THE FLAME OF LOVE
Diana's gaze wandered idly over the blue stretch of water, as it lay
beneath the blazing August sun, while the sea-gulls, like streaks of
white light, wheeled through the shimmering haze of the atmosphere.
Her hands were loosely clasped around her knees, and a little
evanescent smile played about her lips. Behind her, the great red
cliffs of Culver Point reared up against the sapphire of the sky, and
she was thinking dreamily of that day, nearly eighteen months ago, when
she had been sitting in the self-same place, leaning against the
self-same rock, whilst a grey waste of water crept hungrily up to her
very feet, threatening to claim her as its prey. And then Errington
had come, and straightway all the danger was passed.
Looking back, it seemed as though that had always been the way of
things. Some menace had arisen, either by land or sea--or even, as at
her recital, out of the very intensity of feeling which her singing had
inspired--and immediately Max had intervened and the danger had been
averted.
She laid her hand caressingly on the sun-warmed surface of the rock.
How many things had happened since she had last leaned against its
uncomfortable excrescences! She felt quite affectionately towards it,
as one who has journeyed far may feel towards some old landmark of his
youth which he finds unaltered on his return, from wandering in strange
lands. The immutability of _things_, as compared with the constant
fluctuation of life and circumstance, struck her poignantly. Here was
this rock--cast up from the bowels of the earth thousands of years ago
and washed by the waves of a million tides--still unchanged and
changeless, while, for her, the face of the whole world had altered in
little more than a year!
From a young girl-student, one insignificant person among scores of
others similarly insignificant, she had become a prominent personality,
some one in whom even the great, busy, hurrying world paused to take an
interest, and of whom the newspapers wrote eulogistic notices,
heralding her as the coming English _prima donna_. She felt rather
like a mole which has been working quietly in the dark, tunnelling a
passage for itself, unseen and unsuspected, and which has suddenly
emerged above the surface of the earth, much to its own--and every one
else's--astonishment!
Then, too, how utterly changed were her relations with Max Errington!
At the beginning of their acquaintance he had held himself deliberately
aloof, but since that evening at Adrienne de Gervais' house, when they
had formed a compact of friendship, he had, apparently, completely
blotted out from his mind the remembrance of the obstacle, whatever it
might be, which he had contended must render any friendship between
them out of the question.
And during these last few months Diana had gradually come to know the
lofty strain of idealism which ran through the man's whole nature.
Passionate, obstinate, unyielding--he could be each and all in turn,
but, side by side with these exterior characteristics, there ran a
streak of almost feminine delicacy of perception and ideality of
purpose. Diana had once told him, laughingly, that he was of the stuff
of which martyrs were made in the old days of persecution, and in this
she had haphazard lit upon the fundamental force that shaped his
actions. The burden which fate, or his own deeds, might lay upon his
shoulders, that he would bear, be it what it might.
"Everything's got to be paid for," he had said one day. "It's
inevitable. So what's the use of jibing at the price?"
Diana wondered whether the price of that mysterious something which lay
in his past, and which not even intimate friendship had revealed to
her, would mean that this comradeship must always remain only that--and
never anything more?
A warm flush mounted to her face as the unbidden thought crept into her
mind. Errington had been down at Crailing most of the summer, staying
at Red Gables, and during the long, lazy days they had spent together,
motoring, or sailing, or tramping over Dartmoor with the keen moorland
air, like sparkling wine, in their nostrils, it seemed as though a
deeper note had sounded than merely that of friendship.
And yet he had said nothing, although his eyes had spoken--those vivid
blue eyes which sometimes blazed with a white heat of smouldering
passion that set her heart racing madly within her.
She flinched shyly away from her own thoughts, pulling restlessly at
the dried weed which clung about the surface of the rock. A little
brown crab ran out from a crevice, and, terrified by the big human hand
which he espied meddling with the clump of weed and threatening to
interfere with the liberty of the subject, skedaddled sideways into the
safety of another cranny.
The hurried rush of the little live thing roused Diana from her
day-dreams, and looking up, she saw Max coming to her across the sands.
