The Way of Ambition Part 118

His eyes shone as he said the last words. They were suddenly the eyes not of a man crushed but of a man released.

She felt a pang of deadly cold at her heart.

"In--freedom?" she almost whispered.

She had believed that the failure of all her hopes, the failure before the world of which she no longer dared to cherish any lingering doubt, had completely overwhelmed her.

In this moment she knew it had not been so, for abruptly she saw a void opening in her life, under her feet, as it were. And she knew that till this moment even in the midst of ruin she had been standing on firm ground.

"In freedom!" she said again. "What--what do you mean?"

He was silent. A change had come into his face, a faint and dawning look of surprise.

"What do you mean?" she repeated.

And now there was a sharp edge to her voice.

"That I must take back the complete artistic freedom which I have never had since we married, that I must have it as I had it before I ever saw you."

She got slowly up from the sofa.

"Is that--all you mean?" she said.

"All! Isn't it enough?"

"But is it all? I want to know--I must know!"

The look in her face startled him. Never before had he seen her look like that. Never had he dreamed that she could look like that. It was as if womanhood surged up in her. Her face was distorted, was almost ugly.

The features seemed suddenly sharpened, almost horribly salient. But her eyes held an expression of anxiety, of hunger, of something else that went to his heart. He dropped his hand from the piano and moved nearer to her.

"Is that all you meant by freedom?"

"Yes."

She sighed and went forward against him.

"Did you think--do you care?" he stammered.

All the dominating force had suddenly departed from him. But he put his arms around her.

"Do you care for the man who has failed?"

"Yes, yes!"

She put her arms slowly, almost feebly, round his neck.

"Yes, yes, yes!"

She kept on repeating the word, breathing it against his cheek, breathing it against his lips, till his lips stifled it on hers.

At last she took her lips away. Their eyes almost touched as she gazed into his, and said:

"It was always the man. Perhaps I didn't know it, but it was--the man, not the triumph."

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII

"And you really mean to give up Kensington Square and the studio, and to take Djenan-el-Maqui for five years?" said Mrs. Mansfield to Charmian on a spring evening, as they sat together in the former's little library on the first floor of the house in Berkeley Square.

"Yes, my only mother, if--there's always an 'if' in our poor lives, isn't there?"

"If?" said her mother gently.

"If you will occasionally brave the Gulf of Lyons and come to us in the winter. In the summer we shall generally come back to you."

Mrs. Mansfield looked into the fire for a moment. Caroline lay before it in mild contentment, unchanged, unaffected by the results of America.

Enough for her if a pleasant warmth from the burning logs played agreeably about her lemon-colored body, enough for her if the meal of dog biscuit soaked in milk was set before her at the appointed time. She sighed now, but not because she heard discussion of Djenan-el-Maqui. Her delicate noise was elicited by the point of her mistress's shoe, which at this moment pressed her side softly, moving her loose skin to and fro.

"The Gulf of Lyons couldn't keep me from coming," Mrs. Mansfield said at last. "Yes, I daresay I shall see you in that Arab house, Charmian.

Claude wishes to go there again?"

"It is Claude who has decided the whole thing."

Charmian's voice held a new sound. Mrs. Mansfield looked closely at her daughter.

"You see, Madre, he and I--well, I think we have earned our retreat.

We--we did stand up to the failure. We went to the first night of Jacques Sennier's new opera and helped, as everyone in an audience can help, to seal its triumph. I--I went round to Madame Sennier's box with Claude--Adelaide s.h.i.+ffney and Armand Gillier were in it!--and congratulated her. Madre, we faced the music."

Her voice quivered slightly. Mrs. Mansfield impulsively took her child's hands and held them.

"We faced the music. Claude is strong. I never knew what he was before.

Without that tremendous failure I never should have known him. He helped me. I didn't know one human being could help another as Claude helped me after the failure of the opera. Even Mr. Crayford admired him. He said to me the last day, when we were going to start for the s.h.i.+p: 'Well, little lady, you've married the biggest failure we've brought over here in my time, but you have married a man!' And I said--I said--"

"Yes, my only child?"

"'I believe that's all a woman wants.'"

"Is it?"

Mrs. Mansfield's dark, intense eyes searched Charmian's.

"Is it all that _you_ want?"

"You mean--?"