It was that risk, a risk of which she guessed so little, which overshadowed the three days which had been added to Caragh's sojourn at Ballindra, and which settled, black and heavy, on his reflections when she waved him a farewell.
Lettice had driven him the bleak ten miles to the dreary little station which lay like a great gray stone upon the stony fields, and he had resigned himself to eight hours of Irish travel and his thoughts, doubting of which he would be the rather rid.
The announcement of a man's affection for a woman is regarded, to-day at least, dynamically. It is supposed to put things in motion; and it is left, very reasonably, for the man to explain what.
Maurice recognized the obligation; but he asked a breathing space in which to adjust the machinery. There was a good deal to be arranged, he said. There was considerably more than could be told a bride. His affairs, he explained, entangled by the provisions of his father's will, were beginning to adjust themselves. But his income for the present was provisional, and till certain securities had been realized and charges paid—things which could not be hurried—he would hardly know how he stood, not definitely enough, at any rate, to speak of settlements.
Lettice made a mouth at that.
"I know," he said, as he softened its displeasure, "but there's your brother!"—he was her guardian and the sole trustee of her small possessions. "I can take a shot at his first question."
"Oh, so can I," she sighed. "But when will you be able to answer it?"
"Say in six months," he suggested. "Can you have all that patience?"
She nodded, and so, quite honestly, Caragh obtained his respite; though the arrangements for which he needed it were not entirely financial.
It was, curiously enough, the very honesty of the transaction which troubled his Celtic mind as he travelled eastward.
Since he had to hide from her the real necessity for postponement, he would have preferred to hide it behind the responsible audacity of a lie; behind something for which he could feel manfully and contritely accountable.
Deception was least endurable which did not compromise the deceiver. He hated the hedging truth.
He hated more things that morning than he often took the trouble even to think about, and they were mostly phases of himself. He was conscious too, as the train rolled across the weary strapwork of stonewalled fields, of a new sensation. He felt to have left a part of himself in Ballindra, fastened there securely, yet tied to him still by a thread that seemed drawn out of him, as the weaving filament from a spider's body, which, far or fast as he might travel, he could not break. It would hold him and bring him back.
The part which he had left there was the pledge he had given, the word of his honour; a word which had been a lie at best: yet no true oath that he had ever sworn had seemed to have half its sanctity. It was her belief that made it sacred and more binding than the truth.
The proud way she wore this mock jewel, as though it were a priceless stone, shut for ever the giver's lips upon its value.
If he had once loved her he might have faced her without disgrace in the day his love had died, but there was no grace left him now but his deception. That, henceforth, was to be the high thing, the stimulating fineness of his life; and, curiously enough, it woke in him a determination, manful and tender, which no real passion of the past had been able to arouse.
It woke too, though from less tranquil slumbers, the remembrance of his mutations, the grieved conviction of instability. He, least of all men, should furnish a socket for the lamp of constancy. Of what impression, he asked himself mournfully, had he ever kept the print. It was odious, contemptible. He was sick of his inconstancy; it took the exalting seriousness from life.
But though for his fickleness he blamed no one but himself, he realized that it had been aided by his somewhat unfortunate predilections. None of the women whose fascination he had acknowledged could be considered an inspiration to stability. The very colour of their charm had a chameleon quality and his appreciation was, too often, for its susceptive changes.
Yet, had he met, so at least he told himself, some sober-sweet demand upon his constancy, he believed that, in conduct at any rate, he could have sustained it.
Well, the demand had now been made, and if he had not faced it with any furious gratitude, here was in him a humble determination to realize for one woman at least her conception of a man. That resolve had stiffened him into something approaching a romantic attitude on that fairy beach in the first shock of his unlooked-for conquest, and it sustained him now, more or less, while during the slow dull journey he reflected soberly as a conqueror on the administration of his new possession.
There was a good deal to be thought of; a good deal about him that would have to go. Economies to be effected, not in expenditure only—that was a small matter—but in life. And in life it had pleased him hitherto to be just a little extravagant. He had wasted it generously, for others as heedlessly as for himself. He had done nothing, as he was so often, so importantly reminded; but then, in a happier sense, he had done everything.
Done it with a simplicity, a gaiety, a frugality even; since, after all, it was the evanescent, the immaterial things he cared for; the goods that are never marked in plain figures and only paid for in life.
Well, there would be an end to that sort of payment, save such as went into his wife's pocket. She seemed, poor pretty thing, to swell and spread, ogreishly, between him and—if he must confess it—his most alluring interests.
Her warding arms shut out the enchantment of all the charming women in the world.
Truly, he reflected, in the matter of a woman's value, the man who, with an income just sufficient for himself, sought her hand in marriage, must seem the most determined optimist under the sun.
Yet he felt anything but an optimist when the darkness of the night gave place to white clouds of steam above the rocking oily blackness of harbour water, and he dragged himself stiff and tired from his ill-lit carriage into the blanching glare of Kingston jetty.
Caragh found at his rooms, when he arrived in London, in the forefront of his correspondence, a letter and a telegram.
Both were from Lady Ethel Vernon, and had an appositeness with which their recipient could very readily have dispensed.
They had been propped against a photograph of the sender, a coincidence not remarkable considering the number of her likenesses which the room held.
These agreed in the presentment of a woman, dark and slight, with a finely carried head, deep eyes that might be passionate, and a mouth that knew something of disdain.
Caragh took up one of the portraits when he had read his letter, looked at it along while without expression, and set it down again. The letter, which bore a foreign postmark and was some days old, spoke to the writer's probable departure with her husband for Budapest, where the latter, who had been an under secretary, wished to study some question of religious politics which was to come before the House of Deputies.
It groaned at the necessity of such a sojourn at such a season, and suggested, if a hint so imperious could be called suggestion, that Maurice Caragh's presence might be required in the Hungarian capital. The telegram merely added that it was.
Caragh picked up an English Bradshaw, and after turning its pages absently for five minutes in search of continental routes, realized the inadequacy of the volume, took up his hat, and went out.
Piccadilly dozed in the September sun, with a strange air of tired quietness, inert and listless as a weary being.
A stale warm haze of sunlight filled the air, silent, unstirred, that made a misty thickness in the plumage of the trees, while from some by-street were blown pale vapours with the smoky reek of bitumen, which told of autumn's leisurely repairs.
The dust on the roadway rose about the spray of a water-cart, and beyond it rumbled a solitary bus. On the park-stand waited, driverless, a worn four-wheeler, its horse asleep; and, here and there along the forsaken pavement, desultory figures, which the season never saw there, came and went.
