Part 21 (1/2)
He took one from the box she pa.s.sed him, and gravely lit it. They were doing everything in a very informal manner. Dinner had been served in the library, a cozy little apartment with a large open grate in which a cheerful fire had been lit. The ordinary table had been dispensed with in favor of a small round one just large enough for them, and now, with dessert on the table, they had turned their chairs round to the fire in very homelike fas.h.i.+on.
”Do you know, I like this,” Helen said softly. ”I think it is so much better than a dinner party, or going out anywhere.”
”See what a difference the presence of a distinguished man of letters makes,” laughed Lady Thurwell. ”Now, only a few hours ago, we were dreading a very dull evening--Helen as well as myself. How nice it was of you to take pity on us, Mr. Maddison!”
”Especially considering your aversion to our society,” put in Helen.
”Are not you really thinking it a shocking waste of time to be here talking to two very unlearned women instead of seeking inspiration in your study?”
He looked at her reproachfully.
”I know nothing of Lady Thurwell's tastes,” he said; ”but you can scarcely call yourself unlearned. You have read much, and you have thought.”
”A pure accident--I mean the thinking,” she answered lightly. ”If I had not been a country girl, with a mind above my station, intellectually, there's no telling what might have happened. Town life is very distracting, if you once get into the groove. Isn't it, aunt?”
Lady Thurwell, who was a thorough little _dame de societe_, rose with a pout and shrugged her shoulders.
”I'm not going to be hauled over the coals by you superior people any longer,” she answered. ”I shall leave you to form a mutual improvement society, and go and write some letters. When you want me, come into the drawing room, but don't come yet. Thank you, Mr. Maddison,” she added, as he held the door open for her; ”be merciful to the absent, won't you?”
And so they were alone! As he closed the door and walked across the room to his seat, there came back to him, with a faint bewildering sweetness, something of the pa.s.sionate emotion of their farewell in the pine grove on the cliff. He felt his pulses quicken, and his heart beat fast. It was in vain that the dying tenets of his old life, a life of renunciation and solitude, feebly rea.s.serted themselves. At that moment, if never before, he knew the truth. The warm fresh sunlight lay across his barren life, brightening with a marvelous glow its gloomiest corners. The old pa.s.sionless serenity, in which the human had been crushed out by the intellectual, was gone forever. He loved this woman.
And she was very fair. He stole a long glance at her as she leaned back in her low wicker chair--the fond glance of a lover--and he felt his keenly artistic sense stirred from its very depths by her purely physical beauty. The firelight was casting strange gleams upon the deep golden hair which waved about her oval face and shapely forehead in picturesque unrestraint, and there was an ethereal glow in her exquisite complexion, a light in her eyes, which seemed called up by some unusual excitement.
The setting of the picture, too, was perfect. Her ivory satin gown hung in long straight lines about her slim perfect outline with all the grace of Greek drapery, unrelieved save by one large bunch of Neapolitan violets nestling amongst the folds of old lace which filled up the open s.p.a.ce of her bodice. He stood and looked at her with a strange confusion of feelings. A new life was burning in his veins, and for the first time since his boyhood he doubted his absolute self-mastery. Dared he stay there? Could he sit by her side, and bandy idle words with her?
The silence had lasted for several minutes, and was beginning to possess something of that peculiar eloquence which such silences usually have.
At last she raised her eyes, and looked at him standing motionless and thoughtful amongst the shadows of the room, and at the first glance he felt his strength grow weak, and his pa.s.sionate love rising up like a living force. For there was in her eyes, and in her face, and in her voice when she spoke, something of that softening change which transfuses a woman's being when she loves, and lets the secret go from her--a sort of mute yielding, an abandonment, having in it a subtle essence of unconscious invitation.
”Come and talk to me,” she said softly. ”Why do you stand out there?”
He made one last despairing effort. With a strangely unnatural laugh, he drew a chair to her side and began to talk rapidly, never once letting his eyes rest upon her loveliness, striving to keep his thoughts fixed upon his subject, but all the time acutely conscious of her presence. He talked of many things with a restless energy which more than once caused her to look up at him in wonderment. He strove even to keep her from answering him, lest the magic of her voice should turn the trembling scale. For her sake he unlocked the inmost recesses of his mind, and all the rich store of artistic sensations, of jealously preserved memories, came flooding out, clothed with all that eloquence of jeweled phrase and daintily turned sentence which had made his writings so famous. For her sake, too, he sent his imagination traveling through almost untrodden fields, bringing back exquisite word pictures, and lifting the curtain before many a landscape of sun-smitten thought. All the music of sweet imagery and pure bracing idealism thrilled through her whole being. This was indeed a man to love! And as his speech grew slower, and she heard again that peculiar trembling in his tone, the meaning of which her woman's heart so easily interpreted, she began to long for those few words from him which she felt would be the awakening of a new life in her. He could not fail to notice even that slight change, and wondering whether her attention was commencing to flag, he paused and their eyes met in a gaze full of that deep tragical intensity which marks the birth between man and woman of any new sensation. The fire which glowed in his eyes told her of his love as plainly as the dreamy yet expressive light which gleamed in hers spoke also to him, and when her head drooped before the gathering pa.s.sion in his face, and the faint color streamed into her cheeks, no will of his could keep the words back any longer. He felt his breath come quickly, and his heart almost stop beating. His pulses were quickening, and a strange new delight stole through him.
Surely this was the end. He could bear no more.
And it seemed as though it were indeed so, for with a sudden impulse he caught hold of her white, ringless hand, and drew it gently toward him.
There was a slight instinctive resistance which came and went in a s.p.a.ce of time only a thought could measure. Then she yielded it to him, and the sense of her touch stole through his veins with a sort of dreamy fascination, to give place in a moment to the overmastering fire of his great pa.s.sion.
Her face was turned away from him, but he saw the faint color deepen in her cheeks and the light quivering of the lip. And then a torrent of feeling, before which his last shaking barriers of resistance crumbled away like dust, swept from his heart, striking every chord of his nature with a crash of wild music.
”Helen, my love, my love!” he cried.
And she turned round, her eyes dim with trembling tears, yet glowing with a great happiness--turned around to feel his arms steal around her and hold her clasped to his heart in a mad sweet embrace. And it seemed to her that it was for this that she had lived.
CHAPTER XXIV
A WOMAN'S LOVE
It seemed to him in those few golden moments of his life that memory died away and time stood still. The past with its hideous sorrows, and the future over which it stretched its chilling hand, were merged in the present. Life had neither background nor prospect. The overpowering realization of the elysium into which he had stepped had absorbed all sense and all knowledge. They were together, and words were pa.s.sing between them which would live to eternity in his heart.