The Silver Poppy Part 14

"Or his hatchet," broke in Cordelia.

"And I suppose out of the mumbling delight of that hairy savage has come what we moderns call family love, and out of the way in which the she-thing groveled and thrust the hot meat on a slab of stone and crawled with it to her lord and master-to-be has flowered what we call courtship."

"And just as her happy yelping," went on Cordelia satirically, "was the root of our speech, I suppose that hunk of half-cooked flesh was the root of this _terrine de foie gras_."

She sniffed at her delicacy appreciatively.

"How much nicer the modern way is," she added, dreamily, "marriage by capture transformed into marriage by chef."

"But _has_ it changed so much, after all?" asked Repellier, looking about at the half-filled hampers.

Cordelia thought it over before her mirror that evening as she dressed, and she rediscovered two truths. One was that it really hadn't changed so much, and the other was that Mr. Repellier often said things with a sort of double meaning, which, she knew, was always going to fill her with a hazy distrust of him.

Her toilet was an exceptionally elaborate one, and it was almost seven before she tapped lightly on Mrs. Spaulding's door.

Dismay crept through her as she entered; she immediately recognized all the familiar symptoms.

"I've got one of my heads again, my dear. I'm sorry, but I _can't_ go."

Cordelia looked at her with compressed lips.

"You'll _have_ to run along by yourself, my dear. It'll be all right, and I'll send Thomas with the brougham at nine."

Hartley was deep in a pile of disordered notes and ma.n.u.scripts, trying to arrange them with some sort of method, when her tiny knock sounded on his apartment door. He did not hear it; it might never have been intended for his hearing, it was so light and timorous. Before he was even aware of her presence everything had been slipped in through the softly opened door. And when he suddenly looked up he saw her standing there laughing, expectant, radiant, a Lady Bountiful surrounded by her riches.

He started up and came quickly toward her. He had scarcely looked for them so soon. But she stopped him with a gesture.

"I've come alone," she warned him. And she told him how she had been deserted at the last moment. She was glad, and yet sorry--as she saw how his face lighted up--that he should look at it so joyously innocent.

"I have come to feed the lion," she cried. "Roar if you dare, sir!" She slipped off her wrap, and laying her hat and gloves aside, deftly placed a couple of Hartley's carnations in her hair. Noticing over her shoulder that he was watching her, she laughingly told him the different names the newspapers had given that poor head of hers--everything from "flame-washed" and "tawny russet" to "beaten bronze." Then she laughed again softly, and produced a mysterious parcel.

"Roll up my sleeves, sir!" she demanded prettily, standing before him.

When this was done, and he had noticed how small but perfectly rounded her white arm was, she opened her parcel and shook out the whitest of white ap.r.o.ns.

"Dear, dear, isn't it fine?" she cried, jubilantly tiptoeing so that she could see herself in the mirror.

Hartley looked at her in wonder. The last little complaining voice of a disturbed conscience went scurrying back to its kennel. Any constraint that had hung over him disappeared. With one whisk of her silk skirt Cordelia seemed to have driven the quietness and loneliness from the little rooms.

It was the pale and fragile priestess of letters in a new and altogether unexpected light. He even had to confess to himself that he had never seen her make a more perfect picture. She seemed more softly womanly, more wistfully happy, than ever before. The missing note had been found.

She herself was not unconscious of this, and it deepened the rose-tint on her usually pallid cheeks. And she took a strange joy in her novel tasks, as she bustled about laying out the things in a most housewifely manner.

She made a few blunders about it, for it was work that was new to her, but they laughed them off together. It all seemed to appeal to something dormant and primitive in her, and she was happy. It was the blossoming, in her, of the belated flower of domesticity. Gazing down at the white linen and the dishes, in a moment of abstraction, she resolved within herself thereafter to give more time and attention to such things, she even inwardly decided, some day, to take a course in cooking. It was, she felt, like finding a quaint old jewel in the folds of some neglected and long-forgotten gown, a flower in some forsaken garden.

"I suppose," said Cordelia dreamily, as she contemplated the results of her labors, "that the fryingpan is the oldest weapon we women have in that perpetual warfare of the elemental she against the elemental he.

Did you ever think of it in that light? Can't you imagine a shock-headed creature with a stone hatchet in his hand crawling into a cave and finding a lady in a bearskin roasting a piece of bear meat, or something like that? And can't you imagine how his pagan heart went out to her at the sight?"

Hartley growled, savage-like; and they both laughed.

"But I suppose," she went on thoughtfully, "that out of his mumblings of delight has come what we call family love. And then do you realize, sir, that out of the way that female savage groveled and thrust that hot meat on a slab of stone before him came that beautiful thing we call courtship?"

"Fine!" cried Hartley; "and evolution in a nutsh.e.l.l."

"Yes," said Cordelia happily. "I think I'll have to use that in a book sometime."

