CHARLIE (_putting his arm round her waist_). Only suited to reckless
people who risk the disappointments of the future for the effervescence
of the present.
DORA. What did she say?
CHARLIE. She began to talk about my sister's boy inheriting the
property, as though we cared.
DORA. Will he?
CHARLIE. Of course. It's entailed. But he's a fine lad, and we, who will
be all in all to each other, need not grudge it him.
DORA (_thoughtfully_). I suppose not.
CHARLIE. I believe that is the source of Jane's affection for me. She
knows how safe I am in the matter of marriage.
DORA. Then you have never contemplated it?
CHARLIE (_emphatically_). Never!
DORA (_horrified_). And you made love to me without any idea of
proposing?
CHARLIE. You forget: you explained your creed at the outset.
DORA (_paling_). Then you deliberately availed yourself of the
opportunity----
CHARLIE (_drawing his moustache over the corners of his lips_). Of
adoring a girl whose theories corresponded with my own? Yes.
DORA (_with tears in her eyes_). Oh! You mean you would not have loved
me if your courtship had involved marriage?
CHARLIE. I can't say. We both abhor to be handicapped by legalities,
don't we? We both enjoy the same rights of independence----
DORA (_rising angrily_). Then, if loving me had necessitated the
surrender of your liberty you could not have done it?
CHARLIE (_earnestly_). Could you?
DORA (_sobbing_). Could I? I would have loved you always.
CHARLIE (_taking her in his arms_). I would have loved you in the same
way.
DORA. Not if I had wanted to marry you?
CHARLIE. I won't say. You never put me to the test.
DORA (_excitedly_). But if I should? Oh, Charlie--tell me, would
you--won't you--marry me?
(Mrs GRAHAM _enters, and, finding them in each others arms,
prepares to leave_.)
CHARLIE. Clare! We want your congratulations. Dora has proposed to me,
and I am to name the happy day.
Mrs CLARE GRAHAM. What! And how about her oath?
DORA (_blushing_). Oh, I only vowed that, however pressed to marry, I
would refuse. But I was not pressed; was I, Charlie?
CHARLIE (_sedately_). Certainly not.
In the Cradle of the Deep.
"But the sweet child heart you may always keep,
For then the stars will be yours and the deep,
The boundless deep. Good night."
It had been a long engagement, commenced by him between the ages of
knickerbocker and tobacco, and encouraged by her as a development of the
Prince Bountiful and Cinderella romances of the schoolroom. A charming
contract, drawn up without sign and seal and cemented after the manner
of barbaric hordes by heterogeneous offerings precious to the engaging
parties, such as guinea-pigs, bird's eggs, looted apples, and, later on,
prizes in vellum, deposited with blushing triumph into the concavity of
a Dolly Varden pinafore. Parents wagged their heads and forbade, but the
veto was conditional; the wisdom of the serpent was allied to a certain
downiness of the dove, for hints at expectations in the future of the
impecunious suitor necessitated an attitude both Janus-faced and
revolving. Their perspicacity was duly rewarded, for later on the
vacuous pockets of the young subaltern--he had gone to thicken the "thin
red line"--became plethoric with inherited revenues of a deceased uncle
on the mother's side, a personage for whom malt had been the Brahma of
idolatry, who had laid up for himself a tidy treasure despite the
corruptions of rust and moth.
No sooner were the legacy dues arranged than Victor Dorrien, in a letter
beautifully ebullient if ungrammatical, demanded permission to import
his chosen one to share a temporary exile in India where, for the nonce,
he was tied by technical obligations. He vowed that celibacy was dull,
and soldiering monotonous; and, moreover, that, without the sweetheart
of his youth to tease and plague him, there would no glint on the
avuncular guineas.
The letter was a hearty one, and went the round of the family circle to
a chorus of satisfied praise. The chorus did it. Someone has said that
"perpetual representation amounts to inculcation," and this phrase ably
describes the uses of chorus. Continued reiteration makes gospel truth.
