Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/409

Rh , "I hope you will never try, my darling."

"Oh, but you know this can't last," she returned with playfully affected authority. "It must come to an end. They will interfere."

"Who can? Who will dare?" said the painter with confidence.

"People will. We had better stop it ourselves — before it all comes out and we are shamed," said Florimel, now with perfect seriousness.

"Shamed!" cried Lenorme. "Well, if you can't help being ashamed of me — and perhaps, as you have been brought up, you can't — do you not then love me enough to encounter a little shame for my sake? I should welcome worlds of such for yours."

Florimel was silent. She kept her face hidden on his shoulder, but was already halfway to a quarrel.

"You don't love me, Florimel," he said after a pause, little thinking how nearly true were the words.

"Well, suppose I don't!" she cried, half defiantly, half merrily; drawing herself from him, she stepped back two paces, and looked at him with saucy eyes, in which burned two little flames of displeasure, that seemed to shoot up from the red spots glowing upon her cheeks. Lenorme looked at her. He had often seen her like this before, and knew that the shell was charged and the fuse lighted. But within lay a mixture even more explosive than he suspected; for not merely was there more of shame and fear and perplexity mingled with her love than he understood, but she was conscious of having now been false to him, and that rendered her temper dangerous. Lenorme had already suffered severely from the fluctuations of her moods. They had been almost too much for him. He could endure them, he thought, to all eternity if he had her to himself, safe and sure; but the confidence to which he rose every now and then that she would one day be his just as often failed him, rudely shaken by some new symptom of what almost seemed like cherished inconstancy. If, after all, she should forsake him! It was impossible, but she might. If even that should come, he was too much of a man to imagine anything but a stern encounter of the inevitable, and he knew he would survive it; but he knew also that life could never be the same again, that for a season work would be impossible — the kind of work he had hitherto believed his own rendered forever impossible perhaps, and his art degraded to the mere earning of a living. At best, he would have to die and be buried and rise again before existence could become endurable under the new squalid conditions of life without her. It was no wonder, then, if her behavior sometimes angered him, for even against a will-o'-the-wisp that has enticed us into a swamp a glow of foolish indignation will spring up. And now a black fire in his eyes answered the blue flash in hers; and the difference suggests the diversity of their loves: hers might vanish in fierce explosion, his would go on burning like a coal-mine. A word of indignant expostulation rose to his lips, but a thought came that repressed it. He took her hand, and led her — the wonder was that she yielded, for she had seen the glow in his eyes, and the fuse of her own anger burned faster; but she did yield, partly from curiosity, and followed where he pleased — her hand lying dead in his. It was but to the other end of the room he led her, to the picture of her father, now all but finished. Why he did so he would have found it hard to say. Perhaps the genius that lies under the consciousness forefelt a catastrophe, and urged him to give his gift ere giving should be impossible.

Malcolm stepped into the drawing-room, where the table was laid as usual for breakfast; there stood Caley, helping herself to a spoonful of honey from Hymettus. At his entrance she started violently, and her sallow face grew earthy. For some seconds she stood motionless, unable to take her eyes off the apparition, as it seemed to her, of the late marquis, in wrath at her encouragement of his daughter in disgraceful courses. Malcolm, supposing she was ashamed of herself, took no further notice of her, and walked deliberately toward the other door. Ere he reached it she knew him. Burning with the combined ires of fright and shame, conscious also that by the one little contemptible act of greed in which he had surprised her she had justified the aversion which her woman-instinct had from the first recognized in him, she darted to the door, stood with her back against it and faced him flaming. "So!" she cried: "this is how my lady's kindness is abused! The insolence! Her groom goes and sits for his portrait in her father's courtdress!"

As she ceased all the latent vulgarity of her nature broke loose, and with a protracted pff she seized her thin nose between her thumb and forefinger, to indicate that an evil odor of fish interpenetrated 