"I have been trying to meet you ever since I came to Durban," said the
boy, in a voice that all the world might hear, so young it was and
eager.
There was a stir among that portion of the world present in Mrs
Carr-Ellison's drawing-room. The man playing beautiful, desultory
modulations on the grand piano struck a passionate chord and quivered
off into the treble softly so that he might hear the woman's answer;
several scandalised skirts shivered and seemed to whisper, but the woman
on the high-backed, gold satin sofa, did not disturb herself. She sat
unsmiling, her head resting against the back of the sofa, her arms
stretched wide on either side of her.
She had the despairing, unlighted eyes that tell of a soul's light gone
out, and her mouth drooped bitterly at the corners; but her hair was
very beautifully arranged, and her pale gown with its gloomy sleeves and
silvery bands must have taken some weeks to design.
"I saw your picture on Le Poer's table, and I told him to give me an
introduction to you; but the beggar wouldn't," the boy went on; and the
skirts drawn closer, whispered again. Le Poer was the fastest man in
the fastest military set in Maritzburg; what was Miss Wilde's picture
doing on his table? Really, these writing women were very queer, one
never knew what they were up to, coming from Heaven knows where, and
settling down in rooms without a chaperone, writing for newspapers.
"Oh!" the sphinx woman had spoken at last but her voice was very tired
and uninterested. She was used to having men try to meet her, and
candour did not appeal to her very much. She had long ago worn out her
interest in the obvious, and walked through life now with ears only for
the silences, and eyes only for the things not seen, unless they were
the traces of pain quivering the surface under which she lived. She was
always interested in pain.
The boy's persistence worried her; his words seemed very crude. Yet a
certain vigour in his voice drew her eyes up to where, waiting for one
or other of the men at her side to move, he stood before her. It
occurred to her then that for so tall a man he stood up with remarkable
calmness and indifference where everyone was seated.
"The stage," she thought, then mused as to how, if she were writing of
him, she could best describe the young untidy way his hair grew above
his forehead.
"Ragged would be too extravagant," were the words that formed themselves
in her mind with a sense of familiarity that puzzled her, until in a
flash she remembered that the night before she had seen him on the
stage, and had thought the same thought about his hair.
"Ah! the apothecary!" she exclaimed, and sitting up, stared back into
his blue, intense eyes.
"She is really a little mad," thought Mrs Carr-Ellison, who, at first
distressed at the girl's unsociability to a strange guest, was now
filled with vague embarrassment to see them staring into each other's
eyes and babbling of apothecaries. She did not appreciate that to
Dolores Wilde the boy had changed suddenly into a man--a man who had
lived and suffered and understood; and that with the memory of how, in
the few lines assigned to him as the starving seller of drugs and
potions in Shakespeare's greatest romance--he had supplied the touch of
tragedy that to her made the play real life, her inmost soul leaped out
to him as a comrade. While, though she knew it not, her hands were
already at his heart-strings.
Mrs Carr-Ellison did not see these things, because they were not to be
seen. She only thought that it was very queer and Bohemian of Miss
Wilde to behave so, and a very bad example for her daughter Gwen, who
was observing the proceedings with all her eyes and ears; so she
interrupted that touching of spirit hands with a commonplace.
"Mr Scarlett," she said, "do take Miss Wilde into the verandah, and get
some ices for yourselves."
They refused the ices earnestly, sharing a smile; but they were glad to
go. He followed the trails of her strange gown through the wide dim-lit
verandahs, and found her a chair in a far corner where the light from
above fell palely into her eyes, and restless shadows of maidenhair fern
played about her drooping mouth.
"Your picture spoke to me from Le Poer's table," he said, as though
there had been no interruption, "and then he told me all about you. Do
you mind? Ever since I have wanted to speak to you, and tell you that
you shall not always be sad. Look here,"--his expressions were very
boyish,--"I have had my life broken up too, and yet I am beginning to be
glad again, and you must. You are too sweet and splendid to be always
sad."
"You are very young," she answered quietly, wondering why she did not
resent the first spoken sympathy anyone had dared to offer her in all
these years. "For me--I am an old woman."
