Part 19 (1/2)

Below she met Arnaud with an unpleasant shock--she hadn't given him a thought. Her feeling now was hardly more than annoyance at her forgetfulness. He would be terribly distressed at her going, and she was genuinely sorry for this, poised at the edge of an explanation of her purpose. Arnaud was putting b.u.t.ter and salt into his egg-cup, after that he would grind the pepper from a French mill--pure spices were a precision of his--and she waited until the operation was completed.

Then it occurred to her that all she could hope to accomplish by admitting her intention was the ruin of his last hour alone with her.

He was happier, gayer, than usual. But his age was evident in his voice, his gestures. Linda marveled at her coldness, her ruthless disregard of Arnaud's claim on her, of his affection as deep as Pleydon's, perhaps no less fine but not so imperative. Yet Arnaud had had over twenty years of her life, the best; and she had never deceived him about the quality of her gift. It was right, now, for Dodge to have the remainder.

But whether it were right or wrong, there was no failure of her determination to go to Pleydon in the vindication of her existence.

She delayed speaking to Arnaud until, suddenly, breakfast was over. He seldom went to the law office where he had been a partner, but stayed about the lower floor of his house, in the library or directing small outside undertakings. Either that or he left, late, for the Historical Society, with which his connection and interest were uninterrupted.

As Linda pa.s.sed him in the hall he was fumbling in the green bag that accompanied all his journeyings into the city; and she gathered that he intended to make one of his occasional sallies. She proceeded above, to her room, where with steady hands she pinned on her hat. It would be impossible to take any additional clothes, and she'd have to content herself with something ready-made until she could order others in the establishment of her living with Dodge. Her close-fitting jacket, gloves, and a short cape of sables were collected; she gazed finally, thoughtfully, about the room, and then, with a subdued whisper of skirts, descended the stair. Arnaud was in the library, bending over the table that bore his acc.u.mulation of papers and serious journals. A lingering impulse to speak was overborne by the memory of what, lately, she had endured--she saw him at the dusty end of that long corridor through which she had monotonously journeyed, denied of her one triumph, lost in inconsequential shadows--and she continued firmly to the door which closed behind her with a normal mute smoothness, an inanimate silence.

x.x.xVIII

The maid who admitted Linda to Pleydon's apartment, first replying, ”Yes, Mrs. Hallet. No, Mrs. Hallet,” to her questions, continued in fuller sentences expressing a triumph of sympathy over mere correctness.

She lingered at the door of the informal drawing-room, imparting the information that Mr. Pleydon had become very irregular indeed about his meals, and that his return for lunch was uncertain. Something, however, would be prepared for her. Linda acknowledged this briefly. Often, with Mr. Pleydon at home, he wouldn't so much as look at his dinner. Times, too, it seemed as though he had been in the studio all night. He went out but seldom now, and rarely remained away for more than an hour or two. Linda heard this without an indication of responsive interest, and the servant, returning abruptly from the excursion into humanity, disappeared.

She was glad to have this opportunity alone to accustom herself to a novel position. But she was once more annoyingly calm. Annoyingly, she reiterated; the fervor of her anger, which at the same time had been bitterly cold, had lessened. She was practically normal. She regarded this, the loss of her unprecedented emotion, in the light of a fraud on her sanguine decision. Linda had counted on its support, its generous irresistible tide, to carry her through the remainder of her life with the exhilaration she had so largely missed.

Here in Dodge's room she was as placid, almost, as though she were in the library at home. That customary term took its place in her thoughts before she recognized that, with her, it had s.h.i.+fted. However, it was unimportant--home had never been a magical word to her; it belonged in the vast category which, of such universal weight, left her unstirred.

She resembled those Eastern people restlessly and perpetually moving across sandy deserts as they exhausted, one after another, widely separated scanty oases.

She studied the objects around her with the pleased recognition that they were unique, valuable, and in faultless taste. Then she fell to wondering at the difference had Dodge been poor: she would have come to him, Linda knew, just the same. But, she admitted frankly, it would have been uncomfortable. Perhaps that--actual poverty, actual deprivation--was what her character needed. A popular sentiment upheld such a view; she decided it was without foundation. There was no reason why beauty, finely appropriate surroundings, should damage the spirit.

Her mind turned to an examination of her desertion of Arnaud, but she could find no trace of conventional regret; of what, she felt, her sensation ought to be. The instinctive revolt from oblivion was an infinitely stronger reality than any allegiance to abstract duty. She was consumed by the pa.s.sionate need to preserve the integrity of being herself. The word selfish occurred to her but to be met unabashed by the query, why not? Selfishness was a reproach applied by those who failed to get what they wanted to all who succeeded. Linda wasn't afraid of public opinion, censure; she didn't shrink even from the injury to her husband. What Dodge would think, however, was hidden from her.

She had no doubt of his complete acceptance of all she offered; ordinary obligations to society bound him as little as they held her. It would be enough that she wanted to come to him.

She would bother him, change his habit of living, very little. Long years of loneliness had taught her to be self-sufficient. Linda would be too wise to insist on distasteful regularity in the interest of a comparatively unimportant well-being. In short, she wouldn't bother him.

That must be made clear at once.

More than anything else he would be inexpressibly delighted to have her with him, to find--at last--his love. Little intimacies of satin mules, glimpses, charming to an artist! He'd be faultless, too, in the relations.h.i.+ps where Arnaud as well had never for a moment deviated from beautiful consideration. Two remarkable men. While her deficiency in humor was admitted, she saw a glimmer of the absurd in her att.i.tude and present situation. The combination, at least, was uncommon. There had been no change in her feeling for either Arnaud or Dodge, their places in her being were undisturbed; she liked her husband no less, Dodge no better.

Lunch was announced, a small ceremony of covered silver dishes, heavy crystal, Nankin china, and flowers. The linen, which was old, bore a monogram unfamiliar to her--that of Dodge's mother, probably. When she had finished, but was still lingering at the narrow refectory table, she heard Pleydon enter the hall and the explanatory voice of the servant.

An unexpected embarra.s.sment pervaded her, but she overcame it by the realization that there was no need for an immediate announcement of her purpose. Dodge would naturally suppose that she was in New York shopping.

He did, to her intense relief, with a moving pleasure that she had lunched with him. ”It's seldom,” he went on, ”that you are so sensible.

I hope you haven't any plans or concerts to drag you away immediately.

I owe you a million strawberries; but, aside from that, I'd like you to stay as long as possible.”

”Very well,” she replied quietly; ”I will.”

She hadn't seen him since the statue at Hesperia had been destroyed, and she tried faintly to tell him how much that outrage had hurt her. It had injured him too, she realized; just as Arnaud predicted. He showed his age more gauntly, more absolutely, than the other. His skin was dry as though the vitality of his countenance had been burned out by the flame visible in his eyes.

”The drunken fools!” he exclaimed of the mob that had torn Simon Downige from his eminence; ”they came by way of all the saloons in the city.

Free drinks! That is the disturbing thing about what the optimistic call civilization--the fact that it is always at the mercy of the ignorant and the brutal. There is no security; none, that is, except in the individual spirit. And they, mostly, are the victims of a singular insane resentment--Savonarola and there were greater.

”But you mustn't think, you mustn't suppose, that I mean it's hopeless. How could I? Who has had more from living? Love and complete self-expression. That exhausts every possibility. Three words. Remember Cottarsport. But the love--ah,” he smiled, but not directly at her.