CHAPTER VIII.
Helena Belmont saw little of her company for two days. She spent part of the time in the forest, the rest in her boudoir, a long room on the east side of the house opening into her bedroom at one end and into a small library at the other. The bedroom was a pretty thing of pale pink and green, and white lace. The library, lined from floor to ceiling with books, many several generations old, had only a rug on the bare floor, a table and several upright chairs. The walls of the boudoir were panelled with the beautiful delicately-veined redwood the forest trees conceal under their forbidding bark. The ceiling was arched and heavily beamed. The curtains of doors and windows, the deep chairs and couches, the rugs on the dark floor were of Smyrna stuffs whose only tangible color was a red that was almost black. A redwood mantel was built to the ceiling; a large table of the same wood, heavily carved, was covered with books and costly trifles. The deep window seats were also upholstered. The Castilian roses nodded against the pane, but Helena could look above the garden wall into the forest on the mountain.
And here Helena sat for hours. She was profoundly stirred and touching lightly the keys of something akin to happiness. Several times before in her life she had felt what she believed to be the quickening of love; but it had died in its swaddling clothes, and had been a vagary of the fancy to this. Her brain and her woman’s instinct told her unerringly that she had found the man. Every part of her went out to him. A faint sweet something tipped her pulses. It is possible that passion was regnant at this time; that she was possessed by the savage primitive desire of the first woman for the first man; so far she had come in contact with little beyond the man’s powerful personality and responsive magnetism. Nevertheless there had been spiritual recognition, blind and groping as it may have been; certain torpid instincts stirred, and she divined vaguely what a woman might be to her husband. She had known many married women more or less intimately, been the confidante of more than one liaison; and with intuition fostered by such knowledge and her own strong brain, she rejoiced that she had met him in time, divining something of the bitter sadness which companions a woman, who, meeting a man too late, must be one thing to him, instead of twenty: his wife would still have the better part of his life, his higher nature, his duty, the supreme happiness of making his home.
She dreamed dreams of her future with Clive: the love and the art by which she would hold him, the companionship. She forgot Mary Gordon’s existence. Had she remembered, she would have imperiously dismissed the very thought of her. She had obtained what she wanted all her life, and recognized no obstacles.
She went up to the log by the creek and touched caressingly the tree against which he had leaned, gathered some of the ashes from his pipe and held them in the hollow of her hand. She smiled as she did so, and wondered that clever women and silly women should be so little dissimilar when in love.
It was on the morning of the third day that the Chinese butler tapped at her door, and said—
“Mr. Lollins wantee you at telephone, missee.”
“Oh, tell somebody else to answer him. I am tired of the very sound of that telephone. Someone is at it all day. I’ve a great mind to have it taken out.”
“Allight, missee.”
A few moments later he returned.