INEFFECTUAL FLUTTERS
She prayed that night for his pure soul,
And thanked her new-found God
That he returned unscathed and whole
To that white world he trod.
John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."
A woman's last love is always a rechauffé of her first.—"The Silver Poppy."
Hartley had to wait in the library for some time; he sat in the dusky, massive room wondering why he should listen so eagerly for Cordelia's step. When she did come down—she had finally surrendered and written him a pitiful, urgent little note complaining of his neglect and her loneliness, and declaring that she must see him at once—she stepped before him resplendent in a shimmering gown of salmon-colored liberty satin, which looked almost yellow in the softened lamplight, subdued by her own careful hand. She was more nervous than she appeared, and she was glad of the half-lights. She had long since discovered that the library was the one room in the Spaulding household where one could sit in assured solitude. The Spauldings, indeed, were not a bookish family, Alfred Spaulding always briskly protesting that he preferred living life to reading it. And when it came to a matter of recreation, he used to say, sixty miles in an automobile knocked the daylights out of sixty chapters of romantic philanderings.
Cordelia came over to Hartley almost timidly, and looked up at him out of her eyes after the manner of a child who had done wrong and had been punished, and was repentant once more.
She was startled to notice the change in him, to see how attenuated and drawn his face was, how worn he looked about the eyes.
"My poor boy!" There was much of the maternal in that little cry. "My poor boy, what is it?" she asked with trembling lip, in her earnestness taking his hand once more.
"Oh, it's nothing. I've been working jolly hard and got a little under the weather," he explained. He could never endure sympathy.
"And you never told me!" There was a touch of more than kindness, of more than melancholy reproof, in the unconsciously softened voice. It seemed to rend all the fogs that had muffled and darkened life.
"And now, heigho, I feel like a holiday!" he cried as he told her, half ashamed of the softer mood that stole over him, how much had been accomplished with The Unwise Virgins.
"Why, surely you haven't finished it—so soon?"
"Not finished, altogether, but the bulk of the work is done."
"The bulk done!" She was thinking of her months of silent and agonized labor—her labor that had been lost.
"Yes, now the work of the file remains—and that's easy."
Was it so easy? she was wondering.
Cordelia, he thought, did not appear able to share in his enthusiasm. She seemed to take no delight in what he had called their common accomplishment. She accepted it all very quietly, and did not even ask when she might see the manuscript. He had expected her to be more openly interested, at any rate, and was momentarily chilled and puzzled at her unlooked-for indifference. Then some gleam of light seemed to come to him, for looking at her again, she smiled up at him through her still gentle glance of reproach.
"Did you forget? This is my first night."
"Your first night?" He felt that their lives had been strangely divided of late, that he was looking out on her existence as through a floating veil, or as one looks from a tower on a windy world.
"Yes, to-night The Silver Poppy has its first performance—it's first performance in town, I mean."
He had forgotten it completely, shamefully. But it brought him a relieving touch of happiness; he understood now why she had elbowed into the background the thing that had stood out so important to him. He was trying to explain away his stupidity and to laugh away his absent-mindedness when Mrs. Spaulding's voice sounded in the hall.
Cordelia suddenly turned to him.
"You'll come with us to-night, of course?"
He tried to draw back.
"Do!" she pleaded. "I've been—been depending on you. I'd feel more confident if you were along with me. We have a lower box, and there'll be just the four of us. Do come."
"But are you sure you want an outsider along?" he asked dubiously, annoyed at his own pettishness.
"Quite sure," she said, and though his eyes avoided her own as she spoke those two monosyllables, he could guess from the vibrant tone of her voice just what expression she wore.
He agreed to go, then, gladly enough.
"And you deserve some fun, anyway," she said happily, "after being penned up this way."
"Yes, I'd like to drink in a little of the fulness and color of existence now, for a change. I feel like taking life down in gulps."
"Of course you do—then let's begin to-night. Is it a pledge?"
"It is. And here's to the fulness of life."
"The fulness of life—shake on it, as they say down in my country."
From that first-night performance of Cordelia's much-talked-of drama Hartley carried away many mixed feelings.
It was when the perfunctory applause that came at the end of the first act had died dishearteningly away that Cordelia had turned to him and confessed, as though acting under some sudden impulse, that the work of making the play from her book had not been performed by her alone.
"They insisted on having their own men do it," she explained. "They keep men under salary for just that sort of thing."
"But your name's on every spare fence-board in the city," almost gasped Hartley.
"Yes, I know; they insisted that I should stand as both author and playwright. I fought against it from the first, but it was useless. They said it would be worth so much more to them that way."
She looked at him questioningly. "But it makes me feel like a thief," she sighed. She was hidden out of sight in a dusky corner of the box, and he could not see her face. He looked out at the audience and said nothing.
It was at the end of the third act that the first touch of enthusiasm fell on the house. Cordelia, bending forward with newly awakened interest, was listening to the continued applause abstractedly but eagerly, almost hungrily, Hartley thought.
It was then that Zillinger, the manager of the house, all but burst into the box, excited, hot, perspiring.
"They're calling for you, Miss Vaughan," he cried under his breath, holding the door for her. And listening, she could hear the distant insistent cry of "Author! Author!"
Cordelia hesitated a moment. Zillinger was motioning energetically toward the narrow little aperture that led back of the boxes into the stage. They were shaking the curtain to sustain the hand. Cordelia looked at Hartley with a mute question in her eyes.
"For God's sake, quick—they're calling you!" cried Zillinger again, mopping his brow. Cordelia noticed Hartley's face—it stood out in the stronger glare from the footlights—and in it at that moment she seemed to read something for which she had been searching. She settled back in her chair.
"I can't come," she said simply.
Zillinger advanced as though to seize her bodily—he knew the pattering multitudinous voice of that vast stippled dragon and feared its caprices.
"They're keepin' it up for you—you got to!" he cried in desperation.
"They can keep it up till morning for all I care—I shall not come!"
Zillinger threw up his hands and rushed away, mopping his face and muffling his oaths with the same handkerchief.
Cordelia's hand sought Hartley's in the dusk of the half-lighted box.
"Bully!" was the only word he said, but she understood how much it meant, and it made her inordinately happy for all the rest of that night. She felt, in some way, that her life had approached its Great Divide.