Part 18 (2/2)

As if in the development of her feeling Linda had a sensation of cras.h.i.+ng with a sickening violence from a pedestal to the ground.

Actually, it seemed, the catastrophe had happened to her. She heard, with a sense of inutility, Arnaud denouncing the outrage; he had a pencil in his hand for the composition of a telegram to Dodge. He paid--but perhaps only naturally--no attention to her, suffering dully from her fall. She shuddered before the recreated lawless approaching voice of the mob; the naked ugly violence froze her with terror; she felt the gross hurried hands winding ropes about her, the rending brutality of force--

She sat and automatically took a small carved gla.s.s of orange-juice from a bed of ice, and her chilled fingers recalled a dim image of her mother. Arnaud was speaking, ”I'm afraid this will cut through Pleydon's security, it was such a wanton destruction of his unique power. You see, he worked lovingly over the cast with little files and countless finite improvements. The mold, I think, was broken. What a piece of luck the thing's at Cottarsport.” He paused, obviously expecting her to comment; but suddenly phrases failed her.

In place of herself she should be considering Dodge; her sympathy even for him was submerged in her own extraordinary injury. However, she recovered from her first gasping shock, and made an utterly commonplace remark. Never had her sense of isolation been stronger. ”I must admit,”

her husband continued, ”that I looked for some small display of concern.

I give you my word there are moments when I think Pleydon himself cut you out of stone. He isn't great enough for that, though; in the way of perfection you successfully gild the lily. A thing held to be impossible.”

Linda told him with amazing inanity that his opinion of her was unreliable; and, contented, he lightly pursued his admiration of what he called her boreal charm. At intervals she responded appropriately and proceeded with breakfast. She had entered a region of dispa.s.sionate consideration, her characteristic detachment, she thought, regained. She mentally, calmly, reconstructed the motives and events that had led to the destruction of the statue; they, at least, were evident to her.

She reaffirmed silently her conviction that it had resulted from the stupidity, the vanity, of a woman. The limitations of men, fully as narrow, operated in other directions.

Then, with an incredulous surprise, she was aware that the clear s.p.a.ce of her reason was filling with anger. Never before had such a flood of emotion possessed her; and she surrendered herself, in an enormous relief, to the novelty of its obliterating tide. It deepened immeasurably, sweeping her far from the security of old positions of indifference and critical self-possession. Linda became enraged at a world that had concentrated all its degraded vulgarity in one unspeakable act.

x.x.xVII

It was fall, October, and the day was a s.p.a.ce of pale gold foliage wreathed in blue garlands of mist. The gardener was busy with a wooden rake and wheelbarrow in which he carted away dead leaves for burning.

The fire was back of the low fence, in the rear, and Linda, at the dining-room window, could hear the fierce small crackle of flames; the drifting pungent smoke was like a faint breath of ammonia. Arnaud had left for the day, Lowrie was at the university, while Vigne and her husband--moving toward their ultimate colonial threshold--had taken a small house. She was alone.

As usual.

However, in her present state her solitude had lost its inevitability; she failed to see why it must continue until the end of time. She could no longer discover a sufficient reason for her limitless endurance, her placid acceptance of all that chance, or any inconsiderable person, happened to dictate. She wasn't like that in the least. Her temper had solidified as though it were ice, taking everywhere the form in which it was held. It was a reality. She determined, as well, that her feeling should not melt back into the familiar acceptance of a routine that had led her blindfolded across such an extent of life.

She understood now, in a large part, her disturbance at the indignity to Dodge's monument--he had a.s.sured her that she was its inspiration; except for her it would never have been realized, he would have kept on modeling those Newport fountains, continued with the Susanna Nodas, spending himself ign.o.bly. He loved her, and that love had resulted in a statue the world of art, of taste, honored. But it was she all the while they were approving, discussing, writing about, Linda Condon.

She had always been that, Pleydon had informed her, never Linda Hallet--in spite of Arnaud and their children. It sounded like nonsense; but, at the bottom, it was truth. Of course it couldn't be explained, for example, to the man who had every right, every evidence, to consider himself her husband. Nothing was susceptible of explanation. Absolutely nothing! There was the earth, which appeared to be everything, the houses you entered, the streets you pa.s.sed over, the people among whom you lived, yet that wasn't all. Heavens, no! It was quite unimportant compared with--with other facts latent in the mind and blood.

Dodge Pleydon's love was one of those other facts; it was simply impossible to deny its existence, its power. Dodge had been totally changed by it, born over again. But she, who had been the source, had had no good from it, nothing except the thrill that had always been hers. No one knew of it, counted it as her achievement, paid the slightest attention to her. Arnaud smiled indulgently, Lowrie scoffed.

When the statue had been thrown down they thought of it merely as a deplorable part of the day's news. They hadn't seen that she, Linda Condon, was unspeakably insulted.

She doubted if she could bring them to comprehend what had happened--to her. Or if Arnaud understood, if she made it plain, what good would be done! That wouldn't save her, put her back again on the pedestal. The latter was necessary. Linda recognized that a great deal of her feeling was based on pride; but it was a pride entirely justified. She had no intention of submitting to the coa.r.s.e hands and ropes of public affront.

Throughout her life she had rebelled against any profanation of her person, she had hated to be touched.

Every instinct, she found, every delicate self-opinion, was bound into Pleydon's success; the latter had kept her alive. Without it existence would have been intolerable. It was unbearable now.

She discharged the small daily duties of her efficient housekeeping with a contemptuous exactness; for years she had accomplished, in herself, nothing more. But at last a break had come. Linda recognized this without any knowledge of what reparation it would find. She wasn't concerned with that, a small detail. It would be apparent. Arnaud was silent through dinner; tired, it seemed. She saw him as if at the distant end of a dull corridor--as she looked back. There was no change in her liking for him. Mechanically she noticed the disorder of his scant hair and rumpled sleeves.

Not until, waking sharply, in the middle of the night, did she have a glimpse of a possible course--she might live with Dodge and perfectly express both her retaliation and her accomplishment. In that way she would reestablish herself beside him and place their vision in bronze on an elevation beyond the spite of the envious and the blind.

It was so directly simple that she was surprised it hadn't occurred to her before. The possibility had always been a part, unsuspected and valuable, of her special being; the largely condemned faults of her character and experience had at least brought her this--a not inconsiderable freedom in a world everywhere barred by the necessity for upholding a hypocritical show of superiority to honest desire. The detachment that deprived her of life's conventional joys released her from its common obligations. That conviction, however, was too intimately connected with all her inheritance to bring her any conscious dramatic sense of rebellion or high feeling of justified indignation.

Sleep had deserted her, and she waited for the dawn in the windows that would bring her escape. It was very slow coming; the blackness took on a grayer tone, like ink with added faint infusions of water. Slowly the blackness dissolved and she heard the stir of the sparrows in the ivy.

There was the pa.s.sing rumble of an early electric car on the paved aged street, the blurred hurried shuffle of a workman's clumsy shoes. The brightening morning was cool with a premonitory touch of frost; at the window she saw a vanis.h.i.+ng silver sheen on the lawn and board fence.

A sensation of youth pervaded her; and while, perhaps, it was out of keeping with her years, she had still her vitality unspent; she was without a trace of the momentary frost on the gra.s.s. She was tranquil, leisurely; her heart evenly sent its life through her unflushed body.

Piece by piece she put on her web-like garments, black and white; brus.h.i.+ng the heavy stream of her hair and tying the inevitable sash about her supple waist.

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