She watched the proud, free gait of the tall figure with appreciation
in her eyes. There was something very individual and characteristic
about Max's walk--a suggestion as of immense vitality held in check,
together with a certain air of haughty resolution and command.
"I thought I might find you here," he said, when they had shaken hands.
"Did you want me?"
He looked at her with a curious expression in his eyes.
"I always want you, I think," he said simply.
"Well, you seem to have a faculty for always turning up when _I_ want
_you_," she replied. "I was just thinking how often you had appeared
in the very nick of time. Seriously"--her voice took on a graver
note--"I feel I can't ever repay you.--you've come to my help so often."
"There is a way," he said, very low, and then fell silent.
"Tell me," she urged him, smilingly. "I like to pay my debts."
He made no answer, and Diana, suddenly nervous and puzzled, continued a
little breathlessly:--
"Have I--have I offended you? I--I thought"--her lips quivered--"we
had agreed to be friends."
Max was silent a moment. Then he said slowly:--
"I can't keep that compact."
Diana's heart contracted with a sudden fear.
"Can't keep it?" she repeated dully. She could not picture her
life--no--robbed of this friendship!
"No." His hands hung clenched at his sides, and he stood staring at
her from beneath bent brows, his mouth set in a straight line. It was
as though he were holding himself under a rigid restraint, against
which something within him battled, striving for release.
All at once his control snapped.
"I love you! . . . God in heaven! Haven't you guessed it?"
The words broke from him like a bitter cry--the cry of a heart torn in
twain by love and thwarted longing. Diana felt the urgency of its
demand thrill through her whole being.
"Max . . ."
It was the merest whisper, reaching his ears like the touch of a
butterfly's wing--hesitantly shy, and honey-sweet with the promise of
summer.
The next instant his arms were round her and he was holding her as
though he would never let her go, passionately kissing the soft mouth,
so close beneath his own. He lifted her off her feet, crushing her to
him, and Diana, the woman in her definitely, vividly aroused at last,
clung to him yielding, but half-terrified by the tempest of emotion she
had waked.
"My beloved! . . . _My soul_!"
His voice was vehement with the love and passion at length unleashed
from bondage; his kisses hurt her. There was something torrential,
overwhelming, in his imperious wooing. He held her with the fierce,
possessive grip of primitive man claiming the chosen woman as his mate.
She struggled faintly against him.
"Ah! Max--Max . . . . Let me go. You're frightening me."
She heard him draw his breath hard, and then slowly, reluctantly, as
though by a sheer effort of will, he set her down. He was white to the
lips, and his eyes glowed like blue flame in their pallid setting.
"Frighten you!" he repeated hoarsely. "You don't know what love
means--you English."
Diana stared at him.
"'You English!' What--what are you saying? Max, aren't you English
after all?"
He threw back his head with a laugh.
"Oh, yes, I'm English. But I'm something else as well. . . . There's
warmer blood in my veins, and I can't love like an Englishman. Oh,
Diana, heart's beloved, let me teach you what love is!"
Impetuously he caught her in his arms again, and once more she felt the
storm of his passion sweep over her as he rained fierce kisses on eyes
and throat and lips. For a space it seemed as if the whole world were
blotted out and there were only they two alone together--shaken to the
very foundations of their being by the tremendous force of the
whirlwind of love which had engulfed them.
When at length he released her, all her reserves were down.
"Max . . . Max . . . I love you!"
The confession fell from her lips with a timid, exquisite abandon. He
was her mate and she recognised it. He had conquered her.
Presently he put her from him, very gently, but decisively.
"Diana, heart's dearest, there is something more--something I have not
told you yet."
She looked at him with sudden apprehension in her eyes.
"Max! . . . Nothing--nothing that need come between us?"
Memories of the past, of all the incomprehensible episodes of their
acquaintance--his refusal to recognise her, his reluctance to accept
her friendship--came crowding in upon her, threatening the destruction
of her new-found happiness.
"Not if you can be strong--not if you'll trust me." He looked at her
searchingly.
"Trust you? But I do trust you. Should I have . . . Oh, Max!" the
warm colour dyed her face from chin to brow--"Could I love you if I
didn't trust you?"
