Part 24

Before she got halfway through the song Norman was fighting against the same mad impulse that had all but overwhelmed him as he watched her in the afternoon. And when her last note rose, swelled, slowly faded into silence, it seemed to him that had she kept on for one note more he would have disclosed to her amazed eyes the insanity raging within him.

She turned on the piano stool, her hands dropped listlessly in her lap. "Aren't those words beautiful?" she said in a dreamy voice. She was not looking at him. Evidently she was hardly aware of his presence.

He had not heard a word. He was in no mood for mere words. "I've never liked anything so well," he said. And he lowered his eyes that she might not see what they must be revealing.

She rose. He made a gesture of protest. "Won't you sing another?" he asked.

"Not after that," she said. "It's the best I know. It has put me out of the mood for the ordinary songs."

"You are a dreamer--aren't you?"

"That's my real life," replied she. "I go through the other part just to get to the dreams."

"What do you dream?"

She laughed carelessly. "Oh, you'd not be interested. It would seem foolish to you."

"You're mistaken there," cried he. "The only thing that ever has interested me in life is dreams--and making them come true."

"But not my kind of dreams. The only kind I like are the ones that couldn't possibly come true."

"There isn't any dream that can't be made to come true."

She looked at him eagerly. "You think so?"

"The wildest ones are often the easiest." He had a moving voice himself, and it had been known to affect listening ears hypnotically when he was deeply in earnest, was possessed by one of those desires that conquer men of will and then make them irresistible instruments. "What is your dream?--happiness? . . . love?"

She gazed past him with swimming eyes, with a glance that seemed like a brave bright bird exploring infinity. "Yes," she said under her breath. "But it could never--never come true. It's too perfect."

"Don't doubt," he said, in a tone that fitted her mood as the rhythm of the cradle fits the gentle breathing of the sleeping child. "Don't ever doubt. And the dream will come true."

"You have been in love?" she said, under the spell of his look and tone.

He nodded slowly. "I am," he replied, and he was under the spell of her beauty.

"Is it--wonderful?"

"Like nothing else on earth. Everything else seems--poor and cheap--beside it."

He drew a step nearer. "But you couldn't love--not yet," he said. "You haven't had the experience. You will have to learn."

"You don't know me," she cried. "I have been teaching myself ever since I was a little girl. I've thought of nothing else most of the time. Oh--" she clasped her white hands against her small bosom--"if I ever have the chance, how much I shall give!"

"I know it! I know it!" he replied. "You will make some man happier than ever man was before." His infatuation did not blind him to the fact that she cared nothing about him, looked on him in the most unpersonal way. But that knowledge seemed only to inflame him the more, to lash him on to the folly of an ill-timed declaration. "I have felt how much you will give--how much you will love--I've felt it from the second time I saw you--perhaps from the first. I've never seen any woman who interested me as you do--who drew me as you do--against my ambition--against my will. I--I----"

He had been fighting against the words that would come in spite of him. He halted now because the food of emotion suffocated speech. He stood before her, ghastly pale and trembling. She did not draw back. She seemed compelled by his will, by the force of his passion, to stay where she was. But in her eyes was a fascinated terror--a fear of him--of the passion that dominated him, a passion like the devils that made men gash themselves and leap from precipices into the sea. To unaccustomed eyes the first sight of passion is always terrifying and is usually repellent. One must learn to adventure the big wave, the great hissing, towering billow that conceals behind its menace the wild rapture of infinite longing realized.

"I have frightened you?" he said.

"Yes," was her whispered reply.

"But it is your dream come true."

She shrank back--not in aversion, but gently. "No--it isn't my dream," she replied.