There was--after the manner of suburban vogue--a tennis club in Weytown.
To this the _elite_ of Weytown society, composed mostly of shelved
officers in various degrees of dilapidation, and their growing families,
belonged. Here the Burnleys and Silvers had met, from the years of
teetotum to those of flirtation, and here, outside the cabalistically
marked acre, in their search for truant tennis balls, had Carol and
Rosser commenced the engagement which some said was serious, and others
declared to be but a boy and girl pastime.
When the Burnleys' visitor, Yate Tyndall, appeared upon the scene, which
he did almost immediately after his introduction to the Silvers, there
was spoon diet for the gossips in plenty. Where Carol was, there the six
feet two of the lumbering youth perambulated also; where she was
not--and the colour of her caprices was changeable as the iridescence of
soap-suds--there, _pro tem._, was the soldierly figure extinct.
Burnley laughed, then he chaffed, then he warned. Reminiscences of
Rosser were flaunted, dabbed forth like blisters, their unpleasantness
being excused by their curative intent; but to no avail. Then Harry,
never tolerant of home tattle, suddenly lent himself as its mouthpiece.
Carol was a flirt--nay, more; Rosser, her childhood's one chum, her
girlhood's sweetheart, had been but two months absent, and she had
picked up with, to her, the merest stranger, etc. etc. Harry further
hinted at spiderly instincts, and hummed, "Will you walk into my
parlour" somewhat portentously. The fact was that there was slight
abrasion of his own heart's surface, but that he overlooked to
view himself heroically, as most of us do, and believed his
animus was purely in the interest of his friend. But the friend
rejected salvation--flouted it--and in a few days the subject was
emphatically--Yate could be repulsively emphatic when roused--closed
between them.
On the tennis ground Carol and her new admirer made an almost daily
group. They seldom played, but they wore flannels in compliment to the
surroundings, and dallied with time in talking what one, at least, of
them believed to be philosophy. But, as before said, Carol's moods were
never stationary. She had a mischievous wit and an effervescent,
infectious sprightliness about her--it was a constitutional
characteristic rather than the immediate outcome of gaiety. This made
acquaintances consider her one of the happiest girls in the world. But
of late her friends were prone to notice a suspicious drowsy pinkness of
the eyelids, a sad pucker of the lip corners which argued complexly with
the gusts of exuberance that followed any fit of pre-occupation. And
Yate, as he grew in knowledge of her, could have testified to other
moods still--ugly ones--had he not been too neck-deep in emotion, too
loyal, too profoundly worshipful of the secrets of Nature to notice
anything but beauty in the characteristics of an ungarnished reality
like hers. Besides this, though he was but a youth, he had cosmopolitan
blood in his veins, and cosmopolitan dilution means poetry at a very
early age--poetry which clothes womanhood with mystery, and makes her a
ravishing mixture of puny weakness and irresistible strength. To him she
was the handwriting on the wall of Belshazzar, a sign for wonderment and
awe and dumb prostration, a problem too sublime for solution, though the
key to many exalted enigmas lay, alas! merely with Rosser.
Of this Yate suspected a little--a very little. He never fully knew--nor
indeed did she--how far the man was responsible for the development of
the ineradicable events which crowded that autumn-tinted period. Once he
spoke of him. It was when they had rambled from the tennis regions to
where the edge of an adjacent common was banked with trees and dotted
with seats arabesqued with initials by the playful penknives of holiday
hordes. She had been capricious all day--moody, petulant--snappish, in
vulgar phrase.
"Won't you tell me what bothers you?" he said, addressing the coil of
her hair, for her face was bent to some hieroglyphics traced by her
sunshade in the sandy ground.
"You!" she blurted.
"Shall I go?" he asked, meekly. "I've offered to do so often if it would
make you happier."
"It wouldn't--nothing would make me happier."
"Why are you miserable?"
"I'm not," she muttered, and a heavy tear fell with a thud on the back
of her glove.
He lifted the hand to his lips and kissed away the drop before it had
time to sink in.
"Would it make you glad to know that if this were poison I would take
it, to share even so much of you?"
"It _is_ poison, rank, acid poison, straight out of my wicked heart----"
"Then empty it; let me drain it, that there may be room for nothing but
love."
"Love is a vaster emptiness--it is only a shadow thrown by ourselves."
"You have proved it so?" he questioned, anxiously. "You have loved?"
"I have loved," she breathed, with a weary accent on the middle word.
There was a long pause while they looked intently into the evening
mists, which were weaving themselves into a veil of purple tissue over
the horizon. A horrible tremor had seized him, and his next words, when
they found voice, came thickly out from the burial place of a sob.
"Was it--was it Rosser?"
She merely bowed her head without looking at him.
He rose mutely, stretched his arms to right and left, drew himself to
full length like some huge dog wakened from slumber, then for some
moments he stood with hands clenched on his stick before he spoke.
"I suppose it must be 'good-bye.'"...
She looked at him dreamily.
"Need it?"
He leapt to her side.
"Do you mean that you do not want me to go--that you would rather I
stayed?"
"Much rather."
"And he?"
"He has ceased to exist for me!"
A torrent of hot blood seemed to burst from Yate's frozen brain, as
watershoots from the glaciers in summer.
"God! have you given him up?"
"I made a misstatement. I should have said _I have ceased to exist for
him_."
"That means that you love him?"
She faced round angrily.
"How dare you suggest such things of me? Do you think that women like I
are made the same as slippers, to wait till footsore wanderers have need
of them? Do you imagine I would waste an eyelash in weeping for milk
wantonly spilt?"
"Yet you cried?" he ventured, very softly.
"I cried from desolation. Can't you understand the loss of the illusion
being more lamentable even than the loss of the reality? Come, let us go
back," she added, "it is growing dark."
They wandered homewards lingeringly. The summer dusk was full of sweet
mystery, of hazy, promising indefinitude; the heath led to the high
road, and from thence they came under the darkness of trees,
copper-beech and acacia trees, which made a fringed avenue along the
back of the Silvers' orchard.
They halted as they reached the wicket. Each longed to express
something, but the something was in so many volumes they could not
decide whence to light on their quotation. At last she said:--
"I feel you are good and loyal and true. I wish I were worthy you."
He took her hand in his wide palms and smiled.
"Don't flatter me--if flattery it can be called. I question whether
saintliness in broadcloth is lovable; but I appreciate the compliment
the more for its being undeserved."
"Boy, you are frivolous; if you weren't so good I should not have qualms
about----"
"Do you know," he interposed abruptly, "how the Orientals prostrate
themselves before their divinity? I would do more."
He flung himself on the ground at her feet, his forehead against the
earth, and with a quick touch placed his head beneath her heel.
She uttered a sharp cry and stooped to him--to lift him. Had it been
Rosser's, she thought, the act would have loomed magnificent; as it was,
the combined self-abasement--the devotion, the allegiance of it--was
crude and colourless. For her there were no passionate illuminations to
preserve the margin of the sublime. She had argued love to be but the
shadow cast by ourselves, and at that moment her soul's lamp lighted
only conceptions that were blurred, formless, and grotesque.
But as he rose he caught her in his arms, and she did not resist them.
She lay inert, like a wounded animal after long strife, and pleaded as
though for physical or mental refuge.
"Make me love you! Make me love you!"
And so he kissed her.
It was a kiss that might have awakened a statue to tenderness. The wine
of her lips, as he pressed and bruised and crushed them, intoxicated
him. He forgot Rosser.