He greeted him pleasantly.
"And Mrs. Sohlberg, I suppose," he remarked, feelingly, catching a quick suggestion of the rhythm and sufficiency and naive taste that went with her. She was in simple white and blue--small blue ribbons threaded above lacy flounces in the skin. Her arms and throat were deliciously soft and bare. Her eyes were quick, and yet soft and babyish--petted eyes.
"You know," she said to him, with a peculiar rounded formation of the mouth, which was a characteristic of her when she talked--a pretty, pouty mouth, "I thought we would never get heah at all. There was a fire"--she p.r.o.nounced it fy-yah--"at Twelfth Street" (the Twelfth was Twalfth in her mouth) "and the engines were all about there. Oh, such sparks and smoke! And the flames coming out of the windows! The flames were a very dark red--almost orange and black. They"re pretty when they"re that way--don"t you think so?"
Cowperwood was charmed. "Indeed, I do," he said, genially, using a kind of superior and yet sympathetic air which he could easily a.s.sume on occasion. He felt as though Mrs. Sohlberg might be a charming daughter to him--she was so cuddling and shy--and yet he could see that she was definite and individual. Her arms and face, he told himself, were lovely. Mrs. Sohlberg only saw before her a smart, cold, exact man--capable, very, she presumed--with brilliant, incisive eyes. How different from Harold, she thought, who would never be anything much--not even famous.
"I"m so glad you brought your violin," Aileen was saying to Harold, who was in another corner. "I"ve been looking forward to your coming to play for us."
"Very nize ov you, I"m sure," Sohlberg replied, with his sweety drawl.
"Such a nize plaze you have here--all these loafly books, and jade, and gla.s.s."
He had an unctuous, yielding way which was charming, Aileen thought. He should have a strong, rich woman to take care of him. He was like a stormy, erratic boy.
After refreshments were served Sohlberg played. Cowperwood was interested by his standing figure--his eyes, his hair--but he was much more interested in Mrs. Sohlberg, to whom his look constantly strayed.
He watched her hands on the keys, her fingers, the dimples at her elbows. What an adorable mouth, he thought, and what light, fluffy hair! But, more than that, there was a mood that invested it all--a bit of tinted color of the mind that reached him and made him sympathetic and even pa.s.sionate toward her. She was the kind of woman he would like. She was somewhat like Aileen when she was six years younger (Aileen was now thirty-three, and Mrs. Sohlberg twenty-seven), only Aileen had always been more robust, more vigorous, less nebulous. Mrs.
Sohlberg (he finally thought it out for himself) was like the rich tinted interior of a South Sea oyster-sh.e.l.l--warm, colorful, delicate.
But there was something firm there, too. Nowhere in society had he seen any one like her. She was rapt, sensuous, beautiful. He kept his eyes on her until finally she became aware that he was gazing at her, and then she looked back at him in an arch, smiling way, fixing her mouth in a potent line. Cowperwood was captivated. Was she vulnerable? was his one thought. Did that faint smile mean anything more than mere social complaisance? Probably not, but could not a temperament so rich and full be awakened to feeling by his own? When she was through playing he took occasion to say: "Wouldn"t you like to stroll into the gallery? Are you fond of pictures?" He gave her his arm.
"Now, you know," said Mrs. Sohlberg, quaintly--very captivatingly, he thought, because she was so pretty--"at one time I thought I was going to be a great artist. Isn"t that funny! I sent my father one of my drawings inscribed "to whom I owe it all." You would have to see the drawing to see how funny that is."
She laughed softly.
Cowperwood responded with a refreshed interest in life. Her laugh was as grateful to him as a summer wind. "See," he said, gently, as they entered the room aglow with the soft light produced by guttered jets, "here is a Luini bought last winter." It was "The Mystic Marriage of St. Catharine." He paused while she surveyed the rapt expression of the attenuated saint. "And here," he went on, "is my greatest find so far." They were before the crafty countenance of Caesar Borgia painted by Pinturrichio.
