Part 20 (1/2)
Algarcife turned towards her, his pen raised as if in self-defence.
”When did you begin to love me?”
The pen was lowered, Algarcife smiled. ”In the beginning,” he answered; then he frowned, his tone grew captious. ”I can't, Mariana,” he protested--”I really can't. I must get this work over.”
”You are always working.”
”Heaven knows, I am! If I weren't, we would starve.”
”It is horrible to be poor.”
”We don't improve matters by exclaiming over them. On the contrary, you will prevent my getting this article off to-night, and we will be a few dollars the poorer.”
”You never talk to me. You are always working.”
She spoke pettishly, with an impulse to exasperate.
”Mariana!”
Mariana threw aside her work and clasped her hands. Her face was upturned, her head supported by the back of the chair. He could see the violet shadow which rested like a faint suffusion where the heavy hair swept from behind her ear.
Suddenly her head was lowered, and the mellow lamplight irradiated across the pallor of her face.
”Of course I know you are working for me,” she said, ”but I had rather have less labor and more love.”
”I love you as much when I am working for you as when I am shouting it in your ear.”
”But I like to hear it.”
”I love you. Now be quiet.”
Mariana came and leaned over him. She put her arms about his shoulders and rested her head upon them. There was a sob in her voice. ”Let me help you,” she said. ”It is so hard to sit still and do nothing, while you are killing yourself. Let me help you.”
Anthony turned and caught her, and she lay limp and motionless in his embrace. He kissed her with sudden pa.s.sion.
”You help me by living,” he said, ”by breathing, by being near me, by giving yourself to me unreservedly. Without you I lived but half a life--without you, now that I have had you, I should go to pieces--absolutely. I love you as a man loves once in a thousand years.
But we must live, and I must work.”
He released her and went back to his writing, while Mariana, in pa.s.sionate elation, picked up Mill's _Political Economy_, and fell to studying.
It was shortly after this that she sought to turn her own talents to financial results. With this end in view she invested her pocket-money in a yard or so of white linen and a ma.s.s of colored silks, and wove a garland of nasturtiums around a centre-piece intended to decorate a dinner-table. When it was finished she was seized with a fit of sanguineness, and as she rinsed it in a dozen different waters to insure whiteness, she calculated what the annual products of her labor would amount to. ”If I manage to do one a month,” she remarked, pressing the centre-piece lightly between her moistened hands, ”and say I get about fifteen dollars for each one, I should soon have quite a little income; twelve times fifteen is--how much, Anthony?”
”More than I am going to let you work for,” replied Algarcife. ”Your eyes have been red ever since you started that confounded table-cover.
It is the very last.”
Mariana placed one finger to her lips, and then applied it lightly to the iron she held in her hand. ”I do hope I won't scorch it,” she observed. ”Oh, do give me that blanket! It must be ironed on a blanket to make the flowers stand out. Aren't they natural?”
She lifted her heated face and glanced at him for approbation.
”I feel like plucking them,” returned Algarcife. ”Don't tire yourself.