The Great God Success Part 16

"Is he kissing her?" asked Howard.

"No--not yet. But I'm sure he will as soon as we have turned the corner." She said nothing for a moment or two, her glance straight ahead and upon vacancy, he admiring the curve of her cheek at the edge of its effective framing of fur.

"But we are not----" She spoke in a low tone, regretful, pensive, almost sad. "We are not like them."

"Oh, yes we are. But--we fancy we are not. We've sold our birthright, our freedom, our independence for--for----"

"Well--what?"

"Baubles--childish toys--vanities--shadows. Doesn't it show what ridiculous little creatures we human beings are that we regard the most valueless things as of the highest value, and think least of the true valuables. For, tell me, Lady-Whom-I-Love, what is most valuable in the few minutes of this little journey among the stars on the good ship Mother Earth?"

"But you would not care always as you care now? It would not, could not, last. If we--if we were like those people on the bench back there, we'd go on and--and spoil it all."

"Perhaps--who can say? But in some circ.u.mstances couldn't I make you just as happy as--as some one else could?"

"Not if you had made me infinitely happier at one time than even you could hope to make me all the time. At least I think not. It would always be--be racing against a record; we both would be, wouldn't we?"

Howard looked at her with an expression which transfigured his face and sent the colour flaming to her cheeks. "That being the case," he said, "let us--let us make the record one that will not be forgotten--soon."

During the month he saw her almost every day. She was most ingenious in arranging these meetings. They were together afternoons and evenings.

They were often alone. Yet she was careful not to violate any convention, always to keep, or seem to be keeping, one foot "on the line." Howard threw himself into his infatuation with all his power of concentration He practically took a month's holiday from the office.

He thought about her incessantly. He used all his skill with words in making love to her. And she abandoned herself to an equal infatuation with equal absorption. Neither of them spoke of the past or the future.

They lived in the present, talked of the present.

One day she spoke of herself as an orphan.

"I did not know that," he said. "But then what do I know about you in relation to the rest of the world? To me you are an isolated act of creation."

"You must tell me about yourself." She was looking at him, surprised.

"Why, I know nothing at all about you."

"Oh, yes, you do. You know all that there is to know--all that is important."

"What?" She was asking for the pleasure of hearing him say it.

"That I love you--you--all of you--all of you, with all of me."

Her eyes answered for her lips, which only said smilingly: "No, we haven't time to get acquainted--at least not to-day."

She was to start for Florida at ten the next morning. Mrs. Carnarvon was going away to the opera, giving them the last evening alone. Marian had asked this of her point-blank.

"You are an extraordinarily sensible as well as strong-willed girl, Marian," Mrs. Carnarvon replied.

"I can't find it in my heart to blame you for what you're doing. The fact that I haven't even hinted a protest, but have lent myself to your little plots, shows that that young man has hypnotized me also."

"You needn't disturb yourself, as you know," Marian said gaily. "I'm not hypnotized. I shall not see Mr. Howard again until--after it's all over.

Perhaps not then."

He came to dinner and they were not alone until almost nine. She sat near the open fire among the cushions heaped high upon the little sofa.

She had never been more beautiful, and apparently never in a happier mood. They both laughed and talked as if it were the first instead of the last day of their month. Neither spoke of the parting; each avoided all subjects that pointed in direction of the one subject of which both thought whenever their minds left the immediate present. As the little clock on the mantle began to intimate in a faint, polite voice the quarter before eleven, he said abruptly, almost brusquely:

"I feel like a coward, giving you up in this way. Yes--giving you up; for you have a traitor in your fortress who has offered me the keys, who offers them to me now. But I do not trust you; and I can't trust myself.

The curse of luxury is on you, the curse of ambition on me. If we had found each the other younger; if I had lived less alone, more in the ordinary habit of dependence upon others; if you had been brought up to live instead of to have all the machinery of living provided and conducted for you--well, it might have been different."

"You are wrong as to me, right as to yourself. But yours is not the curse of ambition. It is the pa.s.sion for freedom. It would be madness for you, thinking as you do, even if you could--and you can't."

He stood up and held out his hand. She did not rise or look at him.

"Good night," she said at last, putting her hand in his. "Of course I am thinking I shall see you tomorrow. One does not come out of such a dream,"--she looked up at him smiling--"all in a moment."

"Good night," he smiled back at her. "I shall not open 'the fiddler's bill' until--until I have to." At the door he turned. She had risen and was kneeling on the sofa, her elbow on its low arm, her chin upon her hand, her eyes staring into the fire. He came toward her.

"May I kiss you?" he said.

"Yes." Her voice was expressionless.

He bent over and just touched his lips to the back of her neck at the edge of her hair. He thought that she trembled slightly, but her face was set and she did not look toward him. He turned and left her. Half an hour later she heard the bell ring--it was Mrs. Carnarvon. She wished to see no one, so she fled through the rear door of the reception room and up the great stairway to lock herself in her boudoir. She sank slowly upon the lounge in front of the fire and closed her eyes. The fire died out and the room grew cold. A warning chilliness made her rise to get ready for bed.

"No," she said aloud. "It isn't ambition and it isn't lack of love.

It's a queer sort of cowardice; but it's cowardice for all that. He's a coward or he wouldn't have given up. But--I wonder--how am I going to live without him? I need him--more than he needs me, I'm afraid."

She was standing before her dressing table. On it was a picture of Danvers--handsome, self-satisfied, healthy, unintellectual. She looked at it, gave a little shiver, and with the end of her comb toppled it over upon its face.

XIII.

RECKONING WITH DANVERS.

On that journey south Marian for the first time studied Danvers as a husband in prospect.

The morning after they left New York, their private car arrived at Savannah. At dark the night before they were rushing through a snow storm raging in a wintry landscape. Now they were looking out upon spring from the open windows. As soon as the train stopped, all except Marian and Danvers left the car to walk up and down the platform.

Danvers, standing behind Marian, looked around to make sure that none of the servants was about, then rubbed his hand caressingly and familiarly upon her cheek.

"Did you miss me?" he asked.

Marian could not prevent her head from shrinking from his touch.

"There's n.o.body about," Danvers said, rea.s.suringly. But he acted upon the hint and, taking his hand away, came around and sat beside her.

"Did you miss me?" he repeated, looking at her with an expression in his frank, manly blue eyes that made her flush at the thought of "treason"

past and to come.

"Did _you_ miss _me_?" she evaded.