As Mariana crossed the threshold the light dazzled her, and she raised
her hand to her eyes. Then she lowered it and looked at him between
half-closed lids. It was a trick of mannerism which heightened the
subtlety of her smile. In the deep shadows cast by her lashes her eyes
were untranslatable.
"You are very hospitable," she said.
"A virtue which covers a multitude of sins," he answered, pleasantly.
"If you will make yourself at home, I'll fix things up a bit."
He opened the doors of the cupboard and took out a plate and a cup and
saucer, which he placed before her. "I am sorry I can't offer you a
napkin," he said, apologetically, "but they allow me only one a day, and
I had that at luncheon."
Mariana laughed merrily. The effects of recent tears were visible only
in the added lustre of her glance and the pallor of her face. She had
grown suddenly mirthful.
"Don't let's be civilized!" she pleaded. "I abhor civilization. It
invented so many unnecessary evils. Barbarians didn't want napkins; they
wanted only food. I am a barbarian."
Algarcife cut the cold chicken and passed her the bread and butter.
"Why, none of us are really civilized, you know," he returned,
dogmatically. "True, we have a thin layer of hypocrisy, which we call
civilization. It prompts us to sugar-coat the sins which our forefathers
swallowed in the rough; that is all. It is purely artificial. In a
hundred thousand years it may get soaked in, and then the artificial
refinement will become real and civilization will set in."
Mariana leaned forward with a pretty show of interest. She did not quite
understand what he meant, but she adapted herself instinctively to
whatever he might mean.
"And then?" she questioned.
"And then we will realize that to be civilized is to shrink as
instinctively from inflicting as from enduring pain. Sympathy is merely
a quickening of the imagination, in which state we are able to propel
ourselves mentally into conditions other than our own." His manner was
aggressive in its self-assertiveness. Then he smiled, regarded her with
critical keenness, and lifted the coffee-pot.
"I sha'n't give you coffee," he said, "because it is not good for you.
You need rest. Why, your hands are trembling! You shall have milk
instead."
"I don't like milk," returned Mariana, fretfully. "I'd rather have
coffee, please. I want to be stimulated."
"But not artificially," he responded. His gaze softened. "This is my
party, you know," he said, "and it isn't polite to ask for what is not
offered you. Come here."
He had risen and was standing beside his desk. Mariana went up to him.
The power of his will had enthralled her, and she felt strangely
submissive. Her coquetry she recognized as an unworthy weapon, and it
was discarded. She grew suddenly shy and nervous, and stood before him
in the flushed timidity of a young feminine thing.
He had taken a bottle from a shelf and was measuring some dark liquid
into a wine-glass. As Mariana reached him he took her hand with frank
kindliness. In his cool and composed touch there was not so much as a
suggestion of sexual difference. The possibility that, as a woman, she
possessed an attraction for him, as a man, was ignored in its entirety.
"You have cried half the evening?"
"Yes."
"Drink this." His tone was peremptory.
He gave her the glass, watching her as she looked into it, with the
gleam of a smile in his intent regard. Mariana hesitated an instant.
Then she drank it with a slight grimace.
"Your hospitality has taken an unpleasant turn," she remarked. "You
might at least give me something to destroy the taste."
He laughed and pointed to a plate of grapes, and they sat down to
supper.
The girl glanced about the room critically. Then she looked at her
companion.
"I don't quite like your room," she observed. "It is grewsome."
"It is a work-shop," he answered. "But your dislike is pure nonsense.
Skulls and cross-bones are as natural in their way as flesh and blood.
Nothing in nature is repellent to the mind that follows her."
Mariana repressed a shudder. "I have no doubt that toads are natural
enough in their way," she returned, "but I don't like the way of toads."
Anthony met her serious protest lightly.
"You are a beautiful subject for morbid psychology," he said. "Why,
toads are eminently respectable creatures, and if we regard them without
prejudice, we will discover that, as a point of justice, they have an
equal right with ourselves to the possession of this planet. Only, right
is not might, you know."
"But I love beautiful things," protested Mariana. She looked at him
wistfully, like a child desiring approbation. There was an amber light
in her eyes.
He smiled upon her.
"So do I," he made answer; "but to me each one of those nice little
specimens is a special revelation of beauty."