Caragh, on the doorstep of his club, inhaled gratefully the dormant air, which sank like an opiate into the senses. How happy if those for whose pleasure this highway rang, worn and sleepless, during the hours of June, could only imitate in their recessions the soothing passiveness of its repose.
But the reflection led him to the banks of the Danube, and so, by the Orient express, indoors. There he lunched, looked out his train, worked through his letters, and went out into the dozing afternoon.
If he had ever been before in London during its first September days he felt he had been there to no purpose. He had missed it all. The silence, the sense of space, the strange exhausted air, the curious people moving aimlessly about, like the queer creatures that sometimes take possession of a deserted warren.
He strolled vaguely through the deserted streets, out of which suddenly the inhabitants had sunk as water through a sieve. A housemaid's laughing challenge from a doorway to the grocer's boy rang round an empty square. A lean cat went softly along the pavement, yet one could hear the fall of her pads. Everywhere blinds were drawn behind the windows. The place was in mourning for a people that died annually, like seedling flowers.
Caragh drifted from street to street, amused, philosophic, in that oblivion to his own before and after of which he was so profusely capable.
When he was tired he returned to the club. Then he remembered; and, after deciding regretfully against the adequateness of a telegram, wrote four pages of penitent affection, which he hoped might read more exhilarating in Ballindra than he could pretend to find them.
With their execution his consciousness quickened, and he spent a melancholy evening at the play. Two days later he was in Vienna.
"Here!" cried Harry Vernon, tossing his wife a telegram he had just opened, "this is meant for you. Caragh's coming on from Komarom by raft."
"Byraft?" exclaimed the lady as she caught the envelope. "What's that?"
"One of those crawling timber things you see going by," replied Vernon, gazing meditatively across the river; "it's rather the sort of thing one imagines Caragh would do: invests him with the charm of the unexpected."
His wife was frowning as she read the message.
"What does he mean by such a piece of fooling," she said petulantly, "when he knows I'm here alone!"
"Never having been married, he probably thinks there's me," suggested her husband blandly.
"Well, there's you and about twenty ill-dressed Germans who can't even speak their own language, or no one; mostly no one. It's not amusing in a place like this. When will he be here?"
Harry Vernon put his finger on the bell. "We'll find out," he said.
But they did not. The combined intelligence of the hotel was unequal to coping with the ways of a timber raft; it made obliging guesses, tranquilly ridiculous, as a concession to good manners, which, with easy indifference to distance, endowed Caragh's new mode of motion with any rate of progress between that of a perambulator and of an express train.
Ethel Vernon bit her lip as her husband drew out, with huge relish, in his profuse execrable German the ambagious ignorance of the hotel staff.
"Well," he laughed, as the last witness withdrew, "it seems you may expect Caragh any moment from lunch-time until this day month. If only these good people had named an hour at which he couldn't possibly turn up we should have known when to look for him."
"He may come when he pleases," said his wife indifferently.
"It's a way he has," remarked the other, smiling.
Lady Ethel determined before his arrival to see everything in the city which Caragh might wish to show her.
The effort would bore her considerably, but she hoped for some compensation from his chagrin. The city was, however, for the following days, almost obliterated by pelting rain.
But even that brought a measure of consolation. Ethel sat at her window, and watched the green river grow turbid and swollen under the streaming skies.
"I hope he likes his raft," she murmured grimly.
But it was her husband who on that aspiration had the first news. He had paid a visit to Vacz, and meant to return by water. On the pier he found Caragh, whose curiosity in raft travel was satisfied, and who yearned for dry clothes. They travelled by the same boat, and Maurice explained that his adventure dated back many years in design, which a chance meeting with a timber merchant at Gyor enabled him to execute. He gave an account of the raft-men, their hardihood, humour, and riparian morality.
"I see," said Vernon, amused and interested. "Pity it's not the sort of thing that appeals to a woman!"
Caragh looked at him doubtfully.
"I suppose it's not," he said.
"I mean as a reason for having kept her waiting," Vernon continued.
"Must think of something else," soliloquized the other dolefully.
Vernon laughed.
"There's always that happy alternative for a Celt. Oh, by the way," he cried, with sudden remembrance, "how's the lady?"
"Which lady?" Caragh enquired.
"The lady you're going to marry in that green isle of yours. We heard of her from Miss Persse, who'd been staying over there, at Bally—something or other."
"Miss Nevern?" Caragh suggested absently, looking across the river; he was not a man very easy to surprise.
"That's the name!" said Vernon. "When does it come off?"
"I'm afraid you'll have to ask Miss Persse," replied the other slowly; "I'm not in her confidence."
"Well, I'm sorry," the politician said. "I hoped you were going to settle down and lead an honest life."
"I've kept out of prison—and Parliament, so far," replied Caragh thoughtfully.
"Your things turned up all right, and I took a room for them," Vernon explained, as they landed at the Ferencz Jozsef Quay and went up to the hotel. "The place is so full over this religious Bill that it's hard to get in anywhere."
He went up with Caragh to see if the right room had been reserved.
"We're dining down below at seven; everything's early here. Kapitany is coming, the leader of the opposition in the Magnates."
Caragh got out of his wet things in which he had lived during the two days of rain, took a bath, and dressed. There were still two hours to dinner, and he debated for a moment if he should go in search of Ethel Vernon. Something in his remembrance of her husband's smile, however, seemed to deprecate hurry, and he was aware that the man who knew not how to wait came only to the things he had not wanted.
As he doubted what to do, he remembered vividly where he was. While he loitered, under an apricot twilight the Váczi-utcza was becoming silvered with its thousand lamps.
At that hour the brilliant merry little street would be filling, between its walls of blazing windows, across the breadth of its asphalte road, with a stream of men and women; men of fine carriage and women with splendid eyes; laughing, chattering, flaunting, flirting, strolling idly to and fro.
He would sit there again, as he had sat so often, to sip his coffee and watch the crowd.
On his way a postman, running into him, gave a fresh jolt to his memory.
There would be a letter awaiting him from Lettice! He paused a moment, mentally to locate the post-office, and to taste the curious sedate pleasure the anticipation brought. It was the first letter he had received from her, and the first of such a kind that had ever come to him from any woman. He found it in the big busy building behind the Laktanya, and, slipping it into his pocket, turned back to the gay Váczi-utcza, already filled with a piercing ineffectual whiteness under the clear rose and amethyst of the evening sky.
There, with a green tumbler before him, in a kavehaz much patronized of the garrison, he sat and read his letter, looking out absently between its sentences at the lighted faces in the street.
