Not by anything that she said or did, truly; and yet at that moment her love for him sprang full-armed into being, filling her with joy unspeakable, and promising thenceforth to dominate ambition and all else. But her lover knew it not, and he turned away to grope in thick darkness for the door because the vertigo of failure was blinding him. On the threshold he stopped, and when sight returned looked back at her as she stood under the light of the high easel lamp.
He made sure that the picture and its setting would be a lasting memory, and the sight of it brought back a swelling wave of recollection that went nigh to submerging him. There was the piano, where he had so often stood beside her, turning the leaves of her music while she played for him. In the corner, where the cross light from the windows could be shaded and controlled from her chair, stood her easel—the workbench before which she had spent so many patient hours. On the wall opposite, hanging just where she could see it while she worked, was the little Vedder—his one valuable gift; and beside the fire, which was now burning brightly, stood the easy-chair which had come to be called his, so often had he claimed it.
Some such background he had always imagined for his own home—the home wherein he could escape from the growing responsibilities of his work; the home which Isabel was to make for him. But she had said it could never be, and she was sending him away without hope, and with nothing but the remembrance of her pity to fill the place she had made for herself in his life. She might have kissed him once, he thought, and the thought set itself in words before he could check it.
“It couldn’t have made much difference to you, Isabel; a kiss is only a little thing. And yet I had an idea that if you gave me one the remembrance of it would tide me over some of the hard places. That was all.”
Her eyes met his when he began to say it, but she neither saw nor heard him when he went away. When she looked up and found him gone she ran to the door to call him back, but she was not quick enough. The night had swallowed him, and when she made sure of it she went back to the studio to bury her face in the lounge pillows and to cry bitterly—for what, she knew not, save that her world seemed suddenly to have fallen out of its orbit.
Thus the maid. And the man? As Brant had left the same house a few nights earlier with the devil beckoning him, so went Antrim, stumbling over the curb at the crossing and splashing through the pools made by the overflowing irrigation ditches without once realizing the discomfort. It was mirth for the gods, doubtless. His trouble was only a microscopic bit of side play in the great human comedy. But it was tragic enough to the young man, and many a spoiled life answers to promptings no more insistent than those which gather, buzzardlike, to pick the bones of a starved passion.
In the ruck of it Antrim tramped wearily back to the city, unmindful of all the familiarities until some one spoke to him at the corner of Sixteenth and Larimer Streets. It was Grotter, the division engineer, and he linked arms with the chief clerk and caught step.
“Chilly night, isn’t it, Harry?” he said, shouldering his companion diagonally across the street toward a stained-glass transparency marking the entrance to a saloon. “I should think you’d freeze in that light overcoat. Let’s go in here and have a nip to go to bed on—what do you say?”
Now, no anchoret of the Libyan Desert was ever less a tippler than was Antrim. But the thought of his great disappointment came and grappled with him, and the devil, to whom some very worthy people are yet willing to accord a personality, tempted him with a specious promise of comfort. So he did no more than hang upon the doorstep while Grotter overpersuaded him.
This was at midnight, and therein lay one of life’s little ironies. At the very moment when Isabel, kneeling at her bedside, was trying with innocent cheeks aflame to frame the first halting petition for her acknowledged lover, Antrim was entering the house of temptation with the engineer. And presently he joined Grotter in a cup of some insidious mixture in which beaten eggs and liquid fire seemed to be the chief ingredients, sipping it slowly while he listened to the engineer’s stories of his perils by fire, flood, and unruly grade labourers in the mountains.