Phases of an Inferior Planet

Mariana went home with throbs of elation in her heart. She was thrilled with a strange, unreasoning joy – a sense of wonder and of mystery – that caused her pulses to quiver and her feet to hasten.

"I shall see him again," she thought – "I shall see him again."

She forgot the years of separation, her past indifference, the barriers between them. She forgot the coldness of his voice and his accusing glance. Her nature had leaped suddenly into fulness, and a storm of passion such as she had never known had seized her. The emotions of her girlhood seemed to her stale and bloodless beside the tempest which possessed her now. As she walked her lips trembled, and she thought, "I shall see him again."

At dinner Miss Ramsey noticed her flushed face, and, when they went into the drawing-room, took her hands. "You are feverish," she said, "and you ate nothing."

Mariana laughed excitedly.

"No," she answered, "I am well – very well."

They sat down together, and she looked at Miss Ramsey with quick tenderness.

"Am I good to you?" she asked. "Am I good to the servants? – to everybody?"

"What is it, dear?"

"Oh, I want to begin over again – all over again! It is but fair that one should have a second chance, is it not?"

Miss Ramsey smiled.

"Some of us never have a first," she said; and Mariana took her in her arms and kissed her. "You shall have yours," she declared. "I will give it to you."

When she went up-stairs a little later she took down an old square desk from a shelf in the dressing-room and brought it to the rug before the fire. Kneeling beside it, she turned the key and raised the narrow lid of ink-stained mahogany. It was like unlocking the past years to sit surrounded by these memories in tangible forms, to smell the close, musty odor which clings about the relics of a life or a love that is dead.

She drew them out one by one and laid them on the hearth-rug – these faded things that seemed in some way to waft with the scent of decay unseizable associations of long-gone joy or sorrow. The dust lay thickly over them, as the dust of forgetfulness lay over the memories they invoked. There was a letter from her mother written to her in her babyhood, and the fine, faded handwriting recalled to her the drooping figure – a slight and passionate woman, broken by poverty and disappointments, with vivacious lips and eyes of honest Irish blue. There was a handful of mouldered acorns, gathered by childish fingers on the old plantation; there was the scarlet handkerchief her mammy had worn, and the dance-card of her first ball, with a colorless silk tassel hanging from one end. Then she pushed these things hastily aside and looked for others, as one looks beneath the sentiments for the passions of one's life. She found a photograph of Anthony, pasted on cheap card-board – a face young and intolerant, with the fires of ambition in the eyes and the lines of self-absorption about the mouth. Still looking at the boyish face, she remembered the man that she had seen that morning – the fires of ambition burned to ashes, the self-absorption melted into pain.

With the photograph still in her hand, she turned back to the desk and took out a tiny cambric shirt with hemstitched edges, upon which the narrow lace was yellow and worn. As the little garment fell open in her lap she remembered the day she had worked the hemstitching – a hot August day before the child came, when she had lived like a prisoner in the close rooms, sewing for months upon the dainty slips, and dreaming in that subconscious existence in which women await the birth of a new life. She remembered the day of its coming, her agony, and the first cry of the child; then the weeks when she had lain watching the dressing and undressing of the soft, round body, and then the moist and feeble clutch upon her hand. She remembered the days when it did not leave her arms, the nights when she walked it to and fro, crooning the lullaby revived from her own infancy, and at last the hours when she sat in the half-darkness and watched the life flicker out from the little bluish face upon the pillow.

"Was that yesterday or eight years ago?"

Her tears fell fast upon the tiny shirt, and she folded it and laid it away with the photograph and the other relics – laid away side by side the relics and the recollections covered with dust.

She rose to her feet and carried the desk back to its place in the dressing-room. In a moment she returned and stood silently before the fire, her hand resting upon the mantel-piece, her head leaning upon her arm. She was thinking of the two things a woman never forgets – the voice of the man she has loved and the face of her dead child.

But when she went to bed an hour later there was a smile on her lips.

"I shall see him again," she said. "Perhaps to-morrow."

The next day she went to Nevins's studio and sat for the portrait. Her face was aglow and she talked nervously. He noticed that she started at a noise on the stair, and that her attention wandered from his words. He made daring, if delicate, love to her, but she seemed oblivious of it, and, when she rose to go, remarked that he was depressed. In return, he observed that she was feverish, and advised consulting her physician. "Your eyes are too bright," he said. "What is it?"

"Your reflected brilliancy, perhaps."

"By no means. The lustre is too unnatural."

"Then it is sleeplessness. I lay awake last night."

"Anything the matter? Can I help you?"

She shook her head, smiling.

