第103章

On the day after her evening with her husband in the art gallery, the evening when Gretry had broken in upon them like a courier from the front, Laura had risen from her bed to look out upon a world suddenly empty.

Corthell she had sent from her forever.Jadwin was once more snatched from her side.Where, now, was she to turn? Jadwin had urged her to go to the country--to their place at Geneva Lake--but she refused.She saw the change that had of late come over her husband, saw his lean face, the hot, tired eyes, the trembling fingers and nervous gestures.Vaguely she imagined approaching disaster.If anything happened to Curtis, her place was at his side.

During the days that Jadwin and Crookes were at grapples Laura found means to occupy her mind with all manner of small activities.She overhauled her wardrobe, planned her summer gowns, paid daily visits to her dressmakers, rode and drove in the park, till every turn of the roads, every tree, every bush was familiar, to the point of wearisome contempt.

Then suddenly she began to indulge in a mania for old books and first editions.She haunted the stationers and second-hand bookstores, studied the authorities, followed the auctions, and bought right and left, with reckless extravagance.But the taste soon palled upon her.With so much money at her command there was none of the spice of the hunt in the affair.She had but to express a desire for a certain treasure, and forthwith it was put into her hand.

She found it so in all other things.Her desires were gratified with an abruptness that killed the zest of them.She felt none of the joy of possession; the little personal relation between her and her belongings vanished away.Her gowns, beautiful beyond all she had ever imagined, were of no more interest to her than a drawerful of outworn gloves.She bought horses till she could no longer tell them apart; her carriages crowded three supplementary stables in the neighbourhood.Her flowers, miracles of laborious cultivation, filled the whole house with their fragrance.Wherever she went deference moved before her like a guard; her beauty, her enormous wealth, her wonderful horses, her exquisite gowns made of her a cynosure, a veritable queen.

And hardly a day passed that Laura Jadwin, in the solitude of her own boudoir, did not fling her arms wide in a gesture of lassitude and infinite weariness, crying out:

"Oh, the ennui and stupidity of all this wretched life!"She could look forward to nothing.One day was like the next.No one came to see her.For all her great house and for all her money, she had made but few friends.Her "grand manner" had never helped her popularity.She passed her evenings alone in her "up-stairs sitting-room," reading, reading till far into the night, or, the lights extinguished, sat at her open window listening to the monotonous lap and wash of the lake.

At such moments she thought of the men who had come into her life--of the love she had known almost from her girlhood.She remembered her first serious affair.

It had been with the impecunious theological student who was her tutor.He had worn glasses and little black side whiskers, and had implored her to marry him and come to China, where he was to be a missionary.

Every time that he came he had brought her a new book to read, and he had taken her for long walks up towards the hills where the old powder mill stood.Then it was the young lawyer--the "brightest man in Worcester County"--who took her driving in a hired buggy, sent her a multitude of paper novels (which she never read), with every love passage carefully underscored, and wrote very bad verse to her eyes and hair, whose "velvet blackness was the shadow of a crown." Or, again, it was the youthful cavalry officer met in a flying visit to her Boston aunt, who loved her on first sight, gave her his photograph in uniform and a bead belt of Apache workmanship.He was forever singing to her--to a guitar accompaniment--an old love song:

"At midnight hour Beneath the tower He murmured soft, 'Oh nothing fearing With thine own true soldier fly.'"Then she had come to Chicago, and Landry Court, with his bright enthusiasms and fine exaltations had loved her.She had never taken him very seriously but none the less it had been very sweet to know his whole universe depended upon the nod of her head, and that her influence over him had been so potent, had kept him clean and loyal and honest.

And after this Corthell and Jadwin had come into her life, the artist and the man of affairs.She remembered Corthell's quiet, patient, earnest devotion of those days before her marriage.He rarely spoke to her of his love, but by some ingenious subtlety he had filled her whole life with it.His little attentions, his undemonstrative solicitudes came precisely when and where they were most appropriate.He had never failed her.Whenever she had needed him, or even, when through caprice or impulse she had turned to him, it always had been to find that long since he had carefully prepared for that very contingency.His thoughtfulness of her had been a thing to wonder at.

He remembered for months, years even, her most trivial fancies, her unexpressed dislikes.He knew her tastes, as if by instinct; he prepared little surprises for her, and placed them in her way without ostentation, and quite as matters of course.He never permitted her to be embarrassed; the little annoying situations of the day's life he had smoothed away long before they had ensnared her.He never was off his guard, never disturbed, never excited.

And he amused her, he entertained her without seeming to do so.He made her talk; he made her think.He stimulated and aroused her, so that she herself talked and thought with a brilliancy that surprised herself.

In fine, he had so contrived that she associated him with everything that was agreeable.