acknowledged partnership in a crime. “He’s gone?”
He nodded, smiling at her.
“Gone, right enough--and he’ll get his legacy. I can trace him quite
easily now we know the name of his boat. That gives us a clear
conscience.”
“Does it, Jack?--Does it?--Oh, I wish I could be sure!--Durham is not
the man Tremaine was!”
“He’s a happier man than Tremaine would be, anyway! Think of their
delight when they get that legacy!” He led her back into the
dining-room, where the remains of their anniversary feast were yet upon
the table. “And, dear!” he looked into her eyes, “we are happier people
than we should have been had Durham not replaced Tremaine!”
She shook her head, still doubtful.
“But if he remembers?” she queried.
“He goes a long way off, into a new environment. The chances are
against his remembering at all. If he does,” he shrugged his shoulders,
“he will probably himself put it down as a hallucination from which his
devoted little wife will nurse him back. Don’t worry, my dear. We did
the right thing.”
“If only I could be sure!” she said, with a sigh.
* * * * * *
The next morning Dorothy woke up to see her mother bending over her bed.
“Where’s Dada, Mummy?” she asked.
“Dada?” said Mrs. Satterthwaite, as though she did not understand.
“Yes,” said the child. “Dada--Dada who came back last night!”
Her mother shook her head, smilingly.
“You dreamed it, dear,” she said. “Dada was killed in the war.”
THE LOVERS
He opened the door into darkness and fumbled for the switch. The
spacious, beautifully furnished living-room of the flat--long,
dark bookcase filled with mellowed leather bindings; large, soft
bearskins compensating for the insufficiency of the delicate Persian
carpet on the parquet floor; a few precious prints spaced with an
exquisite reticence upon the walls; an Oriental bibelot here and there
emphasizing the quiet charm of English eighteenth-century furniture
with its touch of the cunningly grotesque; two great leather-covered
chairs by the fireside--was suffused with soft light.
He stood in the doorway--tall, lean, handsome, forceful with a touch of
asceticism--and smiled to the corridor.
“Here we are!” he said, his voice on a note of happiness. “At last!”
He stretched out his arms to the girl upon the threshold. She came
into the light--tall almost as he, long fur coat half-open over her
tailor-made costume, finely modelled head poised in a graceful,
winsome upturn of the face, smiling at him in a radiance of eyes and
mouth--and, on the movement of an irresistible impulse, cast herself
into his embrace.
“At last!” she echoed. “Oh, Jim, dear!--at last--at long last!”
He held her, and she snuggled into his shoulder, face upturned to his,
drawing his kisses down to her with the magnetism of her lips.
The quaint enamel clock on the mantelpiece ticked, just heard, the
passing seconds of eternity, the only sound in the silence of their
union.
Then, with the long breath of recovery from the timeless swoon of a
kiss prolonged to its uttermost limit, she turned her head slowly to
gaze about the room.
“Oh, Jim!” she said, in affectionate reproach, “and you told me you
were a poor man!”
He shrugged his shoulders, his lips mobile in a little smile.
“Well, dear,” he replied in whimsical apology, “compared with the
daughter of a man who owns half a city--compared with what you
might have had!” He looked into her eyes. “Helen! You won’t regret?
They’ll rub it in to you--the title you’ve thrown away--the position
in society--what they’ll be pleased to term your hole and corner
marriage----”
She laughed happily.
“Oh, Jim!--I’ve got you and you’ve got me--and nothing else matters--it
seems to me that you and I are the only two people in the world!” She
assured herself of a tightening of his embrace with a touch of her hand
on his as she looked up into his eyes with a slow, smiling shake of the
head that affirmed her love. “As if only you and I ever existed--and
had always loved! As if all through eternity we had waited for this! As
if I was born to be just Jim Dacres’s wife!”
He looked down upon her, eyes into eyes.
“Darling!” His voice was low and earnest in a sincerity beyond doubt.
“Jim Dacres’s wife you are--and, please God, I’ll never let you go!”
With one more kiss she disengaged herself, came into the centre of the
room, threw her fur coat back from the shoulders with a smile that
invited the assistance he was prompt to give.
“Are we all alone?” she asked, glancing round, struck by the quietude
of the flat.
