in their books at the same moment, and both, with a bored sigh, allowed
them to decline upon their steamer-rug knees, with an artfully
synchronised sympathy. Then their eyes met, and two of a kind recognised
each other and smiled. Nature had created them fully equipped flirts.
They only needed to look at each other to know it; and, straightway,
headlong, with the good excuse of marine ennui upon them, they followed
the law of their natures--Sid, however, with a strong brake on, a
restraint, which, with the comprehension of sorceresses, his companion
felt and interpreted, and inwardly resolved to overcome.
“Strange, how everything is a bore at sea! even the most interesting
book,” said the siren.
“Even the sea,” assented Sid.
“Have you really the courage to say that you think the sea ridiculously
overrated?”
Sid had.
“I love courage,” she answered, looking at him in a laughing,
challenging way.
“You necessitate it,” was the answer, according to the eternal formula;
and so the sea began to be less of a bore, and continued being less and
less so each succeeding day, till the last evening of the voyage had
come.
They were nearing the sad shores of the shamrock, and they had escaped
from the after-dinner promenade, and had made themselves cosey near the
bow of the ship, in some nook of windlass and sailing tackle close to
the bulwark, where they could watch the phosphorescent spume of the
ship’s course, and speak of it, if necessary.
So far, though not entirely satisfied with himself, Sid had combined
faithfulness with flirtation in a blending so adroit that the ache of
his conscience was just bearable; and, he told himself, that Rosamund,
of all women, would be the last to withhold her admiration from so
brilliant a feat of sentimental tight-rope walking. Any student of the
_ars amatoria_ knows how fine is the line between faithfulness and
unfaithfulness, finer far than a hair from the beloved’s head; and Sid
had the right to congratulate himself with his deft-footed adhesion to
that moonbeam of a path. The siren was too expert herself in such
perilous experiment not to have observed and admired Sid’s achievement,
and, naturally, she was piqued by it to a special effort of conquest
this last evening. Not, of course, that she really cared for Sid, any
more than he cared for her. It was merely two flirts making a trial of
strength, the old eternal duel between man and woman; but, for once, the
man had most to lose--and that Sid kept reiterating to himself: for this
momentary diversion he might lose Rosamund, lose his whole life, and the
meaning of it--for this!
The siren, who had not known him for three days without knowing all
about him, estimated accurately with what she had to contend. For the
woman flirt there is no incentive like--Another Woman! It was not this
quite attractive man whose scalp she was after. It was the woman to whom
he was so ridiculously constant that she burned to humiliate.
Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way. I said that the line is fine,
and often, to sincere observers, the adherence to it has a somewhat
technical value. Was it casuistry or simplicity in Sid that made him
feel that his faith was still intact so long as he had not
actually--kissed the siren? We live in a legal, concrete world, a world
that judges us by our definite completed actions rather than by our
feelings, or our cunningly restricted evasions of the penalty. A
kiss--whatever the motive--is a concrete decisive act. A kiss is
evidence. The desire to kiss, however powerful, is not. Now Sid had not
yet kissed the siren. According to any external tribunal, Sid was still
faithful to his Rosamund.
This unkissed kiss, so to say, was the key of the castle; at all events
from the siren’s point of view. Sid’s heart, to tell the truth, ached
with a sincerer standard; but, at all events, be its value what it
might, this unkissed kiss was the redoubt on which he had hoisted his
colours, to fly or fall. And it was to be no easy fight, he realised, as
the siren nestled herself into a comfortable position in that sheltered
nook of windlass and sailing-tackle, and phosphorescence and gold-dust
stars, and the importunate surge of the sea.
He braced himself with the thought of Rosamund as with a prayer. He
crossed himself with the remembrance of his last look as they had
parted. It may sound laughable that anyone should arm himself so
cap-à-pie against a kiss, yet the stakes in any contest are represented
by some apparently trivial symbol. A kiss was the symbol here; and the
siren, at all events, did not under-rate its symbolic value. She fought
for it as though it had been the cross of the Legion of Honour, fought
with all the delicate skill of an artist, and she laughed softly now and
again as she came near winning, winning--the kiss that belonged to
another woman.