And so, from the oysters that came carefully packed in chopped ice to the French coffee which Cordelia made on Hartley's little gas-range--from a recipe which she had carefully penciled on a slip of paper--the dinner proved the daintiest and most delectable of repasts.

In a burst of confidence Cordelia even admitted that it was the happiest one she had ever eaten. Then a silence fell over them, and through the drifting smoke of the cigar which she had so carefully lighted for him he noticed how unusually luminous were the widened pupils of her "semaph.o.r.e eyes," and how sh.e.l.l-like the soft tinting of her oval and finely chiseled face.

But still neither spoke, and neither seemed oppressed by the silence. It seemed so eloquent of quiet content.

"What good chums we make," she said at last, musingly. They had both begun to feel during that long silence the stir of something new and momentous in the air about them.

"And always shall make," he said, taking her hand across the table and holding it firmly and warmly in his own. She looked at him out of wistful and appealing eyes; she felt herself strangely touched into a new vitality--the vitality of the emerging elemental woman. A hand-clasp was the thing she had not asked for; it was the one inadequate touch she had not called for.

"How cold you are!" she murmured plaintively. He looked up at her, half-enlightened, disturbed. He always had felt that she was something to be guarded and cherished. He wondered if it was her misleading air of fragility that had made her always appeal to his nurturing instinct, and had let the eternal he--as she had put it--in him go unchallenged.

"Would you like to see me--the other way?" he suddenly asked her, in a changed voice. He would have recalled that question, even as he would have held back the quick wave of recklessness that swept over him, if it had been in his power. Her words had sent the blood bounding back to his heart. For the first time she sat before him a living, breathing, alluring woman, and not the embodiment of all that was coldly intellectual. She seemed no longer the pale apostle of letters, but herself a woman throbbing and pulsing with mature life, eager, significant, almost challenging. And he, too, was a man, vigorous, full-blooded, not without his wayward impulses of the heart. The scholar in him, the dormant sense of propriety which rebelled against any disregard of the laws of the strong to the weak, of the host to his guest, had hitherto held a coldly restraining hand on him. She, like himself, was a being surging with desires and emotions, warm with forgotten moods and pa.s.sions. And again he felt a flushing wave of irresponsibility sweep through him.

"Yes," she answered deliberately, pouring the last of the wine into his gla.s.s and sipping languidly at her own with her thin, gently curved, crimson lips. She waited for him to speak, but he was silent.

"I believe I'd love to shock you," she murmured in her fluty contralto.

She was looking at him warmly now, with eyes that seemed golden green under the soft glow of the heavily shaded chandelier above their heads.

Her hair was a crown of tangled gold. Her face seemed heavy, like a flower in the heat that comes before rain. A sudden tingling swept through all his nerves, and he looked at her with new eyes. At last he had awakened.

"Yes, what good chums we could have been," he said, it seemed to her almost regretfully.

"'But how interesting one man and one woman can make life,'" she answered slowly.

The sentence was a quotation from the second chapter of The Unwise Virgins as Cordelia had first written it. He remembered the line and the context, and it left him no room for doubt.

"There--there could be no going back," he said, feeling the old ground sinking abysmally from under his feet, and groping out in that last tumultuous moment for something substantial to which to cling. O doubting and pouting Adonis, how could you!

The flags and pennons of victory flamed softly in her triumphant eyes.

In some way, she felt, she had at last drawn him down from his towers.

Once she had been half afraid of him; that hour was gone for all time.

Cordelia slipped out of her chair and came over and stood close beside him. She thrust her pale fingers into his hair and gazed with mild but unhesitatingly candid eyes down into his own. His face looked up to hers, pa.s.sionate, yet with a touch of pain. A sudden pallor swept over him, and before she knew it he had flung up his arms and drawn her down to him.

Some sudden enchaining fragrance and warmth about her overmastered him.

For an intoxicating moment he could feel her very heart, in its wild beating. Then she writhed and twisted away from him, and shrank panting and frightened out of his reach. He went to her once, but she eluded him. And at last he remembered.

"Oh, I forgot, I forgot," she half cried and half sobbed. And then she seemed to grow frightened, both of him and of herself.

"No, no!" she cried as he returned to her, with outstretched arms. "No, we--we must go back and be as we were--before." And he could see that some subtle change had come over her. Until that moment she had, perhaps, been the pursuer. Now, and hereafter--well, she had become the child of uncounted ages of femininity.

She told him, again and again, that it would make no difference, that they should both forget that little blot on what had been their perfect happiness. And for the rest of her visit she busied herself about the apartment, fluttering from room to room with her bird-like activity.

There was a strange smile in the corners of her mouth, a humanizing, maddening sort of smile, Hartley thought it, as he followed her gloomily about while she readjusted his furniture where it displeased her and here and there rearranged his flowers and prints and dishes with her deft fingers. From time to time, in hanging his pictures and curios about the walls, she called on him to help her. This he seemed to do submissively, almost repentantly.