For eight years Lawless had led an adventurous life, consorting chiefly
with men who, like himself, were outside the pale of society. He had
earned a livelihood how he could, sometimes working for his bread with
his hands, at others fairly affluent; but improvident always, giving
away recklessly in his prosperous days what later he knew he would need
for himself. It was during one of his poorer periods that he had
happened across Simmonds, the man who had since introduced him to
Colonel Grey, and so helped him towards a good thing when his fortunes
chanced to be at a particularly low ebb. The tide had turned with
surprising swiftness.
He found it a little difficult at first to realise this unexpected
change of fortune, even more difficult to adapt himself to it.
Doubtless it was the influence of Van Bleit that eventually drew him
from his misanthropic habits and plunged him, somewhat reluctantly, into
the vortex of Cape Town society. The Smythes and Van Bleit introduced
him everywhere. Lawless had no record at the Cape. He became known as
a man of means, and it was rumoured that his family held a good position
in England. The fact that he was connected by marriage with the
beautiful Mrs Lawless added to his popularity; and the vague
information, given by a would-be know-all, that he had once been in the
Army and had left under a cloud was discredited by the civilian
population. But the men in the Service, especially the man at
Government House who was a relation of Mrs Lawless, remembered certain
things; the years that had rolled by since Lawless' disgrace were not so
many as to have put the affair so entirely out of mind that by a little
hard thinking the reason of his dismissal could not be recalled. It was
a reason for which few men have any sympathy. But, perhaps because it
is not the custom in the Service for one man to give another away,
perhaps, too, because this particular man was connected, however
remotely, with the most beautiful woman in Cape Town, those who
remembered the facts held their peace, and the discreditable whisper
died from sheer atrophy.
A certain section of Cape Town society took Lawless up. Among men he
was very popular, and the women decided that he was extraordinarily
fascinating, if a trifle too reserved. He was a man with very little
small talk. Where he recognised a sympathetic personality he left
trivialities alone and plunged straightway into the depths. Every
emotion he betrayed or called forth was of the most profound. Young
girls found him irresistible, but, fortunately for them, he had no taste
for anything but a matured intellect. He admired youth externally, but
he avoided intercourse with it.
One exception he made in favour of a girl he first saw in a railway
carriage while he was returning from Symons Bay to Cape Town in the heat
of a late afternoon. The girl was travelling with her mother and
sister, and Lawless would scarcely have noticed her but for the
persistence of her gaze, which, without her volition, remained
unwaveringly fixed upon the scar on his face. His attention was
attracted towards her long before she realised that she was observed.
He saw her eyes riveted on the scar, and watched her, carelessly at
first, but with increasing interest as he marked the effect of his
disfigurement upon her. She stared at the long deep seam with wide,
surprised eyes; then, her imaginative mind conjuring up a battle-field
with all the paraphernalia of war, she pictured the moment when that
swift relentless slash of the bayonet had been given and received; and
he saw the big eyes darken, and an almost imperceptible shudder shake
her slender frame. His own eyes twinkled humorously, and, drawn perhaps
by their magnetism, the girlish gaze lifted unexpectedly and met his.
If he thought to see her betray a swift confusion, he was disappointed.
Apparently it was the most natural thing in the world that this man
should be staring into her eyes, and that she should return his stare,
not boldly, nor with any thought of intercourse, but with a degree of
reverence such as a young girl feels for a brave man.
The rest of the journey was a duel of looks.
When he got out at the terminus, Lawless stood on the platform and
waited until the girl and her party alighted. He gave no outward sign
of recognition when she passed him, lifting her eyes gravely for a
moment to his face; but the inscrutable grey eyes conveyed far more of
meaning than the mere raising of his hat could possibly have done, or
even a furtive attempt at speech. The girl went home with her mind full
of him. She made a hero of him in her thoughts. Always she pictured
him in the forefront of the battle; she saw him dashing forward against
great odds, to be cut down even while he led his men to victory, waving
them forward over his fallen body. She invested him with all the
attributes which a youthful feminine mind conceives befitting a god of
war.
A few weeks later he met her at a ball. He was introduced to her at her
request. He had attended the dance more to please Van Bleit than
himself, and was standing, a little out of it, near the doorway when one
of the committee came up to him with the announcement that he wished to
introduce him to Miss Weeber.
Lawless followed him indifferently. When he discovered that Miss Weeber
was the girl of the train, the indifference gave place to a satisfaction
that not even the girlish admission that she had solicited the
introduction could damp. He was extraordinarily pleased.
"I knew we should meet some time," he said. "It was written... But I
never pictured it like this. I have imagined you in an unconventional
setting with the veld for a background... illimitable space--a selfish
picture--with only you--and me..."
"And we meet in the heart of a crowd," she said, and smiled. She liked
the imaginative picture that he drew.
