The Wheel of Life Part 19

They strolled slowly down to Gramercy Park, and this time, as they stood together before her door, she asked him, flushing a little, if he would not come inside.

"I only wish I could," he answered, taking out his watch, "but I've promised to meet a man at the club on the stroke of five. If you'll extend the privilege, however, I'll take advantage of it before many days."

His words ended in a laugh, but she felt a moment afterward, as she entered the house and he turned away, that he had looked at her as no man had ever done in her life before. She grew hot all over as she thought of it, yet there had been nothing to resent in his easy freedom and she was not angry. The gay deference was still in his eyes, but beneath it she had been conscious for an instant that the whole magnetic current of his personality flowed to her through his look. That the glance he had bent upon her was one of his most effective methods of impressing his individuality she did not know. Gerty could have told her that he resorted to it invariably at the psychological instant--and so, perhaps, could Madame Alta had she chosen to be confidential. As a conscious or unconscious trick of manner it had served its purpose in many a place when words appeared a difficult or dangerous medium of expression--but to Laura in her almost cloistral ignorance it was at once a revelation and an enlightenment. When it pa.s.sed from her she found that the face of the whole world was changed.

Indoors Mr. Wilberforce and Gerty Bridewell were awaiting her, but it seemed to her that her att.i.tude toward them had grown less intimate--that she herself, her friends, and even the ordinary surroundings of her life were different from what they had been only several hours before. She wanted to be alone--to retreat into herself in search of a clearer knowledge, and even her voice sounded strangely altered in her own ears.

"You look as if you had been frightened, Laura; what is it?" asked Gerty, pressing her hand.

"It is nothing," returned Laura, with a glance; "it is only that my head aches." She pressed her hands upon her temples, and the throbbing of her pulses against her finger tips confirmed her words. When, after a few sympathetic questions, they rose to go, she was aware all at once of a great relief--a relief which seemed to her an affront to friendship so devoted as theirs.

"Roger tells me that we are to have the new book on Wednesday," said Mr.

Wilberforce, as he stood looking down upon her with the peculiar insight which belongs to the affection of age. Then it seemed to her suddenly that he understood the cause of her disturbance and that there were both pity and disappointment in his eyes.

"I hope so," she answered, smiling the first insincere smile of her life, for even as she uttered the words she knew that she no longer felt the old eager, consuming interest in her work, and that the making of books appeared to her an employment which was tedious and without end.

Why, she wondered vaguely, had she devoted her whole life to a pursuit in which there was so little of the pulsation of the intenser realities?

She felt at the instant as if a bandage had dropped from before her eyes, and the fact that Kemper as an individual did not enter into her thoughts in no wise lessened his tremendous moral effect upon her awakening nature. Not one man, but life itself was making its appeal to her, and for the first time she realised something of the intoxication that might dwell in pleasure--in pleasure accepted solely as a pursuit, as an end in and for itself alone. Then, a moment later, standing by her desk in her room upstairs, she remembered, in an illuminating flash, the look with which Kemper had parted from her at her door.

CHAPTER III

THE MOTH AND THE FLAME

Several weeks after this, on the day that Trent's first play was accepted, he dropped in to Adams' office, where the editor was busily giving directions about the coming _Review_.

"I know you aren't in a mood for interruptions," began the younger man, in a voice which, in spite of his effort at control, still quivered with a boyish excitement, "but I couldn't resist coming to tell you that Benson has at last held out his hand. I'm to be put on in the autumn."

Adams laid down the ma.n.u.script upon which he was engaged, and turned with the winning smile which Trent had grown to look for and to love.

"Well, that is jolly news," he said heartily, "you know without my saying so that there is no one in New York who is more interested in your success than I am. We'll make a fine first night of it."

"That's why I dropped in to tell you," responded Trent, while his youthful enthusiasm made Adams feel suddenly as old as failure. "I came about a week ago, by the way, but that shock-headed chap at the door told me you were out of town."

Adams nodded as he picked up the ma.n.u.script again.

"I took Mrs. Adams south," he replied. "Her health had given way."

"So I heard, but I hope she's well again by now?"

"Oh, she's very much better, but one never knows, of course, how long one can manage to keep one's health in this climate. I hate to make you hurry off," he added, as the other rose from his chair.

"I want to carry my good news to Miss Wilde," rejoined Treat. "Do you know, she was asking about you only the other day."

"Is that so? I've hardly had time for a word with her for three weeks.

Mrs. Adams has not been well and I've kept very closely at home ever since I got back. Will you tell her this from me? It's a nuisance, isn't it, that life is so short one never has time, somehow, for one's real pleasures? Now, Laura Wilde is one of my real pleasures," he pursued, with his quiet humour, "so when there's a sacrifice to be made, its always the pleasure instead of the business that goes overboard. Oh, it's a tremendous pity, of course, but then so many things are that, you know, and its confoundedly difficult, after all, to edit a magazine and still keep human."

