"Who isn't?" he said musingly. "We want to be in the thick of the fray, people like you and me, even if it kills us. But--we can't choose. A good deal is chosen for us before we're born--the color of our hair, the shapes of our noses" (he smiled and sighed), "doubtless the kinks in our brains--Come, the fire is out, and if I allow you to take cold, Ellen Neal will surely banish me from Eden with her flaming sword."

As they walked briskly home in the early February twilight, she said after a long silence, "See here, Stefan, if you really are going when your book is finished, let's not waste any more time going about to silly parties and all that. You only do it to please me, and I only do it to show you off. Why should we pretend any longer?--Let's be together as much as we possibly can without bothering about anybody else! Shall we?"

He looked rather startled.

"I mean," she continued calmly, "to make no more engagements at all; and you needn't either--unless you wish to?"

"I shall not wish to."

"I thought not! There's really n.o.body here you care about talking to except me, is there? And there's n.o.body in the world I'd willingly waste a word on if you were about. So there, that's settled!" she said with a little breath of satisfaction. "It's a good thing you're old enough to be my father, Stefan, or I suppose people would begin to talk about us.

Still," she added, "I'm glad you're not eighty!"

Meeting her candid, clear, affectionate gaze, Nikolai managed to summon up a smile of his own that was quite grandfatherly.

CHAPTER XLIX

Joan was not the judge of human nature she fancied herself if she believed that a disparity in age would render gossip innocuous. The disparity was not as apparent as she believed. Nikolai was, in his dark, impa.s.sive way, a singularly handsome man, and the stories of his early ghetto life and later experiences made of him a romantic figure to more eyes than Joan's. In vain the Jabberwocks rallied around her to a girl.

In vain Effie May, whose shrewd ears heard usually whatever was to be heard, even in her retirement, casually spread abroad the story of Mr.

Nikolai's devotion to the first Mrs. Darcy.

Joan's att.i.tude was discouraging to her most loyal friends. She seemed quite unaware that she was being defended and rallied around. It rather relieved her when invitations began to dwindle in number; she was thus saved the trouble of declining them. She entered into their growing solitude _a deux_ with the same single-mindedness she had brought to bear upon her frivolous period, her domestic period, and her brief career of publicity; being one of those natures which can do only one thing at a time, and that very hard.

When she thought about their relationship at all, it rather pleased her to fancy that she was playing Mrs. Thrale to Nikolai's Dr. Johnson.

Unfortunately the people about her were for the most part unaware of this cla.s.sic relationship; and had they known of it would have doubtless regarded it with one eye knowingly closed.

Much of the town's attention fastened itself upon Archibald. Scandals there had been before this, even in its upper circles; but they had maintained hitherto a decent surrept.i.tiousness, had veiled themselves beneath a more or less transparent cover of secrecy, until some climax occurred in the way of pistol-shot or divorce-proceeding. The _tertium quid_, acknowledged and accepted, was new to the experience of Louisville; and very interesting.

Meanwhile Stefan Nikolai, all unconscious of the stimulus he was offering to general conversation, spent all of his free hours with Joan, having long since faced and discounted the risk of it so far as he was concerned. The risk Joan herself might run appeared to his experience negligible. He had never even in his youth attracted women as less intellectual men attract them.

Doubtless even had he been aware of the town's talk it would not have troubled him. For all his knowledge of humanity, he was no man of the world, in the accepted sense of the term. He lived too much beyond it to attach great importance to its opinion. In only one person he recognized any right of criticism. That was Joan's husband, with whom long since he had come to an understanding.

It is a pity that neither Joan nor Joan's world ever came to know of this understanding, which would have added to the affair a distinct flavor.

Mr. Nikolai had taken a small apartment, where Joan and her husband and occasionally others dined with him, or dropped in for a gla.s.s of tea in the Russian fashion and an hour of two of music afterwards. Nikolai, true to the instinct of his race, never made even a temporary home without music in it. He had, in addition to a piano, various instruments collected in different lands, among them a balalaika upon which the servant Sacha could sometimes be induced to play a shy accompaniment to peasant ballads.

