Shadows of Flames Part 96

Amaldi had gone to that ball braced for two ordeals--the meeting with Sophy and the meeting with the man whom she had married. He was introduced to Loring a few moments before he left. Belinda introduced him. Loring had come up as they sat together on the terrace. A light just overhead shone directly on his face.

Amaldi had winced from the beauty of that face, as he had winced from Sophy's look of fragility. He had not the superficial scorn for male beauty which is felt by the average Anglo-Saxon. He did not fall into the common error of thinking that women are indifferent to beauty in men. On the contrary, he knew that some women are as much affected by it as men are by the beauty of women.

He looked at the perfect Greek type of Loring's face, enhanced by the intense pallor that over-stimulation always lent it, and he knew (being a Latin) the terrific spell that such a face can cast over the imagination.

At that moment, so strong is the fleshly man in even the most highly evolved being, he could have wished that she had loved a monster for his soul, rather than this stripling for his beauty. The power of vivid visualisation is one of a Latin's chief tortures when unrequited love mocks him. Amaldi could see the beauty of Sophy and Loring in each other's arms as plainly as though they had stood enlaced before him.

He had said good-night rather abruptly.

As he walked off along the terrace, Belinda had asked scampishly of Loring:

"Well, Morry, what d'you think of my dago mash?"

"I don't think of him," had been the surly retort.

"Well, I do. _I_ think he's a peach. He's simply stunning to look at anyhow. So dark and sort of holding his breath at one. A marquis, too, let me tell you. Don't you think I'd make a nice marchioness?"

"For G.o.d's sake, don't play the fool with me, Linda."

She pouted.

"You won't _let_ me play the fool with you! That's why I'm going to see if I can with my handsome dago."

Loring's reply to this had been to seize her by one arm and jerk her to her feet before him.

"My bracelet! You hurt me...." she had murmured. He released her arm, and she stood nursing it against her breast, thrusting out her red lips over it, saying, "There! there!" to it as if it had been a baby.

"I don't believe I hurt it an atom.... Let me see," he had demanded. She made him furious--furious with desire and detestation. He loathed her roguery and wiles, yet they mastered him just as drink did.

"Let me see," he said again, putting out his hand towards her arm.

She yielded it to him with a languid movement, so that it hung a warm, white weight in his grasp.

"There...." she said, pressing her forefinger into the soft flesh.

It was then that he had set that violent kiss upon it. His lips clung, drew at the delicate, supple texture. The girl leaned against him half swooning with the delight of his hot lips upon the coolness of her bare arm.

She didn't care in the least when, coming to himself again, he flung away her arm as though it had been a bit of trash.

"Go to bed," he had said roughly between his teeth. "Go to bed and say your prayers ... you need 'em...."

She had stood laughing softly, as he strode off after Amaldi, towards the house. She didn't mind his rudenesses because she knew of old that reaction was sure to follow. He was too good-tempered and easy-going in his normal state to keep up this savage mood with her. He was only cross like this when he'd "had too much." And the more brutal he was at such times, the more apt he was to make up for it by being "nice" afterwards.

She had had some experience of these moods in him even as a schoolgirl.

In fact, the next day Loring, rather ashamed of the hazy memory that he retained of that scene on the terrace, was very "nice" to her indeed. He proposed a ride together. This was the beginning of delightful rides alone with him.

Sophy had given up both riding and dancing for the past two or three weeks. The truth was that she had not felt very well of late. The constant, hopeless sense of defeat, of a wearing situation from which she could see no means of extricating herself, had begun to affect her body. This sensation of physical weariness was new to her. Always, until now, her strong, elastic physique had resisted triumphantly. But nowadays she felt jaded. Everything seemed an effort. Her grey eyes, which Amaldi remembered so brilliantly eager, had that subdued, waiting look which comes from either physical or mental suffering constantly endured. Which of these causes brought that look into her eyes, he felt that he must know. He could not bear it that her eyes should have that look in them. What was wrong? Was it her health or was it that a second time she had made the mistake most terrible of all to a woman such as she was? In that case....

Amaldi faced himself squarely. There was no escaping the truth of what he had brought upon himself by his own act. It had needed but that one sight of her, that one touch of her hand to rouse in him the old love, as much stronger for the lapse of years as was his manhood. And now ...

what? There was no danger of his repeating his mistake of six years ago.

A great love always, sooner or later, brings humility--the proud humility expressed in the fine old Latin phrase of the Romish ritual--"whom to serve is to be a King." To serve her in her need, Amaldi felt, would confer kinghood of spirit.

"If she is unhappy ... if love has failed her this second time ... if she has no love left to give me ... even in years to come ... why, then, at least I can be her friend...." thought Amaldi.

He had reached this "Station" in the Via Crucis of love. He looked back, wondering, on the man he had been as contrasted with the man he now was.

Had any one told him at thirty that he would some day feel towards a woman as he now felt towards Sophy, he would have smiled. Yet, within a decade he had come to know by experience that the intense, sublimated pa.s.sion of the _Vita Nuova_ is no exaggeration.

