Part 12 (1/2)
She looked up inquiringly. A finger of sunlight pierced the branches of an elm and pointed to her upraised face.
”I have rather bad manners,” he went on. ”It is a failing which you must accept as you accept the color of my hair--”
Mariana smiled.
”I say just what I think,” he added.
Mariana frowned.
”That is what I complain of,” she responded. Then she laughed so brightly that a tiny child, toddling with a toy upon the walk, looked up and clapped its hands.
His eyes warmed.
”But you will take me for better or for worse?” he demanded.
”Could it be better?” she asked, demurely.
”That is a matter of opinion.”
They left the park and turned into a cross-town street. The distant blocks sloped down into the blue blur of the river, from which several gaunt, gray masts rose like phantom wrecks evolved from the mist. Beyond them the filmy outline of the opposite sh.o.r.e was revealed.
Suddenly Mariana stopped.
”This is Morani's, and I must go in.” She held out her hand.
”How is the voice?” he asked.
”I am nursing it. Some day you shall hear it.”
”I have heard it,” he responded.
She smiled.
”Oh, I forgot. You are next door. Well, some day you shall hear it in opera.”
”Shall I?”
”And I shall sing Elsa with Alvary. My G.o.d! I would give ten years of my life for that--to sing with Alvary.”
He smiled at the warmth in her words and, as he smiled he became conscious that her artistic pa.s.sion ignited the fire of a more material pa.s.sion in himself. A fugitive desire seized him to possess the woman before him, body and brain. From the quivering of his pulses he knew that the physical nature he had drugged had stirred in response to a pa.s.sing appeal.
”Good-bye,” said Mariana. She tripped lightly up the brown-stone steps.
As she opened the outer door she turned with a smile and a nod. Then the door closed and he went on his way. But the leaping of his pulses was not appeased.
CHAPTER VIII
One morning, several days later, Mariana, looking from her window, saw Anthony standing upon the fire-escape. He had thrown a handful of crumbs to a swarm of noisy sparrows quarrelling about his feet.
As he stood there with the morning sunlight flas.h.i.+ng upon his face and gilding the dark abundance of his hair, the singularly mystic beauty of his appearance was brought into bold relief. It was a beauty which contained no suggestion of physical supremacy. He seemed the survival of a lost type--of those purified prophets of old who walked with G.o.d and trampled upon the flesh which was His handiwork. It was the striking contrast between the intellectual tenor of his mind and its physical expression which emphasized his personality. To the boldest advance in scientific progress he had the effect of uniting a suggestion of that poetized mysticism which const.i.tutes the charm of a remote past. With the addition of the yellow robe and a beggar's bowl, he might have been transformed into one of the Enlightened of nigh on three thousand years ago, and have followed the Blessed One upon his pilgrimage towards Nirvana. The modernity of his mind was almost tantalizing in its inconsistency with his external aspect.