Mary Wollaston by Henry Kitchell Webster (best story books to read txt) 📕

you spoke of the Ravinia matter was that I didn't want you to break your word. You had told them that they could count on you and I didn't want you, on my account, to be put in a position where any one could accuse you of having failed him. My own word was involved, for that matter. I told LaChaise I wouldn't put any obstacles, in your way. Of course, I didn't contract lobar pneumonia on purpose," he added with a smile.

The intensity of her gaze did not relax at this, however. She was waiting breathlessly.

"The other question isn't quite so easy to answer," he went on, "but I think I would wish you to--follow the path of your career wherever it leads. I shall always count for as much as I can in your life, but not--if I can help it--as an obstacle."

"Why?" she asked. "What has made the perfectly enormous difference?"

It was not at all an unanswerable question; nor one, indeed, that he shrank from. But it wanted a little preliminary reflection. She interrupted before he was ready to speak.

"Of course, I really know. Have known all along. You haven't forgiven me."

He echoed that word with a note of helplessness.

"No," she conceded. "That isn't it, exactly. I can't talk the way you and Mary can. I suppose you have forgiven me, as far as that goes. That's the worst of it. If you hadn't there'd be more to hope for. Or beg for. I'd do that if it were any good. But this is something you can't help. You're kind and sweet to me, but you've just stopped caring. For me. What used to be there has just--gone snap. It's not your fault. I did it myself."

"No," he said quickly. "That's where you're altogether wrong. You didn't do it. You had nothing to do with the doing of it."

She winced, visibly, at the implication that, whoever was responsible, the thing was done.

"Paula, dearest!" he cried, in acute concern. "Wait! There are things that can't be dealt with in a breath. That's why I was trying to think a little before I answered."

Even now he had to marshal his thoughts for a moment before he could go on. It was too ridiculous, that look of tragic desperation she wore while she waited! He averted his eyes and began rather deliberately.

"You are dearer to me now--at this moment, as we sit here--than ever you've been before. I think that's the simple literal truth. This matter of forgiveness--of your having done something to forfeit or to destroy my--love for you... Oh, it's too wildly off the facts to be dealt with rationally! I owe you my life. That's not a sentimental exaggeration. Even Steinmetz says so. And you saved it for me at the end of a period of weeks--months I guess--when I had been devoting most of my spare energies to torturing you. Myself, incidentally, but there was nothing meritorious about that. In an attempt to assert a--proprietary right in you that you had never even pretended to give me. That I'd once promised you I never would assert. The weight of obligation I'm under to you would be absolutely crushing--if it weren't for one thing that relieves me of it altogether. The knowledge that you love me. That you did it all for the love of me."

She moved no nearer him. These were words. There was no reassurance for her in them. One irrepressible movement of his hands toward her, the mere speaking of her name in a voice warmed by the old passion, would have brought her, rapturous, to his knees.

"There's no such thing as a successful pretense between us, I know," he said. "So I'll talk plainly. I'm glad to. I know what it is you miss in me. It's gone. Temporarily I suppose, but gone as if it had never been. That's a--physiological fact, Paula."

She flushed hotly at that and looked away from him.

"I don't know exactly what a soul is," he went on. "But I do know that a body--the whole of the body--is the temple of it. It impenetrates everything; is made up of everything. Well, this illness of mine has, for these weeks, made an old man of me. And I'm grateful to it for giving me a chance to look ahead, before it's too late. I want to make the most of it. Because you see, my dear, in ten years--or thereabouts--the course of nature will have made of me what this pneumonia has given me a foretaste of. Ten years. You will be--forty, then."

She was gazing at him now, fascinated, in unwilling comprehension. "I hate you to talk like that," she said. "I wish you wouldn't."

"It's important," he told her crisply. "You'll see that in a minute, if you will wait. Before very long--in a month or so, perhaps--I shall be, I suppose, pretty much the same man I was--three months ago. Busy at my profession again. In love with you again. All my old self-assurance back; the more arrogant if it isn't quite the real thing. So now's the time, when the fogs one moves about in have lifted and the horizon is sharp, to take some new bearings. And set a new course by them. For both of us.

"There is one fact sitting up like a lighthouse on a rock. I'm twenty-four years older than you. Every five years that we live together from now on will make that difference more important. When you're forty-five--and you'll be just at the top of your powers by then--I shall be one year short of seventy. At the end, you see, even of my professional career. And that's only fifteen years away. Even with good average luck, that's all I can count on. It's strange how one can live along, oblivious to a simple sum in arithmetic like that."

