He did not expect a woman to know her own mind, but he thought her ignorance might be more agreeable.
So passed what was for Terence a very melancholy winter. He bore it with a resignation nerved by the near prospect of escape to a berth in Paris, which had been as good as promised him when it became vacant. Meanwhile Downing Street saw more of him than usual, and he took every opportunity of immersing himself still deeper in his work.
The post he had been expecting became available in March, and, too modest to urge his claim or to remind his patron, he was mortified to find one morning that it had been filled by another.
He accepted his ill-fortune silently, and only learnt a month later to whom he owed it.
He was enlightened then by accident, the peer, in whose gift the appointment practically lay, happening to express a regret that Terence had not seen his way to accept it.
"To accept it!" he replied, laughing. "It wasn't offered me."
"It wasn't offered you," said the other slowly, "because a certain friend of yours told me you had determined definitely, for the present, not to leave England."
Terence met the speaker's searching glance, which smouldered with admonition.
"I see," he smiled. "My own fault entirely."
He understood to whom the "certain friend" referred, as well as the warning against feminine influence in his chief's eye; and, for a moment of sick disappointment, he burned to confront the woman who had betrayed him with his knowledge of her perfidy, to fling this piece of unimagined baseness in her face, and so be rid of her.
But he realized ruefully within an hour that no such release was possible, at least for him. She had but done this thing to keep him near her.
She would plead that to stoop to such an act of treachery to the one who was dearest to her only proved how ungovernable was her love. There would be another horrible scene. She would threaten again to kill herself. And in the end he would succumb. Each sacrifice he had made for her only committed him to a fresh one. She had cultivated weakness in order to revel in his strength; he had pauperized her with his soul. Had she been a woman of rages, of pride, of resentments, it would have proved another matter; but how was it possible to hurt a thing that clung about one's neck.
So he said no more of his discomfiture, bitter as it was to his ambition as well as to his hopes of freedom. Her querulous exactions had already alienated his sympathies, so that it was no harder now to be kind to her than it had been before.
And he was glad to know definitely what he had to fear from her, even though the definition was so inclusive. He determined to loosen, slowly and gently, those tendrils of sentiment by which she clung to him, which were so enfeebling her self-support.
But he saw that he had little to hope for save from time and the natural infidelity of her sex.
Time, unfortunately, seemed arrayed against him, for it was in April of the same year that he met Miss Lilias Anstruther.
Their meeting summed up the possibilities of love at sight. He loved her as she passed him on the stairs, and she him, as she afterwards confided, while he was being led to her for introduction, an occasion which has—for an Englishman, at any rate—small opportunities of display.
But love at sight is such a miracle to the seer that he never imagines its duplication. Terence saw nothing on Miss Anstruther's features but the attention an intelligent woman might show to any man with a name in the making.
She imagined, in the stern set of his, boredom at having to make himself agreeable to a merely pretty girl.
There was, in his mind, no doubt, enough to complicate a glance of admiration, since he saw between him and her the jealous presence of another woman.
What that presence meant to him, now, he realized with despair.
He had endured in silence its unscrupulous intrigues; he had schooled himself to meet the most preposterous of its requirements. But then he stood alone; the worst that could be done him was the most that he need fear. He could live secure since only he could suffer.
Now! He lost his breath as he thought of it.
He saw Lilias several times that month. He did not notice that it seemed easy to see her. That she had a hand in that facility would have been the last thing to strike him.
Love had come to him in the extravagant splendours it only wears for those who find it late, with the eyes still unsoiled through which youth sought it. For, to the boy, love is only a white angel, but the man sees it iridescent with the colours of his accumulated years of hope.
It was not surprising that Terence, who had never even imagined himself in love before, and whose every instinct forbade a paltering with its substitute, should have been overwhelmed by this putting forth of an enchantment he had long ceased to expect.
He kept his head from early habit, which made the danger of losing it in Miss Anstruther's presence almost a delight, and he banished the acknowledgment of his happiness from every part of him but his eyes.
There, however, in the glow of an accustomed kindliness it could escape recognition, and there too it was often absorbed in a stern anxiety when he faced the risks of its discovery by the other woman.
From her he kept, with a man's timorous diplomacy, every echo of the girl's name, until he learnt they were acquainted. Then he had to endure an inquest on his concealment, and the woman's suspicions were fertilized by his replies.
They found food for growth later on in what she was pleased, perhaps rightly, to imagine a preoccupation in his manner.
She was, of course, aware of his effort to dilute what was emotional in their intercourse, and to replace it with a tender and unashamed fraternity.
Of that he made no secret; and she made very little of her resolve to thwart it.
