Linda Condon Part 20

It was inevitable, she thought, for Arnaud to be in the library. He rose unsteadily as she stood in the doorway. "Linda," he articulated with difficulty. A book had rested open on the table beside him and, closing it, he put it back in its place. His arm trembled so that it took a painfully long while. Then he moved forward, still confused.

"What a confounded time you were gone. I had the most idiotic fancy. You see, it was so unlike you; none more exact in habit. All day. I didn't get to the Historical Society, it seemed so devilish far off. I'd never blame you for leaving an old man without any gumption." He must never think that again, she replied. Wasn't she, too, middle-aged?

XL

Linda admitted, definitely, the loss of her youth; and yet a stubborn inner conviction remained that she was unchanged. In this she had for support her appearance; practically she was as freshly and gracefully pale as the girl who had married Arnaud Hallet. Even Vigne, with indelible traces of her motherhood, had faint lines absent from Linda's flawless countenance. Her children, and Arnaud, were immensely proud of her beauty; it had become a part--in the form of her ridiculously young air--of the family conversational resources. She was increasingly aware of its supreme significance to her.

One of her few certainties had been the discovery that, while small truths might be had from others, all that intimately and deeply concerned her was beyond questioning and advice. The importance of her attractiveness, for example, which seemed the base of her entire being, was completely out of accord with the accepted standard of values for middle-aged women. Other things, called moral and spiritual, she inferred, should take up her days and thoughts. There was a course of discipline--exactly like exercises in the morning--for the preparation of the willingness to die.

But such an att.i.tude was eternally beyond her; she repudiated it with a revolt stringing every nerve indignantly tense. She had had, on the whole, singularly little from life but her fine body; it had always been the temple and altar of her service, and no mere wordy rea.s.surance could now repay her for its swift or gradual destruction. The latter, except for accident, would be her fate; she was remarkably sound. In her social adventures, the b.a.l.l.s to which, without Arnaud, she occasionally went, she was morbid in her sensitive dread of discovering, through a waning admiration, that she was faded.

It would be impossible to spend more care on her person than she had in the past; but that was unrelenting. Linda was inexorable in her demands on the establishments that made her suits and dresses. The slightest imperfection of fit exasperated her; and she regarded the endless change of fashions with contempt. This same shifting, she observed, occurred not only in women's clothes but in the women themselves.

Linda remembered her mother, eternal in gaiety, but very obviously different from her in states of mind affecting her appearance. She was unable to define the change; but it was unmistakable--Stella Condon seemed a little old-fashioned. When now, to Lowrie's wife, Linda was unmistakably out-of-date. Lowrie, fast accomplishing all that had been predicted for him, had married a girl incomprehensible to his mother.

Observing this later feminine development she had the baffled feeling of inspecting a creature of a new order.

To Linda, Jean Tynedale, now a Hallet, seemed harder than ever her own famous coldness had succeeded in being. This came mostly from Jean's imposing education; there had been, in addition to the politest of finishing schools, college--a woman's concern, Bryn Mawr--and then post-graduate honors in a noteworthy university. She was entirely addressed, in a concrete way, to the abstract problems of social progress and hygiene; and, under thirty, the animating spirit, as well as financial support, of an incredible number of Settlements and allied undertakings. She spoke crisply before civic and other clubs; even, in the interest of suffrage, addressing nondescript audiences from a box on the street.

But it was her unperturbed dissection of the motives of s.e.x, the denouncement of a criminal mysterious ignorance, that most daunted Linda. She listened to Jean with a series of distinct shocks to her sense of propriety. What she had agreed to consider a nameless attribute of women, or, if anything more exact, the power of their charm over men, the other defined in unequivocal scientific terms. She understood every impulse veiled for Linda in a reticence absolutely needful to its appeal.

This, of course, the elder distrusted; just as she had no approval for Jean's public activities. Linda didn't like public women; her every instinct cried for a fine seclusion, fine in the meaning of an appropriate setting for feminine distinction, the magic of dress and cut roses. Her private inelegant word for Lowrie's wife was "bold;" indeed, describing to herself the younger woman's patronage of her bearing, she descended to her mother's colloquialism "bra.s.s."

