The Wheel of Life | Page 9

my blood has taught me."
Uncle Percival shook his head. "No--no, she only made a change," he corrected. "She was a little white moth who drifted to another sphere--because she had wanted so much, my child, that this earth would have been bankrupt had it attempted to satisfy her."
"She wanted what?" demanded Laura, her eyes glowing.
The old man turned upon her a glance in which she saw the wistful curiosity which belongs to age. "At the moment you remind me of her," he returned, "and yet you seem so strong where she was only weak."
"What did she want? What did she want?" persisted Laura.
"Well, first of all she wanted your father--every minute of him, every thought, every heart-beat. He couldn't give it to her, my dear. No man could. I tell you I have lived to a great age, and I have known great people, and I have never seen the man yet who could give a woman all the love she wanted. Women seem to be born with a kind of divination--a second sight where love is concerned--they aren't content with the mere husk, and yet that is all that the most of them ever get--"
"But my father?" protested Laura; "he broke his heart for her."
A smile at the fine ironic humour of existence crossed the old man's sunken lips. "He gave to her dead what she had never had from him living," he returned. "When she was gone everything--even the man's life for which he had sacrificed her--turned worthless. He always had the seeds of consumption, I suppose, and his gnawing remorse caused them to develop."
A short silence followed his words, while Laura stared at him with eyes which seemed to weigh gravely the meaning of his words. Then, rising hurriedly, she made a gesture as if throwing the subject from her and walked rapidly to the door.
"Aunt Rosa and Aunt Sophy are coming to dine," she said, "so I must glance at the table. I can't remember now whether I ordered the oysters or not."
The old man glanced after her with timid disappointment. "So you haven't time to hear me play?" he asked wistfully.
"Not now--there's Aunt Angela's dinner to be seen to. If Mr. Bleeker comes with Aunt Sophy you can play to him. He likes it."
"But he always goes to sleep, Laura. He doesn't listen--and besides he snores so that I can't enjoy my own music."
"That's because he'd rather snore than do anything else. I wouldn't let that worry me an instant. He goes to sleep at the opera."
She went out, and after giving a few careful instructions to a servant in the dining-room, ascended the staircase to the large square room in the left wing where Angela remained a wilful prisoner. As she opened the door she entered into a mist of dim candle light, by which her aunt was pacing restlessly up and down the length of the apartment.
To pass from the breathless energy of modern New York into this quiet conventual atmosphere was like crossing by a single step the division between two opposing civilisations. Even the gas light, which Angela could not endure, was banished from her eyes, and she lived always in a faint, softened twilight not unlike that of some meditative Old-World cloisters. The small iron bed, the colourless religious prints, the pale drab walls and the floor covered only by a chill white matting, all emphasised the singular impression of an expiation that had become as pitiless as an obsession of insanity. On a small table by a couch, which was drawn up before a window overlooking the park, there was a row of little devotional books, all bound neatly in black leather, but beyond this the room was empty of any consolation for mind or body. Only the woman herself, with her accusing face and her carelessly arranged snow-white hair, held and quickened the imagination in spite of her suggestion of bitter brooding and unbalanced reason. Her eyes looking wildly out of her pallid face were still the beautiful, fawn-like eyes of the girl of twenty, and one felt in watching her that the old tragic shock had paralysed in them the terrible expression of that one moment until they wore forever the indignant and wounded look with which she had met the blow that destroyed her youth.
"Dear," said Laura, entering softly as she might have entered a death chamber. "You will see Aunt Rosa and Aunt Sophy, will you not?"
Angela did not stop in her nervous walk, but when she reached the end of the long room she made a quick, feverish gesture, raising her hands to push back her beautiful loosened hair. "I will do anything you wish, Laura, except see their husbands."
"I've ceased to urge that, Aunt Angela, but your own sisters--"
"Oh, I will see them,"