Chapter XVII: Part 17

Bobby went, nothing loath. He was not at all a shy child, though he was very reserved as a rule.

Sophy could not have said why she was surprised and rather disappointed at the evident fancy which he had taken to Belinda Horton. She did not divine that even the seven-year-old man vibrated to the spell of Belinda's surcharged femininity.

Bobby lounged against the girl's knee and stared up into her face out of sober, dark-grey eyes.

"Well?" said Belinda, taking his chin in her strong fingers and shaking it slightly. "_Why_ do you like it?"

"'Cause you're beautiful," said he boldly.

Belinda laughed, ran her hand the "wrong way" over his face, and picking up a lump of sugar, pressed it between his willing lips.

"There!" she said. "If you were older, 'twould be a kiss--but I believe little boys don't think kisses as sweet as sugar."

"I think _yours_ would be," he returned promptly, having tucked away the lump of sugar in his cheek.

"Bobby!" called his mother. "Don't be forward...."

"Oh, don't snub him ... please," Belinda said. "He's not 'forward'--but he's going to be a dreadful flirt. My! young man, but you're going to lead the girls a dance when you know how--ain't you?"

"I know how to dance now," said Bobby.

"You do, hey? Well, you shall dance with me some time. Would you like that?"

"Ra-_ther_!"

Sophy, however, didn't at all like this unusual, bold-eyed Bobby who was lolling against a stranger's knee as though they had been intimate for years, and "giving her as good as she sent." She cast a meaning glance at young Grey, who had just finished his cup of tea. He rose obediently, though he felt the deepest sympathy with Bobby.

"Time for your boxing lesson, Bobby," he said.

Bobby pressed closer to Belinda. He looked at his mother.

"Couldn't I stay a _little_ longer, mother?" he pleaded. "'Cause Cousin Belinda's just come?"

Sophy didn't want to appear a prig. She glanced again at Harold Grey.

"You must ask Mr. Grey," she said.

"Mr. Grey" was between two fires. He said somewhat lamely:

"I'm sure Miss Horton will excuse you, Bobby. He has his boxing lesson and his history to prepare for to-morrow," he added, in explanation.

Belinda smiled this time--it was a discreet smile, but disclosed a dimple in the cheek next "Mr. Grey."

"Hard lines, Bobby!" she murmured. "I think I _must_ be nicer than boxing and history!"

"I should _think_ so!" he cried with fervour. "Mr. Grey knows it, too...."

Harold Grey blushed. Belinda laughed delightedly. Sophy rose and took Bobby by the hand. She was laughing, too, but quite firm.

"Come, Bobby," she said. "You can see your Cousin Belinda as much as you like to-morrow."

Bobby, thus admonished, resisted no longer. He made his most formal bow to the company and marched off with his tutor. Belinda rather resented being thus deprived of her youthful admirer.

She looked smilingly at Sophy.

"My! but you've got him in good training, haven't you?" she said lazily. "Have you got Morry trained like that, too?"

Mrs. Horton made a nervous movement.

Sophy took it tranquilly.

"You must judge for yourself," she replied, also smiling. To herself she said: "This girl has a vulgar mind ... and I'm afraid she's taken a dislike to me."

Loring entered a moment later. He, too, blinked when he saw Belinda. It was not so much her beauty that made him blink as her full-fledged "young-ladyhood." He had not realised that the tucking up of her brilliant mane and the letting down of her skirts would produce so complete a transformation.

He came forward rather consciously, kissed his aunt perfunctorily, and said:

"Hello, Linda!"

"Hello, Morry!" she returned, lying back in her armchair and looking serenely up at him. But into her lazy eyes there had come a glint of garnet. The talk was general for a few moments. Then Loring said that he wanted a cup of tea. He rang, and Biggs brought fresh tea-things.

"I'll make it for you," said Belinda. She glanced at Sophy. "If _you_ don't mind?" she said.

"Of course not. Thanks!" said Sophy.

Belinda busied herself with the tea service. She had well-shaped, very white, very deft hands. The White Cat in the fairy tale must have had hands like Belinda's--just so velvety and agile.

Morris watched them curiously. It was odd--but Belinda's hands had "grown up," too. He remembered them tanned and scratched--regular "paws." Now they were white-cat paws, soft as velvet even to look at.

"How funny!" he said suddenly.

Belinda lifted an eyebrow.

"What's 'funny'?"

"Your sitting there so demurely making tea for me."

"Why shouldn't I sit demurely and make tea for you?"

"Oh, I don't know! You see ... I remember you shinning up trees and ... and that sort of thing."

This speech rather halted at the end.

Belinda thought correctly that the memory of that kiss had interfered with the memory of her tree-climbing. Her spirit purred within her.

"I daresay I could 'shin up' a tree quite well nowadays," she remarked. "It doesn't at all prevent one from making good tea."

As she spoke, she nipped a lump of sugar in two between her strong little fingers, and dropped one half into the cup she was preparing for him.

"I say!" exclaimed Morris. "How you do remember things!"

Then he flushed.

"Oh, yes ... I remember things," said Belinda easily.

She poured cream into the cup and pushed it towards him.

"There...." she said. "If you haven't changed ... entirely ... that's the way you like it."

