Maurice had never known an hour so disordered as that which followed
his declaration. His mind was like a locomotive factory trying at a
moment's notice to make balloons. It was a scene of astounding and
fantastic compromises.
The attitude for the occasion appeared to be a clear high joyousness
tinged with the overwhelming sense of an unlooked-for favour.
Something approaching that in appearance he did certainly achieve;
enough to make for the girl the moment of its immense significance; to
give it the acclamation, the splendour of crowning circumstance.
His gladness, like the colour of a flag that suddenly dyes the air with
victory, brought the strangest, the most assuring tumult to her heart.
She heard it, as the beleaguered hear the guns that end their siege,
too faint, too happy, too amazed to answer.
He heard it with amazement too; heard in his own mouth the note of
triumph, of a triumph which seemed to put an end to all his hopes, to
mock with its thin pretence the lost promise of such a moment, the
passionate exultation which it might have yielded him.
Yet he heard it; that was something; and, though he hardly knew what he
was saying, he could read its radiant answer upon the girl's face. If
he was missing the full measure of the hour--and that was to put his
misfortune meagrely--she at least had not suspected it. He had that
single satisfaction--but, to his schooling, a supreme one--the
reflection, as he voiced it to his trouble, that he was 'playing the
game.'
He was inspired to suggest tea. They had brought it with them, and,
though it might have seemed a higher compliment to forget both that and
the hour, it was one that Maurice had not the pluck to pay. He still
felt to be an intruder to the occasion, to be sustaining what some one
else had achieved. The sense of duplicity made him clumsy as a man
under a load; he could not use with a lover's audacity the exquisite
immaturity of the moment. The very kisses which her eyes expected left
a traitor's taste upon his lips.
Action, though it was but tea-making, gave him breathing space; it
dismissed, for a while at least, the most protesting part of him from
service into which so breathlessly it had been pressed.
With a kettle in his hand, and under shelter of the hamper, his
irresponsible buoyancy came back to him, his humorous appreciation of
circumstance even when it told so heavily against himself; and his talk
across the table he was spreading was only a shade too vivid to be a
lover's. Its gay note was thrown up by the girl's silence; a silence
lightened only by a happy nod or smile. She seemed to wish, sitting
intently there, to feel her senses afloat on the invading flood of his
devotion, as a boat is floated by the incoming tide.
It was for that she sat so still, unwilling by any impulse of her own,
to dilute her consciousness of this strange strong thing, which crept
to her very skin and carried her away, surgingly intimate as the living
sea.
Maurice had set her silence down to shyness, till something in the soft
rapture of her face told him its true meaning. The pathos of that and,
for him, the shame of it, hurt him as an air too rare to breathe.
The thought of this woman measuring with grateful wonderment the
magnitude of a thing which had no existence, but in which he had
brought her to believe, wrung him with a keen distress.
And in that sharp moment of shame and pity he came very near loving
her; came near enough, at any rate, to dedicate the future to her
illusion.
As he knelt before her on the sand, offering her a tea-cup in both his
hands as though it were some sacrifice to an idol, he realized, by the
glance which accepted both the humour and the service, what a big thing
he had in hand. It was big enough even, so he found before long, to
hide his own immense disappointment, which shrank into a small affair
beside that which she must never be allowed to feel.
He had received his discomfiture from a false trust in Fate, but hers
would come from a false trust in him.
So Maurice reflected as he watched Miss Nevern trying to persuade
herself that cake on such an occasion was as easy to consume as cake on
any other. In that, however, despite an excellent intention, she did
not succeed; and her failure, absurd as it might sound, lit in him a
pride of responsibility which her "I love you" had not. Here, at any
rate, was an unequivocal effect; beyond evasion he was chargeable with
this; and no priestly sacrament could have so pledged his allegiance as
that little dryness of her throat. She set down her half-emptied cup
with the prettiest pretence of satiety, a pretence which Caragh, with
the hot thirst of a wound upon him, and having already drained the
tea-pot, felt it best became him to ignore.
The wind, which had died at mid-day, freshened in the shadows of the
September evening, and ruffled the flat face of the water into one rich
dark hue.
Along the northern shore of the bay the shade of the bluff had fallen,
and made a leaden edging to the sea.
Southward the low sun blazed, a dull rose-red, against the scarp of
cliff, and turned the further waters and the dim head-lands beyond them
to a wine-dipped purple.
"It's as solemnly gorgeous as you could well have it," Maurice affirmed
as he hauled in the boat, "and we're going out of this spiny harbour
under all sail to show we take the display in a proper spirit."
There was something so boyishly absurd in his determination, that
Lettice, too numb with happiness to be determined about anything, went
with a sigh of abdication into the bow, and leaning over the stem-post,
with her fingers through the lower cringle in the luff, called the
course with the quick decision of a river pilot.
