MARISE LOOKS AND SEES WHAT IS THERE

_A Torch in a Living Tree_

July 24.

Not since his fiery, ungovernable youth had Vincent felt anything like the splendid surge of rich desire and exultant certainty which sent him forward at a bound along the wood-road into which he had seen Marise turn. The moment he had been watching for had come at last, after these three hideous days of sudden arrest and pause. The forced inaction had been a sensation physically intolerable to him, as though he had been frozen immobile with every nerve and muscle strained for a great leap.

He felt himself taking the leap now, with such a furious, triumphant sense of power released, that he came up beside her like a wind in the forest, calling her name loudly, his hands outflung, his face glowing, on fire with joy and his need for her.

For an instant he was dumfounded by the quiet face she turned on him, by his instant perception of a profound change in her, by an expression in her long dark eyes which was new to him, which he felt to be ominous to him. But he was no untried boy to be cast down or disconcerted by sudden alterations of mood in a woman. He was a man, with a man's trained tenacity of purpose and experienced quickness of resource.

He wasted no time. "What has happened to you?" he demanded, peremptorily as by right to know, and with the inner certainty of over-riding it, whatever it was.

She did not seem tacitly or otherwise to deny his right to know, but she seemed to have no words for it, continuing to look at him silently, intently, with no hostility, with a sort of steady, wondering attention in her face, usually so sensitively changing. He felt a resentment at its quiet, at its lack of that instant responsiveness to his look which had given him such moments of exquisite pleasure, which had been her own, her wonderful gift to him. She was looking at him now as she might have looked at any one else, merely in order to see what was there.

Well, he would show her what was there! The will to conquer rose high and strong in him, with an element of fierceness it had not had before because no resistance had called it out. He did not show this, indeed only allowed it the smallest corner of his consciousness, keeping all the rest tautly on the alert for the first indication of an opening, for the first hint of where to throw his strength.

But standing in suspense on the alert was the last role he could long endure, and in a moment, when she did not answer, he took a step towards her, towering above her, his hands on her shoulders, pouring out with a hot sense of release all his longing into the cry, "Marise, Marise my own, what has happened to you?"

How he hated the quiet of her face! With what hungry impatience he watched to see it break. How surely he counted on its disappearance at his touch. For he had the certainty of his power to kindle her left intact from the last time he had seen her, tinder to his spark, helplessly played upon by his voice.

But now it was as though he had held a torch aloft into the green branches of a living tree. A twitch of surface agitation on her face and that was all.

And when she spoke, as she did at once, the sound of her voice was strange and alien to him. With an extreme directness, and with a deep sincerity of accent which, even to his ears, made his own impa.s.sioned outcry to her sound inflated and false, she said earnestly, "I don't believe I can tell you what has happened. I don't believe you could understand it."

He did not believe a word of this, but with his brilliant suppleness of mind he perceived that he was in the wrong key. She was not, for the moment, to be kindled to flame, she who miraculously was never the same.

Perhaps it was the moment for a thrust of sheer power, straight at the obstacle, for of course he knew the obstacle.

"I know what has happened," he said, "without your telling me. Your husband has made a scene, and overborne you, and is trying to force you back into the hen-yard of domestic virtue... ." He changed his manner. He said in a low, beautiful, persuasive voice, his eyes deeply on her, sure of himself with that sureness that no one had ever resisted, "But you can never do that now, you bird-of-paradise! You would only ..."

He was brought up short by a change in her. This time his words had had the power to move her face from the quiet he hated. It was suddenly alive with a strong emotion. But what emotion? He could not guess at its meaning, nor why she should step quickly away, shaking his hands from her shoulders, and looking at him sadly, her eyebrows drawn up as if in pain. He hung uncertain, daunted by his inability to read her face, feeling for the first time an instantly dismissed doubt of his mastery over her.

She said very quickly, with the accent and manner of one who, shocked and pitying, tries to save another from going on with an involuntary disclosure in him of something shaming and unworthy.

"No, oh no! Not that. Neale has done nothing ... said nothing ...

except as he always has, to leave me quite free, all free."

As he was silent for a moment, watchful, not especially moved by her words, which seemed to him unimportant, but alarmed by some special significance which they seemed to have for her, she went on with the single, only note of blame or reproach which was to come into her voice.

"Oh, how _could_ you think that?" she said to him, with a deep quavering disappointment, as though she were ashamed of him.

He knew that he was the cause of the disappointment, although he could not imagine why, and he regretted having made a false move; but he was not deeply concerned by this pa.s.sage. He did not see how it could have any importance, or touch what lay at issue between them. These were all womanish, up-in-the-air pa.s.ses and parries. He had only not yet found his opening.

He flung his head back impatiently. "If it is not that, what is it?" he demanded. "A return of hide-bound scruples about the children? You know that they must live their own lives, not yours, and that anything that gives you greater richness and power makes you a better mother."

"Oh yes, I know that," she answered. "I have thought of that, myself."

But he had a baffled feeling that this was not at all the admission the words would make it seem.

