Linda Condon Part 19

Below she met Arnaud with an unpleasant shock--she hadn't given him a thought. Her feeling now was hardly more than annoyance at her forgetfulness. He would be terribly distressed at her going, and she was genuinely sorry for this, poised at the edge of an explanation of her purpose. Arnaud was putting b.u.t.ter and salt into his egg-cup, after that he would grind the pepper from a French mill--pure spices were a precision of his--and she waited until the operation was completed.

Then it occurred to her that all she could hope to accomplish by admitting her intention was the ruin of his last hour alone with her.

He was happier, gayer, than usual. But his age was evident in his voice, his gestures. Linda marveled at her coldness, her ruthless disregard of Arnaud's claim on her, of his affection as deep as Pleydon's, perhaps no less fine but not so imperative. Yet Arnaud had had over twenty years of her life, the best; and she had never deceived him about the quality of her gift. It was right, now, for Dodge to have the remainder.

But whether it were right or wrong, there was no failure of her determination to go to Pleydon in the vindication of her existence.

She delayed speaking to Arnaud until, suddenly, breakfast was over. He seldom went to the law office where he had been a partner, but stayed about the lower floor of his house, in the library or directing small outside undertakings. Either that or he left, late, for the Historical Society, with which his connection and interest were uninterrupted.

As Linda pa.s.sed him in the hall he was fumbling in the green bag that accompanied all his journeyings into the city; and she gathered that he intended to make one of his occasional sallies. She proceeded above, to her room, where with steady hands she pinned on her hat. It would be impossible to take any additional clothes, and she'd have to content herself with something ready-made until she could order others in the establishment of her living with Dodge. Her close-fitting jacket, gloves, and a short cape of sables were collected; she gazed finally, thoughtfully, about the room, and then, with a subdued whisper of skirts, descended the stair. Arnaud was in the library, bending over the table that bore his acc.u.mulation of papers and serious journals. A lingering impulse to speak was overborne by the memory of what, lately, she had endured--she saw him at the dusty end of that long corridor through which she had monotonously journeyed, denied of her one triumph, lost in inconsequential shadows--and she continued firmly to the door which closed behind her with a normal mute smoothness, an inanimate silence.

x.x.xVIII

The maid who admitted Linda to Pleydon's apartment, first replying, "Yes, Mrs. Hallet. No, Mrs. Hallet," to her questions, continued in fuller sentences expressing a triumph of sympathy over mere correctness.

She lingered at the door of the informal drawing-room, imparting the information that Mr. Pleydon had become very irregular indeed about his meals, and that his return for lunch was uncertain. Something, however, would be prepared for her. Linda acknowledged this briefly. Often, with Mr. Pleydon at home, he wouldn't so much as look at his dinner. Times, too, it seemed as though he had been in the studio all night. He went out but seldom now, and rarely remained away for more than an hour or two. Linda heard this without an indication of responsive interest, and the servant, returning abruptly from the excursion into humanity, disappeared.

She was glad to have this opportunity alone to accustom herself to a novel position. But she was once more annoyingly calm. Annoyingly, she reiterated; the fervor of her anger, which at the same time had been bitterly cold, had lessened. She was practically normal. She regarded this, the loss of her unprecedented emotion, in the light of a fraud on her sanguine decision. Linda had counted on its support, its generous irresistible tide, to carry her through the remainder of her life with the exhilaration she had so largely missed.

Here in Dodge's room she was as placid, almost, as though she were in the library at home. That customary term took its place in her thoughts before she recognized that, with her, it had shifted. However, it was unimportant--home had never been a magical word to her; it belonged in the vast category which, of such universal weight, left her unstirred.

She resembled those Eastern people restlessly and perpetually moving across sandy deserts as they exhausted, one after another, widely separated scanty oases.

She studied the objects around her with the pleased recognition that they were unique, valuable, and in faultless taste. Then she fell to wondering at the difference had Dodge been poor: she would have come to him, Linda knew, just the same. But, she admitted frankly, it would have been uncomfortable. Perhaps that--actual poverty, actual deprivation--was what her character needed. A popular sentiment upheld such a view; she decided it was without foundation. There was no reason why beauty, finely appropriate surroundings, should damage the spirit.

Her mind turned to an examination of her desertion of Arnaud, but she could find no trace of conventional regret; of what, she felt, her sensation ought to be. The instinctive revolt from oblivion was an infinitely stronger reality than any allegiance to abstract duty. She was consumed by the pa.s.sionate need to preserve the integrity of being herself. The word selfish occurred to her but to be met unabashed by the query, why not? Selfishness was a reproach applied by those who failed to get what they wanted to all who succeeded. Linda wasn't afraid of public opinion, censure; she didn't shrink even from the injury to her husband. What Dodge would think, however, was hidden from her.

