The Wheel of Life Part 25

"So she has had one of her bad attacks, I feared it," said the nurse, with a sympathetic glance directed less at Connie than at her husband.

"Yes, it was bad," repeated Adams quietly; and then rising to his feet he staggered like a drunken man into his bedroom across the hall. Still wearing his evening clothes he flung himself heavily upon the sofa and fell at once into the profound sleep of acute bodily exhaustion. Two hours later when he awoke to take the coffee which the kindly nurse brought to him, he found that his slumber, instead of refreshing him, had left him sunk in a sluggish melancholy with a clogged and inactive brain.

"She is very quiet now," said the woman, a tall, strong person of middle age, "and strangely enough the spell has hardly weakened her at all--she has had her breakfast and speaks of going out for a little shopping after luncheon."

"Well, that's good news!" exclaimed Adams heartily, as he hastily swallowed his black coffee. Then, holding out his cup to be refilled, he shook his head with the winning humorous smile which was his solitary beauty. "This coffee will have to write two pages in my magazine," he said, "so pour abundantly, if you please."

Sitting there in his dishevelled evening clothes, with his thin, sallow face under his rumpled hair, he made hardly an impressive figure even when viewed in the effulgent light of romance as a devoted husband.

There was nothing of the heroic in his appearance; and yet as the nurse looked down upon him she felt something of the curious attraction he had for men like Arnold Kemper or Perry Bridewell--men whose innate principles of life differed so widely from his own. It was impossible to build a sentimental fiction about him, she thought--he had no place among the broad shouldered, athletic gentlemen who bewitched her in the pages of the modern novel--but she recognised, for the first time, as she stood gravely regarding him, that there could be a love founded upon other attributes than these. To be loved as he loved Connie seemed to her at the instant a very beautiful and perfect thing.

"I think you have suffered more from it than your wife has," she observed, as she replaced the cup upon the tray.

Adams broke into his whimsical laugh. "You don't judge fair," he retorted, "wait until I'm washed and in my right clothes again. If there's anything on earth that turns a man into a corpse, it is an evening suit by daylight."

Then, as she went out with the tray, he endeavoured, while he changed his clothes, to pull himself, by an effort of will, into proper shape to meet the day's work before him.

An hour afterward, as he walked through the morning sunlight to his office, he found that his unusual melancholy had vanished before the first breath of fresh air. A sense of detachment--of world-loneliness came over him as he looked at the pa.s.sing crowd of strangers, but there was no sadness in the feeling, for he felt within himself the source as well as the renewal of his peace. He had never regarded himself as what is called a religious man--it was more than ten years since he had entered a church or heard a sermon--yet in this very relinquishment of self, was there not something of the vital principle, of the quickening germ of all great religions? Though he had never said in his thoughts "I believe this" or "I hold by this creed or that commandment," his nature was essentially one in which the intellect must be supreme either for good or for evil; and in his soul, which had been for so long the battlefield of a spiritual warfare, there had dawned at last that cloudless sunrise of faith in which all lesser creeds are swallowed up and lost. If he had ever attempted to put his religious belief into words, he would probably have said with his unfailing humour that it "sufficed to love his neighbour and to let his G.o.d alone."

Now, as he pa.s.sed rapidly through the humming streets, his thoughts were so anxiously engrossed by Connie's condition that, when his name was uttered presently at his elbow, he started and looked up like one awakening uneasily from a dream. The next moment the air swam before him and he felt his blood rush in a torrent from his heart, for the voice was Laura's, and he discovered when he turned that she was looking up eagerly into his face.

"Nothing short of a meditation on the seven heavens can excuse such absorption of mind," she said.

"You came like a spirit without my suspecting that you were near," he answered, smiling.

She laughed softly, giving him her full face as she looked up with her unfathomable eyes and tremulous red mouth. At the first glance he noticed a change in her--an awakening he would have called it--and for a minute he lost himself in a vague surmise as to the cause. Then all other consciousness was swept away by pure delight in the mere physical fact of her presence. For the instant, while they walked together through the same sunshine over the same pavement, she was as much his own as if they stood with each other upon a deserted star.

"It has been so long since I really saw you," she said, after a moment's pause, "I wondered, at first, if you were ill, but had that been so I was sure you would have written me."

Even her voice, he thought, had altered; it was fuller, deeper, more exquisitely vibrant, as if some wonderful experience had enriched it.

"Connie was ill, not I," he answered quietly. "I took her South for a fortnight, and since getting back I've hardly been able to go anywhere except to the office."

She glanced at him with a sympathy in which he detected a slight surprise--for so long as Connie had been well and happy he had rarely mentioned her name even to his closest friends.

"I hope, at least, that she is better by now," responded Laura with conventional courtesy.

"Oh, yes, very much better," he replied; "but tell me of yourself--I want to hear of you. Is there other verse?"

