"It isn't that now! I had forgotten everything to do with money and depended on you to take me away from it always."

"When will you marry me?"

In a flash of blinding perception, leaving her as dazed as though it had been a physical actuality, she realized that marrying him had become an impossibility. At the barest thought of it the dread again closed about her like ice. She tried, with all the force of old valuations, with even an effort to summon back the vanquished thrill, to give herself to him. But a quality overpowering and instinctive, the response of her incalculable injury, made any contact with him hateful. It was utterly beyond her power to explain. A greater mystery still partly unfolded--whatever she had hoped from Pleydon belonged to the special emotion that had possessed her since earliest childhood.

In the immediate tragedy of her helplessness, with Dodge Pleydon impatient for an a.s.surance, she paused involuntarily to wonder about that hidden imperative sense. There was a broken mental fantasy of--of a leopard bearing a woman in shining hair. This was succeeded by a bright thrust of happiness and, all about her, a surging like the imagined beat of the wings of the Victory in Markue's room. Almost Pleydon had explained everything, almost he was everything; and then the other, putting him aside, had swept her back into the misery of doubt and loneliness.

"I can't marry you," she said in a flat and dragged voice. He demanded abruptly:

"Why not?"

"I don't know." She recognized his utter right to the temper that mastered him. For a moment Linda thought Pleydon would shake her. "You feel that way now," he declared; "and perhaps next month; but you will change; in the end I'll have you."

"No," she told him, with a certainty from a source outside her consciousness. "It has been spoiled."

He replied, "Time will discover which of us is right. I'm almost willing to stay away till you send for me. But that would only make you more stubborn. What a strong little devil you are, Linda. I have no doubt I'd do better to marry a human being. Then I think we both forget how young you are--you can't pretend to be definite yet."

He captured her hands; too exhausted for any resentment or feeling she made no effort to evade him. "I'll never say good-bye to you."

His voice had the absolute quality of her own conviction. To her amazement her cheeks were suddenly wet with tears. "I want to go now,"

she said unsteadily; "and--and thank you."

His old easy formality returned as he made his departure. In reply to Pleydon's demand she told him listlessly that she would be here for, perhaps, a week longer. Then he'd see her, he continued, in New York, at the Feldts'.

In her room all emotion faded. Pleydon had said that she was still young; but she was sure she could never, in experience or feeling, be older. She became sorry for herself; or rather for the illusions, the Linda, of a few hours ago. She examined her features in the limited uncertain mirror--strong sensations, she knew, were a charge on the appearance--but she was unable to find any difference in her regular pallor. Then, mechanically conducting her careful preparations for the night, her propitiation of the only omnipotence she knew, she put out the candles of her May.

XXII

What welcome Linda met in New York came from Mr. Moses Feldt, who embraced her warmly enough, but with an air slightly ill at ease. He begged her to kiss her mama, who was sometimes hurt by Linda's coldness.

She made no reply, and found the same influence and evidence of the power of suggestion in Judith. "We thought maybe you wouldn't care to come back here," the latter said pointedly, over her shoulder, while she was directing the packing of a trunk. The Feldts were preparing for their summer stay at the sea.

Her mother's room resembled one of the sales of obvious and expensive attire conducted in the lower salons of pleasure hotels. There were airy piles of chiffon and satin, inappropriate hats and the inevitable confections of silk and lace. "It's not necessary to ask if you were right at home with your father's family," Mrs. Condon observed with an a.s.sumed casual inattention. "I can see you sitting with those old women as dry and false as any. No one saved me in the clacking, I'm sure."

"We didn't speak of you," Linda replied. She studied, unsparing, the loose flesh of the elder's ravaged countenance. Her mother, she recognized, hated her, both because she was like Bartram Lowrie and still young, with everything unspent that the other valued and had lost.

In support of herself Mrs. Feldt a.s.serted again that she had "lived,"

with stacks of friends and flowers, lavish parties and devoted attendance.

"You may be smarter than I was," she went on, "but what good it does you who can say? And if you expect to get something for nothing you're fooled before you start." She shook out the airy breadths of a vivid echo of past daring. "From the way you act a person might think you were pretty, but you are too thin and pulled out. I've heard your looks called peculiar, and that was, in a manner of speaking, polite. You're not even stylish any more--the line is full again and not suitable for bony shoulders and no bust." She still cherished a complacency in her amplitude.

