Part 22

"It's nothing in which you could be of the slightest assistance," replied he. "I've got myself in a mess--who was ever in a mess that wasn't of his own making? I jumped in, and I find there's no jumping out. I might crawl out--but I never learned that way of traveling, and at my age it can't be learned."

"Whatever it is," she said, very slow and deliberate, "you must let me help you bear it."

In the silence that followed, the possible meaning of her words penetrated to him. He looked at her in a dazed way. "What did you say--just now?" he asked.

"No matter what it is," she repeated, "we can and will bear it together."

"Does that mean you _care_ for me?" he asked, as if stunned.

"It means I am giving you the friendship you once asked," was her answer, in the same slow, earnest way.

"Oh," he said. Then, as she colored and shrank, "I didn't mean to hurt you. Yes, I want your friendship. It's all--it's more than I've the right to ask, now. You did well to refuse me, when I wanted you and thought I had something to give in return."

"You didn't want _me_," she replied. "You wanted only what almost any man wants of almost any woman. And you had nothing to give me in return--for, I don't want from any man only what you think is all a man ought to give a woman, or could give her. I am like you, in one way. I want all or nothing."

"Well--you'd get nothing, now, from me," said he with stolid bitterness. "I'm done for. I wouldn't drag you down with me, even if you'd let me." And he seized his hat and strode toward the door. But she was before him, barring the way. "Drag me down!" she exclaimed. "A few months ago, when you asked me to marry you--then you did want to drag me down. The name of wife doesn't cover the shame of the plaything of passion. Now----"

His stern face relaxed. He looked down at her doubtfully, longingly. It seemed to him that, if he were to try now, if he were to ask of her pity what she had denied to his passion in his strength and pride, he might get it. The perfume of her bright brown hair intoxicated him; his whole body was inhaling her beauty, which seemed to be flowing like the fumes of ecstasy itself through her delicate, almost diaphanous draperies of lace and silk and linen. She had offered only friendship, but passion was urging that she would yield all if he would but ask. All! And what would be the price? Why, merely yielding to Atwater. He need not tell her until he had made terms with him, had secured something of a future materially, perhaps a great future, for he could make himself most useful to Atwater----

"No matter what it is," she said, "you can count on me."

--Yes, most useful to Atwater; and all would be well. Trick her into marrying him--then, compromise with Atwater--and all would be well. He thought he was about to stretch out his arms to take her, when suddenly up started within him the will that was his real self. "I can't do it," he cried roughly. "Stand away from the door!"

"Can't--do--what?" she asked.

"Can't give in to Atwater." Rapidly he gave her an outline of the situation. Partly because he abhorred cant, partly because he was determined not to say anything sounding like an appeal for her admiration and sympathy, he carefully concealed the real reasons of pride and self-respect that forbade him to make terms with Atwater. "I won't bend to any man," he ended. "I may be, shall be, struck down. But I'll never kneel down!"

She seemed bewildered by the marshy maze of trickery through which his explanation had been taking her. "It seems to me," she urged, "that if you don't make terms with Mr. Atwater, don't return to what you originally agreed to do, it'll mean disgrace you don't deserve, and injury to the men who have stood by you."

"So it will," was his answer in a monotonous, exasperating way. "Nevertheless--" He shrugged his shoulders--"I can't do it. I've always been that way. I don't know, myself, till the test comes, what I may do and what I may not do."

Her eyes lowered, but he thought he could see and feel her contempt. She left the door, seated herself, resting her head on her arms. He shifted awkwardly from one leg to the other. He felt he had accomplished his purpose, had done what was the only decent thing in the circumstances--had disgusted her. It was time to go. But he lingered.

She startled him by suddenly straightening herself and saying, or rather beginning, "If you really loved me----"

He, stung with furious anger, made a scornful gesture. "Delilah!" he cried. "It's always the same story. Love robs a man of his strength. You would use love to tempt me to be a traitor to myself. Yes, a traitor. I haven't much morality, or that sort of thing. But I've got a standard, and to it I must hold. If I yielded to Atwater, I should go straight to hell."