Sophy and Mrs. Horton were deeply absorbed. Sophy had just told Belinda's mother about the plan of having Belinda stop with her at Newport. Mrs. Horton was delighted. They were now discussing the question of dates. Sophy thought that perhaps she had better arrange a coming-out ball for Belinda before the girl appeared in society. In that case, she had better go first to Newport, and Belinda could join her in, say, ten days. Mrs. Horton called over to her daughter, happily excited: "Linda, you are certainly the luckiest girl! Just listen to what Sophy's going to do for you...."

And she explained with enthusiasm.

For some reason, Belinda, who did not colour easily, grew suddenly red. Then she tossed back her head and looked at Sophy.

"It's _awfully_ good of you...." she said. "I think it's most _awfully_ kind of you...." she repeated. Her voice had real feeling in it, and yet, queerly enough, Sophy sensed that this feeling included resentment also. The girl was certainly a very peculiar character. Was it that she did not like receiving favours which she could not return? She looked a haughty creature. Yes--doubtless that was it.

"It will be a great pleasure for me to have you," Sophy said. "I shall love bringing out the beauty of the season."

She said it nicely without a hint of patronage. But now this odd girl grew quite pale.

"Thanks! That's awfully kind of you," she murmured again. What had turned her pale was the thought that Sophy should take pleasure in her own undoing. She was quite relentless, but she had the sort of qualm that might have stirred a very young Nemesis, when precipitating the first tragedy on her appointed path.

After this, the talk again became general for a few moments; then Sophy took Mrs. Horton to see her sister, and the others went to dress for dinner.

XXV

At dinner-time Loring had another shock. This was the sight of Belinda in evening dress. It was the full glare of her beauty that now smote him, together with the sense of her having become suddenly some one else. This was another person altogether--a new Linda. And yet Belinda had sought to temper the effect of her first appearance thus attired. She had a superstitious feeling that her coming-out ball at Newport was to mark an important crisis in her life. Her gown for that occasion had been carefully selected in Paris (by her--not by her mother). That is, she had selected the gown as the one in which she meant to burst upon Loring in the full splendour of her new womanhood. The ball would furnish this opportunity.

She was sorry to have to lessen that cherished effect, even by this one appearance in demi-toilette. So she had chosen the soberest gown in her wardrobe. It was of dark purple chiffon. The long, _mousquetaire_ sleeves veiled her glinting arms. Her white breast was also veiled. But nothing could subdue the flame of her ruddy coronal of hair. An oval mole, black as her eyebrows, lay in the hollow of her white throat--one of those outrageously perfect imperfections with which Nature loves sometimes to seal her masterpieces. This mole was the final touch on the heady lure of Belinda's beauty.

Loring's eyes were drawn to it unwillingly again and again. He marvelled that he did not remember it. He even wondered if that "little devil!" had not painted it herself upon the snow of her throat.

And whenever he looked at the soft, jet-black mole on the white throat, that kiss of two years ago flamed in his blood as it had not flamed at the time of its bestowal. But he was decent enough to be ashamed of this feeling. He answered Belinda rather briefly on the few occasions that she spoke to him. Somehow he did not trust her. Somehow (though this he did not acknowledge to himself) he dreaded her. And he glanced from her to Sophy--telling himself how much more really beautiful Sophy was in her soft grey and pearls than Belinda in her pansy purple and rococo necklace of amethysts and strass. But for the first time, against his will, Sophy's beauty struck him as cold. And yet it was not cold, though, within it, Sophy herself felt chill and numb. She, too, was obsessed by Belinda. It was not so much the girl's flaring good looks that obsessed her, but the thrilling, imperial youth of her. Sophy felt as a wilting, cut rose might feel, looking from its crystal vase upon a vigorous sister-blossom still rooted in the warm earth. It was a wretched sensation. Sophy hated herself for feeling it, and yet each time that she glanced at Belinda it swept over her afresh.

The dinner was rather flat. Only Mrs. Horton was in really good spirits. She was quite elated and happy over the idea of Belinda's going to stop with Sophy at Newport. Her "coming out" would be much "smarter" and more brilliant under Sophy's chaperonage than under poor, dear Grace's.

Belinda, for her part, was rather depressed by Sophy's appearance in the grey gown that filmed like smoke about her beautiful bare shoulders. Belinda had not taken in quite how lovely her rival was when she had first seen her that afternoon in plain white linen. And just as her youth troubled Sophy, so the mystery of experience in Sophy's dark-grey eyes troubled Belinda. She had a moment--one bitter, stinging moment--of feeling not _quite_ so cock-sure about the future.

And Harold Grey, nervously eating far more than he wanted in his effort not to look too often at Belinda, was thinking how sure he was that his mother would pronounce her "not quite a lady," and yet how much more she attracted him than any of the most genuine "ladies" that he had ever seen. "Don't be an abandoned ass," he kept telling himself. "You're an infant's tutor with a fat salary paid you to keep your place. Now keep it--confound you!"

Loring knew that his mother had some old-fashioned prejudice against having champagne served every day for dinner, and as a rule he submitted, though grumblingly, while he was at Nahant. But to-night he felt that he must have the cheering beverage at all costs. Besides, his mother was ill in bed upstairs. Old Biggs looked like a disapproving, Methodistic owl when the order was given. It violated his principles as Mrs. Loring's butler of twenty years' standing, to serve champagne to a family party of five.

"I'm afraid it will hurt your mother's feelings, Morris," Sophy ventured, as Biggs left the room with a very rigid gait.

"Pooh! Why need she know? Such a silly notion, at any rate! And we ought to drink Linda's health--after her two years in foreign parts. You like champagne, don't you, Linda?"