The family chorus on the subject of matrimony is the mainstay of
parental soloists, its note brings the recalcitrant or frisking lamb to
"mark time," and subsequently dictates the pace of a quick march to the
impending sacrifice. Social excitement is almost as sustaining as
fanatical enthusiasm; it is the intoxicant which inflames half the
actors that strut through the world's dramas of marriage, murder, or
martyrdom. It sustained and inflamed little Elsie, who, dizzy with
congratulations, valedictory gushings, present receiving, dress trying,
and orange-blossom choosing, ignored the importance of life's
destination in the enjoyment of the surrounding and immediate scenery.
There was great leave-taking and kerchief-waving and some coursing of
tears down kindred cheeks and noses as the bride-elect was deposited,
with wedding-cake, dress, and addenda, on board the s.s. _Kenilworth_,
in temporary charge of a _passee_ matron of skittish proclivities and
Anglo-Indian epidermis. This obliging lady had volunteered to personify
decorum until arrival in Bombay, when her youthful charge would be
transferred to the chaperonage of Dorrien's sister, on whom the
observances of marriage etiquette depended. Elsie was in no way averse
from the arrangement. All was so novel and so exciting that the Columbus
instinct outbalanced the romantic one. The world had much to offer and
the suburbs very little. There was certainly a well-grown curate, an
Oxford man, ingrained with pedantry and pomposity, and delicately
veneered with artistic ethics; also a retired bookmaker's son, who wore
loud ties and restricted "unmentionables," and who spent money lavishly
nursing a constituency, no one knew where. On the other hand stood
Victor as she remembered him, sound in wind and limb, handsome, honest,
and professedly devoted. Her choice was unhesitating, and she started
forth with dancing heart.
As usual came the inevitable _dies non_, when the unfledged traveller
makes a first bow to the Channel, followed by one or two squeamish days,
when the Bay of Biscay as lauded in poesy and the Bay of Biscay as
discovered in practice are two quite antagonistic things. After which,
with rarified complexion, the sufferer forgets his troubles, and mounts
the deck to enjoy a beatific spell of brine and breeze.
So in due course did Elsie. She found Mrs Willis, who was an old
campaigner, busily engaged in conversation, or its equivalent, the
note-comparing, gossip-scavengering tattle which is inherent to feminine
camp followers of a certain age. Her companions were one Major Lane and
his friend, Captain Burton Aylmer, the latter a person of some celebrity
in military circles where sport was supreme. He looked lazy, long, and
languid, and to those who had seen him neither tent-pegging nor polo
playing, who knew nothing of the spearing of veteran boars, whose tushes
fringed his mantel at home, nor of the "man eater" duel, which in
hunting annals had made his name historical, he seemed effete, if not
affected. He was lolling at full length in a rattan chair, listening
indolently to the flippant duologue of the major and the grass widow.
The lady did not interest him. Her type was too cheap. She represented
one of an order that seemed to be chromo-lithographed in reams for the
benefit of garrisons in Great Britain, India, and the Colonies; but when
he discovered in her the chaperone of a young _ingenue_, with fringeless
forehead and skin like new milk dashed with sunset, his nonchalance
subsided, and he became almost polite. Mrs Willis was prompt to detect
the change of tactics, and swift to solve the problem. She plumed
herself not a little on the possession of a decoy duck, capable of
luring so desirable a prey as Captain Burton Aylmer into her social
toils.
"Be civil to him, my dear," she advised when in private. "Half the women
on board would give their eyes to get him in tow. He is very
_difficile_." Mrs Willis affected the slangy in talking to young girls.
She thought it gave a contemporaneous flavour to the intercourse.
"He seemed to me pleasant enough," breathed Elsie, who was quite
unscienced in complexities of character.
"He can be when he chooses. They say Lady Staines would have given her
back hair for him and followed him barefoot across Asia--but he didn't
see it!"
"Oh!"
"He is very accustomed to that sort of thing. His heart is quite
tear-toughened, a kind of spongiopiline--receptive and impermeable at
the same time."
"Perhaps you do him an injustice; there may never have been a question
of his heart?"
"His sponsor so soon? Beware, little girl; they say he never loved since
a certain queen of society threw him over for strawberry leaves."
"Threw him over!" A line of Tennyson regarding the value of coronets
flashed across her. She wondered with a girlish contemplative scepticism
how this bronzed physique, this heroic modelling, this almost womanly
gentleness of expression had failed, having won, to hold.
