Shadows of Flames Part 76

"Oh, how like a _man_ that is!" cried Charlotte, jumping up in her exasperation, so that the carefully packed little hamper was upset, and the two white-clad figures had to grovel for its contents on all fours in the moonlight. As Charlotte's curly head came near his during this operation, the Judge promptly kissed it, and Charlotte, much disconcerted, scrambled to her feet again, exclaiming: "Joe! how _can_ you be so silly at our time of life?"

But the Judge only laughed, and pulled her down on his linen clad knees, demure frills, "night-basket" and all.

"See here, madam," he demanded, "what do you mean by saying I'm 'like a man'?"

Charlotte laughed in spite of herself.

"I meant it was like a man to take the very reverse of Sophy's case as an example," she said, putting her arm about his neck as they rocked gently together, and rubbing her cheek against his. "Don't you see? It's quite, _quite_ different with us. Why _your_ being _my_ elder, by so many years, only makes me look up to you...."

"'Look up to me!'" echoed he, with a burst of Homeric mirth. Charlotte clapped her hand over his mouth. "Sssh!" she warned. "They'll hear you.

They'll think we're laughing at them."

"Poor things," said he, sobered. "It seems mighty sad to think of two lovers being afraid of being laughed at."

"It _is_ sad," said Charlotte. "You think I'm cross about it, Joe, but I could cry about it this minute."

She dropped her head on his shoulder, and her other arm went round his neck.

"Don't," said the Judge softly. "Don't you cry, honey, whatever you do."

Charlotte from her refuge in his strong neck spoke pa.s.sionately. Her warm breath tickled him almost beyond endurance, but he held her and suffered in silence with the true martyr spirit of the husband who is born and not made.

"Oh, Joe," she murmured vehemently; "you're not a woman, so you can't see it all as I see it. _Now_, perhaps, it's all right, but in a few years ... just a few years.... Oh, my poor Sophy! The grey hairs ...

will come ... then wrinkles.... Little by little, little by little, there, under his eyes--his hateful _young_ eyes--she will grow old. She will look like his mother when she's fifty and he's only forty-five!"

"No, no, lady-bird, really you exaggerate!" slipped in the Judge.

"This _can't_ be exaggerated!" said Charlotte. "It _can't_ be---- _Shakespeare_ couldn't exaggerate it!"

"He's got a right smart gift that way, honey," slipped in the Judge again.

Charlotte didn't hear him. She sat up, much to his relief, and putting her hands on his shoulders looked at him solemnly.

"Joe," she said, "you're a man, so you don't know about one of the worst tragedies in a woman's life--the tragedy of the hand-gla.s.s!"

"The _what_?" asked her husband.

"The hand-gla.s.s, Joe. That little innocent looking bit of silver-framed gla.s.s that you _think_ I only use to do my hair with. Oh, some great poet ought to write an ode to a woman with her hand-gla.s.s! Talk of 'Familiars,' of 'Devils'--there's no Imp out of h.e.l.l...."

"Charlotte!" cried her astounded husband.

"I said out--of--_h.e.l.l_," repeated she firmly--"there's no Imp so cunning, so malicious, so brutal as a woman's hand-gla.s.s. First, like all devils, it begins by flattering her--_when she's young_. Then suddenly, one day, after long years of cunning flattery--suddenly--like that!..." She snapped her fingers in his still more surprised face....

"Like that!--the hateful thing tells her the truth--that she _is growing old_! Oh, just a shadow here--a line there--the first grey hair---- Nothing _really_--only--from that day, on and on and on relentlessly, the message, the odious message never stops! Oh, if anything ought to be buried with a woman, like her wedding ring, it ought to be her hand-gla.s.s--for it's been just as much a part of joy and pain as the ring has!"

She stopped, out of breath, and her husband, rather subdued yet trying to make light of it, hugged her and said: "Seems to me, Sophy oughtn't to claim all the laurels. Seems to me you're a right elegant little poetess yourself!"

Charlotte extricated herself from this frankly marital embrace, and pushing the curls out of her eyes went on, too excited and in earnest to heed this funny little compliment.