The girl broke her bread daintily. "You misunderstand me," she said,
with flattering earnestness and a deprecatory inflection in her voice.
Her head drooped sideways on its slender throat. There was a virginal
illusiveness about her that tinged with seriousness the lightness of her
words. "Surely you love art," she said.
"Oh, I like painting, if that is what you mean," he answered,
carelessly, though her image in his eyes was relieved against a sudden
warmth. "That is, I like Raphael and Murillo and a few of the modern
French fellows. As for music, I don't know one note from another. The
only air I ever caught was 'In the Fragrant Summer-time,' and that was
an accident. I thought it was 'Maryland.'"
Mariana did not smile. She shrank from him, and he felt as if he had
struck her.
"It isn't worth your thinking of," he said, "nor am I."
Mariana protested with her restless hands.
"Oh, but I can't help thinking of it," she answered. "It is dreadful.
Why, such things are a part of my religion!"
He returned her startled gaze with one of amusement.
"I might supply you with an alphabetical dictionary of my peculiar
vices. An unabridged edition would serve for a criminal catalogue as
well. A--Acrimony, Adhesiveness, Atheism, Aggressiveness, Aggravation,
Ambition, Artfulness--"
"Oh, stop!" cried Mariana. "You bewilder me."
He leaned back in his chair and fixed his intent gaze upon her. His eyes
were so deeply set as to be almost indistinguishable, but in the spell
of lamplight she saw that the pupils differed in color, one having a
hazel cast, while the other was of a decided gray.
"Why, I thought you displayed an interest in the subject!" he rejoined.
"You lack the genius of patience."
"Patience," returned Mariana, with a swift change of manner, "is only
lack of vitality. I haven't an atom of it."
A shade of the nervous irritability, which appeared from apparently no
provocation, was in his voice as he answered:
"There is nothing fate likes better than to drill it into us. And it is
not without its usefulness. If patience is the bugbear of youth, it is
the panacea of middle age. We learn to sit and wait as we learn to
accept passivity for passion and indifference for belief. The worst of
it is that it is a lesson which none of us may skip and most of us are
forced to learn by heart." He spoke slowly, his voice softened. Beneath
the veneering of philosophic asceticism, the scarlet veins of primeval
nature were still palpitant. The chill lines of self-restraint in his
face might, in the whirlwind of strong passions, become ingulfed in
chaos.
With an effort Mariana threw off the spell of his personality. She
straightened herself with an energetic movement. From the childlike her
manner passed to the imperious. Her head poised itself proudly, her eyes
darkened, her lips lost their pliant curve and grew audacious.
"That is as grewsome as your room," she said. "Let's talk of pleasant
things."
The changes in her mystified Algarcife. He regarded her gravely. "Of
yourself, or of myself?" he demanded.
"The first would only display your ignorance. I should prefer the
latter. Begin, please." She had grown vivid.
He spoke jestingly. "Here goes. Name, Algarcife. Christened Anthony.
Age, twenty-seven years, three weeks, ten days. Height, five feet eleven
inches. Complexion, anaemic. Physique, bad. Disposition, worse. Manners,
still worse. Does the exactness of my information satisfy you?"
"No;" she enveloped him in her smile. "You haven't told me anything I
want to know. I could have guessed your height, and your manners I have
tested. What were you doing before I came in?"
"Cursing my luck."
"And before that?" She leaned forward eagerly.
"Dogging at a theory of heredity which will reconcile Darwin's gemmules,
Weismann's germ-plasm, and Galton's stirp."
She wrinkled her brows in perplexity. Her show of interest had not fled.
A woman who cannot talk of the things she knows nothing about might as
well be a man.
"And you will do it?" she asked. He had a sudden consciousness that no
one had ever been quite so in sympathy with him as this elusive little
woman with the changeable eyes.
"Well, I hardly think so," he said. "At any rate, I expect to discover
what Spencer would call the germ of truth in each one of them, and then
I suppose I'll formulate a theory of my own which will contain the best
in all of them."
Her manner did not betray her ignorance of his meaning.
"And you will explain it all to me when it is finished?" she asked.
His smile cast a light upon her.
"If you wish it," he answered, "but I had no idea that you cared for
such things."
"You did not know me," she responded, reproachfully. "I am very, very
ignorant, but I want so much to learn." Then her voice regained its
brightness. "And you have read all these books?" she questioned.