"Ah," she exclaimed, as if the clouds had suddenly opened, "then you are right, Horace. You must not yield! Why did you frighten me? Why didn't you say that before? Why did you pretend it was mere stubbornness?"

"Because that's what it is--mere stubbornness. Stubbornness--that's my manhood--all the manhood I've got. I grant terms--I do not accept them."

His manner chilled, where his words would have had small effect. And it conveyed no impression of being an assumed manner; on the contrary, the cold, immovable man before her seemed more like the Armstrong she had known than the man of tenderness and passion. Her words were braver than her manner, and more hopeful, as she said, "You can't deceive me, Horace. It must be that it is impossible to make honorable terms with Atwater."

"As you please."

"You are, for some reason, trying to drive away my friendship. Your pride in your own self-sufficience----"

"You force me to be perfectly frank," he interrupted. "My love for you is nothing but a passion. It has been tempting me to play the traitor to myself. I caught myself in time. I stand or fall alone. You would merely burden and weaken me."

She sat still and white and cold. Without looking at her, he, in a stolid, emotionless way, and with a deliberation that seemed to have no reluctance in it, left her alone.

"Horace!" she cried, starting up, as the portiere dropped behind him.

The only answer was the click of the closing outside door. She sank back, stared in a stupor at the shrine which the god had visited after so many years--had visited only to profane and destroy.

*XXIV*

*NEVA SOLVES A RIDDLE*

Next morning she sent Boris a note asking him not to come until afternoon. When he entered the studio he found her before the blazing logs in the big fireplace, weary, depressed, bearing the unbecoming signs of a sleepless night and a day crouched down in the house. "We must go and walk this off," said he.

"No," replied she listlessly. "Nothing could induce me to dress."

He lit a cigarette, stretched himself at ease in a big chair opposite her. "You have had bad news--very bad news."

"I feel as if I had been ill--on the operating table--and the cocaine were wearing off."

"Armstrong?"

Her answer was the silence of assent.

"When you told Molly not to let anyone in, yesterday, you excepted him?"

"Yes."

"I thought it over afterwards and decided that must be so." Several reflective puffs at the cigarette. Then, not interrogating, but positively, "You care for him."

"Do I?" she said, as if the matter were doubtful and in any event not interesting.

Boris drew a long breath. "That's why I've been unable to make a beginning with you. I ought to have seen it long ago, but I didn't--not until yesterday--not until I had solved the riddle of his being able to get in."

"That's rather a strong conclusion from such a trifling incident."

"Proof is proof enough--to a discerning mind," replied he. A pause, she staring into the fire, he studying her. "Strange!" he went on, suspiciously abstract and judicial. "He's a man I'd have said you couldn't care for."

"So should I," said she, to herself rather than to him.

He was more astonished and interested than he let appear. "There's no accounting for caprices of the heart," he pursued. "But it's a fairly good rule that indifference is always and hugely inflammatory--provided it conveys the idea that if it were to take fire, there would be a flame worth the trouble of the making."

She made no comment.

"And you came on here to win him back?"

"Did I?"

"A woman always does everything with a view to some man." He smiled in cheerful self-mockery. "And I deluded myself into believing you thought only of art. Yes, I believed it. Well--now what?"

"Nothing," she said drearily. "Nothing."

"You won, and then discovered you didn't care?"

"No." She made a gesture that suggested to him utter emptiness. "I lost," she said, as her hands dropped listlessly back to her lap.

Boris winced. Usually a woman makes a confession so humiliating to vanity, only to one whom, however she may trust and like him, she yet has not the slightest desire to attract. Then he remembered that it might have a different significance, coming from her, with her pride so large and so free from petty vanity that the simple truth about a personal defeat gave her no sense of humiliation.