The winning smile shone out again, and Treat noticed how it transfigured the worn, sallow face under the thin brown hair.

"Well, you may comfort yourself with the reflection that it's easy to be human but hard to edit a magazine," laughed the younger man, adding, as he went toward the door and paused near the threshold, "I haven't seen you, by the way, since Miss Wilde's last poems are out. Don't you agree with me that her 'Prelude' is the biggest thing she's done as yet?"

"The biggest--yes, but there's no end to my belief in her, you know,"

said Adams. "She'll live to go far beyond this, and I'm glad to see that her work is winning slowly. Every now and then one runs across a rare admirer."

"And she is as kind as she is gifted," remarked Trent fervently. Then he made his way through the a.s.sistant editors in the outer office, and hastened with his prodigious news to Gramercy Park.

Laura was alone, and after sending up his name he followed the servant to her study on the floor above, where he found her working with a pencil, as she sat before a brightly burning wood fire, over a ma.n.u.script which he saw to his surprise was not in verse. At his glance of enquiry she smiled and laid the typewritten pages carelessly aside.

"No, it's not mine," she said. "They're several short stories which Mr.

Kemper did many years ago, and he's asked me to look over them. I find, by the way, that they need a great deal of recasting."

"Is it possible," he exclaimed in amazement, "that you allow people to bore you with stuff like that?"

The smile which flickered almost imperceptibly across her lips mystified him completely, and he drew his chair a little nearer that he might bring himself directly beneath her eyes.

"Oh, well, I don't mind it once in a while," she returned, "though he hasn't in the very least the literary sense."

"But I wasn't aware that you even knew him," he persisted, puzzled.

"It doesn't take long to know some people," she retorted gayly; then as her eyes rested upon his face, she spoke with one of her sympathetic flashes of insight: "You've come to bring me good news about the play,"

she said. "Benson has accepted it--am I not right?"

"I'm jolly glad to say you are!" he a.s.sented with enthusiasm. "It will be put on in the autumn and Benson has suggested Katie Hanska for the leading role."

His voice died out in a joyous tremor, and he sat looking at her with all the sparkles in his young blue eyes.

"I am glad," said Laura, and she stretched out her hand, which closed warmly upon his. "I can't tell you--it's useless to try--how overjoyed I am."

"I knew you'd be," he answered softly, while his grateful glance caressed her. The triumph of the day--which seemed to him prophetic of the triumph of the future--went suddenly to his head, and in some strange presentiment he felt that his emotion for Laura was bound up and made a part of his success in literature. He could not, try as he would--disa.s.sociate her from her books, nor her books from his, and as he sat there in ecstatic silence, with his eyes on her slender figure in its soft black gown, he told himself that the morning's happy promise united them in a close, an indissoluble bond of fellowship. He saw her always under the literary glamour--he felt the full charm of the poetic genius--the impa.s.sioned idealism which she expressed, and it became almost impossible for him to detach the personality of the woman herself from the personality of the writer whom he felt, after all, to be the more intimately vivid of the two.

"I knew you'd be," he repeated, and this time he spoke with a pa.s.sionate a.s.surance. "If you hadn't been I'd have found the whole thing worthless."

She looked up still smiling, and he watched her large, beautiful forehead, on which the firelight played as on a mirror. "Well, one's friends do add zest to the pleasure," she returned.

For a moment he hesitated; then leaning forward he spoke with a desperate resolve. "One's friends--yes--but you have been more than a friend to me since the beginning--since the first day. You have been everything. I could not have lived without you."

He saw her curved brows draw quickly together, and she bent upon him a look in which he read pity, surprise and a slight tinge of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Oh, you poor boy, is it possible that you imagine all this?" she asked.

"I imagine nothing," he answered with a wounded and despairing indignation, "but I have loved you--I have dreamed of you--I have lived for you since the first moment that I saw you."

"Then you have been behaving very foolishly," she commented, "for what you are in love with is a shadow--a poem, a fancy that isn't myself at all. The real truth is," she pursued, with a decision which cut him to the heart, "that you are in love with a literary reputation and you imagine that it's a woman. Why, I'm not only older than you in years, I'm older in soul, older in a thousand lives. There is nothing foolish about me, nothing pink and white and fleshly perfect--nothing that a boy like you could hold to for a day--"

She broke off and sat staring into the fire with a troubled and brooding look--a look which seemed to lose the fact of his presence in some more absorbing vision at which she gazed. He noticed even in his misery that she had suffered during the last few weeks an obscure, a mysterious change--it was as if the flame-like suggestion, which had always belonged to her personality, had of late gathered warmth, light, effectiveness, consuming, as it strengthened, whatever had been pa.s.sive or without definite purpose in her nature. Her face seemed to him more than ever to be without significance judged by a purely physical standard--more than ever he felt it to be but a delicate and sympathetic medium for the expression of some radiant quality of soul.

"I did not know--I would not have believed that you could be so cruel,"