"What a strange face!" commented Mrs. Sohlberg, naively. "I didn"t know any one had ever painted him. He looks somewhat like an artist himself, doesn"t he?" She had never read the involved and quite Satanic history of this man, and only knew the rumor of his crimes and machinations.
"He was, in his way," smiled Cowperwood, who had had an outline of his life, and that of his father, Pope Alexander VI., furnished him at the time of the purchase. Only so recently had his interest in Caesar Borgia begun. Mrs. Sohlberg scarcely gathered the sly humor of it.
"Oh yes, and here is Mrs. Cowperwood," she commented, turning to the painting by Van Beers. "It"s high in key, isn"t it?" she said, loftily, but with an innocent loftiness that appealed to him. He liked spirit and some presumption in a woman. "What brilliant colors! I like the idea of the garden and the clouds."
She stepped back, and Cowperwood, interested only in her, surveyed the line of her back and the profile of her face. Such co-ordinated perfection of line and color!
"Where every motion weaves and sings," he might have commented. Instead he said: "That was in Brussels. The clouds were an afterthought, and that vase on the wall, too."
"It"s very good, I think," commented Mrs. Sohlberg, and moved away.
"How do you like this Israels?" he asked. It was the painting called "The Frugal Meal."
"I like it," she said, "and also your Bastien Le-Page," referring to "The Forge." "But I think your old masters are much more interesting.
If you get many more you ought to put them together in a room. Don"t you think so? I don"t care for your Gerome very much." She had a cute drawl which he considered infinitely alluring.
"Why not?" asked Cowperwood.
"Oh, it"s rather artificial; don"t you think so? I like the color, but the women"s bodies are too perfect, I should say. It"s very pretty, though."
He had little faith in the ability of women aside from their value as objects of art; and yet now and then, as in this instance, they revealed a sweet insight which sharpened his own. Aileen, he reflected, would not be capable of making a remark such as this. She was not as beautiful now as this woman--not as alluringly simple, naive, delicious, nor yet as wise. Mrs. Sohlberg, he reflected shrewdly, had a kind of fool for a husband. Would she take an interest in him, Frank Cowperwood? Would a woman like this surrender on any basis outside of divorce and marriage? He wondered. On her part, Mrs.
Sohlberg was thinking what a forceful man Cowperwood was, and how close he had stayed by her. She felt his interest, for she had often seen these symptoms in other men and knew what they meant. She knew the pull of her own beauty, and, while she heightened it as artfully as she dared, yet she kept aloof, too, feeling that she had never met any one as yet for whom it was worth while to be different. But Cowperwood--he needed someone more soulful than Aileen, she thought.
Chapter XV
A New Affection
The growth of a relationship between Cowperwood and Rita Sohlberg was fostered quite accidentally by Aileen, who took a foolishly sentimental interest in Harold which yet was not based on anything of real meaning.
She liked him because he was a superlatively gracious, flattering, emotional man where women--pretty women--were concerned. She had some idea she could send him pupils, and, anyhow, it was nice to call at the Sohlberg studio. Her social life was dull enough as it was. So she went, and Cowperwood, mindful of Mrs. Sohlberg, came also. Shrewd to the point of destruction, he encouraged Aileen in her interest in them.
He suggested that she invite them to dinner, that they give a musical at which Sohlberg could play and be paid. There were boxes at the theaters, tickets for concerts sent, invitations to drive Sundays or other days.
The very chemistry of life seems to play into the hands of a situation of this kind. Once Cowperwood was thinking vividly, forcefully, of her, Rita began to think in like manner of him. Hourly he grew more attractive, a strange, gripping man. Beset by his mood, she was having the devil"s own time with her conscience. Not that anything had been said as yet, but he was investing her, gradually beleaguering her, sealing up, apparently, one avenue after another of escape. One Thursday afternoon, when neither Aileen nor he could attend the Sohlberg tea, Mrs. Sohlberg received a magnificent bunch of Jacqueminot roses. "For your nooks and corners," said a card. She knew well enough from whom it came and what it was worth. There were all of fifty dollars worth of roses. It gave her breath of a world of money that she had never known. Daily she saw the name of his banking and brokerage firm advertised in the papers. Once she met him in Merrill"s store at noon, and he invited her to lunch; but she felt obliged to decline. Always he looked at her with such straight, vigorous eyes.