"I don't know what to do next," she continued, thinking aloud. "I seem to have no desire to go on, and, if I had, there doesn't seem to be any path to go on upon. You say I care for him. I don't know. I only know I seem to have needed him--his friendship--or, rather, my friendship for him."

Boris smiled cynically. But her words impressed him. True friendship was, as a rule, impossible between women and men; but every rule has exceptions, and this woman was in so many other ways an exception to all the rules that it might be just possible she had not fallen in love with Armstrong's strength of body and of feature and of will. At any rate, here was a wound, and a wound that was opportunity. The sorer the heart, the more eagerly it accepts any medicine that offers. So Boris suggested, with no apparent guile in his sympathy, "Why not go abroad for a year--two years? We can work there, and perhaps--I can help you to forget." Her expression made him hasten to add, "Oh, I understand. I'm merely the artist to you."

"_Merely_ the artist! It's because you are 'merely the artist' that I could not look on you as just a man."

Boris's smile was sardonic. "The women the men respect too highly to love! The men the women revere too deeply for passion! Poor wretches." The smile was still upon his lips as he added, "Poor, lonely wretches!" But in his eyes she saw a pain that made her own pain throb in sympathy.

"We are, all, alone--always," said she. "But only those like you are great enough to realize it. I can deceive myself at times. I can dream of perfect companionship--or the possibility of it."

"But not with me?"

"I don't trust you--in that way," she replied. "I estimate your fancy for me at its true value. You see, I know a good deal of your history, and that has helped me to take you--not too seriously as a lover."

"How you have misread!" said he, and no one could have been sure whether he was in earnest or not under the manner he wore to aid him in avoiding what he called the colossal stupidity of taking oneself solemnly. "I'm astonished at your not appreciating that a man who lives in and upon his imagination can't be like your sober, calculating, bourgeois friends who deal in the tangible only. Besides, since I've had you as a standard, my imagination has been unable to cheat me. I've even begun to fear I'll never be able to put you far enough into the background to become interested again."

As he thus brought sharply into view the line of cleavage between their conceptions of the relations of men and women, she drew back coldly. "I don't understand your ideas there," said she, "and I don't like them. Anyone who lives on your theory fritters away his emotions."

"Not at all. He makes heavy investments in education. He accumulates a store of experience, of appreciation, of discrimination. He learns to distinguish pearl from paste. It's the habit of women of your kind to become offended if men tell them the honest truth.... Doubtless, Armstrong----"

"Don't! I don't care to hear."

"You interrupt too quickly. I question whether women interest him at all, he's so busy with his gambling. Sensible man, happy man--to have a passion for inanimate things. What I was about to say is that you women, with all your admiration for strength, are piqued and angered by the discovery that a man who is worth while is stronger than any of his passions, even the strongest, even love."

"When a woman gives, she gives all."

"Not a woman such as you are. And that's why I know you will recover, will go on, the stronger and, some day, the happier for it. The broken bone, when it has healed, is stronger than one that has never been broken--and the broken heart also. The world owes its best to strong hearts that have been broken and have healed." He let her reflect on this before he repeated, "You should go abroad."

"Not yet--not just yet."

"Soon," said he. "It will be painful for you to stay here--especially as the truth about him is coming out now."

"The truth!" she exclaimed. Her look, like a deer that has just caught the first faint scent and sound of alarm, warned him he had blundered.

"Oh, nothing new," replied he carelessly. "You know the life of shame they lead, downtown."

"But what of him?" she insisted. She was sitting up in her chair now, her face, her whole body, alert.

"I hear he went too far--or put a paw on prey that belonged to some one of the lions. So, he's going to get his deserts. Not that he's any worse than the others. In fact, he's the superior of most of them--unless you choose to think a man who has remnants of decent instinct left and goes against them is worse than the fellow who is rotten through and through and doesn't know any better." Raphael realized he was floundering in deeper and deeper with every word; but he dared not stop, and so went floundering on, more and more confused. "You'll not sympathize with him, when the facts are revealed. It's all his own fault."

