The Silver Poppy Part 19

"Poor dear!" she murmured. "She's such a silly, frail little thing. When I see her in the hands of you men I feel exactly the same as I do when Alfred gets handling my chinaware. And she's such a trustful child, too!

If it wasn't for her faith in you, really I'd tremble for her future."

Then Mrs. Spaulding filled Hartley's gla.s.s and light-headedly declared that she had got hold of him just in time to save him from being a monk.

Yet Hartley was not altogether idle during these weeks. Each day he threw a little sop of work to the Cerberus of conscience, adding from time to time the finer touches to the ma.n.u.script of The Unwise Virgins while it still lay before him in the rough. This treatment resulted in an unexpected expansion of the story itself and left his pages in a sadly undecipherable condition. Even he himself, however, could see how those touches of after-thought were altering his earlier effort and rounding out his severer structure into a work of more Gothic richness.

One Sunday afternoon late in October he carried the completed ma.n.u.script over to Cordelia. A recent rain had washed the streets from curb to curb, and under foot flagstone and asphalt lay clean as steel. There was a cool freshness in the air, and the vigorous exercise as he went swinging down the river front sent the blood bounding through his veins once more. He stopped to watch the sea-gulls wheeling and dipping above the gray waters of the Hudson--the sight of them filled him with a sudden restless pa.s.sion for a freedom that still seemed to have eluded him. Then he turned to the Drive itself, and let his eyes rest on the stream of flashing horses and hurrying carriages. He remembered what the Spauldings' coachman had confided to him only a few days before: "They don't last long in the city, sir, them horses; it shakes the shoulders off 'n them."

He found Cordelia, excepting the servants, alone in the house. The Spauldings had left the day before for Canada, she told him. Mrs.

Spaulding was to stay in Quebec City, while her husband--who had always been fond of shooting--went north for moose. He had found it possible to s.n.a.t.c.h a three weeks' belated vacation before the winter set in, Cordelia explained, and described with not a little wit the sternness with which he had arisen and dragged away a complaining and none too willing wife.

"Our American husbands, you know, usually show more velvet than claws,"

she added.

She was gowned in a tightly fitting tailor-made dress of bottle green, trimmed with gold. It seemed to deepen the color of her hair and at the same time to give a touch of girlishness to her figure. She guessed at once what Hartley held in his hand.

"I wonder if it could ever be a Silver Poppy the second?" he asked, as he handed the ma.n.u.script over to her. Her mind flashed back to the birth of that earlier book, and for a moment she looked hesitatingly up at him.

"I'd rather read it alone," she said. "Do you mind?"

"I'd rather you did," he answered, wondering at the sudden little sternness that had come over her. It seemed like the shadow on quiet water of a taloned bird he could not see.

"Then I'll leave you in the library to smoke. You said you wanted to see the press notices of the play--I think they'll keep you enough amused,"

she held the heavy _portieres_ aside for him. Then she brought him her huge, heavy sc.r.a.p-book, and lingered a moment before the mantelpiece mirror while he turned over a few of its first pages.

"May I look over all of it?" he asked, with his head bent over the closely pasted pages of clippings.

"Yes, do; some day I'm going to call that book The Price of Fame."

He looked up from a page he had been glancing over, where a paragraph, more faded than the others about it, caught his eye.

"Who is f.a.n.n.y Rice?" he asked.

She was fixing her hair before the mirror and did not turn away from it as she answered, after a moment's pause:

"She's my cousin--in Kentucky."

And as he dipped from page to page into notices from newspapers and ill.u.s.trated interviews from weeklies and studies from critical reviews, frowning over some, laughing over others, she slipped away and left him.

An hour glided past and Cordelia did not return. Hartley took up a novel from the table, and when another long hour dragged on he became uneasy.

He went to the foot of the stairs and called her. Then he rang for the servants, but could get no response to his summons; they were all either out at the moment or beyond sound of the bells.

He went to her study and tapped on the door. Hearing no sound, he opened it and glanced in, but she was not there. He hesitated a moment, then went from silent room to room through the great, quiet house in search of her.

