Paula began to breathe a bit more freely. "Didn't he write?"

"Yes, at first, but I saw at once he was forcing. Then he dictated an answer to one of mine--dictated a letter to me----" Selma Cross halted.

The lids narrowed across her yellow eyes.

"He had said he loved you?" Paula asked with effort.

"By the way," Selma Cross retorted, "did you notice that word 'love' in either of his recent books--except as a generality?"

"Since you speak of it, I do recall he markedly avoided it," Paula said with consuming interest.

"No, he didn't use it to me. He said he never put it in a man's or woman's mouth in a story. Ah, but there are other words," she went on softly. "The man was a lover--beyond dreams--impa.s.sioned."

"About that dictated letter?" Paula urged hastily.

"Yes, I told him I didn't want any more that way. Then Villiers was back, and beckoning again. The last word I received was from Charter's stenographer. She said he was ill. Oh, I did hear afterward--that he was in a sanatorium. G.o.d knows, he must have landed there--if he kept up the pace he was going when I knew him."

In the moment of silence which followed, Paula was hoping with all her might--that this was the end.

"Oh, I know what you're thinking!" Selma said suddenly. "He has fascinated you, and you can't see that he's a rotten cad--from what I've said so far. A woman can never see the meanness of a man from another woman's experience with him. She forgives him for calling forth all another woman has--and then shaking her loose like a soiled bath-robe when one's tub is ready. But it's different when she's the discarded woman!... He was so deep, I can't believe he didn't know that episodes were new to me. Likely, he's had so many around the world, that he can't take them more seriously from the woman's angle--than from his own....

Quentin Charter was the first man to arouse all my dreams. Can't you see how it hurt when he turned out to be--well, that name you refuse to utter?"

"Yes, of course, yes, but you suggest more, Selma!"

"He used me for 'copy,' as they call it. His article on the 'acting of stage-folk after hours,' appeared in a magazine a few weeks later. He's always a saint in his garret, you know. The article was filled with cutting cynicism about stage-matters, many of which he had discovered in the two weeks with me--and laughed over with his wine. I could have forgiven that, only he made me believe that there was not a thought apart from Selma Cross in his mind when we were together.... Oh, what's the use of me lying? I could have forgiven that, anyway!"

"What was it, you could not forgive?" Paula's face was bloodless.

"He told it all about--how easy I had proved in his hands!" the actress revealed with suppressed fury.

The other shrank back.

"That's where the expression comes in, Paula--the expression you hate.

Drunk or sober--cad's the word. What a woman gives to a _man_ is put in his inner vault forever. What she gives to a _cad_--is pa.s.sed on to his friends."

Paula arose, tortured as if branded within. Here was a defection of character which an entire incarnation of purity could not make whole. It was true that in her heart, she had not been mortally stricken before; true, as Selma Cross had so bitterly declared, that a woman is not stayed from mating with a man because a sister has suffered at his hands.

"I have nothing to say about the word, if that is true." Paula spoke with difficulty, and in a hopeless tone.

"Please, eat some supper, dear----"

There was heart-break in the answer: "I cannot. I'm distressed, because I have spoiled yours.... You have answered everything readily--and it has hurt you.... I--feel--as--if--I--must--tell--you--why--I--asked--or I wouldn't have dared to force questions upon you. His letters made me think of him a great deal. When you picked up his book the other morning and said _that_--why, it was all I could stand for the time. His work is so high and brave--I can hardly understand how he could talk about a woman whose only fault was that she gave him what he desired. Are you sure he cannot prove that false?"

Selma Cross left her seat at the table and took Paula in her arms.

"How can he?" she whispered. "The old man knew all about us. One of his friends heard Charter talking about the easy virtue of stage women--that there were scarcely no exceptions! Charter hinted in his article that acting is but refined prost.i.tution. Villiers said because I had a name for being square Charter had chosen to prove otherwise!... Then see how he dropped me--not a word in three years from my memorable lover! And Villiers knew about us--first and last!... I could murder that sort--and to think that his devil's gift has been working upon you----"

"You have told me quite enough, thank you." Paula interrupted in a lifeless voice. "I shall not see him."

Selma Cross held her off at arms' length to glance at her face. "You what?" she exclaimed.

"He is on the way to New York and will be at the _Granville_ to-morrow afternoon, where he hopes to find a note saying he may call here to-morrow night. There shall be no note from me----"

"But did you write to him, Paula?" the actress asked strangely excited.

