A Woman's Will Part 12

"How drolly odd women are," he murmured presently, "and you are so very oddly droll!"

"But will you do it?" she repeated insistently.

He took his cane and drew a line in the dust between two of the cement blocks of the sidewalk, and then he lifted his eyes to hers with a smile so sweet and bright, so liquidly warm and winning, that it metamorphosed him for the nonce into a rarely handsome man.

Few women are proof against such smiles, or the men who can produce them at will, and the remnants of Rosina's wrath faded completely as she saw its dawning. It seemed futile to try to be cross with any one who had such magic in his face, and so she returned the glance in kind.

"And you will walk home on the outside, will you not?" she asked, quite secure as to his answer now.

He laughed lightly and turned to continue on their way.

"Of a surety not," he said; "but we will be from now on very _sympathique_, and never so foolishly dispute once more."

At the dinner-party that evening was the young American who was engaged to the girl at Smith College.

"I saw you walking with Von Ibn this afternoon," he said to Rosina as they chanced together during the coffee-and-cigarette period.

"Where?" she asked. "I don't remember seeing you anywhere."

"No; he appeared to engross you pretty thoroughly. I feel that I ought to warn you."

"What about?"

"He isn't a bit popular."

"Poor man!"

"None of the men ever have anything to do with him; you never see him with any one, and it's odd, because he talks English awfully well."

"What do you suppose they have against him?"

"Oh, nothing in particular, I guess, only they don't like him. He isn't interesting to any one."

"Oh, there I beg to differ with you," she said quickly; "I saw him speak to some one to-day who I am sure found him very interesting indeed."

"Who was it?"

"Myself."

Chapter Four

"Have you ever thought what is love and what is pa.s.sion?"

It was the man who spoke as they leaned against the rail of that afternoon steamer which is scheduled to make port at the Quai by seven o'clock, at the Gare by seven-ten.

Rosina simply shook her head.

"I am going to tell you that," he said, turning his dark gaze down upon the shadows in the wake behind them; "we part perhaps this night, and I have a fancy to talk of just that. Perhaps it will come that we never meet again, but when you love you will think of what I have say."

"I never shall love," she said thoughtfully.

He did not appear to hear her at all.

"It is as this," he said, his eyes glowing into the tossing foam below: "many may love, and there may be very many loves; very few can know a pa.s.sion, and they can know but one. You may love, and have it for one that is quite of another rank or all of another world, but one has a pa.s.sion only for what one may hope for one's own. Love, that is a feeling, a something of the heart,"--he touched his bosom as he spoke but never raised his eyes,--"what I may have known,--or you. But pa.s.sion, that is only half a feeling, and the other half must be in some other, or if it be not there it must be of a force put there, because with pa.s.sion there _must_ be two, and one _must_ find the other and possess the other; that other heart must be, and must be won, and be your own, and be your own all alone." He paused a moment and took out his cigarette case, and contemplated it and put it back. She leaned on the rail and listened, undisturbed by the strength of his speech. In the few short hours of their acquaintance the breadth of mutual comprehension between them seemed to be widening at a ratio similar to the circles spread by a stone striking still water.

"I am going to speak to you in my tongue," he went on presently, "I am going to explain what I say with my music. Will you think to understand?"

"I will try," she told him simply.

"It is so easy there," he said; "I think if I had but my violin I could tell you all things. Because in music is all things. You must have feel that yourself. Only I fear you must smile at my language--it is not so easy to place your soul on a strange tongue."

"I shall not smile," she rea.s.sured him, "I am deeply interested."

"That is good of you," he replied, raising his head to cast a briefly grateful glance at her, "if you may only really understand! For, just as there are all colors for the painter to use, so are there all of the same within music. There is from darkness far below the under ba.s.s to the dazzle of sun in the high over the treble, and in between there are gray, and rose, and rain, and twilight, so that with my bow I may make you all a sad picture between the clefs or a gay one of flowers blooming from G to upper C. And there is heat and cold there too,--one gasps in the F flat down low and one shivers at the needle frost above high C.

And there are all feelings too. I may sing you to sleep, I may thunder you awake, I may even steal your heart forever while you think to only listen in pleasure."

"Not my heart," said Rosina decidedly.

"Ah, now it reminds me what I have begin to tell you," he exclaimed,--"of love and of pa.s.sion. I must get some music and teach you that. Do you know the 'Souvenir' of Vieuxtemps?" he asked her abruptly.

"The 'Souvenir d'Amerique'?"

"No, no," he said impatiently, "not one of those. 'Le Souvenir' it is.

Not of anything. Just alone. If we were only to be of some together I would teach it to you; I have never teach any one, but I would trouble me to teach you that."

Then he paused and, producing his _etui_ for the second time, lit a cigarette.

"It is like this," he went on, staring again upon the now rapidly darkening waters, "you may learn all that I have begin to tell you there in that one piece of music. There is love singing up and up in the treble, and one listens and finds that nothing may be sweeter or of more beauty, and then, most sudden and terrible there sounds there, below, a cry, 'E,--F,--F sharp,--G;' and it is not a cry, rather a scream, strength, force,--a Must made of the music,--and one perceives of a lightning flash that all the love was but the background of the pa.s.sion of that cry of those four notes; and one listens, one trembles, one feels that they were to come before they are there, and when they have come, one can but shake and know their force." He stopped and took his cigarette from between his lips. "_Mon Dieu_," he cried violently, "of what was the composer thinking when he beat out those bars? When you shall play them you shall take only your forefinger and draw all your strength within it, and when the notes shriek in pain you shall have one secret of pa.s.sion there beneath your hand."

He spoke with such force,--such a tremendous force of feeling, that her face betrayed her wonder.

"I frighten you,--yes?" he asked with a smile of rea.s.surance; "oh, that must not be. I only speak so because I will that you know too. It is good to know. Many go to the end and never know but love and are very well content, but I think you will know more. I did love myself once.

She was never mine, and the time is gone, and I have thought to suffer much forever, and then I have stop to suffer, and now I am all forget.

But," he flung his cigarette to the waves, and for the first time during his monologue turned squarely towards her, "but if I have a pa.s.sion come to me _now_, _that_ woman shall be mine! If I die for it she shall be mine. Because what I feel shall be so strong that she shall of force feel it too. Every day, every night, every hour, the need of me will go to her strongly and make her weaker, and weaker, and weaker, until she have no choice but of the being all mine. And so you are quite decided to go to Zurich to-morrow?"

He brought forth the question in such sudden change of subject that she started involuntarily. But then relief at the descent into the commonplace came on her and she replied:

"Yes, I want to go there to-morrow."

"But why do you not want to on Tuesday--or next week?"

"My friend is there," she reminded him.