"_That's_ what I see for Sophy!" she said. "The tragedy of the hand-gla.s.s--the tragedy of love in her case. For that boy can't love her soul and mind as he ought to--and what soul he's got she's given him--for the time being. He's just a walking mirror--a reflection of her. Sophy doesn't dream it--nor he--of course. But I can see it. Love does that sometimes. Oh, you needn't grin, Joe!--I watch life though I _do_ live in the country the year round. Sophy's just a woman Narcissus.

She's in love with her own reflection in Morris Loring. And some day she'll want to draw him from that dream-pool. Then she'll find empty wetness in her hands ... just tears...."

She broke off almost in tears herself. Suddenly she caught her husband's head to her breast:

"Oh," she cried, "I do thank G.o.d that you are bald, Joe, and sixteen years older than I am!"

"Lord love us!" exclaimed the Judge, bursting into inextinguishable mirth this time, "I reckon that's the funniest prayer of thanksgiving that ever went up to the Throne of Grace!"

XII

In the verandah of her cottage at Nahant, where she always pa.s.sed the months of May and June, Mrs. Loring, Morris's mother, sat re-reading the letter in which he told her of his engagement to Mrs. Chesney.

There had been a storm the night before, and the sea made a marvellous, heroic music among the rocks. Mrs. Loring laid the open letter on her knee, and her light, bright blue, short-sighted eyes gazed wistfully towards the sound. Storms both in Nature and in human pa.s.sions, when distant enough, had always possessed a strange charm for her, the charm of printed perils to minds congenitally timorous. She knew Sophy's history and had read her poems when they first came out, with that same sense of one enjoying a tempest in mid-ocean from the staunch deck of a liner. In her case temperament was the liner--though she had always felt in some inmost recess of her being, known only to herself and her Creator, that, given the circ.u.mstances, she, too, might have been a centre of tumult. And sometimes, gazing from the safe, close-curtained windows of her present personality--the result of many careful, cautiously repressed years--she wondered if the mistake makers, the convention breakers, had not the best of it after all? Repentance must be a wonderful emotion--that upheaving, ecstatic repentance that follows big sins. So unconsciously and typically New England was Grace Loring, that she could not think of splendid crime without following it up in her mind by repentance even more gorgeous.

As Mrs. Loring sat there, with her son's letter on her lap, her sister, Mrs. Charles Horton, came out of the house with a novel in her hand and joined her.

"Still brooding over Morry's letter, Grace?" Mrs. Horton asked in a brusque voice, sitting down beside her.

Mrs. Loring withdrew her vague, handsome eyes from the sea, and looked quietly and directly at her sister.

"I'm not brooding, Eleanor," she said gently.

"Well, what then?" asked Mrs. Horton.

Mrs. Loring glanced at the letter through her _face-a-main_ as though consulting it, then said in the same tranquil tone:

"I think I was rather admiring them both."

"What rubbish you talk sometimes, my dear Grace!" exclaimed her sister explosively.

Mrs. Horton was short, brune, and rather plump. She had small, chestnut-brown eyes, and rough, strong, crinkly dark hair. She was in every way the opposite of her tall, distinguished, rather hushed sister.

Her manner of thinking and speaking was blunt and straightforward. Mrs.

Horton had no half-tones--she was like some effective national flag, all clearly defined blocks of frank, crude colour.

"Are you going to write and remonstrate with that young fool, or are you going to sit by and see him smash his life like crockery?" she said abruptly.

Charles Horton had been a Californian and a man of exuberant vitality and speech. His wife, who had loved him and admired him for every contrast to the contained people among whom she had been brought up, had adopted something of his vigorous way of expressing himself.

"Are you?" she repeated.

It was not Mrs. Loring's way to evade things, but she was so really interested in Eleanor's point of view that instead of answering this question she said:

"What are your reasons for inferring that Morris is ruining his life?"

Mrs. Horton tossed her book aside, and clasped her crisp, capable looking little brown hands about one knee.