III
If, during all their inarticulate talks, Fallaray had ever remembered to ask Lola about herself, she would have told him, with perfect truth, the little story of her life and love. She was now wholly without fear. She had found the gate in the wall and had entered to happiness. But Fallaray went through that week-end without thinking, accepting the union that she had brought about without question and with a joy and delight as youthful as her own. From the time that she had found him at four o’clock waiting for her, not caring where she came from so that she came, and saw that she had brushed the loneliness from his eyes and brought a smile to his mouth, all sense of being merely temporary lifted from her heart. In the eagerness of his welcome, in the hunger of his embrace, she saw that she belonged, was already as much a possession and a fact as the old house, hitherto his one treasure and refreshment.
They went hand in hand through those lovely days, like a boy and a girl. He led her from one pet place to another and lay at her feet, watching her with wonder, or going close to kiss her eyes and hair, to prove again and yet again that she was not a dream. And every moment smoothed a line from his face and pointed the way to his need of her in all the days to come. But while he showed that he had lived his future and had begun to spend his past, she, even then, forgot her past and turned her eyes to the future. Those holiday days which bound them together must come to an end, of course. And while she reveled in them as he did and avoided any mention of the work to which he must return, she had found herself in finding him, and becoming woman at last, saw her great responsibility and developed the sense of protection that grows with woman’s love.
And this new sense was strengthened and made all the more necessary because his desire to make holiday had come about through her. And while she lay in his arms in all the ecstasy of love, she knew that she would fall far short of her achievement if she should become of more importance in his life than the work that he seemed to have utterly forgotten. It was for her, she began to see, to send him back with renewed energy and fire, and then, installed in a secret nest, to fulfil the part marked out for her as she conceived it and give him the rustle of silk.
If she had been the common schemer, using her sex magnetism to provide luxuries and security—the golden cage, as she had called it in her youth—the way was easy. But love and hero-worship had placed her on another level. Her cage was Fallaray’s heart, in which she was imprisoned for life. Looking into the future with the suddenly awakened practicality that she had inherited from her mother, she began to lay out careful plans. She must find a girl to take her place with Lady Feo. Gratitude demanded that. She would go home until such time as she could take a furnished flat to which Fallaray could come without attracting attention. What her parents were to be told required much thinking. All her ideas of a Salon, of meeting political chiefs, of going into a certain set of society were foolish, she could see. The second of the most important of her new duties, she told herself, was to shield Fallaray from gossip which would be of use to his political enemies and so-called friends; the first to dedicate her life henceforward, by every gift that she possessed and could acquire, to the inspiration and the relaxation of the man who belonged more to his country than he did to her.
She knew from the observation of specific cases and from her study of the memoirs and the lives of famous courtesans that men were not held long by sex attraction alone, although by that, rather than by beauty and by wit, they were captured. She must, therefore, she owned, with her peculiar frankness, apprentice herself anew, this time to the cultivation of intelligence. She must be able, eventually, to talk Fallaray’s language, if possible, and add brain to what she called her gift.
All these things worked in her mind, suddenly set into action like one of her father’s doctored watches, while she wandered through the sunny hours with Fallaray. All that was French and thrifty and practical in her nature awoke with all that was passionate and love-giving. And when at night she had to leave him to return to the cottage of the sympathetic woman whose discretion deserved a monument, she lay awake for hours to think and plan. She was no longer the lady’s maid, going with love and adoration and long-deferred hope from one failure to another, no longer the trembling girl egged forward to a forlorn hope. She had found the gate in the wall, entered into a golden responsibility and blossomed into a woman.