A long pause, with him watching her in dread as she sat lost in thought. Presently she came back, drew a long breath, said, "Yes, all and altogether his own fault."

He felt enormously relieved. "Come abroad!" he cried. "Yours is simply a case of a woman's being irritated by indifference into some emotion which, for lack of another name, she calls love. Come abroad and forget it all. Come abroad! Art is there, and dreams! Paris--Italy--flowers--light--and love, perhaps. Come--Neva! Do you want fame? Art will give you that. Do you want love?" Her quickened breath, her widening, wistful eyes made him boldly abandon the pretense that he was lingering with her in friendship's by-path, made him strike into the main road, the great highway. "I will give you love, if you'll not shut your heart against me. You and I have been happy together, haven't we--in our work--happy many an hour, many a day?"

"Yes," she admitted. "I owe you all the real happiness I've ever had."

"Over there, with all this far away and vague--over there, you would quite forget. And happiness would come. What pictures we would paint! What thoughts! What dreams! You still have youth--all of the summer, all of the autumn, and a long, long Indian summer. But no one has youth enough to waste any of it. Come, Neva. Life is holding the brimming, sparkling glass to your lips. Drink!"

As he spoke, he seemed Life itself embodied; she could not but feel as if soft light and sweet sound and the intoxicating odor of summer were flooding, billow on billow, into the sick chamber where her heart lay aching.

"If I can," she said. And her glance made him think of morning sunbeams on leaping waters. "If I can.... What a strange, stubborn thing a sense of duty is!"

"You're really just as far from your father here as you would be there."

"I can't explain," said she. "I'll think it over."

And he saw he would have to be content with that for the present.

About eleven that night Armstrong, his nerves on edge from long, incessant pacing of the cage in which Atwater had him securely entrapped, was irritated by a knock at his door. "Come in!" he called sharply.

He heard the door, which was behind him, open and close with less noise than the hall boy ever made. Then nothing but the profound silence again.

"Well, what is it?" he demanded, turning in his chair--he was sitting before an open fire.

He started up, instantly recognized her, though her figure was swathed in an opera wrap, and the lace scarf over and about her head concealed her features without suggesting intent.

"I was at the opera," she began. "All at once--just before the last act--I felt I must see you--must see you to-night. I knew you'd not come to me. So, I had to come to you." And she advanced to the middle of the room. As he made no movement toward her, said nothing, she flung aside the scarf and opened her wrap with a single graceful gesture. She was in evening dress, and the upturned ermine of the collar of her wrap made a beautiful setting for those slender white shoulders, the firm round throat, the small, lightly poised head, crowned with masses of bright brown hair.

He took her hand. It was ice. "Come to the fire," said he.

"I'm cold--with fright," she explained. And then he noted how pale she was. "It wasn't easy to induce the hall boy to let me up unannounced. I told him you were expecting me."

She stretched one hand, one slender, round, bare arm toward the flames. She put one foot on the fender, and his glance, dropping from the allurement of the slim fingers, was caught by the narrow pale-gray slipper, its big buckle of brilliants, the web of pale-gray translucent silk over her instep----

"You've no business here," he said angrily. "You must go at once."

"Not until I am warm."

He looked as helpless as he was.

"Won't you smoke--please?" she asked, after a brief silence.

He took a cigarette from the box on the table, in mechanical obedience. As he was lighting it, he felt that to smoke would somehow be a concession. He tossed the cigarette into the fire. "You simply can't stay here," he cried.

"I simply can't go," she replied, "until I am warm."

In his nervousness he forgot, lit a cigarette, felt he would look absurd if he threw it away, continued to smoke--sullen, impatient.

