THE FIRE IN THE CLEARING
She in twined gold all helmeted,
Cuirassed in yielding rose,
Let fall from lips of wanton red
Three little words, like blows;
And laughed where swayed his spear aloft,
For she no arms did wear,
And her slim body white and soft
Of steel and mail was bare!
JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight."
We prefer our pessimists young and tender, like asparagus; ten
years older and what a bore even Hamlet might have been!--"The
Silver Poppy."
Repellier had been prevailed upon to attempt a portrait of Mrs. Alfred
Spaulding, and three times a week he came to her house to drink a cup of
tea and to work, relaxingly, it is true, on a canvas which was
progressing neither fast nor altogether favorably. He had undertaken the
task only under gentle protest, for, since that day of mingled alarm and
disgust when he beheld two pages of an illustrated weekly given over to
what its editor had dared to call The Repellier Girl, the old artist had
gone back to his _genre_ work, declaring that he was tired of the
American gigantic miniature. So, profitable as he might have found the
painting of beautiful gowns and faces in Bishop's whole lengths, he
preferred thereafter to regard all labor like that which he was now
performing for Mrs. Spaulding as the avocation of a busy life, and not
the vocation of an idle one. And in this instance, too, his fair sitter
had confided to him that she would like the portrait to be done in
secret. It was to be a Christmas present for her husband, and, as she
added with an ambiguity that somewhat ruffled the usual equanimity of
Repellier, "Alfred is such a jealous-minded creature, besides."
It was Cordelia who had finally persuaded him to undertake the picture,
laughing all seriousness out of its rigid secrecy and holding it up to
him as merely the passing whim of a very wealthy and very idle woman. It
was she, too, who suggested a plan which he ultimately carried out--that
the check he received in payment for his work be handed over to the
chronically depleted funds of that East Side Convalescent Home of which
he was a trustee.
Mrs. Spaulding, in turn, was not ungrateful for what she considered
Cordelia's good offices in this case. She even confessed to her young
ward the timid fear that a great artist like Repellier, reproducing on
his canvas feature by feature the very face in which a vast but
heroically hidden passion burned, might some day read the soul of the
picture, where the soul of the woman had passed unnoticed. Cordelia
agreed that such cases were not unknown, but honorably kept her own
counsel in the matter and even bravely fought down within herself the
last inner voice of flippancy.
When Repellier called that afternoon he found Cordelia down in the
Spauldings' commodious kitchen, a cook and two busy maids about her.
"I had to call you down, it smells so fine," she cried happily,
thrusting before his astonished nose a pan of sizzling English pheasant,
which, after a long and tiring hunt throughout the city, she confided to
him, she had found somewhere in cold storage.
"How domestic we are, and how charming we look!" said Repellier in
reply, noting her bright eyes and flushed face.
"Yes, isn't it fine?"
"But," he asked, "what does it all mean?"
She told him of Hartley's change of apartments--it was the thought of
relating these circumstances to Repellier more than to any one else that
had troubled her for days--and how Mrs. Spaulding and she had promised
to give him a little house-warming.
"And so we're going to give him a dinner, a most wonderful dinner!" she
cried. "And I'm doing it all by myself!"
Repellier glanced interrogatively at the three busy servants.
"Of course I have to have a little help, but that's a secret. Our women
at home--in the South--aren't taught to do this sort of thing, you know.
Help, with us, is so easy to get, most of us never learn things. When I
was a girl in Kentucky, I don't believe I ever went into a kitchen more
than once a month. And now I've just discovered the fascination of the
fryingpan."
Cordelia had what Repellier called "the dangerous gift of familiarity."
As he looked at her he remembered how apt Miss Short's description of
her had been: "the girl with the semaphore eyes." She could be as open
and ingenuous as a child at times, and when caring to, could guilelessly
brush aside all the restraining conventionalities with one airy sweep of
the hand.
"I suppose you realize it's the oldest weapon you have in that eternal
warfare of the elemental woman against the elemental man," half laughed
Repellier.
"Feed the brutes," she laughed. Then she looked up quickly. "But I'm not
arming for any particular engagement with the enemy." He had a way of
giving generalities a specific application which she did not like.