There was a tender, almost compassionate expression in his eyes as he
answered, rather sadly:--
"Ah, my dear, we don't know what 'trust' really means until we are
called upon to give it. . . . And I want so much from you!"
Diana slipped her hand confidently into his.
"Tell me," she said, smiling at him. "I don't think I shall fail you."
He was silent for a while, wondering if the next words he spoke would
set them as far apart as though the previous hour had never been. At
last he spoke.
"Do you believe that husbands and wives should have no secrets from one
another?" he asked abruptly.
Diana had never really given the matter consideration--never formulated
such a question in her mind. But now, in the light of love's
awakening; she instinctively knew the answer to it. Her opinion leaped
into life fully formed; she was aware, without the shadow of a doubt,
of her own feelings on the subject.
"Certainly they shouldn't," she answered promptly. "Why, Max, that
would be breaking the very link that binds them together--their
_oneness_ each with the other. You think that, too, don't you?
Why--why did you ask me?" A premonition of evil assailed her, and her
voice trembled a little.
"I asked you because--because if you marry me you will have to face the
fact that there is a secret in my life which I cannot share with
you--something I can't tell you about." Then, as he saw the blank look
on her face, he went on rapidly: "It will be the only thing, beloved.
There shall be nothing else in life that will not be 'ours,' between
us, shared by us both. I swear it! . . . Diana, I must make you
understand. It was because of this--this secret--that I kept away from
you. You couldn't understand--oh! I saw it in your face sometimes.
You were hurt by what I did and said, and it tortured me to hurt
you--to see your lip quiver, your eyes suddenly grow misty, and to know
it was I who had wounded you, I, who would give the last drop of blood
in my body to save you pain."
There was a curious stricken expression on the face Diana turned
towards him.
"So that was it!"
"Yes, that was it. I tried to put you out of my life, for I'd no right
to ask you into it. And I've failed! I can't do without you"--his
voice gathered intensity--"I want you--body and soul I want you. And
yet--a secret between husband and wife is a burden no man should ask a
woman to bear."
When next Diana spoke it was in a curiously cold, collected voice. She
felt stunned. A great wall seemed to be rising up betwixt herself and
Max; all her golden visions for the future were falling about her in
ruins.
"You are right," she said slowly. "No man should ask--that--of his
wife."
Errington's face twisted with pain.
"I never meant to let you know I cared," he answered. "I fought down
my love for you just because of that. And then--it grew too strong for
me. . . . My God! If you knew what it's been like--to be near you,
with you, constantly, and yet to feel that you were as far removed from
me as the sun itself. Diana--beloved--can't you trust me over this one
thing? Isn't your love strong enough for that?"
She turned on him passionately.
"Oh, you are unfair to me--cruelly unfair! You ask me to trust you!
And your very asking implies that you cannot trust _me_!"
There was bitter anger in her voice.
"I know it looks like that," he said wearily. "And I can't explain. I
can only ask you to believe in me and trust me. I thought . . .
perhaps . . . you loved me enough to do it." His mouth twitched with a
little smile, half sad, half ironical. "My usual presumption, I
suppose."
She made no answer, but after a moment asked abruptly:--
"Does this--this secret concern only you?"
"That I cannot tell you. I can't answer any questions. If--if you
come to me, it must be in absolute blind trust." He paused, his eyes
entreating her. "Is it . . . too much to ask?"
Diana was silent, looking away from him across the water. The sun
slipped behind a cloud, and a grey shadow spread like a blight over the
summer sea. It lay leaden and dull, tufted with little white crests of
foam.
The man and woman stood side by side, motionless, unresponsive. It was
as though a sword had suddenly descended, cleaving them asunder.
Presently she heard him mutter in a low tone of anguish:--
"So this--this, too--must be added to the price!"
The pain in his voice pulled at her heart. She stretched out her hands
towards him.
"Max! Give me time!"
He wheeled round, and the tense look of misery in his face hurt her
almost physically.
"What do you mean?" he asked hoarsely.