"You bet!" said Belinda. She flashed both rows of teeth in pleased anticipation.

"Linda!" expostulated her mother, just as in old days. She turned appealingly to Sophy:

"Now I ask you _what_ was the use of my sending her to an expensive Pension school in Paris for two years, if she comes back talking like this?"

"Oh, for God's sake, let her be natural, Aunt Nelly!" put in Loring. "If you only knew how refreshing it is to hear one's own lingo after six weeks or so of England!"

"Didn't you like England, Morry?" asked Belinda.

Loring grinned in the direction of Harold Grey.

"Mr. Grey's presence keeps me from answering with entire candour," he said, a veiled sneer in his voice. He disliked the presence of Bobby's tutor in his household extremely. Harold Grey was an acute young man. He realised this dislike on Loring's part, and returned it with vigour but discretion. He thought Bobby's step-father "just a bit of a cad." He now said composedly:

"Pray don't consider me."

But Loring replied: "Oh, there's plenty of time ahead! I'll give you my sentiments in private, Linda."

Belinda glanced from him to Sophy.

"But _you_ like it, _don't_ you?" she asked.

"Yes. I love England," Sophy answered quietly.

Harold Grey had a "cult" for his pupil's mother. He thought her very wonderful in every way. Now, when she said in that deep, sweet voice of hers that she "loved England," he felt that she was really to be worshipped. And he wondered for the many hundredth time, _how_ she could have married that "gaudy cub." Dependence of position made Harold even harder on his employer than Lady Wychcote had been. But then he shrewdly guessed that it was really the wife and not the husband who employed him. He was already aware of the antagonism that existed between Loring and Bobby. "Breakers ahead there, I should say," he told himself.

At Sophy's reply to Belinda, Loring cast an irritated glance at her and said:

"Oh, Sophy's an out-and-out Anglo-maniac--quite rabid on the subject, in fact. You can't take _her_ opinion. You wait till _I_ talk to you, Linda!"

Neither the look nor the tone escaped Belinda. She also saw that Sophy winced from them--that colour stole into her face and that her lips tightened a little. Here was a useful sidelight. So Morry was as hotly American as ever! That was good. Then Sophy must jar on him at times; for Belinda had decided that she was not very American, not even very Southern. Belinda thanked her stars that she herself was so aggressively a daughter of Columbia.

"See how severe Sophy looks at my daring to jest on such a sacred subject," Loring continued. "By Gad! Sometimes I believe she wishes that we'd remained a Colony of Great Britain!"

("Blithering brute!... Can't you see she's only annoyed because you're jawing this way before _me_?" thought Harold Grey wrathfully.)

But the truth was, that Loring had never forgiven Sophy for the off-hand lesson read him by John Arundel. He half suspected that she had "put him up to it, by gad!" That visit to England had left a big bruise on his _amour propre_. And he "took it out" on Sophy now and then in some such way.

The champagne was served. Belinda's health was drunk. She finished that glass and began another.

"Be careful, Linda," cautioned her step-mother. "You're not used to wine, you know."

All Belinda's dimples began to play like a throng of elves.

"Oh, _Mater_!" she cried. She leaned forward and squeezed Mrs. Horton's dry, brown hand in her velvety white one. "You're too innocent and guileless to run loose in this wicked old world by yourself ... you really are!"

"What do you mean by that extraordinary speech, Linda?"

"Why ... as if the girls at the Pension didn't get bottles of fizz smuggled in to them, any old time! Why, whenever we had a spread on the sly, _some_body's cousin, or brother, or mash slipped us a quart or so of champagne...."

Mrs. Horton looked really aghast. Loring roared. Harold Grey couldn't take his eyes off those twinkling dimples, but in his heart he said: "By Jove! She's a larky little baggage!"

Sophy was the only one who took it calmly. She had decided all of a sudden that there was a good deal of "bluff" about Belinda--that she was of the type that enjoys "shocking people." She said with a smile:

"I don't think you need look so horrified, Eleanor. I believe that Belinda is taking what she'd call 'a rise' out of us."

Belinda only laughed, but she was vexed that Sophy should have seen through her. She had not given her credit for such astuteness. The fact was, that she had never had so much as a sip of champagne while at Madame de Bruneton's excellent Pension. But she found this family meal very dull, she hated seeing Loring in the bosom of domesticity.

However, she won more by her impish tarradiddle than she had looked for. Morris turned to her with something of the old devilment in his eyes and said:

"By Jove, Linda, I hope it's not all bluff! I hope you _are_ a good-enough little sport to enjoy a glass of wine. Good cheer loves company as well as Misery."

Belinda took it in like lightning. Sophy was one of the prigs who do not care to drink even in reason. Poor Morry!

She smiled at him, letting her eyes turn full on his for the first time.

"Of course I enjoy it!" she said. "I _love_ the funny little 'razzle-dazzle' feeling it gives me! But the greatest part of the fun is drinking it _with_ some one.... Some one you like, of course."

"By George, you're a little brick, Linda! Have some more...."

"No," said Belinda, still smiling, and putting her hand over her glass. "'Enough's' _heaps_ better than a feast.... I like to sparkle, but I don't want to boil over...."

"Oh, Belinda! _Belinda!_" said her step-mother.

Sophy came to the rescue.

"An old negro said the best thing I've ever heard about the way that champagne makes one feel," she remarked lightly. "I gave him a glass one Christmas at Sweet-Waters. He'd never tasted champagne before, and I asked him if he liked it. He said: 'Laws, Miss Sophy--dat I does! I feels like I'se done hit dee funny-bones all over me!'"

