bust of Horace St. Leger—each set on an antique porphyry column—started into peculiar and shadowless prominence. The windows of the gallery gave on to the courtyard. Gabrielle held aside one of the vitrine curtains and looked out.
Snow was falling. Countless thin, fine flakes circled and eddied, drifted earthward, and swept up again caught in some local draught. Through the lace work of black, quivering branches the backs of the houses across the courtyard showed pallid and gaunt. Far below, on the frost-bitten grass-plat, the lichen-stained nymph tilted her ice-bound pitcher above the frozen basin. The familiar scene in its present aspect was indescribably dreary, provocative of doubting, distrustful thoughts. With a movement of impatience, her expression hard, her charming lips compressed, the young woman turned away, conscious of being foolishly, unreasonably out of conceit with most things. Doing so, the bust of her husband confronted her, seeming to watch her from out the blank cavities in the eyeballs which so uncomfortably travesty sight. An expression of amused, slightly cynical inquiry rested upon the sculptured face. This, in her present somewhat irritable and over-sensitized condition, she resented, finding it singularly unpleasant. She moved rapidly away along the gallery. Then stopped dead.
From the dining-room came a joyful racket. But, to her astonishment, cutting through the rippling staccato of children's talk and laughter, came the grave tones of a man's voice. Hearing which, steady of nerve and strong though she was, Gabrielle turned faint. The blood left her heart. She made for the nearest window-seat and sank down on it.—Horace was there, in the dining-room, playing with Bette and her little friends as he so dearly loved to play. The fact of her widowhood, the past eighteen months of freedom, became as though they were not. In attitude and sentiment she found herself relegated to an earlier period, against which her whole nature rose in rebellion. She realized how quite horribly little she wanted to see Horace again, or renew his and her former relation. Realized her jealousy of him in respect of her child. Realized, indeed, that, notwithstanding his many attractive qualities and invariable kindness, his resurrection must represent to her something trenching upon despair.
Yet it was cruel, she knew, heartless, to feel thus. She glanced in positive mental torment at the marble bust. It still watched her, through the haggard clarity of the snow-glare, with the same effect of cynically questioning criticism and amusement, almost, so she thought, as one should say: "My dear, be consoled. Even had I the will, I am powerless to return and to claim you. Follow your own fancy. Make yourself perfectly easy. Have no fear but that I am very effectually wiped out of your life."
The blood rushed back to her heart. Her face flamed. She felt humiliated, as though detected in a secret villainy, in an act of detestable meanness. It is an ugly thing to pillage the dead. But she was also very angry, for she understood what had happened. Not Horace—poor, undesired Horace—but Adrian Savage was there in the dining-room. He had changed his mind after all; and, in the hope of somehow working upon her, had stayed to bid grandmother and grandchild good-by. This was a plot, a plant, and she was furious, her sense of justice suffering violent eclipse. For was it not abominable of him to have placed her in so unworthy and mortifying a position in respect of her dead husband, and, incidentally, to have given her such a dreadful fright? Regardless of reason she piled his offenses mountain-high. However, this simplified matters in a way, disposing of a certain question forever. Marry him? She'd as soon marry a ragpicker, a scavenger! She hoped devoutly he would have an atrocious crossing when he did at last seek foreign shores.
Thereupon she rose and swept onward, in the stateliest manner imaginable, with trailing, somber skirts, over the polished, shining floor.
As she threw open the dining-room door a slender, white-frocked, black-silk-legged figure rushed upon her and clasped her about the hips with ecstatic cries.
"Ah! mamma," it piped. "At last you have come! I am so excited. We have waited and listened. But it was a secret. He forbade us to tell you he was here. It was to be a great surprise. Now you may look, but you must promise not to interrupt with conversation. That is very important, you understand, because the next few moments are critical. M. Dax is cooking an omelette in my tiny, weeny frying-pan for our dolls and Teddy-bears."
And so, once again upon this day of self-revelations, Madame St. Leger had to revise her position and own herself in the wrong. Yet the relief of finding neither resuscitated husband nor importunate lover, but simply M. René Dax, in possession was so great that she greeted that eccentric and gifted young man with warm cordiality—wholly ignoring his affectations and the rumors current regarding his moral aberrations, remembering only the irreproachable correctness of his dress and manners, and the quaintly pathetic effect of his small, tired face, great domed head and bulging forehead—like those of a hydrocephalic baby—and the ingeniously fascinating qualities he displayed as self-elected playfellow of Bette and her little friends.
Yes, she told herself, she really had a great regard for René Dax. He touched her. And now she, undoubtedly, passed a wholly delightful three-quarters of an hour in his and the little girls' company, Madame Vernois looking on, meanwhile, sympathetic yet slightly perplexed. For Gabrielle, in her reaction of feeling, forgetful of her black dress and twenty-seven years, and the rather tedious restraints and dignities of her matronhood, was taken with the sprightliest humor. She remembered that three-quarters of an hour now with a degree of regret. If only it could have stopped at that! But, unfortunately, things went further.
For, at parting, she had lingered in the gallery, where the haggard whiteness of the snow-glare struggled with the deepening twilight, thanking René Dax for his kindness to the children and for the happy afternoon he had given them. The sense of holiday, of playtime, was still upon her and she spoke with unaccustomed gaiety and intimacy of tone.
The young man looked up at her attentively, queerly—the top of his head barely level with her shoulder—and answered, a certain harshness observable in his carefully modulated voice:
"Do not spoil it all by accusing me of a good action. In accusing me of that you do my intelligence a gross injustice. My conduct has been dictated, as always, by calculated selfishness."
And, when she smilingly protested, he went on:
"I have many faults, no doubt. But I am guiltless of the weakness of altruism—contemptible word, under which the modern mind tries to conceal its cowardice and absence of all sound philosophy. I am an egoist, dear Madame, believe me, an egoist pure and simple."
He paused, looking down with an effect of the utmost gravity at his very small and exquisitely shod feet.
"It happened, for reasons with which it is superfluous to trouble you, that to-day I required a change of atmosphere. I needed to bathe myself in innocence. I cast about for the easiest method of performing such ablutions, and my thought traveled to Mademoiselle Bette. The weather being odious, it was probable I should find her in the house. My plan succeeded to admiration. Have no delusions under that head. It is invariably the altruist, not the egoist, whose plans miscarry or are foiled!"
He took a long breath, stretching his puny person.
"I am better. I am cleansed," he said. "For the moment at least I am restored, renewed. And for this restoration the reason is at once simple and profound. You must understand," he went on, in a soft conversational manner, as one stating the most obvious common-place, "my soul when it first entered my body was already old, immeasurably old. It had traversed countless cycles of human history. It had heard things no man may repeat and live. It had fed on gilded and splendid corruptions. It had embraced the forbidden and hugged nameless abominations to its heart. It had gazed on the naked face of the Ultimate Self-Existent Terror whose breath drives the ever-turning Wheel of Being. It had galloped back, appalled, through the blank, shouting nothingness, and clothed itself in the flesh of an unborn, unquickened infant, thus for a brief space obtaining unconsciousness and repose."
René Dax looked up at her again, his little, tired face very solemn, his eyes glowing as though a red lamp burned behind them.
"Has it ever occurred to you why we worship our mothers?" he asked. "It is not because they bring us into life, but because for nine sacred months they procure us blessed illusion of non-living. How can we ever thank them sufficiently for this? And that," he added,