Ailsa Paige Part 26

Neither of them mentioned him. But after Colonel Arran had gone she went slowly to her room, sat down at her desk, sat there a long, long while thinking. But it was after midnight before she wrote to Berkley:

"Have you quite forgotten me? I have had to swallow a little pride to write you again. But perhaps I think our pleasant friendship worth it.

"Stephen has been here. He has enlisted as a private in his father's regiment of zouaves. I learned by accident from him that you are no longer a.s.sociated with Craig & Son in business. I trust this means at least a partial recovery of your fortune. If it does, with fortune recovered responsibilities increase, and I choose to believe that it is these new and exacting duties which have prevented me from seeing you or from hearing from you for more than three weeks.

"But surely you could find a moment to write a line to a friend who is truly your very sincere well-wisher, and who would be the first to express her pleasure in any good fortune which might concern you.

"AILSA PAIGE."

Two days pa.s.sed, and her answer came:

"Ailsa Paige, dearest and most respected, I have not forgotten you for one moment. And I have tried very hard.

"G.o.d knows what my pen is trying to say to you, and not hurt you, and yet kill utterly in you the last kindly and charitable memory of the man who is writing to you.

"Ailsa, if I had known you even one single day before that night I met you, you would have had of me, in that single day, all that a man dare lay at the feet of the truest and best of women.

"But on that night I came to you a man utterly and hopelessly ruined-morally dead of a blow dealt me an hour before I saw you for the first time.

"I had not lived an orderly life, but at worst it was only a heedless life. I had been a fool, but not a d.a.m.ned one. There was in me something loftier than a desire for pleasure, something worthier than material ambition. What else lay latent-if anything-I may only surmise. It is all dead.

"The blow dealt me that evening-an hour before I first laid eyes on you-utterly changed me; and if there was anything spiritual in my character it died then. And left what you had a glimpse of-just a man, pagan, material, unmoral, unsafe; unmoved by anything except by what appeals to the material senses.

"Is that the kind of man you suppose me? That is the man I am. And you know it now. And you know, now, what it was in me that left you perplexed, silent, troubled, not comprehending-why it was you would not dance with me again, nor suffer my touch, nor endure me too near you.

"It was the less n.o.ble in me-all that the blow had not killed-only a lesser part of a finer and perfect pa.s.sion that might perhaps have moved you to n.o.ble response in time.

"Because I should have given you all at the first meeting; I could no more have helped it than I could have silenced my heart and lived. But what was left to give could awake in you no echo, no response, no comprehension. In plainer, uglier words, I meant to make you love me; and I was ready to carry you with me to that h.e.l.l where souls are lost through love-and where we might lose our souls together.

"And now you will never write to me again."

All the afternoon she bent at her desk, poring over his letter. In her frightened heart she knew that something within her, not spiritual, had responded to what, in him, had evoked it; that her indefinable dread was dread of herself, of her physical responsiveness to his nearness, of her conscious inclination for it.

Could this be she-herself-who still bent here over his written words-this tense, hot-cheeked, tremulous creature, staring dry-eyed at the blurring lines which cut her for ever asunder from this self-outlawed man!

Was this letter still unburned. Had she not her fill of its brutality, its wickedness?

But she was very tired, and she laid her arms on the desk and her head between them. And against her hot face she felt the cool letter-paper.

All that she had dreamed and fancied and believed and cared for in man pa.s.sed dully through her mind. Her own aspirations toward ideal womanhood followed-visions of lofty desire, high ideals, innocent pa.s.sions, the happiness of renunciation, the glory of forgiveness--

She sat erect, breathing unevenly; then her eyes fell on the letter, and she covered it with her hands, as hands cover the shame on a stricken face. And after a long time her lips moved, repeating:

"The glory of forgiveness-the glory of forgiveness--"

Her heart was beating very hard and fast as her thoughts ran on.

"To forgive-help him-teach truth-n.o.bler ideals--"

She could not rest; sleep, if it really came, was a ghostly thing that mocked her. And all the next day she roamed about the house, haunted with the consciousness of where his letter lay locked in her desk. And that day she would not read it again; but the next day she read it. And the next.