She had no doubt of his complete acceptance of all she offered; ordinary obligations to society bound him as little as they held her. It would be enough that she wanted to come to him.

She would bother him, change his habit of living, very little. Long years of loneliness had taught her to be self-sufficient. Linda would be too wise to insist on distasteful regularity in the interest of a comparatively unimportant well-being. In short, she wouldn't bother him.

That must be made clear at once.

More than anything else he would be inexpressibly delighted to have her with him, to find--at last--his love. Little intimacies of satin mules, glimpses, charming to an artist! He'd be faultless, too, in the relationships where Arnaud as well had never for a moment deviated from beautiful consideration. Two remarkable men. While her deficiency in humor was admitted, she saw a glimmer of the absurd in her att.i.tude and present situation. The combination, at least, was uncommon. There had been no change in her feeling for either Arnaud or Dodge, their places in her being were undisturbed; she liked her husband no less, Dodge no better.

Lunch was announced, a small ceremony of covered silver dishes, heavy crystal, Nankin china, and flowers. The linen, which was old, bore a monogram unfamiliar to her--that of Dodge's mother, probably. When she had finished, but was still lingering at the narrow refectory table, she heard Pleydon enter the hall and the explanatory voice of the servant.

An unexpected embarra.s.sment pervaded her, but she overcame it by the realization that there was no need for an immediate announcement of her purpose. Dodge would naturally suppose that she was in New York shopping.

He did, to her intense relief, with a moving pleasure that she had lunched with him. "It's seldom," he went on, "that you are so sensible.

I hope you haven't any plans or concerts to drag you away immediately.

I owe you a million strawberries; but, aside from that, I'd like you to stay as long as possible."

"Very well," she replied quietly; "I will."

She hadn't seen him since the statue at Hesperia had been destroyed, and she tried faintly to tell him how much that outrage had hurt her. It had injured him too, she realized; just as Arnaud predicted. He showed his age more gauntly, more absolutely, than the other. His skin was dry as though the vitality of his countenance had been burned out by the flame visible in his eyes.

"The drunken fools!" he exclaimed of the mob that had torn Simon Downige from his eminence; "they came by way of all the saloons in the city.

Free drinks! That is the disturbing thing about what the optimistic call civilization--the fact that it is always at the mercy of the ignorant and the brutal. There is no security; none, that is, except in the individual spirit. And they, mostly, are the victims of a singular insane resentment--Savonarola and there were greater.

"But you mustn't think, you mustn't suppose, that I mean it's hopeless. How could I? Who has had more from living? Love and complete self-expression. That exhausts every possibility. Three words. Remember Cottarsport. But the love--ah," he smiled, but not directly at her.

Linda was at once rea.s.sured and disturbed; and she rose, proceeding into the drawing-room.

There she sat gracefully composed and with still hands; she never embroidered or employed her leisure with trivial useful tasks. Pleydon was extended on a chair, his fingers caught beyond his head and his long legs thrust out and crossed at the ankles. His gaze was fixed on her unwaveringly; and yet, when she tried to meet its focus, it went behind her as though it pierced the solidity of her body and the walls in the contemplation of a far-removed shining image. Her disturbance grew to the inclusion of a degree of fretfulness at his unbroken silence, his apparent absorption in whatever his meditation projected or found.

x.x.xIX

Now, she decided, was the moment for her revelation; or rather, it couldn't very well be further deferred, for it promised to be halting.

But, with her lips forming the words, he abruptly spoke:

"I have lived so long with your spirit, it has become so familiar--I mean the ability of completely making you out of my heart--that when you are here the difference isn't staggering. You see, you are never away.

I have that ability; it came out of the other wreck. But you know about it--from years back. Time has only managed a greater power. Lately, and I have nothing to do with it, I have been seeing you again as a girl; as young as at Markue's party; younger. Not more than ten. I don't mean that there is anything--isn't the present fashionable word subliminal?--esoteric. G.o.d forbid. You'll remember my hatred of that brutal deception.

"No, it's only a part of my ability to create the shape of feeling, of Simon's hope. I see things as realities capable of exact statement; and, naturally, more than all the rest, you come to me that way. But as a child--who knows why?" he relinquished the answer with an opened palm. "And young like that, perhaps ten, I love you more sharply, more unutterably, than at any other age. What is it I love? Not your adorable plastic body, not that. It isn't necessary to understand.

