Chapter 13

FAINT HEART AND FAIR LADY.

Claire heard Philip leave the house, and she sat down on her bed to wait and think. It seemed ages that she sat there, her imagination busy with a hundred possible calamities. When she finally heard the door open she was almost afraid to look.

"Lawrence!" Her voice was full of warm gladness.

He was hanging his hat in its place.

"Hello, Claire. Back, are you?" His voice held the impersonal, sullen note that he used of late. "Where is Philip?"

"Why, didn't he find you?"

Lawrence was immediately angry. He thought, "Why should Philip be hunting for me? I don't need his care. Can't I even go out without a guardian?"

"I didn't see him," he returned, aloud.

"I sent him to find you." She was standing looking at him, her whole figure expressing love and relief at his return.

He was too angry to catch the fine warmth of her voice, and his inability to see handicapped him more at that moment than at any time in his life.

"I sent him to find you," she said again.

"He didn't. I came back as I went, alone."

"Lawrence, what is the matter with you?" she asked, pleadingly, with tears in her voice.

He felt the emotion in her words, and was suddenly contrite. If he had known it, he was acting like the sentimentalists whom he ridiculed, but he suffered from the egotist's fate, he did not recognize his own failing.

"I don't know that there is anything the matter, Claire. It angered me to think that you still imagine that because I am blind I need a guardian," he said, dropping into a chair.

She came over toward him, impulsively.

"That isn't the idea at all," she said, still very worried. "It was simply that you told me yourself that you were helpless in the snow."

"I didn't ask to be cared for," he snapped.

"I wasn't caring for you--nor about you," she retorted, in sudden irritation. "I didn't want you to be lost, that's all."

"I should think you'd be glad to see me gone." He was a little ashamed of his own words, but he did not try to remedy the speech.

"What do you mean?"

He smiled ironically. "Even a blind man sometimes sees too much of lovers."

Claire sank into a chair and struggled against the starting sobs. It seemed to her that her whole life was becoming one continual argument wherein she was accused and in return forced to demand explanations.

"What in the world do you mean?" she faltered. "Are you saying that Philip and I are lovers?"

"Aren't you?"

"Of course not! It isn't like you to say that. And what if we were?"

"It wouldn't be any of my business, would it?" He was bitter.

"I suppose not," she said, weakly.

"You needn't be hesitant about admitting it. It's true," he went on. "Why shouldn't it be? I am a mere piece of excess baggage which you are too kind-hearted to eliminate. I know that, too. Why shouldn't you eliminate me?" He smiled, satirically. "If I were Philip Ortez, loving you and loved in return, I would feel like killing the blind man, whose presence hampered."

She stared at him, wondering if he were in earnest.

"Then it's fortunate that you haven't the opportunity to feel that way."

"Obviously." He laughed, sullenly. "I sha'n't, because you couldn't love a blind man."

Claire only sat and looked at him, thrilled with the knowledge that he was about to tell her he loved her. She was trembling and desperately afraid of herself. She moved uneasily, and against her will; her lips said, "I could love a blind man, Lawrence."

He sat up and clenched his hands together quickly. The tone of her voice in itself was a direct confession. But his deep skepticism of blindness would not let him believe that he was right.

"Do you mean that you do love me?" he demanded.

She wanted to say "Yes," but she thought of Philip and was afraid of what he might do, should he learn of her lie. Then, too, there was her resolution to go back to Howard. Strange that her long-planned friendly explanation of her own attitude did not occur to her, but it did not.

Lawrence rose and came toward her, his hands out. He was determined to know, once and for all. The gathering emotion in his breast was growing into an unbearable pain.

"Claire," he said, coming nearer and nearer. "Could you love me?"

His hands were almost to her. She saw them coming; terror, love, happiness, anguish, and the desire to be his paralyzed her will. She did not move.

"Yes," she whispered, "I could."

He put his arms around her and lifted her until she was crushed against him.

"Do you love me, Claire?" he asked, tensely.

She did not answer, but her head sank against his shoulder.

Outside the cabin, she heard Philip's step in the snow.

"No!" she cried frantically, filled with dread. "No, no! Let me go!"

Lawrence, too, heard, and released her, stepping back indifferently, as though just going toward a chair.

The door opened, and Philip entered.

"Oh, you're back, I see." The artist was coldly cordial in his greeting.

"And I see you, which is more important," Philip laughed.

"I suppose so." Lawrence sat down, thoughtfully. "Claire has just scolded me for going out. She doesn't like to have me add to the bother I am already."

Claire was still under the spell of her own emotion, and she resented Lawrence's sang-froid. He was as cold as a block of stone. Her heart cried out against him because he could not see why she had said "No" to him, because he believed her! She wanted to cry, but did not dare.