“All alone, dear,” he replied, folding her coat over a chair. “I told
Mrs. Wilkinson she could go out. I thought it would be good to have it
all to ourselves for this first evening--you and I alone in Paradise,
darling!” He kissed her, drew her toward the fire. “Warm yourself, my
beauty--and pretend it is my heart!” He squeezed her shoulders with
broad, strong hands.
She shook her head at him in roguish reproof, as she spread her
fingers--the new gold ring upon one of them--before the blaze he
stirred.
“Pretty, pretty!” she rebuked him. “Where has Jim Dacres learned to
make love, I should like to know!”
“In your eyes, dearest!” he replied, smiling into them. “In your eyes
that open right back into a soul that knows immemorial secrets and
knows them all as love!”
She felt quietly for his hand and held it, without a word, through
moments where speech was profanation.
Then, with a long breath, feminine curiosity awaking in her, she turned
her head and glanced once more around the room.
“It’s charming, Jim!” she asserted. “I didn’t know you had so much
taste. Where did you get all these beautiful things?” She left the
fireside, began to roam about the room, peering into cabinets, picking
up one precious object after another, turning over the pages of the
books that lay upon the tables.
He watched her lithe, graceful movements with admiration.
“All over the place,” he answered, negligently. “China, Japan--a few in
Italy----”
“And this?” she asked, holding up a large crystal ball, supported in a
lotus cup upon the back of a carved ivory elephant studded with amber
and turquoise and coral, its feet upon an ivory tortoise. “What is
this?”
“Oh--that! I got that in India. Some old crystal-gazer’s outfit. It’s
a few hundred years old--symbolizes the universe, you know. The world
rests upon an elephant and the elephant upon a tortoise. I don’t know
what the tortoise stands on----”
Her face was bright with interest.
“And have you ever looked into it?”
“Of course not.” His tone was contemptuous. “I don’t go in for that
sort of thing. I didn’t buy that--an old Hindoo priest gave it to me--a
nice old chap who was good enough to adopt me more or less, years ago
now.”
“Oh, Jim! Do let us look into it!” Her voice was ecstatic in a sudden
excitement. “Do let’s look!”
“You won’t see anything,” he emphasized his pessimism in a grudge at
the interest she diverted from him to this inanimate object. “It’s
all rot, you know--only people with brain-sick imaginations ever see
things--or think they see things.”
“Oh, but do let’s try!” She came across to him, the crystal in her
hand. “Do, there’s a darling!” The appeal of the kiss-pouted lips in
the face turned up to him, eyes bright with ingenuous vivacity, was
irresistible.
He shrugged his shoulders with large good-humour.
“All right--but it’s waste of time.”
“Is anything waste of time when we are together, dear?” She nestled
up to him, drew the kiss that was inevitable. “It’s all part of the
romance. Now, be good and do as I tell you. Switch off the lights--the
firelight is enough.”
He obeyed, with a gesture of tolerant complaisance that could refuse no
whim. The room relapsed into shadows shifting in the blaze of the fire
that he had stirred.
“Now come and sit close by me here,” she dictated, delightfully
imperious to this tall strong man, seating herself in one of the
big chairs by the fireside. “There is room for two. That’s right.”
He squeezed his long body into the seat beside her. She held up the
crystal ball. “Now you hold it with one hand and I will hold it with
one hand--like this!” With her free hand she clasped the hand that
remained on her knee. “That’s all I want to see, dear--our joint
fates, linked together.” Her voice was soft and tender, thrillingly
sincere. “Just you and I--for ever--past or future, darling, what does
it matter?--it’s all one long life that is only real when you and I
touch.” She finished with a sigh of happiness.
He responded in a gentle pressure of her hand. Together they stared
into the crystal sphere they jointly held. Minute after minute passed
in silence, in a pervading sense of intimate communion where their
pulse-beats, in the contact of their hands, regulated themselves to an
identical rhythm.
“I see nothing,” he murmured, vaguely disappointed, “nothing at all.”
“Patience!” she breathed, intent on the crystal, but sparing him
a little squeeze of the fingers in recognition of his presence.
“Look!--keep on looking!”
Again there was silence. The ticking of the clock upon the mantelpiece
became almost hypnotic in its monotony. The fire dulled down, its light
no longer reflected in leaping flashes in the crystal.
“Look!” she whispered. “It’s clouding over--going milky! Do you see?”
