A few seconds during which he could feel the energy of her swift
thoughts. Then, "Wait!" she commanded, and darted into her private
office, closing the door.
She was gone twenty minutes. "The person I was calling up hadn't got
in," she explained, when she returned. "I had to wait for him. You are
to stay here--you are not to go in any circumstances."
"I must go," was his answer in a dreary tone. "I promised Fosdick, and
I daren't offend him. Besides--well, it's prudent."
"'Lois," said Narcisse earnestly, "I give you my word of honor, it would
be the very worst step you could take, to obey Fosdick and go. I
promise you that, if you stay, all will be well. If you go, you would
better throw yourself into the sea, midway, for you will ruin your
reputation--ours."
He dropped into a chair. "My instinct is against going," he confessed.
"I've done nothing. I haven't got a cent that doesn't belong to me
honestly. But, Cis, I simply mustn't offend Fosdick."
"Because of Amy?"
"Yes."
"If you go, you'll have no more chance for her than--than a convict in a
penitentiary."
"You know something you are not telling me?"
"I do. Something I can't tell you."
He supported his aching head with his hands and stared long at the
floor. "I'll not go!" he exclaimed, springing to his feet suddenly.
"I've done nothing wrong. I'll not run away."
Narcisse had been watching him as if she were seeing him struggling for
his life in deep water before her very eyes. At his words, at his
expression, like his own self, the brother she had brought up and
guarded and loved with the love that is deeper than any love which
passion ever kindled--at this proclamation of the victory of his better
self, she burst into tears. "'Lois! 'Lois!" she sobbed. "Now I can be
happy again. If you had gone it would have killed me." And the tone in
which she said it made him realize that she was speaking the literal
truth.
The natural color was coming back to his face. He patted her on the
shoulder. "I'm not a weak, damn fool clear through, Cissy," cried he,
"though, I must say, I've got a big, broad streak of it. You are sure
of your ground?"
"Absolutely," she assured him, radiant now, and so beautiful that even
he noted and admired. But then, he was in the mood to appreciate her.
So long as the way was smooth, he could neglect her and put aside her
love, as we all have the habit of neglecting and taking for granted, in
fair weather, the things that are securely ours. But, let the storms
come, and how quickly we show that we knew all the time, in our hearts,
whom we could count on, could draw upon for strength and courage--the
few, real friends--perhaps, only one--and one is quite enough, is
legion, if it be the right one.
"You're not trusting to somebody else?" said he.
"Of course I am. But he's a real somebody, one I'd stake my life on.
'Lois, I know."
"That settles it," said he. "But even if you weren't sure, even if I
were certain the worst would overtake me, I'd not budge out of this
town. As for Amy, if she's what I think her, she'll stand the test. If
not-- After all, I don't need anybody but you, Cissy."
And he embraced and kissed her, and went back to his own part of the
offices, head high and step firm. He stirred round there uneasily for a
while, then shut himself in with the telephone and called up Fosdick's
house. "I wish to speak to Miss Fosdick," he said. Presently he heard
Amy's voice. "Well, Hugo?"
"It isn't your brother," said Alois. "It's I."
"Oh!" Her tone was very different--and he did not like it, though he
could not have said why. "The servant," she explained, "said she
thought it was Hugo."
"I've changed my mind about going abroad. You said you wanted to see me
about some matter. I think--in fact, I'm sure--I know what you mean.
Don't trouble; I'll come out all right. By the way, please tell your
father I'm not going, will you?"
"Father!" she exclaimed. "Did _he_ want you to go?"
"I'd rather not talk about that. It's a matter of business. Please
don't give him the impression I told you anything. Really, I
haven't--have I?"
"Did father want you to go abroad?" insisted Amy.
"I can't talk about it over the telephone. I'll tell you when I see
you--all about it--if you think you'd be interested."
"Please answer my one question," she pleaded. "Then I'll not bother you
any more."