She was terribly beautiful was the siren, terribly everything that a
seductive woman can be. The atmosphere about her was a dreamy whirlpool,
of which the vortex was her lips, and Sid felt himself being drawn
closer and closer to that vortex. How he longed to throw up his arms and
drown--but, instead, suddenly, brusquely, rudely, he sprang up.
“I won’t,” he cried abruptly, and left her.
It was not gracefully done, but it was the only way he could do it.
Victories are seldom graceful. In the thick of battle it is occasionally
necessary to be impolite. Suddenly Sid had seen, as it were, luridly
embodied the moment he had told himself might some day come--the moment
of temptation. Here was he face to face with it at last, one of those
terrible moments of trial which divide the past from the future, and
challenge us to decide then and there, once and for all, what we really
mean about ourselves; one of those moments that cannot be postponed, but
must be met and fought just how and when they come; and, as Sid realised
all the moment meant, those perfumed alluring lips so dangerously near
to his filled him with a veritable terror, and his heart almost stopped
beating with dread of succumbing. Poor Sid, he had been so accustomed to
take such kisses as they came with a light heart; but now suddenly, as
in a lightning flash, he seemed to see the meaning of those mysterious
standards by which the faith of men and women has been immemorially
judged, a meaning he had never suspected before; and he saw, too, the
divine beauty of them; and the vivid revelations thus made to him, not a
moment too soon, had given him that strength to cry out “I won’t,” and
tear himself away.
As with a burning heart, he arraigned himself before himself in the
solitude of his stateroom, it seemed at first that his victory had been
but a poor one, a victory only in name. He had desired to kiss the
siren--it was impossible to deny that; and surely the very wish to do so
was unfaithfulness; and the only reason that had restrained him--was it
not the fear of losing Rosamund? No, it was more than that, and with the
realisation that it was really more than that--a real aspiration,
however feeble, toward the better way of loving, a repugnance for the
old way, and a genuine preference, very young and tender indeed as yet,
for a finer ideal--he grew a little comforted. Yes, it had been a
victory, a greater one than it had seemed. He had not really wanted to
kiss the siren, after all, in spite of compromising appearances--not
really deep down. It was only an old habit of the surface that had
momentarily got the better of him! And, though it may sound like
casuistry, it was not so. Poor boy, it might not have seemed a brilliant
victory to the looker-on. But flirtation is a habit that dies hard, and,
till he had known Rosamund, the mere idea of faithfulness to a woman
had never remotely entered into his mind. This passage with the siren,
however, had proved him so far on the road to regeneration as to have
developed an actual preference for being faithful! He was himself
surprised at the feeling, and it filled him with a certain awe, made him
almost a little frightened, though curiously happy. Did he really love
one woman like that at last? Just one woman, out of all the women in the
world? Yes, just one woman. It was a wonderful feeling.
* * * * *
The temptation of the siren had been the gross one of the senses. The
finer and subtler trial had yet to come. Rosamund had so far compromised
with her original decree as to consent to limit Sid’s ordeal to one out
of his nine muses. She would be content, she said, with his seeing
Meriel, she, whom you may remember he was to love till Judgment Day; for
Rosamund was right in thinking that, of all Sid’s previous feelings, his
love for Meriel had been most serious. Indeed, it had been a feeling
apart from all others, and it had always shone wistfully in Sid’s memory
as a lost sacred thing that had come into his life too early, before his
heart had been ready for it. A magic gift of loving it had been, but he
had taken it carelessly with the rest, and realised all it had been only
when it was far away. He recalled looks out of Meriel’s eyes which told
him long after that she had known he was not ready for the love she
could give him, and, unconsciously, the occasional thought of this old
shortcoming of his had prepared him for--Rosamund, of whom Meriel came
to seem in his mind a beautiful prophecy. Thus old love dies that new
may live, or rather lives on in giving its life to the new. Certainly,
Sid could never have loved Rosamund more had he not loved Meriel so
much.
Yet, what if it should prove that Rosamund in her turn had only been
developing him toward repossession of his old dream! Love moves in a
mysterious way. How strange if this interval of experience had been
meant to bring him back, at last worthy of them, to Meriel’s arms at
last. He could not deny that his love for Rosamund had been haunted
sometimes by moonlit memories of Meriel’s face, though he could with
equal truth say that the new love was greater than the old one, because
of its inclusion of stable human elements which his fairy dream of
Meriel had lacked. Meriel had been a dream-woman, but hardly a human
woman; but Rosamund was both. Yet, almost without his knowing it, there
had been lurking in the background of his consciousness a vague
curiosity--it was hardly more--as to what it would seem like to see
Meriel again; what her face would seem like, how her voice would sound.