For a minute she looked away to the rapidly moving vehicles in the street; then turning quickly toward him, she spoke with one of the impulsive gestures he had always found so charming and so characteristic.

"There is no verse--there will never be any more," she said. "Shall I tell you a secret?"

He bent his head. "A dozen if you like."

"Well, there's only one--it's this: I wasn't born to be a poet. It was all a big mistake, and I've found it out in plenty of time to stop. I'd rather do other things, you know; I'd rather live."

"Live," he repeated curiously; and the incidents of his own life flashed quickly, one by one, across his mind. Marriage, birth, death, the illusion of desire, the disenchantment of possession; to place one's faith in the external object and to stake one's happiness on the accident of events--did these things const.i.tute living for such as she?

"When you say 'life' do you not mean action?" he asked slowly.

"Oh, I want to be, to know, to feel," she replied almost impatiently. "I want to go through everything, to turn every page, to experience all that can be experienced upon the earth."

A smile was in his eyes as he shook his head. "And when you have accomplished all these interesting things," he said, "you will have gained from them--what? The lesson, learned perhaps in great sorrow, that the outward events in life are of no greater significance than the falling of the rain on the growing corn. Nothing that can happen or that cannot happen to one matters very much in the history of one's experience, and the biggest incident that ever came since the beginning of the world never brought happiness in itself alone. It may be," he added, with a tenderness which he made no effort to keep from his voice, "that you will arrive finally at the knowledge that all life is forfeiture in one way or another, and that the biggest thing in it is sometimes to go without."

His tone was not sad--the cheerful sound of it was what impressed her most, and when she looked up at him she was almost surprised by the smiling earnestness in his face.

"Do you mean that this is what you have learned?" she asked.

Her seriousness sent him off into his pleasant laugh. "Whatever I have learned it has not been ingrat.i.tude for a meeting like this," he responded gayly. "It is one of my unexpected joys."

"And yet it's a joy that you take small advantage of," she remarked.

"I'm almost always at home and I'm very often wishing that you would come. As a last test, will you dine with me to-morrow night?"

While she spoke, for the briefest flicker of her eyelashes, she saw him hesitate; then he shook his head.

"I fear I can't," he replied regretfully, "the nurse goes home, you see, and there's no one left with Connie. When she's well again I'll come gladly if you'll let me."

Her face flushed a little. "I'm sorry I asked you," she said; "I ought to have thought--to have known."

He felt the wrench within him as if he had torn out a living nerve, for it was the end between them and he had meant that it should be so. Life would have no compromises with illusions, he knew--not even with the last and the most beautiful of desires.

"On the other hand your wish made me very happy," he returned.

She had stopped when they reached a corner, and he realised, with a pang, that the chance meeting was at an end. As she stood there in the pale sunshine, his eyes hung upon her face with an intensity which seemed to hold in it something of the tragedy of a last parting. At the moment he told himself that so far as it lay in his power he would henceforth separate his life from hers; and as he made the resolution he knew that he would carry her memory like a white flame in his heart forever.

An instant afterward he went from her with a smile; and as she turned to look after him, moved by a sudden impulse, she felt a vague stir of pity for the gaunt figure pa.s.sing so rapidly along the crowded street. While she watched him she remembered that there were worn places on the coat he wore, and with one of the curious eccentricities of sentiment, this trivial detail served to surround him with a peculiar pathos.

CHAPTER VII

IN WHICH FAILURE IS CROWNED BY FAILURE

At one o'clock, when Adams left his office to go home to luncheon--a custom which he had not allowed himself to neglect since Connie's illness--he found Mr. Wilberforce just about to enter the building from the front on Union Square.

"Ah, I've caught you as I meant to," exclaimed the older man, with the cordial enthusiasm which Adams had always found so delightful. "It's been so long a time since I had a talk with you that I hope you'll come out somewhere to lunch?"

"I only wish I could manage it," replied Adams, "but I must look in for a minute on Mrs. Adams--she's been ill, you know."

He saw the surprise reflected in his companion's face as he had seen it a little earlier in Laura's; and at the same instant he felt a sensation of annoyance because of his inability to act upon his impulse of hospitality. He would have liked to take Mr. Wilberforce home with him; but remembering the probable quality of the luncheon which awaited him, he repressed the inclination.

"Is that so? I'm sorry to hear it," remarked the other in the conventional tone in which Adams' friends always spoke of Connie. "Well, I'll walk a block or two with you in your direction," he added as they turned toward Broadway. "Laura told me, by the way, that she was so fortunate as to have a glimpse of you this morning."

Adams nodded and then looked quickly away from the other's searching eyes. "Yes, we met rather early in the street," he responded; "she seems to me to be looking very well, and yet she's altered, somehow--I can't say exactly how or where."

"Then you've noticed it," returned Mr. Wilberforce, with a sigh, and he asked almost immediately: "Does she appear to you to be happier than she was?"