The Call of the Blood | Page 8

spirit which was alive in him, and hated but could not banish it. As a friend he certainly loved Hermione. She knew that. But he did not love her as a man loves the woman he wishes to make his wife. She must know that, too. He loved her but was not in love with her, and she loved but was not in love with him. Why, then, should this marriage make a difference in their friendship? She said that it would not, but he felt that it must. He thought of her as a wife, then as a mother. The latter thought made his egotism shudder. She would be involved in the happy turmoil of a family existence, while he would remain without in that loneliness which is the artist's breath of life and martyrdom. Yes, his egotism shuddered, and he was angry at the weakness. He chastised the frailties of others, but must be the victim of his own. A feeling of helplessness came to him, of being governed, lashed, driven. How unworthy was his sensation of hostility against Delarey, his sensation that Hermione was wronging him by entering into this alliance, and how powerless he was to rid himself of either sensation! There was good cause for his melancholy--his own folly. He must try to conquer it, and, if that were impossible, to rein it in before the evening.
When he reached the hotel he went into his sitting-room and worked for an hour and a half, producing a short paragraph, which did not please him. Then he took a hansom and drove to Peathill Street.
Hermione was already there, sitting at a small table in a corner with her back to him, opposite to one of the handsomest men he had ever seen. As Artois came in, he fixed his eyes on this man with a scrutiny that was passionate, trying to determine at a glance whether he had any right to the success he had achieved, any fitness for the companionship that was to be his, companionship of an unusual intellect and a still more unusual spirit.
He saw a man obviously much younger than Hermione, not tall, athletic in build but also graceful, with the grace that is shed through a frame by perfectly developed, not over-developed muscles and accurately trained limbs, a man of the Mercury rather than of the Hercules type, with thick, low-growing black hair, vivid, enthusiastic black eyes, set rather wide apart under curved brows, and very perfectly proportioned, small, straight features, which were not undecided, yet which suggested the features of a boy. In the complexion there was a tinge of brown that denoted health and an out-door life--an out-door life in the south, Artois thought.
As Artois, standing quite still, unconsciously, in the doorway of the restaurant, looked at this man, he felt for a moment as if he himself were a splendid specimen of a cart-horse faced by a splendid specimen of a race-horse. The comparison he was making was only one of physical endowments, but it pained him. Thinking with an extraordinary rapidity, he asked himself why it was that this man struck him at once as very much handsomer than other men with equally good features and figures whom he had seen, and he found at once the answer to his question. It was the look of Mercury in him that made him beautiful, a look of radiant readiness for swift movement that suggested the happy messenger poised for flight to the gods, his mission accomplished, the expression of an intensely vivid activity that could be exquisitely obedient. There was an extraordinary fascination in it. Artois realized that, for he was fascinated even in this bitter moment that he told himself ought not to be bitter. While he gazed at Delarey he was conscious of a feeling that had sometimes come upon him when he had watched Sicilian peasant boys dancing the tarantella under the stars by the Ionian sea, a feeling that one thing in creation ought to be immortal on earth, the passionate, leaping flame of joyous youth, physically careless, physically rapturous, unconscious of death and of decay. Delarey seemed to him like a tarantella in repose, if such a thing could be.
Suddenly Hermione turned round, as if conscious that he was there. When she did so he understood in the very depths of him why such a man as Delarey attracted, must attract, such a woman as Hermione. That which she had in the soul Delarey seemed to express in the body--sympathy, enthusiasm, swiftness, courage. He was like a statue of her feelings, but a statue endowed with life. And the fact that her physique was a sort of contradiction of her inner self must make more powerful the charm of a Delarey for her. As