It was her wish that their meeting be at night, and she gave him a
sign. Unnoticed by the others, she succeeded in whispering to him that
she would come to him that night with a gift. He was to wait for her.
He looked at her without a word. When she glided away, his lips
throbbed.
After midnight, when all were asleep in the house, she left her
chamber, and mounted to the upper floor where Christian had his rooms.
She went softly but without especial fear. Bending her head forward,
she held in her hands the folds of the white silken over-garment that
she wore. Its transparent texture was more like a white shimmer, a
pearly gleam upon her flesh than a garment. It was doubled only about
her waist and bosom, and her steps were impeded by a satin riband
about her knees. Thus, while her pulses throbbed, she had to trip, to
her own amusement, like the Geisha girls she had seen in a theatre.
When Christian had locked the door behind her, she leaned against it in
sudden weakness.
Gently he took her wrists, and breathed a kiss upon her forehead,
smiled, and asked: “What did you want to bring to me, Letitia? I long
to know.”
Suddenly she was aware that she had forgotten the golden toy. Shortly
before she had left her room, she had laid it in readiness; and yet she
had forgotten it. “How stupid of me!” The words slipped out, and she
gazed in shame at her little shoes of black velvet. “How stupid of me!
There was a little toad made of gold that I meant to bring to you.”
It startled him. Then he recalled the words that he had spoken so many
months ago. The intervening time seemed thrice its natural length.
He wondered now how he could ever have been frightened of a toad. He
could, to be sure, hear his own words again: “Have a little toad made
of gold, that the evil magic may disappear.” But the monition had no
validity to-day. The spell had been broken without a talisman.
And as he saw the girl stand before him, quivering and intoxicated,
the trembling and the ecstasy seized him too. Many others had come to
him--none so innocent and yet so guilty, none so determined and so
deluded at once. He knew those gestures, that silent yearning, the eye
that flamed and smouldered, the half-denial and the half-assent, the
clinging and repulsing, the sighs and the magical tears that tasted
like warm and salty dew. He knew! And his senses urged him with all
their power to experience and to taste it all again.
But there were things that stood between him and his desire. There
was a pallid brunette face whose eyes were upon him with unimaginable
clearness. There was a blood-soaked face to which the black hair clung.
There was a face that had once been beautiful, swollen by the waters of
the Thames. And there was a face full of hatred and shame against the
coarse linen of a bed, and another in the storeroom of a hotel which
was swathed in a white cloth. There were other faces--faces of men and
women, thousands upon thousands, on the shore of a river, and still
others that were stamped upon and charred, which he had seen as though
they were concrete realities through the eyes of another. All these
things stood between him and his desire.
And his heart opposed it too. And the love that he felt for Letitia.
He grew a little paler, and a chill crept into his fingertips. He
took Letitia by the hand, and led her to the middle of the room. She
looked about her timidly, but every glance was his who filled her whole
being. She asked him concerning the pictures that hung on the wall,
and admired a picture of himself which was among them. She asked after
the meaning of a little sculptured group which he had bought in Paris:
a man and a woman emerging from the earth of which they were made,
contending with primitive power.
Her deep voice had a more sensuous note than ever. And as he answered
her, the temptation assailed him anew to touch with his lips the warm,
rosy, throbbing curve of her shoulder, which was like a ripe fruit. But
an inescapable voice within him cried: Resist once! Resist but this
single time!
It was difficult, but he obeyed.
Letitia did not know what was happening to her. She shivered, and
begged him to close the window. But when he had done so, her chill
increased. She looked at him furtively. His face seemed arrogant and
alien. They had sat down on a divan, and silence had fallen upon them.
Why did I forget the little toad? Letitia thought. My folly is to blame
for everything. And instinctively she moved away from him a little.
“Letitia,” he said, and arose, “perhaps you will understand it all some
day.” Then he kneeled on the floor at her feet, and took her cool hands
and laid them against his cheeks.
“No, I don’t understand,” Letitia whispered, and her eyes were wet,
although she smiled, “and I shall never understand.”
“You will! Some day you will!”
“Never,” she asserted passionately, “never!” All things were confused
within her. She thought of flowers and stars, of dreams and images. She
thought of birds that fell dead out of the air, as he had described
them once, and a deer dying at the hunter’s feet. She thought of paths
upon which she would go, of far sea-faring, and of jewels and costly
garments. But none of these images held her. They were formed and
dissolved. A chain broke in her soul, and she felt a need to lie down
and weep for a while. Not for long. And it was possible that, when the
weeping was over, she might look forward with delight once more to the
coming day and to Stephen Gunderam and to their wedding.
“Good-night, Christian,” she said, and gave him her hand as after
a simple chat. And all the objects in the room had changed their
appearance. On the table stood a cut-glass bowl full of meadow-saffron,
and their white stalks were like the antennæ of a polypus. The night
outside was no longer the same night. One seemed quite free now in a
peculiar way--in a defiant and vengeful way.
Christian was amazed by her gesture and posture. He had not touched
her; yet it was a girl who had come to him, and it was a woman who
went. “I will think about it,” she said, and nodded to him with a
great, dark look. “I will learn to understand it.”
So she went--went on into her rich, poverty-stricken, adventurous,
difficult, trifling life.
Christian listened to the dying echo of her tread beyond the door. He
stood without moving, and his head was bent. To him, too, the night had
changed into another. Despite his obedience to the inner voice, a doubt
gnawed at his soul whether what he had done was right or wrong, good or
evil.