tone and he walked quickly across the pavement to the sheltering dusk of a cross street. ”May G.o.d d.a.m.n him for this!” he cried in a hoa.r.s.e whisper.

Following rapidly in his footsteps, Perry caught up behind him, and made an impulsive, nerveless clutch at the unfolded paper. ”I knew you'd see it; so I wanted to be along with you,” he said in a voice like that of a tragic schoolboy.

Adams turned to him immediately, with a restraint which had succeeded his first quivering exclamation. ”So you knew that Brady's wife meant to sue for a divorce?” he asked.