He did not for a moment fear the result, yet he sometimes felt that he
would like to try the experiment; but all these feelings had been of the
very shadowiest, hardly rippling the surface of consciousness; so when
Rosamund had suddenly made her odd proposal, they had seemed phantom
nothings indeed compared with the aching reality of a month’s exile from
her side.
All that had been Meriel had passed into Sid’s love for Rosamund. Meriel
herself could only be a ghost, however beautifully visible and audible,
a fair house of dreams from which the dreams had departed. Yet, for all
that, it was not without some agitation that Sid found himself at length
in the quaint little seaside town, whence a ferryboat would take him to
a village across the bay, high over which Meriel and her mother lived,
looking over the sea. Her ghost began to grow more and more luminous
with memories, as a pale moon fills with silver as the night deepens. He
stood on the deck of the little boat, and as it drew near to the
landing-place he could see clearly on the hillside the old white house
with its trellises and its terraced gardens descending the hill. He
could see plainly the little bower where one summer evening they had sat
together, and she had suddenly put her hand in his and said, “My life is
in your hands.”
His heart beat fast as his memories crowded in upon him, and it made him
almost frightened to think that in a few short moments he would really
be looking at her again. He felt as though he were about to see someone
who had been dead a long time, and had come to life again startlingly,
as in dreams. Then there suddenly floated over the water from the
village music very mournful and sweet, and he could see a long line of
dark figures moving slowly up the tortuous village street. At the first
strains of the music a great foreboding had swept through Sid’s heart.
What if Meriel were dead, and, as in a fairy tale, he had come to meet
her--carried through the streets to the tomb. The idea pleased his
fancy, with its picturesque pathos; but no! that music was not for
Meriel. It was a soldier’s death music, yet its solemn valedictory
chords seemed to Sid’s ears to be playing the requiem of a great
passion, fitly ushering him with their voluptuous melancholy to the
grave of his beautiful love.
He took his way thoughtfully up through the climbing village, but there
was a subdued excitement in his face which Rosamund might have construed
as an undue eagerness to face his coming ordeal. At last he turned the
well-known corner of the lane, and there was the house, facing the aery
infinite of the sea. How poignantly familiar it all was; yet, why
instantly did something tell him, something blank about the expression
of the very windows, that--Meriel was not there.
Her mother met him as he turned into the garden, but Meriel was not
there. She had been married--yesterday.
That is what the music had meant.
* * * * *
“So ‘Judgment Day’ is married!” said Rosamund, when Sid had once more
returned to his cage to report himself. “It’s too bad of her,” she
continued, “for she has quite spoiled my little plan. My test has been
no test at all.”
“It was all I needed,” answered Sid. He was thinking of the siren, about
whom, like a wise lover, he had kept silence. Too much confession is a
dangerous weakness, and we are usually the best judges of our own
actions. The siren had been but the process of an experiment. All that
concerned Rosamund was the result.
“I wish I could have seen you, Sid, when you heard about ‘Judgment Day.’
I’d give anything to know what you really felt; but, of course, you’ll
never tell me.”
Sid smiled, but said nothing.
“Weren’t you disgusted with her for daring to do it without your
consent? The bare idea of a woman who had loved you daring to have any
new life on her own account! I am sure you had pictured her spending her
days looking dreamily over the sea--waiting for your return. I know you
had.”
As a matter of fact Sid had, and his feelings on hearing of Meriel’s
marriage had been exceedingly mixed. It was perhaps as well that
Rosamund had no record of them.
“Won’t you tell me what you really felt--just for fun? You can be
honest, I shan’t mind.”
But Sid was too wise to be honest. He knew where these heart-to-heart
confessions, just for fun, were apt to lead.
“I had no feelings. My one thought from beginning to end was to get back
to my cage--and never go out of it again.”
“You were relieved then? You had been a little frightened, eh? Yes, you
know you had, and you were glad to be let off the ordeal--now, weren’t
you?”
