第30章 VI(2)

"The wildest ones are often the easiest." He had a moving voice himself, and it had been known to affect listening ears hypnotically when he was deeply in earnest, was possessed by one of those desires that conquer men of will and then make them irresistible instruments.

"What is your dream?--happiness? . . . love?"

She gazed past him with swimming eyes, with a glance that seemed like a brave bright bird exploring infinity. "Yes," she said under her breath. "But it could never--never come true. It's too perfect."

"Don't doubt," he said, in a tone that fitted her mood as the rhythm of the cradle fits the gentle breathing of the sleeping child. "Don't ever doubt. And the dream will come true."

"You have been in love?" she said, under the spell of his look and tone.

He nodded slowly. "I am," he replied, and he was under the spell of her beauty.

"Is it--wonderful?"

"Like nothing else on earth. Everything else seems --poor and cheap--beside it."

He drew a step nearer. "But you couldn't love--not yet," he said. "You haven't had the experience.

You will have to learn."

"You don't know me," she cried. "I have been teaching myself ever since I was a little girl. I've thought of nothing else most of the time. Oh--" she clasped her white hands against her small bosom--"if I ever have the chance, how much I shall give!"

"I know it! I know it!" he replied. "You will make some man happier than ever man was before."

His infatuation did not blind him to the fact that she cared nothing about him, looked on him in the most unpersonal way. But that knowledge seemed only to inflame him the more, to lash him on to the folly of an ill-timed declaration. "I have felt how much you will give--how much you will love--I've felt it from the second time I saw you--perhaps from the first. I've never seen any woman who interested me as you do--who drew me as you do--against my ambition--against my will. I--I----"

He had been fighting against the words that would come in spite of him. He halted now because the food of emotion suffocated speech. He stood before her, ghastly pale and trembling. She did not draw back.

She seemed compelled by his will, by the force of his passion, to stay where she was. But in her eyes was a fascinated terror--a fear of him--of the passion that dominated him, a passion like the devils that made men gash themselves and leap from precipices into the sea.

To unaccustomed eyes the first sight of passion is always terrifying and is usually repellent. One must learn to adventure the big wave, the great hissing, towering billow that conceals behind its menace the wild rapture of infinite longing realized.

"I have frightened you?" he said.

"Yes," was her whispered reply.

"But it is your dream come true."

She shrank back--not in aversion, but gently. "No --it isn't my dream," she replied.

"You don't realize it yet, but you will."

She shook her head positively. "I couldn't ever think of you in that way."

He did not need to ask why. She had already explained when they were talking of Tetlow. There was a finality in her tone that filled him with despair. It was his turn to look at her in terror. What power this slim delicate girl had over him! What a price she could exact if she but knew! Knew? Why, he had told her--was telling her in look and tone and gesture --was giving himself frankly into captivity--was prostrate, inviting her to trample. His only hope of escape lay in her inexperience--that she would not realize. In the insanities of passion, as in some other forms of dementia, there is always left a streak of reason--of that craft which leads us to try to get what we want as cheaply as possible. Men, all but beside themselves with love, will bargain over the terms, if they be of the bargaining kind by nature. Norman was not a haggler.

But common prudence was telling him how unwise his conduct was, how he was inviting the defeat of his own purposes.

He waved his hand impatiently. "We'll see, my dear," he said with a light good-humored laugh. "I mustn't forget that I came to see your father."

She looked at him doubtfully. She did not understand--did not quite like--this abrupt change of mood.

It suggested to her simplicity a lack of seriousness, of sincerity. "Do you really wish to see my father?" she inquired.

"Why else should I come away over to Jersey City? Couldn't I have talked with you at the office?"

This seemed convincing. She continued to study his face for light upon the real character of this strange new sort of man. He regarded her with a friendly humorous twinkle in his eyes. "Then I'll take you to him," she said at length. She was by no means satisfied, but she could not discover why she was dissatisfied.

"I can't possibly do you any harm," he urged, with raillery.

"No, I think not," replied she gravely. "But you mustn't say those things!"

"Why not?" Into his eyes came their strongest, most penetrating look. "I want you. And I don't intend to give you up. It isn't my habit to give up.

So, sooner or later I get what I go after."

"You make me--afraid," she said nervously.

"Of what?" laughed he. "Not of me, certainly.

Then it must be of yourself. You are afraid you will end by wanting me to want you."

"No--not that," declared she, confused by his quick cleverness of speech. "I don't know what I'm afraid of."

"Then let's go to your father. . . . You'll not tell Tetlow what I've said?"

"No." And once more her simple negation gave him a sense of her absolute truthfulness.

"Or that I've been here?"

She looked astonished. "Why not?"

"Oh--office reasons. It wouldn't do for the others to know."

She reflected on this. "I don't understand," was the result of her thinking. "But I'll do as you ask.

Only, you must not come again."

"Why not? If they knew at the office, they'd simply talk--unpleasantly."

"Yes," she admitted hesitatingly after reflecting.

"So you mustn't come again. I don't like some kinds of secrets."

"But your father will know," he urged. "Isn't that enough for--for propriety?"