It was a shy sweet formal little note, not lavish of endearment, less so even than her lips had been, and with something evasive and unaccustomed about it which touched Caragh, like the shrinking of a child's hand from an unfamiliar texture.
He had completely forgotten her existence half an hour earlier, yet he was surprised to find how tenderly he thought of her, when he thought of her at all. Women, before now, had often filled his thoughts to an aching tension; he had read their letters with a leaping pulse; but he had felt for none of them as he did for this frank girl, who escaped so easily from his remembrance and had never warmed his blood.
He bought a basket of saffron roses on his way back and sent it up to Ethel Vernon. She was sitting at table when he came down to dinner, talking volubly across it to a ruddy white-haired old gentleman with a soldier's face and shoulders. She greeted him with charming animation, introduced him to Kapitany, mentioned his adventure, and wove his tongue at once into their talk. Fine manners and the tact of entertainment were traditions in her family since there had been an earldom of Dalguise, and the famous Hungarian, noting the adroitness with which she piloted Caragh's ethical opinions into the traffic of politics, thought her a very clever woman, and him a very fortunate young man.
With his own good fortune Caragh was less impressed. He had not expected that his roses would be worn, but he wished that a frock had not been selected which seemed so much to miss them.
He knew Ethel Vernon well enough to make out the meaning of her primrose and heliotrope, and she, alas! knew him well enough to be certain that he could not miss it. The delicacy of his perception had supplied her before with forms of punishment, which she used on him the more deliberately since no one else of her acquaintance was hurt by them at all. Her courtesy, which so appealed to Kapitany, seemed to Caragh like a frozen forceps feeling for his nerves. They were both of them beyond the use of courtesies, which may lead back along the road of friendship as far, and faster, than they have led forward. Her affability seemed that night to thrust Caragh back to the days spent in fascinated speculation on the advice in Ethel Vernon's eyes. He had taken it, or supposed he had taken it, in the end, and for nearly three years now she had stood for everything of woman's interest and adjustment in his life. That, for him, was a considerable stretch of constancy, for which however he took no credit. It was due, as he had once suggested, to her bewildering inconstancy to herself, which produced in her captive a sense of attachment to half a dozen women.
Her inconstancy in those three years had not, it was true, been confined altogether to herself. She had forsaken her own high places more than once or twice to follow strange gods. There were certain astounding admirations to her account for men whom Caragh found intolerable.
She found them so herself after a brief experience, and always returned to him more charming for her mistakes, with the wry face of a child who comes from some unprofitable misdemeanour to be scolded and consoled.
So, with mutual concessions and disillusionment, their alliance—never worse than indiscreet—took the shape of a serene affection. On her part somewhat appropriative, and touched perhaps on his with sentiment; yet, in the main, that rare arrangement between man and woman, a loyal and tender comradeship.
Caragh had, in consequence, cause to feel embarrassed by the news he carried.
Projects for his marriage had often made a jest between them, but neither had ever taken the idea seriously, and its development would come to her, as he knew, with all the baseness of a betrayal.
His sense of the cruelty of what he had to tell her endued him with a strange numbness and indifference to the fashion in which during dinner her hurt pride stabbed at him under the caresses of her manner. Beside her just resentment, this irritation because he had dared to keep her waiting seemed not to matter. He was so sorry for all she was to suffer because of him, that no lesser feeling seemed to count. He listened to Vernon's politics, to Kapitany's eulogy offogash, but he was thinking only of what he had to say.
After dinner the Hungarian carried Vernon off to the club, and his hostess offered to keep Caragh until her husband's return.
He followed her upstairs to her sitting-room, and out on to a little balcony which overlooked the Danube.
The night had in it still the soft warmth of the September day, but the sky was dyed with violet, in which the stars were growing white. The river swept beneath them in a leaden humming flood, and beyond it the Castle and Hill of Buda stood black among the stars.
Ethel dropped into a low cane chair, and Caragh, seated upon the balustrade, took a long look at the darkening air before he turned and spoke to her.
He knew that an explanation was expected of him, reasonable, but not so reasonable as to evade reproaches; and an apology, not humble enough to be beneath reproof. He tendered both; and if they left his censor with quite false impressions, that, he reflected ruefully, came of the perverse requirements of a woman's mind.
Looking down at her lifted face below him, pale under the purple heaven as though penetrated by the night, and still estranged, despite his pleading, over so trumpery a cause, he wondered how much, because of her beauty, woman had lost in understanding.
Beauty Ethel Vernon had in its most provoking, most illusive form. It came and went like the scent of a flower, left her passive and unpersuading, or lit her radiantly as a kindled lamp.
Even the shape of her spread skirts in the chair beneath him had in its vagueness something, some soft glow of sense, which made it expressive, and which made it hers. And he was anxious for peace, for peace at any price, from such a needless strife. What he had to tell her would be hard enough any way; but it was, at all events, something with the dignity of fate. He could not speak of it while fighting this little foolish fit of outraged pride, and he would not speak of it while his tidings might seem to be touched with the malice of his punishment. For one moment he was tempted to let this idle quarrel grow into a cause of rupture—so easy with an offended woman—and thus be spared speech at all. It would be easier, more considerate for her, inclination told him, and ah! so acceptably easier and more considerate for himself. But the temptation was not for long. In all his unprofitable vacillations he had shirked nothing to which he had set his name. The only chance to get square with folly was, he knew, by paying the price of it, and the one gain possible in this worst of his blunders seemed to be its pain. He would go through with that.
Yet, though he had his chance that evening, had it thrust upon him, he did not take it. There is a limit even to one's appetite for pain.
But he made peace, having swallowed his scolding and admitted that the ways of men were mad. The talk turned to easier topics, and he looked with less apprehension at the silken shadow in the chair.
Then, with a sudden air of remembrance, Ethel put the question which had clung for hours to the end of her tongue.
"Oh! by the way, am I to congratulate you?"
"Well, I don't know," he said. "About what?"
"Oh, that's absurd!" she exclaimed with a nervous laugh: "Isn't there a Miss Nevin?"
"Two or three, I daresay," he conceded.
"Miss Persse only mentioned one," she said, looking keenly at the dark silhouette of his figure perched on the iron trellis among the stars. "But she wrote that you could tell us a good deal abouther."
"I can," he allowed serenely; "she's a charming creature."
"Sufficiently charming to be charmed by you?"
"So I flatter myself," he said. "I don't know even that I wouldn't put it—to be charmedonlyby me."
