Zuleika Dobson Part 32

"Your own heart was never touched?"

"Never, until I met Laura Frith."

"Who was she?"

"She was my future wife."

"And how was it you singled her out from the rest? Was she very beautiful?"

"No. It cannot be said that she was beautiful. Indeed, she was accounted plain. I think it was her great dignity that attracted me. She did not smile archly at me, nor shake her ringlets. In those days it was the fashion for young ladies to embroider slippers for such men in holy orders as best pleased their fancy. I received hundreds--thousands--of such slippers. But never a pair from Laura Frith."

"She did not love you?" asked Zuleika, who had seated herself on the floor at her grandfather's feet.

I concluded that she did not. It interested me very greatly. It fired me.

"Was she incapable of love?"

"No, it was notorious in her circle that she had loved often, but loved in vain."

"Why did she marry you?"

"I think she was fatigued by my importunities. She was not very strong.

But it may be that she married me out of pique. She never told me. I did not inquire."

"Yet you were very happy with her?"

"While she lived, I was ideally happy."

The young woman stretched out a hand, and laid it on the clasped hands of the old man. He sat gazing into the past. She was silent for a while; and in her eyes, still fixed intently on his face, there were tears.

"Grand-papa dear"--but there were tears in her voice, too.

"My child, you don't understand. If I had needed pity--"

"I do understand--so well. I wasn't pitying you, dear, I was envying you a little."

"Me?--an old man with only the remembrance of happiness?"

"You, who have had happiness granted to you. That isn't what made me cry, though. I cried because I was glad. You and I, with all this great span of years between us, and yet--so wonderfully alike! I had always thought of myself as a creature utterly apart."

"Ah, that is how all young people think of themselves. It wears off.

Tell me about this wonderful resemblance of ours."

He sat attentive while she described her heart to him. But when, at the close of her confidences, she said, "So you see it's a case of sheer heredity, grand-papa," the word "Fiddlesticks!" would out.

"Forgive me, my dear," he said, patting her hand. "I was very much interested. But I do believe young people are even more staggered by themselves than they were in my day. And then, all these grand theories they fall back on! Heredity... as if there were something to baffle us in the fact of a young woman liking to be admired! And as if it were pa.s.sing strange of her to reserve her heart for a man she can respect and look up to! And as if a man's indifference to her were not of all things the likeliest to give her a sense of inferiority to him! You and I, my dear, may in some respects be very queer people, but in the matter of the affections we are ordinary enough."

"Oh grand-papa, do you really mean that?" she cried eagerly.

"At my age, a man husbands his resources. He says nothing that he does not really mean. The indifference between you and other young women is that which lay also between me and other young men: a special attractiveness... Thousands of slippers, did I say? Tens of thousands. I had h.o.a.rded them with a fatuous pride. On the evening of my betrothal I made a bonfire of them, visible from three counties. I danced round it all night." And from his old eyes darted even now the reflections of those flames.

"Glorious!" whispered Zuleika. "But ah," she said, rising to her feet, "tell me no more of it--poor me! You see, it isn't a mere special attractiveness that _I_ have. _I_ am irresistible."

"A daring statement, my child--very hard to prove."

"Hasn't it been proved up to the hilt to-day?"

"To-day?... Ah, and so they did really all drown themselves for you?...

Dear, dear!... The Duke--he, too?"

"He set the example."

"No! You don't say so! He was a greatly-gifted young man--a true ornament to the College. But he always seemed to me rather--what shall I say?--inhuman... I remember now that he did seem rather excited when he came to the concert last night and you weren't yet there... You are quite sure you were the cause of his death?"

"Quite," said Zuleika, marvelling at the lie--or fib, rather: he had been GOING to die for her. But why not have told the truth? Was it possible, she wondered, that her wretched vanity had survived her renunciation of the world? Why had she so resented just now the doubt cast on that irresistibility which had blighted and cranked her whole life?

"Well, my dear," said the Warden, "I confess that I am amazed--astounded." Again he adjusted his gla.s.ses, and looked at her.

She found herself moving slowly around the study, with the gait of a mannequin in a dress-maker's show-room. She tried to stop this; but her body seemed to be quite beyond control of her mind. It had the insolence to go ambling on its own account. "Little s.p.a.ce you'll have in a convent cell," snarled her mind vindictively. Her body paid no heed whatever.

Her grandfather, leaning back in his chair, gazed at the ceiling, and meditatively tapped the finger-tips of one hand against those of the other. "Sister Zuleika," he presently said to the ceiling.

"Well? and what is there so--so ridiculous in"--but the rest was lost in trill after trill of laughter; and these were then lost in sobs.

The Warden had risen from his chair. "My dear," he said, "I wasn't laughing. I was only--trying to imagine. If you really want to retire from--"

"I do," moaned Zuleika.

"Then perhaps--"

"But I don't," she wailed.

"Of course, you don't, my dear."

"Why, of course?"

"Come, you are tired, my poor child. That is very natural after this wonderful, this historic day. Come dry your eyes. There, that's better.

To-morrow--"

"I do believe you're a little proud of me."

"Heaven forgive me, I believe I am. A grandfather's heart--But there, good night, my dear. Let me light your candle."

She took her cloak, and followed him out to the hall table. There she mentioned that she was going away early to-morrow.

"To the convent?" he slyly asked.

"Ah, don't tease me, grand-papa."