"And it lasted?"

"Yes, until your wire came. Then I dropped down, I don't know how, with a b.u.mp. It confronted me with the fact that I was still a human being; it revitalized me, as it were, and reminded me that the softest voice in all the world had been calling for me, and the sweetest eyes in all the world had been looking for me."

Cordelia shrank back from him; he thought for a moment that he had wounded her. The widened pupils of her eyes had grown smaller again, and the shadow of something fugitive and far away flitted across her face.

Was she, he wondered, still so afraid of love?

"Then, you didn't finish the story?" she asked diffidently. It seemed the first time that she had shown a desire to repel him.

He had stepped closer to her, warm with a feeling he tried neither to fathom nor withhold. At this change in her he stopped short, bewildered.

"No." He tried to explain to her. "You said that I _must_ come."

"Oh!" said Cordelia coldly, vaguely; and all that evening Hartley wondered what unknown trouble was weighing upon her spirit. As at other times when similar inscrutable phases of her character had flashed before him, he let the teasing little mystery of the moment pa.s.s without attempting to probe more deeply into it. For he remembered that the real key to her inner and truer self lay between the covers of her first book, The Silver Poppy.

CHAPTER XII

EROS THE RELUCTANT

So many dreams must fail us, dear, So many springs to autumn turn, Let us, in one memorial year, Learn all there is of love to learn.

JOHN HARTLEY, "Pale Souls."

A husband's jealousies, my dear, are the mushrooms on the beefsteak of matrimony.--"The Silver Poppy."

"My dear, are you falling in love?"

It was Mrs. Spaulding who suddenly asked this of Cordelia, tumbling a lump of sugar into the depths of her coffee-cup as a figure and symbol of some vaster emotional descent.

Cordelia looked across the breakfast table at her abstractedly.

"Why not?" she asked lazily.

Mrs. Spaulding looked up, about to speak. The right light, however, was not on Cordelia's brow, and there were certain bounds beyond which she had learned not to trespa.s.s. So she only sighed.

"Fall in love, my dear, a dozen times, if you like. But----"

And again Mrs. Spaulding sighed. Cordelia perhaps understood more than she pretended. Only that morning Mrs. Spaulding had read aloud to her a little note from Repellier--a most formal little note making excuses for being unable to join them in their box party at Wallack's.

From the first, almost, Cordelia had comprehended that silent unshifting drama, undreamed of by even its hero and central figure, the gentle, upright, honest old artist himself. At one time that patient but perverse adoration on the part of Mrs. Spaulding had impressed Cordelia as beautiful in its constancy, as ethereal in its very intangibility.

But of late it was beginning to stand before her as the foolish caprice of a pertinacious and yet idle and dissatisfied woman.

But it was Mrs. Spaulding's one romance--wilful and unreasonable, yet none the less golden. Wealth had brought her many things, but out of the midst of her opulence she reached eagerly for the unattainable--seeking, without knowing it, for life's relieving burden of sorrow, for her woman's due heritage of tears.

"You ought to be happy," Cordelia one day had said to her; "_you_ get everything you want." She had been trying to scold Cordelia out of a pa.s.sing mood of discontent.

"I don't get anything I want," she had cried back at her bitterly. "We can't even have a Long Island place. We can't go to Aiken. We can't go abroad for a summer. Even if we did go, it would be on the wrong steamer, and we'd sit at the wrong table and meet the wrong people. And I can't _drag_ Alfred to a Waldorf dance, and Horse Show week I've always had to sit up alone in a box like a b.u.mp on a log. And he insists on driving in the Park on Sundays--_Sundays_, mind you--and he always wants to go to Sherry's or Martin's for Sat.u.r.day dinner, and wear a Tuxedo coat at a cotillon. Why we've even bought our house here on the wrong street, and to make it even worse we're on the wrong _side_ of the street. We go and sit through those everlasting operas on the wrong night. When we leave town it's always at the wrong season. Then we come back wrong--about the time other people are leaving. Is it any wonder I feel like giving up? Why, Cordelia, my dear, you've met more people and got to be better known in five months than I have in five years!"

And she stirred her coffee with the vigor with which she had once dreamed to stir the social world.

"And you can hold people and make them like you," she went on. "And you aren't afraid to show people that you care for them."

It was Cordelia's turn to drive trouble from a softly rebellious breast.

"If he only guessed how sweet and good you are, some wise man I know would surely come and run off with you."

Mrs. Spaulding looked at her tragically and heaved a ponderous sigh.

Then her American saving sense of humor came to her rescue and she clung to it, like the drowning to a raft.

"I'm a sentimental old fool, my dear," was all she said. And Cordelia was left to her own troubled thoughts.

More than once the author of The Silver Poppy had been heard to say that she was a greatly misjudged woman. The world accepted her as austere and impa.s.sive. The myriad readers of her book thought of her as clever but chilly, as talented but retiring. Yet "upon the stern and somber loom of pa.s.sion and love," her publisher's announcement had read, "the girlish hand of this fair daughter of Dixie has wielded a shuttle wound with the odorous warmth of the Southland and dyed with the bright fancy of one who has loved and known and suffered. From the story of one woman's tenderest devotion and one man's deepest love this young hand has intuitively woven the magic woof of many-hued romance."