But Archie had never come there without Joan; and so one day when he dropped in alone, ostensibly to "hear the Rooshian pick his banjo,"

Nikolai felt a surprise that he was careful not to show. His trained eyes detected signs of distress in Archie which others, including his wife, had failed to notice. The beaming smile did not conceal from Nikolai a little anxious pucker between the brows, a nervous twitching of the big freckled hands.

The writer was not unused to being taken into the confidence of troubled people. It was one of the things that compensated for the enforced solitude of his life, such an occasional glimpse into the secret hearts of his fellow-men. It is an odd fact that writers and philosophers and even poets, all people who live necessarily a little apart from their kind, are frequently chosen as confessors by those who feel the need of confession.

So Nikolai asked no questions, sure that a friendly silence and a good cigar would produce results. Nor did he ring for Sacha and the "banjo."

At length Archie blurted out without preliminaries:

"Joan isn't happy, Mr. Nikolai. I guess you've noticed that! She hasn't been for a long while. I'm not sure she ever was.--I s'pose I was a fool to think a man like me could make her happy."

"It is a large order for any one human being to make another human being happy, Blair."

"But you could have!"

Neither spoke for a few minutes. Nikolai made no pretense of not understanding. Only a slight flush came momentarily into his face, and left it paler by contrast. "I am not sure," he said at last. "But I should have liked to try."

"Of course! I knew that when you cabled us to wait till you came--But Joan don't know it yet. Funny, isn't it, when she's so smart? She thinks you feel toward her like a cross between a teacher and a fond father.--'Father'--my eye! She don't catch you lookin' at her sometimes the way I do!"

"Do I--look at her?"

Archie nodded expressively. "I suppose I understand, because I'm in love myself. And she don't"--he swallowed hard--"because she isn't."

"Not yet, perhaps," said the other slowly. "Give her time, my boy."

"Time? I've given her time." Archie heaved a great sigh. "Now I mean to give her something else. I mean to give her a chance. She never really had a chance before, Mr. Nikolai. I--I kind of got her off her guard, when she was takin' the count. It wasn't sporting of me."

The other, moved, laid a hand on his knee. In moments of emotion the foreign blood showed in such slight demonstrativeness. But Anglo-Saxon Archie stiffened, and the hand was at once removed.

"She's too fine for me, you see," he went on. "Too sort of delicate.--I read somewhere that china vases and bra.s.s vases couldn't float down a stream together without the china ones getting smashed (though why vases would be floating down a stream anyway, _I_ don't know!). But I'm bra.s.s, you see, and she's china. I thought it might be all right after the twinnies came. I still think it might have been, if they--" Again he swallowed hard.

Nikolai nodded.

"Their hearts are wild As be the hearts of birds, till childer come."

But, my dear boy, you speak as if the twinnies had exhausted the available supply!"

Archie's eyes dropped. Then he lifted them again in a frank gaze. "I almost lost her, sir. Do you think I'd put her through a thing like that again? G.o.d!--her little frantic hands clutching at us! And her voice, hoa.r.s.e as a fierce animal's--!" He jumped up and crossed to a window, where he stood with his back to Nikolai, his face working.

After a moment the other followed, and this time Archie did not stiffen under his touch.

"So," said the Jew, "in your love you would deny her the woman's privilege of suffering?"

"Yes! Suffering on account of me--yes! Every time. It ain't fair, women having to stand the whole business. If I could help, if I could bear one single pain of it--But I can't."

"No," said Nikolai, his lips twitching despite the sadness about them.

"No, I am afraid you can't. But--"

"And it's not," interrupted Archie, reverting doggedly to his theme, "as if I were the right man, you see!"

They were silent again.

"You are so afraid of losing her that you will not give her children,"

mused Nikolai presently. "And yet if I understand you you are willing to lose her--otherwise?"

"To the right man," said Archie directly. "To you--Because I think you are the right man. She's been more contented since you've been here than I ever knew her to be. Of course you're twice her age, but that don't count with brainy people. And you could give her everything I can't--not just _things_; you know what I mean! Travel, education, all that. She's in your cla.s.s, sir, not mine.--Will you do it?"

Nikolai looked rather bewildered. "Do what, Blair?"

"Oh, I don't know. Be nice to her all you can, read poetry to her, get her to care for you. Make love to her, if you want!--You can bet I wouldn't say that to many men--" he laughed forlornly--"but you're different, somehow. I can trust you."