Lawless' stay in Cape Town was so much longer than he had expected that
he began to fear Tottie had not been so successful as her vanity had led
her to suppose. He looked daily for news of her; but she was no hand at
corresponding; until she had something definite to tell him he knew she
would not write.
In the end it was not a letter but a telegram that reached him. It had
been handed in at Ceres Road. Beyond this clue as to her whereabouts,
the contents told him little.
"_go to junction hotel kraaifontein find instructions there tottie_."
He hunted up the trains. There was nothing before the morning. He
packed a portmanteau in readiness, and sat down and wrote to Colonel
Grey.
"Dear Sir,--I have received my summons. Am off up the line to-morrow.
Junction Hotel, Kraaifontein, will find me. I will keep you informed as
to my movements.--Yours faithfully, H. Lawless."
"That will keep the old boy quiet for a time," he mused, and went out
and posted it himself.
On turning away from the pillar-box he came face to face with Denzil.
It was the first time they had met since the memorable occasion on the
veld, and it was evident from the expression on their faces that that
last occasion was in the minds of both. The present encounter sprang
upon them unawares. Denzil had known that Lawless was in Cape Town, he
had written to Van Bleit to inform him of the fact; but he had not
happened across him before. He would have felt infinitely happier had
he not happened across him then. Doubtless he remembered Lawless'
words, when, having him at a disadvantage, he had struck him with the
packet of letters across the face. He fervently wished he had refrained
from allowing his feelings to get the better of discretion in the hour
of triumph. Plainly, that hour no longer endured. It was not
inspiriting to meet fully the man whom, when his hands were bound, he
had struck in the face, and recall his words that one day when his hands
were free he would repay the insult.
He eyed the tall figure nervously, and quickened his steps. Lawless
glanced him over with a speculative eye. One blow from his fist would
have knocked him down. And he was sorely tempted to strike out, to
punish this miserable little cur who had dared to insult a better man
than himself. But it was against his policy to endanger his liberty at
that juncture; and to punish Denzil in the open street, with people
passing continually, and a policeman standing at the corner, was
courting arrest. And so he allowed his man to slip past him; but there
was in the keen grey eyes as they rested upon the foe such a look of
quiet prospective vengeance that, though he passed unmolested, Denzil
was not greatly reassured. It was a temporary let-off, he felt.
He hurried on, and Lawless pursued his way in an opposite direction.
The evening was all before him. He decided that with the uncertain
promise of rest the following night held, he would turn in early and
take all the sleep he could procure. He might be glad during the next
few days of a reserve to fall back upon. He returned to his hotel to
dine. Against the kerb before the entrance a motor-car was stationed.
It occurred to Lawless that he had seen the car before; but it was not
until he entered the hotel that he realised its being there concerned
him in any way. A messenger was waiting for him in the vestibule with a
note. He had been waiting some time, and seemed immeasurably relieved
when Lawless came in.
"It requires an answer, sir," he said, as he presented the note.
Lawless ripped open the envelope, and withdrawing the contents, glanced
his eye down the page.
"Very good," he said. "Tell Mrs Lawless I will be with her in about an
hour's time."
The messenger looked at him calculatingly.
"There's the car outside, sir. If you'd like it to wait--"
"I shouldn't," Lawless interrupted curtly.
He tipped the man and went to his room to dress. He wondered why she
should wish to see him, and recalled with an unaccountable irritation
what Julie Weeber had confided to him as the result of her unaided
observation. He had a natural antipathy towards scenes, and he disliked
above all things listening to a dissertation on his moral delinquencies.
When he had dined he hired a taxi and drove to Rondebosch. He told the
driver to wait for him, and went inside the garden and up the path to
the door. His visit was expected. The servant who admitted him helped
him out of the light overcoat he wore to cover his dress suit, and
conducted him to the drawing-room, where Mrs Lawless waited to receive
him, pacing restlessly up and down, up and down, her face white even in
the warm glow of the lights, and her eyes darkly luminous in their pale
setting.
She came to a halt when she heard his step in the hall, and took up a
book as though she would appear to occupy herself, but put it down again
with instinctive dislike towards posing. His step came nearer, she put
out a hand and grasped the back of a chair, gripping it tightly, her
nervousness painfully apparent in the trembling of her lips.
And then the door opened...
A sudden calm overspread her features at sight of him, her stiffened
attitude relaxed. The hand that had gripped the chair-back rested upon
it easily; the other, that hung clenched at her side, fell loosely open.
It seemed as though the appearance of this man for whom she had waited
in a state of great nervous excitement quieted her agitation, as though
his ready response to the summons that conflicting emotions had dictated
and held her back from sending before, brought relief. It was a very
composed and dignified woman that confronted Lawless' gaze, a woman
gowned simply in black, which suited her brilliant beauty, with a single
deep red rose at her breast where the slight opening revealed the
slender throat.