"Things are always different in life," he replied, "from what we would
have. But I'll not quarrel with the occasion; we will make the most of
it. Will you let me see your card?"
She handed it to him.
"It is almost empty," she explained. "We have only just arrived."
"That," he replied gravely, "is fortunate for me. I claim every waltz
you have left."
"Oh no?" she returned quickly. "I couldn't allow that."
"Then every other one," he said; and duly initialled the dances and
returned her her programme.
The quiet mastery of his manner, the assumption that what pleased him
would be equally agreeable to her, robbed her of the power to protest.
She was glad and yet discomfited at the number of dances he had claimed;
and she scribbled subsequent partners' names on the card herself, not
choosing that others should see those frequently recurring initials.
She was also a little apprehensive of what her mother would think if she
noticed, as she could scarcely fail to do, how often she danced with the
same man. But she would not have forgone one of those dances whatever
the penalty.
Lawless had acted on an impulse in initialling her programme as he had
done--a recurrence, even though slight, of the old midsummer madness.
She attracted him. She was not exactly pretty, but there was the charm
of youth in her favour, and an inexplicable something about her that
piqued his curiosity. Also the very obvious fact that she took a
romantic interest in him because of an old wound considerably amused
him. It was so distinctly feminine. How shall a world in which the
mothers of the nations love nothing better than the clash of arms enjoy
universal peace?
He recognised that the scar was the fundamental attraction. But for it
she would probably never have noticed him; because of it she singled him
out from among his fellows, and through it he lived daily in her memory,
figuring as greater than the race generally--a modern Achilles with the
vulnerable spot in the face. The thing became an obsession. Lawless
was conscious even while he danced with her of the fascination the scar
held for her; her eyes seldom strayed from it, and between the dances,
when he led her to the more secluded places for sitting out, she leant
back in her seat and watched it with undiminished interest, while he
fanned her and cynically wondered what she would make of the tale if he
told her the history of the scar...
Before the evening was very far advanced he did tell her its history--
with reservations. She asked for it, a little diffidently, a little
apologetically, but, as he felt, with an irresistible curiosity there
was no subduing.
"I want to know so badly," she said, colouring brightly. "I've wondered
about it ever since I saw you first... You must think it very rude of
me. ... Of course you've noticed me staring. It's abominable, but I
can't help it. It's such a grim souvenir--and splendid too in its way.
I've wanted to ask you about it a dozen times this evening, and I've
been afraid of annoying you. And yet, why should curiosity annoy when
it isn't unkind? ... I wish you'd tell me... Will you?"
"Better curb your curiosity. You will be disillusioned otherwise," he
replied. "It was about the most unromantic moment in my life when I
received that."
"Your life must have been very full of adventure," she answered with
simple and unconscious flattery.
He smiled grimly.
"It hasn't lacked experience of sorts," he admitted.
She looked up into his face, and her eyes were wonderfully soft, and big
with admiration. He was tempted to stoop and kiss the fresh, young,
slightly parted lips. He wondered whether she would resent it if he
did. But the inclination that moved him to take the liberty was hardly
strong enough to cause him to put it into effect.
"Won't you let me judge?" she asked presently.
"Judge what?" he said. He had forgotten for the moment the drift of the
conversation; his mind was intent upon her. Then he saw her eyes fasten
on the scar again, and, remembering her curiosity, laughed. "Oh, that!
... I was forgetting... There isn't much to tell, as a matter of fact.
It represents one lurid moment, and then a blank... I received that
slash over the jaw from one of my own Tommies--we were fighting on
opposite sides at the time... The only satisfaction I got out of it was
when later I learnt that the man next me had settled the reckoning for
me."
"Oh!" the girl whispered, and her soft eyes hardened. Behind the
hardness there lurked conflicting emotions of pity and horror. Naked
fact seemed so much grimmer, so much more significant of the hatred and
the actuality of war than her heroic imagining. She had drawn for
herself a splendid elaborated picture of dash and courage and the glory
of battle, and in a few words he had blotted her picture from the canvas
and set up in its place the rugged and brutal reality. But the reality,
though it hurt, was far more impressive, than her carefully
stage-managed adaptation.
"He deserved death," she said. "How dastardly to attempt to kill his
own officer! ... A deserter, too!"
"No, not a deserter," he contradicted quietly.
"But you said he was fighting on the opposite side!" She looked up at
him suddenly. "Was it during the Boer war?"
"Yes."
He played with her fan, which he was holding, opening and closing it
absently, bringing the sticks together with a little click. Then
abruptly he shut it with a snap and laid it back in her lap.
"There are necessarily two sides to every question, and generally much
to be said on both," he remarked in his sharp, incisive manner. "The
man who was fighting on the Boers' side had been dismissed the Service,
and I suppose, having the killing lust in him, he gave his services
where they were appreciated."
