The Upas Tree | Page 7

be different. I had so long of being impecunious, that I particularly enjoy feeling bottomless! Besides, each year will bring in more. This African book ought to be worth all the rest put together."
Helen was silent; but she sighed as she filled in Cook's cheque and signed it. Ronald had spoken so lightly of the great disappointment of their married life. It was always difficult to get Ronnie to take things seriously. The fact was: he took himself so seriously, that he was obliged to compensate by taking everything and everybody else rather lightly. No doubt this arrangement of relative values, made for success. Ronnie's success had been very rapid, and very brilliant. He accepted it with the unconscious modesty of the true artist; his work meaning immeasurably more to him than that which his work brought him, either in praise or pennies.
But Helen gloried in the praise, kept a watchful eye, so far as he would let her, on the pennies; and herself ministered to the idea that all else must be subservient, where Ronnie's literary career was concerned.
She was ministering to it now, at a personal cost known only to her own brave heart.
CHAPTER IV
FIRELIGHT IN THE STUDIO
It was Ronnie's last evening in England. The parting, which had seemed so far away, must take place on the morrow. It took all Helen's bright courage to keep up Ronnie's spirits.
After dinner they sat together in a room they still called the studio, although Helen had given up her painting, soon after their marriage.
It was a large old-fashioned room, oak-panelled and spacious.
A huge mirror, in a massive gilt frame, hung upon the wall opposite door and fireplace, reaching from the ceiling to the parquet floor.
Ronald, who used the studio as a smoking-room, had introduced three or four deep wicker chairs, comfortably cushioned, and a couple of oriental tables.
The fireplace lent itself grandly in winter to great log-fires, when the crimson curtains were drawn in ample folds over the many windows, shutting out the dank bleakness of the park without, and imparting a look of cosiness to the empty room.
A dozen old family portraits--banished from more important places, because their expressions annoyed Ronnie--were crowded into whatever space was available, and glowered down, from the bad light to which they had been relegated, on the very modern young man whose uncomplimentary remarks had effected their banishment, and who sprawled luxuriously in the firelight, monarch of all he surveyed, in the domain which for centuries had been their own.
The only other thing in the room was a piano, on which Ronnie very effectively and very inaccurately strummed by ear; and on which Helen, with careful skill, played his accompaniments, when he was seized with a sudden desire to sing.
Ronald's music was always a perplexity to Helen. There was a quality about it so extraordinarily, so unusually, beautiful; combined with an entire lack of method or of training, and a quite startling ignorance of the most rudimentary rules.
On one occasion, during a sharp attack of influenza, when he had insisted upon being down and about, with a temperature of 104, he suddenly rose from the depths of a chair in which he had been lying, talking wild and feverish nonsense; stumbled over to the piano, dropped heavily upon the stool, then proceeded to play and sing, in a way, which brought tears to his wife's eyes, while her heart stood still with anxiety and wonder.
Yet, when she mentioned it a few days later, he appeared to have forgotten all about it, turning the subject with almost petulant abruptness.
* * * * *
But, on this their last evening together, the piano stood unheeded. They seemed only to want two chairs, and each other.
She could hardly take her eyes from his face, remembering how many months must pass before she could see him again. Yet it was Ronnie who made moan, and Helen who bravely comforted; turning as often as possible to earnest discussion of his plot and its possibilities. But after a while even she went under, to the thought of the nearness of the parting.
Though it was late in April, the evenings were chilly; a fire glowed in the grate.
Presently Ronnie rose, turned off the electric light, and seated himself on the rug in the firelight, resting his head against his wife's knees.
Silently she passed her fingers through his hair.
Something in the quality of her silence turned Ronald's thoughts from himself to her alone. "Helen," he said, "I hate to be leaving you. Shall you be very lonely?"
She could not answer.
"You are sure your good old Mademoiselle Victorine is coming to be with you?"
"Yes, dear. She holds herself in readiness to come as soon as I feel able to send for her. She and I lived alone together here during eighteen months, after Papa's