She had been on her feet moving distractedly about the room. Now she came around behind his chair and gripped his body in her strong arms.

"You shan't talk like that!" she said. "You shan't think like that! I won't endure it. It's morbid. It's horrible."

"Oh, no, it's not," he said easily. "The morbidity is in being afraid to look at it. It was morbid to struggle frantically, the way I did all the spring, trying to resist the irresistible thing that was drawing you along your true path. It was a cancerous egotism of mine that was trying to eat you up, live you up into myself. That, thank God, has been cut out of me! I think it has. Don't misunderstand me, though. I'm not going to relinquish anything of you that I can keep;--that I ever had a chance to keep."

He took her hands and gently--coolly--kissed them.

"Then don't relinquish anything," she said. "It's all yours. Can't you believe that, John?"

He released her hands and sank back slackly in his chair. "Victory!" he said, a note of inextinguishable irony in his voice. "A victory I'd have given five years of my life for last March. Yet I could go on winning them--a whole succession of them--and they could lead me to nothing but disaster."

She left him abruptly and the next moment he heard her fling herself down upon his bed. When he rose and disengaged himself from his rug, she said, over an irrepressible sob or two, that he wasn't to mind nor come to her. She wasn't going to cry-not more than a minute.

He came, nevertheless, settled himself on the edge of the bed and took possession of her hands again.

"I wouldn't have told you all this," he said--"for you don't need any lessons in arithmetic, child--if I dared trust myself to remember, after the other thing had come back. Now I'm committed--don't you see?--not to play the fool, tragically or ludicrously, as the case might be, trying to dispute the inevitable. And I shall contrive to keep a lot, my dear. More than you think."

Later, the evening of that same day, he asked her what was in the letter that had provoked their talk. Did they want her back in Chicago for rehearsals or consultations? Because if they did there was no reason in the world why she should not go. At the rate at which he was gaining strength there would not be the slightest reason--he gave her his professional word of honor--why she should not go back in a day or two.

"I should have to go back," she said, "if I were going to sing March's opera. There is such a lot of work about a new production that there would be no time to spare."

"But," he asked, "isn't March's opera precisely what you are going to sing?"

"No," she said rebelliously. "It's not. There wasn't anything in the contract about that. I'll carry out the contract this summer. I'll keep my word and yours, since that is what you want me to do. But I won't sing 'Dolores' for anybody."

He did not press her for the reason.

After a little silence, she said, "Lucile thought I'd fallen in love with him. So did Rush, I guess,--and poor old Nat. Did you, John?"

"I tried to, hard enough," he confessed.

She stared. "Tried to!"

"That would have been the easier thing to fight," he said. "There's nothing inevitable about a man,--any man. I'd have stood a chance at least, of beating him, even though he had a twenty-year handicap or so. But the other thing,--well, that was like the first bar of the Fifth Symphony, you know; Fate knocking at the door. Clear terror that is until one can get the courage to open the door and invite Fate in."


CHAPTER XV

THE END OF IT

About a week later--just at the beginning of June, this was--Paula did go back to Chicago, leaving her husband to go on gaining the benefit, for another ten days or so, of that wine-like mountain air. It was an unwelcome conviction that he really wanted her to go, rather than any crying need for her at Ravinia that decided her to leave him. The need would not be urgent for at least another fortnight since it had been decided between her and LaChaise that she should make her debut in _Tosca_, an opera she had sung uncounted times.

Since their momentous conversation in which John had attempted to revise the fundamentals of their life together, they had not reverted to the main theme of it; had clarified, merely, one or two of its more immediate conclusions. Paula was to carry out in spirit as well as in letter the terms of her Ravinia contract exactly as if it were still to be regarded as the first step of her reopened career. What she should do about the second step in case it offered itself to her was a bridge not to be crossed until they came to it.

John had professed himself content to let it remain at that, but she divined that there was something hollow in his profession. It was possible, of course, that his restlessness represented nothing more than a new stage in his convalescence. It didn't seem possible that after the candors of that talk he could still be keeping something back from her. Yet that was an impression she very clearly got. Anyhow, her presence was doing him no good, and on that unwelcome assurance, she bade him a forlorn farewell and went home.

It was a true intuition. John heaved a sigh of relief when she was gone.