While every one was laughing at this, she rose. Harold Grey excused himself to "write letters." "Good riddance!" Loring muttered to Belinda, as Harold disappeared and they followed Sophy and Mrs. Horton towards the drawing-room.

Loring was in his usual after-dinner state--not tipsy, but over-excited. He flashed a side-glance of appraisal. "You've bloomed into an out-and-out beauty, Linda. But I don't suppose you need me to tell you that."

"I think I rather do, Morry."

"Oh, cut it, Linda! Don't try the 'maiden-modesty' act on me.... You know as well as I do that you're a dazzler."

They had lingered by the front door, instead of going on into the drawing-room. A full moon was rising. As Belinda stood in the open doorway, one side of her face and figure was silver, and one golden from the hall lamps. She looked like a wonderful figure of mingled fires. In the strange illumination of her face, her eyes burned dark and full. She and Loring leaned against the opposite door-jambs, gazing at each other.

"I can't get over your being 'grown up,'" Morris said a little thickly, as she did not reply to his last remark.

"Yes ... I'm 'grown up,'" she said softly. She kept looking at him. Then she looked at the sea, then she looked back at him again. "It's nice ... being a woman," she added, still in that very soft voice.

"'Nice'?" asked Loring, with a short laugh. "You find it 'nice'?"

"_Very_ nice," said Belinda.

She smiled suddenly. Her teeth glistened with a strange silvery lustre in the moonlight.

"Why?... Don't you?" she asked, her voice slightly shaken as by withheld laughter. It was going to be easier, after all, than she had thought. She did not realise that Bacchus had as much to do with it as Venus. She only knew that Morris was vibrating to her nearness, that his blood was trembling in him.

As he did not answer, she put out her hand and laid it lightly on his breast.

"Don't you?" she said again.

"Don't I what?" he asked rather crossly.

That hand was like a white flame to his drink-stirred blood.

"Oh, Morry!... What a fraud you are!..."

She laughed smotheredly like Lorelei through some soft, warm wave. "What an awful fraud you are, Morry!... You pay me compliments and all the time you're thinking what a nuisance it's going to be, having me at Newport this season!"

Loring looked at her oddly. Then he looked down at the white hand which still lay against his breast.

"Take your hand away, Linda!" he said curtly.

She took it away and turned it about before her in the moonlight, gazing at it consideringly.

"Poor little old hand!" she breathed pityingly. "You've offended the king...."

She held it up between them, again laughing.

"Must I cut it off?" she asked teasingly. "Will you cut it off for me and 'cast it into the fire'?"

Loring said nothing. He leaned there looking at her darkly. He hated her and desired her. It was the old emotion, under whose stress he had once kissed her, magnified tenfold.

She straightened suddenly and was close to him.

"Why are you so horrid to me, Morry?" she said, in a vehement whisper. "What have I done to vex you? I think it's cruel of you ... my first evening at home ... my first 'grown-up' evening with you...."

He saw her lips trembling. It made him quite breathless to see those full, rich lips trembling so near his.

"I don't mean to be horrid," he said constrainedly.

"But you are ... you _are_!..." she insisted. Her voice hummed with passion like a 'cello string. "You _are_!..." she repeated. "What have I done that you should order me not to touch you--as though my hand were poisonous?"

"I ... I'm nervous this evening...." he said lamely. He knew that he should have turned and gone forthwith into the drawing-room. He simply couldn't. The Purple Emperor aroma--the Belinda magic--held him thralled. Belinda wanted to fall forward on his breast and have her laugh out in the dark warmth of his embrace. But the time was not yet. Some day they would laugh together with love's wild, kiss-broken laughter over this comic interview. But not now.

"Are you sorry you were so horrid?" she murmured.

"Oh, yes ... naturally!..."

She had her velvety finger-tips against his mouth in a flash.

"Then kiss it ... beg its pardon!" she said.

Loring snatched down her hand and ground it between his.

"Linda! You little devil!... You little _devil_!..." he said.

He pushed her from him, then swung her to him violently. He loosed her hand and gripped her hard by both shoulders. This grip was brutal and painful. She found it delicious to be hurt by him. That was her type.

"Let me tell you ... let me tell you," he gasped, and this gasping voice also filled her with joy, "you'll play with fire once too often, my dear ... just once too often.... Burns don't make becoming scars.... Now leave me alone!"

He flung her off in good earnest this time, and strode away to the library. His pulses were racing--his blood pounding. He was scared. He did not mean to be false to Sophy for a worldful of Belindas. Not that his love for Sophy was what it had been. The old ardour was clean gone. He found her cold. He felt cold to her. Yet something in him clung blindly to what had been--to the revealed self in him that Sophy had once called forth.

XXVI

According to agreement, Belinda arrived in Newport two weeks later, the day before the ball. When she came downstairs next evening, dressed for the occasion, Sophy thought that she had never seen so palpitantly gorgeous a creature. It was not her gown that was gorgeous, but the beauty that it illumined like sunlight catching a cloud. Belinda had told her step-mother that the regular dress of debutantes was "not her style." "I should look perfectly absurd in white or blue with rosebuds," she had said, with acumen. So she had selected a costume of shaded apricot chiffon. The rich, fruit-coloured stuff made her breast and arms look white as peeled almonds.

