She plucked off a rose from a flowering rose-tree near her, and began to wrench out its petals with a quick, nervous movement. Helmsley watched her with a vague sense of annoyance.
"I am no more happy," he said suddenly, "than that rose you are picking to pieces, though it has never done you any harm."
She started, and flushed,--then laughed.
"Oh, the poor little rose!" she exclaimed--"I"m sorry! I"ve had so many roses to-day, that I don"t think about them. I suppose it"s wrong."
"It"s not wrong," he answered quietly; "it"s merely the fault of those who give you more roses than you know how to appreciate."
She looked at him inquiringly, but could not fathom his expression.
"Still," he went on, "I would not have your life deprived of so much as one rose. And there is a very special rose that does not grow in earthly gardens, which I should like you to find and wear on your heart, Lucy,--I hope I shall see you in the happy possession of it before I die,--I mean the rose of love."
She lifted her head, and her eyes shone coldly.
"Dear Mr. Helmsley," she said, "I don"t believe in love!"
A flash of amazement, almost of anger, illumined his worn features.
"You don"t believe in love!" he echoed. "O child, what _do_ you believe in, then?"
The pa.s.sion of his tone moved her to a surprised smile.
"Well, I believe in being happy while you can," she replied tranquilly.
"And love isn"t happiness. All my girl and men friends who are what they call "in love" seem to be thoroughly miserable. Many of them get perfectly ill with jealousy, and they never seem to know whether what they call their "love" will last from one day to another. I shouldn"t care to live at such a high tension of nerves. My own mother and father married "for love," so I am always told,--and I"m sure a more quarrelsome couple never existed. I believe in friendship more than love."
As she spoke, Helmsley looked at her steadily, his face darkening with a shadow of weary scorn.
"I see!" he murmured coldly. "You do not care to over-fatigue the heart"s action by unnecessary emotion. Quite right! If we were all as wise as you are at your age, we might live much longer than we do. You are very sensible, Lucy!--more sensible than I should have thought possible for so young a woman."
She gave him a swift, uneasy glance. She was not quite sure of his mood.
"Friendship," he continued, speaking in a slow, meditative tone, "is a good thing,--it may be, as you suggest, safer and sweeter than love. But even friendship, to be worthy of its name, must be quite unselfish,--and unselfishness, in both love and friendship, is rare."
"Very, very rare!" she sighed.
"You will be thinking of marriage _some_ day, if you are not thinking of it now," he went on. "Would a husband"s friendship--friendship and no more--satisfy you?"
She gazed at him candidly.
"I am sure it would!" she said; "I"m not the least bit sentimental."
He regarded her with a grave and musing steadfastness. A very close observer might have seen a line of grim satire near the corners of his mouth, and a gleam of irritable impatience in his sunken eyes; but these signs of inward feeling were not apparent to the girl, who, more than usually satisfied with herself and over-conscious of her own beauty, considered that she was saying just the very thing that he would expect and like her to say.
"You do not crave for love, then?" he queried. "You do not wish to know anything of the "divine rapture falling out of heaven,"--the rapture that has inspired all the artists and poets in the world, and that has probably had the largest share in making the world"s history?"
She gave a little shrug of amused disdain.
"Raptures never last!" and she laughed. "And artists and poets are dreadful people! I"ve seen a few of them, and don"t want to see them any more. They are always very untidy, and they have the most absurd ideas of their own abilities. You can"t have them in society, you know!--you simply can"t! If I had a house of my own I would never have a poet inside it."
The grim lines round Helmsley"s mouth hardened, and made him look almost cruelly saturnine. Yet he murmured under his breath:--
""All thoughts, all pa.s.sions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame; Are but the ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame!""
"What"s that?" she asked quickly.
"Poetry!" he answered, "by a man named Coleridge. He is dead now. He used to take opium, and he did not understand business matters. He was never rich in anything but thoughts."
She smiled brilliantly.
"How silly!" she said.
"Yes, he was very silly," agreed Helmsley, watching her narrowly from under his half-closed eyelids. "But most thinkers are silly, even when they don"t take opium. They believe in Love."
She coloured. She caught the sarcastic inflection in his tone. But she was silent.
"Most men who have lived and worked and suffered," he went on, "come to know before they die that without a great and true love in their lives, their work is wasted, and their sufferings are in vain. But there are exceptions, of course. Some get on very well without love at all, and perhaps these are the most fortunate."
"I am sure they are!" she said decisively.
He picked up two or three of the rose-petals her restless fingers had scattered, and laying them in his palm looked at the curved, pink, sh.e.l.l-like shapes abstractedly.
"Well, they are saved a good deal of trouble," he answered quietly.
"They spare themselves many a healing heart-ache and many purifying tears. But when they grow old, and when they find that, after all, the happiest folks in the world are still those who love, or who have loved and have been loved, even though the loved ones are perhaps no longer here, they may--I do not say they will--possibly regret that they never experienced that marvellous sense of absorption into another"s life of which Mrs. Browning writes in her letters to her husband. Do you know what she says?"
"I"m afraid I don"t!" and she smothered a slight yawn as she spoke. He fixed his eyes intently upon her.
"She tells her lover her feeling in these words: "_There is nothing in you that does not draw all out of me._" That is the true emotion of love,--the one soul must draw all out of the other, and the best of all in each."
"But the Brownings were a very funny couple," and the fair Lucy arched her graceful throat and settled more becomingly in its place a straying curl of her glossy brown hair. "I know an old gentleman who used to see them together when they lived in Florence, and _he_ says they were so queer-looking that people used to laugh at them. It"s all very well to love and to be in love, but if you look odd and people laugh at you, what"s the good of it?"
Helmsley rose from his seat abruptly.
"True!" he exclaimed. "You"re right, Lucy! Little girl, you"re quite right! What"s the good of it! Upon my word, you"re a most practical woman!--you"ll make a capital wife for a business man!" Then as the gay music of the band below-stairs suddenly ceased, to give place to the noise of chattering voices and murmurs of laughter, he glanced at his watch.
"Supper-time!" he said. "Let me take you down. And after supper, will you give me ten minutes" chat with you alone in the library!"
She looked up eagerly, with a flush of pink in her cheeks.
"Of course I will! With pleasure!"
"Thank you!" And he drew her white-gloved hand through his arm. "I am leaving town next week, and I have something important to say to you before I go. You will allow me to say it privately?"
She smiled a.s.sent, and leaned on his arm with a light, confiding pressure, to which he no more responded than if his muscles had been rigid iron. Her heart beat quickly with a sense of gratified vanity and exultant expectancy,--but his throbbed slowly and heavily, chilled by the double frost of age and solitude.
CHAPTER III