Linda turned away unmoved. Of all the world, she thought, only Dodge Pleydon had the power actually to hurt her. She knew that she would see him soon again and that again he would ask her to marry him. She considered, momentarily, the possibility of saying yes; and instantly the dread born with him in the Lowrie garden swept over her. Linda told herself that he was the only man for whom she could ever deeply care; that--for every conceivable reason--such a marriage was perfect. But the shrinking from its implications grew too painful for support.

Her mother's bitterness increased hourly; she no longer hid her feelings from her husband and Judith; and dinner, accompanied by her elaborate sarcasm, was a difficult period in which, plainly, Mr. Moses Feldt suffered most and Linda was the least concerned. This condition, she admitted silently, couldn't go on indefinitely; it was too vulgar if for no other reason. And she determined to ask the Lowries for another and more extended invitation.

Pleydon came, as she had expected, and they sat in the small reception-room with the high ceiling and dark velvet hangings, the piano at which, long ago it now seemed, Judith had played the airs of Gluck for her. He said little, but remained for a long while spread over the divan and watching her--in a formal chair--discontentedly. He rose suddenly and stood above her, a domineering bulk obliterating nearly everything else. In response to his demand she said, pale and composed, that she was not "reasonable"; she omitted the "yet" included in his question. Pleydon frowned. However, then, he insisted no further.

When he had gone Linda was as spent as though there had been a fresh brutal scene; and the following day she was enveloped in an unrelieved depression. Her mother mocked her silence as another evidence of ridiculous pretentiousness. Mr. Moses Feldt regarded her with a furtive concerned kindliness; while Judith followed her with countless small irritating complaints. It was the last day at the apartment before their departure for the summer. Linda was insuperably tired. She had gone to her room almost directly after dinner, and when a maid came to her door with a card, she exclaimed, before looking at it, that she was not in.

It was, however, Arnaud Hallet; and, with a surprise tempered by a faint interest, she told the servant that she would see him.

There was, Linda observed at once, absolutely no difference in Arnaud's clothing, no effort to make himself presentable for New York or her. In a way, it amused her--it was so characteristic of his forgetfulness, and it made him seem doubly familiar. He waved a hand toward the luxury of the interior. "This," he declared, "is downright impressive, and lifted, I'm sure, out of a novel of Ouida's.

"You will remember," he continued, "complaining about my sense of humor one evening; and that, at the time, I warned you it might grow worse.

It has. I am afraid, where you are concerned, that it has absolutely vanished. My dear, you'll recognize this as a proposal. I thought my mind was made up, after forty, not to marry; and I specially tried not to bring you into it. You were too young, I felt. I doubted if I could make you happy, and did everything possible, exhausted all the arguments, but it was no good.

"Linda, dear, I adore you."

She was glad, without the slightest answering emotion, that Arnaud, well--liked her. At the same time all her wisdom declared that she couldn't marry him; and, with the unsparing frankness of youth and her individual detachment, she told him exactly why.

"I need a great deal of money," she proceeded, "because I am frightfully extravagant. All I have is expensive; I hate cheap things--even what satisfies most rich girls. Why, just my satin slippers cost hundreds of dollars and I'll pay unlimited amounts for a little fulling of lace or some rare flowers. You'd call it wicked, but I can't help it--it's me.

"I've always intended to marry a man with a hundred thousand dollars a year. Of course, that's a lot--do you hate me for telling you?--but I wouldn't think of any one with less than fifty--"

Arnaud Hallet interrupted quietly, "I have that."

Linda gazed incredulously at his neglected shoes, the wrinkles of his inconsiderable coat and unstudied scarf. She saw that, actually, he had spoken apologetically of his possessions; and a stinging shame spread through her at the possibility that she had seemed common to an infinitely finer delicacy than hers.

XIII

Most of these circ.u.mstances Linda Hallet quietly recalled sitting with her husband in the house that had been occupied by the Lowries'. A letter from Pleydon had taken her into a past seven years gone by; while ordinarily her memory was indistinct; ordinarily she was fully occupied by the difficulties, or rather compromises, of the present. But, in the tranquil open glow of a Franklin stove and the withdrawn intentness of Arnaud reading, her mind had returned to the distressed period of her wedding.