He nodded assent, unwilling to break the spell by speech, mysteriously
awed as he, too, saw a milky cloud suffuse the depths of the crystal.
Holding their breath, they waited, closely linked, for they knew not
what of vision.
As they stared into it, almost unconscious now of their own bodies, of
the muscular effort that held the crystal globe in unvarying focus from
their eyes, they saw the cloud break and clear in a widening rift that
seemed to open into infinity.
“Look!” she murmured. “_It’s coming!_--Look--_People!_--crowds of
them--running and jostling each other! Look, it’s a fête of some
sort--a lot of them have cockades! Do you see?”
In fact, the depths of the crystal were suddenly inhabited. A throng of
tiny figures, men and women, surged, broke up, flocked together again
in high excitement, arms waving in the air. Over their heads other
figures leaned out from the upper windows of a row of more distant
houses--evidently the scene was a public square--and waved also in
diminutive enthusiasm. Their costumes seemed like fancy dress--men
in long, bright-coloured coats with enormous lapels and tight-fitting
trousers with broad stripes of some contrasting colour--women in
high-waisted dresses and poke bonnets or no bonnets at all--men and
women, and these the greater number, the dominant majority of the
crowd, in the nondescript vestments of squalid, ugly poverty. The
better-dressed men and women wore prominently, all of them, a cockade
or rosette of red, white, and blue.
The crowd packed close together in a common impulse, was agitated
by a common emotion that set a forest of arms waving above their
heads and contorted their faces in cries that were inaudible.
Something was happening in that square--something that evoked fierce
passion--invisible behind the densely serried mob whose backs alone
could be seen.
“Look!” breathed the girl in the chair. “Look!--that poor girl!” There
was a curious accent of vivid sympathy in the whispered ejaculation.
A young girl was forcing her way through the throng, her face covered
in her hands, her shoulders shaking with sobs, weeping convulsively
in a paroxysm of despair. The crowd, intent on the spectacle beyond,
parted and made way for her automatically.
“Oh,” murmured the girl in the chair, “I feel so funny--I feel I want
to cry, too--as if a terrible calamity had suddenly come upon me--a
frightful danger to someone I loved----” She shuddered, “oh, it’s
awful!--it numbs me--it’s--it’s as if I felt what _she_ was feeling!”
The girl in the vision took her hands from her face, looked about her
with eyes of wild misery.
“My God, Helen!” whispered the man in the chair, in a thrill of
excitement. “_It’s you!_”
“Shh!” she breathed, gazing intently into the magic scene. The air
about them seemed mysteriously charged with tumultuous passion, with
the inaudible vociferations of that surging mob. To both, it seemed as
though they were in contact with a real crowd, beset by the vague,
fierce emotions that gather and roll in the collective, primitive soul
of humanity in congregation. It set their hearts to a quicker beat,
bewildered their brains with unheard clamours.
The girl in the vision--so strikingly like the girl in the chair that
she seemed a duplication of her personality--drew herself erect on the
edge of the crowd and wiped her eyes. Evidently, with a great effort,
she was mastering herself. The girl in the chair drew a hard breath,
as though of some supreme determination. Then, taking a few steps, the
figure that they watched moved close under the houses of the nearer
side of the square and, looking up at the doorways as though seeking an
inscription, commenced to walk along the pavement.
The crystal held her still as its centre--like the lens of a
cinematograph following always the chief personage upon the
screen--and, watching her, the man and woman in the chair forgot the
globe that they held with cataleptic rigidity, forgot the diminished
scale of the vision. Their perceptions adjusted themselves like those
of children who day-dream among their toys, and it seemed to both of
them that they gazed into a real scene with full-sized human emotions
at clash in the acute earnestness of present life.
The girl, her face white and tense, her eyes fixed in the courage
of timidity brought to despair, moved along the houses. Suddenly
she stopped, looking upward to a portal surmounted by a trophy
of tri-coloured flags and a shield on which the three words
“_Liberté--Egalité--Fraternité_” were crudely emblazoned. A couple of
ruffianly men in quasi-military uniform, exaggeratedly large cocked
hats coming down over their ears, short pipes in the mouths hidden by
untrimmed, pendent moustaches, enormously long muskets with bayonets
fixed leaning against the bandoliers across their chests, guarded the
doorway. The girl spoke to them, with vehement gestures, evidently
imploring entrance. They barred her path, callously untouched by her
agonized entreaty. She pointed up to an inscription below the trophy
“_RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE--Réprésentant en Mission_,” smiled at them in
a heart-breaking assumption of coquetry, candid innocence never more
purely virginal. One of them shrugged his shoulders and spat upon the
cobbled pavement without removing his pipe. The other winked broadly,
and, still retaining his musket, reached out with his disengaged hand.
