TARNISHED GOLD
She yielded then where she had frowned,
And fell her tears like leaves;
She sank before him on the ground
And clasped his iron greaves.
John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."
After all, Rabelais' religion and women are one and the same thing—a great Perhaps.—"The Silver Poppy."
The lights of Cordelia's little yellow-trimmed study were carefully shaded and softened. Cordelia herself, with bright but restless eyes, with a slightly flushed face, and a little quickness of speech and movement betokening, perhaps, nerves too tensely strung, was already waiting for Hartley, when, an hour later, he stepped up to her door.
He had long since grown used to that freedom of action, to that unthought-of abandon of the Bohemian which Cordelia laid claim to as her natural right, and which the world about her had the habit of laughing away as the mere unrestrained eccentricity of guileless genius. He had noticed that this careless freedom seemed to suit her best. He liked her least when she was least ingenuous.
"It's so stupid and lonesome downstairs in that big sepulchral dining-room!" she said. "Let's have dinner up here."
A momentary and careless feeling that some too boldly effacing sponge was wiping out the last blurred line of formality passed through him.
"Oh, I have nearly all my meals served up here, now that I'm alone!" she explained. "It's much quieter and more cozy. Here we can have dinner in peace, and be undisturbed. You don't mind, do you?"
After his stiff ride the blood was still running through his veins vigorously. He could feel life pulsing dominatingly through him, and some mysterious back-wash of that wave of joyous intoxication which earlier had taken possession of Cordelia now seemed sweeping in turn through him.
"The queen can do no wrong!" he cried, looking down into the unnatural brightness of her face that gleamed like a flower in the half-light. Then something transient, fugitive, inscrutable, something that crept up into her eyes, drove the careless smile from his lips, and they looked at each other, man and woman.
"Stevens," she said, turning to the servant who had answered her ring, "I am at home to no one this evening! Remember, Stevens, to no one!"
She had replaced her dark-green riding-habit by a loose, heavily pleated robe of bebe blue, lined with the palest of yellow satin. Its sleeves hung loosely about her white arms, which they left partly unconcealed, as though by accident. Her even whiter throat, too, was left bare. She seemed suddenly converted from a child of alertness to a woman of languor. Hartley did not go out of his way to analyze the mystery of that sudden alteration by means of a mere change of raiment. But it seemed as if some magical breath of enchantment had blown away the fragile petals from the blossom of youth and left in its place the mellowed and rounded fruit of womanhood.
As he gazed across the table at her during that strangest of dinners she seemed to take on a warm maturity and a vitality quite new to her. The heavier shadows, caused, no doubt, he thought, by mere weariness of body, that seemed to dwell under the arch of her eyebrow, again and again suggested to him the picture of her as a young mother, saddened with the burden of her first maternity.
"Do you know," she said to him suddenly—they had been talking but little that night—"I have never yet once called you by your Christian name! John! How that sounds like you: substantial, solid, dignified! No; I have never dared. I believe I am still afraid of you—John!"
He made her say it over a dozen times. She repeated the name until it seemed to fall to pieces on her tongue, and lose all meaning. Then she sighed heavily.
"I'm tired!" she murmured, locking her fingers behind her head. He noticed an unlooked-for fulness about the round, tower-like neck that seemed to sigh into the white breadth of the shoulders like a river into its sea.
"Cordelia, you are tired," he repeated suddenly: and he moved as though to rise from his chair. A frightened look shot into her face. She wondered for a moment if he would have the heart to leave her there, so soon, so unsatisfied, and without a sign. She dreaded the thought of the solitude that would come after he had gone, the thought of that last night of what she must soon call her old life.
"I wonder if you know how tired I am?" she murmured absently, pushing back her sleeves and leaning forward with her elbows on the table.
"I wonder if you can imagine how heavily I'll sleep to-night, and how tired I shall get up, even, in the morning?"
He rose from his chair, and walking round to the side of the table where she sat, stood behind her without speaking. She could feel the caress of his hand on her thick hair.
"I feel as though I'd like to be mothered to-night by some one!" she murmured softly, as her eyelids drooped.
He still touched her hair, almost reverently, but that was all.
Then she turned to him with the smile of a tired child.
"Lift me up—I want you to lift me up, and carry me over to my couch!"
He lifted her in his arms as he might a child of three, and as he did so the memory of another night when he had first done the same thing rushed back through his mind; and without a word he carried her to the little Japanese couch beside her writing-desk of gold and mother-of-pearl. He found a rug and covered her feet.
She gazed up at him with lips that appeared to pout girlishly.
"Do you want to sleep now?" he asked gently, bending over her.
As he looked down at her in the silence that followed his words her mouth seemed to grow heavy. That fugitive, inscrutable something crept into her eyes once more; and all of a sudden his face grew deathly pale, and then flushed again.
"John!"
He turned and made three steps toward the door.
"John!" she cried after him, with a note of pain in the cry. She had flung off the rug, and was leaning on her elbow. He looked from where he stood, hesitating.
He went slowly back, and bent over her once more. Her pleading lips were perilously close to his.
"Must you go?" she asked, sinking back in her weariness, and raising two arms from which the loose silken sleeves fell back. The next moment a vibrant tremor of exaltation swept over her.
"Don't go! Don't go!" she murmured. "Don't leave me!"
The two white arms came together and folded over him and drew him in like wings.
Time and the world were nothing to her then; time and the world were shut out from him. It was the lingering, long-delayed capitulation of the more impetuous, profounder love she had held back from him, of the finer and softer self she had all but famished in the citadel of her grim aspirations. She no longer allured him, or cared to allure him; she had nothing to seek of him thereafter; she had only the ruins of her broken life to give him.
And he, too—he felt those first thin needles of bliss that crept and projected themselves over the quiet waters of friendship, and he knew that a power not himself was transforming those waters of change and unrest and ebb and flow into the impenetrable solidity of love itself.