Elouise Lowrie--Amelia was dead--sunk in a stupor of extreme old age, her bloodless hands folded in an irreproachable black surah silk lap, sat beyond the stove; and Lowrie, Linda's elder child, five and a half, together with his sister Vigne, had been long asleep above. Linda was privately relieved by this: her children presented enormous obligations.

The boy, already at a model school, appalled her inadequate preparations by his flashes of perceptive intelligence; while she was frankly abashed at the delicate rosy perfection of her daughter.

The present letter was the third she had received from Dodge Pleydon, whom she had not seen since her marriage. At first he had been enraged at the wrong, he had every reason to feel, she had done him. Then his anger had dissolved into a meager correspondence of outward and obvious facts. There was so much that she had been unable to explain. He had always been impatient, even contemptuous, of the emotion that made her surrender to him unthinkable--Linda realized now that it had been the strongest impulse of her life--and, of course, she had never accounted for the practically unbalanced enmity of her mother.

The latter had deepened to an incredible degree, so much so that Mr.

Moses Feldt, though he had never taken an actual part in it--such bitterness was entirely outside his generous sentimentality--had become acutely uncomfortable in his own home, imploring Linda, with ready tears, to be kinder to her mama. Judith, too, had grown cutting, jealous of Linda's serenity of youth, as her appearance showed the effect of her wasting emotions. Things quite extraordinary had happened: once Linda's skin had been almost seriously affected by an irritation that immediately followed the trace of her powder-puff; and at several times she had had clumsily composed anonymous notes of a most distressing nature.

She had wondered, calmly enough, which of the two bitter women were responsible, and decided that it was her mother. At this the situation at the Feldts', increasingly strained, had become an impossibility.

Arnaud Hallet, after his first visit, had soon returned. There was no more mention of his money; but every time he saw her he asked her again, in his special manner--a formality flavored by a slight diffident humor--to marry him. Arnaud's proposals had alternated with Pleydon's utterly different demand.

Linda remembered agonized evenings when, in a return of his brutal manner of the unforgettable night in the Lowrie garden, he tried to force a recognition of his pa.s.sion. It had left her cold, exhausted, the victim of a mingled disappointment at her failure to respond with a hatred of all essential existence. At last, on a particularly trying occasion, she had desperately agreed to marry him.

The aversion of her mother, becoming really dangerous, had finally appalled her; and a headache weighed on her with a leaden pain. Dodge, too, had been unusually considerate; he talked about the future--tied up, he a.s.serted, in her--of his work; and suddenly, at the signal of her rare tears, Linda agreed to a wedding.

In the middle of the night she had wakened oppressed by a dread resulting in an uncontrollable chill. She thought first that her mother was bending a malignant face over her; and then realized that her feeling was caused by her promise to Dodge Pleydon. It had grown worse instead of vanishing, waves of nameless shrinking swept over her; and in the morning, further harrowed by the actualities of being, she had sent a telegram to Arnaud Hallet--to Arnaud's kindness and affection, his detachment not unlike her own.

They were married immediately; and through the ceremony and the succeeding days she had been almost entirely absorbed in a sensation of escape. At the death of Amelia Lowrie, soon after, Arnaud had suggested a temporary period in the house she remembered with pleasure; and, making small alterations with the months and years, they had tacitly agreed to remain.

Linda often wondered, walking about the lower floor, why it seemed so familiar to her: she would stand in the dining-room, with its ceiling of darkened beams, and gaze absent-minded through the long windows at the close-cut walled greenery without. The formal drawing-room, at the right of the street entrance, equally held her--a cool interior with slatted wooden blinds, a white mantelpiece with delicately reeded supports and a bas-relief of Minerva on the center panel, a polished bra.s.s scuttle for cannel-coal and chairs with wide severely fretted backs upholstered in old pale damask.

The house seemed familiar, but she could never grow accustomed to the undeniable facts of her husband, the children and her completely changed atmosphere. She admitted to herself that her princ.i.p.al feeling in connection with Lowrie and Vigne was embarra.s.sment. Here she always condemned herself as an indifferent, perhaps unnatural, mother. She couldn't help it. In the same sense she must be an unsatisfactory wife.