Chapter XVI: Love

Cold-blooded calculation was no portion of Waldon’s character. In order to make him treacherous there must be some appeal to his passions. Full of poetic sentiment, he was void of actual magnanimity. All the grandeur of his ideas were the outgrowth of a vivid imagination. His intellect and his appetites went hand in hand, sharpening each other.

Under some impulses he was generous. Let those impulses die away, and a current of unbelievable meanness set in that seemed impossible to those who had read the man’s thoughts, or listened to the splendor of his conversation. This was the man whose society had transfigured Clara Anderson’s life. Life! the girl had not lived before. All the rest was a stale, unprofitable dream to her. Now it seemed as if love had made her immortal. Weeks had passed like hours to her. There by the window, that had become distasteful from its associations with toil, she sat like some spirit in Heaven, listening to that voice, blushing under the glance of those eyes, happy in the mere consciousness of his presence. Up to this time no absolute word of love had been spoken between these two, but she had never felt the loss, and his readings had been full of application. When a burning passage left his lips its spirit was carried to hers with a glance or a smile more eloquent than words.

But this day, while Lydia was holding a conference with her own shadow by the roadside, the craving vanity of this man broke bounds. With epicurean patience he had scattered the seed and watched its sensitive growth. Now he was seized with a desire to drink the fragrance of the flowers.

He was leaning back in the great splint-bottomed easy-chair close by the window, gazing with half-shut eyes on the bright face of the girl as she bent over her work dreamily, with the needle pointing idly from her fingers.

Such dreams came upon her often of late, and he loved to watch the changes of her countenance as they left light or shade upon its beauty.

All at once he leaned forward, laid one hand upon her shoulder, and bent his face to hers.

“Clara, do you love me?”

A swift thrill passed under his hand. The girl lifted her face and a glorious light broke through the brooding softness of her eyes.

“Love you!” she answered, radiant with light and color, “Oh heavens! what would life be to me if I did not?”

Waldon drew his face closer to hers and she felt a kiss touch her lips lightly, as if a red rose-leaf had fallen there—the first that had ever passed between them.

Walden drew back, and sighing, as if his breath were laden with the fragrance of flowers, sat watching the swift mutations of that beautiful face under the ripple of his first kiss.

“It is something worth living for,” he said in a voice rich with contentment. “To be thoroughly loved is the great necessity of a man’s life.”

Clara lifted her eyes to his with wistful questioning. He had shaken her heart as bees wrest honey from lilies. Did this content him? Had he no words of love to give in return?

The girl did not say this, even in thought, but a vague want disturbed her, and the joy in her bosom seemed slowly ebbing away. Perhaps she felt a subtle loss too, such as sensitive women know, without knowledge, when the first kiss of love is taken from their lips.

“There is no need of words,” thought the girl, consoling herself. “One glance of his eyes speaks more eloquently than the lips of other men.”

“Ah,” thought Waldon, roving backward in his mind, “if such moments could last forever, the love of one woman would be enough for a lifetime, and where could I find a being more exquisite?”

Clara knew that he was thinking of her admiringly, but of the more subtle worldliness underlying that admiration she could have no idea. It was like a serpent coiled under a matting of roses. Feeling his glance upon her she looked up and smiled.

He reached forth his hand, smiling back upon her.

“You are happy now, sweet Bonnibel,” he said; for it was his habit to use quaint phrases gathered from Mediæval romance, that his love-making might be unlike that of other men.

“Have I made _you_ happy?” she answered, with smiles and blushes sweeping across the loveliness of her face. “Without that everything would be incomplete with me.”

“Can you doubt it?”

“Oh, indeed, how can I?”