Phases of an Inferior Planet

"Well, no matter. It might have been a chop. By the way, I met Mr. Speares – "

"Father Speares," corrected Mariana.

"Mr. or Father, he's a nice old chap, isn't he?"

"He's a saint," said Mariana. Then she grew serious. "If you could have gone into the Church – honestly, I mean – how pleased he would have been, dearest."

"Yes; but I couldn't, you know, and if I had I could not have married you. He is High Church, you see. Celibacy is his pet institution."

Mariana colored. "Then I am glad you didn't." She flung herself upon him; then, drawing back, added, wistfully, "But you wouldn't have been poor."

"Do you find it so hard?"

"I hate it – for you. You work so hard. And I can't help you."

"My beloved!"

"I mind it most for you. But, of course, I feel badly when the washer-woman comes and there isn't any money – and I should like to have some gloves – "

"You shall have them, my darling. Why didn't you tell me?"

Mariana leaned upon his breast and swept her loosened hair across his arm. "It doesn't matter very much," she answered. "If I were starving and you kissed me I should forget it." And she added, with characteristic inconsequence: "Only I haven't been out for several days because I didn't have any."

"You shall have them to-morrow. Is there anything else, dearest?"

"Nothing!" laughed Mariana.

She went to the mirror and began coiling her hair. From the glass her eyes met Anthony's, and she threw him a smiling glance.

"I have been reading one of your books," she said, pointing with the brush; "there it is."

Anthony lifted the volume from the bureau and grew serious. "Mill?" he observed. "It is a good start. Every woman should know political economy. I am glad it interests you."

"I haven't gone beyond the first page yet," returned Mariana, putting up both hands to fluff her aureole, and pausing to run her fingers over her eyebrows in the attempt to narrow them. "There was something in the first page about 'a web of muslin,' and, somehow, it suggested to me the idea of making that bonnet. Odd, wasn't it? And I am so glad I read it, for I am sure I should never have thought of the bonnet otherwise – and it is becoming."

"But you like Mill?"

"Oh yes," said Mariana; "I find him very suggestive."

CHAPTER XIII

Anthony and Mariana founded their life together upon well-worn principles. They accepted in its entirety the fallacy that love is a self-sustaining force, independent of material conditions.

"So long as we love each other," Mariana declared, "nothing matters."

And Anthony upheld this declaration. To Algarcife those first months of intimate association were inexpressibly fresh and inspiriting. That acute sense of nearness to Mariana supplied what had been a void in his existence, and he looked back upon the time he had spent without her as a colorless stretch of undifferentiated days.

And yet, with a feminine presence beside him, work was less easy. In the evenings, when Mariana followed him to his study and seated herself in a rocking-chair beneath the lamplight, he sometimes experienced a vague recognition of its inappropriateness. He found the old absorption to have grown intractable, and the creak of Mariana's rocker, or the low humming of her voice, was sufficient to surprise in him that repressed irascibility from which he had never been able to shake himself free. Even in the midst of his passionate delight in her, a profound melancholy would seize him at times, and he would find the cravings of his intellectual nature harassed by the superficial tenor of his daily employment. Again, as Mariana sat in the lamplight, her swift fingers busy with some useless bit of millinery, he would regard her with a sudden tightening of his pulses, and a thrill of fear at the prospect of a coming separation. The droop of her head, the contour of her face where the bone of her chin was accentuated by thinness, the soft line of throat above the full collar, the nimbus of hair shining in the light, the fall of her skirt, the slender slippered feet, aroused in him a tumultuous sense of possession. He would turn from his writing to rest upon her a warm and magnetic glance, before which her lowered lashes would be lifted, her pensive lips break into a smile.

Then, again, the instinct for solitude, which his years of study had intensified, would reawaken, and the creaking of the rocker would act as an irritant upon his nerves.

It was at such a moment that Mariana had looked up and spoken, the bright inflection of her voice aggravating the interruption.

"Anthony!"

Algarcife turned towards her, his pen raised as if in self-defence.

"When did you begin to love me?"

The pen was lowered, Algarcife smiled. "In the beginning," he answered; then he frowned, his tone grew captious. "I can't, Mariana," he protested – "I really can't. I must get this work over."

"You are always working."

"Heaven knows, I am! If I weren't, we would starve."

"It is horrible to be poor."

"We don't improve matters by exclaiming over them. On the contrary, you will prevent my getting this article off to-night, and we will be a few dollars the poorer."

"You never talk to me. You are always working."

She spoke pettishly, with an impulse to exasperate.

"Mariana!"

Mariana threw aside her work and clasped her hands. Her face was upturned, her head supported by the back of the chair. He could see the violet shadow which rested like a faint suffusion where the heavy hair swept from behind her ear.

Suddenly her head was lowered, and the mellow lamplight irradiated across the pallor of her face.

"Of course I know you are working for me," she said, "but I had rather have less labor and more love."

"I love you as much when I am working for you as when I am shouting it in your ear."

"But I like to hear it."

"I love you. Now be quiet."

Mariana came and leaned over him. She put her arms about his shoulders and rested her head upon them. There was a sob in her voice. "Let me help you," she said. "It is so hard to sit still and do nothing, while you are killing yourself. Let me help you."

Anthony turned and caught her, and she lay limp and motionless in his embrace. He kissed her with sudden passion.

"You help me by living," he said, "by breathing, by being near me, by giving yourself to me unreservedly. Without you I lived but half a life – without you, now that I have had you, I should go to pieces – absolutely. I love you as a man loves once in a thousand years. But we must live, and I must work."

He released her and went back to his writing, while Mariana, in passionate elation, picked up Mill's Political Economy, and fell to studying.

It was shortly after this that she sought to turn her own talents to financial results. With this end in view she invested her pocket-money in a yard or so of white linen and a mass of colored silks, and wove a garland of nasturtiums around a centre-piece intended to decorate a dinner-table. When it was finished she was seized with a fit of sanguineness, and as she rinsed it in a dozen different waters to insure whiteness, she calculated what the annual products of her labor would amount to. "If I manage to do one a month," she remarked, pressing the centre-piece lightly between her moistened hands, "and say I get about fifteen dollars for each one, I should soon have quite a little income; twelve times fifteen is – how much, Anthony?"

"More than I am going to let you work for," replied Algarcife. "Your eyes have been red ever since you started that confounded table-cover. It is the very last."