She thought this sitting at a dinner-table which held Vigne and her husband and Lowrie and Jean Hallet. Arnaud, drawing life from the vitality of an atmosphere charged with youth, was unflagging in splendid spirits and his valorous wit. Jean would never inspire the affection Arnaud had given her; nor the pa.s.sion that, in Pleydon, had burned unfed even by hope.

Her thoughts slipped away from the present to the sculptor. Three years had vanished since she had gone with an intention of finality to his apartment, and in that time he had neither been in their house nor written. Linda had expected this; she was without the desire to see or hear from him. Dodge Pleydon was finished for her; as a man, a potentiality, he had departed from her life. He was a piece with her memories, the triumphs of her young days. Without an actual knowledge of the moment of its accomplishment she had pa.s.sed over the border of that land, leaving it complete and fair and radiant for her lingering view.

Whether or not she had been happy was now of no importance; the magic of its light showed only a garden and a girl in white with a black bang against her blue eyes.

The bang, the blueness of gaze, were still hers; but, only this morning, brush in hand, the former had offered less resistance in its arrangement; it was thinner, and the color perceptibly not so dense. At this, with a chill edge of fear, she had determined to go at once to her hairdresser; no one, neither Arnaud, who loved its l.u.s.ter, nor an unsympathetic bold scrutiny, a scrutiny of bra.s.s, should see that she was getting gray. There was no fault about her figure; she had that for her satisfaction; she was more graceful than Jean's square thinness, more slim than Vigne's maternal presence.

Linda had the feeling that she was engaged in a struggle with time, a ruthless antagonist whom she viewed with a personal enmity. Time must, would, of course, triumph in the end; but there would be no sign of her surrender in the meanwhile; she wouldn't bend an inch, relinquish by a fraction the pride and delicacy of her person. The skilful dyeing of her hair to its old absolute blackness, as natural and becoming in appearance as ever, was a symbol of her determination to cheat an intolerable tyranny.

The process, dismaying her soul, she bore with a rigid fort.i.tude; as she endured the coldness of a morning bath from which, often, she was slow to react. This, to her, was widely different from the futile efforts of her mother, those women of the past, to preserve for practical ends their flushes of youth and exhilaration. She felt obscurely that she was serving a deeper reality created by the hands of Pleydon, Arnaud's faith and pure pleasure, all that countless men had seen in her for admiration, solace and power.

But it was inevitable, she told herself bitterly, that she should hear the first intimation of her decline from Jean Hallet. Rather, she overheard it, the discussion of her, from the loiterers at breakfast as she moved about the communicating library. Jean's emphatic slightly rough-textured voice arrested her in the arrangement of a bowl of zinnias:

"You can't say just where she has failed, but it's evident. Perhaps a general dryness. Perfectly natural. Thoroughly silly to fight against it--" Vigne interrupted her. "I think mother's wonderful. I can't remember any other woman nearly her age who looks so enchanting in the evening."

Linda quietly left the flowers as they were and went up to the room that had been her father's. It was now used as a spare bedroom; and she had turned into it, in place of her own chamber, instinctively, without reason. She had kept it exactly as it had been when Amelia Lowrie first conducted her there, as it was when her father, a boy, slept under the white canopy.

Linda advanced to the mirror; and, her hands so tightly clenched that the finger-nails dug into the palms, forced herself to gaze steadily at the wavering reflection. It seemed to her that there had been a malicious magic in Jean's detraction; for immediately, as though the harm had been wrought by the girl's voice, she saw that her clear freshness had gone. Her face had a wax-like quality, the violet shadows under her eyes were brown. Who had once called her a gardenia? Now she was wilting--how many gardenias had she seen droop, turn brown. Her heart beat with a disturbing echo in her ears, and, with a slight gasp that resembled a sob, she sank on one of the uncomfortable painted chairs.

What, above every other sensation, oppressed her was a feeling of terrific loneliness--the familiar isolation magnified until it was past bearing. Yet, there was Arnaud, infallible in his tender comprehension, she ought to go to him at once and find support. But it was impossible; all that he could give her was, to her special necessity, useless. She had never been able to establish herself in his sympathy; the reason for that lay in the fact that she could bring nothing similar in return.