* * * * *
Hour after hour passed in the usual shipboard routine, by which every
day became the exact counterpart of its forerunner. Only to Elsie was
each moment a joy and a revelation. It was impossible to disregard the
fact that, from being a juvenile of no account, she had developed into a
personage--a personage, whose humble servitor society had been ready
enough to serve. In the conquest there was no elation such as might have
existed for maturer women. She was too absorbed with the all ruling
presence to heed what happened around. The wind was only fresh when it
carried his voice to her ear, the waves only buoyant when they danced
beneath their mutual pacings; day was light, because she shared it with
him; night was dark, because they were apart.
At last Mrs Willis betrayed signs of alarm. "A mild flirtation is all
very well, but people will talk; you must really be careful, Elsie! What
will Victor Dorrien say when he comes to claim his bride?"
Dorrien! His bride! The words mentally thrust Bradshaw into the binding
of Keats; she suffocated as though she had steamed direct from Eden to
seaside lodgings. Was she indeed affianced to this almost unremembered
lover of her childhood, and was she indeed journeying straight into his
arms? How came it that the purpose of her voyage had been almost
forgotten, that the seconds had grown so full of actuality as to outsize
the horizon, the zenithed sunshine so blinding, that all surroundings
seemed enveloped in atmospheric haze?
Each morning in her cabin she registered a vow that the coming day
should be the last of illusion, that the stern facts of destiny should
be faced; each night her fevered, impatient brain cried for dawn, to
prove by the sight of the noble outlines, the sound of the beloved
voice, that the end was not yet come. It was scarcely his utterances
that attracted; perhaps the knowledge of his soul grew best from what he
failed to say, what he failed to seem. But she saw the weary boredom of
his eyes change to fire as her glance sought his, and she knew her
lightest speech sped like spores upon the wind to find a root and
resting place within his heart. She yearned to hint at her projected
fate--she yearned, yet dreaded. Dissection of the sentimental mosaic of
years is no facile undertaking, so many scraps and fragments go to the
gradual making of the romantic whole, and she dared not approach the
culminating tangle of the love story without explaining in detail the
nascence and growth of the dilemma.
Thus with the course of the vessel drifted the craft of emotion, past
Suez, through the broil of the Red Sea, out again into a sapphire ocean.
Mrs Willis, looking ahead, saw breakers and imminent wreck.
"You are both mad," she thundered at Elsie. "This must cease; you must
tell him that in a few days, immediately on your arrival in Bombay in
fact, you are to marry."
"I cannot."
"But, child, think of it. What can you do? You _must_ go to Dorrien's
sister's house--it is all arranged--you will be married the next day.
You know I do not land, and that there will be no one but the Dorriens
to take care of you. You could not even return to England without delay
that would be scandalous."
All this poured in a breath from the agitated chaperone, who had
awakened too late to a sense of her responsibilities.
"I will tell him to-morrow--to-morrow night ... it will be the last,"
sobbed Elsie to the pillows in her restricted berth. And when dinner was
ended, the final meal on board--for the vessel was steaming extra knots
per hour in order to reach port at daybreak--these lovers met for their
farewell. They paced the dimly-lighted deck in silence, with weighted
feet, and hearts that scarcely pulsed lest the bumper of anguish might
run over. Then, behind the wheel, where the gusts of laughter from the
expectant and happy travellers could not reach them, they halted--still
silent, staring with parched, despairing eyes at the swirling water and
the long track of dimpled silver that spread like the trail of an ocean
comet in their wake. The night showed serene and purple, a universe in
regal repose, only the ship, throbbing with insensate activity, rushed
panting to doom; on, on, on, while precious moments flashed fast--a
shower of jewels falling into the abyss, never to be retrieved. There
was no Joshua to hold time in a spell; nothing to stay the deepening
hours from waning into a disastrous dawn.
She spoke. His profile cut dark against the ocean reflections; there was
no fear of meeting his eyes.
"To-morrow morning we shall touch Bombay. I am going there to be
married, Captain Aylmer." Silence again. The ship's machinery rotated
evenly--mercilessly. His face was sunk in shadow, she could but guess
that her speech was heard.
"Is it not news to you?"
Her words, like drunken footsteps on stony soil, reeled despite an
affectation of steadiness.
