Perch of the Devil

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

“I’ve got Ora’s last letter here; want to hear it?”

“Good Lord, no. Tell me what they are doing. I sent Ida five thousand dollars a few days ago, so I suppose they’re flying high. She cabled her thanks and said they were both well.”

“Don’t you really know what they’ve been doing?”

“Not a thing.”

“Well—let’s see. They went over in June. They did France, Germany—lot of places in regulation tourist style—incidentally met several of Mrs. Stratton’s old friends. Then they went back to Paris, where they appear to have indulged in an orgy of clothes preparatory to a round of country house visits on the Continent and in England. Ora writes with great enthusiasm of—er—Ida’s improvement. Says you’d think she’d been on top all her life, especially since she got those Paris duds, and met a lot of smart people; makes a hit with everybody, and will astonish Butte when she comes back.”

“That will please her!” He felt no glow of tenderness, but some satisfaction that he could gratify the ambitions of the woman he had married. He was still too keen on his own youthful dreams, and thankful at their partial fulfillment, not to sympathise with those of others.

Mark left him to accept the more commodious hospitality of Oakley, and Gregory sat for another hour smoking, hoping for the mood of sleep. But the news had excited him, and he preferred to sit up rather than to toss about his narrow bed. The last part of the conversation, however, had given a new turn to his thoughts. Suddenly, unbidden, Ora flashed into his mind and refused to be dislodged. He walked up and down, striving to banish her as he had done before, when, sleepless, she had peremptorily demanded his attention. Tonight she was almost a visible presence in the little room.

He sat down again and grimly permitted his mind to dwell upon his long communion with her on the steps of the School of Mines. He tried to analyse his impulse to take her there. Unconventional as he was it had never occurred to him to do such a thing before, and there were twenty women in the room whom he would have expected to exercise a more potent fascination had he been in the humour for a flirtation. He had been quite honest in telling Ora that he had taken her out merely to look at her under the stars, and in intimating that to make love to her was the last thing in his mind. She had hardly seemed a woman at all there in the ballroom or when he first sat at her feet; his mind was relaxed and the “queer” romantic or poetical streak that he often deprecated had taken possession of it; if he had had a suspicion of anything more he would have fled from her at once, for she was the wife of his friend. As it was he merely had dismissed Mark from his mind and tried the experiment of setting a bit of exquisite white poetry to the music of the stars....

As often as her memory had assailed him he had longed to rehearse that scene; the conversation, desultory and personal; her white profile against the flaming blue sky; the intensity and brilliancy of her eyes, so unlooked for in her young almost colorless face; her pink mouth that changed its expression so often; her curious magnetism, so unlike that of the full-blooded woman—all of that and something more; the strange community of mind—or soul?—that had drawn him on to pour out his secret self into another self of whose contact he was almost literally sensible,—in a sudden desire for comprehension that had been like the birth of a new star in his mental constellation. He had felt the thrill of her sympathy, her understanding, then another thrill of perplexity, fear; then the little quarrel, when he had thought her more adorable than ever, and no longer bearing the least resemblance to a star-wraith, but wholly feminine. When he left her it was with the confused sense that he had sojourned for a bit with the quintessence of womanhood whom Nature had cast in a new and perilous mould.

He went over the hour again and again, hoping to bore himself, to arrive at the conclusion that it had been a mere commonplace flirtation with a coquette who was as cold as she looked. But he found the recaptured scene very sweet. The power of concentration he possessed enabled him to shut out the little room and sit at the feet of the woman whose magic personality had penetrated the barriers he so jealously had built about his soul and given him the first sense of companionship he had ever known.