An old necklace of brilliants and topaz lay like flecks of sunlight on her milky throat. Belinda never wore modern jewelry. She had an astonishing gift for decking her own rather extravagant beauty in precisely the right way. A twist of golden tissue was threaded in and out through her burnished hair, and held in place by a clot of topazes. These jewels hid one ear, and their brilliant hardness cut against her cheek. It is impossible to describe the strange allurement of the glowing, yellow gems, thus pressed against the soft damask of the young cheek. An Eastern woman gets this effect by wearing heavy bangles that dent the flesh of the upper arm. Sophy could not explain why this cluster of topaz over Belinda's ear seemed to savour of perverseness--of an adroit and cunning perverseness. It was certainly charming--yet it repelled her. She reminded herself listlessly that Belinda's whole personality rather repelled her. It was a matter of temperamental aversion--for she felt sure that she also repelled Belinda.

Perhaps for this reason they were particularly civil to each other. And Sophy had certainly been kindness itself about this ball and the girl's visit to her. She had even chosen her gown for the evening with reference to Belinda's. She was all in black and silver. She looked pale--not her best. Those warm, dusky stains were too marked under her eyes. She felt at ebb-tide. But Belinda was like a great, joyous, sunlit, inrushing wave.

"You are very beautiful in that gown, Belinda," Sophy said. "You look like sunlight."

"And you look like moonlight--on lilies," said Belinda, who could say very pretty things when she chose. Yet as she said it she was thinking how glad she was that she herself was red-rose rather than lily! How typically a splendid tiger-lily she seemed in her orange gown, she could not have imagined. The black mole on her throat was just like the mark on a tiger-lily leaf.

When Loring joined them, he said:

"What the deuce! You look like a mandarin orange in all that yellow, Linda!..." But his eyes said something else. Belinda was quite satisfied. When he added fretfully: "Why d'you stick that lump of jewels over one ear, like that? This isn't Turkey or Hindustan...." she was more pleased than ever. She knew that the hard glitter against her soft cheek allured him, and that his pettishness only meant that he didn't wish to be allured. But his reasoned wishes didn't matter in the least to her. It was the unreasoning, uncontrollable wish at the depths of his nature that she meant to call forth. "Love" she named this Wish. The pride of the eye and the lust of life seemed the true glories of being to Belinda. Her creed was simple. To love, to enjoy, to laugh with all the strength of one's body--these were the exhilarating ends of existence.

The ball went merrily. Belinda had the success that might easily have been predicted. In contrast with her, the other young girls seemed like pale-hued flowers on some tapestry at whose centre glows a rich blossom worked in gold. She danced and danced without getting dishevelled or red, or pale. She looked the embodied Joy of Living, as she swayed tirelessly, a faint, secret smile just parting her lips, her head thrown slightly back. And the young men with whom she danced seemed also washed out and inadequate beside her--very insufficient twigs to support the radiant, full-blown blossom of her beauty.

But as the evening wore on, though she still smiled, a little flame of anger and disappointment began to burn her heart. Morry was evidently hard-set against her. Not once had he asked her to dance. It was very shabby of him. It was cowardly. She knew very well that he was afraid of her. She loved his fear of her, but she hated this dull, "proper," tame resistance that wouldn't dare even one dance with her. Then suddenly her spirits leaped. There would be the Cotillion. He would _have_ to dance with her some time during the Cotillion! Her opportunity came with the "Mirror figure." She sat on a little gilded chair in the middle of the ballroom, one gold-shot foot thrust out. She was more than ever like Lorelei, as she sat there with the little silver mirror in her hand, coolly touching her tossed hair into place, while she waited for the swains to kneel foolishly before her.

Sophy, who had not danced this evening, stood near a doorway watching her. To her, the girl in her apricot draperies, looking at herself in the silver glass with such perfect _disinvolture_, seemed suddenly like a beautiful Falsehood who had stolen Truth's mirror and was trying to see what it revealed. For somehow, as she had watched her during the evening, the intuitive conviction had come to her that Belinda was very false. And yet Belinda was perfectly true--to herself. What to Sophy would have seemed falseness, would have seemed to Belinda "being true to herself." She really thought it "being true to herself" to take Morris for herself, if she could, by any means within the limits of conventional propriety and at any cost to any one--but herself and, within reason, him.

Young men by the score came and knelt at the golden shoes of Belinda. She sent them all away, with the most charming effrontery. Then Sophy saw Loring approach. He looked pale and sulky.

She watched the two curiously. It seemed as if Belinda were going to flout Morris also. But all at once she laughed, and pressed the mirror against his upturned face. It was an odd gesture--almost like a caress. Sophy thought that it displeased her because of something in it that she could only characterise as "bad form." The next moment, she saw Morris pull the girl rather roughly up into his arms, and waltz off with her.

A woman standing near by said spontaneously: "What a beautiful couple they make!"

Yes. Sophy saw that, too. They were really quite wonderful floating about to the sensuous rhythm in each other's arms. And all at once the thought flashed to her: "How well they suit each other in every way!" She stood gazing after them--singling them out from the whirling throng. And her thought returned to her, enlarged, more distinct: "He ought to have married her ... not me." The more she watched them, the more this thought possessed her. Belinda would not have bored him with ideals. Belinda would not have been bored herself by the "social stunt" as exacted in New York and Newport. Belinda would have found that visit to England "bully fun." She would have joined with him in "poking up the highbrows." Nor would Belinda have objected to wine-bred love--of this, somehow, Sophy felt particularly sure. Yes; in all things they would have been fittingly mated. In age, in taste, in habits, in temperament.

