Bella Donna Part 22

As she said the last three words, her voice had a really beautiful sound in it, and a sound that was surely beautiful because of some moral quality it contained or suggested. More than a whole essay of Emerson's did this mere sound suggest friendship. The leaves of the book of this woman's attractions were being turned one by one for Isaacson. And of all her attractions her voice perhaps was the greatest.

The waiter came in with tea. When he had gone, the Doctor could speak.

But he scarcely knew what to say. Very seldom was his self-possession disturbed. To-day he felt at a disadvantage. The depression, perhaps chiefly physical, which had lately been brooding over him, and which had become acute at the concert, deepened about him to-day, made him feel morally small. Mrs. Chepstow's cheerfulness seemed like height. For a moment in all ways she towered above him, and even her bodily height seemed like a mental triumph, or a triumph of her will over his.

"But this is only autumn," he said.

"We can pretend it is winter."

She gave him his cup of tea, with the same gesture that had charmed Nigel on the day when he first visited her. Then she handed him a plate with little bits of lemon on it.

"I've found out your tastes, you see. I know you never take milk."

He was obliged to feel grateful. Yet something in him longed to refuse the lemon, the something that never ceased from denouncing her. He uttered the right ba.n.a.lity:

"How good of you to bother about me!"

"But you bother about me, and on your only free day! Don't you think I am grateful to you?"

There was no mockery in her voice. Today her irony was concealed, but, like a carefully-covered fire, he knew it was burning still. And because it was covered he resented it. He resented this comedy they were playing, the insincerity into which she was smilingly leading him. She could not imagine that she deceived him. She was far too clever for that. Then what was the good of it all?--that she had put him, that she kept him, at a disadvantage.

She handed him the m.u.f.fins. She ministered to him as if she wanted to pet him. Again he had to feel grateful. Even in acute dislike men must be conscious of real charm in a woman. And Isaacson did not know how to ignore anything that was beautiful. Had the Devil come to him--with a grace, he must have thought, "How graceful is the Devil!" Now he was charmed by her gesture. Nevertheless, being a man of will, and, in the main, a man who was very sincere, he called up his hard resolutions, and said:

"No, I don't think you are grateful. I don't think you are the woman to be grateful without a cause."

"Or with one," he mentally added.

"But here is the cause!"

She touched his sleeve. And suddenly, with that touch, all her charm for him vanished, and he was angry with her for daring to treat him like those boys by whom she had been surrounded, for daring to think that she could play upon the worst in him.

"I'm afraid you are mistaken," he said. "I am no cause for your grat.i.tude."

She looked more cordial and natural even than before.

"But I think you are. For you don't really like me, and yet you come to see me. That is unselfishness."

"Only supposing what you say were true, and that you did like me."

"I do like you."

She said it quite simply, without emphasis. And even to him it sounded true.

"Some day perhaps you will know it."

"But--I do not believe it."

He had recovered from the stroke of her greatest weapon, her voice.

"That does not matter. What is matters, not what some one thinks is, or is not."

"Yes," he said. "What is matters. I have come here, not to pay a formal call, or even a friendly visit, but, perhaps, to commit an impertinence."

She smilingly moved her head, and handed him her cigarette-case.

"No, you would never do that."

He hesitated to take a cigarette--and now her bright eyes frankly mocked him, and said, "A cigarette commits you to nothing!" Certainly she knew how to make him feel almost like an absurd and awkward boy; or was it his feeling of overwork, of physical depression, that was disarming him today?

"Thank you."

He lighted a cigarette, and she lighted another, still with a happy air.

"How do you know that?" he asked.

"I feel it."

With a little laugh, she reminded him of his saying about women.

"You are wrong. I am going to do it," he said.

"But--do you really think it an impertinence?"

He was beset by his sensitive dislike to mix in other people's affairs, but almost angrily he overcame it.

"I don't know. You may. Mrs. Chepstow, you were raving just now about the delights of the English winter--"

"Shut out!" she interpolated.

"Then why should you avoid them?"

"And who says I am going to?"

"Are not you going to Egypt?"

She settled herself in the angle of the sofa.

"Would it be the wrong climate for me, Doctor Isaacson?"

She put an emphasis on "Doctor."

"I am not talking as a doctor."

"Then as a friend--or as an enemy?"

"As a friend--of his."

"Of whom?"