HELENA BELMONT saw little of her company for two days. She spent part of the time in the forest, the rest in her boudoir, a long room on the east side of the house opening into her bedroom at one end and into a small library at the other. The bedroom was a pretty thing of pale pink and green, and white lace. The library, lined from floor to ceiling with books, many several generations old, had only a rug on the bare floor, a table and several upright chairs. The walls of the boudoir were panelled with the beautiful delicately-veined redwood the forest trees conceal under their forbidding bark. The ceiling was arched and heavily beamed. The curtains of doors and windows, the deep chairs and couches, the rugs on the dark floor were of Smyrna stuffs whose only tangible color was a red that was almost black. A redwood mantel was built to the ceiling; a large table of the same wood, heavily carved, was covered with books and costly trifles. The deep window seats were also upholstered. The Castilian roses nodded against the pane, but Helena could look above the garden wall into the forest on the mountain.
And here Helena sat for hours. She was profoundly stirred and touching lightly the keys of something akin to happiness. Several times before in her life she had felt what she believed to be the quickening of love; but it had died in its swaddling clothes, and had been a vagary of the fancy to this. Her brain and her woman’s instinct told her unerringly that she had found the man. Every part of her went out to him. A faint sweet something tipped her pulses. It is possible that passion was regnant at this time; that she was possessed by the savage primitive desire of the first woman for the first man; so far she had come in contact with little beyond the man’s powerful personality and responsive magnetism. Nevertheless there had been spiritual recognition, blind and groping as it may have been; certain torpid instincts stirred, and she divined vaguely what a woman might be to her husband. She had known many married women more or less intimately, been the confidante of more than one liaison; and with intuition fostered by such knowledge and her own strong brain, she rejoiced that she had met him in time, divining something of the bitter sadness which companions a woman, who, meeting a man too late, must be one thing to him, instead of twenty: his wife would still have the better part of his life, his higher nature, his duty, the supreme happiness of making his home.
She dreamed dreams of her future with Clive: the love and the art by which she would hold him, the companionship. She forgot Mary Gordon’s existence. Had she remembered, she would have imperiously dismissed the very thought of her. She had obtained what she wanted all her life, and recognized no obstacles.
She went up to the log by the creek and touched caressingly the tree against which he had leaned, gathered some of the ashes from his pipe and held them in the hollow of her hand. She smiled as she did so, and wondered that clever women and silly women should be so little dissimilar when in love.
It was on the morning of the third day that the Chinese butler tapped at her door, and said—
“Mr. Lollins wantee you at telephone, missee.”
“Oh, tell somebody else to answer him. I am tired of the very sound of that telephone. Someone is at it all day. I’ve a great mind to have it taken out.”
“Allight, missee.”
A few moments later he returned.
“Mr. Lollins slay he got something velly important tellee missee.”
Helena went rapidly to the little room by the front door sacred to the telephone. The fear shook her that something had happened to Clive.
She sat down by the table and rang the bell.
“Halloo, Helena! is that you?” came Rollins’ hearty, reassuring voice.
“Yes. What do you want? I wish you wouldn’t bother me.”
“Awfully sorry, but I’ve a piece of news for you—a corker.”
“Well.”
“It’s about your Englishman.”
“My Englishman? What Englishman? What nonsense are you talking?”
“Oh, come off. I’ve terrible news for you. I’ve just congratulated him. He’s mortgaged.”
“I wish you would not talk slang over the telephone. I suppose you mean he’s engaged to Mary Gordon.”
“That’s the hard cold fact.”
“Well, please congratulate them for me. I’ll give them a dinner. I’ll write a note to-day——”
“You’ll see him to-night. I hope you haven’t forgotten that you are all to dine with us.”
“I had forgotten it, but we’ll be there.”
“Great Scott, Helena! have you also forgotten that this is our last night, and that you asked six of us to spend a week with you? Are those boys still there?”
“They are; but I’ll send them home this minute. I’m awfully sorry I forgot it, but everything will be ready for you. I’ll send a wagon over for your traps this afternoon, and the char-à-banc will bring you back to-night. Now, clear out, I have a great deal to attend to.”
Helena replaced the trumpet carefully in its bracket, then leaned her elbows on the table and laughed. The one sensation of which she was definitely conscious for the moment was genuine amusement. She recalled her dreams, her pictured life with Clive, and felt a fool; but she had always been able to laugh at herself, and she did so now. In a little while she went into the corridors, where the guests were dawdling after their morning drive.
“Mes enfants,” she said, blowing a kiss from the tips of her fingers to each of the young men in turn, “go straightway and pack up. You are to go home on the 4.10. I asked, a week ago, six of the club men to come here to-night, and you must vacate. And, what do you think? My Englishman is engaged to Mary Gordon.”
She ruffled her hair with a tragic little gesture, threw up her hands and disappeared.
It was not long before the humor died out of her. In its wake came the profoundest depression she had ever known. She looked into a blank and colorless future, realizing that a woman may be young until fifty if it is still her privilege to seek and wait and hope, but that when her great joy has touched and passed her, she has buried all that is best of her youth.
She could not stay in her rooms, eloquent of imaginings, but went back to her guests, and clung to them and talked of what interested them, and had never been more hospitable and charming; all the while mechanically counting the years and months and days that lay ahead of her. The depression lasted for hours, during which she wondered if the weight in her brain was crushing the light and reason out of it.
And then the devil entered into her.