TREATS OF THE ATTRACTION OF OPPOSITES
As soon as Trent had left the room Laura felt that the silence became
oppressive and constrained. For the first time in her life she found
herself overwhelmed with timidity--with a fear of the too obvious
word--and this timidity annoyed her because she was aware that she no
longer possessed the strength with which to struggle against it. That it
was imperative for her to lighten the situation by a trivial remark, she
saw clearly, yet she could think of nothing to say which did not sound
foolish and even insincere when she repeated it in her thoughts. Had she
dared to follow her usual impulse and be uncompromisingly honest, she
would have said, perhaps: "I am silent because I am afraid to speak and
yet I do not know why I am afraid, nor what it is that I fear." In her
own mind she was hardly more lucid than this, and the mystery of her
heart was as inscrutable to herself as it was to Kemper.
Then, presently, a rush of anger--of hot resentment--put courage into
her determination, and raising her head, with an impatient gesture, she
looked indifferently into his face. He was still sitting in the square
of sunlight, which had almost faded away, and as she turned toward him,
he met her gaze with his intimate and charming smile. Though his words
were casual usually and uttered in a tone of genial raillery, this
smile, whenever she met it, seemed to give the lie to every trifling
phrase that he had spoken. "What is the use of all this ridiculous
fencing when you fill my thoughts and each minute of the day I think
only of you," said his look. So vivid was the impression she received
now, that she felt instantly that he had caressed her in his
imagination. Her heart beat quickly, while she rose to her feet with an
indignant impulse.
"What is it?" he asked and she knew from his voice that he was still
smiling. "What is the matter?"
Picking up his typewritten manuscript, she returned with it to her
chair, drawing, as she sat down, a little farther away.
"I merely wanted to look over this," she returned, "Mr. Trent
interrupted me in my reading."
"Then you've something to thank him for," he remarked gayly, and added
in the same tone, "I noticed that he is in love with you--and I am
beginning to be jealous."
For an instant she looked at him in surprise; then she remembered his
affected scorn of what he called "social cowardice"--his natural or
assumed frankness--and she shook her head with a laugh of protest.
"He in love! Well, yes, he's in love with his imagination. He's too
young for anything more definite than that."
"A man is never too young to fall in love," he retorted, "I had it at
least six times before I was twenty-one."
The laughter was still on her lips. "You speak as if it were the
measles."
"It is--or worse, for when you've pulled through a bad attack of the
measles you may safely count yourself immune. With love--" he shrugged
his shoulders.
"Do you mean," she asked lightly, "that one can keep it up like
that--forever."
He shook his head.
"Oh, I think a case is rare," he replied, "after seventy-five. One
usually dies by then."
"And is there never--with a man, I mean--really one?"
"Oh, Lord, yes, there's always one--at a time."
His laughing eyes were probing her, and as she met them, questioningly,
she found it impossible to tell whether he was merely jesting or in
deadly earnest. With the doubt she felt a sharp prick of curiosity, and
with it she realised that in this uncertainty--this flashing suggestion
of all possibilities or of nothing--dwelt the singular attraction that
he had for her--and for others. Was he only superficial, after all? Or
did these tantalising contradictions serve to conceal the hidden depths
beneath? Had she for an instant taken him entirely at his word value,
she knew that her interest in him would have quickly passed--but the
force which dominated him, the lurking seriousness which seemed always
behind his laughter, the very largeness of the candour he
displayed--these things kept her forever expectant and forever
interested.
"I hate you when you are like this," she exclaimed, almost indignantly.
"A woman always hates a man when he tells her the truth," he retorted.
"She has a taste for sweets and prefers falsehood."
"It may be the truth as you have seen it," she answered, "but that after
all is a very small part of the whole."
"It's big enough at least to be unpleasant."
"Well, it's your personal idea of the truth, all the same," she
insisted, "and you can't make it universal. It isn't Gerty's for
instance."
"You think not?" he made a face of playful astonishment. "Well, how
about its hitting off our friend Perry?"
