It was in his eyes that I saw the cause of her perturbation.Ordinarily gray and cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft and golden, and all adance 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 color was due; but golden his eyes were, enticing and masterful, at the same time luring and compelling, and speaking a demand and clamor 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 color and the dancing lights were gone.Cold and gray 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 Furuseth's christening, in love! And then, without rhyme or reason, all sceptical, my mind flew back to a small biographical note in the red-bound "Who's 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 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.Symons's lines came into my head:
"I wandered all these years among A world of women, seeking you."And then I had ceased seeking.It was not for me, this greatest thing in the world, I had decided.Furuseth was right; I was abnormal, an "emotionless monster," a strange bookish creature, capable of pleasuring in sensations only of the mind.And though I had been surrounded by women all my days, my appreciation of them had been aesthetic and nothing more.I had actually, at times, considered myself outside the pale, a monkish fellow denied the eternal or the passing passions I saw and understood so well in others.
And now it had come! Undreamed of and unheralded, it had come.In what could have been no less than an ecstasy, I left my post at the head of the companionway and started along the deck, murmuring to myself those beautiful lines of Mrs.Browning:
"I lived with visions for my company Instead of men and women years ago, And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know A sweeter music than they played to me."But the sweeter music was playing in my ears, and I was blind and oblivious to all about me.The sharp voice of Wolf Larsen aroused me.
"What the hell are you up to?" he was demanding.
I had strayed forward where the sailors were painting, and came to myself to find my advancing foot on the verge of overturning a paint-pot.
"Sleep-walking, sunstroke, -- what?" he barked.
"No; indigestion," I retorted, and continued my walk as if nothing untoward had occurred.