"You have, as a child, a quality of blinding loveliness in a world I absolutely distrust. An Elysian flower. Is it possible, do you suppose, to worship an abstract idea? It's not important to insist on my sanity."

The question of that had occurred independently to Linda; his hurried voice and lost gaze filled her with apprehension. A dull reddish patch, she saw, burned in either thin cheek; and she told herself that the fever had revived in him. Pleydon continued:

"Yet it is a timeless vision, because you never get old. I see Hallet failing year by year, and your children, only yesterday dabs of soft flesh, grow up and pa.s.s through college and marry. I hear myself in the studio with an old man's cough; the chisels slip under the mall and I can't move the clay about without help--all fading, decaying, but you.

Candles burn out, hundreds of them, while your whiteness, your flame--

"Strange, too, how you light a world, a sky, eternity. A word we have no business with; a high-sounding word for a penny purpose. Look, we try to keep alive because it's necessary to life, to nature; and the effort, the struggle, breeds the dream. You can understand that. Men who ought to know say that love is nothing more." He rose and stood over her, towering and portentous against the curtained light. "I don't pretend to guess. I'm a creative artist--Simon Downige at Cottarsport--I have you.

If it's G.o.d so much the better."

What princ.i.p.ally swept over Linda was the knowledge that his possession of her must keep them always apart. The reality, all realities, were veils to Pleydon. Her momentary vision of things beyond brick and earth was magnified in him until everything else was obliterated. The fever!

Oh, yes, that and his pa.s.sion for work merged in his pa.s.sion for her.

She could bring him nothing; and she had a curious picture of two Lindas visible to him here--the Linda that was actual and the other, the child.

And of them it was the latter he cared most for, recreated out of his desire to defraud his loneliness, to repay the damage to his spirit realized in bronze.

She was, suddenly, too weary to stir or lift her hand; a depression as absolute as her flare of rage enveloped her. Now the reason for her coming seemed inexplicable, as if, for the while, her mind had failed.

She repressed a shudder at the thought of being, through the long nights of his restlessness and wandering voice, alone with Pleydon. She hadn't, Linda discovered, any of the trans.m.u.ting feeling for him which alone made surrender possible. She calculated mentally how long it would take her to reach the station, what train would be available.

Linda accepted dumbly the fatality to her own hope; for a few hours she had thought it possible to break out of the prison of circ.u.mstance, to walk free from all hindrance; but it had been vain. She gazed at Dodge Pleydon intensely--a comprehensive view of the man she had so nearly married, and who, more than any other force, dominated her being. It was already too late for anything but memory; she saw--filled with pity for them both--hardly more than a strange old man with deadened hair and a yellow parchment-like skin. His suit of loose gray flannel gave her a feeling that it had been borrowed from some one she lovingly knew. The gesture of his hand, too, had been copied from a brilliant personage with a consuming impatience at all impotence.

"Remember me to Arnaud," he said, holding her gloves and the short fur cape. "Wait!" he cried sharply, turning to the bookcase against the wall. Pleydon fumbled in a box of lacquered gilt with a silk cord and produced a glove once white but now brown and fragile with age. "You never missed it," he proceeded in a gleeful triumph; "but then you had so many pairs. Once I sent you nine dozen together from Gren.o.ble. They were nothing, but this you had worn. For a long while it kept the shape of your hand."

"Dodge," she tried without success to steady her voice, "it stayed with you anyhow, my--my hand."

"But yes," he answered impatiently. He returned the glove to its box, carefully tying the ta.s.selled cord. Then, after clumsily helping her with the cape, he accompanied her to the elevator. "There were other things," he told her. "Did you see the letters about the Hesperia affair? Heaps of them. Rodin.... But what can you expect in a world where there is no safety--" The stopping cage cut off his remark. She held out the hand that was less real to him than the dream.

"Good-by, Dodge."

"Yes, Linda. But watch that door, your skirt might easily be caught in it." He fussed over her safety until, abruptly, he seemed to rise in s.p.a.ce, shut out from her by the limitations of her faith.

The evening overshadowed her in the train, as though she were whirling in the swiftest pa.s.sage possible, through an indeterminate grayness, from day to night. The latter descended on her as she reached the steps of her home. It was still that; now it would continue to be until death. Nothing could ever again offer her change, release, vindication; nothing, that was, which might give her, for a day, what even her mother had plentifully experienced--the igniting exultation of the body.