"Then--yes." He waited for her next remark, but it did not come. "Are
you still there?"
"Yes," came her answer, faint and strange.
"What is it?" he cried. "What's the matter?"
"Nothing. Good-by--and--I'm _so_ glad you're not going--oh, I can't
express how glad--_Alois_!"
She did not give him the chance to reply.
*XX*
*BORIS DISCLOSES HIMSELF*
Hugo, sitting to Boris for the portrait afterward locally famous as "The
Young Ass," fell into the habit of expatiating upon Armstrong. His mind
was full of the big Westerner, the author of the most abject humiliation
of his life, the only one he could not explain away, to his own
satisfaction, as wholly some one else's fault. Boris humored him, by
discreetly sympathetic response even encouraged him to talk freely; nor
was Boris's sole reason the undeniable fact that when Hugo was babbling
about Armstrong, his real personality disported itself unrestrained in
the features the painter was striving to portray. The wisest parent
never takes a just measure of his child; and, while the paternal passion
is tardier in beginning than the maternal, it is full as deluding once
it lays hold. Fosdick thought he regarded Hugo as a fool; also he had
fresh in mind proof that Hugo was highly dangerous to any delicate
enterprise. Yet he confided in him that they would both be soon
signally revenged upon the impudent upstart. He did not tell how or
when; but Hugo guessed that it would be at the coming "investigation."
A very few days after his father had told him, he told Boris. What
possible danger could there be in telling a painter who hadn't the
slightest interest in business matters, and who hadn't the intellect to
understand them? For Hugo had for the intellect of the painter the
measureless contempt of the contemptible. Also, Boris patterned his
dress after the Continental fashions for which Hugo, severely and
slavishly English in dress, had the Englishman's derisive disdain.
Boris listened to Hugo's confidence with no sign, of interest or
understanding, and Hugo babbled on. Soon, Boris knew more than did Hugo
of the impending catastrophe to the one man in the whole world whom he
did the honor of hating.
Hate is an unusual emotion in a man so tolerant, so cynical, at once
superior and conscious of it. But, watching Armstrong with Neva,
watching Neva when Armstrong was about, Raphael had come to feel rather
than to see that there was some tie between them. He had no difficulty
in imagining the nature of this tie. A man and a woman who have lived
together may, often do, remain entire strangers; but however constrained
and shy and unreal their intimacy may have been, still that intimacy has
become an integral part of their secret selves. It is the instinctive
realization of this, rather than physical jealousy, that haunts and
harrows the man who knows his wife or mistress did not come to him
virgin, and that does not leave him until the former husband or lover is
dead. Boris did not for an instant believe Neva could by any
possibility fall in love with Armstrong--what could she, the artistic
and refined, have in common with Armstrong, crude, coarse,
unappreciative of all that meant life to her? A man could care without
mental or heart sympathy, and a certain kind of woman; but not a Neva,
whose delicacy was so sensitive that he, with all his expert delicacy of
touch, all his trained softness of reassuring approach, was still far
from her. No, Neva could never love Armstrong. But why did she not
detest him? Why did she tolerate a presence that must remind her of
repulsive hours, of moments of horror too intense even to quiver? "It
is the feminine, the feline in her," he reflected. "She is avenging
herself in the pleasure of watching his torment."
That was logical, was consoling. However, Boris was wishing she would
get her fill of vengeance and send the intruder about his stupid, vulgar
business. Hugo's news thrilled him. "I hope the hulk will have to fly
the country," he said to himself. He did not hope, as did Hugo, that
Armstrong would have to go to the penitentiary. Such was his passion
for liberty, for the free air and sunshine, that he could not think with
pleasure of even an enemy's being behind bolts and bars and the dank
dusk of high, thick prison walls. As several weeks passed without
Armstrong's calling--he always felt it when Armstrong had been there--he
became as cheerful, as gay, and confident as of old.