"Perry!" she replied disdainfully. "Do you know if he weren't so simple,
I'd detest him."
"But why?" His eyebrows were still elevated.
"Because he thinks of nothing under the sun but the sensations of his
great big body."
"Well, that may not be magnificent," he paraphrased gayly, "but it is
man."
"Then, thank heaven, it isn't woman!" she exclaimed.
"Do you mean to tell me," he leaned forward in his chair and she was
conscious suddenly that he was very close to her--closer, in spite of
the intervening space, than any man had ever been in her life before,
"do you honestly mean to tell me that women are different?"
The expression of his face altered as it always did before an
approaching change in his mood, and she saw in it something of the
satiety--the moral weariness--which is the Nemesis of the soul that is
led by pleasure. It was at this moment that she felt an exquisite
confidence in the man himself--in the man hidden behind the cynicism,
the affectation, the utter vanity of words.
"Oh, they can't devote themselves to their own sensations when they have
to think so much of other people's," she responded merrily; and she felt
again the strange impulse of retreat, the prompting to fly before the
earnestness that appeared in his voice. While he was flippant, her
intuitions told her that she might be serious, but when the banter
passed from his tone, she turned to it instinctively as to a defence.
"But those that I have known"--he stopped and looked at her as if he
weighed with an experienced eye the exact effect of his words.
She laughed, but it was a laugh of irritation rather than humour.
"Perhaps you did not select your examples very wisely," she remarked.
Her look arrested him as he was about to reply, and he spoke evidently
upon the impulse of the moment. "Did Gerty tell you about Madame Alta?"
he enquired.
She shook her head with an evasion of the question, "I don't remember
that it was Gerty."
"But you have heard of her?"
"I've _heard_ her," she answered. "It is a very beautiful voice."
He frowned with a nervous irritation, and she saw from his impatient
movements that he was under the influence of a disagreeable excitement.
"Well, I was once in love with her," he said bluntly.
She made an indifferent gesture.
"And now I hate her," he added with a sharp intonation.
"Is that the ordinary end of your romances?" she questioned without
interest.
"It wasn't romance," he replied bitterly; "it was hell."
Again she caught the note of satiety in his voice, and it stirred her to
a feeling of sympathy which she despised in herself.
"At least you worked out your own damnation," she returned coolly.
"One usually does," he admitted. "That's the infernal part of it. But
I'm out of it now," he pursued with an egoism which rejoiced in its own
strength. "I'm out of it now with a whole skin and I hope to keep decent
even if I don't get to heaven. You might not think it," he concluded
gravely, "but I'm at bottom as religious a chap as old John Knox."
"You may be," she observed without enthusiasm, "but it's the kind of
religion which impresses me not at all."
"Well, it might have been better," he said, "but I never had a chance.
I've known such devilish women all my life."
Humour shone in her eyes, making her whole face darkly brilliant with
expression. "Do you know that you show a decided family resemblance to
Adam," she observed.
"It does sound that way," he laughed, "but there's some hard sense in
it, after all. A woman has a tremendous effect on a man's life--I mean
the woman he really likes."
"Wouldn't it be safer to say the 'women'?" she suggested.
"Nonsense. I was only joking. There is always one who is more than the
others--any man will tell you that."
"I suppose any man will--even Perry Bridewell."
"Why not Perry?" he demanded. "You can't imagine how he used to bore the
life out of me about Gerty--but Gerty, you know," he added in a burst of
confidence which impressed her as almost childlike, "isn't exactly the
kind of woman to a--a lift a fellow."
Before his growing earnestness she resorted quickly to the defence of
flippancy. "Nor is Perry, I suppose, exactly the kind of man that is
lifted," she observed, with a laugh.
He looked at her a moment with a smile which had even then an edge of
his characteristic genial irony. "You are the sort of woman who could do
that," he said abruptly.
"Could lift Perry? Now, God forbid!" she retorted gayly.