He was twenty-eight, and she was a year younger, but he knew how sorrow
ages the heart, and understood. He moved a pot of fern away from her
feet, because it seemed to blur the picture of her, sitting there, and a
crumple it had made in the hem of her gown he smoothed out with the
simplicity of a child and the gentle hands of a woman.
"I am not so young. I have tasted the rough of the world and some of
its joys, and I still love the joys. You are in danger of loving its
sorrows so much that you will not be able to be happy again when you
have the chance."
"I shall never have the chance, boy, not in this world anyhow; the gods
will take care of that."
"Well, in the next then," he persisted. "I have all sorts of splendid
theories about our failures here being our triumphs there, haven't you?
Don't you--when things go all askew, find yourself building on what
comes--after?"
Her lips curved in a wry smile. Truth to tell, this world had treated
her so ill that she had but small hope of the next.
He went on speaking with an amazing buoyancy in his voice.
"If death were not so hemmed in with the sickness and horrors that
frighten a man! If it would only come to one quickly, out in the open
air and sunshine--in a rush of living excitement--how many of us would
stay, I wonder?"
"I would," she cried, with a shiver, "I would."
"I wouldn't," he said fervently. "I am so curious and interested in
what is hidden that I--"
"Don't," she cried out, half in anger, "you are so young, so full of the
joy of life, why do you speak of death? Earth must be very sweet to you
yet."
"So it is," he assented, quickly; "and there are always ambitions here."
"Ah, yes!" she said, with the relief of one whose feet have found firm
ground. "Our ambitions. What do you want?"
He sat up very straight, and his eyes seemed to grow bluer. He loved
his profession.
"I want to be as fine as Ravenhill first. You have seen his _Hamlet_,
and know what that means. I want to be his equal and then--alone.
Then--but one want at a time is enough, if you mean to achieve it. What
do you want?"
She had wanted many things. Her wants had formed the lever by which the
gods had worked their irony upon her; and her portion had been dead
sea-apples. So now she "went softly under the stars," and voiced no
want. But oh! to write something good--not the petty drivel of Women
and Emancipation--but something alive and true, so that Meredith, and
Kipling, and Hardy would some day take her by the hand and greet her
"comrade." Oh! to fill in her life with work, work, work, work, noble
work, so that there was never a gap left to remember in. O! for rest
from the torment of memory and an empty heart.
Did she tell him these things, or did he simply understand? She never
remembered afterwards, but she knew that he knew, on that sweet,
tropical summer night.
They sat late talking.
The hostess gave her into his charge, and, like all the other guests,
they went away in a ricksha, with the bells tinkling and the Zulu boy's
white suit gleaming in the vapoury, delicate light shed by a slender
fragment of moon and a star-splashed sky.
"Doesn't it appal you sometimes to think how much that little fragment
of moon knows about you?" she asked. "She has seen all one's sins and
all one's sufferings--"
"And knows the reason for both," he said quietly.
She shivered, and her little lonely hands, lying on the ricksha coverlet
like white flowers, trembled, so that he took them up and held them.
"Some day she will see you happy, too," he said, "for she is a very
tender old moon."
And when Dolores would have laughed her little bitter laugh at the
thought of happiness, no sound would come, for the bitterness was all
gone, and a great peace had fallen on her heart.
At her door he spoke of a reception which was to be given the next night
to a famous singer who was visiting Natal. They were both going to the
reception, but he would be late, he said. He was "on" in the last act
of _Romeo and Juliet_. Would she keep him a dance if there was any
dancing afterwards? She promised.
When the next night came he was very late, but he came straight to her,
and the peace within her deepened as she felt his arm about her.
She did not look up at him, for his eyes had grown so deeply, fiercely
blue, that she dared not meet them there, before all the world.
While they danced, and all too soon, the music swerved suddenly from the
waltz into "God Save the Queen," and their evening was over. He was
fain to take her to the cloak-room, where a woman friend waited; but in
the shadow of the doorway he spoke.
"I find I want something else, besides fame. Will you give it to me,
you sweet, sad woman?"
She could not speak, her heart was in her throat; but the droop had gone
from her lips, and her eyes were shining in the dark like velvet stars.
"When may I come to you! To-morrow?"
