Phases of an Inferior Planet

He was gazing at her with burning eyes. His hands were clinched at his sides, and the veins on his temples swelled like blue cords.

Then his look met hers and held it, and the desire in their eyes leaped out and closed together, drawing them slowly to each other.

Still they were silent, he standing straight and white in the centre of the room, she shrinking back against the mantel.

Suddenly he reached out.

"Mariana!"

"Anthony!"

She was sobbing upon his breast, his arms about her, her face hidden. The heavy sobs shook her frame like the lashing of a storm, and she braced herself against him to withstand the terrible weeping.

Presently she grew quiet, and he released her. Her face was suffused with a joy that shone through her tears.

"You love me?" she asked.

"I love you."

She smiled.

"I will stay near you," she said. "I will not go South."

For a moment he was silent, and when he spoke his voice rang with determination.

"You will go South," he said, "and I will go with you."

Her eyes shone.

"South? And you with me?"

He smiled into her upturned face.

"Do you think it could be otherwise?" he asked. "Do you think we could be near – and not together?"

"I – I had not thought," she answered.

He held her hands, looking passionately at her fragile fingers.

"You are mine," he said – "mine as you have been no other man's. Nature has joined us together. Who can put us asunder?" Then he held her from him in sudden fear. "But – but can you face poverty again?" he asked.

"What will matter," she replied, "so long as we are together?"

"You will leave all this," he went on. "We will start afresh. We will have a farm in the South. It will be bare and comfortless."

She smiled.

"There will be peach-trees," she said, "all pink in the spring-time, and there will be the sound of cow-bells across green pastures."

"I will turn farmer," he added. "I will wring a living from the soil."

She lifted her glowing eyes.

"And we will begin over again," she said – "begin from the beginning. Oh, my love, kiss me!"

He stooped and kissed her.

CHAPTER XIII

When Anthony descended Mariana's brown-stone steps the afterglow had faded from the west, and far down the street the electric lights shone coldly through frosted globes. He walked with a springing step, lifting his head as if impatient of restraint. His future was firm. There was no hesitancy, no possibility of retrenchment. In one breath he had pledged himself to break the bonds that held him, and this vow there was no undoing. He had sealed it with his passion for a woman. Already his mind was straining towards the freedom which he faced. The years of insincerity would fall away, and the lies which he had uttered would shrivel before one fearless blaze of truth. Fate had settled it. He was free, and deception was at an end. He was free!

In the effort to collect his thoughts before going to dinner he crossed to Broadway, walking several blocks amid the Saturday-evening crowd. He regarded the passing faces idly, as he had regarded them for twenty years. They were the same types, the invincible survivals from a wreck of individuals. He saw the dapper young fellow with the bloodless face, pale with the striving to ascend a rung in the social ladder; he saw the heavy features of the common laborer, the keen, quick glance of the mechanic, and the paint upon the haggard cheeks of the actress who was out of an engagement. They passed him rapidly, pallid, nervous, strung to the point of a breaking note, supine to placid pleasures, and alert to the eternal struggle of the race. When he had walked several blocks he turned and went back. The noise irritated him. He winced at the shrill voices and the insistent clanging of cable-car bells. He wanted to be alone – to think.

In the quiet of the side-street his thoughts assumed more definite shape. The mad thrill of impulse gave place to a rational joy. He possessed her, this was sufficient. She was his to be held forever, come what would. His in wealth and in poverty, in sickness and in health. His for better or for worse – eternally his.

He set his teeth sharply at the memory of her tear-wet face. He felt the trembling of her limbs, the burning pressure of her lips. Broken and worn and robbed of youth – was she not trebly to be desired? Was his the frail passion that exacts perfection? He had not loved beauty or youth; he had loved that impalpable something which resists all ravages of decay – which rises triumphant from death.

Yes, trebly to be desired! He remembered her as he had first seen her, lifting her head from her outstretched arms, her eyes scintillant with tears. He recalled the tremulous voice, the plaintive droop of the head. Then the night when he had held her in the shadow of the fire-escape, her loosened hair falling about him, her hands hot in his own. She had said: "I am yours – yours utterly," and the pledge had held. She was his, first and last. What if another man had embraced her body, from the beginning unto the end her heart was locked in his.

All the trivial details of their old life thronged back to him; struggle and poverty, birth and death, and the emptiness of the ensuing years yawned, chasm-like, before his feet. He was like a man suddenly recalled from the dead – a skeleton reclothed in flesh and reattuned to the changes of sensations. Yes, after eight years he was alive once more.

He entered the rectory, and in a few moments went in to dinner. To his surprise he found that he was hungry, and ate heartily. All instincts, even that for food, had quickened with the rebirth of emotion.

He drank his claret slowly, seeing Mariana seated across from him, and the vision showed her pale and still, as she had come to him the night of the storm, the snow powdering her hair. Then he banished the memory and invoked her image as he had seen her in the afternoon, wan and hollow-eyed, but faintly coloring and tremulous with passion. She would sit opposite him again, but not here.

He had a farm in the South, a valueless piece of land left him by a relative of his mother. It was there that they would go to begin life anew and to mend the faith that had been broken. He would till the land and drive the plough and take up the common round of life again – a life free from action as from failure, into which no changes might ring despair.

He left the table and went into his study, seating himself before the fire. The little dog, with that subtle perception of mental states possessed by animals, pressed his cold nose into the palm of his master's hand, whimpering softly, a wistful look in his warm, brown eyes. Then he lay down, and, resting his head upon his paws, stared into the fire – seeing in the flames his silent visions.

Anthony leaned back upon the cushions, and the face of Mariana looked at him from the vacant chair on the hearth-rug. The reddish shadows from the fire flitted across her features and across the slim, white hand that was half outstretched. He saw the slippered feet upon the rug and a filmy garment in her lap, as the work had fallen from her idle hands.

The maid came in with his coffee and he lighted his pipe. In a moment the bell rang and Ellerslie entered, his face flushed, his hands hanging nervously before him. He sat down in the chair, still warm from the vision of Mariana, and Father Algarcife looked at him with a sudden contraction of remorse. For the first time he winced before the glance of another – of a girlish-looking boy with a tremulous voice and an honest heart. He was looking into the fire when Ellerslie spoke.

"I want you to meet my mother," he said. "You know she is coming to town next week. She is very anxious to know you; I have written so often about you."

The other looked up.

"Next week – ah, yes," he responded. He was thinking that by that time he would have passed beyond the praise or blame of Ellerslie and his mother – he would be with Mariana.

The younger man went on, still flushing.

"She often sends you messages which I don't deliver. She has never forgotten that illness you nursed me through five years ago."

Father Algarcife shook his head slightly, his eyes on the flames that played among the coals.

"She must not exaggerate that," he answered.

Ellerslie opened his mouth, but closed it without speaking. His shyness had overcome him.