"I told him we were worried," she said, indifferently.

"So we were." Philip was cheerful and friendly.

Lawrence buried himself from them both, and sat brooding, clothed in the blackness that blindness brought when it suddenly loomed before him as the wall between him and his life's desires. The brief instant Claire had been in his arms had made him feel that his life was intolerable without her, and that blindness was the curse of a double living death. She had told him that she did not love him. She had struggled to be free.

Lawrence failed to read Claire aright because he had not seen her, and because his blindness made him uncertain of himself.

That was the truth of it all, the awful truth of his life.

He was always uncertain of himself because he was afraid of blindness. He strutted, boasted, lied, and above all pretended to himself that he believed his hard philosophy because he was afraid, afraid of failing to do the things he wanted to do. He saw himself clearly now, he was a coward, a deceiving ape, a monkey caught in the terror of tangling roots, and denying it. He barked like a frightened dog, at the thing that was his master. He was gripped by life, tortured by life, denied death by life, and cheated by life of living. His imagination, fired by his passion, leaped into play, and he felt himself a thousand times a slave, a chained prisoner in the hand of circumstance.

Philip was laughing gaily, and talking to Claire, who listened, answered, and was all the while lost in her own thought. When he had entered, Philip had looked quickly at the two to see if there was aught between them, and had found Lawrence colder, more despondent than ever. He told himself that Lawrence had evidently pleaded with Claire for her love and been denied. At least, this blind man had not been successful, and Philip could afford to be good-humored. The more agreeable he was, the more Claire would turn to him from that dark, ungracious form yonder. His would be the victory of pleasant manners. Therefore he talked, gladly, smilingly, while Claire listened, or seemed to listen.

She was rebellious at the fear which had made her cry "No" to Lawrence, and at the same time glad that she had done so, afraid of the future, exasperated with Philip for coming in at the supreme moment, and angry with Lawrence for his stupidity.

Perhaps these tangled relations might have been cleared had it not been for a piece of folly more stupendous than any they had yet experienced. This event occurred the day after Lawrence's walk in the snow.

Philip had stepped out for a few minutes to look at a near-by trap, and Claire and the artist were left alone for the first time since her denial. She wanted him to renew his suit, feared that he would, and sat waiting for him to speak.

But he remained silent, and at last she said, "Lawrence."

"Well?" He did not move.

The psychology of woman has been too often commented upon and attempted by those who thought they could explain. Why Claire was doing and saying what she did, she herself could not tell.

"Lawrence, don't you ever, ever act as you did yesterday again."

He smiled. "It would be dangerous if your gallant should come in less slowly." He was filled with a desire to hurt her.

Claire was angry with him for saying what was so utterly far from her mind and so different from what she wanted him to say.

"If my gallant should come in," she thrust coldly, "he would scarcely appreciate the melodrama you are playing."

Lawrence sat up with a jerk, his rage near the boiling point.

"What do you mean?" he demanded. "I have not interfered with your delightful episode, have I?"

"No, and you couldn't. I mean that my husband--he is my lover--for I know that is what you intend by 'gallant'--would scarcely appreciate the type of man who mopes and abuses the woman who does not care to lie in his arms."

Lawrence sat still, while a fierce, uncontrollable rage consumed him. He felt that to take this woman and whip her into submission would be a pleasure. He thought of the lash he had in his studio at home and wished it were in his hand. With the thought he rose and stepped swiftly toward Claire, his teeth set.

She saw him, and rose.

"I have one way of showing you who is master," he began, and stopped.

She had stepped forward and was standing almost against him.

"Even blindness does not allow you the freedom to threaten."

He shrank back and dropped once more into his chair.

Claire was talking rapidly, savagely. Later she was to be thrown into a despairing self-hate that kept her many a night in tears, but now she went on.

"Do you think I will overlook everything in you because I pity you? There have been times when your impositions, so carelessly thrust upon me, because you were selfish, because you knew I must accept them from you, were almost unbearable. The touch of your thief-trained hands to steal from everything its beauty and self-respect has galled me beyond all endurance. My body has received its last vile grasp from you."

She stopped, appalled at his expression. She did not know, neither of them knew, that love, the ever-changing impulse of creation within men and women, speaks its desire through bitter scorn and abuse, when softer words are too slow in finding their way.

He was sitting there, white, anguished, cowering under her tongue, his whole life shaken. Her words made him feel that the thing she said was true. He had always feared it, realizing that in a measure it was inevitable, and his great strength was now turned against himself, against his bitter handicap, and he was in that tremendous upheaval that requires a rebuilding of one's faith. His belief in himself was broken. His belief in his power was gone. Coming after weeks of thought and fear about blindness, Claire's words tore him asunder and made him feel that there was nothing for him but abject misery and dependence upon charity.

