Phases of an Inferior Planet Part 52

"It is late," he said, "as you doubtless know, and I have neglected a call. May I leave you to go on alone?" Then his voice softened. "Are you ill?" he asked--"or in pain?"

She laughed mirthlessly.

"You are too strong," she returned, "to stoop to irony."

"It was not irony," he answered, gently.

She smiled sadly, her eyes raised.

"Tell me that you will come to see me--once," she said.

He looked at her with sudden tenderness.

"Yes," he answered; "I will come. Good-bye!"

"Good-bye!"

And they went different ways.

CHAPTER X

Mariana went home with throbs of elation in her heart. She was thrilled with a strange, unreasoning joy--a sense of wonder and of mystery--that caused her pulses to quiver and her feet to hasten.

"I shall see him again," she thought--"I shall see him again."

She forgot the years of separation, her past indifference, the barriers between them. She forgot the coldness of his voice and his accusing glance. Her nature had leaped suddenly into fulness, and a storm of pa.s.sion such as she had never known had seized her. The emotions of her girlhood seemed to her stale and bloodless beside the tempest which possessed her now. As she walked her lips trembled, and she thought, "I shall see him again."

At dinner Miss Ramsey noticed her flushed face, and, when they went into the drawing-room, took her hands. "You are feverish," she said, "and you ate nothing."

Mariana laughed excitedly.

"No," she answered, "I am well--very well."

They sat down together, and she looked at Miss Ramsey with quick tenderness.

"Am I good to you?" she asked. "Am I good to the servants?--to everybody?"

"What is it, dear?"

"Oh, I want to begin over again--all over again! It is but fair that one should have a second chance, is it not?"

Miss Ramsey smiled.

"Some of us never have a first," she said; and Mariana took her in her arms and kissed her. "You shall have yours," she declared. "I will give it to you."

When she went up-stairs a little later she took down an old square desk from a shelf in the dressing-room and brought it to the rug before the fire. Kneeling beside it, she turned the key and raised the narrow lid of ink-stained mahogany. It was like unlocking the past years to sit surrounded by these memories in tangible forms, to smell the close, musty odor which clings about the relics of a life or a love that is dead.

She drew them out one by one and laid them on the hearth-rug--these faded things that seemed in some way to waft with the scent of decay unseizable a.s.sociations of long-gone joy or sorrow. The dust lay thickly over them, as the dust of forgetfulness lay over the memories they invoked. There was a letter from her mother written to her in her babyhood, and the fine, faded handwriting recalled to her the drooping figure--a slight and pa.s.sionate woman, broken by poverty and disappointments, with vivacious lips and eyes of honest Irish blue.

There was a handful of mouldered acorns, gathered by childish fingers on the old plantation; there was the scarlet handkerchief her mammy had worn, and the dance-card of her first ball, with a colorless silk ta.s.sel hanging from one end. Then she pushed these things hastily aside and looked for others, as one looks beneath the sentiments for the pa.s.sions of one's life. She found a photograph of Anthony, pasted on cheap card-board--a face young and intolerant, with the fires of ambition in the eyes and the lines of self-absorption about the mouth. Still looking at the boyish face, she remembered the man that she had seen that morning--the fires of ambition burned to ashes, the self-absorption melted into pain.

With the photograph still in her hand, she turned back to the desk and took out a tiny cambric shirt with hemst.i.tched edges, upon which the narrow lace was yellow and worn. As the little garment fell open in her lap she remembered the day she had worked the hemst.i.tching--a hot August day before the child came, when she had lived like a prisoner in the close rooms, sewing for months upon the dainty slips, and dreaming in that subconscious existence in which women await the birth of a new life. She remembered the day of its coming, her agony, and the first cry of the child; then the weeks when she had lain watching the dressing and undressing of the soft, round body, and then the moist and feeble clutch upon her hand. She remembered the days when it did not leave her arms, the nights when she walked it to and fro, crooning the lullaby revived from her own infancy, and at last the hours when she sat in the half-darkness and watched the life flicker out from the little bluish face upon the pillow.

"Was that yesterday or eight years ago?"

Her tears fell fast upon the tiny shirt, and she folded it and laid it away with the photograph and the other relics--laid away side by side the relics and the recollections covered with dust.

She rose to her feet and carried the desk back to its place in the dressing-room. In a moment she returned and stood silently before the fire, her hand resting upon the mantel-piece, her head leaning upon her arm. She was thinking of the two things a woman never forgets--the voice of the man she has loved and the face of her dead child.

But when she went to bed an hour later there was a smile on her lips.

"I shall see him again," she said. "Perhaps to-morrow."

The next day she went to Nevins's studio and sat for the portrait. Her face was aglow and she talked nervously. He noticed that she started at a noise on the stair, and that her attention wandered from his words. He made daring, if delicate, love to her, but she seemed oblivious of it, and, when she rose to go, remarked that he was depressed. In return, he observed that she was feverish, and advised consulting her physician.

"Your eyes are too bright," he said. "What is it?"

"Your reflected brilliancy, perhaps."

"By no means. The l.u.s.tre is too unnatural."

"Then it is sleeplessness. I lay awake last night."

"Anything the matter? Can I help you?"

She shook her head, smiling.

"I am adjusting a few difficulties," she answered; "chiefly matrimonial, but they belong to my cook."

He looked at her attentively.

"Don't worry," he said. "It is not becoming. The flush is all right, but in time it will give place to discontent. You will sow perplexities to reap--"

"Furrows," finished Mariana. Then she nodded gayly. "What a pessimist you are!" she said. "No, I am going to use the best cosmetic--happiness."

And she lifted her skirts and descended the stairs.

That afternoon she remained in-doors, wandering aimlessly from room to room, opening a book to turn a page or two and to throw it aside for another.

In the evening she went out to dinner, and Ryder, who was among the guests, remarked that he had never seen her in better form. "If there was such a thing as eternally effervescent champagne, I'd compare you to it," he said. "Are you never out of spirits?"

She looked at him with sparkling eyes. "Oh, sometimes," she responded; "but as soon as I discover it, I jump in again."

"And I must believe," he returned, his gaze warming, "that your element is one that cheers but not inebriates."

"You are very charitable. I wonder if all my friends are?"