"I suppose a few thousand years ago some shock-headed, hairy-bodied
creature with a stone hatchet crawled on all fours into a cave and
beheld a rat-browed, matted-haired she-thing stooping over a gory piece
of toasting bear meat, and his heart went out to her at once."
"Or his hatchet," broke in Cordelia.
"And I suppose out of the mumbling delight of that hairy savage has come
what we moderns call family love, and out of the way in which the
she-thing groveled and thrust the hot meat on a slab of stone and
crawled with it to her lord and master-to-be has flowered what we call
courtship."
"And just as her happy yelping," went on Cordelia satirically, "was the
root of our speech, I suppose that hunk of half-cooked flesh was the
root of this _terrine de foie gras_."
She sniffed at her delicacy appreciatively.
"How much nicer the modern way is," she added, dreamily, "marriage by
capture transformed into marriage by chef."
"But _has_ it changed so much, after all?" asked Repellier, looking
about at the half-filled hampers.
Cordelia thought it over before her mirror that evening as she dressed,
and she rediscovered two truths. One was that it really hadn't changed
so much, and the other was that Mr. Repellier often said things with a
sort of double meaning, which, she knew, was always going to fill her
with a hazy distrust of him.
Her toilet was an exceptionally elaborate one, and it was almost seven
before she tapped lightly on Mrs. Spaulding's door.
Dismay crept through her as she entered; she immediately recognized all
the familiar symptoms.
"I've got one of my heads again, my dear. I'm sorry, but I _can't_ go."
Cordelia looked at her with compressed lips.
"You'll _have_ to run along by yourself, my dear. It'll be all right,
and I'll send Thomas with the brougham at nine."
* * * * *
Hartley was deep in a pile of disordered notes and manuscripts, trying
to arrange them with some sort of method, when her tiny knock sounded on
his apartment door. He did not hear it; it might never have been
intended for his hearing, it was so light and timorous. Before he was
even aware of her presence everything had been slipped in through the
softly opened door. And when he suddenly looked up he saw her standing
there laughing, expectant, radiant, a Lady Bountiful surrounded by her
riches.
He started up and came quickly toward her. He had scarcely looked for
them so soon. But she stopped him with a gesture.
"I've come alone," she warned him. And she told him how she had been
deserted at the last moment. She was glad, and yet sorry--as she saw how
his face lighted up--that he should look at it so joyously innocent.
"I have come to feed the lion," she cried. "Roar if you dare, sir!" She
slipped off her wrap, and laying her hat and gloves aside, deftly placed
a couple of Hartley's carnations in her hair. Noticing over her shoulder
that he was watching her, she laughingly told him the different names
the newspapers had given that poor head of hers--everything from
"flame-washed" and "tawny russet" to "beaten bronze." Then she laughed
again softly, and produced a mysterious parcel.
"Roll up my sleeves, sir!" she demanded prettily, standing before him.
When this was done, and he had noticed how small but perfectly rounded
her white arm was, she opened her parcel and shook out the whitest of
white aprons.
"Dear, dear, isn't it fine?" she cried, jubilantly tiptoeing so that she
could see herself in the mirror.
Hartley looked at her in wonder. The last little complaining voice of a
disturbed conscience went scurrying back to its kennel. Any constraint
that had hung over him disappeared. With one whisk of her silk skirt
Cordelia seemed to have driven the quietness and loneliness from the
little rooms.
It was the pale and fragile priestess of letters in a new and altogether
unexpected light. He even had to confess to himself that he had never
seen her make a more perfect picture. She seemed more softly womanly,
more wistfully happy, than ever before. The missing note had been found.
She herself was not unconscious of this, and it deepened the rose-tint
on her usually pallid cheeks. And she took a strange joy in her novel
tasks, as she bustled about laying out the things in a most housewifely
manner.
She made a few blunders about it, for it was work that was new to her,
but they laughed them off together. It all seemed to appeal to something
dormant and primitive in her, and she was happy. It was the blossoming,
in her, of the belated flower of domesticity. Gazing down at the white
linen and the dishes, in a moment of abstraction, she resolved within
herself thereafter to give more time and attention to such things, she
even inwardly decided, some day, to take a course in cooking. It was,
she felt, like finding a quaint old jewel in the folds of some neglected
and long-forgotten gown, a flower in some forsaken garden.