Instinctively, his hand went up as if to shield him from a blow, and he murmured, "For God's sake, Claire!"

There was to come a time, later, when experience would have taught him that there is a wild strain in the nature of human hearts which abuses out of a desire to be conquered. He did not yet realize that he had spoken truly when he said that this woman had hidden in her the savage warring sexed tumult of all the struggling ages.

She saw him there, his hand up, and suddenly her emotion changed. It was love, still love crying out for expression, but now she was all compassion, tenderness, and fear. She read in his face what she had done, and her heart was gray with the pain at her own failure.

Now all love for her was buried, perhaps dead, under his shattered selfhood, slain in the wrecking earthquake that she had brought to pass with the ardor of her passion. She had meant to sting him into taking her in his arms and forcing her to love him, and instead--"Oh, God!" she whispered, and slipped behind the curtain to throw herself on her bed and weep with heart wrung by self-condemnation and loving pity for the man whom she had clubbed with his own dread weakness. She had shattered into chaos the strong soul of the man she loved, with the only weapon he would have felt, and she realized now that it was her love, her desire to be his, to be his utterly, that had led her to do it.

Lawrence was too hurt to move. His mind repeated again and again the words she had spoken. He kept saying to himself: "Blindness has made me that, an egotist beggar." He did not reproach Claire. She had swept him too far from his habitual moorings for that. There was no rebellion against her, none, indeed, against life. Over him rolled wave after wave of self-contempt, distrust, and anguish that shook him with an agony that only the assured man knows when the one he loves most of all on earth strikes dead his faith in himself. He thought of a multitude of things that stabbed anew, but not once did he move in the interminable period that passed before Philip returned.

When he did come, the Spaniard was amazed at the crouching, white-faced man whom he found before a dying fire. There was something so sad in the blind face that Philip felt no suspicion and no anger. He looked for Claire, but she was not visible. He stirred the fire and set about preparing supper while his mind began digging at the problem which he saw in the attitude of the man there in the chair. Claire did not come out to help. She was too exhausted from the storm that had swept over her. In her bed she could hardly smother the scream that kept rising to her lips. She wanted to spring up and cry aloud to Lawrence for forgiveness. She was scarcely aware of Philip as he moved about.

She could have thrown herself at Lawrence's feet and pleaded with him. She was discovering that her whole wild outbreak was a strange expression of her physical desire for this man whom she loved, and the discovery made her as self-detesting as she had been violent in her outbreak. It seemed to her that there was nothing, nothing she would not do to make amends to Lawrence for what she had said. She wanted to tell him what it had been that prompted her, but she dared not lest in revulsion at her viciousness he turn on her and kill her.

"God, God," she muttered, "what have I done!"

Philip was calling her to supper. She steadied her voice, and said humbly: "I can't come out. I'm not feeling very well. Go on without me, please."

She heard him speak to Lawrence, and she strained her ears to catch the answering movement toward the table, but there was none. At last Philip spoke again in a voice that was full of anxiety: "Lawrence, what in God's name has happened?"

Lawrence was moving now, and she waited with bated breath for his answer. He walked to the table and sat down. His voice was heavy. "I've found myself out, Philip. That's all. I know what I am."

There was a moment of silence. Claire covered her mouth with her hand to suppress a cry. She wanted to shout: "No, no, no, not that, but what I am, my beloved, my adored one."

"What do you mean?" Philip's voice seemed stern.

"I mean that I am indebted to you and Claire for the truth I needed."

Behind the curtain Claire turned on her face and burst into sobs.

Philip arose abruptly. "Lawrence," he said quietly, "I do not know what has happened to you this afternoon; I do not know what you mean; but this I do know: I am deeply sorry if anything I have done or said has made you feel that you are an unwelcome guest in my home."

Lawrence stood up and gathered his scattered senses.

"Philip, I beg your pardon, old man. It isn't that at all. The truth is"--and his voice broke--"I have lied to myself and to the world these many years. Much of it hasn't been my fault, but I must pay the price just the same. I am blind. That has led me to a sort of clamorous egoism which carried me on and on until I came to feel that I was really doing something. At last, I know that I am a narrow human parasite, worthless, utterly worthless. A blind, clinging, grasping, vagrant beast, fed upon the mercy of too kind-hearted humanity. I am sorry. It isn't my fault, but it is so."

Philip stood for a few minutes in silence. "You're ill, Lawrence," he said finally. "Get back to yourself if you can. Things do not stay at this point in human abasement. I know of what I speak. I have been through that myself. I cannot say anything comforting. No one can."

They went to bed with but a few commonplace remarks, and the cabin became silent. Lawrence lay awake through that night. Claire, unknown to him, spent her vigil in a great readjustment of her life.