"I am adjusting a few difficulties," she answered; "chiefly matrimonial, but they belong to my cook."

He looked at her attentively.

"Don't worry," he said. "It is not becoming. The flush is all right, but in time it will give place to discontent. You will sow perplexities to reap – "

"Furrows," finished Mariana. Then she nodded gayly. "What a pessimist you are!" she said. "No, I am going to use the best cosmetic – happiness."

And she lifted her skirts and descended the stairs.

That afternoon she remained in-doors, wandering aimlessly from room to room, opening a book to turn a page or two and to throw it aside for another.

In the evening she went out to dinner, and Ryder, who was among the guests, remarked that he had never seen her in better form. "If there was such a thing as eternally effervescent champagne, I'd compare you to it," he said. "Are you never out of spirits?"

She looked at him with sparkling eyes. "Oh, sometimes," she responded; "but as soon as I discover it, I jump in again."

"And I must believe," he returned, his gaze warming, "that your element is one that cheers but not inebriates."

"You are very charitable. I wonder if all my friends are?"

He lowered his voice and looked into her eyes. "Say all your worshippers," he corrected, and she turned from him to her left-hand neighbor.

She laughed and jested as lightly as if her heart were a feather, and went home at last to weep upon her pillow.

For the next few days she lived like one animated by an unnatural stimulant. She talked and moved nervously, and her eyes shone with suppressed excitement, but she had never appeared more brilliant, and her manner was charged with an irresistible vivacity. To Miss Ramsey she was unusually gentle and generous.

Each morning, on rising, the thought fired her, "He may come to-day"; each night the change was rung to, "He may come to-morrow"; and she would toss feverishly until daybreak, to dress and meet her engagement, with a laugh upon her lips. To a stranger she would have seemed to face pain as she faced joy, with a dauntless insolence to fate. To a closer observer there would have appeared, with the sharper gnawing at her heart, the dash of a freer grace to her gestures, a richer light to her eyes. It was as if she proposed to conquer destiny by the exercise of personal charm.

At the end of the week she came down to luncheon one day with a softer warmth in her face. When the meal was over she went up to her room and called her maid. "I want the gray dress," she said; but when it was laid on the bed she tossed it aside. "It is too gloomy," she complained. "Bring me the red;" and from the red she turned to the green.

She dressed herself with passionate haste, arranging and rearranging the coil of her hair, and altering with reckless fingers the lace at her throat. At last she drew back from the glass, throwing a dissatisfied glance at her reflection – at the green-clad figure and the small and brilliant face, surmounted by its coils of shining brown. Then she added a knot of violets to the old lace on her breast, and went down-stairs to walk the drawing-room floor. An instinctive belief in his coming possessed her. As she walked slowly up and down on the heavy carpet, the long mirrors suspended here and there threw back at her fugitive glimpses of her moving figure. In the dusk of the room beyond she saw herself irradiated by the glimmering firelight.

The hands of the clock upon the mantel travelled slowly round the lettered face. As she watched it she felt a sudden desire to shake them into swiftness. She touched the clock and drew back, laughing at her childishness. A carriage in the street caught her ears and she went to the window, glancing through the half-closed curtains. It passed by. Then a tall, black figure turning the corner arrested her gaze, and her heart leaped suddenly. The figure came on and she saw that it was an elderly clergyman with white hair and a benevolent face. She was seized with anger against him, and her impatience caused her to press her teeth into her trembling lip. In the street a light wind chased a cloud of dust along the sidewalk until it danced in little eddying waves into the gutter. An organ-grinder, passing below, looked up and lifted his hand. She took her purse from the drawer of the desk and threw him some change; but when the broken tune was ground out she shook her head and motioned him away. The sound grated upon her discordant nerves.

She left the window and crossed the room again. The hands of the clock had made a half-hour's progress in their tedious march.

A book of poems lay on the table, and she opened it idly, her mental fever excited by the lighter words of one who had sounded the depths and sunk beneath.

"If Midge will pine and curse its hours away,
Because Midge is not everything – for aye,
Poor Midge thus loses its one summer day,
Loses its all – and winneth what, I pray?"

She threw the book aside and turned away – back to the window where there was dust and wind – back into the still room where the monotonous tick of the clock maddened her quivering mood. She walked to and fro in that silent waiting which is the part of women, and beside which the action of battle is to be faced with a song of thanksgiving.

The trembling of her limbs frightened her, and she flung herself upon a divan. The weakness passed, and she got up again. Another half-hour had gone.

All at once there was a ring at the bell. For an instant she felt her heart contract, and then a delirious dash of blood through her veins to her temples. Her pulses fluttered like imprisoned birds.