“Won’t you come up with me, and tell me where to hang it?”
They took the little elevator to the floor above, and Laura led the artist to the room in question—her “sitting-room,” a wide, airy place, the polished floor covered with deep skins, the walls wainscotted halfway to the ceiling, in dull woods. Shelves of books were everywhere, together with potted plants and tall brass lamps. A long Madeira chair stood at the window which overlooked the park and lake, and near to it a great round table of San Domingo mahogany, with tea things and almost diaphanous china.
“What a beautiful room,” murmured Corthell, as she touched the button in the wall that opened the current, “and how much you have impressed your individuality upon it. I should have known that you lived here. If you were thousands of miles away and I had entered here, I should have known it was yours—and loved it for such.”
“Here is the picture,” she said, indicating where it hung. “Doesn’t it seem to you that the light is bad?”
But he explained to her that it was not so, and that she had but to incline the canvas a little more from the wall to get a good effect.
“Of course, of course,” she assented, as he held the picture in place. “Of course. I shall have it hung over again tomorrow.”
For some moments they remained standing in the centre of the room, looking at the picture and talking of it. And then, without remembering just how it had happened, Laura found herself leaning back in the Madeira chair, Corthell seated near at hand by the round table.
“I am glad you like my room,” she said. “It is here that I spend most of my time. Often lately I have had my dinner here. Page goes out a great deal now, and so I am left alone occasionally. Last night I sat here in the dark for a long time. The house was so still, everybody was out—even some of the servants. It was so warm, I raised the windows and I sat here for hours looking out over the lake. I could hear it lapping and washing against the shore—almost like a sea. And it was so still, so still; and I was thinking of the time when I was a little girl back at Barrington, years and years ago, picking whortleberries down in the water lot, and how I got lost once in the corn—the stalks were away above my head—and how happy I was when my father would take me up on the hay wagon. Ah, I was happy in those days—just a freckled, black-haired slip of a little girl, with my frock torn and my hands all scratched with the berry bushes.”
She had begun by dramatising, but by now she was acting—acting with all her histrionic power at fullest stretch, acting the part of a woman unhappy amid luxuries, who looked back with regret and with longing towards a joyous, simple childhood. She was sincere and she was not sincere. Part of her—one of those two Laura Jadwins who at different times, but with equal right called themselves “I,” knew just what effect her words, her pose, would have upon a man who sympathised with her, who loved her. But the other Laura Jadwin would have resented as petty, as even wrong, the insinuation that she was not wholly, thoroughly sincere. All that she was saying was true. No one, so she believed, ever was placed before as she was placed now. No one had ever spoken as now she spoke. Her chin upon one slender finger, she went on, her eyes growing wide:
“If I had only known then that those days were to be, the happiest of my life. … This great house, all the beauty of it, and all this wealth, what does it amount to?” Her voice was the voice of Phèdre, and the gesture of lassitude with which she let her arms fall into her lap was precisely that which only the day before she had used to accompany Portia’s plaint of
—my little body is a-weary of this great world.
Yet, at the same time, Laura knew that her heart was genuinely aching with real sadness, and that the tears which stood in her eyes were as sincere as any she had ever shed.
“All this wealth,” she continued, her head dropping back upon the cushion of the chair as she spoke, “what does it matter; for what does it compensate? Oh, I would give it all gladly, gladly, to be that little black-haired girl again, back in Squire Dearborn’s water lot; with my hands stained with the whortleberries and the nettles in my fingers—and my little lover, who called me his beau-heart and bought me a blue hair ribbon, and kissed me behind the pump house.”
“Ah,” said Corthell, quickly and earnestly, “that is the secret. It was love—even the foolish boy and girl love—love that after all made your life sweet then.”
She let her hands fall into her lap, and, musing, turned the rings back and forth upon her fingers.
“Don’t you think so?” he asked, in a low voice.
She bent her head slowly, without replying. Then for a long moment neither spoke. Laura played with her rings. The artist, leaning forward in his chair, looked with vague eyes across the room. And no interval of time since his return, no words that had ever passed between them, had been so fraught with significance, so potent in drawing them together as this brief, wordless moment.
At last Corthell turned towards her.
“You must not think,” he murmured, “that your life is without love now. I will not have you believe that.”
But she made no answer.
“If you would only see,” he went on. “If you would only condescend to look, you would know that there is a love which has enfolded your life for years. You have shut it out from you
