Shadows of Flames Part 70

"_Your_ life?... _Over?_..." He gazed at her so that her eyes wavered from his. She could not help this. It distressed her to be standing there before him in her short skirt, bare-headed, with eyes that would not keep steady. She felt that he had the advantage of her out there in those wide, still aisles of gold with their groining of dark branches.

It was as if he had her far from home, in his own haunts. The glowing forest sustained him, gave him his natural setting. He stood there facing her, the young wood-G.o.d in his own domain. She felt a droll almost hysteric yearning for trailing skirts, and the dignified refuge of an armchair. That absurdly girlish bow of black ribbon seemed to burn her neck. She knew that she looked incongruously young for the soul that inhabited her. She made a desperate grasp at dignity of voice. Her cold tone should be her trailing garment--make him realise the distance that was spiritually between them. When she spoke it was in a steady voice.

"My life--as regards love--is over, because I have come to a place in it where I do not even wish love," she said icily. A ba.n.a.l quotation slipped from her before she could stop it. "'_Ich habe geliebt und geleben_,'" she said, vexed at the cra.s.s ordinariness of the words as they struck her ear.

There was silence. A squirrel dropped a nut through the still, flaky gold of lapping leaves--then chittered angrily at its own awkwardness.

Loring said at last in a strangled voice:

"I am jealous of that dead man."

Sophy whitened.

"Don't say such things to me," burst from her in a sharp whisper.

"Have I hurt you?" he whispered back. "I'd die for you ... have I hurt you? Did you love him so much as that? Are you really dead ... with him?"

"Yes."

Another silence. Then the wilful, pa.s.sionate young voice broke out again:

"No! you are not dead ... you are not dead! You are only sleeping...."

Sophy started as though from a sort of sleep.

"We must go," she said. "I'd forgotten...."

She turned and began walking rapidly away from him.

He caught her up in a stride.

"You break my life like a rotten twig," he said. "And go to roast chestnuts for your son."

The anguish of bitterness in his voice kept his words from absurdity.

"Don't say such things ... don't say such things," Sophy murmured, walking faster and faster. He kept beside her, implacable in the smarting novelty of defeated love and will.

"Your face is so beautiful and gentle.... Who would have thought you could be so hard ... like flint?"

"I am not hard.... I only tell you the bare truth to save you pain."

"You can't save me pain. Why do you throw me these mouldy crusts of old sayings? I offer you the best of me.... Don't you even think me worth a word out of your heart?"

Sophy paused. Her heart gushed pity--and regret.

"Oh, my dear...." she said lamentably, looking up at him with frank pain. "Why do you want to make it so hard for us both?"

"Then ... it is hard ... a little ... for you, too? I mean ... it hurts you to hurt me so?"

"Yes, yes, it hurts me! Do you think I am made of stone? Do you think I like seeing you suffer?"

"Then...." his throat closed on the words he wanted to say. He was ignominiously near to tears. Chokily he got it out:

"Then ... don't send me away ... just because ... I love you. Let me stay near you.... It can't hurt you ... and it's life to me."

"No, no. That would be horribly wrong of me--utterly, hatefully selfish."

He caught at this.

"You'd like to have me? You've called me a good 'playmate,' you know. I won't bore you with--with"--he gulped--"this craziness of mine.... If I'm 'good' ... you'll let me stay on?"

"Oh, it's all wrong! It's all wrong, my dear!" said Sophy, quite desperately. "You should go away at once. This is all just a phase ...

just a pa.s.sing...."

"Please," said Loring, with real dignity.

Sophy felt very unhappy. She knew that she was doing wrong to temporise.

Yet that cruel kindness of the tender-hearted made her hesitate. She could not bear to banish him all at once in this harsh way.

"Well ... for a little while...." she murmured weakly. "But it would be much better for you to...."

"Please," said Loring again. "Allow me to judge of what will be best for me."

"I ought not to," she said miserably. The whole scene had unnerved her--jarred the fine, secure monotony of the life that she had thought so firmly established. One cannot stand face to face with genuine love without feeling a stir in chords long dumb. Loring's young, idealising pa.s.sion had set certain strings in Sophy's nature vibrating. It gave her that sensation of aching melancholy with which we listen to the faint notes of an old piano that was rich and mellow in our youth. It made her feel very lonely. She had not once felt lonely since coming home--not once in these calmly joyous years of mental renewal. Restlessness she had known of late, but never loneliness. Now she felt all drooping with the solitude of her own spirit as she walked homeward beside Loring. The soft, dun red of the autumn sky seemed to her like the quiet, sombre glow of her own life that had no more flame to give forth, that had sunk into steady embers, that would presently resolve itself into the white ash of old age. Yet it was wonderful to be loved again--even though she had no love to give in return. It was movingly wonderful--though awful in a way--to feel this tonic answering of slack chords to the full, resonant notes struck from the blazing lyre of youth....

