Athalie Part 59

She said, still gazing absently into the darkness: "Yes. But I am just beginning to wonder what it is that _I_ may have lost,--what it is that I have never known."

"Don't think of it! Don't permit anything I have said or done to trouble you or stir you toward such an awakening.... I don't want to stand charged with that. You are tranquil, now--"

"I--_was_."

"You are still!" he said in quick concern. "Listen, Athalie--the majority of men lose their grip at moments; men as irresolute as I lose it oftener. Don't waste sympathy on me; it was nothing but a whine born of a lesser impulse--born of emotions less decent than you could comprehend--"

"Maybe I am beginning to comprehend."

"You shall not! You shall remain as you are! Dear, don't you realise that I can't steady myself unless I can look up to you? You've raised yourself to where you stand; you've made your own pedestal. Look down at me from it; don't ever _step_ down; don't ever condescend; don't ever let me think you mortal. You are not, now. Don't ever descend entirely to my level--even if we marry."

She turned, smiling too wisely, yet adorably: "What endless romance there is in that boy's heart of yours! There always was,--when you came running back to me where I stood alone by the closed door,--when you found me living as all women who work live, and made a beautiful home for me and gave me more than I wished to take, asking nothing of me in return. Oh, Clive, you were chivalrous and romantic, too, when you listened to your mother's wishes and gave me up. I understand it so much better, now. I know how it was--with your father dead and your beautiful mother, broken, desolate, confiding to your keeping all her hope and pride and future happiness,--all the traditions of the family, and its dignity and honour!

"In the light of a clearer knowledge, do you suppose I blame you now?

Do you suppose I blame you for anything?--for your long and broken-hearted and bitter silence?--for the quick resurgence of your affection for me--for your love--Oh, Clive!--for your pa.s.sion?

"Do you suppose I think less of you because you love me--care for me in the many and inexplicable ways that a man cares for a woman?--because you want me as a man wants the woman he loves, as his wife if it may be so, as his _own_, anyhow?"

She let her eyes rest on him in a new and fearless comprehension, tender, curious, sad by turns.

"It is the romance of pa.s.sion in you that has been fighting to awaken the Sleeping Princess of a legend," she said with a slight smile; "it is the same illogical, impulsive romance that draws back just as her closed lids tremble, fearing to awaken her to the sorrows and temptations of a world which, after all, G.o.d made for us to wake in."

"Athalie! I am a scoundrel if I have--"

"Oh, Clive!" she laughed, mocking the solemn measure of her own words; "adorable boy of impulse and romance, never to outgrow its magic armour, destined always to be ruled by dreams through the sweetest and most generous of hearts, you need not fear for me. I am already awake--at least I am sufficiently aroused to understand you--and something, too, of my own self which I have never hitherto understood."

For a second, lightly, she rested her warm, fresh cheek against his.

When it was burning she disengaged her fingers from his and leaned aside against the rain-swept window.

"You see?" she said calmly but with heightened colour.... "I am very human after all.... But it is still my mind that rules, not my emotions."

She turned to him in her old sweetly humorous and mocking manner:

"That is all the romance of which I am capable, Clive--if there be any real romance in a very clear mind. For it is my intellect that must lead me to salvation or to destruction. If I am to come cras.h.i.+ng down at your feet, I shall have already planned the fall. If I am to be destroyed, it will not be by any accident of romantic emotion, of unconsidered impulse, or sudden blindness of pa.s.sion; it will be because my intelligence coolly courted destruction, and accepted every chance, every hazard."

So spoke Athalie, smiling, in the full confidence and pride of her superb youth, certain of the mind's autocracy over matter, lightly defying within herself the latent tempest, of which she as yet divined no more than the first exquisitely disturbing breeze;--deriding, too, the as yet unloosened bolts of the old G.o.ds themselves,--the white lightning of desire.

"Come," she said, half mockingly, half seriously, pa.s.sing her arm through Clive's;--"we are quite safe together in this safe and sane old world--unless _I_ choose--otherwise."

She turned and touched her lips lightly to his hair:

"So you may safely behave as irrationally, irresponsibly, and romantically as you choose.... As long as I now am wide awake."

And then, for the first time, he realised his utter responsibility to this girl who so gaily and audaciously relieved him of it. And he understood how pitifully unarmed she really stood, and how imminent the necessity for him to forge for himself the armour of character, and to wear it eternally for his own safety as well as hers.

