Part 28 (2/2)

And she answered: ”No, I will go to a square.”

He was silent, and she left in sudden haste.

That she walked miles in that fearful weather, driven on by sheer inability to rest, he realized pityingly. Occasionally he would go to the window as she descended the stairs, and the sight of the fragile, black-robed figure, making its rapid way through the fierce suns.h.i.+ne, would cause him a spasmodic contraction of pain. And yet the remembrance of her indifference would chill the words with which he greeted her return, and the knowledge that her heart had pa.s.sed from him and was straining towards the outside world would veil his mental suffering in an a.s.sumption of pride. That Mariana's withered desires for the fulness of life had grown green again, he could but know. He had seen the agony inflicted upon her by every trivial detail of their lives--by the poorly cooked food, by the fly-specks upon the dishes, by the absence of a hundred superficial refinements. He had seen her flinch at the odors of stale vegetables, and set her teeth at the grating voices of the other lodgers. He had heard her moans in the night, rising from a wail for the small comforts of life to a wail for the child she had lost. He had marked every added line about her mouth, every bitter word that fell from her lips. And yet he had gone unswervingly on his way, and she had not known, but had thought him as pulseless to her presence as she to his.

”I am late,” she said one day in September, coming in with more brightness than usual. ”Have you had luncheon?”

”I waited for you,” responded Anthony.

As she laid aside a roll of music she carried, he saw that it was the score of a light opera.

”You have been to Signor Morani's?” he asked.

”Yes, I have been taking lessons again.”

Anthony glanced dubiously round.

”And you have no piano,” he said. ”You will miss it.”

Mariana shook her head, and pushed away her tea with a gesture of disgust. ”But I practise at Signor Morani's. He lets me use one of his rooms.”

He noticed that she spoke cheerfully, and that a wave of her lost freshness had returned to her face. The instantaneous effect of her moods upon her appearance was an ever-recurring surprise to him. It was as if, by the play of her features, she unconsciously translated feeling into expression.

In a moment she spoke again.

”It is a part that I have been studying,” she continued, ”and I must commit the words to memory.”

He picked it up. It was a serio-comic opera, ent.i.tled, ”La Sorciere.”

”Morani says that my voice has developed during the long rest. He was surprised when I sang.”

”Was he?” asked Anthony, absently. He was wondering dully what would be the end of Mariana's ambitions--if there was any end for ambitions other than obliteration. Had fate anything to offer more durable than dust and ashes?

Mariana glanced about her and her face clouded. ”It is that horrible cabbage again,” she complained. ”I believe those people down-stairs do nothing but fry cabbage. It makes me ill.”

Anthony was recalled from his abstraction with a sense of annoyance.

”It seems to me,” he retorted, sharply, ”that, in our condition, to worry over a grievance of that order would be refres.h.i.+ng--when one's heels are hanging over the verge of starvation, it is a relief to be allowed to smell some one else's dinner.”

”That depends upon what the dinner consists of,” Mariana rejoined. ”I may be reduced to living on dry bread, but I hope you will spare me the fried cabbage.”

”You speak as if I had reduced you to this state for my own gratification.” His temper was getting the better of him, and, with a snap, he set his teeth and was silent.

The mental distress, the stimulants he had used to spur a jaded brain into action, and his failing health had left him a prey to anger. An unexpected interruption, a jarring sound, a trivial mishap, were sufficient to cause him an outburst from which he often saved himself by flight.

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