She reserved the posting till night, after the coming of Yate, who was
due at dinner. In the evening the young man arrived. He had fought his
way on foot through a deluge of rain and a thundering blast. The tussle
suited his mood, which had rebelled against the suavity of conveyance to
his enchanting goal. A handsome colour glowed through the tan of his
cheeks, and the sombre green-grey of his eyes shone gallant and golden
with the illuminations of love. At first glimpse of him Carol recognised
in his personality that almost godlike quality which welds mere dust
into heroes. What devotion he was prepared to give her! A crown of
sovereignty to lift the chosen one above princes and peoples, pain and
penury, and privation. But the diadem was too large, too massive; her
poor ignoble head might sink under it. And then princes and peoples
would become but a mob, antagonistic or inane, and the pinch of pain,
privation, and penury would eternally grip at the strings of her
love-famished heart.
She showed him her renouncement of Rosser, and sent it forth to post.
His heart bounded, for her composure deceived him and masked the cost of
the decisive action.
After dinner, Mrs Silver, complaining of the elements outside and the
leaden temperature within, retired to lie down in the adjacent boudoir.
They were alone. On a distant pedestal a lamp, petalled like a poppy,
threw sleepy rays across the room; at the piano some smaller flowers
leant their rose blush to the winking candles. She was seated at the
keys in a gown, gauzy white, with two dreamy hands expressing some
twilight theme of Schumann's--a reverie of sorrow and sighing. He sat
passive, but it was the passivity of the spinning-top. His greedy eyes
looked at the wandering fingers and longed to detain them, leant on the
mignonette which cast a languid breath from the muslin folds of her
bodice--fastened gladly, almost possessively, on the tiny blue speck
that marred the outline of her under lip. Poor sweet speck! Oh, that it
might there remain for ever as seal royal of the eternity of his truth!
At last she lifted her hands and rose. He rose in sympathy and advanced,
half afraid; restrained by the indefinable awe with which we all
approach joys that are too delicious to be seized.
For a moment she scanned him earnestly but not regretfully, and, as she
gazed, she noted the passage of his eyes as they travelled
conqueror-wise to the dark flaw on the margin of her mouth. His glance
let loose the words that had swelled her heart with pent-up purpose.
She held out her hand. He grasped it eagerly; but there was a stiff
wrist and elbow at the back of it which dictated the distance from him
to her.
"Yate--Mr Tyndall--I want you to go away!"
"What!--now?--this moment?"
"Yes, and for ever!"
She spoke deliberately, without a quaver of sorrow, and every word on
his heart spat like hailstones coming down a chimney on live coal.
His huge frame trembled and swayed an instant. Then he laughed. It was a
jarring, joyless convulsion.
"You don't mean it--you are doing it to try me--say you don't, Carol, my
darling."
"But I do," she explained. "Listen. I have behaved infamously to you. I
will take all the blame. You were so good, so noble, so loving. You came
just when I was dying of heartbreak--people do die of it, no matter what
the philosophers say. You saved me, you lifted me to life and womanly
pride, you prevented me from writing cringing letters to----in short you
saved me from throwing myself at Mr Rosser's head. Nay, don't speak. I
told you I had loved him."
"You love him still!" he cried.
"No. I showed you my letter this evening to prove it. But that is no
reason for loving you."
"But you'll try and love me? I would make you--you said I might," he
murmured, as though coaxing trust from a child.
"No," she said, disengaging her hand and brushing it across her eyes as
if to sweep away a blighting memory. "No, it was then I knew myself,
then I took courage to face the future without him--without you----"
"But because you refuse him, why----"
"I will not become a thief. Because my own gold has been filched and
squandered I should be no less a thief were I to fill my purse with what
I can never earn--never repay."
"My love is a free gift, Carol--I don't make reservations," he mumbled,
hopelessly, for he knew her tones dictated rather than argued.
"Won't you see that it is because your gift is so lavish, so
rare--because I cannot return--I cannot take it? Offerings of real worth
cannot be so accepted without degradation. Dear Yate, good-bye. Some day
when you have recovered this you will know I am right. Perhaps, even,
you may place me, faults and all, in some special heart-niche reserved
for defunct yet exotic truths."
She affected flippancy, but her mirth hung lank, like the curls of a
drowning man.
He bent over her hand and kissed it.
Then he said thickly, in a drunkard's voice, "I'll go ... by the garden
way----" and rushed out.
She heard the conservatory door bang behind him, and lost the sound of
his footsteps in the howl of the storm.
They took him over the soaking lawn, along the orchard, out by the
wicket, into the avenue of copper-beech and acacia where last night they
had stood together. There he beat his head against the senseless bark of
the dripping trees and wept aloud. And the burst of his sobs mingled
with the roaring of the wind as it swept over him and expended its wild
tumult against the closed windows of her house.
Twin Souls (Dialogue).
_Characters._
ARDILAUN VYSE, _a popular poet; and_ CYNICUS NEERE, _an old
bachelor._