Linda Condon Part 17

"No," Linda told him, "they won't do that." Her obscure excitement was communicated to him. "Why not?" he demanded.

"Because," she paused to steady her voice, "because I am going to take a very great responsibility. If it fails, if you let it fail, you'll ruin ever so much. Yes, Mr. Hallet, I am sure, will consent to your marrying Vigne." She escaped at the first opening from his incoherent grat.i.tude.

Arnaud was in the library, and she stopped in the hall, busy with the loosening of her veil. Perhaps it would be better to speak to him after dinner; she ought to question Vigne first; but, as she stood debating, her daughter pa.s.sed her tempestuously, blurred with crying, and Arnaud angrily demanded her presence.

x.x.xIII

"You were quite right," he cried; "this young idiot Sandby has been telling Vigne that he loves her; and now Vigne a.s.sures me, with tears, that she likes it! They want to get married--next week, tomorrow, this evening." Linda stood by the window; soon the magnolia-tree would be again laden with flowers. She gathered her courage into a determined composure of tone. "I saw Bailey outside," she admitted. "He told me. It seems excellent to me."

Arnaud Hallet incredulously challenged her. "What do you mean--that you gave him a trace of encouragement!" Linda replied:

"I said that I was certain you would consent." She halted his exasperated gesture. "You think Vigne is nothing but a child, and yet she is as old as I was at our wedding. My mother was no older when Bartram Lowrie married her. I think Vigne is very fortunate, Bailey is as nice as possible; and, as he said, it isn't as if you knew nothing of the Sandbys; they are as dignified as the Lowries."

An expression she had never before seen hardened his countenance into a sarcasm that travestied his customary humor. "You realize, of course, that except for what his father gives him young Sandby is wretchedly poor. He's nice enough but what has that to do with it? And, in particular, how does it touch you, Linda Condon? Do you suppose I can ever forget your answer that time I first asked you to marry me? You wouldn't consider a poor man; you were worth, really, a hundred thousand a year; but, if nothing better came along, you might sacrifice yourself for fifty."

"I remember very well," she answered; "and, curiously enough, I am not ashamed. I was very sensible then, in a horrible position with extravagant habits. They were me. I couldn't change myself. Without money I should have made you, any man, entirely miserable. Arnaud, I hadn't--I haven't now--the ability to see everything important through the affections, like so many many women. You often told me that; who hasn't? I have always admitted it wasn't pleasant nor praiseworthy. But how, to use your own words, does all that affect Vigne? She isn't cold but very warm-hearted; and, instead of my experience, she has her own so much better feeling."

"I absolutely refuse to allow anything of the sort," he declared sharply. "I won't even discuss it--for three years. Tell this Sandby infant, if you like, to come back then."

"In three years, or in one year, Vigne may be quite different, yes-less lovable. Happiness, too, is queer, Arnaud; there isn't a great deal of it. Not an overwhelming amount. If it appears for an instant it must be held as tightly as possible. It doesn't come back, you know. Don't turn to your book yet--you can't get rid of us, of Vigne and me, like that; and then it's rude; the first time, I believe, you have ever been impolite to me."

"Forgive me," he spoke formally. "You seem to think that I am as indifferent as yourself. You might be asking the day of the week to judge from your calm appearance. The emotion of a father, or even of a mother, perhaps, you have never explored. On the whole you are fortunate. And you are always protected by your celebrated honesty." She said:

"I promised Bailey your consent."

"Why bother about that? It isn't necessary for your new romantic mood.

An elopement, with you to steady the ladder, would be more appropriate."

She repeated the fact of her engagement. Her dread for him had vanished, its place now taken by a distrust of what, in her merged detachment and suffering, she might blunderingly do. At the back of this she realized that his case, his position, was hopeless. Without warning, keen and undimmed, his love for her flashed through his resentful misery. There was no spoken acknowledgement of surrender; he sank into his chair dejected and pitiable, infinitely gray. His shoes, on the brightness of the hooked rug, were dingy, his coat drawn and wrinkled.