He had but small success but more than he expected. He declined several invitations to Wallingford during the summer, where she had again a house; and when he went in August, found her, thanks partly to the persistence of some exacting and undesired guests, more malleable than she had ever been before.
He had been so attentively kind to her during the season that she found no excuse to upbraid him, yet she showed by a dozen disdainful poses how fiercely she resented his determined friendliness.
Meanwhile he had seen little of Lilias. His devotion to her was too sensitive and too entire to allow him even to offer her his company while he had still, however occasionally, to bestow his kisses on another woman. That woman too was still a moral charge upon him, and a source beside of incalculable danger.
What she would not do was clearly not everywhere conterminous with what she should not.
He had sufficiently realized that his happiness would never appeal to her apart from hers, and that there would be a stormy finish where hers ended. But he still trusted in time, and was satisfied with the slight progress towards reasonableness in their relationship.
Her letters continued to upbraid him with his neglect; but they began to hint at a reciprocal attitude.
She too, they threatened, could be indifferent; the time might come when to his appeal there would be no response.
Terence prayed devoutly for that day to hasten, as the months went on; and ran down in November, ostensibly for a week's hunting, to a house in Leicestershire where Miss Anstruther was staying.
Knowing the country better than he, she offered to pilot him, and took him under her charge with a delightful assurance, which allowed him no voice nor choice of his own while out of doors.
She rode straight, but used her head, in cutting out a line, to nurse her horse, and showed a most unfeminine appreciation of distances, save when the hounds were running late away from home.
During the long easy amble homeward in the dusk, on such occasions Terence might have been led to doubt that it was inadvertence which had secured him so much of her company, had he not arrived at conclusions of much greater moment.
To have found, at thirty-five when such discoveries are being despaired of the woman for whom his life had waited for whom, unknown, it had worn its innocence untainted, was sufficient of itself to monopolize his thoughts.
In her presence he became young again; young in interests, in expectancy, in purposeless energies. The whole desire of the man was in focus for the first time in his life.
Lilias gave him her company but no other sign of liking; yet her company was of itself sufficient to make him insanely content.
Still his fears made him cautious. The prize was too great, the thought of failure too consuming, to admit of risk.
So he let the winter go without a word to her of what was eating out his heart, using what chances offered for seeing her, but making none that might attract comment, and all the while attenuating the link that bound him to the other, and trying to accustom her to do without him.
He seemed in that to be making headway.
She wrote more and more rarely to him, and never in the expansive fashion of the past, and if he kissed her on parting, as occasionally she insisted, it added no warmth to his farewell. Yet he still misdoubted her, and would not have put his fortune to the touch had Fate not forced his hand with the announcement that Miss Anstruther was leaving for India in the spring.
He looked in vain for ways to stop her, but shyly, and conscious of a new distance in her manner, as though she thought his interest might be more explicit.
On that he spoke. Her evasions, chilly with the disdain of every honest woman for a philanderer, were intolerable. He saw the risk he ran either way of losing her, but chose that which gave him, at any rate, fighting chances, and told her of his love.
Three days followed in the blue of heaven; then he came back to earth, and took up his trouble.
The other woman was at St. Raphael, so he had to write. He would have vastly preferred to tell her face to face what he had done. He had no courage for a fight in the dark; he wished to see the blow come back, and meet it. But there were reasons insuperable against that.
He expected an intemperate reply, but nothing so wildly bereft of reason as that which reached him. It was shrill with threats which turned his blood to ice and then set it boiling with indignation; threats which seemed to echo from some shrieking purlieu of the Mile End Road.
Her soul revolted, she wrote, at what he had done. He had thrown her away like stale water. His selfishness had made her life unbearable. Her pride, her capacity for caring, her whole womanhood had been hurt and crushed to death.
She went about feeling there was no meaning any more in anything. He had hardened and embittered her nature to a terrible degree.
He had hurt her so unendurably that it didn't seem to matter how she hurt others.
Love and truth and honour had become a farce, and loyalty was an unnecessary scruple.
She ended by saying she did not know how long she could go on bearing it in silence. The only fair thing seemed to be to tell Miss Anstruther everything that had happened, and let her judge between them.
Despite the sense of his integrity, and a dreary memory of the months devoted to her whims, Terence almost felt himself to be, as he read her impeachment, the unspeakable brute that she described.
He even tried to excuse her horrid and unexpected forms of speech; the clamour, the invective, the dismal absence of reserve. If she had overleapt the bounds of decency he had given her the impetus, and to be startled by such an exhibition only argued his inexperience.