"Ah, that's too superlative," she sighed derisively.
"To be said of any woman? Possibly! You're a woman and you ought to know," he reflected. "But she's the sort of woman one says rather more of than one ought."
"And rather more to than one ought."
"Well, yes, perhaps. One forgets, of course; but I fancy I must have said a good deal."
"She could listen to a good deal, no doubt," said Ethel Vernon slowly.
"She could listen absorbingly," he replied with ardour.
"And you said all you knew?"
"Heaven pity a poor woman! no! You forget my attainments. I said all that I was hopelessly ignorant of. That proved infinitely more attractive."
"I daresay it did," she agreed shortly. "Your ignorance of what you shouldn't say to a woman is past belief."
"I don't think it passed hers," he said pensively. "She hasn't your capacity for distrust."
"She'll acquire it," returned the other drily. "And what do you do in that sort of place? I heard you sailed with her."
"I sailed with her, I sat with her, I supped with her! The brother was obligingly occupied, and preoccupied, with the estate—which yields about half what it costs him—and so she had to look after me."
"Which wasn't difficult?"
"Simplicity itself," he smiled. "She had to look such a very little way; I was never out of her sight."
"Idyllic!"
"It was. We sailed from the hour the mists lifted till the moon rose to show us home. Or we sat together on little beaches with only the wide seas in sight."
"Where she made love to you?"
"Where she made love to me. On a strand of fairy shells, with a sapphire pool beside us and her little arm about my neck."
Ethel Vernon laughed. "You're about the only man I know who would have told her to remove it."
"I didn't tell her to remove it. I abandoned myself to the situation. You didn't ask, by the way, if she were pretty."
"No, I heard that you had stayed there for a fortnight."
Caragh chuckled. "A very sage deduction," he replied. "Well, she is pretty, though you mightn't think so. It's the sort of prettiness that tempts you in."
"That tempts you in?" she questioned irritably.
"Yes, tempts you in to the character. Like a lamp by the window of a cosy room. Makes you want to go in, and loll in a chair, and look at the pictures—there are pictures—and feel comfortably and gratefully at home. There's a kind of beauty, you know, to which one says, 'Yes, very charming; but, for heaven's sake, let's stay outside!'"
"But you didn't stay outside Miss Nevin's?" Ethel Vernon asked.
"Miss Nevern's," he corrected. "No, as I've told you, I went in, and walked round, and wondered how she had kept it so unspoiled. Most girls' minds are pasted over with appalling chromos of the emotions, as painted in fiction; and there's a stale taint of some one else's experience in everything they do and say; a precocious air of having been vicariously there before. It's quite stimulating to come across a woman who is fresh to what she feels."
"Like the beautiful Miss Nevern! And how did it end?"
"Oh, howdoesit end?" he said with a sigh. "We vowed the endless everythings, and kissed, and parted. And here I am in Budapest!"
The lady in the chair looked up at him for some seconds with a slow smile upon her lips. "I wonder when you're going to be too old," she murmured, "to talk nonsense?"
"Oh, it wasn't nonsense," he answered mournfully.
She began some question as to his journey, but he checked it with a lifted finger and a sudden "Hush!"
She could only hear the dull rush of the river and the waning rumble of the town. Then above these floated, blown soft and faint as a thistle-seed against their faces, a bugle note from the black Castle of Buda across the stream.
A wailing cadence, twice repeated, and then the long melancholy call, with all its intricate phrases delicately clear, now that their ears were adjusted to the thread of sound, ending as it had opened with the falling cadence which left a last low mournful note upon the air.
"What is it?" she enquired as the sound faded.
"Last Post," he answered. "Wait!"
The gurgle of the river rose again, and the feebler murmur of the streets rejoined it. Then the call came once more; came with buoyant clearness through the blue night air, straight across the water.
The noises of the city seemed to cease, as though all stood listening to that fluting sweetness, and, when its last plaintive challenge died away, the slender echoes of other bugles could be heard repeating it to the distant barracks beyond the hill.
Long after the last was silent Caragh still stared out over the river at the girdle of lights along its further shore and the scattered tapers which burned beyond it up the Castle slope into the sky.
"That seems to impress you very much," said Ethel Vernon presently.
"It does impress me," he replied. "It doesn't seem to belong there."
He did not say why. It was seldom worth while to submit to a woman any sentiment that was unestablished. Convention was the passport to her understanding. But what, he wondered, had soldiers in common with that cry of the spent day? How were their blatant showy lives related to the impotent patience of its despair? It was as if some noisy roisterer had breathed a Nunc Dimittis.
But he only explained, when she pressed for his reason, that the call did not sound to him sufficiently truculent for a soldier's good-night.
He whistled its English equivalent. "That's more like it," he exclaimed. "The man who sleeps on that will sleep too deep to dream of anything but love, and blood, and beer."
They talked on under the stars till Harry Vernon stumbled out on to the balcony from the darkness of the room, and began at once an energetic account of his evening at the Casino. He never consulted the interest of his hearers, but his voluble information generally made his interest theirs. He was to inspect, on the morrow, more than most men would have cared to look at in a week, and he was certain to see it all with the weighty sense of responsibility to his country which only an under secretary can acquire. He apologized to his wife for leaving her introduction to the city with one as incompetent as Caragh to do it justice.
"He probably knows it a great deal better than you ever will," she laughed.
"He probably does," replied her husband with a grin, "but the parts he knows best he won't be able to show you."
Caragh threw a cushion at the speaker's head as he turned to say good-night to his wife.
He went downstairs, and out on to the quay, turning southward along the river towards the Fövámház.
For a foreigner he knew Pest well, but his knowledge only led him now by its loneliest avenue. He stood for a long while, his back to the empty market-place—which glowed by day with the red and orange of autumn ripeness—his elbows on the broad stone embankment, gazing out across the swirling river on which the starlight slid and shivered in darting streaks of gold.
He hated himself for what had taken place that evening, as he had often with equal reason hated himself before.
Somehow he seemed to lack the personal seriousness which saved men from treating their own affairs with the humorous tolerance which they extended to their neighbours! Life appeared to him the same comic spectacle from whatever point one saw it. Fate was often just as funny when it killed as when it crowned you, and however intimately they might annoy him, he never could keep back a laugh at its queer ways.
It was Fate's whim at present to make him look like a scoundrel by a deed that was probably as decent as any he would ever do, and the irony of his ill-luck so tickled him that, in laughing at it, he had become really abominable.
A sentimentalist with a sense of humour cut, as he could see, a very poor figure; it were better, so far as appearances went, to be a pompous fool.