But he soon began to note that Neva was not up to the mark. "What is
it?" he at once asked himself in alarm whose deep, hidden causes he did
not suspect, so slow are men of his kind to accuse themselves of
harboring so vanity-depressing a passion as jealousy. "Has he got wind
of his danger? Has he been trying to work on her sympathies?" He
proceeded to find out.
"What's wrong, my dear?" asked he, in his gentle, caressing,
master-to-pupil way. "You aren't as interested as you were. This
sunshine doesn't reflect from your face and your voice as it should."
"I've been worried about a friend of mine," confessed she. "There's no
real cause for worry, but I can't shake off a foreboding."
"Tell me," urged he. "It'll do you good."
"It's nothing I can talk about. Really, I'm not so upset as you seem to
imagine."
But a few moments later he heard a deep sigh. He glanced at her; she
was staring into vacancy, her face sad, her eyes tragic. In one of
these irresistible gusts of passion, he flung down his brushes, strode
up to her. "What has that scoundrel been saying to you?" he demanded.
She startled, rose, faced him in amazement.
"Boris!" she cried breathlessly.
The body that is molded upon a spirit such as his--or hers--becomes as
mobile to its changes as cloud to sun and wind. Boris's good looks
always had a suggestion of the superhuman, as if the breath of life in
him were a fiercer, more enduring flame than in ordinary mortals. That
superhuman look it was that had made Neva, the sensitive, the
appreciative, unable ever quite to shake off all the awe of him she had
originally felt. The man before her now had never looked so superhuman;
but it was the superhumanness of the fiend. She shrank in fascinated
terror. His sensuous features were sensuality personified; his rings,
his jeweled watch guard, his odor of powerful perfume, all fitted in
with his expression, where theretofore they had seemed incongruous.
"Boris!" she repeated. "Is that _you_?"
Her face brought him immediately back to himself, or rather to his
normal combination of cynical good-humored actuality and cynical
good-humored pose. The vision had vanished from her eyes, so utterly, so
swiftly, that she might have thought she had been dreaming, had it not
remained indelibly upon her mind--especially his eyes, like hunger, like
thirst, like passion insatiable, like menace of mortal peril. It is one
thing to suspect what is behind a mask; it is quite another matter to
see, with the mask dropped and the naked soul revealed. As she, too,
recovered herself, her terror faded; but the fascination remained, and a
certain delight and pride in herself that she was the conjurer of such a
passion as that. For women never understand that they are no more the
authors of the passions they evoke than the spark is the author of the
force in the dynamite it explodes or of the ensuing destruction; if the
dynamite is there, any spark, rightly placed, will do the work.
"Yes, it's I," replied Raphael, rather confusedly. He was as much
disconcerted by what he had himself seen of himself, as by having shown
it to her. A storm that involves one's whole being stirs up from the
bottom and lifts to the surface many a strange secret of weakness and of
wickedness, none stranger than the secrets of one's real feelings and
beliefs, so different from one's professions to others and to himself.
Raphael had seen two of these secrets--first, that he was insanely
jealous of Armstrong; second, that he was in love with Neva. Not the
jealousy and the love that yet leave a man master of himself, but the
jealousy and the love that enslave. In the silence that followed this
scene of so few words and so strong emotions, while Neva was hanging
fascinated over the discovery of his passion for her, he was gazing
furtively at her, the terror that had been hers now his.
He had been fancying he was leading her along the flower-walled path he
had trod so often with some passing embodiment of his passing fancy, was
luring her to the bower where he had so often taught what he called and
thought "the great lesson." Instead, he was himself being whirled
through space--whither? "I love her!" he said to himself, tears in his
eyes and tears and fears in his heart. "This is not like the
others--not at all--not at all. I love her, and I am afraid." And then
there came to him a memory--a vision--a girl whom he had taught "the
great lesson" years before; she had disappeared when he grew tired--or,
perhaps it would be more accurate to say, when he had exhausted for the
time the capacity of his nerves; for how can a man grow tired of what he
never had?--and the rake kills the bird for the one feather in its
crest. At any rate, he sent her away; he was seeing now the look in her
eyes, as she went without a murmur or a sigh. And he was understanding
at last what that look meant. In the anguish of an emotion like
remorse, yet too selfish, perhaps, too self-pitying for remorse, he
muttered, "Forgive me. I didn't know what I was doing."