Yet even his generosity could not acquit her. He remembered her repeated wail, "Tell me I haven't spoilt your life!"—a cry which no ardour of his assurance seemed able to satisfy. Well, now she had the only proof that could appease her conscience, and this was the result. He showed her that his life was still whole, and she itched to break it beyond repair.
His resentment quickened. Surely it was more than should be asked of a man's benevolence to sacrifice his life to no purpose for a woman's mistake.
He wrote urgently, and as he thought in reason; but the letter read to her as a wrathful menace. He had explained that in trying to hurt others she might hurt herself the more, since to alienate Miss Anstruther would be to make a lifelong enemy of himself.
She replied in such spiritless dejection that he had to try to comfort her. She asked why he had been in such a hurry to supersede her; and though his patience of many months seemed to him misnamed as hurry, he explained the circumstance which made him speak.
Many letters passed between them: letters coloured on her part by a childish irresponsibility and persistence, and on his by an attempt, a fatal attempt, to treat her as a child, and to let her hug the little salves to her vanity which she invented daily and submitted piteously for his confirmation.
Terence discovered, when it was too late, that sooner than allow that any one could supplant her in his affection, she had pictured his proposal as a man's heroic sacrifice of himself to a girl's forwardness, and his letters had unconsciously confirmed her fatuous invention.
Consoled by it, she wrote to Lilias a letter of congratulation, and her correspondence with Terence grew heavy with the odour of a shared and precarious secret which she, at least, would make honourable pretences to ignore.
Terence, at his wit's end for peace, capitulated to her self-complacent theory, after a half-hearted attempt to take it from her.
To destroy her faith in it seemed needlessly unkind, seeing how much her faith in everything else appeared to be bound up therein. And if her comfort in it was false, false it had been all along, from the days when for her sake he had fostered it. Now, at any rate, it brought comfort to them both.
He was shown the letter Lilias had received from her, and thought his danger at an end. Yet he went softly, not daring to own the intensity of his happiness even to himself. He tried to keep the joy of it from his mind, to walk humbly as a mortal should, lest the gods might grow jealous of his exulting dreams.
Yet at times, despite his caution, at the higher tides of his delight, he would laugh up in the face of heaven, not arrogantly, but with the overrunning sense of his content.
A woman's lips had breathed their ephphatha upon his eyelids, and he looked out upon a new world.
New, since her beauty, like a crystal spar, lent a rainbow border to all things beyond it. His life seemed lifted by a spread of wings at every touch of her fingers.
There was a magic in her influence, that fed from the soft reluctance of her body the fuel that burned in his. A magic on which he lived between their meetings, and for whose strange infusion he fainted while they were apart.
He told her, laughing, that he was almost frightened to be such a slave; and though she paid no heed to the assertion, it sank with melting heat into her heart, and unknown to him the girl's breast throbbed, behind its shy demurs, with a fierce exultation in the sense that swayed him.
So two months passed, the two months when even the English earth seems mad, mad with the surge of its triumphant greenness, and with the singing flood of birds that fills it from the south.
From the south, too, came, in May, the other woman, giving Terence notice of her return, and telling him that she only wished to see him if he felt a meeting was not impossible.
He replied that nothing could make it impossible but his ignorance of her address, which she had omitted to send him.
He called the day after it arrived. He had no avidity for the interview; but, seeing that he would be certain some day to meet her, thought the sooner the safer.
She received him with a curious prescribed coldness, warmed in the strangest way by glances of reproachful pity. She spoke in a compressed tone, and Terence expected that at any moment she would scream and seize him. The prevision was so strong that, on leaving her, he practically backed to the door, keeping his eye deterrently fixed upon her, as though she were some savage creature that might spring upon him if he turned his head.
She took the line throughout that, despite his perfidy, he was to be regarded with a grieved compassion; and she met his profession of attachment to the woman he was about to marry with the sad smile of a lenient unbelief.
Once or twice the raging bitterness of a soul pent up behind it threatened to engulf the passive monotony of her speech, and the dull eyes glowed as though about to scorch him; but nothing deplorable happened, and Terence breathed a deep relief as the door closed behind him and shut off, as he trusted, from his future the only danger that threatened it.
His confidence, however, did not live for long. Scarcely more than a week later something serious in Miss Anstruther's face checked him as he greeted her.
"Yes," she answered to his eyes, "there's something I want to ask you. Is it true, as you told me, that you had never loved any one before you met me?"
"Yes," he said.
"Did you never give any one cause to think you loved her?"
"Not with intention."
"But you might have without meaning to?"
"I did, without meaning to."
"Oh, you know?" she exclaimed.
