Part 20 (2/2)

Vigne entered and put an affectionate arm about her shoulders, repeating--unconscious that Linda had heard the discussion which had given it being--the conviction that her mother was wonderful, specially in the black dinner dress with the girdle of jet. With no facility of expression she gave her daughter's arm a quick light pressure.

From then she watched the slow progress of age with a new realization, but an unabated distaste and, wherever it was possible, a determined artifice. Arnaud had failed swiftly in the past months; and, while she was inspecting the impaired supports of an arbor in the garden, he came to her with an unopened telegram. ”I abhor these things,” he declared fretfully; ”they are so sudden. Why don't people write decent letters any more! It's like the telephone.... Good manners have been ruined.”

She tore open the envelope, read the brief line within, and, a hand suddenly put out to the arbor, sank on its bench. There had been rain, but a late sun was again pouring over the sparkling gra.s.s, and robins were singing with a lyrical clearness. ”What is it?” Arnaud demanded anxiously, tremulous in the unsparing sunlight. She replied:

”Dodge died this morning.”

His concern was as much for her as for Pleydon's death. ”I'm sorry, Linda,” his hand was on her shoulder. ”It is a shock to you. A fine man, a genius--none stronger in our day. When you were young and for so long after.... I was lucky, Linda, to get you; have you all this while.

Nothing in Pleydon's life, not even his success, could have made up for your loss.”

She wondered dully if Dodge had missed her, if Arnaud Hallet had ever had her in his possession. The robins filled the immaculate air with song. It was impossible that Dodge, who was so imperious in his certainty that he would never say good-by to her, was dead.

XLI

There was a revival of public interest in the destruction of Pleydon's statue at Hesperia, the papers again printed accounts colored by a variety of att.i.tudes unembarra.s.sed by fact; and the serious journals united in a dignity of eminently safe praise. At first Linda made an effort to preserve these; but soon their similarity, her inability to find, among sonorous periods, any trace of Dodge's spirit--in reality she knew so blindingly much more than the most penetrating critical intellect--caused her to leave the reviews unread. No one else living had understood Pleydon; and when descriptions of his life spoke of the austerity in his later years, his fanatical aversion to women, Linda thought of the brittle glove in the gilt-lacquer box.

Her own emotion, it seemed to her, was the most confused of all the unintelligible pressures that had converted her life into an enigma.

She had a distinct sense of overwhelming loss--of something, Linda was obliged to add, she had never owned. However, she realized that during Pleydon's life she had dimly expected a happy accident of explanation; until almost the last, yes--after she had returned from that ultimate journey, she had been conscious of the presence of hope. The hope had been for herself, created out of her constant baffled dissatisfaction.

But now the man in whom solely she had been expressed, the only possible reason for her obstinate pride, had left her in a world that, but for Arnaud's fondness, looked on her without remark. The loss of her distinction had been finally evident at b.a.l.l.s, in the dresses in which Vigne had thought her so wonderful, and she dropped them. Here, she repeated, was when affection, generously radiated through life, should have reflected over her a tranquil and contented joy. She had never given it, and she was without the ability to receive. She admitted to herself, with a little annoyed laugh, that her old desire for inviolable charm, for the integrity of a memorable slimness, was unimpaired. It was, she thought, too ridiculously inappropriate for words.

Yet it had changed slightly into the recognition that what so often had been called her beauty was all she now had for sustenance, all she had ever had. Her mind returned continually to Pleydon, and--deep in the mystery of his pa.s.sion--she was suddenly invaded by an insistent desire to see the monument at Cottarsport. She spoke to Arnaud at once about this; and alone, through his delicacy of perception, Linda went to Boston the following day.

The further ride to Cottarsport followed the sea--a brilliant serene blue, fretted on the landward side by innumerable bare promontories, hideous towns and factories, but bowed in a far unbroken arc at the immaculate horizon. She left the train for a hilly cl.u.s.ter of houses, gray and low like the rock everywhere apparent, dropping to a harbor that bore a company of motionless boats with half-spread drying sails.

The day was at noon, and the sky, blue like the sea, held, still as the anch.o.r.ed schooners, faint, chalky symmetrical clouds. Linda found the Common without guidance; and at once saw, on its immovable base of rugged granite, the bronze statue of Simon Downige. It stood well in advance of what, evidently, was the court-house, the white steeple Dodge had described. She found a bench by a path in the thin gra.s.s; and there, her gloved hands folded, at rest in her lap, her gaze and longing were lifted to the fixed aspiration.

From where she sat the seated figure was projected against the sky; Simon's face was turned toward the west; the West that, for him, was the future, but which for Linda represented all the past. This conviction flooded her with unutterable sadness. A sense of failure weighed on her, no less heavy for the fact that it was perpetually vague. Her thoughts gathered about Dodge himself; and she recalled the curious vividness of his vision of her as a child, perhaps ten. She, too, tried to remember that time and age. It was almost in her grasp, but her realization was spoiled by absurd mental fragments--the familiar illusion of a leopard and a rider with bright hair, a forest with the ascending voices of angels, and an ominous squat figure with a slowly nodding plumed head.

The vista of a hotel returned, a fleet recollection of marble columns and a wide red carpet ... the white gleam and carbolized smell of a drug-store ... a thick magazine in a brown cover. These, changed into emotions of mingled joy and pain, s.h.i.+fted in bright or dim colors and sensations. There was a slow heavy plodding of feet, now above her head, the pa.s.sage of a carried weight; and, in a flash of perception, she knew it was a coffin. She raised her clasped hands to her breast, crying into the sunny silence, to the figure of Simon Downige lost in dream:

”He died that night, at the Bos...o...b.., after he had told me about the meadows with silk tents--”

Her memory, thrilling with the echoed miraculous chord of the child of ten, sitting gravely, alone, among the shrill satins and caustic voices of a feminine throng, was complete. She saw herself, Linda Condon, as objectively as Pleydon's described vision: there was a large bow on her straight black hair, and, from under the bang, her gaze was clear and wondering. How marvelously young she was! The vindictive curiosity of the questioning women, intent on their rings, brought out her eager defense of her mother, the effort to explain away the ugly fact that--that Mr. Jasper was married.

She saw Linda descending the marble stairs to the lower floor where the games were kept in a somber corridor, and heard a voice halting her irresolute pa.s.sage:

”h.e.l.lo, Bellina.”

That wasn't her name, and she corrected him, waiting afterward to listen to a strange fairy-like tale. The solitary, sick-looking man, with inky shadows under fixed eyes, was so actual that she recaptured the pungent drift of his burning cigarette. He talked about love in a bitter intensity that hurt her. Yet, at first, he had said that she was lovely, a touch of her ... forever in the memory. Mostly, however, he spoke of a beautiful pa.s.sion. It had largely vanished, his explanation continued; men had come to wors.h.i.+p other things. Plato started it.

She recalled Plato, as well, in connection with Dodge; now, it appeared to her, that remote name had always been at the back of her consciousness. There were other names, other men, of an age long ago in Italy. Their ideal, religion, was contained in the adoration of a woman, but not her body--it was a love of her spirit, the spirit their purity of need recognized, perhaps helped to create. It was a pa.s.sion as different as possible in essence from all she had observed about her. It was useless for common purposes, withheld from Arnaud Hallet.

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