"I suppose," said Cordelia dreamily, as she contemplated the results of
her labors, "that the fryingpan is the oldest weapon we women have in
that perpetual warfare of the elemental she against the elemental he.
Did you ever think of it in that light? Can't you imagine a shock-headed
creature with a stone hatchet in his hand crawling into a cave and
finding a lady in a bearskin roasting a piece of bear meat, or something
like that? And can't you imagine how his pagan heart went out to her at
the sight?"
Hartley growled, savage-like; and they both laughed.
"But I suppose," she went on thoughtfully, "that out of his mumblings of
delight has come what we call family love. And then do you realize, sir,
that out of the way that female savage groveled and thrust that hot meat
on a slab of stone before him came that beautiful thing we call
courtship?"
"Fine!" cried Hartley; "and evolution in a nutshell."
"Yes," said Cordelia happily. "I think I'll have to use that in a book
sometime."
And so, from the oysters that came carefully packed in chopped ice to
the French coffee which Cordelia made on Hartley's little
gas-range--from a recipe which she had carefully penciled on a slip of
paper--the dinner proved the daintiest and most delectable of repasts.
In a burst of confidence Cordelia even admitted that it was the happiest
one she had ever eaten. Then a silence fell over them, and through the
drifting smoke of the cigar which she had so carefully lighted for him
he noticed how unusually luminous were the widened pupils of her
"semaphore eyes," and how shell-like the soft tinting of her oval and
finely chiseled face.
But still neither spoke, and neither seemed oppressed by the silence. It
seemed so eloquent of quiet content.
"What good chums we make," she said at last, musingly. They had both
begun to feel during that long silence the stir of something new and
momentous in the air about them.
"And always shall make," he said, taking her hand across the table and
holding it firmly and warmly in his own. She looked at him out of
wistful and appealing eyes; she felt herself strangely touched into a
new vitality--the vitality of the emerging elemental woman. A hand-clasp
was the thing she had not asked for; it was the one inadequate touch she
had not called for.
"How cold you are!" she murmured plaintively. He looked up at her,
half-enlightened, disturbed. He always had felt that she was something
to be guarded and cherished. He wondered if it was her misleading air of
fragility that had made her always appeal to his nurturing instinct, and
had let the eternal he--as she had put it--in him go unchallenged.
"Would you like to see me--the other way?" he suddenly asked her, in a
changed voice. He would have recalled that question, even as he would
have held back the quick wave of recklessness that swept over him, if it
had been in his power. Her words had sent the blood bounding back to his
heart. For the first time she sat before him a living, breathing,
alluring woman, and not the embodiment of all that was coldly
intellectual. She seemed no longer the pale apostle of letters, but
herself a woman throbbing and pulsing with mature life, eager,
significant, almost challenging. And he, too, was a man, vigorous,
full-blooded, not without his wayward impulses of the heart. The scholar
in him, the dormant sense of propriety which rebelled against any
disregard of the laws of the strong to the weak, of the host to his
guest, had hitherto held a coldly restraining hand on him. She, like
himself, was a being surging with desires and emotions, warm with
forgotten moods and passions. And again he felt a flushing wave of
irresponsibility sweep through him.
"Yes," she answered deliberately, pouring the last of the wine into his
glass and sipping languidly at her own with her thin, gently curved,
crimson lips. She waited for him to speak, but he was silent.
"I believe I'd love to shock you," she murmured in her fluty contralto.
She was looking at him warmly now, with eyes that seemed golden green
under the soft glow of the heavily shaded chandelier above their heads.
Her hair was a crown of tangled gold. Her face seemed heavy, like a
flower in the heat that comes before rain. A sudden tingling swept
through all his nerves, and he looked at her with new eyes. At last he
had awakened.
"Yes, what good chums we could have been," he said, it seemed to her
almost regretfully.
"'But how interesting one man and one woman can make life,'" she
answered slowly.
