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Elisha Cuthbert Gallery Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
lightly enough;
but I saw her eyes return to his, involuntarily, as though
fascinated; then they fell, but not swiftly enough to veil the rush
of terror that filled them.
It was in his eyes that I saw the cause of her perturbation.
Ordinarily grey and cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft and
golden, and all a-dance with tiny lights that dimmed and faded, or
welled up till the full orbs were flooded with a glowing radiance.
Perhaps it was to this that the golden colour was due; but golden
his eyes were, enticing and masterful, at the same time luring and
compelling, and speaking a demand and clamour of the blood which no
woman, much less Maud Brewster, could misunderstand.
Her own terror rushed upon me, and in that moment of fear--the most
terrible fear a man can experience--I knew that in inexpressible
ways she was dear to me. The knowledge that I loved her rushed
upon me with the terror, and with both emotions gripping at my
heart and causing my blood at the same time to chill and to leap
riotously, I felt myself drawn by a power without me and beyond me,
and found my eyes returning against my will to gaze into the eyes
of Wolf Larsen. But he had recovered himself. The golden colour
and the dancing lights were gone. Cold and grey and glittering
they were as he bowed brusquely and turned away.
"I am afraid," she whispered, with a shiver. "I am so afraid."
I, too, was afraid, and what of my discovery of how much she meant
to me my mind was in a turmoil; but, I succeeded in answering quite
calmly:
"All will come right, Miss Brewster. Trust me, it will come
right."
She answered with a grateful little smile that sent my heart
pounding, and started to descend the companion-stairs.
For a long while I remained standing where she had left me. There
was imperative need to adjust myself, to consider the significance
of the changed aspect of things. It had come, at last, love had
come, when I least expected it and under the most forbidding
conditions. Of course, my philosophy had always recognized the
inevitableness of the love-call sooner or later; but long years of
bookish silence had made me inattentive and unprepared.
And now it had come! Maud Brewster! My memory flashed back to
that first thin little volume on my desk, and I saw before me, as
though in the concrete, the row of thin little volumes on my
library shelf. How I had welcomed each of them! Each year one had
come from the press, and to me each was the advent of the year.
They had voiced a kindred intellect and spirit, and as such I had
received them into a camaraderie of the mind; but now their place
was in my heart.
My heart? A revulsion of feeling came over me. I seemed to stand
outside myself and to look at myself incredulously. Maud Brewster!
Humphrey Van Weyden, "the cold-blooded fish," the "emotionless
monster," the "analytical demon," of Charley Furuseths
christening, in love! And then, without rhyme or reason, all
sceptical, my mind flew back to a small biographical note in the
red-bound Whos Who, and I said to myself, "She was born in
Cambridge, and she is twenty-seven years old." And then I said,
"Twenty-seven years old and still free and fancy free?" But how
did I know she was fancy free? And the pang of new-born jealousy
put all incredulity to flight. There was no doubt about it. I was
jealous; therefore I loved. And the woman I loved was Maud
Brewster.
I, Humphrey Van Weyden, was in love! And again the doubt assailed
me. Not that I was afraid of it, however, or reluctant to meet it.
On the contrary, idealist that I was to the most pronounced degree,
my philosophy had always recognized and guerdoned love as the
greatest thing in the world, the aim and the summit of being, the
most exquisite pitch of joy and happiness to which life could
thrill, the thing of all things to be hailed and welcomed and taken
into the heart. But now that it had come I could not believe. I
could not be so fortunate. It was too good, too good to be true.
Symonss lines came into my head:
"I wandered all these years among
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