Part 41 (1/2)
”Plenty, too, I'll bet! Oh, it's in your pretty face, in your eyes!--it's in you, all about you. I'm not much in that line but I can feel it in the air. Why I felt it as soon as I came into your room, but I was that stupid--thinking of Mrs. Del Garmo--and never a.s.sociating it with you!... Do you do any trance work?”
”No.... I have never cultivated--anything of that sort.”
”I know. The really gifted don't cultivate the power as a rule. Only one now and then, and here and there. The others are pure frauds--almost every one of them. But--” she looked searchingly at the girl,--”you're no fraud! Why you're full of it!--full--saturated--alive with--with vitality--psychical and physical!--You're a glorious thing--half spiritual, half human--a superb combination of vitality, sacred and profane!”--She checked herself and turned on the girl almost savagely: ”Who was the fool of a man you were looking for in the crystal?... Very well; don't tell then. I didn't suppose you would. Only--G.o.d help him for the fool he is--and forgive him for what he has done to you!... And may I never enter this room again and find you with the tears freshly scrubbed out of the most honest eyes G.o.d ever gave a woman!... Good night, Miss Greensleeve!”
”Good night,” said Athalie.
After she had closed the door and locked it she turned back into the empty room, moving uncertainly as though scarcely knowing what she was about. And then, suddenly, the terror of utter desolation seized her, and for the first time she realised what Clive had been to her, _and what he had not been_--understood for the first time in her life the complex miracle called love, its synthesis, its every element, every molecule, every atom, and flung herself across the bed, half strangled, sobbing out her pa.s.sion and her grief.
Dawn found her lying there; but the ravage of that night had stripped her of much that she had been, and never again would be. And what had been taken from her was slowly being replaced by what she had never yet been. Night stripped her; the red dawn clothed her.
She sat up, dry-eyed, unbound her hair, flung from her the crumpled negligee. Presently the first golden-pink ray of the rising sun fell across her snowy body, and she flung out her lovely arms to it as though to draw it into her empty heart.
Hafiz, blinking his jewelled eyes, watched her lazily from his pillow.
CHAPTER XVI
As she came, pensively, from her morning bath into the sunny front room Athalie noticed the corner of an envelope projecting from beneath her door.
For one heavenly moment the old delight surprised her at sight of Clive's handwriting,--for one moment only, before an overwhelming reaction scoured her heart of tenderness and joy; and the terrible resurgence of pain and grief wrung a low cry from her: ”Why couldn't he let me alone!” And she crumpled the letter fiercely in her clenched hand.
Minute after minute she stood there, her white hand tightening as though to strangle the speech written there on those crushed sheets--perhaps to throttle and silence the faint, persistent cry of her own heart pleading a hearing for the man who had written to her at last.
And after a while her nerveless hand relaxed; she looked down at the crushed thing in her palm for a long time before she smoothed it out and finally opened it.
He wrote:
”It is too long a story to go into in detail. I couldn't, anyway. My mother had desired it for a long time. I have nothing to say about it except this: I would not for all the world have had you receive the first information from the columns of a newspaper. Of that part of it I have a right to speak, because the announcement was made without my knowledge or consent. And I'll say more: it was made even before I myself was aware that an engagement existed.
”Don't mistake what I write you, Athalie. I am not trying to escape any responsibility excepting that of premature publicity. Whatever else has happened I am fully responsible for.
”And so--what can I have to say to you, Athalie? Silence were decenter perhaps--G.o.d knows!--and He knows, too, that in me he fas.h.i.+oned but an irresolute character, void of the initial courage of conviction, without deep and st.u.r.dy belief, unsteady to a true course set, and lacking in rugged purpose.
”It is not stupidity: in the bottom of my own heart I _know_!
Custom, habit, acquired and inculcated acquiescence in una.n.a.lysed beliefs--these require more than irresolution and a negative disposition to fight them and overcome them.
”Athalie, the news you must have read in the newspapers should first have come from me. Among many, many debts I must ever owe you, that one at least was due you. And I defaulted; but not through any fault of mine.
”I could not rest until you knew this. Whatever you may think about me now--however lightly you weigh me--remember this--if you ever remember me at all in the years to come: I was aware of my paramount debt: I should have paid it had the opportunity not been taken out of my own hands. And that debt paramount was to inform you first of anybody concerning what you read in a public newspaper.
”Now there remains nothing more for me to say that you would care to hear. You would no longer care to know,--would probably not believe me if I should tell you what you have been to me--and still are--and still are, Athalie!
Athalie!--”
The letter ended there with her name. She kept it all day; but that night she destroyed it. And it was a week before she wrote him:
”--Thank you for your letter, Clive. I hope all is well with you and yours. I wish you happiness; I desire for you all things good. And also--for _her_. Surely I may say this much without offence--when I am saying good-bye forever.