VI

Loring had said that he would be "good" if Sophy did not banish him altogether, and he was, very "good." It was the goodness of a spoilt child that swallows physic for the spoonful of jam to follow. The jam in Loring's case was represented by the hours that he was allowed in Sophy's presence. He had not known himself capable of such self-control.

Altogether, his love for Sophy had revealed to him as it were another man cased within the man that he had heretofore thought was himself.

This new man was of more sensitive stuff, finer and yet much stronger than the other man had been. It was something like having a sixth sense bestowed on him--this new appetency for all manner of things towards which until now he had only felt a vague indifference. His life, since college days, had been made up of sport, occasional spurts of travel in wild places, girls--to a moderate degree--the usual convivial, surface intercourse with other young bloods--some ennui, generally dispelled by drink (the average young American's ordinary indulgence in "high-b.a.l.l.s"

as a panacea for tedium).

Loring had an excellent, but lazy, mind. At Harvard he had read law.

Once out of college, he had dropped it promptly. He had inherited fifteen millions at his father's death, when he was only twenty-one.

What was the use of moiling away at law? The property was looked after already by a firm of the most distinguished lawyers in New York. He could see no "sense" in racking his brain with work that bored him when this work was absolutely without necessity. So he had spun in gay peripheral circles with the wheel of life--until meeting Sophy. Now she had drawn him to its centre. It was strange how his consciousness, thus centrifugally established, seemed another consciousness. Only the present was real--this radiant and somewhat awful present in which he loved Sophy as he had not believed that human beings could love. His past seemed like a dull, cheap volume of gaudy colour-prints. He could not realise that he had moved through those vulgar pictures of the past.

_This_ Morris Loring, he felt, had not been part of them. He flared hot with shame, merely in glancing back at them. Yet his life had not been really shameful--in the grossest meaning of the word. Some sensual pleasure he had taken, not much. In the odiously smug phrase with which his native literature was given to describing virtuous youth, he was rather by way of being a "clean-limbed, clean-minded young American."

But the pig of St. Anthony has a trick of running between the limbs of youth, no matter how cleanly--indeed, he seems to take an evil joy in tripping the cleanliest, if only once. It was these chance tumbles into the mire that scalded Loring's heart with shame, as he knelt now at the white shrine of his lady. He would have liked to have a new body as well as a new soul to love her with. For the will in him had not really submitted to her will. It was only bent to this momentary obedience, like a strong spring ready to act at the least touch. Love made him as wary and as cunning as a fox in springtime. Not for one moment did he relinquish his determination to win her ultimately. In the meantime, he was "good." That is, he did not vex her by hinting at his love.

All his energies were concentrated on becoming such "a playmate" as she would miss if taken from her. He was like Jacob serving for Rachel. This new life that had sprung up in him seemed to have the indomitable patience of spiders. And without tiring, ceaselessly, exhaustlessly, he spun about her the fine web of pleasant habit--a mesh of delicate, trivial customs, fine as the silken band that bound Fenris, and that would be as hard to break should the time come when she wished to break it.

His family and friends thought, of course, that he was merely staying on for the Virginia hunting season. It seemed reasonable enough. The "Eldon Hounds"--Macfarlane's pack--were well known in the North; but the Hunt was not fashionable. Most Northern sportsmen went to Loudoun county.

There was too much wire in this part of Albemarle. Even Macfarlane threatened to leave if something could not be done about the wire. So Loring set to work in the matter. He became very popular in the county.

This rather bored him, but he must seem to remain for the hunting. He did not choose that there should be gossip. He was very careful about his visits to Sweet-Waters. Even the Macfarlanes did not know how often he went there.

As for Sophy, after the first qualms of conscience had pa.s.sed, and she saw how easily Loring slipped back again into the old, pleasant intercourse, she was delighted to have him stay on. He had a great charm for her, the charm of sheer beauty and a certain winsomeness that even Charlotte was beginning to yield to.