Ordham smiled grimly. “I have not the faintest idea she will refuse to go with me when she is persuaded that no argument or threat will keep me at home. I can understand that she will hate to leave London,—England,—but she will accompany me. Small doubt of that.”
Margarethe set her teeth. It was with some difficulty that she clung to the programme she had worked out before arriving in England. To manipulate him until his wife should be abhorrent and desertion inevitable, with the consequent scandal and disaster, was not the part she had set herself to play in his life. But when the rich soil of a woman’s nature, long covered with the volcanic ashes of old passions, which conserve and fertilize, is sprouting with the roses and the toadstools of a new passion, the rôles of operatic masterpieces are mere play to that of the disinterested friend. Margarethe had come to this renewal of their intimacy secure in the belief that her passions were either dead or safely entombed; but they had revealed themselves, insolent and powerful, when, shaken with the tumults of Isolde, she had met his eyes that first night in Covent Garden. She was appalled, but her will lost nothing of its strength, she had practised self-control for many years; and by one of those profound and obscure contradictions, ever manifesting themselves in human nature, her idealism recovered from its late inertia and entered upon a new lease. The more insistently and unequivocally love spoke, the more determined she grew that descend to that buried plane set thick with awful corpses she would not, those dead foul memories that must forever make the materializing of love mean but one more carnal experience. Once she could have idealized this bond, even had she known Ordham in her ignorant youth, a thousand times more had she met him with a mature mind and a past of even comparative ignorance; but now, the moment she gave herself, all power of idealism would be slain, and she believed that she should kill herself—perhaps him as well.
Nor was self-control an unendurable tax. She had passed that first and best period of reproductiveness, when passion drowns reason, nor had she reached that age when so many women fatally awaken to the fact that but a bit of youth remains and they had best make the most of it. Moreover, perhaps the vitalest point of all, she was a great artist with the world at her feet. Poor women, that had only their good intentions to bulwark them! She threw them a passing sympathy.
“Perhaps it is not necessary,” she said abruptly, “but I should like your promise that you will permit nothing to interfere with your career, the public exercise of your best energies. I know that you will not reply, ‘Of course!’ and that if you make me the promise you will keep it.”
“The promise is not necessary, but you shall have it if you wish. What else have I left? Were it not for that prospect of future usefulness and activity—I don’t care to think of what I should become—or be doing at the present moment.”
“Speculation would be throwing away good time, for without the abilities which are driving you into a career you would not be you. But what you must husband at present are your opportunities. In some subtle way, your wife, supported by your mother, who seems to have great political influence—I believe you told me that two of her cousins or uncles are in the present cabinet?—might rear obstacles, create postponements, until the government wiped you off its slate as a trifler who was blocking the way of more serious men.”
He sat up in a sudden fright. “I’ll go to the F. O. to-morrow and ask definitely for a post in September, giving my word that nothing less than a mortal illness shall prevent my departure the moment I get orders.”
She leaned forward eagerly, and, taking his hand, held it against her breast, which was neither cold nor calm. “You promise me that, you swear it,” she whispered.
He trembled violently, his lids dropped, and he made a sudden movement as if to take her in his arms. She stood up.
“Gypsies have strong eyes,” she said lightly.