"Oh, Morry!... What a fraud you are!..."

She laughed smotheredly like Lorelei through some soft, warm wave. "What an awful fraud you are, Morry!... You pay me compliments and all the time you're thinking what a nuisance it's going to be, having me at Newport this season!"

Loring looked at her oddly. Then he looked down at the white hand which still lay against his breast.

"Take your hand away, Linda!" he said curtly.

She took it away and turned it about before her in the moonlight, gazing at it consideringly.

"Poor little old hand!" she breathed pityingly. "You've offended the king...."

She held it up between them, again laughing.

"Must I cut it off?" she asked teasingly. "Will you cut it off for me and 'cast it into the fire'?"

Loring said nothing. He leaned there looking at her darkly. He hated her and desired her. It was the old emotion, under whose stress he had once kissed her, magnified tenfold.

She straightened suddenly and was close to him.

"Why are you so horrid to me, Morry?" she said, in a vehement whisper.

"What have I done to vex you? I think it's cruel of you ... my first evening at home ... my first 'grown-up' evening with you...."

He saw her lips trembling. It made him quite breathless to see those full, rich lips trembling so near his.

"I don't mean to be horrid," he said constrainedly.

"But you are ... you _are_!..." she insisted. Her voice hummed with pa.s.sion like a 'cello string. "You _are_!..." she repeated. "What have I done that you should order me not to touch you--as though my hand were poisonous?"

"I ... I'm nervous this evening...." he said lamely. He knew that he should have turned and gone forthwith into the drawing-room. He simply couldn't. The Purple Emperor aroma--the Belinda magic--held him thralled. Belinda wanted to fall forward on his breast and have her laugh out in the dark warmth of his embrace. But the time was not yet.

Some day they would laugh together with love's wild, kiss-broken laughter over this comic interview. But not now.

"Are you sorry you were so horrid?" she murmured.

"Oh, yes ... naturally!..."

She had her velvety finger-tips against his mouth in a flash.

"Then kiss it ... beg its pardon!" she said.

Loring s.n.a.t.c.hed down her hand and ground it between his.

"Linda! You little devil!... You little _devil_!..." he said.

He pushed her from him, then swung her to him violently. He loosed her hand and gripped her hard by both shoulders. This grip was brutal and painful. She found it delicious to be hurt by him. That was her type.

"Let me tell you ... let me tell you," he gasped, and this gasping voice also filled her with joy, "you'll play with fire once too often, my dear ... just once too often.... Burns don't make becoming scars.... Now leave me alone!"

He flung her off in good earnest this time, and strode away to the library. His pulses were racing--his blood pounding. He was scared. He did not mean to be false to Sophy for a worldful of Belindas. Not that his love for Sophy was what it had been. The old ardour was clean gone.

He found her cold. He felt cold to her. Yet something in him clung blindly to what had been--to the revealed self in him that Sophy had once called forth.

XXVI

According to agreement, Belinda arrived in Newport two weeks later, the day before the ball. When she came downstairs next evening, dressed for the occasion, Sophy thought that she had never seen so palpitantly gorgeous a creature. It was not her gown that was gorgeous, but the beauty that it illumined like sunlight catching a cloud. Belinda had told her step-mother that the regular dress of debutantes was "not her style." "I should look perfectly absurd in white or blue with rosebuds,"

she had said, with ac.u.men. So she had selected a costume of shaded apricot chiffon. The rich, fruit-coloured stuff made her breast and arms look white as peeled almonds.

An old necklace of brilliants and topaz lay like flecks of sunlight on her milky throat. Belinda never wore modern jewelry. She had an astonishing gift for decking her own rather extravagant beauty in precisely the right way. A twist of golden tissue was threaded in and out through her burnished hair, and held in place by a clot of topazes.

These jewels hid one ear, and their brilliant hardness cut against her cheek. It is impossible to describe the strange allurement of the glowing, yellow gems, thus pressed against the soft damask of the young cheek. An Eastern woman gets this effect by wearing heavy bangles that dent the flesh of the upper arm. Sophy could not explain why this cl.u.s.ter of topaz over Belinda's ear seemed to savour of perverseness--of an adroit and cunning perverseness. It was certainly charming--yet it repelled her. She reminded herself listlessly that Belinda's whole personality rather repelled her. It was a matter of temperamental aversion--for she felt sure that she also repelled Belinda.

Perhaps for this reason they were particularly civil to each other. And Sophy had certainly been kindness itself about this ball and the girl's visit to her. She had even chosen her gown for the evening with reference to Belinda's. She was all in black and silver. She looked pale--not her best. Those warm, dusky stains were too marked under her eyes. She felt at ebb-tide. But Belinda was like a great, joyous, sunlit, inrushing wave.

"You are very beautiful in that gown, Belinda," Sophy said. "You look like sunlight."