He followed with his eyes her swift gestures.
"Those," he answered, pointing to the north shelves, "I have skimmed.
Those behind you, I have read; and those," he nodded towards his right,
"I know word for word."
"And what do you do?" The delicacy of her manner imbued the question
with unconscious flattery.
"I--oh, I eke out an existence with the assistance of the Bodley
College."
"What have you to do with it? Oh, I beg your pardon! I had forgotten we
were almost strangers."
He answered, naturally.
"It is my unhappy fate to endeavor to instil a few brains and a good
deal of information into the heads of sixty-one young females."
"And don't you like them?" queried Mariana, eagerly.
"I do not."
"Why?"
"What an inquisitor you are, to be sure!"
"But tell me," she pleaded.
"Why?" he demanded, in his turn.
She lowered her lashes, looking at her quiet hands.
"Because I want so much to know."
His smiling eyes were probing her. "Tell me why."
She raised her lashes suddenly and returned his gaze. There was a
wistful sincerity in her eyes.
"I wish to know," she said, slowly, "so that I may not be like them."
For a moment he regarded her silently. Then he spoke. "My reasons are
valid. They giggle; they flirt; and they put candy in my pockets."
"And you don't like women at all?"
"I like nice, sensible women, who wear square-toed shoes, and who don't
distort themselves with corsets."
The girl put out her pretty foot in its pointed and high-heeled slipper.
Then she shook her head with mock seriousness.
"I don't suppose you think that very sensible?" she remarked.
He looked at it critically.
"Well, hardly. No, it isn't in the least sensible, but it--it is very
small, isn't it?"
"Oh yes," responded Mariana, eagerly. She felt a sudden desire to flaunt
her graces in his face. He was watching the play of her hands, but she
became conscious, with an aggrieved surprise, that he was not thinking
of them.
"But you don't like just mere--mere women?" she asked, gravely.
"Are you a mere--mere woman?"
"Yes."
"Then I like them."
The radiance that overflowed her eyes startled him.
"But you aren't just a mere--mere man," she volunteered.
"But I am--a good deal merer, in fact, than many others. I am a shape of
clay."
"Then I like shapes of clay," said Mariana.
For an instant they looked at each other in silence. In Mariana's
self-conscious eyes there was a soft suffusion of shyness; in his
subjective ones there was the quickening of an involuntary interest.
"Then we agree most amicably," he remarked, quietly. As she rose he
stood facing her. "It is time for your sleep and my work," he added, and
held out his hand.
As Mariana placed her own within it she flashed whitely with a sudden
resentment of his cool dismissal.
"Good-night!" she said.
He looked down at her as she lingered before him. "I want to be of use
to you," he said, frankly, "but things have an unfortunate way of
slipping my memory. If at any time I can serve you, just come to the
fire-escape and call me."
"No," answered the girl, pettishly, "certainly not."
His brow wrinkled. "That was rude, I know," he rejoined, "but I meant it
honestly."
"I have no doubt of it."
As she turned to go he detained her with a compelling touch.
"You aren't angry?"
"No."
"And you forgive me?"
"I have nothing to forgive. Indeed, I am grateful for your charity."
He surveyed her in puzzled scrutiny. "Well, I am sure I sha'n't forget
you," he said. "Yes, I am quite sure of it."
"What a marvellous memory!" exclaimed Mariana, crossly, and she stepped
out upon the fire-escape.
"Good-night!" he called.
"Good-night!" she responded, and entered her room.
"He is very rude," she whispered as she closed the shutters. In the
half-light she undressed and sat in her night-gown, brushing the heavy
tangles of her hair. Then she lighted the flame before the little altar
and said her prayers; kneeling with bowed head. As she turned off the
light she spoke again. "I am not sure that I don't like rudeness," she
added.
Meanwhile Algarcife had watched her vanish into the shadows, a smile
lightening the gravity of his face. When she had disappeared he turned
to his desk. With his singular powers of concentration, he had not taken
up his pen before all impressions save those relating to the subject in
hand had been banished from his mind. His expression was buoyant and
alert. Turning over his papers, he passed with a sense of reinvigoration
to the matter before him.
"Yes; I think, after all, that a strongly modified theory of pangenesis
may survive," he said.