Self-esteem is so widespread a virtue that the world, whatever it may say, is always impressed even by ridiculous dignity, and its one universally unconvincing spectacle is the man laughing at himself. Besides, when a man finds himself absurd, what is he likely to think imposing?
Yet, for all his humour, Caragh sighed. For the moment, as on many previous moments, he craved the solemn personal point of view to make life seem for once of some importance and give him a taste of undiluted tears.
His reflections were interrupted by something rubbing against his leg.
It proved to be a little white dog, and he addressed some whimsical advice to it about the time of night before looking out again upon the river. But as the animal made no sign of movement, but merely shivered against his ankle, he lifted it up and set it on the parapet before him.
From an inspection there he found it to be all but starved, with just strength enough to stand.
He was indifferent to dogs, and felt that the wisest course, as he explained to it, would be to drop the trembling creature into the water and out of a world that had used it so ill.
But he was very far from indifferent to the waif-like loneliness that gazed at him from its eyes, and, tucking it resignedly under his wrap, he turned back to the hotel.
He spent an hour there, feeding it with some biscuits that remained from his raft journey, soaked in whisky and water, and then, since the little thing refused to rest but on the bed, he made the best of its odorous presence beside him, and only cursed his own soft-heartedness when waked occasionally by its tongue.
On the morrow he began to show Ethel Vernon the city, and for two days she was too interested and fatigued to find fault with him. She had discovered the terrier, and enthusiastically adopted it, to Caragh's relief, being as devoted to dogs as he was apathetic.
But on the third evening, when they were sitting again together upon the balcony after a quiet afternoon, she spoke her disappointment.
The night was as splendidly blue as it had been when they sat there before; and she, dressed in black, with blue-black sequins woven over her bodice and scattered upon her skirt, looked to be robed in some dark cluster of starlight in her corner of the balcony.
They had been talking of matters in which neither took much interest; then after a long pause she said quietly, "Why are you so different?"
"I?" he exclaimed.
"Oh, please don't pretend," she sighed. "What is it?"
"I told you," he said doggedly, "the other night."
"The other night?" she repeated. "What, when we were here?"
"Yes," he said.
She reflected for a moment. "About that girl, the one in Ireland? Do you mean that?"
"I do," he said.
"Do you mean it was true?" she asked with increasing tenseness.
"Quite true," he said.
"But you were laughing," she protested incredulously. "I took it for a joke."
"I'm always laughing," he said grimly; "but I wish I hadn't been then. It was so serious that I couldn't be. But it's no good explaining that; you can't understand."
Her mind was set on something different—on something to her of more moment than a man's absurd reasons for being trivial. It was some time before she spoke.
"You asked her to marry you?" she pondered slowly, only half in question, as though scarcely able to realize what he had done.
"I did," he said; "how else should we be engaged?"
"Oh, dozens of ways," she answered: "she might have asked you."
"Well, she didn't," he said stoutly.
"I wonder if you know," she mused; "men don't. And did you want to marry her?"
"Would I have asked her otherwise?" he demanded.
"Oh, yes," she sighed; "very possibly. Men often propose because they can think of nothing else to say. And have you wanted to be married long?"
"What do you mean?" he said.
"Three months?" she queried.
The light little head was tilted sideways in old fascinating way. It was not so dark but he might have seen it had he not been staring at the stars. He might even have noticed, had he looked closer, how wide her eyes were, and how unsteady the small mouth.
"Why three months?" he said.
"Wasn't it three months ago we were at Bramley Park?" she went on reflectively. "Can you still remember what you told me there?"
"Was it different from what I'd told you everywhere?" he parried.
"No—o!" she murmured, with a long wavering breath; "not until to-night. You said you could never, while I lived, think of marrying another woman."
"Yes," he assented; "I remember. We were looking down at the moonlight on the lake."
"We were," she said. "And you had your hand on mine. You put it there; you put it there as you spoke. Were you thinking how wonderfully easy it was to fool a woman?"
"I've never fooled you, nor tried to fool you," he answered quietly. "I've cared for you too much for that. No, not in the common way; but because you've always been such an honest and good friend to me. Some women insist on being fooled; they make any sort of truth to them impossible. You made a lie."
"So it seems now," she said wistfully.
"No," he replied, "it seems now just the opposite. But I can't help that."
"You could have helped it ... once," she said.
"Oh, we can always help things once," he objected.
"Did you know her when we were at Bramley?"
"Yes, very slightly."
"Very slightly, only three months ago," she repeated incredulously.
"Yes," he said.
There was a pause. Ethel Vernon's fingers were playing nervously with a ring.
"When did you want to marry her?" she asked at length.
He hesitated in his turn.
"I can't tell you that," he said.
"Why?" she questioned. "Don't you know?"
"I know perfectly," he said.
"Well?" she queried. Then, as he made no response, "Haven't I the right to know?"
"I can't say," he answered. "I haven't the right to tell you."
"Why?"
"It isn't only mine to tell," he said.
"It's hers, you mean?" she exclaimed. "Everything's hers, I suppose, now; everything that you once could call your own! Did you ever share your life withmein that fashion?"
"You forget," he said gravely. "Sheshares herself."
Ethel Vernon leaned towards him fiercely. "Do you mean——" she began impetuously, and stopped.
He turned and looked steadily into her angry eyes. Her quick breath spread the starlight to a vague and smoky blueness among the gleaming sequins on her breast. "Yes," he said, "that is probably what Idomean. First or last, whatever you may call her, it's the woman's self that counts."
She remained for a moment with her eyes still passionately alight, and something visible even in the dusk upon her face which she would and would not say. Then her mouth hardened, and she flung herself back in her chair.
"I hate you," she cried.
"No," he said with a sigh; "you hate the fact. Every woman does whom it doesn't profit."
There was nothing said between them for some minutes, and Caragh could hear the silk ripple as her foot swung to and fro among the ruchings of her skirt. The sound brought back another silence, when she had sat beside him on an English summer evening in a dusk almost as deep; brought back the hour from that scented night when, with the spells of strangeness still upon her charm, he had listened to her ankles' silken whisper, and felt in the dark the unendurable sweetness of her presence rob his life of its desires.
He was carried so far by the memory that the change in her voice startled him when she spoke again.
"What did you tell her about me," she demanded.
"I didn't tell her anything," he said.
"She hasn't asked about your past?"
"Not yet."
"You think she won't?"
"Oh, no, I don't," he smiled.
"And when she does! Will you tell her the usual lie?"