Those who maintain that Beatrice was for Dante merely a symbol of Divine and Abstract love, cannot realise the miraculous power of metamorphosis inherent in a supreme, human love withheld from its natural expression.

Love of this kind is clairvoyant and clairaudient. Though he could not yet discern causes clearly, Amaldi could both see and hear the shadowy presences that followed Sophy in those days. The one stared with the eyes of a virgin at her broken cestus, the other plained softly: "Vanity of vanities ... all is vanity." Why this was, he did not know, but that it was, he knew certainly. He set himself to watch, with the watchfulness of the "_Loyal serviteur._"

Within the next day or two he called about tea-time as Sophy had asked him to. He found her having tea on the sea-lawn with Bobby and his tutor. Bobby made friends with him at once.

Then shortly Loring and Belinda came in from a ride. It amused Amaldi that Belinda appropriated him at once. This Att.i.tude of hers suited him very well. He could see Sophy often in this way, while being considered "_le flirt_" of Miss Horton. He would also have opportunities of observing Loring in his own home. This, just at present, was what he most desired. He wished to find out what sort of man was behind the persona of that beautiful mask. Now as he responded with discretion to Belinda's rather familiar chaffing, he thought that Loring's glance was slightly hostile. He sat sipping a cup of tea in silence, looking at them every now and then over its brim.

Belinda thought it "bully fun" to flirt with Amaldi "under Morry's very nose." What a dog in the manger Morry was! He hadn't the courage to claim her himself, yet he glowered and sulked because another man responded to her bewitchment.

Sophy wondered what impression Amaldi was really receiving. She could not help thinking that the fencing between them was much as if Belinda wielded a bludgeon and Amaldi a rapier. And as this thought came to her, she winced, remembering that horrible time when she had seen Amaldi himself use a stick as a sword.

It was Loring's att.i.tude throughout the scene that chiefly impressed Amaldi. "It is not possible...." he kept saying to himself. "No ... it's impossible...."

But the more he noticed those sullen, lowering glances of Loring in their direction, the more he felt that what he declared "impossible" was a fact.

Was that, then, the secret of Sophy's tired, subdued eyes? Did she still love that handsome, sulky boy, while he turned from her to this obvious young seductress? Amaldi felt hot with pain and anger at the mere surmise. Yet the situation was most likely. And if it were so, Belinda was "playing him off" to rouse the other's jealousy. "Little minx!"

thought Amaldi in English. It made him furious to think that she might be using him in this way in the very presence of the woman he adored.

He went away some moments later with a troubled spirit. What could friendship avail here? He had not realised that part of his high mood had come from the conjecture that Sophy no longer loved the man she had married. What had he or "friendship" to do in a _galere_ already weighted to the water-line with love and jealousy? Hope is so inevitably one with love, even the love that has decided on the stony path of "friendship." He had hoped ... what had he hoped? Down the long vista of years--what was it that he had glimpsed at the far end, as one glimpses sunlight at the end of a long, dark tunnel? He sat far into the night thinking--brooding.

But day brought counsel. He decided that he had jumped to premature conclusions. He determined to pursue the course that he had at first planned. At least, in this way, he would arrive at the truth. Now he only fumbled with conjecture. The first thing must be to win Sophy to a feeling of confidence in their renewed relations.

And very exquisitely, by fine indirection, he put her at her ease with him--conveyed the impression that time had done its work-a-day task of sobering pa.s.sionate emotion into tranquil esteem.

Life had dealt rather harshly with them both. They had both grasped Illusion--flower of Maya--and been stung by the serpent coiled beneath.

But a friendship such as this was not illusion. It wore no veils--its speech was plain and sober--it went clad in honest homespun. Had not Amaldi himself once told her that he was not a sentimentalist? This honest, daylight feeling that had now sprung up between them had in it no sentimentality. She did not want sentiment. She wanted this that Amaldi gave her--communion and stimulus, clear and bracing as a day of her Virginian autumn. It was so long--so unbelievably long--since she had talked pleasantly with a man who was interested in the things that she found interesting. And they would sit often, over the tea-table on the sea-lawn, before the others came in from driving or riding, exchanging ideas on philosophy and religion and poetry and art. She asked Amaldi about his everyday life. He replied smiling that he had become as ardent an agriculturist as Cavour had once been. Sophy did not know about this phase in the great statesman's career. She was deeply interested. It came out that Amaldi had been asked to give some lectures on the "Risorgimento" that coming winter at Columbia University. The idea rather pleased him, he said. He thought of taking Cavour as his chief subject.

Sophy kindled at the idea. It made her own problems and disappointments seem insignificant to think of the gigantic odds with which that great being contended all his life, and to selfless ends.

"How worth while it all was--his struggle and his Victory!" she cried.

Her eyes dilated--grew brilliant as he remembered them in other days.

"Yes," said Amaldi, "he really merged his private self in the self of humanity. Buddha was not more a Buddhist in that respect than Cavour was."

"And you will stay here this winter, and tell America something of him?"

"I think so ... yes."

It solved for him the riddle of being longer near her without causing comment.