The Call of the Blood - Page 26/317

"Look at those lights," he said, pointing to those that gleamed across

the water through the London haze that sometimes makes for a melancholy

beauty, "and that movement of the river in the night, tremulous and

cryptic like our thoughts. Is anything important?"

"Almost everything, I think, certainly everything in us. If I didn't feel

so, I could scarcely go on living. And you must really feel so, too. You

do. I have your letters to prove it. Why, how often have I written

begging you not to lash yourself into fury over the follies of men!"

"Yes, my temperament betrays the citadel of my brain. That happens in

many."

"You trust too much to your brain and too little to your heart."

"And you do the contrary, my friend. You are too easily carried away by

your impulses."

She was silent for a moment. The cabman was driving slowly. She watched a

distant barge drifting, like a great shadow, at the mercy of the tide.

Then she turned a little, looked at Artois's shadowy profile, and said: "Don't ever be afraid to speak to me quite frankly--don't be afraid now.

What is it?"

He did not answer.

"Imagine you are in Paris sitting down to write to me in your little

red-and-yellow room, the morocco slipper of a room."

"And if it were the Sicilian grandmother?"

He spoke half-lightly, as if he were inclined to laugh with her at

himself if she began to laugh.

But she said, gravely: "Go on."

"I have a feeling to-night that out of this happiness of yours misery

will be born."

"Yes? What sort of misery?"

"I don't know."

"Misery to myself or to the sharer of my happiness?"

"To you."

"That was why you spoke of the garden of paradise and the deadly swamp?"

"I think it must have been."

"Well?"

"I love the South. You know that. But I distrust what I love, and I see

the South in him."

"The grace, the charm, the enticement of the South."

"All that, certainly. You said he had reverence. Probably he has, but has

he faithfulness?"

"Oh, Emile!"

"You told me to be frank."

"And I wish you to be. Go on, say everything."

"I've only seen Delarey once, and I'll confess that I came prepared to

see faults as clearly as, perhaps more clearly than, virtues. I don't

pretend to read character at a glance. Only fools can do that--I am

relying on their frequent assertion that they can. He strikes me as a man

of great charm, with an unusual faculty of admiration for the gifts of

others and a modest estimate of himself. I believe he's sincere."