"Did I tell it to you?"
"You didn't ask me to marry you," she thrust back. "One treats the woman differently that one's going toshare."
"Yes," he admitted doubtfully, "it's very possible one does. Only I think the sharing works the other way. One tells her the truth in common honesty."
"Never!" she exclaimed. "You tell her the truth in transcendental lunacy, and wish you'd bitten your tongue out five minutes later when you see she thinks you a sweep."
He turned towards her with a smile. "I'm afraid my transcendental lunacies are about done," he said.
She laughed. "To judge by the last of them," she retorted.
"The last of them!" he exclaimed reprovingly. "You shouldn't speak of marriage by so wild a name."
"I don't," she said shortly; "only of yours. Will you swear to me that you love her?"
"Willingly," he answered, "if you're unwise enough to ask."
"To ask for an oath which would have no meaning?"
"None whatever," he replied. "What would you expect?"
"The truth!" she said. "Isn't it due to me?"
"Yes," he admitted, "and you've had it; though it hasn't been easy. Consider if a man is likely to relish the sort of confession that I've made to you?"
"You couldn't very well avoid it," she reminded him.
"Oh, yes, I could," he said. "I might have quarrelled with you—you're uncommonly easy to quarrel with—and then ... when you heard of my engagement you'd have put it down to pique."
"You thought of doing that?" she asked distrustfully.
"Yes, I thought of that and of a dozen other ways of—well, of taking you in," he admitted, "and of getting out of it myself."
"It doesn't sound very brave," she said softly.
"No, it sounds uncommon paltry, I've no doubt," he agreed. "I funked it, and I tried to think it would have been kinder as well as pleasanter to keep you in the dark. Would it?"
She shook her head.
"Well, I don't know," he reflected doubtfully; "I fancy you'd sooner have thought that you had done it than that I had, however little you might have liked it. And you'd have been a bit sorry for me, instead of thinking me a beast."
"I'm sorry for you as it is," she answered quietly.
"What do you mean?" he exclaimed.
"I don't believe you love her," she said unsteadily.
"Oh, well," he murmured with a shrug; "then I can't persuade you."
She shook her head again—the little tossing shake which reminded Caragh sharply of how she used to tease him, through the curls that sometimes fall across her eyes. He was looking at the stars before she spoke again.
"I think there's one thing you might tell me which wouldn't hurt her if I knew," she said persuadingly. "Was it because you'd come to care less for me that ... that you ... that you asked her?"
He rose from his seat, and leant against the iron trellis of the balcony, looking out across the river.
"Was it?" she pleaded.
"No!" he said to the night. He turned presently and took a step to enter the room. "Time I went," he said, checking his progress as he passed her chair.
She laid her fingers upon his sleeve. "Morrie!" she whispered.
He stooped and kissed her face, while her detaining hand slipped with a soft pressure into his.
Then she let it go, and sat, listening, as the sound of his footsteps died away beyond the room; sat gazing out at the moving sky, with a face from which the light had faded, till Henry Vernon's voice surprised her dreams.
It was in the following June that Caragh found himself preparing for his final visit to Ballindra. Lettice Nevern and her brother had been in town for some six weeks during the winter, and his business affairs having straightened themselves, and enabled him to anticipate a sufficiently plausible income for two people, he had asked Arthur Nevern formally for his sister's hand.
Nevern understood the proposal and the man who made it so slightly, that, displeased by the prospective loss of an admirable housekeeper, he began to pile up, breathlessly, inflated obstacles to its fulfilment.
Caragh heard him out.
"It's a confounded nuisance, of course, for you," he said; "these sort of things always are for somebody. That's why I've waited to get my side of it square before bothering you, so that you'd know for certain from the outset when your sister would be leaving you. We're not going to decide where to settle till we can look at places together, so that won't make for delay, but she refuses to be hurried over her kit, as it's to provide six months' food for some pet school of hers in Ballindra, so I've given her till July. The only question is, would you sooner the wedding was over there or here?"
Arthur Nevern stared at the younger man's directness, but he discovered speedily that he might stare as he pleased.
The little that Lettice had was in her own right, and Caragh had asked no more with her from the man before him.
Nevern was thus left with nothing to refuse but his consent, and that, apparently, was of no consequence to those who asked it.
He gave it at last as ungraciously as he could, and agreed later that the ceremony should be in London, in order to share its expense with an aunt of his who had offered her house.
He twitted Caragh with his impatience, and Caragh smiled.
His smile touched a point of humour unlikely to tickle a future brother-in-law, but he suggested that a man's hurry to be married seldom appealed to his friends.
He might have added that the reasons for it in his own case did not appeal to himself, but they were too serious and disconcerting even for his sense of the ridiculous.
They were, put briefly, the possible attraction of another woman; and it was his despairing self-contempt that goaded him to dispose, so high-handedly, of any obstacles to his marriage with Lettice Nevern.
It was particularly characteristic of him, that while reflecting almost every hour on some fantastic chance that might avert their union, he applied his foot with an almost unmannerly intolerance to any of the reasonable hindrances in its way. That was of a piece, no doubt, with his marked aversion from any form of moral hedging, and his preferred fondness for an honest lie.
He had stayed at Budapest for three days after his confession, to keep Ethel Vernon company till her husband's engagements were at an end. He had asked her if she wished him to remain, and she had said indifferently that he must please himself. He did not please himself; but he did not go.
The terms on which they met and spoke were strained and curious.
Caragh in his perverse fashion found them stimulating. Ethel made not the faintest reference to what he had told her, but she treated him neither with the familiar plainness into which they had fallen, nor as a common and secure acquaintance.
There was about her bearing an extraordinary delicacy and distance such as a girl uses to deny herself to the man to whom, unconscious, she has, proudly and irretrievably, given her heart.
Having exhausted the interests of the town, they spent the time in long drives to the places she expressed a wish to see in the country; an occupation not pre-eminently adapted to an evasive relationship.
On the fourth morning she said to him, simply:
"I can't stand it any more. You must go."
"Have I been a brute?" he asked.
"No," she said; "you've been extremely nice. Perhaps that's why. I don't know: I've tried not to know. Perhaps I may feel differently when I meet you again. I can't say. I daresay not. But I can't go on as we are. You don't mind my asking, do you? I don't think you wanted to stay. Why should you? I can make up something to Henry about your going: there's always the telegraph to account for things. And don't write, please, unless I ask you to. I'm going to try to forget you—if I can. What's the use of doing anything else? I've been a fool enough as it is."