"Yes," he said, "I know. May I ask how you do?"
"No," she replied; "I'd sooner not tell you that. I only wanted to be told it wasn't true."
"But it is true!" he objected.
"Oh, not what matters," she breathed. "Did she care for you very, very much?"
"She cared a good deal more than I deserved," he said gravely; "and more unspeakably than I desired."
"But she didn't find that out?"
"No, she didn't find it out. Think what finding out would have meant to her."
The girl was silent for a moment.
"Did you kiss her?" she asked, below her breath.
"I did many things I would have preferred not to," he said quietly; "but what they were you could not wish, I think, to learn from me."
"On account of what I know?" she asked.
"I don't know what you know," he replied; "but I think that no man who has shared, however unwillingly, a woman's secret, has any rights over it but those of burial."
She gave him her lips with a smile, and made no further reference to the subject before they parted. She was going into the country, and he was not to see her for ten days.
He spent some part of them wondering idly whence her information had come, but he was in no mood to make enquiry where it might have been effective, and had put the question from his mind, when, at the end of the week, he received from Lilias a feverish note saying that everything between them depended on his reply to something that she must ask him. Would he let her know the first moment he could come.
He named the next morning, but, when leaving his rooms on the way to her the letter was delivered which changed the face of the world for him, and hung the future on his choice of an alternative.
The letter was short, and passionately scornful. It admitted no challenge, no reply. She had seen, it said, all he had written to the other woman, and she despised him so utterly that she felt no pain in parting from him for ever.
That was all. Yesterday he held for her all the beauty and the savour of the world, to-day she loathed him as a leper. In an hour she had repudiated the most sacred convictions of her soul.
She had learnt his fineness at every turn of his thoughts. Her spirit, that had touched his at first so timidly, had come to seek with passionate security its most intimate caress. There was nothing she had not revealed to him, no shame so sweet nor so secret which she had feared to let him know.
And now!
"If I had loved a devil unawares," reflected Terence sadly, "I hardly think I would have cast her out like that. Love should not, for its own dignity, degrade so easily what it has ennobled."
Yet not for a moment did he resent the ruthlessness of her letter. His love had indeed exalted her above possibility of that.
He had lost her! It was of nothing less that he could think. For some while he did not even wonder how the astounding change had come. Her brief note said nothing; nothing of what had happened in that momentous fortnight, nothing of the source of her enlightenment, nothing even to excuse the feeding of her suspicions on letters of his which were not addressed to her.
It left, indifferently, everything to his conjecture; but conjecture was not difficult.
The tragic ending of his hopes was the outcome, he had little doubt, of his last visit to the other woman. She saw him then as hers no longer; saw in him too, perhaps, in spite of his concealments, a radiance which her love had never wrought, and realized, with cruel clearness, how entirely he was another's.
And so, inflamed with jealousy beyond endurance, she had determined that no one should possess him if she might not, and had used her pain, malignantly, to poison the other's pleasure.
That poison took no doubt at first the form of hints; a woman's pitying innuendoes, which had roused the girl's suspicions and been the cause of her demands. And when she repeated his disclaimer, further proofs, he supposed, were mentioned, and finally the letters had been produced.
As the story of those two short weeks took shape in his mind—the profitless destruction done to his life and to another's by a woman's venomous malice—he could, in the fierceness of his despair, have made an end to her with his naked hands.
At that, ashamed of himself, he smiled, remembering the frequent vaunting of her pride and the affectations of her honour. This was strange work for either of them. But then a woman's honour was so detachable.
She had it if you had it; and if you hadn't it, neither had she. In that way her morality never placed her at a disadvantage. She could always be as noble or as mean as her opponent.
He smiled again, more grimly, to think that on him of all men such a fate had fallen. That he who all his life had shrunk from women should be execrated as a philanderer! Surely ironic comedy could go no further?
And to consider, beside it, the kind of man, for whom London is too small a harem, wedded gratefully, reverently, every day, by the kind of woman who found him unworthy, the kind of man, alas! to whom all too probably, to appease that terrible vanity of a trumpeted indifference, she might fall: to the first brute who desired to possess her.
Her fineness would not save her! Had it ever saved a woman yet from such a fate? By the blaze of his wrath he seemed to see the reason.
Woman had no fineness, no sensibility, no subtlety of discernment. Her fastidiousness was an affectation, like the cut of her skirt: she wore each because it was the fashion. It was made for her, not by her, and was no part of her at all.
But his anger could only for an instant find fuel to feed it in the woman he loved. It turned at once against the other, and his thoughts turned with it to her letters, the only bond between them which remained.