"No; I was told you would marry unless----"
"Unless what?" she quavered.
"Unless you changed your mind--refused."
"Mr Dorrien's sister is my only friend in Bombay. If I refuse--leave her
house--I shall be alone. I shall be helpless when Mrs Willis and you are
gone."
A light hand, hot and feverish, shot its flame through his thin coat
sleeve. He shivered.
"That is what I am coming to. Stand away from me--do not look at me--I
want to say something which sticks very hard."
He shrank back into deeper shadow. There was horrible stillness. She
stood transfixed, chilling, as Lot's wife must have stood when crystal
after crystal replaced the warm and buoyant rivulets of being.
"Elsie--I may call you that just once--you must not refuse. If you do,
you will be without any friendship but mine--and my friendship would be
worse than deadliest enmity. The reason you must have guessed. It has
kept me tongue-tied till now--a coward, a blackguard, some might say.
The reason is because"--his voice blurred hoarsely through a strangled
sob--"because I am married already."
A convulsive gasp from her--scarcely audible--no word.
He clutched at a rail and resumed almost grimly, cauterising his gaping
wound with reality's searing iron,
"My wife is in a sanatorium, mentally deranged. A virtuous woman, but
she was wedded to mysticism and morphia, and loved me never a bit."
The fall of pitiful tears, tears from the sweet blue of her guileless
eyes, came hissing against the red-hot cicatrice. His strength almost
failed. Such innocence, such loneliness needed protection. But his! This
man who had brought down wild beasts in the open, found deadlier tussle
in the confines of his brain. He quavered--his firm jaws clenched.
Reason is muscular, but nature is subtle and crafty. With a jerk, a
twist, reason is overthrown, but it takes time and heart's blood to
stretch nature prone and panting.
When he next spoke his voice was hard--uneven.
"Elsie, for God's sake help me! Don't cry, or I must open my arms and
hold you in them for ever, come what may. We have needed no words to
translate love's language in--no signs to show we were each to each the
complement that Heaven has made and laws of men have marred; we shall
need no oath to bind us to remembrance. Good-bye. Some day, when you are
older, you may know what it costs a fellow to protect a woman from her
greatest enemy--himself."
The sound smote her heart, harsh and grating, like rusty steel. She
could not scan the ashen mask that hid the rage of conflict; merciful
darkness had enveloped the death struggle with a gossamer pall. There
was not even a clasp of hands to tell his going; she knew it, but still
stood there, as the vessel glided on into the sweltering night's
maturity over a placid sea, under a placid sky, while human passions
raged and rent themselves in useless agony.
* * * * *
Two hours later all was silent; most of the passengers, overcome with
the tropical temperature and restlessness, were sinking into the fevered
sleep that comes only when night's noon has turned a cool shoulder to
the scorchings of the day. On the open deck, to catch what breeze there
might be, the men slumbered, with forms inartistically outspread; the
women, in a more sheltered nook, though not far removed, were stretched
on couches all in a row like shrouded corpses awaiting the resurrection.
Night looked down as on some pillaged city where only the dead are left
to keep each other ghostly company. Suddenly, from among them there
uprose a small, white wraith--lithe, barefooted, with wandering hair. It
fled, looking nor right nor left--its footfall light as
snowflakes--straight on, to where the ship's track threw a ruffled
tongue across the stillness of the water. In a single flash the silver
ripples gaped, parted, closed again, enfolding in the bosom of the deep
the fair frail atom--an atom that seemed, in the immensity, scarce
larger than the feather from a seagull's wing. Then the serene face of
the ocean smiled smoothly as ever, hugging its hidden secret till the
bursting of the grand chorus when the sea gives up its dead.
* * * * *
And Burton Aylmer, afar off, with outstretched, grey-flanneled limbs,
lay motionless, his hands clasped beneath his head, his eyes staring
with haggard scepticism at the floating ultramarine of the heavens. His
lips moved as though framing a prayer, but he was only muttering to
himself, parrot-wise, the burden of the ritual that bound him to "a
virtuous woman, wedded to mysticism and morphia," who loved him "never a
bit."
Some Crazy Patchwork.
"Oh, love's but a dance,
Where time plays the fiddle."