There was in Caragh's eye the remembrance of days when it seemed as if that desired oblivion would be his to seek, days when his devotion had appeared to be quite obliterated from her memory by the surprising splendour of some one else.
That was, of course, the last thing of which he could remind her, but it was, too, the last he could forget.
He had accepted the real misery of those days without murmuring; at least he might use their ancient poison as an anodyne now. Not to excuse, nor to exalt himself, but to dilute, as it were, now that he had to drink it, the cup of her indignation.
It made the sour of that seem, at least, not quite so much of his own mixing to remember that, twice at least in the last two years, he might have drifted from her on occasions when her attention was too engrossed by another to notice that he was gone.
He would have liked in the friendliest fashion to have led her memory to those days, to show her how dispensable he was; only, he reflected one never knew how a woman would take that sort of consolation: he was not very sure if he would value it himself.
And when it came to his good-byes, he felt anything but fitted for the consoler's office. He had come to Pest bitterly grieved to lose a friend; but he left it like a baffled lover.
The shy strangeness of her manner and the proud distance in her eyes had brought again about Ethel Vernon the glamour of days when his heart beat quicker at her approach.
With every hour of indifference the old provocation in her presence grew. He felt that to stay would be but to yield to it again, and he heard with a dismal relief her sentence of exile.
He set himself rigidly to pack his things, yet where to go he could not determine. That invisible bond which tied him to the future made all the difference to a man's plans. The East beckoned—he was half way to it—and the green harbours of the Asian coast.
But that meant money, as he knew of old, and it was lack of money that had deferred his vow. In all honesty he could not spend upon himself what he had half pledged to another. He turned disconsolately towards home.
He drifted about during the autumn from one shoot to another. It was his ordinary occupation for three months of the year, yet now it seemed unusual. It seemed outside a new continuity of existence which had begun for him.
But he devoted himself to settling his affairs, and was able in consequence, as has been narrated, to propose himself as an unwelcome relative when Arthur Nevern was in town.
Caragh had looked forward doubtfully to meeting Lettice again, under conditions which might suit her so much less well as a background than the open downs and the sea. But his forebodings were gloomy enough to be disappointed.
She had some art in dress, as he had noted from her evening frocks, and if in the daytime she seemed for town sometimes a trifle decorative, it was a decoration on which those who passed her bestowed an approving eye. She needed a certain amplitude to set her off. The big fur collar, and the expansive hat made the modelling of her face seem daintier than it was. With her hat off, her prettiness owed everything to the fair fine hair that curled almost to her eyes. Maurice had once brushed it back in a playful moment, but he never risked the disillusionment again. He needed every aid to his attachment that artifice could supply.
She seemed, on her part, to be aware that her beauty required management. It was not of a sort to be worn with a disdainful indifference as to how it might strike you.
It had to be looked after, or it didn't strike you at all. She kept a conscious eye upon her fringe, and she left occasionally, as Caragh had noticed, a harmless confederate with her complexion on the lapels of his coat.
He brushed off the powder with a mixed sense of regret and gratitude. He was sorry she needed it but, since the need was there, better she had the wit to know it and the ambition to look her best. Better far than to suppose with an arrogant vanity that to his infatuation nothing could come amiss.
Of what, indeed, came most amiss she probably had not a suspicion. The breezy life of Ballindra had admitted few mental interests, and, in the country, character, which it develops, often has the air of mind. In Lettice, whose character was charming, the resemblance had deceived Caragh. But in London, where character sinks and mind is on the surface, his estimate was corrected.
He endured dreary plays in which she delighted; he sat bravely at ballad concerts; he listened without a groan to her enthusiasms upon domestic art; he tried to read the books she praised.
The outlook was depressing. The same fear touched him that must have fallen upon Babel. Here, for life was a companion who on its finer interests would never understand a word he said. He might, perhaps, bring her painfully to a sense of her unsuspected ineptitude; might make her mechanically conscious of the commonplace; might shake her faith in ignorance as a standard of art. He might in fact taint the sincerity of her admirations. That was all.
In art—and art is but the tenderer appreciation of life—they would never use the same language, never understand each other's speech. The marvelling thrill of familiar strangeness, of joyous apprehension, which the subtlety of art can wake in the initiate, they would never share.
That was not much to miss, perhaps; but, when Caragh tried to think of something its absence would not affect, he stopped in dismay.
Yet apart from her appearance, in spite of her deficiencies, the girl's love wrought a change in him of which, with surprise, he found himself aware.
It became less of an effort to return her caresses, and her kisses no longer made him feel guilty of impersonating her lover.
They never woke in his veins even a momentary ardour, and now, his pulse beat under them no whit the faster, but he had begun to grow susceptible to the quickened throb of hers. The shy renouncement of her self-restraint, as she let the secrets of her being pass, between queer little moods of resistance, into the strangeness of his power, moved him to a sense of protective tenderness he had never felt before.
It was shortly after he had said a last good-bye to Lettice Nevern that Caragh's troubles began afresh.
He had the best intention to acquire the married habit, or a habit, at any rate, that should differ widely from the one he had.
With that object he secluded himself for a fortnight from the life to which he was accustomed, and denied his company, for reasons which they vigorously disbelieved, to his friends.
He could allow himself the theatre, having never cherished lime-lit illusions, nor hovered to dispel them about the stage door. He had always what he was pleased to call a frugal taste in beauty, and had never made a bid for any that was 'priced'!
But the theatres only served him for a week, and even so with some exaggeration of what he wished to see. At the end of a second, he decided that a wife was as essential as repentance to a change of life, and dropped back into his old ways.
And the devil, who, perhaps as a reprisal for the deficiencies of his own abode, takes a pleasure in knocking the bottom out of every sort of domicile, at once put his foot through the flooring of Maurice Caragh's reform.
At least he met Laura Marton at the dinner which closed his fortnight's sojourn in the wilderness.
He was suffering from those two weeks of his own society, but, probably, even without that preparation, he would have capitulated to her charm.
To speak of him, so consecutively, in the hands of three women gives too crowded an impression of his susceptiveness. No trait was, in fact, further from his character.
Three years were passed since he met Ethel Vernon, and he had not harboured in all of them so much as a vexed thought about a woman's face.
He was pleased so far from easily, that he might very readily have failed throughout his life to have been pleased at all. But when pleased, it was on the instant and absorbingly. Ten seconds he had suggested as an average requirement for falling in love, but it is questionable if any of his own declensions had taken half that time. Nor was proximity at all essential. He could not recall, he admitted modestly, having discovered that a woman was adorable at more than a hundred yards. But he had no wish to exalt his own experience into a standard: he could believe in anything up to half a mile.