The sentence was a quotation from the second chapter of The Unwise
Virgins as Cordelia had first written it. He remembered the line and the
context, and it left him no room for doubt.
"There--there could be no going back," he said, feeling the old ground
sinking abysmally from under his feet, and groping out in that last
tumultuous moment for something substantial to which to cling. O
doubting and pouting Adonis, how could you!
The flags and pennons of victory flamed softly in her triumphant eyes.
In some way, she felt, she had at last drawn him down from his towers.
Once she had been half afraid of him; that hour was gone for all time.
Cordelia slipped out of her chair and came over and stood close beside
him. She thrust her pale fingers into his hair and gazed with mild but
unhesitatingly candid eyes down into his own. His face looked up to
hers, passionate, yet with a touch of pain. A sudden pallor swept over
him, and before she knew it he had flung up his arms and drawn her down
to him.
Some sudden enchaining fragrance and warmth about her overmastered him.
For an intoxicating moment he could feel her very heart, in its wild
beating. Then she writhed and twisted away from him, and shrank panting
and frightened out of his reach. He went to her once, but she eluded
him. And at last he remembered.
"Oh, I forgot, I forgot," she half cried and half sobbed. And then she
seemed to grow frightened, both of him and of herself.
"No, no!" she cried as he returned to her, with outstretched arms. "No,
we--we must go back and be as we were--before." And he could see that
some subtle change had come over her. Until that moment she had,
perhaps, been the pursuer. Now, and hereafter--well, she had become the
child of uncounted ages of femininity.
She told him, again and again, that it would make no difference, that
they should both forget that little blot on what had been their perfect
happiness. And for the rest of her visit she busied herself about the
apartment, fluttering from room to room with her bird-like activity.
There was a strange smile in the corners of her mouth, a humanizing,
maddening sort of smile, Hartley thought it, as he followed her gloomily
about while she readjusted his furniture where it displeased her and
here and there rearranged his flowers and prints and dishes with her
deft fingers. From time to time, in hanging his pictures and curios
about the walls, she called on him to help her. This he seemed to do
submissively, almost repentantly.
Scarcely a word had passed between them until Cordelia had come to the
draping of what Mrs. Spaulding had called the Turkish corner. Above a
broad, low divan two heavy pistoleted Arabian spear-heads had been hung
crosswise from the ceiling. Over these a pair of Bagdad _portières_ were
to be draped.
Standing on a chair, Cordelia tried twice to reach over the spear-heads,
but they were too high for her.
"Let me try," said Hartley. He hung them, but they were badly draped,
and had to be taken down again. Cordelia pointed out to him for the
second time that there was one particular way in which they had to be
swung. She herself made a last effort to reach the horizontal spear-bar.
In doing so her hair tumbled down over her face. She tossed it back with
her free hand, and looked down at him for a moment, questioningly.
"Oh, I know!" she cried, with a sudden illuminating thought. "I know!
_You_ lift me up."
She laughed with childish _abandon_. He took her fragile, sinuous,
pulsing body in his arms--she was very light--and lifted her till she
was high above his head. She was laughing, and found it hard to balance
her body with his arms so tightly about her knees. The _portière_ fell
from her hands, and lay in a huddled mass at their feet.
She fought bitterly with herself, in the space of that one short gasp,
but something--she scarcely knew what--confounded her better judgment.
She looked one second down into his white face and their eyes met. Then
her body drooped limply down to him, deeper and deeper, into his arms;
and her head, with all its wealth of tumbled gold, fell just over his
shoulder, against his face.
The next moment _portière_ and the world were forgotten, and without
knowing it she was offering him her mouth, and he was holding her limp
and sobbing body close in his arms and kissing her warm lips again and
again.
She struggled feebly against him at first, and tried to say that she
must go. But the speech died down into a murmur, and she could only sob
weakly:
"I can't help it! I can't help it!" For one last moment she panted to be
free, and then the violet eyelids sank wearily over the happy eyes, and
she lay even closer, and very still, in his arms.
A sudden knock on the outer door startled them both back to a forgotten
world. She caught at her hair, and tried to twist it decently about her
head once more. He went to the door and opened it.
It was Thomas, the coachman, come for Miss Cordelia.