"Good night, dear," he said.

In her new and magnificent self-confidence she turned and put both arms around his neck, drawing his lips against hers.

But after he had gone she leaned against the closed door, less confident, her heart beating too fast and hard to entirely justify this new enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the body, or her overwhelming faith in its wise and trusted guardian, the mind.

And he went soberly on his way through the rain to his hotel, troubled but determined upon his new role as his own soul's armourer. All that was in him of romance and of chivalry was responding pa.s.sionately to the girl's unconscious revelation of her new need.

For now he realised that her boasted armour was of gauze; he could see her naked heart beating behind it; he beheld, through the s.h.i.+eld she lifted on high to protect them both, the moon s.h.i.+ning with its false, reflected light.

Never did Athalie stand in such dire need of the armour she supposed that she was wearing.

And he must put on his own, rapidly, and rivet it fast--the inflexible mail of character which alone can s.h.i.+eld such souls as his--and hers.

When he came into his own room, a thick letter from his wife lay on the table. Before he broke the seal he laid aside his wet garments, being in no haste to read any more of the now incessant reproaches and complaints with which Winifred had recently deluged him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Finally ... he cut the envelope and seated himself beside the lamp."]

Finally, when he was ready, he cut the envelope and seated himself beside the lamp. She wrote from the house in Kent:

"It was a very different matter when you were travelling about and I could say that you were off on another exploring expedition. But your return from South America was mentioned in the London papers; and the fact that you are now not only in New York but that you have also gone into business there is known and is the subject of comment.

"I shall be, as usual, perfectly frank with you; I do not care whether you are here or not; in fact I infinitely prefer your absence to your presence. But your engaging in business in New York is a very different matter, and creates a different situation for me.

"You like to travel. Why don't you do it? I don't care to be the subject of gossip; and I shall be--am, no doubt, already,--because you are making the situation too plain and too public.

"It's well enough for one's friends to surmise the condition of affairs; no unpleasantness for me results. But let it once become newspaper gossip and my situation among people I most earnestly desire to cultivate would become instantly precarious and perhaps impossible.

"It is not necessary for me to inform you what is the very insecure status of an American woman here, particularly in view of the Court's well known state of mind concerning marital irregularities.

"The King's views coincide with the Queen's. And the Queen's are perfectly well known.

"If you continue your exploring expeditions, which you evidently like to engage in, and if you report here at intervals for the sake of appearances, I can get on very well and very comfortably. But if you settle in New York and engage in business there, and continue to remain away from this country where you are popularly supposed to maintain residences in town and country, I shall certainly begin to experience very disagreeably the consequences of your selfish conduct.

"Your reply to my last letter has thoroughly incensed me.

"You always have been selfish. From the time I had the misfortune to marry you I had to suffer from your selfish, self-centred, demonstrative, and rather common character--until you finally learned that demonstration is offensive to decent breeding, and that, although I happened to be married to you, I intended to keep to my own notions of delicacy, reserve, privacy, and self-respect.

"Of course you thought it a sufficient reason for us to have children merely because _you_ once thought you wanted them; and I shall not forget what was your brutal att.i.tude toward me when I told you very plainly that I refused to be saddled with the nasty, grubby little brats. Evidently you are incapable of understanding any woman who is not half animal.

"I did not desire children, and that ought to have been sufficient for you. I am not demonstrative toward anybody; I leave that custom to my servants. And is it any crime if the things that interest and appeal to you do not happen to attract me?

"And I'll tell you now that your subjects of conversation always bored me. I make no pretences; I frankly do not care for what you so smugly designate as 'the things of the mind'

and 'things worth while.' I am no hypocrite: I like well bred, well dressed people; I like what they do and say and think. Their characters may be negative as you say, but their poise and freedom from demonstration are most agreeable to me.

"You politely designated them as fools, and what they said you characterised as piffle. You had the exceedingly bad taste to sneer at various members of an ancient and established aristocracy--people who by inheritance from generations of social authority, require no toleration from such a man as you.

"These are the people who are my friends; among whom I enjoy an established position. This position you now threaten by coolly going into business in New York. In other and uglier words you advertise to the world that you have abandoned your home and wife.

"Of course I cannot help it if you insist on doing this common and disgraceful thing.

"And I suppose, considering the reigning family's att.i.tude toward divorce, that you believe me to be at your mercy.