VIII

It was shortly after he had said a last good-bye to Lettice Nevern that

Caragh's troubles began afresh.

He had the best intention to acquire the married habit, or a habit, at

any rate, that should differ widely from the one he had.

With that object he secluded himself for a fortnight from the life to

which he was accustomed, and denied his company, for reasons which they

vigorously disbelieved, to his friends.

He could allow himself the theatre, having never cherished lime-lit

illusions, nor hovered to dispel them about the stage door. He had

always what he was pleased to call a frugal taste in beauty, and had

never made a bid for any that was 'priced'!

But the theatres only served him for a week, and even so with some

exaggeration of what he wished to see. At the end of a second, he

decided that a wife was as essential as repentance to a change of life,

and dropped back into his old ways.

And the devil, who, perhaps as a reprisal for the deficiencies of his

own abode, takes a pleasure in knocking the bottom out of every sort of

domicile, at once put his foot through the flooring of Maurice Caragh's

reform.

At least he met Laura Marton at the dinner which closed his fortnight's

sojourn in the wilderness.

He was suffering from those two weeks of his own society, but,

probably, even without that preparation, he would have capitulated to

her charm.

To speak of him, so consecutively, in the hands of three women gives

too crowded an impression of his susceptiveness. No trait was, in

fact, further from his character.

Three years were passed since he met Ethel Vernon, and he had not

harboured in all of them so much as a vexed thought about a woman's

face.

He was pleased so far from easily, that he might very readily have

failed throughout his life to have been pleased at all. But when

pleased, it was on the instant and absorbingly. Ten seconds he had

suggested as an average requirement for falling in love, but it is

questionable if any of his own declensions had taken half that time.

Nor was proximity at all essential. He could not recall, he admitted

modestly, having discovered that a woman was adorable at more than a

hundred yards. But he had no wish to exalt his own experience into a

standard: he could believe in anything up to half a mile.

In that, such was the delicacy of his distinctions, he was perfectly

sincere; but it was that delicacy which made them so prohibitive to

adorations even at half a mile.

Laura Marton might, perhaps, have tested such a distance successfully,

she was so perfectly his conception of a type.

He conceived a good deal in types, and preferred the typical even to

the length of its deficiencies.

Deficiency did indeed play a part in Laura Marten's attractions, since

the broad mouth, the long eyes, and the drowsy luxuriance of her figure

were without everything that could make them harmless.

She came under the superbs in Caragh's catalogue, and to the superb he

was almost a stranger.

That, perhaps, speeded his intimacy.

"You can take it for granted that I think you magnificent," he said at

their first meeting.

This was their last. It epitomized sufficiently what had happened in

the interval. Some of it might be accounted for by his having told her

that the next interval was for ever.

The occasion was a dance at a big house in Grosvenor Square. It was

Caragh's last appearance as a bachelor in town, since he started on the

morrow for a trip which the owners of a new Atlantic liner were taking

in her round the Isles. He was to be dropped at Ballindra, where his

marriage, for recent family reasons, was after all to take place.

He was seated on a lounge in a blind passage near the top of the house,

and, though still early in the evening, he had been sitting there for

some time.

He knew the house more intimately than most of those who were seeking

for such seats, and this one was left to him and his partner entirely

undisturbed. The music floated up the stairs with varying

distinctness, as the dancers choked the entrances to the great gallery

below.

He was leaning back, with his arms half folded and a hand upon his

mouth, looking straight before him.

Laura Marton, sitting sideways with one white arm along the top of the

lounge and the sweep of her amber-coloured skirts against his feet,

bent forward insistently towards him; a braid of gold across her

splendid shoulders, and a band of turquoise in her brown hair.

The long soft fawn gloves were crumpled in her lap, and her left arm,

which hung straight and bare beside her, tapped a turquoise fan against

her ankle as she waited for his reply.

"I know," he sighed. "You don't and you can't see it: what's the use

of my saying it again? You're sure no woman would care for what I'm

giving her, if she only knew. I daresay; but, you see, she's not going

to know. She's going to luxuriate in an apparent adoration. That's

easier than to be happy with one that's inapparent, however actual.

And it's a lot likelier that the make-believe will last; because--well,

because there's nothing in it not to."

He smiled whimsically at his own English, but the girl's face darkened

with a frown.

"It makes no difference how you put it," she exclaimed hotly; "the

thing's detestable! You'll only look at it from your point of view;

and because it's costing you so much, you think it must be worth all

that to the girl. But it's not! You're getting her life, and

everything that's in her and of her, and you're getting it for a lie!