They formed the packet of many coloured papers which at last, blind with scorn to their sanctity, he had drawn from its secret place.
He had kept them without defined intention; certainly with no premonition of needing them in his defence; so far as he could remember, only to remind himself how that strange disturbance of his life had come about.
But now, as his anger burnt the better part of him, he saw another use for them. They alone could justify, could extenuate what he had done. No man who had endured an undesired love could read them and condemn.
But a woman? That was another matter. And a woman, too, who had adored! How would she read their raving violence?
Would she believe that the woman who wrote so wildly of the surrender of herself had never dreamed of giving him more by it than her lips.
He wondered. Women were so hopelessly ignorant of one another. So unable to conceive as womanly any qualities but their own; so unable to believe even in the existence of a compulsion which would not move themselves.
Well, whether she believed or not, whether she would divine and forgive, or be confirmed in her contempt, there remained no other way to move, nor even to approach her.
It was horrible to have received such letters from a woman one did not love, more horrible still to use them in one's defence. But she had left him no alternative.
It was through her offence that he came to be fighting for what was dearer than his life. Was any right left her to complain of his weapon?
Besides, as he assured himself, he would only be enlarging a story which she had told: it was her tongue, not his, that had proclaimed it. And whether happiness or despair came to him from the event, it could at least bring her no change of fortune.
But with the very assertion of her security came apprehension from a possibility he had not foreseen.
What if Lilias, finding that those letters in no way absolved him, but proved the woman guilty of an unforgivable perfidy, should turn vengefully against her the secrets which they held?
The fear swept clear his clouded honour. Here was he answering a woman's baseness in the very fashion he had impeached as her habitual use.
He was fighting her malicious treachery with a betrayal as infamous, and which could be no whit excused by hers.
The sacredness of such letters could not be altered by circumstances; love had written them for love's eye only, and they must be held inviolable though love turned to hate.
And it was not only his personal honour that restrained him, but the honour of love itself; the silence, the gravity which every great service imposes upon those who have borne it; the duty of handing down unsullied, unspoken of, the proud name the brave tradition to those that come after.
It was because Love had indeed touched him with its sceptre that he could shield in silence one who had worn its name unworthily even while under it she had stabbed him to the heart.
He laid his hand upon the packet to return it to its place. Then, with sudden hesitation and a rueful smile at the sense of his own weakness, he rose and carried it across to the grate.
He laid it on the coals and lit a match beneath it; and, as he turned away again towards the window, heard in the blaze his hope and his despair together flame indifferently to the sky.
The light shore breeze of a September morning was dying out across the bay. The wide Atlantic beyond it seemed flat as a floor of sapphire inlaid with pale veins of green. The sky was without a cloud; and the sun filled the unstirred silence with a clear golden heat.
The high gray cliffs that held the bay, hid, at either end, the land beyond it; half hid even, by a curve of their contour, the entrance to Ballindra River, so that no sign of habitation was to be seen along the shore.
The blue spaces of the sea were empty, save for a little lug-rigged boat which had slipped out of the river while the mists still slept upon it, and had spent the morning creeping with each soft breath of air to the northern border of the bay.
It was now close to land, so close that the object of its journey could be plainly seen.
Before it, cradled, under the cliffs, between the serried ledges of rock, was a tiny beach.
It was in shape like a young moon, paved in silvery pink and pearl by milk-white pebbles and delicate shells, with shelving wings of stone thrust out and bent inward from either side into the sea.
The long ledges of rock were of a dark lavender, and from them a brilliant yellow weed dripped and swung in the transparent pool of purple and emerald, which throbbed softly against the pearly crescent of the shore.
East and west, so far as eye could reach, the sea pushed a sparkling shoulder against the sheer front of the cliffs. Nowhere else in the whole bay was there a foot's breadth of beach, and there was clearly no outlet landwards even from the slender strand towards which the boat was heading.
A girl with fair hair and luminous gray eyes was steering, and a man of about thirty sat upon the opposite gunwale with the slack sheet in his hand. She looked up at the flapping leech, and then with a whimsical smile into his face.
"You'll have to row in," she said.
"Not I," he protested airily; "we're going to sail."
She laughed a low contented laugh at his perversity.
"Like this?" she enquired, tilting her head at the empty canvas.
"Give the wind time," he replied, with a glance across the bay and a big indrawn breath of complete satisfaction; "we've the whole day before us."
"We haven't the whole channel, though," she said, nodding to starboard, where a black fin of rock cut suddenly in the clear water a little whispering ring of foam.
"Phew!" exclaimed the man, screwing round on the gunwale as the black fin disappeared. "Many like that?"