Just here Loring himself passed by her on his way out of the room. The waltz was over. He walked rapidly like a man towards some object. His face was white and set and his eyes black. Sophy could not know that he was drunk, not with wine but with Belinda. She slipped out into the hall after him. Only some servants were standing about--not near them. She detained him an instant, her hand on his arm. "Morris--don't be vexed...." she said very low. "But don't take any more--just this evening. Your cousin's first ball...."

He flung off her hand. His face worked. "For God's sake, go your way," he said, in a violent whisper, "and let me go mine! I'm tired of squatting on the steps of the temple. Let up on me, for God's sake! _I_ don't interfere with _you_!..."

He was gone. And obeying a very natural if reprehensible impulse, he drank a glass more of champagne than he had intended to before Sophy spoke.

She turned and went quietly back towards the ballroom. To-morrow she would think things out more clearly. Certainly they could not continue as they were now. She had not meant to "nag." Yet she had nagged. Sophy had rare largenesses in her. She was neither as hurt nor as angered by Loring's words as most women would have been. She had reached that very chill room in Love's House, where it is easy to put one's self in another's place.

"But I can't go on like this ... not _all_ my life," she thought wearily. Yet she saw no way out. The thought of divorce never occurred to her. She hated divorce as she hated other vulgarities. Yet, illogically enough, this view of the matter was only applied to her own case. She heartily and thoroughly approved of it for others. She even thought that marriage should be a civil contract, dissolvable by the mutual consent of both parties, or by the resolution even of one.

A woman of whom she was rather fond--Helen Van Raalt--spoke to her suddenly, touching her shoulder from behind.

"Sophy, dear, I'm _dreadfully_ sorry to be so late! I had to take May to Fanny's party first, you know. And we've only _just_ got away. And I've brought an old friend of yours along with me--my cousin--Marco Amaldi...."

XXVII

Sophy found herself with her hand in Amaldi's. She wanted to laugh nervously. She could think of nothing clearly for a moment.

Amaldi noticed how pale she was. She did not seem less beautiful than he remembered her, but his heart winced, for he thought that she looked ill.

He had the advantage of Sophy in this sudden meeting, because he had been prepared for it. However, "preparation" in such a case is something as if a man imprisoned for years in a dark dungeon should "prepare" to see the sunlight. As much as he might school himself, he would be sure to quake to his inmost core when once again it flooded him.

Amaldi had tried hard to forget. If he had not forgotten he had at least succeeded in dulling the edge of his feeling for her. But it was by time and work that he had chiefly commanded his love.

He flung himself into all sorts of agricultural and civic reforms and enterprises. Political life, as an end in itself, did not appeal to him, but he thought with Cavour in regard to the "need which every worthy man feels of making himself useful to the society of which he is a part."

Then had come the news of Sophy's marriage to Loring. Amaldi had had another bitter recrudescence of feeling over that. He was filled with a contemptuous anger against himself for what seemed to him a poor-spirited fidelity. He was nothing, had never been anything to this woman who spread devastation through his life. He had always despised the love that starves on in faithful submission. He would on every occasion have altered where he alteration found, and bent with the remover to remove--only he discovered that it was not in his power to do so. This emotion which had seized him without his volition or consent, proved stronger than his will. Even though he succeeded in curbing it, though it lay in chains, as it were, in the profundity of his being--yet it stirred and threatened at the idea of any other love. It was like a jealous, ill-governed prisoner who will not share his cell.

This one, supreme flame had burned out in Amaldi all capacity for loving any other woman.

As the years passed, however, a calmer temper rose in him. Reflecting on those early days of his love for Sophy, he realised that he had demanded much while offering little--that he had been unreasonable in expecting her to love him under the circumstances. Why, indeed, he asked himself one day, four years after he had parted from her so stormily--why truly should she have loved him? His whole effort at that time had been to repress himself. He had never been truly himself when with her, so much of his will had been absorbed in trying to restrain his passion. He had been silent, reserved, conventional. Yet he had expected her to return a feeling, whose depth and intensity she could not possibly have realised. Now for the second time she was the wife of another man....

No reasoning, no philosophy, no lapse of time could save Amaldi from crisping in the furnace of this thought.

But when, two years afterwards, his agricultural interests made a journey to America seem necessary, he faced the probability of meeting her again with tolerable coolness. He was nearing forty and he considered life a discipline to be endured with hardihood. His character had deepened and strengthened.

The Marchesa, in daily contact with him, found a dear companion, though his habit of long silences seemed to increase with growing years. To his inmost self she never attained. She did not know whether any chord of his former passion for Sophy still vibrated. He never alluded to her.

The situation in regard to his wife was just the same. When the Marchesa looked at her son's fine, sensitive dark face, grown stronger for controlled pain, and realised that in all likelihood no compensation would ever come to him, she felt that incomparable bitterness with which we watch the suffering of one for whom we would gladly die.

She might die for Marco ten times over, yet he would never really live. "Two women have seen to that," she told herself bitterly. Yet in her more rational moods she did not blame Sophy. She had known her too intimately to blame her. No--that Marco had loved her was not Sophy's fault. There had been in his love for her that inevitability which characterises true passion as well as true poetry.

* * * * *

And Sophy, standing now with her hand in Amaldi's after all these years, had at first no thoughts that could properly be called thoughts,--the memory of the three windows in the room where she had first met him--of how it had seemed to mean something, and yet had meant nothing, like all else in her life....