Linda saw herself on her knees before him, before his patience and generosity, sobbing her contrition into his forgiving hands. She longed with every nerve--as she had so often before--to lose herself in pa.s.sionate emotion. She had never been more erect or withdrawn, never essentially less touched. After a little, waiting for him to speak, she saw that he, too, had retreated into the profound depths of his own illusions and despairs.

x.x.xIV

For a surprising while--even in the face of Vigne's radiance--Arnaud was as still and shadowed as the inert surface of a dammed stream. Then slowly, the slenderest trickle at first, his wit revived his spirit; and he opened an unending mock-solemn attack on Bailey Sandby's eminently serious acceptance of the responsibilities of his allowed love.

The boy had left the university, and his father--a striking replica of Arnaud's prejudices, impatience and fundamental kindness--exchanged with Vigne's male parent the most dismal prophecies together with concrete plans for their children's future security. This, inevitably, resulted in Vigne's marriage; a ceremony unattended by Pleydon except by the presence of a very liberal check.

The life-size version of his Simon Downige was again under way--it had been torn down, Linda knew, more than once--and he was in a fever of composition. Nor was this, she decided with Arnaud, his only oppression: the Asiatic fever clung to him with disquieting persistence. Pleydon himself admitted he had a degree or two in the evening.

Linda was seated in his studio near Central Park West, perhaps a year later, and she observed aloud that so much wet clay around was bad for him. He laughed: nothing now could happen to him, he was forever beyond accident, sickness, death--his statue for the monument in Hesperia was finished. It stood revealed before them, practically as Linda had first seen it, but enlarged, towering, as if the vision it portrayed had grown, would continue to grow eternally, because of the dignity of its hope, the necessity of its realization.

"Now," she said, "it will go to the foundry and be cast." He corrected her. "You will go to the foundry and be cast ... in bronze." A distinct graceful happiness possessed her at the knowledge that his love for her was as constant as though it, too, were metal. Not flesh but bronze, spirit, he insisted.

The multiplying years made that no more comprehensible than when, a child, she had thrilled in a waking dream. Love, spirit, death. Three mysteries. But only one, she thought, was inevitably hers, the last. To be loved was not love itself, but only the edge of its cloak; response was an indivisible part of realization. No, sterility was the measure--of its absence. And she was, Linda felt, in spite of Vigne and Lowrie, the latter a specially vigorous contradiction, the most sterile woman alive. There were always Dodge's a.s.surances, but clay, stone, metal, were cold for a belief to embrace. And she was, she knew, lovelier now than she had ever been before, than she would ever be again.

x.x.xV

The faint ringing of the bell from outside that probably announced Arnaud sounded unreal, futile, to Linda. He came into the studio, and at once a discussion began between the two men of the difference in the surfaces of clay and bronze. The talk then shifted to the pictorial sources of the heroic Simon Downige before them, and Linda declared, "Dodge, you have never made a head of me. How very unflattering!"

"You're an affair for a painter," he replied; "Goya or Alfred Stevens.

No one but Goya could have found a white for you, with the quality of flower petals; and Stevens would have fixed you in an immortality of delicate color, surrounded by your Philadelphia garden." He stood quite close to her, with his jacket dragged forward by hands thrust into its pockets, and he added at the end of a somber interrogation, "But if you would really like to know why--"

In a moment more, she recognized, Dodge would explain his feeling for her--to Arnaud, to any one who might be present. The gleam in his eyes, his remoteness from earthly concern, were definitely not normal.

Pleydon, his love, terrified her. "No," she said with an a.s.sumed hurried lightness, "don't try to explain. I must manage to survive the injury to my vanity."

They left New York almost immediately, Pleydon suddenly determining to go with them; and later were scattered through the Hallet household.

Vigne and her husband were temporarily living there; with their heads close together they were making endless computations, numerous floor plans and elevations. Linda, at the piano in the drawing-room, could hear them through the hall. Pleydon was lounging in a chair beyond her.

She couldn't play but she was able, slowly, to pick out the notes of simple and familiar airs--echoes of Gluck and blurred motives of Scarlatti. It was for herself, she explained; the sounds, however crude and disconnected, brought things back to her. What things, she replied to Pleydon's query, she didn't in the least know; but pleasant.

The fact that she understood so little depressed her with increasing frequency. It was well enough to be ignorant as a girl, or even as a young woman newly married; but she had left all that behind; she had lost her youth without any compensating gain of knowledge. Linda could not a.s.sure herself that life was clearer than it had been to her serious childhood. It had always been easily measured on the surface; she had had a very complete grasp of its material aspects almost at once, accomplishing exactly what she had planned. Perhaps this was all; and her trouble an evidence of weakness--the indecision, she saw with contempt, that kept so many people in a constant agitation of disappointment.