"And you look like moonlight--on lilies," said Belinda, who could say very pretty things when she chose. Yet as she said it she was thinking how glad she was that she herself was red-rose rather than lily! How typically a splendid tiger-lily she seemed in her orange gown, she could not have imagined. The black mole on her throat was just like the mark on a tiger-lily leaf.

When Loring joined them, he said:

"What the deuce! You look like a mandarin orange in all that yellow, Linda!..." But his eyes said something else. Belinda was quite satisfied. When he added fretfully: "Why d'you stick that lump of jewels over one ear, like that? This isn't Turkey or Hindustan...." she was more pleased than ever. She knew that the hard glitter against her soft cheek allured him, and that his pettishness only meant that he didn't wish to be allured. But his reasoned wishes didn't matter in the least to her. It was the unreasoning, uncontrollable wish at the depths of his nature that she meant to call forth. "Love" she named this Wish. The pride of the eye and the l.u.s.t of life seemed the true glories of being to Belinda. Her creed was simple. To love, to enjoy, to laugh with all the strength of one's body--these were the exhilarating ends of existence.

The ball went merrily. Belinda had the success that might easily have been predicted. In contrast with her, the other young girls seemed like pale-hued flowers on some tapestry at whose centre glows a rich blossom worked in gold. She danced and danced without getting dishevelled or red, or pale. She looked the embodied Joy of Living, as she swayed tirelessly, a faint, secret smile just parting her lips, her head thrown slightly back. And the young men with whom she danced seemed also washed out and inadequate beside her--very insufficient twigs to support the radiant, full-blown blossom of her beauty.

But as the evening wore on, though she still smiled, a little flame of anger and disappointment began to burn her heart. Morry was evidently hard-set against her. Not once had he asked her to dance. It was very shabby of him. It was cowardly. She knew very well that he was afraid of her. She loved his fear of her, but she hated this dull, "proper," tame resistance that wouldn't dare even one dance with her. Then suddenly her spirits leaped. There would be the Cotillion. He would _have_ to dance with her some time during the Cotillion! Her opportunity came with the "Mirror figure." She sat on a little gilded chair in the middle of the ballroom, one gold-shot foot thrust out. She was more than ever like Lorelei, as she sat there with the little silver mirror in her hand, coolly touching her tossed hair into place, while she waited for the swains to kneel foolishly before her.

Sophy, who had not danced this evening, stood near a doorway watching her. To her, the girl in her apricot draperies, looking at herself in the silver gla.s.s with such perfect _disinvolture_, seemed suddenly like a beautiful Falsehood who had stolen Truth's mirror and was trying to see what it revealed. For somehow, as she had watched her during the evening, the intuitive conviction had come to her that Belinda was very false. And yet Belinda was perfectly true--to herself. What to Sophy would have seemed falseness, would have seemed to Belinda "being true to herself." She really thought it "being true to herself" to take Morris for herself, if she could, by any means within the limits of conventional propriety and at any cost to any one--but herself and, within reason, him.

Young men by the score came and knelt at the golden shoes of Belinda.

She sent them all away, with the most charming effrontery. Then Sophy saw Loring approach. He looked pale and sulky.

She watched the two curiously. It seemed as if Belinda were going to flout Morris also. But all at once she laughed, and pressed the mirror against his upturned face. It was an odd gesture--almost like a caress.

Sophy thought that it displeased her because of something in it that she could only characterise as "bad form." The next moment, she saw Morris pull the girl rather roughly up into his arms, and waltz off with her.

A woman standing near by said spontaneously: "What a beautiful couple they make!"

Yes. Sophy saw that, too. They were really quite wonderful floating about to the sensuous rhythm in each other's arms. And all at once the thought flashed to her: "How well they suit each other in every way!"

She stood gazing after them--singling them out from the whirling throng.

And her thought returned to her, enlarged, more distinct: "He ought to have married her ... not me." The more she watched them, the more this thought possessed her. Belinda would not have bored him with ideals.

Belinda would not have been bored herself by the "social stunt" as exacted in New York and Newport. Belinda would have found that visit to England "bully fun." She would have joined with him in "poking up the highbrows." Nor would Belinda have objected to wine-bred love--of this, somehow, Sophy felt particularly sure. Yes; in all things they would have been fittingly mated. In age, in taste, in habits, in temperament.

Just here Loring himself pa.s.sed by her on his way out of the room. The waltz was over. He walked rapidly like a man towards some object. His face was white and set and his eyes black. Sophy could not know that he was drunk, not with wine but with Belinda. She slipped out into the hall after him. Only some servants were standing about--not near them. She detained him an instant, her hand on his arm. "Morris--don't be vexed...." she said very low. "But don't take any more--just this evening. Your cousin's first ball...."

He flung off her hand. His face worked. "For G.o.d's sake, go your way,"

he said, in a violent whisper, "and let me go mine! I'm tired of squatting on the steps of the temple. Let up on me, for G.o.d's sake! _I_ don't interfere with _you_!..."

He was gone. And obeying a very natural if reprehensible impulse, he drank a gla.s.s more of champagne than he had intended to before Sophy spoke.