The Little Lady of the Big House / Маленькая хозяйка большого дома. Книга для чтения на английском языке

He did not respond to her smile, and her eyes delightedly warmed to the boyish sullenness that vexed his own eyes. A thought was hot on his tongue, but he restrained the utterance of it while she wondered what it was, disappointed not to have had it.

“It will work out[448],” she assured him gravely. “It will have to work out somehow. Dick says all things work out. All is change. What is static is dead, and we’re not dead, any of us… are we?”

“I don’t blame you for loving Dick, for… for continuing to love Dick,” he answered impatiently. “And for that matter, I don’t see what you find in me compared with him. This is honest. He is a great man to me, and Great Heart is his name – ” she rewarded him with a smile and nod of approval. “But if you continue to love Dick, how about me?”

“But I love you, too.”

“It can’t be,” he cried, tearing himself from the piano to make a hasty march across the room and stand contemplating the Keith on the opposite wall as if he had never seen it before.

She waited with a quiet smile, pleasuring in his unruly impetuousness.

“You can’t love two men at once,” he flung at her.

“Oh, but I do, Evan. That’s what I am trying to work out. Only I don’t know which I love more. Dick I have known a long time. You… you are a —”

“Recent acquaintance[449],” he broke in, returning to her with the same angry stride.

“Not that, no, not that, Evan. You have made a revelation to me of myself. I love you as much as Dick. I love you more. I – I don’t know.”

She broke down and buried her face in her hands, permitting his hand to rest tenderly on her shoulder.

“You see it is not easy for me,” she went on. “There is so much involved, so much that I cannot understand. You say you are all at sea. Then think of me all at sea and worse confounded. You – oh, why talk about it – you are a man with a man’s experiences, with a man’s nature. It is all very simple to you. ‘She loves me, she loves me not.’ But I am tangled, confused. I – and I wasn’t born yesterday – have had no experience in loving variously. I have never had affairs. I loved only one man… and now you. You, and this love for you, have broken into a perfect marriage, Evan —”

“I know – ” he said.

“– I don’t know,” she went on. “I must have time, either to work it out myself or to let it work itself out. If it only weren’t for Dick…” her voice trailed off pathetically.

Unconsciously, Graham’s hand went farther about her shoulder.

“No, no – not yet,” she said softly, as softly she removed it, her own lingering caressingly on his a moment ere she released it. “When you touch me, I can’t think,” she begged. “I – I can’t think.”

“Then I must go,” he threatened, without any sense of threatening. She made a gesture of protest. “The present situation is impossible, unbearable. I feel like a cur[450], and all the time I know I am not a cur. I hate deception – oh, I can lie with the Pathan, to the Pathan – but I can’t deceive a man like Great Heart. I’d prefer going right up to him and saying: ‘Dick, I love your wife. She loves me. What are you going to do about it?’”

“Do so,” Paula said, fired for the moment.

Graham straightened up with resolution.

“I will. And now.”

“No, no,” she cried in sudden panic. “You must go away.” Again her voice trailed off, as she said, “But I can’t let you go.”

* * *

If Dick had had any reason to doubt his suspicion of the state of Paula’s heart, that reason vanished with the return of Graham. He need look nowhere for confirmation save to Paula. She was in a flushed awakening, burgeoning like the full spring all about them, a happier tone in her happy laugh, a richer song in her throat, a warmness of excitement and a continuous energy of action animating her. She was up early and to bed late. She did not conserve herself, but seemed to live on the champagne of her spirits, until Dick wondered if it was because she did not dare allow herself time to think.

He watched her lose flesh[451], and acknowledged to himself that the one result was to make her look lovelier than ever, to take on an almost spiritual delicacy under her natural vividness of color and charm.

And the Big House ran on in its frictionless, happy, and remorseless way. Dick sometimes speculated how long it would continue so to run on, and recoiled from contemplation of a future in which it might not so run on. As yet, he was confident, no one knew, no one guessed, but himself. But how long could that continue? Not long, he was certain. Paula was not sufficiently the actress. And were she a master at concealment of trivial, sordid detail, yet the new note and flush of her would be beyond the power of any woman to hide.