She Buildeth Her House Part 23

"We are moving in a circle," Bellingham said hastily.

For the first moment, Charter felt the whip-hand over his own faculties.

"I've noted the great, modern tendency to preach _body_," he said, inhaling a big breath of the fragrant air, "to make a religion of bodily health--to look for elemental truth in alimentary ca.n.a.ls; to mix prayer with carnal subterfuge and heaven with health resorts. Better Phallicism bare-faced.... I read a tract recently written by one of these body-worshippers--the smug, black devil. It made me feel just as I did when I found a doctor book in the attic once, at the age of ten....

Whatever I may be, have done, may feel, dream or think below the diaphragm--hasn't anything to do with my religion. I believe in health, as in a good horse or a good typewriter, but my body's health is not going to rule my day."

"You are young--to have become chilled by such polar blasts," Bellingham said uneasily, for he now found the other's eyes but without result.

"I came into the world with a full quiver of red pa.s.sions," Charter said wearily, yet strangely glad. "The quiver is not empty. I do not say that I wish it were, but I have this to declare: I do not relish being told how to play with the barbs; how to polish and point and delight in them; how to put them back more deadly poisoned. I think there are big blankets of mercy for a natural voluptuary--for the things done when tissues are aflame--but for the man who deliberately studies to recreate them without cost, and tells others of his experiments--frankly, I believe in h.e.l.l for such men-maggots. Oblivion is too sweet. The essence of my hatred for these Bodyists is because of the poison they infuse into the minds of youths and maidens, whose character-skeletons are still rubbery.... But let such teachers purr, wriggle, and dilate--for they're going back right speedily to the vipers!"

Bellingham's eyes had been lost in the South. He turned, arose, and after a pause said lightly, "Your talk is strong meat, young man....

I--I suffered a serious accident some months ago and cannot stay too long in one place. We shall talk again. How far do you go with the _Panther_?"

"Saint Pierre."

Charter already felt the first pangs of reaction. His vehemence, the burn of temper for himself, in that he had allowed the other's personality to prey upon him, and the unwonted aggressiveness of his talk--all a.s.sumed an evil aspect now as he perceived the occultist's ghastly face. In rising, Bellingham seemed to have stirred within himself centres of unutterable torture. His look suggested one who has been drilled in dreadful arcanums of pain, unapproached by ordinary men.

"I think I must have been pent a long time," Charter said in his trouble. "Perhaps, I'm a little afraid of myself and was rehearsing a warning for the strength of my own bridle-arm--since we're swinging down into these Isles of Seduction."

"You'll find a more comfortable coolness with the years, I think, and cease to abhor your bounding physical vitality. Remember, 'Jesus came eating and drinking----'"

Charter started under the touch of the old iron. "But 'wisdom is justified of all her children,'" he responded quickly.

They were at the door of Bellingham's cabin, which was forward on the promenade. The doctor laughed harshly as he turned the key. "I see you have your Scriptures, too," he said. "We must talk again."

"How far do you go with the _Panther_?" Charter asked, drawing away. His eyes had filled for a second, as the door swung open, with the photograph of a strangely charming young woman within the cabin.

"I have not decided--possibly on to South America."

Charter felt as he walked alone that he had shown his youth, even a pertness of youth. He recalled that he had done almost all the talking; that he had felt the combativeness of a boy who scents a rival from another school--quite ridiculous. Moreover, he was weary, as if one of his furious seasons of work had just ended--that rare and excellent kind of work which gathers about itself an elemental force to drive the mind as with fire until the course is run.... He did not encounter Bellingham during the rest of the voyage.

Long before dawn the _Panther_ gained the harbor before Saint Pierre, and Charter awoke to the consciousness of a disorder in the air. Alone on deck, while the night was being driven back over the rising land, he was delighted to pick out the writhing letters of gold, "_Saragossa_,"

through the smoky gray, a few furlongs to the south. Peter Stock, an acquaintance from a former call at Saint Pierre, had become a solid and fruitful memory....

Father Fontanel was found early, where the suffering was greatest in the city. The old eyes lit with gladness as he caught Charter with both hands, and murmured something as his gaze sank into the eyes of the younger man--something which Charter did not exactly understand, about wolves being slain.

"What have you been doing with Old Man Pelee, Father? We heard him groaning in the night, and the town is fetid with his sickness."

"Ah, my son, I am afraid!"

Had all the seismologists of civilization gathered in Saint Pierre, and uttered a verdict that the volcano was an imminent menace, Charter would not have turned a more serious look at Pelee than he did that moment....

At the _Palms_, he found Peter Stock and a joyous welcome. They arranged for luncheon together, and the Capitalist hurried down into the city....

That proved a memorable luncheon, since Peter Stock at the last moment persuaded Miss Wyndam to join them.

Charter was disturbed with the thought that he had seen her before; and amazed that he could have forgotten where. He could only put it far back among the phantasmagoria of drinking days. Certainly the sane, restored Charter had never met this woman and forgotten. His veins were dilated as by a miraculous wine.

"The name is new to me, but I seem to have seen you somewhere, Miss Wyndam," he declared.

"That's the second time you've said that, young man," Mr. Stock remarked. "Don't your sentences register?"

"It's always bewildering--I know how Mr. Charter feels," Paula managed to say. "I'm quite sure we were never introduced, though I know Mr.