But for one long strident scrape--during which each held a
breath--against a sunken ledge which the helmsman found her too close
hauled to clear, they came valorously into the open sea, and Maurice,
sitting over the gunwale to windward with the sheet in his hand,
brought Lettice aft to steer.
He had the position of vantage, for she sat a foot beneath him, and,
unlike hers, his eyes owed no attention to the sail.
She begged him not to look at her; but, feeling that observation was to
her advantage, he only complied for a moment with her request.
Observation was to his advantage too; for if, with shut eyes, it was
easier to remember what he had lost in his new possession, with them
open it was impossible to forget what he had gained.
Only a dull man would have called Lettice Nevern beautiful, but the
dullest could not have thought her plain.
She had, in its most dainty shape, that perfect imperfection known as
prettiness. Distractingly pretty, most women called her; and men who
were not thought easy of distraction had justified the label. She had
a figure a sculptor would have prized, full, buoyant, flexible, with
the grace of splendid health in every line. It was a consolation,
Maurice reflected, to be able to admire an acquisition, even though one
did not desire it. She had, too, an admirable temper, an eye for what
became her, a dozen interests in the open air. That made for mutual
accommodation, and he could imagine nothing in her which could lessen
his respect.
His ignorance of women was based on too wide an acquaintance to be
neglected, yet he felt sure that Lettice was no coquette.
And despite the gaiety with which her face was so charmingly inscribed,
she could endure quietness--enjoy it even, as four summers at Ballindra
proved.
On the whole he felt cause to thank Providence, as a man might, able to
nurse his damaged limbs after an accident, that the catastrophe was,
for him, no worse.
He was beginning to wonder what it might be for her.
They raced home under more canvas than one who knew the shore winds of
Ballindra would have cared to carry; but neither, for diverse reasons,
was inclined to prudence, and the wake they blazed across that
blue-black surface was a joy to see.
Caragh's right hand went to and fro, as though it held a bolting horse,
and the sheet wore a deep red furrow about his palm.
Lettice kept her eyes on her work, for, as they felt the tide-race, it
took some little coaxing through the stiffer gusts to hold the boat's
nose on the Head in front of them.
The wind that swept the sea was channelled by the contour of the cliffs
into blustering draughts that streamed from the deep cut coombes, with
spaces almost of calm between them. Slantwise across these lay their
course, and as the boat leapt, like a hurt thing, at each fresh blow,
Maurice could feel the quick restraint of the girl's guiding fingers.
As his arm gave with the gust, the pressure of hers upon the tiller
seemed to answer it, and that sensation of swift divination and subtle
responsiveness between his hand and hers was worth the risk of an
upset, and Maurice only wished it were less impossible to discover if
Miss Nevern shared it. He supposed not. Women, so time had taught
him, were seldom sensitive to the unexpected.
As they cleared the Head, and the mystery of the river lay in the dark
hills before them, Caragh came again to his senses.
"Down helm!" he said.
She woke out of her reverie, but with her hand hard over.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"Shorten sail," he said, letting go the halyards.
"You're very cautious," she flouted.
"It's the timidity of sudden happiness," he smiled, making fast the
first reef cringle to the boom; "you've given me too much to lose."
She touched for an instant the hand which clipped the leech beside her,
and the print of her warm fingers came like an oath for sanctity,
turning to truth what had had for his own ear but a jesting bitterness:
she had given him too much to lose.
"Well!" he laughed, when they were going again, as the full draught of
the river laid them over, and, ahead, the orange lights of Ballindra
gleamed in the cleft purple of the land, "would you like that tuck out
of her skirts?"
She set her lips, as they shaved the outmost ledges of the southern
shore, and came about in the banging wind.
"You ought to row," she said, smiling.
"Not a doubt of it," he admitted blandly; "you've only to say the word."
But she did not. Though the harbour was not full, there were riding
lights enough upon the water to make, in that dusk, the threading of
their way exciting, even without the tide under them, which hummed and
jumped against the quivering anchor-chains. But she was proud of her
seamanship, and of her knowledge of the river, and conscious that the
man who watched her could appreciate the skill in every turn of her
wrist, and the pluck which kept it steady as they grazed the great
black shapes of ships, or spun about as a straining cable snapped up at
them out of the dark water.
Tim Moran, the old boatman who put them ashore, had a melancholy
headshake at her rashness.
"Bedad, sor, it's not meself that larned her to be so vinturesome!" he
explained apologetically to Caragh as he pocketed an unlooked-for piece
of silver at the slip.
"She's a wilful little thing, I'm afraid," Maurice murmured, slipping
his arm in hers, as they went up into the obscurity of the shore, "and
rather given to running risks in the dark."
She gave him her face for answer; and the kiss he put upon it was her
seal of safety in the darkest risk that she had run.