To think that her beauty had done or was doing this! Her mind, quite beyond herself, ran forward to an hour when perhaps this eager, magnetic man would take charge of her in a way never dreamed of by Harold. But she went on practising, shopping, calling, reading, brooding over Harold"s inefficiency, and stopping oddly sometimes to think--the etherealized grip of Cowperwood upon her. Those strong hands of his--how fine they were--and those large, soft-hard, incisive eyes. The puritanism of Wichita (modified sometime since by the art life of Chicago, such as it was) was having a severe struggle with the manipulative subtlety of the ages--represented in this man.
"You know you are very elusive," he said to her one evening at the theater when he sat behind her during the entr"acte, and Harold and Aileen had gone to walk in the foyer. The hubbub of conversation drowned the sound of anything that might be said. Mrs. Sohlberg was particularly pleasing in a lacy evening gown.
"No," she replied, amusedly, flattered by his attention and acutely conscious of his physical nearness. By degrees she had been yielding herself to his mood, thrilling at his every word. "It seems to me I am very stable," she went on. "I"m certainly substantial enough."
She looked at her full, smooth arm lying on her lap.
Cowperwood, who was feeling all the drag of her substantiality, but in addition the wonder of her temperament, which was so much richer than Aileen"s, was deeply moved. Those little blood moods that no words ever (or rarely) indicate were coming to him from her--faint zephyr-like emanations of emotions, moods, and fancies in her mind which allured him. She was like Aileen in animality, but better, still sweeter, more delicate, much richer spiritually. Or was he just tired of Aileen for the present, he asked himself at times. No, no, he told himself that could not be. Rita Sohlberg was by far the most pleasing woman he had ever known.
"Yes, but elusive, just the same," he went on, leaning toward her. "You remind me of something that I can find no word for--a bit of color or a perfume or tone--a flash of something. I follow you in my thoughts all the time now. Your knowledge of art interests me. I like your playing--it is like you. You make me think of delightful things that have nothing to do with the ordinary run of my life. Do you understand?"
"It is very nice," she said, "if I do." She took a breath, softly, dramatically. "You make me think vain things, you know." (Her mouth was a delicious O.) "You paint a pretty picture." She was warm, flushed, suffused with a burst of her own temperament.
"You are like that," he went on, insistently. "You make me feel like that all the time. You know," he added, leaning over her chair, "I sometimes think you have never lived. There is so much that would complete your perfectness. I should like to send you abroad or take you--anyhow, you should go. You are very wonderful to me. Do you find me at all interesting to you?"
"Yes, but"--she paused--"you know I am afraid of all this and of you."
Her mouth had that same delicious formation which had first attracted him. "I don"t think we had better talk like this, do you? Harold is very jealous, or would be. What do you suppose Mrs. Cowperwood would think?"
"I know very well, but we needn"t stop to consider that now, need we?
It will do her no harm to let me talk to you. Life is between individuals, Rita. You and I have very much in common. Don"t you see that? You are infinitely the most interesting woman I have ever known.
You are bringing me something I have never known. Don"t you see that? I want you to tell me something truly. Look at me. You are not happy as you are, are you? Not perfectly happy?"
"No." She smoothed her fan with her fingers.
"Are you happy at all?"
"I thought I was once. I"m not any more, I think."
"It is so plain why," he commented. "You are so much more wonderful than your place gives you scope for. You are an individual, not an acolyte to swing a censer for another. Mr. Sohlberg is very interesting, but you can"t be happy that way. It surprises me you haven"t seen it."
"Oh," she exclaimed, with a touch of weariness, "but perhaps I have."
He looked at her keenly, and she thrilled. "I don"t think we"d better talk so here," she replied. "You"d better be--"
He laid his hand on the back of her chair, almost touching her shoulder.