CHAPTER VIII

LIFE'S IRON CROWN

Deep in its ancient center we Had dreamed its aging heart should be; Yet there, where should have slept its soul, Was only darkness and a hollowed bole!

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Old Yew at Iffley."

Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow.--"The Silver Poppy."

When Hartley turned the last page of The Silver Poppy he closed the book meditatively but amazed. In it he had found the golden key to a long-closed mystery. In it he had seen revealed the great heart and mind of a misunderstood woman. He had caught the substance where before he had beheld only the shadow. It was as if from the shuttered windows of an empty house he had heard unexpected music. He had found the deeper and truer woman. All suspicion and dread of some elusive element he had never been able to fathom in Cordelia Vaughan at one stroke vanished away. Thereafter he was determined to read her and accept her as she lay revealed in the pages before him.

For he saw that into those pages had escaped some mellower, softer, profounder part of her, a part which when face to face with her at different times he had groped for in vain. For he could see, as plain as his hand, that The Silver Poppy was not a book of the moment. It had in it elements of greatness that startled him, and left him gasping. There was a whimsical turn to its tendernesses, a quiet reserve to its humor and pathos so adroitly blended, a quaintness and ingenuous freshness of touch, and, above all, an impersonal, judicial aloofness from life that spoke, at first sight, more of the hand of a man than that of a woman, and a woman still in her youth--at any rate, in her youth as an artist and a creator.

It was this flood of new feeling that bore him, elated and fired with enthusiasm, to the first of Cordelia's and Mrs. Spaulding's receptions late that afternoon. Long beforehand he had determined not to attend this reception. Besides cutting into time which was not altogether his own, he was beginning to see the impossibility of any further incongruous vacillating between the sordidness of Chatham Square and the splendor of the upper West Side; the grim irony in those contrasting pictures of life stung him too unpleasantly. But in his hour of new enlightenment he overcame his older scruples. He had a stern duty of self-humiliation to perform and a once wavering integrity to redeem. And he fell to remembering little speeches that Cordelia Vaughan once had made, and little ways that clung to her, and the tints of her hair and the many little variable intonations of her voice. And thinking of these things he made his way up through the city toward her once more.

A fluttering striped awning and a strip of crimson carpet ran from the Spauldings' doorway to the curb, where forty carriages half blocked the street. It was clear to Hartley that Cordelia's first reception was not to be a failure. That he came conspicuously unadorned and unknown and on foot in no way troubled him as he made his way through the crowd of heterogeneous loungers that fringed the strip of crimson carpet. In other days he had been used to such things. Some touch of the scholar in him, too, contributed to his bearing that sense of remoteness which elevated him above such perturbations.

It was the memory for the second time of his pendulum-like alternating between two such strangely opposing existences, and the cutting, keen irony of the thing that heightened his color as he hurried in from liveried servant to servant, and suddenly found himself in a crush of flowers and waving plumes and rich gowns, with here and there the sober black of a dissonant and desolate-looking man. And above it all the hum of many voices and the breath of many perfumes rose and mingled.

The next moment he caught sight of Cordelia herself, where she stood beside Mrs. Spaulding, greeting her guests one by one and smiling her grat.i.tude for each prettiness of speech borne to her by that tide of new-found friends. Hartley, across the intervening crush, noticed that she looked almost exquisite and flower-like in a gown of white stuff that seemed to accentuate her note of frailty. She reminded him, as he looked, of a pale yellow clicquot.

He noticed, too, that she received her homage with all the girlish dignity of an imperious young queen, a little too coldly and too haughtily, perhaps, and yet with a mild composure that was causing the honest-eyed Mrs. Spaulding to turn more than once in secret wonderment, and gaze at her admiringly. There was nothing in Cordelia's bearing to reveal any inner ruffling of a spirit tranquil and detached--nothing beyond the pale rose-like flush that had mounted to her softly undulating, almost gently hollowed cheeks, and the luminosity of her outwardly calm eyes.

Cordelia did not see Hartley in the odorous, rustling stream that was slowly bearing him toward her until he was almost at her side. Then she paled a little, and let her eyes rest on him keenly, speaking smilingly, as she looked, to a florid woman confronting her.

In a minute or two he himself was before her and had taken her hand. She had not expected him that afternoon.

"It was so charming of you to come, Mr. Hartley," she murmured. It was the same phrase he had already heard her say at least half a dozen times over; the formality of her welcome chilled him. He had forgotten there were a dozen persons at his heels.

"I _had_ to come!" he confessed. Something earnest in his tone frightened her. She showed him by her glance that there were others hemming them in.

"Then you have read it?" she asked quickly, lowering her voice.

"Yes; and I have so much, _so_ much to tell you about it. It is all wonderful, and all beautiful."