"I must have time to think. Husband and wife ought to be one.
What--what happiness can there be if . . . if we marry . . . like this?"
He bent his head.
"None--unless you can have faith. There can be no happiness for us
without that."
He took a sudden step towards her.
"Oh, my dear, my dear! I love you so!"
Diana began to cry softly--helpless, pathetic, weeping, like a child's.
"And--and I thought we were so happy," she sobbed. "Now it's all
spoiled and broken. And you've spoilt it!"
"Don't!" he said unsteadily. "Don't cry like that. I can't stand it."
He made an instinctive movement to take her in his arms, but she
slipped aside, turning on him in sudden, passionate reproach.
"Why did you try and make me love you when you knew . . . all this? I
was quite happy before you came--oh, so happy!"--with a sudden yearning
recollection of the days of unawakened girlhood. "If--if you had let
me alone, I should have been happy still."
The unthinking selfishness of youth rang in her voice, asserting its
infinite demand for the joy and pleasure of life.
"And I?" he said, very low. "Does my unhappiness count for nothing?
I'm paying too. God knows, I wish we had never met."
Never to have met! Not to have known all that those months of
friendship and a single hour of love had held! The words brought a
sudden awakening to Diana--a new, wonderful knowledge that, cost what
they might in bitterness and future pain, she would rather bear the
cost than know her life emptied of those memories.
She had ceased crying. After a few moments she spoke with a gentle,
wistful composure.
"I was wrong, Max. You're not to blame--you couldn't help it any more
than I could."
"I might have gone away--kept away from you," he said tonelessly.
A faint, wintry little smile curved her lips.
"I'm glad you didn't."
"Diana!" He sprang forward impetuously. "Do you mean that?"
She nodded slowly.
"Yes. Even if--if we can't ever marry, we've had . . . to-day."
A smouldering fire lit itself in the man's blue eyes. He had spoken
but the bare truth when he had said that warmer blood ran in his veins
than that of the cold northern peoples.
"Yes," he said, his voice tense. "We've had to-day."
Diana trembled a little. The memory of that fierce, wild love-making
of his rushed over her once more, and the primitive woman in her longed
to yield to its mastery. But the cooler characteristics of her nature
bade her pause and weigh the full significance of marrying a man whose
life was tinged with mystery, and who frankly acknowledged that he bore
a secret which must remain hidden, even from his wife.
It would be taking a leap in the dark, and Diana shrank from it.
"I must have time to think," she repeated. "I can't decide to-day."
"No," he said, "you're right. I've known that all the time,
only--only"--his voice shook--"the touch of you, the nearness of you,
blinded me." He paused. "Don't keep me waiting for your answer longer
than you can help, Diana," he added, with a quiet intensity.
"You'll go away from Crailing?" she asked nervously.
He smiled a little sadly.
"Yes, I'll go away. I'll leave you quite free to make your decision,"
he replied.
She breathed a sigh of relief. She knew that if he were to remain at
Crailing, if they were to continue seeing each other almost daily,
there could be but one end to the matter--her conviction that no
happiness could result from such a marriage would go by the board. It
could not stand against the breathless impetuosity of Max's
love-making--not when her own heart was eager and aching to respond.
"Thank you, Max," she said simply, extending her hand.
He put it aside, drawing her into his embrace.
"Beloved," he said, and now there was no passion, no fierceness of
desire in his voice, only unutterable tenderness. "Beloved, please God
you will find it in your heart to be good to me. All my thoughts are
yours, but for that one thing over which I need your faith. . . . I
think no man ever loved a woman so utterly as I love you. And oh!
little white English rose of my heart, I'd never ask more than you
could give. Love isn't all passion. It's tenderness and shielding and
service, dear, as well as fire and flame. A man loves his wife in all
the little ways of daily life as well as in the big ways of eternity."
He stooped his head, and a shaft of sunlight flickered across his
bright hair. Diana watched it with a curious sense of detachment.
Very gently he laid her hands against his lips, and the next moment he
was swinging away from her across the stretch of yellow sand, leaving
her alone once more with the sea and the sky and the wheeling gulls.