"Yes--a little after you left me the other morning. It was silly of me.

Oh, but I did not tell him what I had heard--or who told me!... Finish your supper--you must go."

"And how did you learn of his coming?"

"He telegraphed me to-day. That's why I bothered you at your supper----"

"What a dramatic situation--if you decided to see him!" Selma Cross said intensely. "And to think--that to-morrow is Sunday night and I don't work!"

Paula felt brutalized by the change in the other's manner. "I have decided not to see him," she repeated, and left the apartment.

TWELFTH CHAPTER

CERTAIN ELEMENTS FOR THE CHARTER CRUCIBLE, AND HIS MOTHER'S PILGRIMAGE ACROSS THE SANDS ALONE TO MECCA

Charter had come a long way very swiftly in his search for realities. If it is required of man, at a certain stage of evolution, to possess a working knowledge of the majority of possible human experiences, in order to choose wisely between good and evil, Charter had, indeed, covered much ground in his thirty-three years. As a matter of fact, there were few degrees in the masonry of sensation, into which he had not been initiated. His was the name of a race of wild, sensual, physical types; a name still held high in old-world authority, and identified with men of heavy hunting, heavy dining and drinking. The Charters had always been admired for high temper and fair women. True, there was not a germ of the present Charter mental capacity in the whole race of such men commonly mated, but Quentin's father had married a woman with a marvellous endurance in prayer--that old, dull-looking formula for producing sons of strength. A silent woman, she was, a reverent woman, an angry woman, with the stuff of martyrdoms in her veins.

Indeed, in her father, John Quentin, reformer, there were stirring materials for memory. His it was to ride and preach, to excoriate evil and depict the good, with the blessing of a living G.o.d shining bright and directly upon it. A bracing figure, this Grandfather Quentin, an ethereal bloom at the top of a tough stalk of Irish peasantry. First, as a soldier in the British army he was heard of, a stripling with a girl's waist, a pigeon breast, and the soul's divinity breathing itself awake within. His was a poet's rapture at the sight of morning mists, wrestling with the daybreak over the mountains; and everywhere his regiment went, were left behind Quentin's songs--crude verses of a minor singer, never seeking permanence more than Homer; and everywhere, he set about to correct the degradations of men, absolutely unscared and grandly improvident. A fighter for simple loving-kindness in the heart of man, a worshiper of the bright fragment of truth vouchsafed to his eyes, a lover of children, a man who walked thrillingly with a personal G.o.d, and was so glorified and ignited by the spirit that, every day, he strode singing into battle. Such was John Quentin, and from him, a living part of his own strong soul, sprang the woman who mothered Quentin Charter, sprang pure from his dreams and meditations, and doubtless with his prayer for a great son, marked in the scroll of her soul.... For to her, bringing a man into the world meant more than a bleak pa.s.sage of misery begun with pa.s.sion and ended with pain.

Her single bearing of fruit was a solitary pilgrimage. From the hour of the conception, she drew apart with her own ideals, held herself aloof from fleshly things, almost as one without a body. Charter, the strongly-s.e.xed, her merchant-husband, the laughing, scolding, joking gunner; admirable, even delightful, to Nineteenth Century men of hot dinners and stimulated nights--showed her all that a man must _not_ be.

Alone, she crossed the burning sands; cleansed her body and brain in the cool of evenings, expanded her soul with dreams projected far into the glistening purple heavens and whispered the psalms and poems which had fed the lyric hunger of her father.

It glorified her temples to brood by an open window upon the night-sky; to conceive even the garment's hem of that Inspiring Source, to Whom solar systems are but a glowworm swarm, and the soul of man mightier than them all. Sometimes she carried the concept farther, until it seemed as if her heart must cease to beat: that this perfecting fruit of the universe, the soul of man, must be imprisoned for a time in the womb of woman; that the Supreme seemed content with this humble mystery, nor counted not aeons spent, nor burnt-out suns, nor wasting myriads that devastate the habitable crusts--if only One smile back at Him at last; if only at last, on some chilling planet's rim, One Worthy Spirit lift His l.u.s.trous pinions and ascend out of chaos to the Father.

