"Time was I coveted the woes they rued
Whose love commemorates them,--I that meant
To get like grace of love then!--and intent
To win as they had done love's plenitude,
Rapture and havoc, vauntingly I sued
That love like theirs might make a toy of me,
At will caressed, at will (if publicly)
Demolished, as Love found or found not good.
"To-day I am no longer overbrave.
I have a fever,--I that always knew
This hour was certain!--and am too weak to rave,
Too tired to seek (as later I must do)
Tried remedies--time, manhood and the grave--
To drug, abate and banish love of you."
ALLEN ROSSITER. _A Fragment_.
I
When Patricia and Charteris had left the beach, Colonel Musgrave parted
the underbrush and stepped down upon the sand He must have air--air and
an open place wherein to fight this out.
Night had risen about him in bland emptiness. There were no stars
overhead, but a patient, wearied, ancient moon pushed through the
clouds. The trees and the river conferred with one another doubtfully.
He paced up and down the beach....
Musgrave laughed in the darkness. His heart was racing, racing in him,
and his thoughts were blown foam. He raised his hat and bowed
fantastically in the darkness, because the colonel loved his gesture.
"Signor Lucifer, I present my compliments. You have discoursed with me
very plausibly. I honor your cunning, signor, but if you are indeed a
gentleman, as I have always heard, you will now withdraw and permit me
to regard the matter from a standpoint other than my own. For the others
are weak, signor; as you have doubtless discovered, good women and bad
men are the weakest of their sex. I am the strongest among them, for all
that I am no Hercules; and the outcome of this matter must rest with
me."
So he sat presently upon the log, where Charteris had sat when Musgrave
came to this beach at sunset. Very long ago that seemed now. For now the
colonel was tired--physically outworn, it seemed to him, as if after
prolonged exertion--and now the moon looked down upon him, passionless,
cold, inexorable, and seemed to await the colonel's decision.
And it was woefully hard to come to any decision. For, as you know by
this, it was the colonel's besetting infirmity to shrink from making
changes; instinctively he balked--under shelter of whatever
grandiloquent excuse--against commission of any action which would alter
his relations with accustomed circumstances or persons. To guide events
was never his forte, as he forlornly knew; and here he was condemned
perforce to play that uncongenial rôle, with slender chances of reward.
Yet always Anne's face floated in the darkness. Always Anne's voice
whispered through the lisping of the beeches, through the murmur of the
water....
He sat thus for a long while.