"Ever since you left, yesterday," she went on, "I've been thinking of what you said, or, rather, of how you said it. And to-night, sitting there with the Morrises, I saw through your pretenses."

He turned upon her to make rude denial. But her eyes stopped him, made him turn hastily away in confusion; for they gave him a sense that she had been reading his inmost thoughts.

"Horace," she said, "you came to say good-by."

"Ridiculous," he scoffed, red and awkward.

"Horace, look at me."

His gaze slowly moved until it was almost upon hers, and there it rested.

"You have made up your mind to get out of the world, if they defeat you."

He laughed noisily. "Absurd! I'm not a romantic person, like your friend Boris. I'm a plain man of business. We don't do melodramatic things.... Come!" He took her scarf from the chair where she had dropped it. "You must go."

For answer she slipped off the cloak, deliberately lined a chair with it, and seated herself. "I shall stay," said she, "until I have your promise not to be a coward."

He looked at her with measuring eyes. She was very pale and seemed slight and frail; her skin was transparent, her expression ethereal. But the curve of her chin, though oval and soft, was as resolute as his own.

"You asked for my friendship," she continued. "I gave it. Now, the time has come for me to show that my words were not an empty phrase.... Horace, you are in no condition to judge of your own affairs. You live alone. You have no one you can trust, no one you can talk things over with."

He nodded in assent.

"You must tell me the whole story. Bring it out of the darkness where you've been brooding over it. You can trust me. Just talking about it will give you a new, a clearer point of view."

"To-morrow--perhaps I'll come to you," he said, his voice hushed and strained. "But you mustn't stay here. You've come on impulse----"

"Where her reputation's concerned a woman never acts on impulse. You might not come to-morrow. It must be to-night." Her voice was as strange as his had been, was so low that its distinctness seemed weird and ghostly. "Come, Horace, drop your silly melodramatics--for it's you that are acting melodrama. Can't you see, can't you feel, that I am indeed your friend?"

He seated himself and reflected, she watching him. The stillness had the static terror of a room where a soul is about to leave or about to enter the world. It was not her words and her manner that had moved him, direct and convincing though they were; it was the far subtler revelation of her inmost self, and, through that, of a whole vast area of human nature which he had not believed to exist. Suddenly, with a look in his eyes which had never been there before, he reached out and took her hand. "You don't know what this means to me," he said in a slow, quiet voice. And he released her hand and went to lean his forehead against the tall shelf of the chimney-piece, his face hidden from her.

She did not interrupt his thoughts and his emotions until he was lighting a fresh cigarette at the table. Then she said, "Now, tell me--won't you, please?"

"It's a long story," he began.

"Don't try to make it short," urged she. And she settled herself comfortably.

It took him an hour to tell it; they discussed it for an hour and a half afterwards. Whenever he became uneasy about the time, she quieted him by questions or comments that made him feel her interest and forget the clock. At the last quarter before two, he rose determinedly. "I'm going to put you into a cab," said he. "You have accomplished all you came for--and more--a great deal more."

She made no attempt to stay on longer. He helped her into her cloak, helped her to adjust the scarf so that it would conceal her face. They were both hysterically happy, laughing much at little or nothing. He rang for the elevator, then they dashed down the stairs and escaped into the street before the car could ascend and descend again. At the corner where there was a cab stand, he drew her into the deep shadow of the entrance to the church, took both her hands between his. "It will be a very different fight from the one I was planning when you came," said he.

"And you'll win," asserted she confidently.

"Yes, I'll win. At least, I'll not lose--thanks to you, Neva." He laughed quietly. "When I'm old, I'll be able to tell how once the sun shone at midnight and summer burst out of the icy heart of January."

She nodded gayly. "Pretty good for a plain business man," said she.

Another moment and she was in the cab and away, he standing at the curb watching with an expression that made the two remaining cabmen grin and wink at each other by the light of the street lamp.

*XXV*

*TWO WOMEN INTERVENE*