"Plenty, plenty!" laughed the girl. "Are you going to row?"
He shook his head. Then, with an effect of having completely forgotten her, stared eagerly across that wavering jewel of water at the rose and silver of the beach, and down through the transparent purple depths beneath him at the sand and the rocks and the waving yellow weed.
She watched his face brighten with their beauty, as though somehow he had absorbed it, and his grave good looks take on a boyish lightness, as his eyes turned from colour to colour, or followed the sea-fern streaming in the pulse of the tide. Leaning forward with a smile she laid her hand on the cleat in front of her and let the halyard go. The brown sail ran down till the parrel jammed, and Maurice Caragh faced round reproachfully.
"Why don't you want to row?" she cried. "It isn't a hundred yards."
"No, I know," he sighed, as he freed the clip of the traveller and gathered in the bunt; "but a sail looks so much more adventurous."
"Even in a calm?" she smiled.
"Oh, yes, most in a calm," he replied, seating himself disconsolately on the thwart in front of her, and slowly pushing out a sweep. "Adventure's nothing with a full sail, but all the fear of the sea is in the flat one. Look here!" he continued, without change of tone, "the rowlocks are gone."
She thrust out the point of a little white shoe at the place where they lay beneath his thwart, and he pushed them resignedly into their chocks, and pulled for the shore; Lettice Nevern standing up with her finger tips on the tiller behind her, and her eye intent upon the channel.
Her quick emphatic directions amused the man who was rowing, as the boat wound through the invisible maze.
"Goodness!" he exclaimed, backing hard with his left, "I shouldn't care to bring a boat in here with a bit of wind."
"You couldn't," she replied, "with any wind but what we've got. That's what I like about it. There are not ten days in the year you can dare to land here. But this half tide is the worst; it's easier with less or more water."
"Do you ever come here by yourself?" he asked, resting on the oars.
"I've always come by myself," she answered, looking down into his face, "that's why"—she hesitated for a moment—"that's why I didn't bring you before."
The reason might not have seemed explicit to another, but it carried a sense of privilege to Caragh's mind that troubled the look with which he acknowledged it.
"I hope I mayn't prove unworthy of it," he said gravely.
"I don't know," she answered, with an absent glance at him: "it's a very dear little beach."
He was willing to admit, when he landed, that it might be anything she pleased to call it, but there was chiefly wonder in his eye. The bands of tiny white and silver pebbles, and of tinier pink shells, made a floor so delicate, so incredibly dainty as seemed, in that land of legend, proof sufficient of a fairy's treading.
The water lay so still and clear against it that only by the brighter tint of the covered pebbles could the margin of the sea be told, and the moving tide that swayed the weed made all along the curved strand a little whispering song, unlike any other music in the world.
Lettice enjoyed Caragh's bewilderment for a moment, but stopped him as he was bringing the cable ashore.
"You must moor her out," she said.
"Oh, no!" he pleaded, "the tide's rising, and she'll look so jolly and so impossible nosing along the shore with all that water under her, on the very edge of an ocean."
But Lettice was inflexible. The tide would be lower she said by the time they started; and Maurice had to shove the boat out again, and succeeded, after a couple of vain attempts, in jerking the anchor off her bow on to a holding bottom.
"Oh, well," he said cheerfully, eyeing the result of his labour, while he unpacked the luncheon, "she looks very well out there; only I wish I'd put up the sail."
"Are you quite mad to-day?" the girl asked.
She sat watching him with an air of grave amusement; her feet drawn up and her hands clasped below her knees. She wore a white serge coat and skirt, with a biscuit-coloured silk shirt and a ribbon of the same shade round her sailor hat. She looked much younger than her twenty-three years, though the baby-fairness of her hair and skin were sobered by the quiet depths of her gray eyes.
"I'm never mad," said Caragh to her question, holding up the red length of a lobster against the sky, "but sometimes, with you, I'm less distressingly sane than usual."
Lettice, her hands fallen to her ankles, watched him sideways, with one temple resting on her knee.
"That's the reflection of my foolishness, I suppose?" she said.
"Possibly!" he assented; "I'm very highly polished."
He was sitting with his feet towards the sea, unpacking the hamper on to a spread cloth beside him. He viewed the result appreciatively.
"Two bells!" he announced to Lettice. "We're going to do ourselves well."
His prediction, however, only applied to himself, for Lettice ate even less than usual; an amount, he had once declared, absurdly incompatible with her splendid air of health.
She offered him no assistance in clearing up, but he showed a proper sense of his privilege, by refusing even to throw the lobster claws into the sea. Lettice smiled at the chaos of fragments he insisted on repacking.