He advanced into the room and stood quite close to her, looking steadily
into the dark glowing eyes.
"I don't know whether this prompt response to your note is
inconvenient," he said. "But it was now or not at all. Had you left it
until to-morrow you would have missed me."
"You are leaving Cape Town again?" she asked... "When?"
"To-morrow morning."
"And where do you go?"
"Up the line," he answered... "Not very far."
She flushed quickly. Some instinct told her that he was going to rejoin
the companion in whose society he had left Cape Town before. A chilled
look came into her eyes. It seemed that whenever she held out a hand
across the distances that separated them a great wall of his making rose
between them to divide them more certainly than before. And he
invariably made her aware of this wall at the very outset, so that her
every effort during the difficult interviews between them was but an
ineffectual hurling of herself against this impassable barrier. She
moved from behind the chair and seated herself.
"I'm sorry," she said simply. "Won't you sit down?" He accepted the
invitation, and leaning back surveyed her with a thoughtful interest
that was critical rather than admiring, and intensely curious. She had
some purpose in sending for him, he supposed. He wondered, with a
slight impatience, why she distressed herself so unnecessarily. They
had come long ago to the parting of the ways,--it was a mistake to go
out of one's road in order that the paths should recross merely to
separate again.
"I had no idea you would be leaving--so soon," she said. "I wasn't
aware you were in Cape Town until I passed you that morning in the car."
"I had only just got back," he explained.
"Afterwards I was sorry--that I didn't stop," she went on slowly,
labouring somewhat over the sentences. "But--I was surprised. And I
felt a little diffident about asking you to come out... I knew you
would come, of course... That's why, perhaps."
"My only wonder is that you take the trouble," he returned. "Plainly,
you don't get any joy of it... And hasn't it ever occurred to you that
it's painful for me as well? My life hasn't been wholly without
regrets. You remind me of the old Inquisitorial system--continually
stretching a man on the rack for some imaginary good purpose. And you
rack yourself in the process... Where's the sense in it, anyway?"
"I have thought," she said,--"I have tried--"
She got up abruptly from her seat and turned her back on him and walked
slowly down the long room, and stood by the fireplace with her elbow on
the mantel and her face dropped on her hand. He remained seated where
he was, and leaning forward, his hands between his knees, watched her
with interest. She made a curiously striking and graceful picture,
standing there with her half-averted face, the warm lamp-light falling
on her black-robed figure. There was a restrained yet dramatic appeal
in her attitude that touched him, and in the long drooping line of neck
and shoulder as it was turned towards him was a suggestion of weakness
that commended itself to his masculine mind. She looked lonely, and
sad, he considered.
"I know what you thought," he said. "I know what you tried to do. It
was praiseworthy in many respects... But it was too late. If you would
fashion the clay into a goodly shape you should hasten to do so while it
is pliable. When once it is set you can only break it."
"You always make me feel," she said, without changing her position,
"that I am directly responsible for the waste of your life."
"I don't admit that my life stands for waste," he replied coldly.
She lifted her face, and turning it slightly looked steadily in his
direction.
"Perhaps," she said, "I am not qualified to judge. I only judge from
what I see--from what I know you might have done if only you had willed
it. And now--"
She looked away from him, and once more dropped her face upon her hand.
"Hugh," she said, and her voice was so low as to be scarcely louder than
a whisper, "I asked you to come here to-night, because I felt that there
was much in the past on my side that needed your forgiveness. I was
hard... I see that now... When you wanted sympathy I failed you. And
things happened to separate us. Perhaps it was less your fault than I
imagined. But--there are certain things a woman finds it difficult to
pardon."
"I have never blamed you," he interposed harshly.
He too got up, but he did not follow her. He stood leaning against one
of the windows with his back to the outer air.
"I have blamed myself," she answered gently,--"often."
"You would," he said. "You're made like that. You'd bow your back to
any burden you believed it to be your duty to bear. But you needn't
imagine it your especial mission to undertake any burden on my account.
I wish from the bottom of my soul you could bring yourself to forget my
existence."
"I can't do that," she answered... "I don't want to."
She moved from her position and came to a standstill in front of him
with her hands locked together in an attitude that was like a
supplication in the nervous entwining of her fingers.
"I want you to lead a life more worthy of yourself," she said...
"worthier of the man I knew and loved. Oh, my dear! if you only knew
how all these years you have been steadily breaking my heart... I can't
bear it... I can't bear it, that you should lead the life you are
leading... You are going back to that woman to-morrow... I know it.
