TARNISHED GOLD
She yielded then where she had frowned,
And fell her tears like leaves;
She sank before him on the ground
And clasped his iron greaves.
JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight."
After all, Rabelais' religion and women are one and the same
thing--a great Perhaps.--"The Silver Poppy."
The lights of Cordelia's little yellow-trimmed study were carefully
shaded and softened. Cordelia herself, with bright but restless eyes,
with a slightly flushed face, and a little quickness of speech and
movement betokening, perhaps, nerves too tensely strung, was already
waiting for Hartley, when, an hour later, he stepped up to her door.
He had long since grown used to that freedom of action, to that
unthought-of abandon of the Bohemian which Cordelia laid claim to as her
natural right, and which the world about her had the habit of laughing
away as the mere unrestrained eccentricity of guileless genius. He had
noticed that this careless freedom seemed to suit her best. He liked her
least when she was least ingenuous.
"It's so stupid and lonesome downstairs in that big sepulchral
dining-room!" she said. "Let's have dinner up here."
A momentary and careless feeling that some too boldly effacing sponge
was wiping out the last blurred line of formality passed through him.
"Oh, I have nearly all my meals served up here, now that I'm alone!" she
explained. "It's much quieter and more cozy. Here we can have dinner in
peace, and be undisturbed. You don't mind, do you?"
After his stiff ride the blood was still running through his veins
vigorously. He could feel life pulsing dominatingly through him, and
some mysterious back-wash of that wave of joyous intoxication which
earlier had taken possession of Cordelia now seemed sweeping in turn
through him.
"The queen can do no wrong!" he cried, looking down into the unnatural
brightness of her face that gleamed like a flower in the half-light.
Then something transient, fugitive, inscrutable, something that crept up
into her eyes, drove the careless smile from his lips, and they looked
at each other, man and woman.
"Stevens," she said, turning to the servant who had answered her ring,
"I am at home to no one this evening! Remember, Stevens, to no one!"
She had replaced her dark-green riding-habit by a loose, heavily pleated
robe of bebe blue, lined with the palest of yellow satin. Its sleeves
hung loosely about her white arms, which they left partly unconcealed,
as though by accident. Her even whiter throat, too, was left bare. She
seemed suddenly converted from a child of alertness to a woman of
languor. Hartley did not go out of his way to analyze the mystery of
that sudden alteration by means of a mere change of raiment. But it
seemed as if some magical breath of enchantment had blown away the
fragile petals from the blossom of youth and left in its place the
mellowed and rounded fruit of womanhood.
As he gazed across the table at her during that strangest of dinners she
seemed to take on a warm maturity and a vitality quite new to her. The
heavier shadows, caused, no doubt, he thought, by mere weariness of
body, that seemed to dwell under the arch of her eyebrow, again and
again suggested to him the picture of her as a young mother, saddened
with the burden of her first maternity.
"Do you know," she said to him suddenly--they had been talking but
little that night--"I have never yet once called you by your Christian
name! John! How that sounds like you: substantial, solid, dignified! No;
I have never dared. I believe I am still afraid of you--John!"
He made her say it over a dozen times. She repeated the name until it
seemed to fall to pieces on her tongue, and lose all meaning. Then she
sighed heavily.
"I'm tired!" she murmured, locking her fingers behind her head. He
noticed an unlooked-for fulness about the round, tower-like neck that
seemed to sigh into the white breadth of the shoulders like a river into
its sea.
"Cordelia, you _are_ tired," he repeated suddenly: and he moved as
though to rise from his chair. A frightened look shot into her face.
She wondered for a moment if he would have the heart to leave her there,
so soon, so unsatisfied, and without a sign. She dreaded the thought of
the solitude that would come after he had gone, the thought of that last
night of what she must soon call her old life.
"I wonder if you know how tired I am?" she murmured absently, pushing
back her sleeves and leaning forward with her elbows on the table.
"I wonder if you can imagine how heavily I'll sleep to-night, and how
tired I shall get up, even, in the morning?"
He rose from his chair, and walking round to the side of the table where
she sat, stood behind her without speaking. She could feel the caress of
his hand on her thick hair.
"I feel as though I'd like to be mothered to-night by some one!" she
murmured softly, as her eyelids drooped.
He still touched her hair, almost reverently, but that was all.
Then she turned to him with the smile of a tired child.
"Lift me up--I want you to lift me up, and carry me over to my couch!"
He lifted her in his arms as he might a child of three, and as he did so
the memory of another night when he had first done the same thing rushed
back through his mind; and without a word he carried her to the little
Japanese couch beside her writing-desk of gold and mother-of-pearl. He
found a rug and covered her feet.
She gazed up at him with lips that appeared to pout girlishly.
"Do you want to sleep now?" he asked gently, bending over her.
As he looked down at her in the silence that followed his words her
mouth seemed to grow heavy. That fugitive, inscrutable something crept
into her eyes once more; and all of a sudden his face grew deathly pale,
and then flushed again.
"John!"
He turned and made three steps toward the door.
"John!" she cried after him, with a note of pain in the cry. She had
flung off the rug, and was leaning on her elbow. He looked from where he
stood, hesitating.
He went slowly back, and bent over her once more. Her pleading lips were
perilously close to his.
"Must you go?" she asked, sinking back in her weariness, and raising two
arms from which the loose silken sleeves fell back. The next moment a
vibrant tremor of exaltation swept over her.
"Don't go! Don't go!" she murmured. "Don't leave me!"
The two white arms came together and folded over him and drew him in
like wings.
Time and the world were nothing to her then; time and the world were
shut out from him. It was the lingering, long-delayed capitulation of
the more impetuous, profounder love she had held back from him, of the
finer and softer self she had all but famished in the citadel of her
grim aspirations. She no longer allured him, or cared to allure him; she
had nothing to seek of him thereafter; she had only the ruins of her
broken life to give him.
And he, too--he felt those first thin needles of bliss that crept and
projected themselves over the quiet waters of friendship, and he knew
that a power not himself was transforming those waters of change and
unrest and ebb and flow into the impenetrable solidity of love itself.