The girl shrank back, horror in her eyes--and then, as if bethinking
herself of an unfailing resource, felt feverishly in the neckerchief
which covered her bosom. She drew out a packet of notes, offered them.
With a broad grin on their faces, the two ruffians parted to allow her
passage.
She climbed an uncarpeted, dreary staircase and hesitated for a
moment outside a door inscribed “_le citoyen réprésentant du peuple
Desnouettes_.” She knocked timidly, opened, and entered.
Across a large bare room a young man was seated, writing, at a table.
A broad tri-coloured sash barred his blue, wide-collared coat and
white waistcoat. He had divested himself of the cocked hat with three
absurdly large plumes of blue, white, and red which lay upon the
table and the long hair of his uncovered head reached almost to his
shoulders. He looked up, as if startled, at his visitor, looked up
with a young face whose intellectual keenness, whose vivid, passionate
eyes above the long nose and almost ascetic mouth were strangely,
disconcertingly reminiscent of--of----
“_Jim!_” gasped the young woman in the chair, feeling herself in that
curious state of split identity where the unaffected, remote Ego
registers without controlling the adventures of a dream.
“Shh!” he murmured in his turn, bewildered to find himself as it were
looking at his own personality and, though as at the other side of a
partition in his soul, experiencing the feelings of the man at whom he
gazed. An echo of a surprise, of a mysterious surprise that disturbed
him to the depths--of something that had come, startlingly new and
powerful though not yet fully manifest, into his life--reverberated
in the recesses of his being as he contemplated the girl. And then a
counter-impulse flooded him, the impulse that made him set his mouth,
rejecting with an assertion of his own personality wedded to some vague
ideal, the vulgar influence of a human emotion. He felt as though the
girl approached _him_, as she moved toward that young man who regarded
her with a stern frigidity.
“_Citoyenne?_” he was surprised to find himself murmuring the coldly
polite query, as though repeating it after that insultingly superior
young man.
He heard the gasp of the young woman at his side as of someone
infinitely remote from him. His real being was in that large bare room
where the superb young republican scrutinized the young girl with a
cold glance that put her out of countenance. Yet how beautiful she was
as she blushed up to her eyes, youthful modesty in confusion! He felt
something flush warm within his breast, a vague emotion that dissipated
the assurance underneath his sternly maintained aspect. Before she had
spoken, an alarm to the threatened supremacy of his cold reason rang
through the depths of him. He reacted with a severity that he obscurely
felt to be excessive, reiterated almost with menace “_Citoyenne?_” Was
the word really uttered from his lips? He did not know.
She came close, poured out her trouble in a flood of nervous, anguished
speech that he comprehended perfectly without being able to arrest
a single definite word in his memory--it was as though that part
of him which understood was something deep down, lying beyond the
necessity for spoken language. Of course! he comprehended with a kind
of awakening memory--that old _émigré_ who had stolen back disguised,
in defiance of the laws, whom he had arrested for plotting against
the safety of that Republic One and Indivisible of which he was the
incorruptible servant, whose name he had but just put on the fatal
list of the next batch for the guillotine! He chilled, mercilessly;
wondered for a moment at his own inexorability, and then, as his
identification with the scene completed itself, understood it.
For a crime against himself, against another individual, he might
have had compassion. The conspirator against that fanaticized ideal
of his soul, the young Republic fighting in rags for its life, for
the ultimate freedom of all humanity, was guilty of the unforgiveable
sin. He steeled himself, in a pride of approximation to that Brutus,
to those other sternly incorruptible Roman republicans with whom his
imagination was filled. No human tears, no human despair however
poignant, should move him from his path of duty. He felt his teeth
set hard over the absurd feebleness in his breast as his eyes rested,
coldly he hoped, upon that beautiful girl who stood, strangely
disturbing in her closeness, and stretched out her arms to him in
agonized appeal. As if telepathically, his soul was filled with her
passionate, eloquent entreaty--he had to fight down the tears which
threatened his eyes in sympathy with those which suffused the beautiful
orbs which looked into his, in despair of softening them.