You think it's a fine lie, I know, the sort of lie that life is all

along. You've told me that! Oh, yes, you have; or something like it.

But what are _you_ that you should handle a woman as if you had made

her, and lie to her like a god! Do you think you're big enough to make

that seem fair?"

"Ah, you don't understand," he murmured still staring before him,

afraid to stir the fire in her smouldering eyes. "I'm doing this

because I'm so small."

Her incredulous gasp was almost a repudiation; but she said nothing and

he went on:

"Because the love that's worth perfidies and desertion and all the

other personal superlatives will never come my way. I thought it

would: yes! once, long ago. But it hasn't, and it won't. If I was big

enough!"--he caught his breath--"Ah, that's another matter. For _that_

love excuses everything--'red ruin and the breaking up of

laws'--because it's bigger, and better, and more enduring than the

world itself. But it isn't mine."

He stopped, and faced for an instant the furious blaze of her eyes.

Then he said more slowly:

"So the next best thing seemed, for a man like me, to make a good

girl's dreams come true; her dreams of love, and honour, and a man's

desire ... when one is the man, and can."

"You're not the man!" she cried. "And it's wicked and cruel to pretend

to be."

"Look here!" he said persuasively. "Suppose that you were as poor a

thing as I am; suppose that you, too, had come to look for no more from

love than it means to me, and that some one came along who took you for

an angel; a man young and strong and pure with the one great passion of

a lifetime showing all over him; and that, in too weak or too kind a

moment you had let him take you in his arms, and let him believe then

as true the dreams that he had dreamt of you, and sealed with your

kisses the vows which he had sworn. Well! when you'd come to realize

that all his strength and sweetness hung on his belief in you, would

you call it wicked and cruel to go on with the pretence?"

She made no answer for some moments. The grip of her white fingers

relaxed upon the couch and the fan hung quiet against her ankle as she

continued to absorb him with her devouring eyes.

"You've forgotten _me_," she whispered at length.

"No," he protested; "you can't say that, can you? I told you at once."

"Told me what?" she demanded.

"That I was not free," he said.

"Yes," she exclaimed, "the very first time you spoke to me. As if I

were certain to lose my heart if I had not been warned. I hated you

pretty hotly for it too, I can assure you. And you might have saved

yourself the trouble. I'd been told it before."

"Before?"

"Yes, by Ethel Vernon. She said, when she heard I was to meet you,

'He's going to marry a girl that he doesn't care a sou for.' How did

she know?"

"She didn't know," he said.

"How did she guess then? Had you been in love with her?"

"Yes."

"She with you?"

"You forget," he said gravely: "she's a married woman."

"I did forget," she smiled. "And was there no one you were in love

with between her and me?"

"I'm not in love with you," he said.

She smiled again, drearily. "Does it do you any good to say that?" she

asked.

"No," he answered; "I said it for you."

"For me?" she objected.

"Yes," he replied; "you said I'd forgotten you."

"Do you call that remembering?" she enquired ruefully.

"Don't you?" he murmured. "Would I have said it for myself?"

"Said what?" she asked.

"That I'm not in love with you?"

"I daresay," she said.

"Even if it had not been true?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "I daresay," she said.

"Do you?" he smiled. "It's a good deal to dare." He drew a long

unsteady breath. "Well," he sighed, "suppose it wasn't?"

"Wasn't true?" she said.

"Wasn't true," he repeated slowly. "Suppose that I've--wilfully--lied

to you. Suppose that the hour I saw your face brought my lost dreams

back to me; suppose that in you I found the woman for want of whom all

my days have in despair been wasted; the one woman who could have made

life splendid, and love passionate and ceaseless and supreme. Or, no!

not even that, not even that! Suppose only that I felt your

fascination as any man might feel it; that I was just bewitched by your

beauty; that every day without its glamour was the darkness of death,

and the thought of other men possessing it an unendurable torment.

Suppose which you please, whichever seems to you simplest, or

strangest, or most deplorable--and tell me again you think it was for

my own sake that I was silent!"

The musing tone in which he had begun was gone before he ended. He had

turned to her, even as he leaned a little back and away against the end

of the lounge; his shoulders were squared, and his brows drawn above

the gray eyes which gazed almost defiantly into her face.

And as his mood hardened hers had melted.

Darkness had spread again across her eyes; spread as the night above a

lighted river--its depths a-glimmer with strange reflections, and her

lips had fallen softly apart from their disdainful smile into an

unconscious baby sweetness, through which she breathed.

She was listening with an absorbed intentness, with all her senses

crowding to her ears.