The room--except for the timed clangor of the electric cars, like the measure of lost minutes--was quiet. The photograph of Bartram Hallet in cricketing clothes had faded until it was almost indistinguishable. Soon the faint figure would disappear entirely, as though the picture were amenable to the relentless principle operating in her.

The peace about her finally lessened her acute suffering, stilled her heart. She told herself with a show of vigor that she was a coward, a charge that roused an unexpected activity of denial. She discovered that cowardice was intolerable to her. What had happened, too, was so far out of her hands that a trace of philosophical acceptance, recognition, came to her support. The loveliest woman alive must do the same, meet in a looking-gla.s.s--that eternal accompanying sibyl--her disaster. She rose, her lips firmly set, composed and pale, and returned to the neglected flowers in the library.

Vigne entered and put an affectionate arm about her shoulders, repeating--unconscious that Linda had heard the discussion which had given it being--the conviction that her mother was wonderful, specially in the black dinner dress with the girdle of jet. With no facility of expression she gave her daughter's arm a quick light pressure.

From then she watched the slow progress of age with a new realization, but an unabated distaste and, wherever it was possible, a determined artifice. Arnaud had failed swiftly in the past months; and, while she was inspecting the impaired supports of an arbor in the garden, he came to her with an unopened telegram. "I abhor these things," he declared fretfully; "they are so sudden. Why don't people write decent letters any more! It's like the telephone.... Good manners have been ruined."

She tore open the envelope, read the brief line within, and, a hand suddenly put out to the arbor, sank on its bench. There had been rain, but a late sun was again pouring over the sparkling gra.s.s, and robins were singing with a lyrical clearness. "What is it?" Arnaud demanded anxiously, tremulous in the unsparing sunlight. She replied:

"Dodge died this morning."

His concern was as much for her as for Pleydon's death. "I'm sorry, Linda," his hand was on her shoulder. "It is a shock to you. A fine man, a genius--none stronger in our day. When you were young and for so long after.... I was lucky, Linda, to get you; have you all this while.

Nothing in Pleydon's life, not even his success, could have made up for your loss."

She wondered dully if Dodge had missed her, if Arnaud Hallet had ever had her in his possession. The robins filled the immaculate air with song. It was impossible that Dodge, who was so imperious in his certainty that he would never say good-by to her, was dead.

XLI

There was a revival of public interest in the destruction of Pleydon's statue at Hesperia, the papers again printed accounts colored by a variety of att.i.tudes unembarra.s.sed by fact; and the serious journals united in a dignity of eminently safe praise. At first Linda made an effort to preserve these; but soon their similarity, her inability to find, among sonorous periods, any trace of Dodge's spirit--in reality she knew so blindingly much more than the most penetrating critical intellect--caused her to leave the reviews unread. No one else living had understood Pleydon; and when descriptions of his life spoke of the austerity in his later years, his fanatical aversion to women, Linda thought of the brittle glove in the gilt-lacquer box.

Her own emotion, it seemed to her, was the most confused of all the unintelligible pressures that had converted her life into an enigma.

She had a distinct sense of overwhelming loss--of something, Linda was obliged to add, she had never owned. However, she realized that during Pleydon's life she had dimly expected a happy accident of explanation; until almost the last, yes--after she had returned from that ultimate journey, she had been conscious of the presence of hope. The hope had been for herself, created out of her constant baffled dissatisfaction.

But now the man in whom solely she had been expressed, the only possible reason for her obstinate pride, had left her in a world that, but for Arnaud's fondness, looked on her without remark. The loss of her distinction had been finally evident at b.a.l.l.s, in the dresses in which Vigne had thought her so wonderful, and she dropped them. Here, she repeated, was when affection, generously radiated through life, should have reflected over her a tranquil and contented joy. She had never given it, and she was without the ability to receive. She admitted to herself, with a little annoyed laugh, that her old desire for inviolable charm, for the integrity of a memorable slimness, was unimpaired. It was, she thought, too ridiculously inappropriate for words.

