It seemed the last notes of a dream. He had been awake for some
minutes, but had feared to stir lest the voice should stop. Slowly he
unclosed his eyes. The voice went on. He had never heard such music;
it was deep and sweet and luring. It was like the golden hair of the
Princess Lettice lowered from her casement to her lover. It was like the
silver feet of laughter twinkling up a beanstalk ladder to the stars.
It was like spread wings, swooping and drifting over a fairyland of
castellated tree-tops. Now it wandered up the passage and seemed to halt
behind the tapestry of Absalom. Now it grew infinitely distant until it
was all but lost.
He eased himself out of bed. Save for the pool of scarlet that weltered
across floor and ceiling from the hearth, the room was filled with
blackness.
“Who’s there?” he whispered.
No answer. He tiptoed up the steps and out into the passage. It was long
and gloomy; at the end of it a strip of light escaped from a door
which had been left ajar. It was from there that the voice was calling.
Steadying himself with his hand against the wall, he stole noiselessly
towards it Just as he reached the strip of light the singing abruptly
ended.
“No, Hal. You shouldn’t do that. You do it too often. Please not any
more.”
“Just once on your lips.”
“If it’s only once. You promise?”
“I promise.”
The door creaked. When he saw them, their bodies were still close
together, but as they turned to glance across their shoulders their
heads had drawn a little apart. Her hands, resting on the keyboard,
were held captive by the man’s. Candles, flickering behind their heads,
scorched a hole in the dusk to frame them.
The man’s face was boyish and clean-shaven, self-indulgent and almost
handsome. It was a pleasant face: the corners of the mouth turned up
with a hint of humor; the lips were full and kind; the eyes blue and
impatient His complexion was high and his hair flaxen; his bearing
sensitive and a little self-conscious. He was a man who could give
himself excessively to any one he loved and who consequently would be
always encountering new disappointments.
And the woman--she was like her voice: remote and passionate; haunting
and unsatisfying; an instrument of romance for the awakening of
idealized desires. She was fashioned no less for the attracting of love
than for its repulse. Her forehead was intensely white; her brows were
like the shadow of wings, hovering and poised; her eyes now vague as
a sea-cloud, now flashing like sudden gleams of blue-gray sunlight Her
hair was the color of ancient bronze--dark in the hollows and burnished
at the edges. Her throat was her glory--full and young, throbbing like a
bird’s and slender as the stalk of a flower. It was her mouth that gave
the key to her character. It could be any shape that an emotion made
it: petulant and unreasonable; kind and gracious and adoring. She was a
darkened house when she was unresponsive; there was no stir in her--she
seemed uninhabited. In the street below her windows some chance traveler
of thought or affection halted; instantly all her windows blazed and the
people of her soul gazed out.
The odd little figure, hesitating in the doorway, had worked this
miracle. Her eyes, which had been troubled when first they rested on
him, brightened. Her lips relaxed. Like a bubble rising from a still
depth, laughter rippled up her throat and broke across the scarlet
threshold of her mouth.
“Oh, Hal, what a darling! Where did you get him? And what a dear, funny
nightgown!”
She tore her hands free from the man’s. Running to the little boy, she
knelt beside him, bringing her face down to his level. As if to prevent
him from escaping, she looped her arms about his neck.
“You are dear and funny,” she said. “Where d’you come from?”
Teddy was abashed. He didn’t mind being called dear, but he strongly
objected to being called funny. He was terribly conscious of the pink
flannel garment which clothed him. It hung like a sack from his narrow
shoulders. If Mrs. Sheerug hadn’t safety-pinned a reef in at the neck,
there would have been danger of its slipping off him. He couldn’t see
his hands; they only reached to where his elbows ought to have been. He
couldn’t see his feet; a yard of pink stuff draped them. He had had
to kilt it to make his way along the passage. But the garment’s chief
offense, as he regarded it, was that it was a woman’s: a rather stout
middle-aged woman’s--the sort of woman who had given up trying to look
pretty and probably wore a nightcap. Teddy forgot that had he not been
press-ganged into sickness, the beautiful lady’s arms would not have
been about him. All he remembered was that he looked a caricature at a
moment when--he scarcely knew why--he wanted to appear most manly. Mrs.
Sheerug was responsible and he felt hotly resentful.
“Where did you come from?”
“Bed.”
“But isn’t it rather early to be in bed? Perhaps you’re not well.”
“I’m quite well.” He spoke stubbornly, looking aside and trying to keep
the tears back. “I’m quite well; it’s she who pretends I isn’t.”
“_She!_ Ah, I understand. Poor old boy, never mind.”
She drew him against her breast and kissed him. He thought she would
release him; but still she held him. He could feel the beating of her
heart and the slow movement of her breath. He didn’t want her to let him
go; but why did she still hold him? Shyly he raised his eyes.
“Won’t you smile?” she said. “I’d like to see what you look like. And
now tell me, what made you come here?”
“I heard you,” he whispered. “Please let me stay.”
She glanced back at the man; he sat where she had left him, by the
piano, watching. She rather liked to make him jealous. Turning to the
child, she lowered her voice, “You’ll catch cold if you don’t get back
to bed and I’ll be blamed for it. If I come with you, will that be as
good as if I let you stay?”
“Oh, better.”
“Then kiss me.”
As she rose from her knees she gathered him in her arms. The man
left his seat to follow. She paused in the doorway, gazing across her
shoulder. “No, Hal, it’s a time when you’re not wanted.”
“But Vashti----”
She laughed mischievously. “I said no. There’s some one else to-night
who wants me all to himself.”
When Teddy became a man and looked back on that night there were two
things that he remembered: the first was his pride and sense of triumph
at hearing himself preferred to Hal; the second was that love, as an
inspiring and torturing reality, entered into his experience for the
first time. As she carried him into the darkness of the passage which
had been full of fears without her, her act seemed symbolic. Gazing
back from her arms, he saw the man--saw the perplexed humiliation of
his expression, his aloneness and instinctively his tragedy, yet without
pity and rather with contentment In later years all that happened to him
seemed a refinement of spiritual revenge for his childish callousness.
The solitary image of the man in the dim-lit room, his empty hands and
following eyes took a place in the gallery of memory as a Velasquezesque
masterpiece--a composition in brown and white of the St. Sebastian of a
love self-pierced by the arrows of its own too great desire.