The vision faded back to the oblivion from which it had so curiously
emerged. He glanced at Neva again, with critical eyes, like a surgeon
diagnosing stolidly his own desperate wound. She was, or seemed to be,
busy at her easel. He could study her, without interruption. He made
slow, lingering inventory of her physical charms--beauties of hair and
skin and contour, beauties of bosom's swell and curve of arm and slant
of hip and leg. No, it was not in any of these, this supreme charm of
her for him. Where then?
For the first time he saw it. He had been assuming he was regarding her
as he had regarded every other woman in the long chain his memory was
weaving from his experiences and was coiling away to beguile his days of
the almond tree and the bated sound of the grinding. And he had
esteemed these women at their own valuation. It was the fashion for
women to profess to esteem themselves, and to expect to be esteemed, for
reasons other than their physical charms. But Boris, searcher into
realities, held that only those women who by achievement earn
independence as a man earns it, have title to count as personalities, to
be taken seriously in their professions. He saw that the women he knew
made only the feeblest pretense to real personal value other than
physical; they based themselves upon their bodies alone. So, women had
been to him what they were to themselves--mere animate flesh.
He attached no more importance--beyond polite fiction--than did they
themselves to what they thought and felt; it was what men thought of
their persons, what feelings their persons roused in men--that is, in
him. And he meted out to them the fate they expected, respected him the
more for giving them; when they ceased to serve their sole purpose of
ornament or plaything he flung them away, with more ceremony, perhaps,
but with no less indifference than the emptied bottles of the scent he
imported in quantity and drenched himself with.
But he saw the truth about Neva now--saw why, after the few first weeks
of their acquaintance, he had not even been made impatient by her bad
days--the days when her skin clouded, her eyes dimmed, her hair lost its
luster, and the color, leaving her lips, seemed to take with it the
dazzling charm of her blue-white teeth. Why? Because her appeal to his
senses was not so strong as her appeal to-- He could not tell what it
was in him this inner self of hers appealed to. Heart? Hardly; that
meant her physical beauty. Intellect? Certainly not that; intellect
rather wearied him than otherwise, and the sincerest permanent longing
of his life was to cease from thinking, to feel, only to feel--birds,
flowers, perfumed airs, the thrill of winds among grasses and leaves,
sunshine, the play of light upon women's hair, the ecstasy of touch
drifting over their smooth, magnetic bodies. No, it was neither her
intellect nor her heart, any more than it was her loveliness. Or,
rather, it was all three, and that something more which makes a man
happy he knows not why and cares not to know why.
"I would leave anyone else to come to her," he said to himself. "And if
anyone else lured me away from her, it would be only for the moment; I
would know I should have to return to her, as a dog to its master." He
repeated bitterly, mockingly, "As a dog to its master. That's what it
means to be artist--more woman than man, and more feminine than any
woman ever was."
He stood behind her, looking at her work. "You'd better stop for
to-day," he said presently. "You're only spoiling what you did
yesterday."
"So I am," said she.
She put down palette and brushes with a sigh and a shrug. When she
turned, he stood his ground and looked into her eyes. "I've been
letting outside things come between me and my work," she went on,
pretending to ignore his gaze.
"You guessed my secret a few minutes ago?" he asked.
She nodded, and it half amused, half hurt him to note that she was
physically on guard, lest he should seize her unawares.
His smile broadened. "You needn't be alarmed," said he, clasping his
hands behind his back. "I've no intention of doing it."