Yet it had changed slightly into the recognition that what so often had been called her beauty was all she now had for sustenance, all she had ever had. Her mind returned continually to Pleydon, and--deep in the mystery of his pa.s.sion--she was suddenly invaded by an insistent desire to see the monument at Cottarsport. She spoke to Arnaud at once about this; and alone, through his delicacy of perception, Linda went to Boston the following day.

The further ride to Cottarsport followed the sea--a brilliant serene blue, fretted on the landward side by innumerable bare promontories, hideous towns and factories, but bowed in a far unbroken arc at the immaculate horizon. She left the train for a hilly cl.u.s.ter of houses, gray and low like the rock everywhere apparent, dropping to a harbor that bore a company of motionless boats with half-spread drying sails.

The day was at noon, and the sky, blue like the sea, held, still as the anch.o.r.ed schooners, faint, chalky symmetrical clouds. Linda found the Common without guidance; and at once saw, on its immovable base of rugged granite, the bronze statue of Simon Downige. It stood well in advance of what, evidently, was the court-house, the white steeple Dodge had described. She found a bench by a path in the thin gra.s.s; and there, her gloved hands folded, at rest in her lap, her gaze and longing were lifted to the fixed aspiration.

From where she sat the seated figure was projected against the sky; Simon's face was turned toward the west; the West that, for him, was the future, but which for Linda represented all the past. This conviction flooded her with unutterable sadness. A sense of failure weighed on her, no less heavy for the fact that it was perpetually vague. Her thoughts gathered about Dodge himself; and she recalled the curious vividness of his vision of her as a child, perhaps ten. She, too, tried to remember that time and age. It was almost in her grasp, but her realization was spoiled by absurd mental fragments--the familiar illusion of a leopard and a rider with bright hair, a forest with the ascending voices of angels, and an ominous squat figure with a slowly nodding plumed head.

The vista of a hotel returned, a fleet recollection of marble columns and a wide red carpet ... the white gleam and carbolized smell of a drug-store ... a thick magazine in a brown cover. These, changed into emotions of mingled joy and pain, shifted in bright or dim colors and sensations. There was a slow heavy plodding of feet, now above her head, the pa.s.sage of a carried weight; and, in a flash of perception, she knew it was a coffin. She raised her clasped hands to her breast, crying into the sunny silence, to the figure of Simon Downige lost in dream:

"He died that night, at the Bos...o...b.., after he had told me about the meadows with silk tents--"

Her memory, thrilling with the echoed miraculous chord of the child of ten, sitting gravely, alone, among the shrill satins and caustic voices of a feminine throng, was complete. She saw herself, Linda Condon, as objectively as Pleydon's described vision: there was a large bow on her straight black hair, and, from under the bang, her gaze was clear and wondering. How marvelously young she was! The vindictive curiosity of the questioning women, intent on their rings, brought out her eager defense of her mother, the effort to explain away the ugly fact that--that Mr. Jasper was married.

She saw Linda descending the marble stairs to the lower floor where the games were kept in a somber corridor, and heard a voice halting her irresolute pa.s.sage:

"h.e.l.lo, Bellina."

That wasn't her name, and she corrected him, waiting afterward to listen to a strange fairy-like tale. The solitary, sick-looking man, with inky shadows under fixed eyes, was so actual that she recaptured the pungent drift of his burning cigarette. He talked about love in a bitter intensity that hurt her. Yet, at first, he had said that she was lovely, a touch of her ... forever in the memory. Mostly, however, he spoke of a beautiful pa.s.sion. It had largely vanished, his explanation continued; men had come to worship other things. Plato started it.

She recalled Plato, as well, in connection with Dodge; now, it appeared to her, that remote name had always been at the back of her consciousness. There were other names, other men, of an age long ago in Italy. Their ideal, religion, was contained in the adoration of a woman, but not her body--it was a love of her spirit, the spirit their purity of need recognized, perhaps helped to create. It was a pa.s.sion as different as possible in essence from all she had observed about her. It was useless for common purposes, withheld from Arnaud Hallet.