Charter's work."

"That's good of you, indeed," he said. "I don't mean--to know my work--but to help me out with Friend Stock. It is bewildering that I have forgotten. I feel like a boy in an enchanted forest. Pelee has been working wonders all day."

"I can't follow you," the Capitalist sighed. "Your sentences are puckered."

They hardly heard him. Paula, holding fast with all her strength to the part she had planned to play, sensed Charter's blind emotion, distinct from her own series of shocks. To her it was that furious moment of adjustment, when a man and his ideal meet for the first time in a woman's heart. As for this heart, she feared they would hear its beating. Instantly, she knew that he had not come to Saint Pierre expecting to find her; knew that she was flooding into his subconsciousness--that he felt _worlds_ and could not understand. She found the boy in his eyes--the boy of his old picture--and the deep lines and the white skin of a man who has lived clean, and the brow of a man who has thought many clean things. He was thinking of the Skylark, and "Wyndam" disturbed him.... Always when he hesitated in his speech, the right word sprang to her lips to help him. She caught the very processes of his thinking; his remoteness from the thought of food, was her own.... For hours, since she had heard his voice below, Paula had paced the floor of her room, planning to keep her secret long. She would play and watch his struggle to remember the Skylark; she would weigh the forces of the conflict, stimulate it; study him among men, in the presence of suffering, and in the dread of the mountain. All this she had planned, but now her whole heart went out to the boy in his eyes--the boy that smiled. All the doubts which at best she had hoped for the coming days to banish were erased in a moment; she even believed in its fullness the letter from Selma Cross--because he was embarra.s.sed, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with emotions he could not understand, quite as the boy of her dreams would be. She lived full-length in his silences, hardly dared to look at him now, for she felt his constant gaze. She knew that she was colorless, but that her eyes were filled with light.... Presently she realized that they were talking of Father Fontanel.

"He's a good old man," said Peter Stock. "He works day and night--and refuses to call it work. Just think of having a servant with a G.o.d like Father Fontanel's to make work easy!"

"He's even a little bit sorry for Pelee," Charter said. "I'm never quite the same in Saint Pierre. Many times up in the States, I ask myself, if it isn't largely in my mind about Father Fontanel's spirit and his effect upon me. It isn't. Stronger than ever it came to me this morning.

You know him?" He turned the last to the woman.

"Yes, I found him down on the water-front----"

"And brought him to me," said Mr. Stock, and added: "You know what bothered me about priests so long--they seem to have it all settled between them that theirs is the only true Air-line Limited to G.o.d.

Fontanel's down in the lowlands, where life is pent and cruel, where there are weak sisters and little ones who have to be helped over hard ways--that's what gets Peter Stock."

"You don't know how good that is to hear," Paula said softly. "I have thought it, too, about some men in holy orders--black figures moving along in a 'grim, unfraternal' Indian file, with their eyes so occupied in keeping their feet from breaking fresh ground--that it seems they must sometimes lose the Summit."

Charter looked from one to the other. Peter Stock regarded their plates.

Paula made a quick pretense of eating, and was grateful when Charter broke the silence: "Yes, Father Fontanel has found one of the trails to the Top--one of the happy ones. Sometimes I think there are just as many trails, as an ant could find to the top of an apple. Wayfarers go a-singing on Father Fontanel's trail--eyes warm with soft skies and untellable dreams. It's a way of fineness and loving-kindness----"

Mr. Stock had risen from the table and moved to a window which faced the North. All was vague about them. Paula had been carried by Charter's voice toward far-shining mountains.... In the silence, she met the strange, steady eyes of _the boy_, and looked away to find that the room had darkened.

"It is getting dark," he said.

She would have said it, if he hadn't.

The mountain rumbled.

"The North is a ma.s.s of swirling grays and blacks," Peter Stock announced from the window. "It isn't a thunderstorm----"

A sharp detonation cleaved the darkening air, and from the rear of the house the answer issued--quavering cries of children, sharp calling of mothers, and the sullen undertone of men. A subdued drumming came from the North now, completing the tossing currents of sound about the house.

The dismal bellowing of cattle and the stamping of ponies was heard from the barns. All this was wiped out by a series of terrific crashes, and the floor stirred as if intaking a deep breath. The dining-room filled with a crying, crouching gray-lipped throng of servants. A deluge of ash complicated the half-night outside, and the curse of sulphur pressed down.

Paula arose. Charter had taken his place close beside her, but spoke no word.

TWENTIETH CHAPTER

CHARTER'S MIND BECOMES THE ARENA OF CONFLICT BETWEEN THE WYNDAM WOMAN AND SKYLARK MEMORIES

In the _Rue Rivoli_ there was a little stone wine-shop. The street was short, narrow, crooked, and ill-paved--a cleft in Saint Pierre's terrace-work. Just across from the vault-like entrance to the shop, the white, scarred cliff arose to another flight of the city. Between the shop and the living-rooms behind there was a little court, shaded by mango-trees. Dwarfed banana-shrubs flourished in the shade of the mangoes, and singing-birds were caged in the lower foliage. Since the sun could find no entrance, the wine-shop was dark as a cave, and as cool. One window, if an aperture like the clean wound of a thirteen-inch gun could be called a window, opened to the north; and from it, by the grace of a crook in the _Rue Rivoli_, might be seen the mighty-calibred cone of Pelee.