Then with a shock that "brought her to," as it were, she recalled how she and Amaldi had parted from each other six years ago, and the colour welled into her face.

He knew what she was thinking of. He, too, was thinking of it.

Mrs. Van Raalt was chattering again. "Just think what an odd thing Marco's been doing in America!... He's been all over the West studying the system of agriculture. Isn't that the funniest way for an Italian to spend his time in America?"

"But you've been in America before, haven't you?" said Sophy mechanically.

She was thinking what an air of race Amaldi had, and how quiet and strong he looked standing there against the whirling, parti-coloured background of the ball. Somehow she did not remember in him this powerful look of manhood. Then she realised--he _was_ more a man. Those six intervening years had given him this new look.

"Oh, yes," he said, answering her question. "Twice. Once when I was a boy--once about nine years ago. My mother gave me many messages for you, Signora--'_tanti auguri_'...."

The Italian words swept Sophy back, and she paled again. This and the mention of his mother brought so vividly the memory of Cecil's death.

"Please give her my love ... when you write...." she said, her voice a little shaken. (Helen Van Raalt had turned away with some one.) "I shall never forget her kindness to me...." she added. As if she felt her words too formal, she repeated: "I shall never, never forget all her kindness to me...."

"She will be very happy to get such a message from you," said Amaldi. He, too, felt his tone to be formal. Yet what could there be between them but formalities! His heart shook in his breast. He had been mad, quite mad--a vain fool, to risk seeing her again. He had even thought that to see her thus, married for the second time, and happily, would allay the uneasy ache with which he always thought of her. He realised, in these very first moments, that it was the contrary which had happened. That half-numbed ache had sprung into a throb of acute pain at the first sight of her face. And how delicate she looked! Then leaped the question: Was she only ill ... or was she unhappy?

This thought of her possible unhappiness had not before occurred to Amaldi. That a woman with such bitter experience to guide her should make a second mistake in a question so vital as marriage had not seemed possible. Now as he observed her it seemed quite possible ... even probable. It took his breath. He felt that he must look strange and so began to speak casually. After a few moments Sophy said: "I must introduce you to some of these pretty girls.... They will be thinking me very negligent."

He followed her submissively. He had come to this debutante ball just for the opportunity of seeing her. Now he must pay the penalty.

Sophy led him first to Belinda.

"Belinda, this is my friend, the Marchese Amaldi," she said. "This is the heroine of the ball, Marchese ... Miss Horton, my...." she almost stumbled--"my husband's cousin," it came out bravely.

Belinda thought that Amaldi looked "a great swell." She set herself at once to enthrall him. Amaldi lent himself idly to the old, old game. Belinda had at times the stupidity of all cock-sureness. She went to bed that night firmly convinced that Amaldi was her future slave.

She said something of the sort jestingly to Sophy. Sophy looked at her gravely, then she coloured a little and said:

"I must tell you Belinda that the Marchese Amaldi is married. He is separated from his wife--but in Italy there is no divorce."

"Pooh!" said Belinda airily. "I don't want to be his marchioness.... I only want to see how a stately dago like that makes love...."

Sophy had not replied. And Belinda, safe in her bedroom, taking off her jewels with little pussy-cat yawns of replete pleasure, had thought:

"He must have been in love with _her_ once ... when she was younger. Just common or garden jealousy--her telling me that!"

Then she looked at a little red mark on her white arm, and forgot all about Amaldi and Sophy. She lifted her arm and rubbed her cheek softly to and fro over the mark. It had been left there by a violent kiss.

"Oh, Morry ... Morry...." she purred, caressing her own arm where he had caressed it, full of voluptuous reminiscence. "As if I care whether all the dagoes in the world have as many wives as Bluebeard!-- My Jove ... my _darling_!"

And she kissed and kissed the little red seal of love on her arm that was white like peeled almonds.

XXVIII

Amaldi had gone to that ball braced for two ordeals--the meeting with Sophy and the meeting with the man whom she had married. He was introduced to Loring a few moments before he left. Belinda introduced him. Loring had come up as they sat together on the terrace. A light just overhead shone directly on his face.

Amaldi had winced from the beauty of that face, as he had winced from Sophy's look of fragility. He had not the superficial scorn for male beauty which is felt by the average Anglo-Saxon. He did not fall into the common error of thinking that women are indifferent to beauty in men. On the contrary, he knew that some women are as much affected by it as men are by the beauty of women.

He looked at the perfect Greek type of Loring's face, enhanced by the intense pallor that over-stimulation always lent it, and he knew (being a Latin) the terrific spell that such a face can cast over the imagination.

At that moment, so strong is the fleshly man in even the most highly evolved being, he could have wished that she had loved a monster for his soul, rather than this stripling for his beauty. The power of vivid visualisation is one of a Latin's chief tortures when unrequited love mocks him. Amaldi could see the beauty of Sophy and Loring in each other's arms as plainly as though they had stood enlaced before him.

He had said good-night rather abruptly.

As he walked off along the terrace, Belinda had asked scampishly of Loring:

"Well, Morry, what d'you think of my dago mash?"

"I don't think of him," had been the surly retort.

"Well, I do. _I_ think he's a peach. He's simply stunning to look at anyhow. So dark and sort of holding his breath at one. A marquis, too, let me tell you. Don't you think I'd make a nice marchioness?"

"For God's sake, don't play the fool with me, Linda."

She pouted.