Even her splendid carriage was relaxed; her bosom drooped; dark hollows

showed about her throat; her chin sank, till the white shoulder on

which she leaned almost touched a tiny ear; the fan slipped from her

other hand and hung by the loop about her wrist.

Her eyes met his as he ended; and, as it were, beneath the long silence

of that look he could hear the brushing sound of the breath between her

parted lips, like the far-off pulse of the sea.

But he missed so the other change which came to her; came, as it were,

when the senses which had been away, so tensely listening, returned

with their news. They brought back no erectness to her bearing, but

deepened and coloured her drooping beauty till its languor became in

itself a mien, a seduction that grew more perilous and overpowering

with each quickening breath that filled her breast.

But of all that Caragh noticed nothing. He saw only those wavering

lights in the liquid darkness of her eyes, a darkness that spread about

him till he felt the draught and swirl of its unknown waters.

It was from that he was taken by the sudden fastening of the girl's

hands about his face, and he woke with a flash of enlightenment to all

that was in hers.

He tried to shake his head, but she only tightened her fingers about it

and drew it towards her, smiling, with a strength that astonished him.

"Don't," he said.

But she pressed her wrists against his cheeks till his mouth was

crushed between them, and drew him closer; closer to the strange smile

upon her lips--cruel, passionate, triumphant, and yet adoringly

fond--which seemed to come from beyond the borders of the world he knew.

Then, with a bird's swiftness, her lips were against his face, bruising

it with the wildness of her kisses, as she held it in a clutch that

pained him to the plundering madness of her mouth.

Unable to speak, he caught her wrists to draw them from his face, but

at the touch of her skin his hands lost the power to help him, and hung

idly like heavy bracelets upon her arms.

They had slipped to her elbows and fallen unclasped from them, when, as

suddenly as she had seized it, she thrust his face from her to the full

length of her arms and held it there, gazing into it with the fury of

despoiled possession, which had the same savage strangeness as her

smile.

Caragh's eyes were gravely distressed. "Don't, don't!" he pleaded.

Then she opened her hands and threw his face out of them away from her,

with a little low crying laugh horrible to hear, and sat, leaning

sideways and motionless, her head propped on her wrist, looking away

from him across the back of the lounge.

Caragh merely straightened himself in the corner where she had flung

him. He did not turn to look at her, and said nothing.

There was something in what had happened past explaining; its very

lawlessness made it natural, put it outside of everything, in a place

by itself where there were no measurements, where there was no

proportion.

He was unconscious of any surprising experience, and did not give a

thought to what might be passing in the girl's mind.

And she, sitting there with that wrecked air of passion, seemed as

utterly indifferent how she appeared to him.

"You were right," he said at length, looking straight before him: "I've

done it all for myself."

She gave him, without turning, a glance from her exhausted eyes, but

took no further notice.

"I'm going back because I _daren't_ fail her. I think too little of

myself, God knows, to risk thinking less. Can you understand that? I

was falling lower and lower, losing hope that I could ever be constant

to anything that loved me. Then she came. It hadn't mattered with the

others. I was only something to them that any one could be. But she

was different--different because she had never loved before, and I

meant everything to her that love can mean to a woman's life,

everything that is sacred and tender and divine. And I saw in keeping

her love pure and happy the one thing that could lift me out of the pit

and let me look myself in the face again. It's the one chance that's

been given me, and if I can't take it I'm done for. Yes, it's sheer

selfishness, as you said; but I'm going back to her. Do you

understand?"

She did not move nor look round at him. "You love me," she said dully.

"It makes no difference," he answered.

She gave a little mirthless laugh.

"But it will," she said; "it will. You'll remember me when she can't

understand you, and my kisses when you're sick of hers, and my arms

when she's asleep beside you. You won't think _then_ that it makes no

difference. You won't say _then_ that she was the one chance for you.

You'll remember then that a woman loved you whose love was all that you

had dreamed. Maurice, Maurice, you're not the sort of man that makes a

saint!"

He turned to her and put out his hand. "I'm going," he said.

"Good-bye!"

She laid her left hand in it. Hers was quite cold, but she shivered as

she touched him. "Will you come back to me ever?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"Never?"

"Never, never!"

"If you want me, you must say," she went on impassively. "It won't

matter what I'm doing--I mean if I'm married, or anything. If you want

me, I'll come to you. But you must say. Love ... ah! you don't know

what it means!"

He left her with a pressure of the hand, and she caught a glimpse of

him as he groped his way towards the stairs. But she did not stir, nor

try to stop him.