His impatience began to burn high, and a dawning alarm to translate itself into anger. He would not be played with, by any woman who ever lived! "Marise," he said roughly, "what under the sun is it?" In his tone was all his contemptuous dismissal of it, whatever it might be ...

outworn moral qualms, fear of the world's opinion, inertia, cowardice, hair-splitting scruples, or some morbid physical revulsion ... there was not one of them which he knew he could not instantly pounce on and shake to rags.

Marise stood very still, her eyes bent downward. "Aren't you going to answer me?" he said, furious.

She nodded. "Yes, I'm going to answer you," she said, without raising her eyes. He understood that he must wait, and stood opposite to her, close to her, looking at her, all the strength of his pa.s.sion in that avid gaze.

She was stamped on his mind in every detail as she looked at that instant, infinitely desirable, infinitely alluring, in her thin white dress, her full supple woman's body erect and firm with a strong life of its own, her long sensitive hands clasped before her ... how many times in his dreams had he held them in his ... her shining dark hair bound smoothly about her head and down low on each side of her rounded forehead. Her thick white eyelids, down-dropped, were lowered over her eyes, and her mouth with its full lips and deep corners ... at the sight of her mouth on which he had laid that burning kiss, Vincent felt a barrier within him give way ... here he was at last with the woman he loved, the woman who was going to give herself to him ... Good G.o.d! all these words ... what did they mean? Nothing. He swept her into his arms and drew her face to his, his eyes closed, lost in the wonder and ecstasy of having reached his goal at last.

She did not make the startled virginal resistance of a girl. She drew away from him quietly ... the hatred for that quiet was murderous in him ... and shook her head. Why, it was almost gently that she shook her head.

How dared she act gently to him, as though he were a boy who had made a mistake! How dared she not be stirred and mastered! He felt his head burning hot with anger, and knew that his face must be suffused with red.

And hers was not, it was quiet. He could have stamped with rage, and shaken her. He wanted to hurt her at once, deeply, to pierce her and sting her back to life. "Do you mean," he said brutally, "that you find, after all, that you are a cold, narrow, cowardly, provincial woman, stunted by your life, so that you are incapable of feeling a generous heat?"

As she remained silent, he was stung by the expression on her face which he did not understand. He went on vindictively s.n.a.t.c.hing up to drive home his thrust the sharpest and cruelest weapon he could conceive, "_Perhaps you find you are too old?_"

At this she looked away from him for an instant, up to the lower branches of the oak under which they stood. She seemed to reflect, and when she brought her eyes back to his, she answered, "Yes, I think that is it. I find I am too old."

He was for years to ponder on the strangeness of the accent with which she said this, without regret, with that d.a.m.nable gentleness as though to hide from him a truth he might find hard to bear, or be incapable of understanding.

How could any woman say "I find I am too old" with that unregretting accent? Was it not the worst of calamities for all women to grow old?

What was there left for a woman when she grew old?

But how preposterous, her saying that, she who stood there in the absolute perfection of her bloom!

He found that he did not know what to say next. That tolerant acquiescence of hers in what he had meant to sting intolerably ... it was as though he had put all his force into a blow that would stun, and somehow missing his aim, encountering no resistance, was toppling forward with the impetus of his own effort. He recovered himself and looked at her, choking, "You don't mean ..." he began challenging her incredulously, and could go no further.

For she nodded, her eyes on his with that singular expression in them which he did not understand, and which he intensely resented.

He was so angry that for a moment he could not speak. He was aware of nothing but anger. "It's impotence and weakness on your part, that's all it is!" he cast out at her, hating her savagely as he spoke, "no matter what fine words you've decided to call it to cloak your own feebleness.

It's the littleness of the vital spark in you. Or it's cowardly inertia, turning from the real fulfilment that calls for you, back to chips and straw because you are used to them. It's being a small, poor, weak, cowed creature, traditional-minded, instead of the splendid, brave, living woman I thought I loved. I am _glad_ to leave you behind, to have no more of you in my life. I have no use for thin-blooded cowards."

She made no answer at all, not a word. His flaming eyes fell away from her face. He turned from her abruptly and walked rapidly away, not looking back.

Then he found he had ceased to advance rapidly, had stopped and was standing still, wrung in so dreadful a pain that his hand was at his side as though he had been stabbed. With no thought, with no awareness of what he was doing, he ran back to her, his hands outstretched, suffering so that he must have help. He did not mean to speak, did not know what he was to say ... he cried out to her, "Marise, Marise ... I love you! _What can I do?_"

The cry was desperate, involuntary, forcing its way out from unfathomed depths of feeling below all his anger and resentment, and tearing him to pieces as it came. It was as though he had taken his heart out and flung it at her feet.

Her face changed instantly and was quiveringly alight with a pale and guilty agitation. "No ... oh _no_, Vincent! I thought you only ... I had thought you could not really ... Vincent, forgive me! Forgive me!"

She took one of his hands in both hers ... the last unforgotten touch he was ever to have of her... .

It came to him through those words which he did not understand that she was pitying him; and stung to the quick, he drew back from her, frowning, with an angry toss of his head.

Instantly she drew back also, as though she had misinterpreted something.