And if it were her desire to see him once again before all ended irrevocably for ever-or if it was what her heart was striving to tell her, that he was in need of aid against himself, she could not tell. But she wrote him:

"It is not you who have written this injury for my eyes to read, but another man, demoralised by the world's cruelty-not knowing what he is saying-hurt to the soul, not mortally. When he recovers he will be you. And this letter is my forgiveness."

Berkley received it when he was not particularly sober; and lighting the end of it at a candle let it burn until the last ashes scorched his fingers.

"Burgess," he said, "did you ever notice how hard it is for the frailer things to die? Those wild doves we used to shoot in Georgia-by G.o.d! it took quail shot to kill them clean."

"Yes, sir?"

"Exactly. Then, that being the case, you may give me a particularly vigorous shampoo. Because, Burgess, I woo my volatile G.o.ddess to-night-the G.o.ddess Chance, Burgess, whose wanton and naughty eyes never miss the fall of a card. And I desire that all my senses work like lightning, Burgess, because it is a fast company and a faster game, and that's why I want an unusually muscular shampoo!"

"Yes, sir. Poker, sir?"

"I-ah-believe so," said Berkley, lying back in his chair and closing his eyes. "Go ahead and rub h.e.l.l into me-if I'll hold any more."

The pallor, the shadows under eyes and cheeks, the nervous lines at the corners of the nose, had almost disappeared when Burgess finished. And when he stood in his evening clothes pulling a rose-bud stem through the b.u.t.ton-hole of his lapel, he seemed very fresh and young and graceful in the gas-light.

"Am I very fine, Burgess? Because I go where youth and beauty chase the shining hours with flying feet. Oh yes, Burgess, the fair and frail will be present, also the dashing and self-satisfied. And we'll try to make it agreeable all around, won't we? ... And don't smoke all my most expensive cigars, Burgess. I may want one when I return. I hate to ask too much of you, but you won't mind leaving one swallow of brandy in that decanter, will you? Thanks. Good night, Burgess."

"Thank you, sir. Good night, sir."

As he walked out into the evening air he swung his cane in glittering circles.

"Nevertheless," he said under his breath, "she'd better be careful. If she writes again I might lose my head and go to her. You can never tell about some men; and the road to h.e.l.l is a lonely one-d.a.m.ned lonely. Better let a man travel it like a gentleman if he can. It's more dignified than sliding into it on your back, clutching a handful of lace petticoat."

He added: "There's only one h.e.l.l; and it's h.e.l.l, perhaps, because there are no women there."

CHAPTER VIII

Berkley, hollow-eyed, ghastly white, but smiling, glanced at the clock.

"Only one more hand after this," he said. "I open it for the limit."

"All in," said Cortlandt briefly. "What are you going to do now?"

"Scindere glaciem," observed Berkley, "you may give me three cards, Cortlandt." He took them, scanned his hand, tossed the discards into the centre of the table, and bet ten dollars. Through the tobacco smoke drifting in level bands, the crystal chandeliers in Cortlandt's house glimmered murkily; the cigar haze even stretched away into the farther room, where, under brilliantly lighted side brackets, a young girl sat playing at the piano, a gla.s.s of champagne, gone flat, at her dimpled elbow. Another girl, in a shrimp-pink evening gown, one silken knee drooping over the other, lay half buried among the cushions, singing the air which the player at the piano picked out by ear. A third girl, velvet-eyed and dark of hair, listened pensively, turning the gems on her fingers.

The pretty musician at the piano was playing an old song, once much admired by the sentimental; the singer, reclining amid her cushions, sang the words, absently:

"Why did I give my heart away- Give it so lightly, give it to pay For a pleasant dream on a summer's day?

"Why did I give? I do not know.

Surely the pa.s.sing years will show.

"Why did I give my love away- Give it in April, give it in May, For a young man's smile on a summer's day?

"Why did I love? I do not know.

Perhaps the pa.s.sing years will show.