"Bridget will have ideas of your economy when she opens that," she suggested.
"She'll guess perhaps that we lunched in Paradise," he said.
They walked to the limits of it when he had finished, and sat on the outermost spur of rock.
The ocean was like glass; yet the water pulsed to and fro past them between the long limestone ledges, as it rose and fell with the breath of the sleeping blue breast of the sea.
And the tender sounds of it never ceased. Soft thumps in the blind tunnels beneath them, a crystal kiss that whitened an edge of stone, the whisper of clear rillets that ran up and tinkled down again, finding no pool to hold them; and, under all, the brushing, backwards and forwards in the moving water, of the yellow tangle of weed.
Caragh remained but a short time in the seat he had chosen. Rising, he stood at the margin of the sea, shifting his footing now and then, to scan some fresh wonder of colour, and with his ears intent on the soft complexity of sound. He seemed entirely to have forgotten his companion's presence, and Lettice watched him with an interest which became annoyed.
"One would think you had never seen such a thing before," she said.
He turned at the sound of her words, but came more slowly to their meaning.
"Oh, one never has seen, or heard, anything before; it's always different," he replied, smiling. "Just listen to that little pool emptying; it runs up a whole octave, but such a queer scale! yet a minute ago I couldn't hear it! And the comic cadence of the water in that gully, it almost makes one laugh. How old Bach would have played with it. But you don't hear?"
"Not a note," she said with tight lips; "but I've no ear."
Caragh caught the tone of grievance. He smiled across at her.
"It's sheer vanity to say that," he tossed back; "but I'll admit if your ears were smaller no one could see them."
He stepped over the intervening ledges, and they picked their way side by side to the beach.
"But it is wonderful," he continued, "that there's a whole world round us that we listen to and look at for years and years, yet never either hear or see till some strange fortunate moment." He put his hand under her outstretched arm as her balance wavered upon a ridge. "Why, this may be Paradise after all, only we don't notice the angels."
His fingers closed on her elbow as she slipped upon a piece of weed.
"You shouldn't avow it, though you do ignore me," she said reproachfully.
"Ah," he sighed, as they stepped down upon the strand, "you do no justice to my plural. I wasn't thinking of the sort of paradise that may be made by one pair of wings. All the same," he went on reflectively, throwing himself upon the beach beside her, "it isn't as an angel that I've ever thought of you."
The tide was almost at its full, and the clear deep water with its thin crystal lip, which opened and shut upon the stones, was only a yard or two from Miss Nevern's feet.
Her little white shoes were thrust out straight before her, heels together, pointing to the sky, and she leaned forward looking over them across the bay.
At Caragh's words she turned her face towards him, with the vague depths of some conjecture in her eyes, as though disposed to ask him how, if not as an angel, he had ever thought of her. But she turned her eyes again, without speaking, to the topaz hills beyond the bay.
Maurice lay a moment looking at her silent profile, then, standing in front of her, he spread out the wide white skirt fan-wise on either side of her feet.
"Now you're perfectly symmetrical," he said, contemplating her from above.
She lifted her eyes to his from the distant hills with a smile.
"It would make a charming thing in marble," he continued; "almost Egyptian and yet so immensely modern. Only some fool of a critic would be certain to ask what it meant."
"And what would you say?"
He gave the statue a moment's further consideration.
"Well, that it wasn't meant for him, anyway," he replied, dropping down again beside her.
"Could you tell him what it meant for you?" she enquired, without moving.
"Not to save my life," he said at once; adding, as if to reassure himself, "but I know."
"You could tell me, perhaps?" she suggested presently.
"Heavens, no!" he exclaimed. "You least of all. You'd think me crazy."
"Oh, I think you that as it is," she admitted thoughtfully.
He laughed, but with his eyes still occupied with the beauty of her bent figure.
He filled his left hand absently with the little shells on which he lay, shaking them up and down on his open palm, till only a few were left between his fingers. As he dropped these into the other hand, his eye fell upon them.
"I say! what dear little things!" he exclaimed enthusiastically. "Why didn't you tell me about them?"
Lettice turned her head.
"I thought you'd seen them," she said indifferently.
"They're quite incredible," he went on, too absorbed in his discovery to notice her tone; "how is it that, with an ocean falling on them here, they're not ground to gruel. They make me feel more than ever an interloper. You should have moored me out in the boat: this floor was laid for naiads and fays and pixies; for nothing so heavy-footed as a man."
"Or a woman," Lettice suggested, still seated as he had posed her, but watching his search among the pebbles with her chin against her shoulder.