"You won't _let_ me play the fool with you! That's why I'm going to see if I can with my handsome dago."

Loring's reply to this had been to seize her by one arm and jerk her to her feet before him.

"My bracelet! You hurt me...." she had murmured. He released her arm, and she stood nursing it against her breast, thrusting out her red lips over it, saying, "There! there!" to it as if it had been a baby.

"I don't believe I hurt it an atom.... Let me see," he had demanded. She made him furious--furious with desire and detestation. He loathed her roguery and wiles, yet they mastered him just as drink did.

"Let me see," he said again, putting out his hand towards her arm.

She yielded it to him with a languid movement, so that it hung a warm, white weight in his grasp.

"There...." she said, pressing her forefinger into the soft flesh.

It was then that he had set that violent kiss upon it. His lips clung, drew at the delicate, supple texture. The girl leaned against him half swooning with the delight of his hot lips upon the coolness of her bare arm.

She didn't care in the least when, coming to himself again, he flung away her arm as though it had been a bit of trash.

"Go to bed," he had said roughly between his teeth. "Go to bed and say your prayers ... you need 'em...."

She had stood laughing softly, as he strode off after Amaldi, towards the house. She didn't mind his rudenesses because she knew of old that reaction was sure to follow. He was too good-tempered and easy-going in his normal state to keep up this savage mood with her. He was only cross like this when he'd "had too much." And the more brutal he was at such times, the more apt he was to make up for it by being "nice" afterwards. She had had some experience of these moods in him even as a schoolgirl.

In fact, the next day Loring, rather ashamed of the hazy memory that he retained of that scene on the terrace, was very "nice" to her indeed. He proposed a ride together. This was the beginning of delightful rides alone with him.

Sophy had given up both riding and dancing for the past two or three weeks. The truth was that she had not felt very well of late. The constant, hopeless sense of defeat, of a wearing situation from which she could see no means of extricating herself, had begun to affect her body. This sensation of physical weariness was new to her. Always, until now, her strong, elastic physique had resisted triumphantly. But nowadays she felt jaded. Everything seemed an effort. Her grey eyes, which Amaldi remembered so brilliantly eager, had that subdued, waiting look which comes from either physical or mental suffering constantly endured. Which of these causes brought that look into her eyes, he felt that he must know. He could not bear it that her eyes should have that look in them. What was wrong? Was it her health or was it that a second time she had made the mistake most terrible of all to a woman such as she was? In that case....

Amaldi faced himself squarely. There was no escaping the truth of what he had brought upon himself by his own act. It had needed but that one sight of her, that one touch of her hand to rouse in him the old love, as much stronger for the lapse of years as was his manhood. And now ... what? There was no danger of his repeating his mistake of six years ago. A great love always, sooner or later, brings humility--the proud humility expressed in the fine old Latin phrase of the Romish ritual--"whom to serve is to be a King." To serve her in her need, Amaldi felt, would confer kinghood of spirit.

"If she is unhappy ... if love has failed her this second time ... if she has no love left to give me ... even in years to come ... why, then, at least I can be her friend...." thought Amaldi.

He had reached this "Station" in the Via Crucis of love. He looked back, wondering, on the man he had been as contrasted with the man he now was. Had any one told him at thirty that he would some day feel towards a woman as he now felt towards Sophy, he would have smiled. Yet, within a decade he had come to know by experience that the intense, sublimated passion of the _Vita Nuova_ is no exaggeration.

Those who maintain that Beatrice was for Dante merely a symbol of Divine and Abstract love, cannot realise the miraculous power of metamorphosis inherent in a supreme, human love withheld from its natural expression.

Love of this kind is clairvoyant and clairaudient. Though he could not yet discern causes clearly, Amaldi could both see and hear the shadowy presences that followed Sophy in those days. The one stared with the eyes of a virgin at her broken cestus, the other plained softly: "Vanity of vanities ... all is vanity." Why this was, he did not know, but that it was, he knew certainly. He set himself to watch, with the watchfulness of the "_Loyal serviteur._"

Within the next day or two he called about tea-time as Sophy had asked him to. He found her having tea on the sea-lawn with Bobby and his tutor. Bobby made friends with him at once.

Then shortly Loring and Belinda came in from a ride. It amused Amaldi that Belinda appropriated him at once. This Attitude of hers suited him very well. He could see Sophy often in this way, while being considered "_le flirt_" of Miss Horton. He would also have opportunities of observing Loring in his own home. This, just at present, was what he most desired. He wished to find out what sort of man was behind the persona of that beautiful mask. Now as he responded with discretion to Belinda's rather familiar chaffing, he thought that Loring's glance was slightly hostile. He sat sipping a cup of tea in silence, looking at them every now and then over its brim.

Belinda thought it "bully fun" to flirt with Amaldi "under Morry's very nose." What a dog in the manger Morry was! He hadn't the courage to claim her himself, yet he glowered and sulked because another man responded to her bewitchment.

Sophy wondered what impression Amaldi was really receiving. She could not help thinking that the fencing between them was much as if Belinda wielded a bludgeon and Amaldi a rapier. And as this thought came to her, she winced, remembering that horrible time when she had seen Amaldi himself use a stick as a sword.

It was Loring's attitude throughout the scene that chiefly impressed Amaldi. "It is not possible...." he kept saying to himself. "No ... it's impossible...."

But the more he noticed those sullen, lowering glances of Loring in their direction, the more he felt that what he declared "impossible" was a fact.