"That's treachery," she said.
He smiled at her cynically.
"I'd like your definition of treachery... I imagine you hold the
popular exaggerated ideal of man's duty to the State. Fine thinking is
all very well in theory, but put it to the test, and where are you? ...
This world is built for the practical, not for the sentimentalist. A
thousand years hence we may be sufficiently civilised to make the ideal
life possible. Then we shall be satisfied to recognise one another's
good qualities, instead of overlooking them in the eagerness of our
eternal search after the bad. But that will entail social and political
revolution--and the abolition of war."
"You say that!" she cried, catching on to the part of his speech which
she understood.--"You!--a soldier!"
"My only right to the title now is that of soldier of fortune," he
replied.
She looked a little surprised.
"Of course I knew you had left the Army," she said. "But once a soldier
always a soldier."
"On the principle that the leopard cannot change his spots!"
"I've only heard that applied to vicious tendencies," she said.
"Very true," he returned with a harshness of tone and manner that she
was puzzled to account for. "There is never any hope for the damned in
this world... When a man has been evil we see to it that we keep him
so."
Had it been possible for him to displease her, he knew that he would
have done so then. As it was, his sentiments disappointed her. She
could not understand, and therefore had no sympathy with, a cynical
outlook on life. And he was lacking in self-appreciation. She was a
type of womanhood who enjoys a heroic pose,--a type that is
unconsciously responsible for the braggart and the egotist. He was
perfectly aware that he might have made a fine story out of the scar
that appealed to her so powerfully, that he could have posed as a very
god in her eyes; but he was either lacking in conceit, or the desire to
stand high in her regard was not sufficiently strong to incline him to
be boastful. And the scar was one of the distinctions he was least
proud of. It marked the most gallingly unsuccessful period in a life
which, it seemed to him, had been one big futile promise. Few men had
had better chances, fewer still had been hedged about as he had been by
conflicting and destructive forces. His very temperament was opposed to
a successful career. And yet he had all the gifts--and he knew it--that
go towards the making of a successful man. He was bigger than the
majority, a man who even as a failure was bound to make his mark. But a
mental superiority only made him realise more certainly his inadequacy
in other respects. He chafed at the knowledge of wasted powers, the
perversion of ideas, and the lowering of talents to fit the altered
conditions of his life. Some men adapt themselves to evil fortune, but
to the man who realises his essential place in the scheme of things, to
be forced to take a position on a lower plane is humiliating to the
point of revolt. Time had accustomed Lawless to his downfall; but his
resignation was no reconciled submission, it was at best acceptance of
the irremediable.
The girl had risen at the conclusion of his trenchant speech, and stood,
holding her fan loosely in both hands, looking up at him in the dim rosy
glow of the Chinese lanterns. She wore white with a string of pearls
round the slender throat. Lawless, looking down at her, observed how
thin her shoulders were. The prettiest part of her neck was hidden--the
concession to youthful modesty.
"The band is playing the next dance," she said.
"Yes," he answered. But he did not move at once. "You are dancing it,
I suppose?"
She nodded. At the moment she wished that she had been less eager to
fill her card. He was sitting out most of the dances. She had watched
him hanging about doorways looking on with a slightly bored curiosity,
and once or twice she had passed him on her partner's arm seated alone
on the stoep. His aloofness appealed to her imagination. Everything in
connection with him interested her tremendously. She was even tempted
to skip the next dance, and trust to her partner not finding her in this
secluded and dimly lit place. It was not so much the knowledge that
such conduct was unworthy, as the fear that he might think less highly
of her, that kept her to her engagement.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I shall look forward to our next waltz."
She smiled up at him suddenly, and stooping deliberately he held her by
both arms and kissed her on the lips.
It had been an impulse, not an irresistible impulse; he had made no
effort at resistance. The red young lips appealed to him,--the girlish
homage appealed to him. She was altogether fresh and delightful. And
she did not resent his conduct. For a moment she drew back startled, a
little confused, a little undecided as to what she ought to do; the next
instant self-consciousness vanished; she was pathetically proud and
pleased and grateful that this hero of her imagination should feel
sufficiently kindly towards her to wish to kiss her. She remained quite
quiet under his hands, blushing, with eyes downcast, and a little
fleeting smile playing tenderly about her mouth. He removed his hands
from her shoulders, and offered her his arm.
"Your partner will be getting perfectly rabid," he said. "I suppose I
must take you back now to the madding crowd, kind little friend..."
Afterwards he wondered at himself. The thing was absurd... A girl in
her first season! It puzzled him to think what the attraction could be.
She was not even especially good-looking. A starving man is no
epicure, he told himself; and determined--but did not keep his resolve--
to leave the thing alone.