Sid certainly had been, but he steadily refused to be drawn. And then
Rosamund suddenly changed her tactics.
“But you haven’t asked anything about me during your retrospective
pilgrimage!” she said.
“You!” exclaimed Sid, a look of peculiarly masculine surprise coming
into his face.
“O yes, me! I suppose you imagined me during your absence sitting here,
_à la_ ‘Judgment Day’, docilely awaiting your return.”
“What do you mean, Rosamund?” asked Sid, anxiously.
“I mean that you seem to forget that I, too, had made previous
engagements for Judgment Day. When you were off pilgrimaging in the
past--what was to hinder me from doing the same?”
“O Rosamund, you didn’t.”
“Didn’t I! I’d often wondered what it would be like to kiss Jack Meriden
again, so your being away on your own affairs gave me a good
opportunity.”
“You kissed him!” exclaimed Sid, in angry astonishment, all his
masculine proprietorship in his face.
“Why not!” she answered, nodding her head affirmatively.
“You--kissed--him,” Sid repeated, grasping her wrists fiercely.
Rosamund shook herself free, with mocking laughter.
“Ah! there talks the man--the lord of creation. The man is to be allowed
to go off and flirt with whom he pleases, but the woman, O no! While
the man is engaged in these pleasing diversions, she must sit at home
faithfully darning his socks. No, sir! I did kiss Jack Meriden, and it
was a very nice kiss, too.”
“You did,” repeated Sid slowly, in an anguish of jealousy.
“You must remember, Sid,” she answered mockingly, “what a serious affair
it was between us--quite a Judgment-Day affair. Those old memories die
hard, as you, of all people, should know.”
“I only know that you--kissed--Jack--Meriden,” repeated Sid, rising to
his feet; “and that I am going.”
He strode savagely across the lawn, making as if to leave the garden.
Rosamund let him go some distance, and then called him back.
“Why should I come back?” he asked, sulkily.
“I want to tell you something,” she said in a caressing voice.
He came back to her side, and stood there.
“Well, what is it?” he asked stiffly.
“You must sit down. I can’t tell you that way.”
Sid sat down, with non-committal aloofness. She put her arm around his
rigid shoulders, and whispered.
“You are the greatest goose that ever lived. I never kissed Jack
Meriden. I love you--not as a man loves, but as a woman loves.”
“I love you the same way,” answered Sid, the storm-clouds suddenly swept
from his face, “there is only one way of--loving. The other thing needs
another name.”
And, with that, Rosamund snapped to the door of his cage forever.
EVA, THE WOODLAND AND I
Whenever I ought to be working especially hard at my desk in the middle
of the woodland, where I have built myself a little log house for my
books, and my pictures and my pen--because the household down at the
bottom of the hill does not want a man indoors writing all day when
there are all kinds of important domestic operations afoot, which, when
he is there, have to be done softly, with hushed voices and muffled
tread, lest the serenity of the great brain with the pen be
ruffled--whenever, I say, I ought to be working especially hard up there
in the wood, among the pines and the bracken and the dancing leaves and
the whistle of birds that seem to call, “What a sin it is to be working
on such a day!” there often comes a tiny figure and looks in at the
window with three-year-old baby eyes, and watches the mysterious person
there at the desk, with, for all her affected innocent look, a definite
purpose of seduction in her baby heart. I know too well what she is up
to. It is a day all aromatic sunshine, and she wants us to play truant
together, hunting butterflies and wild flowers, instead of having to
behave properly with nurse, and sitting there at that stupid desk.
She knows perfectly well that she is doing the sweet forbidden thing,
for her mother has impressed upon her again and again, with much
solemnity, that she must on no account interrupt father when he is
busy--on masterpieces. Eva has always listened with an air of enigmatic
innocence on her little broad indomitable face. Her blue eyes have worn
a look of what I might call stubborn obedience, and then--Well, I am
sorry to say that on the first opportunity, when nurse’s back is turned,
she has made off as fast as her sturdy little legs will carry her, up
among the secrecies of the fern, till at last she has arrived at my
window--a baby Eve, offering me the wild apple of idleness and
sunshine.