Precisely what it meant no one attempted to define, but it sounded very well, and what was more, it seemed to hint that the pale young auth.o.r.ess from the hills of Kentucky had once known her own romance of the heart, and that the gates of feeling had thereafter been closed to all supplicants. This was a deduction so natural that the elderly maiden lady who conducted a column of society chatter on one of the back pages of a daily newspaper had even ventured to print--this was after a very substantial dinner at Sherry's, where-at Cordelia herself was the gracious and generous hostess--that many a stout heart of Manhattan had reason to lament the fact that the feelings of a certain golden-haired daughter of Kentucky were impregnable to all a.s.sault. The lady, indeed, was so closely allied to literature that, unlike the philosopher of the Rubaiyat, she could never be divorced from barren reason and make a second marriage. This was all put with a slyness so adroit and yet with an application so undoubted that it had once more been whispered about that the beautiful young Kentucky genius preferred great dreams to Dan Cupid. Her studious maiden-hood seemed hedged about by a bulwark of half-written books. It was a sad example of beauty sacrificed on the altar of bookishness.

And yet, it was argued, this precocious child of letters at some time during her career must have learned to love, and love deeply; one critic declared her pen to have been dipped not in ink, but "in the ruddy flood of a warm and palpitating heart." If, in truth, she had never loved, how, then, had that fluent pen of hers ever learned to write so movingly and so masterfully of the divine pa.s.sion?

How, indeed? That was the riddle which more than one puzzled mind had to leave unread. That was a thought, too, that had troubled Hartley not a little; there were times when he felt vaguely envious of that unknown, mysterious, shrouded past. He had read also that Cordelia had declared that she could never marry, that devotion to her art precluded any such worldly consummation. It had even crept into print that Iscaro, the Egyptian palmist, had sealed her girlhood decision by prophesying that she was to achieve immortality only through a life of celibacy.

Yet such are the cross-threads of fate. For Hartley, puzzling over these things as others before him had done, had built up in his consciousness an incongruous, self-contradictory, impossible character of a woman who seemed to him always warm to the eye and was yet destined to prove marble cold to the touch.

It was for Cordelia, perhaps, the penalty of eminence. For little as she had ever shown any sign of sacrificing her artistic aspirations in the rose-grown temple of matrimony, the hunger of the unmated and maturing animal, the wavering pa.s.sion that arises at times involuntarily in the breast of the coldest priestess amid her coldest marbles, quiescent, but quiescent only as a tiger sleeping in its noonday cave, was now not unknown to the heart of Cordelia Vaughan. She wanted to be loved; but above all things, she wanted to love.

The cry of ripe womanhood for its mate awoke at times, but only of late, she knew, with an intensity that was sadly disturbing. Through her girlhood, she remembered, she had often said with a great air that she could never love. To love other than uprightly was even more impossible--yet she had secretly tired of the hollow part of an Aspasia without a Pericles. She had often tried to convince herself that she was too happily neutral, too indeterminate of temperament, to stray from the lonely heights to which she had so painfully climbed for the mere pa.s.sing glint of a bubble. Now, for at least once in her life, half weary of all her comfortless basking at the too fierce fireside of her early fame she was beginning to ask more and more pa.s.sionately for some touch of the mellow sun of actual affection, for some gentle warmth of disinterested tenderness.

For with all her activity and with all the attention she seemed to receive, Cordelia's life was still a desolately lonely one. An early girlish pose of protesting a fear of men had crystallized into a habit of evading them, except in not infrequent cases of late where they stepped before her as instruments of literary destiny. Good men, she had once said, are like good roads: made for walking over. As the belle of her little Kentucky town she had held herself proudly above each and all of her young suitors. As the successful author of a great book, as the woman of wit and reason, she had tended to repel that attention at the hand of the admiring male which such charm in woman as she might lay claim to invariably called for. She had known many courtships, though, in her own way. Yet she asked herself if she had ever known one absolute and unselfish love.

It was Mrs. Spaulding's lightly put question that drove her into a dreary retrospect of a youth she seldom cared to look back on. But was this love now coming to her on belated wings?

She wondered where the difference lay, wherein John Hartley was not like all other men. Why had she looked out on him with awakened eyes? She remembered how, at the first, that grave considerateness with which he had treated her had caused an immediate m.u.f.fled fluttering in the sleeping cotes of affection. There was an answering seriousness in his steady gray eyes that had appealed to her. He was manly, and honest, and strong. Yet she knew that explained nothing. Nor did the fact that he had continuously eluded her, that in some way he stood above her in a masterfulness that caused dormant femininity ever dumbly to bow to it.

And still she probed herself for reasons, and still she stood unsatisfied. Was it true, even, that she could ever be in love with him?

When she leaned down and asked herself, in the mirror, that strange and disturbing question, one gray day late in September, she neither smiled nor sighed. For she tried to tell herself that it was not love, but loneliness. She, too, like Mrs. Spaulding, had never been given all that her heart desired.

It was not until Cordelia had read and reread Hartley's first twenty chapters of his reconstructed version of The Unwise Virgins--and what wondrous chapters, she saw, he had made them--that her plaintive and unconfessed longing for companionship, by some strange caprice of impression, deepened into a stronger and more compelling emotion. She felt then, of a sudden, that he held the reins of her destiny in his hands. She wanted him near her. Not only in her loneliness, but also in her weakness, she needed him to lean upon. The little that she had already asked of him she would repay a thousandfold.

And as the result of that day's silent questioning of herself she went in person from editor to editor, as she had never done before, with a bundle of his ma.n.u.scripts. And before many days, after numerous disappointments and more than one humiliation, she succeeded in disposing of no less than five of his stories. If, as a distributer of his wares she had moments of suffering, she learned to take an incongruous joy out of them, and no word of what she pa.s.sed through ever reached Hartley's ears.

CHAPTER XIII

THE FETTERED RELEASE