And she--the woman in the chair, remote spheres away, trembled
at a trouble in her soul, at an awakening of something else in
her--something that was wrong, unpardonably at variance with every
standard of her life, as she looked into those stern but fascinating
eyes in the ascetic face and pleaded her cause. She despised herself
for the blush she felt creep over her. Her father’s life--her father’s
life!--what else dared she think of? This superb young man was an
enemy, an implacable enemy, the incarnation of all the crimes wreaked
upon her class! Yet her dignity imposed upon her, and she dared not
practice that false coquetry upon him that, in a sublime abnegation of
her own pride, she had promised herself to use as a supreme resource.
She could only plead, plead passionately, in utter sincerity, the best
in her appealing to the best in him--and she scorned herself for
admitting that there was that best to evoke.
A devil stirred in him, subtly malicious, tempting him with an
intellectual bait that was the disguise of passions of whose
reality he was but vaguely cognizant. These proud _aristos_! The
bitterness of a youth of humiliations surged up in him, avid for
vengeance. He encouraged it as a protection against himself. He
would show them--these oppressors of the people, these enemies of
the republic--who sent their womenfolk to corrupt the virtuous
representatives of the nation! Two could play at that game! He smiled
in the thought of the insult he prepared.
With a quick movement he rose from his seat and, on an impulse that
was almost blind in its swift fulfilment, put his arm round the girl’s
waist and kissed her full on the mouth. The act was done before her
instinct of self-protection could assert itself--and then she pushed
him away in sudden revolt, stood facing him with panting bosom and a
countenance where emotions chased each other in alternations of white
and red. For a moment she contemplated him, breathing tumultuously, and
then, with a gesture of disgust, she wiped her lips. Her eyes looked
straight into his with angry dignity, withered him with their fierce
disdain. A bitter smile wreathed her lips.
“_Er, bien, citoyen_--you have had your pay. My father’s life!”
Did he actually hear the words? The low, scornfully vengeful laugh
which came involuntarily from him was like an echo, far off, of
that mocking laugh, inaudible now, in the bare room where the young
commissary, arrogant with the outrage he had inflicted upon this
representative of a superior race, drew himself up in his conscious
incorruptibility.
“Your father dies to-morrow, _citoyenne_!” The marble coldness of his
voice was a triumph of which he was not sure until it rang in his ears.
He exulted in its echo, like a saint self-consciously a victor over
temptation.
Their eyes met, looked into each other with a sudden furious,
unappeasable hatred--a hatred which flooded them with a passion that
was bigger than themselves--that soul-devouring hatred, clutching
instinctively at death for its expression, which is the other face
of violent love. Between these souls, in commotion far beyond their
consciousness, indifference was not possible. They had met, and the
world was in upheaval.
He heard the hiss of a long breath drawn in through clenched teeth--he
distinguished no longer between the girl like a brooding invisibility
in the chair beside him and the panting girl confronting that suddenly
pale young patriot whom he watched with inexpressible fascination. He
saw the insult, like livid lightning, in her face before she hurled it
at him.
“_Canaille!_”
The word rang close in his ear, and yet infinitely far away, on an
accent of vindictive emphasis that struck to his soul.
A fury surged up in him, a blind fury that annihilates with one
ruthless blow of its insulted strength.
He stamped a signal on the floor.
“You also, _citoyenne_, will die to-morrow!” The decree, cold as the
bloodless lips which uttered it, echoed in him to a savage satisfaction.
The girl remained motionless, head high, in superb indifference to his
threat. The door behind her was flung open. The two ruffianly guards
ran in, sprang to grip her arms in obedience to his imperious gesture.
She smiled at him, splendid in unshakable disdain.
“_We prefer to die!_”
He motioned them out, livid with a rage beyond words. She went,
proudly, unresistingly between her brutal captors. At the door she
turned her head and smiled at him again, a smile full of significance.
“_Canaille!_”
He sat down to his table and, in a furious scrawl, added a name to his
list.
... The vision dissolved in blackness, in an obliteration, for timeless
moments, of all thought....