I pretend not to see, I bow my head more sternly over my task in
profound absorption; but Eva is not to be taken in by such cheap
devices. She knows that she has only to stand long enough at the
window--cleverly making no sign, not tapping or calling, but just
silently there--for me to give in, and, throwing down my pen, catch her
in my arms and carry her up to the gorse-lit moorland that spreads its
boundless horizon at the top of our little wood.
The sun has been calling me all day, and the leaves have been whispering
invitations upon the pane; but I have found it comparatively easy to
resist them. The eternal temptation of the birds calling and calling me
away I have steeled my heart to resist also. But Eva! No, I cannot
resist her. So, after a sham fight of a few moments, she and I are on
our way up the woods as fast as we can, for fear nurse or mother may
catch sight of us before we really escape.
But for one particular day, of which at the moment I am thinking, I am
afraid I cannot lay the blame on her. No, it was all my fault. I believe
that that day she had meant to be a really good girl. I must take the
blame of luring her from her arduous duties with her dolls. And yet I
cannot blame myself very sincerely; for the forenoon had been so full of
sunshine and wafting perfume that I could not have regarded myself as a
human being had I stayed at my desk, merely writing, while the sun was
shining and the birds singing and the wild-rose opening its dewy heart
to the sky.
Deliberately I had decided that I would not work, and strolled up
through the green, sun-ascending perfumes to the gorse and heather at
the top of the pine wood. As I emerged into the broad, brooding
sunshine, a swift rustle stirred in the underbrush, and a zigzag of
silver flashed away from my feet, threshing its way, with sinuous,
sinister beauty, to shelter in an old bank hard by. I had disturbed an
adder taking his noonday sun bath.
Snakes are hardly more common in England than they are said to be in the
island of Saint Patrick. When occasionally surprised, they startle one
with something like the thrill of an apparition, something of the fear
and fascination of the supernatural. They seem to belong to the
beautiful wicked side of nature, that at once repels and ensnares.
Though I had lived much in the country, I had not previously seen three
snakes in my life; so this fleeing, flashing adder was quite an event in
my morning’s walk, and my first thought was: If only Eva were here to
see it too!
Presently the adder himself gave me my opportunity, by gliding into a
hole in the bank, from which there was no outlet except by the way he
had entered. I could see him sitting there coiled in the darkness, with
his vicious head erect, ready, tiny worm, after all, as he was, to fight
the whole big world. He sat there and watched me, unmoving; and then,
noticing a big stone that lay near, I closed with it the door of his
little cave, and made his imprisonment safe with earth. Then I went down
the wood again to bring Eva. I caught sight of her through the garden
hedge, sitting on the grass playing with alphabetical bricks. Nurse sat
a short way off sewing.
Nurse is such an old friend of ours and so clothed with vice-maternal
authority that I am almost as much afraid of her in regard to Eva’s and
my truancies as I am of Eva’s mother. Men rightly enough, by natural
law, are allowed little to say in the rearing of their own babies, and,
however much the master of the house you may deem yourself, your
authority stops with the good woman who guards your child. There is
something sacred about a nurse--a mother nurse, I mean; not a
nursemaid--which it would be profanity, even impertinence, for a mere
father to disregard. When the mother is not there, the nurse is the
mother, and her word is law.
Realising this, I could not dare openly to cross the lawn and take Eva
away with me, as though I had every right to do so. Had I dared to do
that, I should have been speedily humiliated by that mysterious
authority which is said to rock the cradle and to rule the world. In
other words, nurse and I would have had a spirited fight, in which I
would have been speedily worsted.
Therefore, I lay in ambush a while behind the hedge of flowering laurel,
wondering how to catch Eva’s attention. Presently I found a simple way.
Within reach of my hand grew a red rose bush, weighted with fat, heavy
roses. One of these I plucked, and threw it with a dexterity on which I
prided myself right into Eva’s lap. If there is one thing I love about
her, it is the calm way she takes surprises. She looked silently at the
rose a moment, then with her strong, quiet eyes gazed around to see
where it could have come from. As she did that, I gently shook the
rose-bush. She watched it shaking a moment, and then caught sight of
me. Even then she kept her presence of mind; but an indefinable twinkle
in her eyes, momentarily illuminating her little imperturbable baby
face, telegraphed to me that she had understood.