In that, such was the delicacy of his distinctions, he was perfectly sincere; but it was that delicacy which made them so prohibitive to adorations even at half a mile.
Laura Marton might, perhaps, have tested such a distance successfully, she was so perfectly his conception of a type.
He conceived a good deal in types, and preferred the typical even to the length of its deficiencies.
Deficiency did indeed play a part in Laura Marten's attractions, since the broad mouth, the long eyes, and the drowsy luxuriance of her figure were without everything that could make them harmless.
She came under the superbs in Caragh's catalogue, and to the superb he was almost a stranger.
That, perhaps, speeded his intimacy.
"You can take it for granted that I think you magnificent," he said at their first meeting.
This was their last. It epitomized sufficiently what had happened in the interval. Some of it might be accounted for by his having told her that the next interval was for ever.
The occasion was a dance at a big house in Grosvenor Square. It was Caragh's last appearance as a bachelor in town, since he started on the morrow for a trip which the owners of a new Atlantic liner were taking in her round the Isles. He was to be dropped at Ballindra, where his marriage, for recent family reasons, was after all to take place.
He was seated on a lounge in a blind passage near the top of the house, and, though still early in the evening, he had been sitting there for some time.
He knew the house more intimately than most of those who were seeking for such seats, and this one was left to him and his partner entirely undisturbed. The music floated up the stairs with varying distinctness, as the dancers choked the entrances to the great gallery below.
He was leaning back, with his arms half folded and a hand upon his mouth, looking straight before him.
Laura Marton, sitting sideways with one white arm along the top of the lounge and the sweep of her amber-coloured skirts against his feet, bent forward insistently towards him; a braid of gold across her splendid shoulders, and a band of turquoise in her brown hair.
The long soft fawn gloves were crumpled in her lap, and her left arm, which hung straight and bare beside her, tapped a turquoise fan against her ankle as she waited for his reply.
"I know," he sighed. "You don't and you can't see it: what's the use of my saying it again? You're sure no woman would care for what I'm giving her, if she only knew. I daresay; but, you see, she's not going to know. She's going to luxuriate in an apparent adoration. That's easier than to be happy with one that's inapparent, however actual. And it's a lot likelier that the make-believe will last; because—well, because there's nothing in it not to."
He smiled whimsically at his own English, but the girl's face darkened with a frown.
"It makes no difference how you put it," she exclaimed hotly; "the thing's detestable! You'll only look at it from your point of view; and because it's costing you so much, you think it must be worth all that to the girl. But it's not! You're getting her life, and everything that's in her and of her, and you're getting it for a lie! You think it's a fine lie, I know, the sort of lie that life is all along. You've told me that! Oh, yes, you have; or something like it. But what areyouthat you should handle a woman as if you had made her, and lie to her like a god! Do you think you're big enough to make that seem fair?"
"Ah, you don't understand," he murmured still staring before him, afraid to stir the fire in her smouldering eyes. "I'm doing this because I'm so small."
Her incredulous gasp was almost a repudiation; but she said nothing and he went on:
"Because the love that's worth perfidies and desertion and all the other personal superlatives will never come my way. I thought it would: yes! once, long ago. But it hasn't, and it won't. If I was big enough!"—he caught his breath—"Ah, that's another matter. Forthatlove excuses everything—'red ruin and the breaking up of laws'—because it's bigger, and better, and more enduring than the world itself. But it isn't mine."
He stopped, and faced for an instant the furious blaze of her eyes. Then he said more slowly:
"So the next best thing seemed, for a man like me, to make a good girl's dreams come true; her dreams of love, and honour, and a man's desire ... when one is the man, and can."
"You're not the man!" she cried. "And it's wicked and cruel to pretend to be."
"Look here!" he said persuasively. "Suppose that you were as poor a thing as I am; suppose that you, too, had come to look for no more from love than it means to me, and that some one came along who took you for an angel; a man young and strong and pure with the one great passion of a lifetime showing all over him; and that, in too weak or too kind a moment you had let him take you in his arms, and let him believe then as true the dreams that he had dreamt of you, and sealed with your kisses the vows which he had sworn. Well! when you'd come to realize that all his strength and sweetness hung on his belief in you, would you call it wicked and cruel to go on with the pretence?"
She made no answer for some moments. The grip of her white fingers relaxed upon the couch and the fan hung quiet against her ankle as she continued to absorb him with her devouring eyes.
"You've forgottenme," she whispered at length.
"No," he protested; "you can't say that, can you? I told you at once."
"Told me what?" she demanded.
"That I was not free," he said.
"Yes," she exclaimed, "the very first time you spoke to me. As if I were certain to lose my heart if I had not been warned. I hated you pretty hotly for it too, I can assure you. And you might have saved yourself the trouble. I'd been told it before."
"Before?"
"Yes, by Ethel Vernon. She said, when she heard I was to meet you, 'He's going to marry a girl that he doesn't care a sou for.' How did she know?"
"She didn't know," he said.
"How did she guess then? Had you been in love with her?"
"Yes."
"She with you?"
"You forget," he said gravely: "she's a married woman."
"I did forget," she smiled. "And was there no one you were in love with between her and me?"
"I'm not in love with you," he said.
She smiled again, drearily. "Does it do you any good to say that?" she asked.
"No," he answered; "I said it for you."
"For me?" she objected.
"Yes," he replied; "you said I'd forgotten you."
"Do you call that remembering?" she enquired ruefully.
"Don't you?" he murmured. "Would I have said it for myself?"
"Said what?" she asked.
"That I'm not in love with you?"
"I daresay," she said.
"Even if it had not been true?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "I daresay," she said.
"Do you?" he smiled. "It's a good deal to dare." He drew a long unsteady breath. "Well," he sighed, "suppose it wasn't?"
"Wasn't true?" she said.
"Wasn't true," he repeated slowly. "Suppose that I've—wilfully—lied to you. Suppose that the hour I saw your face brought my lost dreams back to me; suppose that in you I found the woman for want of whom all my days have in despair been wasted; the one woman who could have made life splendid, and love passionate and ceaseless and supreme. Or, no! not even that, not even that! Suppose only that I felt your fascination as any man might feel it; that I was just bewitched by your beauty; that every day without its glamour was the darkness of death, and the thought of other men possessing it an unendurable torment. Suppose which you please, whichever seems to you simplest, or strangest, or most deplorable—and tell me again you think it was for my own sake that I was silent!"