Perhaps this was enough; more than the majority had or accomplished. She made, again, a resolute effort to be contented, at rest. Her straying fingers clumsily wrought a fragmentary refrain that mocked her determination. It wasn't new, this--this dissatisfaction; but it had grown sharper. As she was older her restlessness increased at the realization that life, opportunity, were slipping from her. Soon she would be forty.

The conviction seized her that most lives reflected hers in that their questioning was never answered. The fortunate, then, were the incurious and the hearts undisturbed by a maddening thrill. She said aloud, "The ones who never heard music." Pleydon was without a sign that she had spoken. Her emotions were very delicate, very fragile, and enormously difficult to perceive. They were like plants in stony ground. Where had she heard that--out of the Bible? Then she thought of her failure to get anything from religion--a part of her inability to drink at the springs which others declared so refreshing. Linda pressed her hands more sharply on the keys and the answering discord had the effect of waking her to reality.

Pleydon remained until the following afternoon, and then was lost--in the foundry casting his statue--for six months. Arnaud went over to view the completion of the bronze and returned filled with enthusiasm. "Its simplicity is the surprising part," he told her. "The barest statement possible. But Pleydon himself is in a disturbing condition; I can't decide if it is mental or physical. The fever of course; yet that doesn't account for his distance from ordinary living. The truth is, I suppose, that men weren't designed for great arts, and nature, like the jealous G.o.d of the Hebrews, retaliates. It is absurd, but Pleydon reminds me of you; you're totally different. I suppose it's because of the detachment you have in common." He veered to a detail of Lowrie's first year at a university, and exhibited, against a decent endeavor to the contrary, his boundless pride in their son.

The boy was, Linda acknowledged, more than commonly dependable and able. He was heavy, like his father, and so diffident that he almost stuttered; but his mental processes flashed in quick intuitive perceptions. Lowrie was an easy and brilliant student; and, perhaps because of this, of his mental certainty, he was not intimate with her as Arnaud had hoped and predicted. It seemed to Linda that he instinctively penetrated her inner doubt and regarded it without sympathy. In this he was her son. Lowrie was a confident and unsympathetic critic of humanity.

Even now, so soon, there was no question of his success in the law his fitness had elected. The springs of his being were purely intellectual, reasoning. In him Linda saw magnified her own coldness; and, turned on herself, she viewed it with an arbitrary feminine resentment. He was actually courteous to her; but under all their intercourse there was a perceptible impatience. His scorn of other women, girls, however, was openly expressed and honest; it had no trace of the mere affectation of pessimism natural to his age. Arnaud, less thoughtful than she, was vastly entertained by this, and drew Lowrie out in countless sly sallies and contradictions.

Yes, he would succeed, but, after all, what would his success be worth--placed, that was, against Vigne's radiant happiness, Bailey Sandby's quiet eyes and the quality of his return home each evening?

Her thoughts came back to Pleydon--she had before her a New York paper describing the ceremony of unveiling his Simon Downige at Hesperia.

There was a long learned article praising its beauty and emphasizing Pleydon's eminence. He was, it proceeded, an anomaly in an age of momentary experimental talents--a humanized Greek force. He didn't belong to to-day but to yesterday and to-morrow. This gave her an uncomfortable vision of Dodge in s.p.a.ce, with no warm points of contact.

She, too, was suspended in that vague emptiness. Linda had the sensation of grasping at streamers, forms, of sparkling mist. A strange position in view of her undeniable common sense, the solid foundations of her temperament and experience. She saw from the paper, further, that the Downige who had commissioned the monument was dead.

x.x.xVI

In the middle of the festive period that connected Christmas with the new year Arnaud turned animatedly from his breakfast scanning of the news. "It seems," he told her, "that a big rumpus has developed in Hesperia over the Pleydon statue--the present Downige omnipotence, never friendly with our old gentleman, has condemned its bronze founder.

You know what I mean. It's an insult to their pride, their money and position, to see him perpetuated as a tramp. On the contrary he was a very respectable individual from a prominent family and town.