She looked at him, startled. Her whole rapt face caught fire, and for a moment was suffused with a great light. Only in animals and wild things had he ever before seen that strange phosph.o.r.escence of the eyes.

Then she looked into his face once more, and all the color went out of her own. She saw her mistake.

"But which, _which_?" she cried in sudden anguish, under her breath. At first he did not understand. Then slowly he came to see just what she meant.

"The Silver Poppy," he answered her, wondering.

She put her four bent finger-tips up to her parted lips with a sudden odd little gesture, as though she was thrusting and holding back some involuntary small cry. It seemed a movement of both disappointment and despair.

It was all over in a minute, and before Hartley could realize why it was done, or what it had meant, the same stream that had borne him in to her as relentlessly had carried him away. Ebbing into flushed but cooler diffuseness, it left him in another room, where he beheld rustling, laughing groups of women, and palms, and heard the sounds of m.u.f.fled music and broken s.n.a.t.c.hes of talk.

He looked back toward Cordelia and tried to catch a glimpse of her, but a sea of plumed heads waved between them.

"But life is only a vaudeville, with hunger and love for top-liners,"

he heard a gaunt tragedian disclaiming to a woman with penciled eyebrows and obviously rouged cheeks and lips.

"Yes, but think how many times we can love!" the rouged lips laughed back at him. Hartley moved on through the crush.

"A woman's eyes," a long-haired young man at his elbow was declaring to a group of listening women, "a woman's eyes are the index of her soul."

An elderly lady in mauve caught him up.

"But our souls, you see, are like the magazines--they mostly come uncut.

And that's why only the paper-knife of matrimony really finds us out."

Hartley looked at the group, crestfallen, disappointed, vaguely disgusted. Their brilliance seemed to him the brilliance of tinsel and paper roses. And he asked himself in sudden indeterminate terror if this was the sort of thing he was to waste his days over.

CHAPTER IX

THE TWILIGHT OF THE G.o.dDESS

She from her rose-grown turrets came And laughed up in his eyes; He flushed to his pale brow with shame, And spake unto the skies:

"To Christ this woman yet shall bow, Or be cast down," he said, "And where she flaunts her scarlet now Shall float the Cross instead."

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight."

Put a touch of spring in the air, the thought of a woman in the heart, and keep from poetry if you can.--"The Silver Poppy."

For the second time Cordelia Vaughan had left Hartley stunned and amazed. Twice since he had first met her he looked up in bewilderment and found it necessary to readjust his estimate of her. This second readjustment, though, was somewhat different from the first.

It was not until he had left her (receiving her homage like the acknowledged and imperious young queen she was) that once more back in his dingy little lodging, stiflingly squalid after the richness of the Spauldings' crowded drawing-room, he had untied the blue silk ribbon that so daintily bound the ma.n.u.script of her second book. To lose himself in it would be a relief. He was glad to slip away into the unreal world which her hand had opened up to him.

Cordelia had named her story The Unwise Virgins. With the open ma.n.u.script once before him, Hartley read it through, from start to finish. And it was from that reading he emerged stunned and amazed.

The Unwise Virgins was a failure, a glittering but disheartening failure. Of that there could be no two opinions. The streets of the city had not been so kind to Cordelia Vaughan as had the open hills of Kentucky. Her second book had none of the power and movement of The Silver Poppy, none of those whimsical tendernesses and quaint touches of humor and pathos that had half m.u.f.fled the razor edge of her earlier satiric touch.

From the first Hartley had been led to regard Cordelia as a woman without an affluent sense of humor. Then, after reading The Silver Poppy, he had wondered if she had not drained off, as it were, her vanished reservoirs of mirth; if her mental blitheness had not been lost with the too labored advent of her first-born. He had heard not infrequently of "men of one book." Could it be that Cordelia was a woman of one supreme effort? Or was it her newer life that was so altering and wasting and enervating her?

For, hard as he found it to confess to himself, The Unwise Virgins, as a whole, held neither accomplishment nor hope. In fact, with his child terror of the trite and the commonplace, and racked as he was by his "torture of form," he found in it nothing but energy miserably misspent. It was a heap of glittering particles that ran elusively through the fingers, a labored thing of shreds and patches. Its simulation of power was almost pedantry, its affectation of _finesse_ was time and time again flaccid idling with words half understood.

Each time the wings of his admiration were about to unfold, the stroke of some little ba.n.a.lity sent him tumbling down to earth again. Yet through the maze of all this energy misdirected he could get glimpses of the substantial enough central idea on which Cordelia had attempted to build. But on it she had built nothing but a misshapen, chaotic thing which tempted him, with his pa.s.sion for form, to demolish and rebuild after his own fashion. It stood a challenge to him.

Not that Hartley looked on himself as a master workman in this respect.