The spirit of her own father was nearer to her in this wonderful pilgrimage than her husband, to whom she was cold as Etruscan gla.s.ses in the deep-delved earth (yet filled with what fiery potential wine!). He called her Mistress Ice, brought every art, lure, and expression in the Charter evolution to bear upon her; yet, farther and farther into heights he could not dream, she fled with her forming babe. Many mysteries were cleared for her during this exalted period--though clouded later by the pangs of parturition.... Once, in the night, she had awakened with a sound in her room. At first she thought it was her husband, but she heard his breathing from the next chamber. At length before her window, shadowed against the faint light of the sky, appeared the head and shoulders of a man. He was less than ten feet from her, and she heard the rustle of his fingers over the dresser. For an instant she endured a horrible, stifling, feminine fright, but it was superseded at once by a fine a.s.sembling of faculties under the control of genuine courage. The words she whispered were quite new to her.

"I don't want to have to kill you," she said softly. "Put down what you have and go away--hurry."

The burglar fled quietly down the front stairs, and she heard the door shut behind him. Out of her trembling was soon evolved the consciousness of some great triumph, the nature of which she did not yet know. It was pure ecstasy that the realization brought. The courage which had steadied her through the crisis was not her own, but from the man's soul she bore! There was never any doubt after that, she was to bear a son.

There is a rather vital defect in her pursuing the way alone, even though a great transport filled the days and nights. The complete alienation of her husband was a fact. This estranged the boy from his father. Except as the sower, the latter had no part in the life-garden of Quentin Charter. The mother realized in later years that she might have ignored less and explained more. The fear of a lack of sympathy had given her a separateness which her whole married life afterward reflected. She had disdained even the minor feminine prerogative of acting. Her husband had a quick, accurate physical brain which, while it could not have accompanied nor supported in her sustained inspiration, might still have comprehended and laughingly admired. Instead, she had been as wholly apart from him as a memory. Often, in the great weariness of continued contemplation, her spirit had cried out for the sustenance which only a real mate could bring, the gifts of a kindred soul. Many times she asked: "Where is the undiscovered master of my heart?"

There was no one to replenish within her the mighty forces she expended to nurture the spiritual elements of her child. A lover of changeless chivalry might have given her a prophet, instead of a genius, pitifully enmeshed in fleshly complications. In her developed the concept (and the mark of it lived afterward with glowing power in the mind of her son)--the thrilling possibility of a union, in the supreme sense of the word, a Union of Two to form One....

Charter, the boy, inherited a sense of the importance of the "I." In his earlier years all things moved about the ego. By the time of his first letter to Paula Linster, the world had tested the Charter quality, but to judge by the years previous, more specifically by the decade bounded by his twentieth and thirtieth birthdays, it would have appeared that apart from endowing the young man with a fine and large brain-surface, the Charter elements had triumphed over the mother's meditations. To a very wise eye, acquainted with the psychic and material aspects of the case, the fact would have become plain that the hot, raw blood of the Charters had to be cooled, aged, and refined, before the exalted spirit of the Quentins could manifest in this particular instrument. It would have been a very fascinating natural experiment had it not been for the fear that the boy's body would be destroyed instead of refined.

His mother's abhorrence for the gross animalism of drink, as she discovered it in her husband (though the tolerant world did not call him a drunkard), was by no means reflected intact in the boy's mind. A vast field of surface-tissue, however, was receptive to the subject. Quentin was early interested in the effects of alcohol, and entirely unafraid.

He had the perversity to believe that many of his inclinations must be worn-out, instead of controlled. As for his ability to control anything about him, under the pressure of necessity, he had no doubt of this.

Drink played upon him warmly. His young men and women a.s.sociates found the stimulated Charter an absolutely new order of human enchantment--a young man lit with humor and wisdom, girded with chivalry, and a delight to the emotions. Indeed, it was through these that the young man's spirit for a s.p.a.ce lost the helm. It was less for his fine physical attractions than for the play of his emotions that his intimates loved him. From his moods emanated what seemed to minds youthful as his own, all that was brave and true and tender. An evening of wine, and Charter dwelt in a house of dreams, to which came fine friendships, pa.s.sionate amours, the truest of verses and the sweetest songs. Often he came to dwell in this house, calling it life--and his mother wept her nights away. Her husband was long dead, but she felt that something, named Charter, was battling formidably for the soul of her boy. She was grateful for his fine physique, grateful that his emotions were more delicately attuned than any of his father's breed, but she had not prayed for these. She knew the ghastly mockeries which later come to haunt these houses of dreams. Such was not her promise of fulfilment.

She had not crossed the deserts and mountains alone to Mecca for a verse-maker--a bit of proud flesh for women to adore.... Charter, imperious with his stimulus, wise in his imagined worldliness, thought he laughed away his mother's fears.