Part 47 (2/2)

Folly stopped in her tracks. Her face went suddenly livid with rage.

”No lydy!” she cried in the most directly expressive of all idioms. ”If I wasn't a _perfect_ lydy, I'd slap your blankety blank little blank.”

At each word of the virile repartee of c.o.c.kneydom coming so incongruously from those soft lips, Lewis's heart went down and down in big, jolting b.u.mps. Scarcely aware of what he was doing, he stepped out into the path. Folly looked up and saw him. The look of amazement in his face, eyes staring and mouth open and gulping, struck and held her for a second before she realized who it was that stood before her.

For just the fraction of a moment longer she was frightened and puzzled by Lewis's dumfounded mien; then her mind harked back for the clue and got it. No one had to tell her that the game was up so far as Lewis was concerned. She knew it. Her face suddenly crinkled up with mirth. With a peal of laughter, she dodged him and ran improperly for her very proper little turnout. He did not follow except with his eyes.

”Larfin' at _us_, governor,” jibed the diminutive c.o.c.kney, putting a rail between himself and Lewis. ”The 'uzzy! The minute I lays my heye on that marm, I says, 'Blime yer, _you_ ain't no lydy'! I say, governor, give us a penny.”

Lewis turned away and took a few steps gropingly, head down, as though he walked in a trance. Presently he stopped and came back, feeling with finger and thumb in his waistcoat pocket. He drew out a gold coin, looked at it gravely, and flipped it across the rail at the ragam.u.f.fin.

Then he turned and walked off with a rapid stride.

The little c.o.c.kney s.n.a.t.c.hed at the coin, and popped it into his mouth.

Too overwhelmed to speak his grat.i.tude, he stood on his head until Lewis was out of sight. It was the first time in his life that he had handled, much less possessed, a ”thick un.”

CHAPTER LI

The expert surgeon, operating for blindness on the membranes of the eye, is denied the bulwark of an anesthetic. Such a one will tell you that the moment of success is the moment most pregnant with disaster. To the patient who has known only the fraction of life that lies in darkness, the sudden coming of light is a miracle beyond mere resurrection from the dead. But he is warned he must avoid any spasm of joy. Should he cry out and start at the coming of the dawn, in that moment he bids farewell forever to the light of day.

Something of this shock of sudden sight had come to Lewis, but it came to him with no spasm of joy. A man who has been drugged does not awake to joy, but to pain. Liberation and suffering too often walk hand in hand. Lewis had felt no bondage; consequently his freedom was as terrible as it was sudden. It plunged him into depths of depression he had never before sounded.

From the park he went mechanically to the flat, and sat for hours by the window looking out upon the dead Sunday gray of London. Darkness came, and with it Nelton and lights. Nelton remarked that there was nothing to eat in the house.

”I know,” said Lewis, and sat on, too abject to dress and go out for dinner. In his depression his thoughts turned naturally to his father.

He thought of joining him, and searched time-tables and sailings, only to find that he could not catch up with the expedition. Besides, as he looked back on their last days in America, he doubted whether his father would have welcomed his coming.

The next few days were terrible indeed, for Lady Derl, as he had feared, was out of town. He wrote to her, begging her to let him know where she was and when she would come to London. For three days he waited for an answer, and then the emptiness of the whole world, the despair of isolation, drove him to his studio and to work.

He had had an impulse to write to Natalie, even to go to her; but there was a fineness in his nature that stopped him, a shame born of the realization of his blindness and of the pity in which H lne and Leighton and perhaps even Natalie must have held him.

Suddenly the full import of H lne's intimate sacrifice in the disrobing of the palpitating sorrow of her life and of his father's immolation of his land of dreams struck him. They had done these things to make him see, and he had remained blind. They had struck the golden chords of the paean of mighty love, and he had clung, smiling and unhearing, to his penny whistle.

For the first time, and with Folly farther away than ever before, he saw her as she was. Once he had thought that she and youth were inseparable, that Folly _was_ youth. Now, in the power of sudden vision, he saw as his father had seen all along, that Folly was as old as woman, that she had never been young.

These things did not come to Lewis in a single day, but in long hours of work spread over many weeks. He was laboring at a frieze, a commission that had come to him through Le Brux, and upon which he had done considerable work before going to America. What he had done had not been altogether pleasing to his father. Lewis had felt it, though Leighton had said little beyond d.a.m.ning it to success.

Now Lewis saw the beginning he had made through his father's eyes. He saw the facile riot and exaggerations of youth, and contrasted their quick appeal to a hurried age with the modesty of the art that hides behind the vision and reveals itself not to an age or to ages, but in the long, slow measure of life everlasting. He undid all but the skeleton of what he had done, and on the bare frame built the progression of repressed beauty which was to escape the glancing eye only to find a long abiding-place in the hearts of those who wors.h.i.+p seldom, but wors.h.i.+p long.

At last he got word from H lne. Has letter had followed her to the Continent and from there to Egypt. She wrote that she was tired of travel, and was coming home. In a postscript she mentioned a glimpse of Leighton at Port Said. Lewis was impatient to see her. He had begun to know his liberation.

The revelation that had come to him in the park was not destined to stand alone. Between such women as Folly and their victims exists an almost invariable camaraderie that forbids the spoiling of sport. The inculcation of this questionable loyalty is considered by some the last attribute of the finished adventuress, and by others it is said to be due to the fact that such women draw and are drawn by men whose major rule is to ”play fair.” Both conclusions are erroneous, as any victim can testify.

The news that Lewis no longer followed in Folly's train permeated his world with a rapidity that has no parallel outside of London except in the mental telegraphy of aboriginal Africa. Men soon began to talk to him, to tell him things. He turned upon the first with an indignant question, ”Why didn't you tell me this before?” and the informer stared at him and smiled until Lewis found the answer for himself and flushed.

Ten thousand pointing fingers cannot show the sunrise to the blind.

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