"Oh, Perry be hanged!" he exclaimed, with the candid ill-humour which,
strangely enough, had a peculiar attraction for her. "If I had known you
fifteen years ago I might be a good deal nearer heaven than I am
to-day."
The charm of his earnestness was very great, and she felt that the
sudden sensation of faintness which came over her must be visible in her
fluttering eyelids and in her trembling hands.
"I haven't faith in a salvation that must be worked out by somebody
else," she said, in a voice she made cold by an effort to render it
merely careless.
An instant before he had told himself with emphasis that he would go no
further, but the chill remoteness from which she looked at him stirred
him to an emotion that was not unlike a jealous anger. She seemed to him
then more brightly distant, more sweetly inaccessible than she had done
at their first meeting.
"Not even when it is a salvation through love?" he asked impulsively,
and at the thought that she was possibly less indifferent than she
appeared to be, he felt his desire of her mount swiftly to his head.
Her hand went to her bosom to keep down the wild beating of her heart,
but the face with which she regarded him was like the face of a statue.
"No--because I doubt the possibility of such a thing," she said.
"The possibility of my loving you or of your saving me?"
"The possibility of both."
"How little you know of me," he exclaimed, and his voice sounded hurt as
if he were wounded by her disbelief.
She raised her eyes and looked at him, and for several seconds they sat
in silence with only the little space between them.
"It is very well," she said presently, "that I believe nothing that you
say to me--or it might be hard to divide the truth from the untruth."
"I never told you an untruth in my life," he protested angrily.
"Doesn't a man always tell them to a woman?" she enquired.
For an instant he hesitated; then he spoke daringly, spurred on by her
indifferent aspect. "He doesn't when--he loves her."
"When he loves her more than ever," she returned quietly, as if his
remark held for her merely an historic interest, "Perry Bridewell loves
Gerty, I suppose, and yet he lies to her every day he lives."
"That's because she likes it," he commented, with a return of raillery.
"She doesn't like it--no woman does. As for me I want the truth even if
it kills me."
"It wouldn't kill you," he answered, and the tenderness in his voice
made her feel suddenly that she had never known what love could be, "it
would give you life." Then his tone changed quickly and the old pleasant
humour leaped to his eyes, "and whatever comes I promise never to lie to
you," he added.
She shook her head. "I didn't ask it," she rejoined, with a sharp
breath.
"If you had," he laughed, "I wouldn't have promised. That's a part of
the general contrariness of men--they like to give what they are not
asked for."
"Well, I'll never ask anything of you," she said, smiling.
"Is that because you want to get everything?" he enquired gayly.
A pale flush rose to her forehead, and the glow heightened the singular
illumination which dwelt in her face. "Would the best that you could
give be more than a little?"
"It would be more than a woman ever got on earth."
"Well, I'm not sure that I would accept your valuation," she remarked,
with an effort to keep up the light tone of banter.
"Then make your own," he answered, as he rose from his chair, but his
eyes and the strong pressure of his hand on hers said more than this.
"When I've read through the manuscript I'll talk to you about it," she
observed, as he was leaving "If you really want them published, though,
they must be considerably altered."
"Oh, do it yourself," he returned, with an embarrassed eagerness. "Do
anything you please--put in the literary stuff and all that."
He spoke with an entire unconsciousness of the amount of work he asked
of her, and she liked him the better for the readiness with which he
took for granted that she possessed the patience as well as the will to
serve him.
"Well, we'll talk about it later," she said, and then for the first time
during the conversation she raised upon him, in all its mystery of
suggestion, that subtle fascination of look which he felt at the instant
to be her transcendent if solitary beauty. Through the afternoon he had
waited patiently for this remembered smile--had laid traps for it, had
sought in vain to capture it unawares, and had she been a worldly
coquette bent upon conquest, she could not have used her weapons with a
finer or more decisive effect. After more than two hours in which her
remoteness had both disappointed and irritated him, he went away at last
with her face at its most radiant moment stamped upon his memory.