Her heart urged yes, but her brain remembered that to-morrow she must
interview the famous singer. She would give it up, she thought swiftly,
and let her newspaper go. But no! Perhaps, if she denied herself for a
few short hours, the gods would remember, and make her reward the
sweeter. She must make some sacrifice for this great happiness.
"No; Wednesday," she whispered, and quickly, for fear she should revoke:
"Good-night."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
For a day of general rejoicing, as the twenty-fourth of May always is in
the Colonies, Tuesday dawned drab and dreary.
Looking from her window in the early morning, Dolores could see the
waves rushing and ravening wildly in the bay, and beating themselves in
foamy fury against the embankment.
"They will have a dreadful day for their aquatic sports," she thought,
recalling a typed headline she had seen in the editor's office the day
before, and remembering how, on public holidays, everyone in Durban went
on to the bay; but she did not care very much. The wind might blow and
the sea might lash from that day forth for evermore, it would not matter
to her. Nothing mattered but that the gods had relented. The gods!
What gods? There was only one God. Cecil Scarlett's God, and He was
very good. He had forgiven her for her pagan heart, and the years of
misery had dropped from her. Cecil Scarlett wanted her, and she was the
King's daughter among women. Life seemed worth the trouble again, and
the joy of eventful living came back with the flush and swell of a tide.
She fell to mapping out her day so that every chink of it should be
filled up until she saw him again. Her interview with Madame, the
singer, at eleven; the afternoon to write it up, and to finish some
other work for her editor; then the famous lady's concert, which she
must attend that night and criticise for her paper. And after? The
thought came over her that she could not wait till to-morrow, she must
see him before. She would go to the theatre after the concert, slip
into her place in the stage-box, and he would see her and come to her
afterwards. So it would come sooner after all. She would wear her
primrose gown--years ago she had been beautiful in yellow--she would be
beautiful again to-night for him (a wild-rose flush flew into her
cheeks); no more black and white gowns for her. Ah! surely the day
would be too long.
As she dressed, words to fit her mood came to her in the lines of Alice
Meynell's _Renouncement_:--
I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,
I shun the thought that dwells in all delight--
The thought of thee--and in the blue heavens' height,
And in the sweetest passage of a song.
Once during the afternoon she left her work on an impulse and went into
the balcony for a moment.
A fresh, strong wind, smelling of the sea, was blowing, and the sun had
burst radiantly from behind the clouds.
Suddenly she had a strong impression of Cecil Scarlett.
She closed her eyes involuntarily, and the wind rushed across her parted
lips. It was almost as if he had kissed her--the kiss she had seen in
his eyes the night before.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"And in the sweetest passage of a song," she whispered, as, her day's
work over, she sat facing the platform in the crowded concert hall; and
she told herself that she would not give up one of the tormented moments
that kept her from him.
While the audience waited for the appearance of the woman whose
wonderful voice had never before been heard on African shores, not she,
but one of her company--a dark, sombre-eyed woman--came on to the
platform with music in her hand.
Dolores trembled. Why was this? Who was this sorrowful woman? Had not
she, Dolores, done forever with sorrow?
Then Sarah Berry's tragic contralto at its wildest and saddest rang out
and filled the hall with words of Cowen's _Promise of Life_. When she
had finished, and the whole house was on its feet calling her back,
Dolores sat hushed, stricken in her seat by the conviction which had
come to her with the song--the conviction that Sorrow had not done with
her--that she was Tragedy's own.
The old cold gnaw was back at her heart; she felt with a terrible sense
of premonition that she was waiting to be struck; and, while she waited,
a woman's smooth, superficial voice said behind her:
"Have you heard, Miss Wilde, that one of the Ravenhill Company was
drowned in the bay this afternoon? He and some others were going to the
rescue of some wrecked people. Quite young, they say. Dreadful, isn't
it? The theatre is closed."
Someone cried, "Hush!" Sarah Berry had come back, and was singing again
the last verse of her song.
There is no life that hath not held some sorrow,
There is no soul but hath its secret strife.
Still our eyes smile--our hearts pray for to-morrow,
Fair in its promise of more perfect Life.
Earth is not all. His angels ever hearken
Heaven shall make perfect our imperfect life.
Dolores sat ashen-faced and stony-eyed; but peace was in her heart. She
could not grieve "as others which have no hope."