Athalie Part 32

"Yes, Clive."

"So _near_!" he said aloud to himself. "Couldn't he have spoken to me?--just one word--"

"Dearest--dearest!"

"G.o.d knows why you should see him and I shouldn't! I don't understand--when I was his son--"

"I do not understand either, Clive."

He seemed not to hear her, standing there with blank gaze shifting from object to object in the room. "I don't understand," he kept repeating in a dull, almost querulous voice,--"I don't understand why." And her heart responded in a pa.s.sion of tenderness and grief.

But she found no further words to say to him, no explanation that might comfort him.

"Will he ever come here--anywhere--again?" he asked suddenly.

"Oh, Clive, I don't know."

"Don't you know? Couldn't you find out?"

"How? I don't know how to find out. I never try to inquire."

"Isn't there some way?"

"I don't really know, Clive. How could I know?"

"But when you see such people--shadows--shapes--"

"Yes.... They are not shadows."

"Do they seem real?"

"Why, yes; as real as you are."

"Athalie, how _can_ they be?"

"They are to me. There is nothing ghostly about them."

For a moment it almost seemed to her as though he resented her clear seeing; then he said: "Have you always been able to see--this way?"

"As long as I can remember."

"And you have never tried to cultivate the power?"

"I had rather you did not call it that."

"But it is a power.... Well, call it faculty, then. Have you?"

"No. I told you once that I did not wish to see more clearly than others. It is all involuntary with me."

"Would you try to cultivate it because I ask you to?"

"Clive!"

"Will you, Athalie?"

The painful colour mantled her face and neck and she turned and looked away from him as though he had said a shameful thing.

He continued, impatiently: "Why do you feel that way about it? Why should you not cultivate such a delicate and wonderful sense of perception? Why are you reluctant? What reason is there for you to be ashamed?"

"I don't know why."

"There is no reason! If in you there happen to be faculties sensitive beyond ours, senses more complex, more exquisitely attuned to what others are blind and deaf to, intuitions that to us seem miraculous, a spirituality, perhaps, more highly developed, what is there in that to cause you either embarra.s.sment or concern? That in certain individualities such is the case is now generally understood and recognised. You happen to be one of them."

She looked up at him very quietly, but still flushed.

"Why do you wish me to try--make any effort to develop this--thing?"

"So that--if you _could_ see him again--and if, perhaps, he had anything to say to me--"

"I understand."

"Will you try, Athalie?"

"I'll try--if you wish it. And if I can learn how to try."

Had he asked her to strip her gown from her shoulders under his steady gaze, it had been easier than the promise she gave him.

And now the hour had come for him to bid her good-bye. He said that he and his mother would not remain abroad for more than the summer. He said he would write often; spoke a little more vaguely of seeing her as soon as he returned; drew her cool, white hands together and kissed them, laid his cheek against them for a moment, eyes closed wearily.

The door remained ajar behind him after he had gone. Lingering, her hand heavy on the k.n.o.b, she listened to the last echo of the elevator as it dropped into lighted depths below.

Then, very far away, an iron grille clanged. And that ended it.

But she still lingered. There was one more shape to pa.s.s through the door which she yet held open;--the phantom of her girlhood. And when at last, it had pa.s.sed across the threshold, never to return, she shut the door softly, sinking to her knees there, her pale cheek resting against the closed panels, her eyes fixed on vacancy.

So departed those twain out of the room and out of her life, together--her lover by brevet, and her lingering girlhood,--leaving behind them a woman in a world of men suddenly strange and menacing and very still.

But Clive went back into a familiar world--marred, obscured, distorted for the moment by shock and sorrow--but still a familiar world.

Because neither his grief nor his love--as he had termed it--had made of him more than he had been,--not yet a man, yet no longer a boy, but something with all the infirmities of both and the saving graces of neither.

In that borderland where he still lingered, morally and spiritually, the development of character ceases for a while until such time as the occult frontier be crossed. What is born in the cradle is lowered into the grave, but always either in n.o.bler or less n.o.ble degrees. For none may linger in that borderland too long because the unseen boundary moves for him who will not stir when his time is up--moves slowly, inexorably nearer, nearer, pa.s.sing beneath his feet, until it is lost far in the misty years behind him.

He wrote her from the steamer twice, the letters being mailed from Plymouth; then he wrote once from London, once from Paris; later again from Switzerland, where he had found it cooler, he said, than anywhere else during that torrid summer.