He found her at last in a nook of the upper west hall, which he had heard Mrs. Spaulding speak of as the Quietude. She was bending over the last pages of his ma.n.u.script in the paling evening light at the window, curled up, cat-like, in a huge armchair. Her lips were slightly parted, and as her white face bent over those last pages of his story some eager, luminous hunger that dwelt in her eyes held Hartley spellbound.

He watched her without speaking.

When the last page was read she looked up slowly and let her absent eyes dwell on him as her lips murmured something he could not catch. Then he laughed a little and stepped toward her through the twilight.

At his first step he saw that he had been mistaken. She had neither heard nor seen him. But she did not cry out, only a deadly whiteness swept over her already pale face, and she put her hand up to her heart with a quick little motion.

In a moment her fright had pa.s.sed and she could breathe naturally once more. The pale color crept slowly back into her face.

"I thought something might have happened," he said weakly.

"How you startled me!" she gasped, growing calmer as she spoke. Then she shook her white skirts out and sat up more decorously in the chair. "You must promise me never to do it again," she said softly. "It's heredity with me, I think, for my old mammy nurse once told me it was a fright that really killed my mother. You'll promise, won't you?"

She looked at him with solemn eyes. The gray twilight fell across her face and melted into the gold of her hair. Her bottle-green gown seemed black in the dusk, and her pale features, freighted with an elusive and wistful pathos, seemed to Hartley, in that minute of fleeting but vivid impression, like the face of some sweet lady of forgotten centuries gazing out of the gloom of an old canvas. It was a face that held him musingly spellbound, in which he could see and dream of things that were not there, as in a fire by night or in a fountain by day.

He dropped on his knees beside her and caught her hands. She could see the sudden flame of tumultuous love and of desire that burned through him, and she drew away, strangely, almost in terror.

"No, no!" she cried in a low voice. "Not now! Not here!"

She pressed away from him, as from a danger, though on his face was nothing but tenderness and pleading. She shrank from him hesitatingly, as though the cup of devotion that he held up to her was something too costly for her to taste.

A hurrying and startled chambermaid turning on the light brought them back from that garden of enchantment into which youth can wander but seldom. There was nothing left for them to do but walk soberly down through the long halls of the quiet house to the library once more. Yet all the while Cordelia seemed to be fighting some silent and inward battle, to be swayed by some great conflict of emotion that trampled from her the many long-thought-of things she had to say, as cavalry tramples a field once golden with wheat.

She was silent and restless and nervous until Hartley gathered up the scattered pages of The Unwise Virgins and put them in order on the library table. Then she looked into his eyes and murmured tenderly, and under the stress of a sudden impulse:

"I'm proud of you, so proud of you, my big boy!"

He looked down into her face--into her face, that he felt could change like water. It was dignified, glorified by a light that he had seldom seen on a woman's countenance, and it left him happy once more. The artist in him, receiving its dole, elbowed the man in him slowly aside.

"Then it _will_ do?" he asked.

"It is all strength and all beauty," she said simply. Then she added in another voice, "You have made me very humble."

She sighed pitifully as she looked at the pile of written pages.

"I have only imitated you," he declared.

"Imitated me?" she echoed.

"Yes. All along it was The Silver Poppy that was my model--that I tried to follow from first to last."

"I feel as though you had given me a mental flogging," she broke in.

"None of this is mine! _None_ of it," she cried pa.s.sionately. "None of it, by right," she added as she gazed at the topmost sheet. "I was only the mouse who pulled the thorn out of the lion's paw, and look what he has done for me."

"But see what you have done, what you are doing for _me_!" he cried impetuously. "And see what you can do, what some day you must do."

She held up a hand as though to bar it back, as though it were something that still confounded her better judgment and might lead to lifelong mistakes and sorrows.

Then he added, more gently: "Every page of this, Cordelia, is quite as much yours as mine. You suggested it, you inspired it. If it were not for you, dear, it should never have been written."

His hand was on the throttle of sacrifice, and he seemed bent on racing the engine of self-abnegation to its last wheel-turn. Her face lighted up with a new and fierce fire as he spoke. He wondered if that happy smile was born of his first more intimate use of her Christian name.

"But _you_ have done it all!" she reiterated.