It was that risk, a risk of which she guessed so little, which
overshadowed the three days which had been added to Caragh's sojourn at
Ballindra, and which settled, black and heavy, on his reflections when
she waved him a farewell.
Lettice had driven him the bleak ten miles to the dreary little station
which lay like a great gray stone upon the stony fields, and he had
resigned himself to eight hours of Irish travel and his thoughts,
doubting of which he would be the rather rid.
The announcement of a man's affection for a woman is regarded, to-day
at least, dynamically. It is supposed to put things in motion; and it
is left, very reasonably, for the man to explain what.
Maurice recognized the obligation; but he asked a breathing space in
which to adjust the machinery. There was a good deal to be arranged,
he said. There was considerably more than could be told a bride. His
affairs, he explained, entangled by the provisions of his father's
will, were beginning to adjust themselves. But his income for the
present was provisional, and till certain securities had been realized
and charges paid--things which could not be hurried--he would hardly
know how he stood, not definitely enough, at any rate, to speak of
settlements.
Lettice made a mouth at that.
"I know," he said, as he softened its displeasure, "but there's your
brother!"--he was her guardian and the sole trustee of her small
possessions. "I can take a shot at his first question."
"Oh, so can I," she sighed. "But when will you be able to answer it?"
"Say in six months," he suggested. "Can you have all that patience?"
She nodded, and so, quite honestly, Caragh obtained his respite; though
the arrangements for which he needed it were not entirely financial.
It was, curiously enough, the very honesty of the transaction which
troubled his Celtic mind as he travelled eastward.
Since he had to hide from her the real necessity for postponement, he
would have preferred to hide it behind the responsible audacity of a
lie; behind something for which he could feel manfully and contritely
accountable.
Deception was least endurable which did not compromise the deceiver.
He hated the hedging truth.
He hated more things that morning than he often took the trouble even
to think about, and they were mostly phases of himself. He was
conscious too, as the train rolled across the weary strapwork of
stonewalled fields, of a new sensation. He felt to have left a part of
himself in Ballindra, fastened there securely, yet tied to him still by
a thread that seemed drawn out of him, as the weaving filament from a
spider's body, which, far or fast as he might travel, he could not
break. It would hold him and bring him back.
The part which he had left there was the pledge he had given, the word
of his honour; a word which had been a lie at best: yet no true oath
that he had ever sworn had seemed to have half its sanctity. It was
her belief that made it sacred and more binding than the truth.
The proud way she wore this mock jewel, as though it were a priceless
stone, shut for ever the giver's lips upon its value.
If he had once loved her he might have faced her without disgrace in
the day his love had died, but there was no grace left him now but his
deception. That, henceforth, was to be the high thing, the stimulating
fineness of his life; and, curiously enough, it woke in him a
determination, manful and tender, which no real passion of the past had
been able to arouse.
It woke too, though from less tranquil slumbers, the remembrance of his
mutations, the grieved conviction of instability. He, least of all
men, should furnish a socket for the lamp of constancy. Of what
impression, he asked himself mournfully, had he ever kept the print.
It was odious, contemptible. He was sick of his inconstancy; it took
the exalting seriousness from life.
But though for his fickleness he blamed no one but himself, he realized
that it had been aided by his somewhat unfortunate predilections. None
of the women whose fascination he had acknowledged could be considered
an inspiration to stability. The very colour of their charm had a
chameleon quality and his appreciation was, too often, for its
susceptive changes.
Yet, had he met, so at least he told himself, some sober-sweet demand
upon his constancy, he believed that, in conduct at any rate, he could
have sustained it.
Well, the demand had now been made, and if he had not faced it with any
furious gratitude, here was in him a humble determination to realize
for one woman at least her conception of a man. That resolve had
stiffened him into something approaching a romantic attitude on that
fairy beach in the first shock of his unlooked-for conquest, and it
sustained him now, more or less, while during the slow dull journey he
reflected soberly as a conqueror on the administration of his new
possession.
There was a good deal to be thought of; a good deal about him that
would have to go. Economies to be effected, not in expenditure
only--that was a small matter--but in life. And in life it had pleased
him hitherto to be just a little extravagant. He had wasted it
generously, for others as heedlessly as for himself. He had done
nothing, as he was so often, so importantly reminded; but then, in a
happier sense, he had done everything.
Done it with a simplicity, a gaiety, a frugality even; since, after
all, it was the evanescent, the immaterial things he cared for; the
goods that are never marked in plain figures and only paid for in life.
Well, there would be an end to that sort of payment, save such as went
into his wife's pocket. She seemed, poor pretty thing, to swell and
spread, ogreishly, between him and--if he must confess it--his most
alluring interests.
Her warding arms shut out the enchantment of all the charming women in
the world.
Truly, he reflected, in the matter of a woman's value, the man who,
with an income just sufficient for himself, sought her hand in
marriage, must seem the most determined optimist under the sun.
Yet he felt anything but an optimist when the darkness of the night
gave place to white clouds of steam above the rocking oily blackness of
harbour water, and he dragged himself stiff and tired from his ill-lit
carriage into the blanching glare of Kingston jetty.