Give her up, Hugh,--and this life of adventure,--for my sake--because I
ask it. Don't go to-morrow. I hate the thought of your going... Stay
here."
"Impossible," he answered with quiet decision. "I am pledged. I must
go. I have no choice in the matter."
Her hands fell apart. She made a quick, almost a despairing gesture.
"And do I count for nothing in your life?" she asked passionately. "You
loved me once... in the years that are past--when you were younger. And
I was young too--a girl. Ah! life, life! How full of promise it seems,
and how each successive year fades and dims that promise! You were a
king among men to me then... And now--you lead the life of a common
adventurer, following reckless and dangerous enterprises, and enjoying
your idle moments after the manner of a loose liver. Oh! my God! need
this thing be? ... Why will you wantonly subjugate all that is fine in
your nature? It was those finer qualities in you that I loved, and you
are deliberately killing them."
Lawless had drawn himself instinctively straighter under the shower of
words. He looked at her with hard, unresponsive eyes.
"I have no use for that kind of love," he said coldly. "It is of no
human value. To love the imaginary saint in a man is not going to help
the man when you make the inevitable discovery that the saint isn't
there. If love is to be of any use it must be for the sinner as well."
He went nearer to her, and laughed harshly when he observed how she drew
back involuntarily from his advance.
"When you can bring yourself," he said, "to suffer my touch without
flinching; when you can feel glad for my lips to rest upon yours without
consideration for where last they may have rested; when you can love me
for myself--as I am--as you know me, a common adventurer, a profligate,
then we may wipe out the intervening years... not before."
She was silent for a while after he had finished; and he knew that she
was considering what he had uttered with such brutal frankness, weighing
it in her mind.
Presently she said, moistening her dry lips before speaking:
"Will you promise not to go to-morrow? ... to break with the old life
finally?"
"Bargain for bargain," he returned cynically. "You can't give freely,
you see."
His face hardened, became more resolute.
"I can't do what you ask... It is out of the question. I am pledged
irrevocably--promised. I can't draw back."
She moved away with a gesture of bitterness, and with her back towards
him, stood, a reluctant tragic figure, with one hand on the back of the
chair where she had stood when he entered.
"It is always the same," she whispered... "Always the same. Your
desires--the desire of the moment, first. I don't believe you ever
loved me, though at one time you professed so much."
"At least, I did not love an ideal," he answered. "I loved the flesh
and blood that is you."
She turned her head slowly and looked at him.
"That is it," she answered bitterly... "The flesh and blood! ... The
fairness of the flesh... All that the flesh means you care for."
"Oh! I'm materialistic," he admitted. "I've no fancy for falling in
love with a dream."
He followed her, and took up his position again close to her, with his
hands behind him, looking steadily into her eyes.
"Until I met you," he said, "I never realised how closely allied vice
and virtue are. You are so very virtuous that to knock up against your
purity flings a man back on himself and inclines him to the other
extreme. I've always looked on intolerance as a vice. ... You are
intolerant--most good people are. If only intolerance realised the
amount of evil it is directly responsible for! But you'll wonder at my
impertinence in preaching to you... Indeed, I wonder at myself."
"Go on," she said hoarsely. "Perhaps--when you are gone--I shall
remember."
"Good Lord!" he cried. "I don't want you to remember. Put me out of
your thoughts altogether."
"Ah! if we could command our thoughts," she said.
His face suddenly lost its hard look, a kinder light came into the keen
eyes. For a brief moment he rested a hand on the chair-back beside
hers, then, recollecting, as suddenly removed it.
"When I go out of this room to-night," he said, "I go out of your life
finally. If you send for me again, I shall not obey the summons. God
knows, I have injured you enough... The least that I can do is to help
you to forget. This raking among the ashes is unprofitable. You can't
step down from your pedestal. I can't stand with you on the heights.
We look at life from different points of view, at different elevations.
You see things from a height that obscures your perspective; I look upon
life from a lower level, and behold its naked realities. What seems to
me natural, you would regard as gross. It is one of the essential
differences--only exaggerated--between man and woman. I can't see the
use in reviving through these unsatisfactory meetings all the stresses
we lived through in the past... I'll keep out of Cape Town as much as
possible, and when my job here is ended I'll leave the country."
"There is no need for that," she replied in so low a voice that he only
just heard what she said. "I came out because I knew you were out here.
I wanted to see you. Now that I have seen you I shall go Home."
She looked at him quite calmly and held out her hand.
"Good-bye," she said, that was all.
He felt grateful to her after he had left that she had spared him a more
emotional scene. Could he have looked back into the room when he was
speeding towards Cape Town he would have known that the emotion had
merely been held in check.