"Cover those number threes!" he said, without looking up from it, picking out the tiniest shells into a little pink heap upon his hand.
"They're not number threes," she retorted; "and they have to carryme. You'd find them heavy enough if you were under them."
He glanced up quickly at the half-hidden outline of the face behind her shoulder.
"I daresay," he murmured.
Something in the manner of his agreement brought the colour into her cheek, and, perhaps to hide it, she leant over towards him, and, propped on one elbow, began to search for the little shells and drop them into his hand.
She noticed, as she had never before had opportunity, the suggestion of a fine capacity in the shape of his open hand, and the sharp decision of its rare creases.
"How deep your lines are!" she said.
He looked with enquiry at the darkened features which were bent above his hand, and in reply she raked with a nail, as pink as and more polished than they, the little pile of shells back towards his thumb.
"Oh, that!" he exclaimed, as she ran the tip of her finger along the furrow. "It's wonderful, isn't it? I never saw a heart line on any hand that filled me with such respect. Cut evidently by one of those obstinately permanent affections that make one gasp in books. Let's look at yours?"
She opened, smiling, on a very rosy palm, a network of slender lines, grated and interlaced.
"Oh, shut it up!" he frowned. "Hide it from your dearest friend. Ah, my simplicity which thought you so different from all that!"
She laughed, and screwing up her hand looked down into its little cup.
"Well," she said; "tell me what you see in it."
But he shook his head.
"I shut my eyes," he declared solemnly. "Hold it a little further off."
"I shan't," she said.
"I mean," he explained, "that a yard away it's everything that one could wish."
She surveyed her hand reflectively. There had been those who wished it a good deal nearer than that; and who had wished in vain.
"At what people call a safe distance, I suppose," she said. "I think you're very fond of safe distances."
He almost started at the touch of scornful provocation in the words and in the tone. A delightful indifference to what he was or wasn't fond of had made hitherto, by its very exclusions, so much possible between them.
"Do you?" he replied, his eyes still upon her bent figure. "Why?"
"You weren't aware of it?" she asked.
"I wasn't. I haven't been told of it before."
"Perhaps, it's only with me?" she suggested.
"Perhaps, it's only with you," he smiled. "How does it show?"
She made, with her slender nail, little moons in the sand.
"It doesn't show," she said, looking down at her finger; "one feels it."
"A general attitude of caution," he suggested playfully; "such as this."
"As what?" she enquired.
"Oh!" he said, with a wave of his hand at the enclosing wall of cliff and the empty vastness of the sea, "this teeming beach, the fashionable resort behind it, the chaperon at our elbow!"
She glanced at him with a shy smile.
"Oh, not in that way," she said; "besides you couldn't help yourself; you were brought. No, one sees it mostly in the things you say."
"In the things I say?"
"Well, no! perhaps, in the things you don't say."
"I see!" he mused, with the same air of banter, "the desert areas of omission! Others made them blossom for you like the rose? I don't succeed in even expressing things that were commonplaces with them?"
"What sort of things?" she asked, her eyes again upon the sand.
"Oh, you know them probably, better than I," he said; "being a woman and used to them."
"To what?"
"To the ordinary masculine fatuities of admiration, for instance."
"No," she said reflectively; "you don't succeed in expressing those. Do you try?"
"Not much, I'm afraid. They offend me."
"You!" she exclaimed, surprised into facing him with lifted brows, "you might have said they would offend a woman."
"I might have, years and years ago!" he replied; "but that passed with other elevating superstitions of one's youth. Since then I've observed an unpleasant variety in admirations, but have yet to meet the offended woman. No, a woman may call you a fool for your flummery, or even think you one; but she'll give you every opening to repeat the folly."
The surprise in Lettice Nevern's eyes grew more serious.
"You think a man should never tell a woman that he admires her?" she said.
"He needn't appraise her to her face like a fat ox in a show-pen! unless—oh, well, unless, I suppose, she likes it."
"And then?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"Oh, then, one might say, she's qualified for the show-pen. Let him tie on the ticket."
A stain of duller red upon the girl's cheek would have betrayed some quickening of her thought, had he been looking at her, instead of out across the purple level of the sea, where, above Ballindra, the harbour hills were turning in the slanting sunlight from topaz to amethyst.
The smile of humorous toleration with which Maurice Caragh accepted half the perplexities of life had always seemed to her so completely to reveal his mind—like the pool before them, through which the light filtered to the very floor—that this dark humour of depreciation let out the sounding line through her fingers into unanchorable depths.
"I think you're a little hard," she said slowly; "women aren't vain, as a rule; at least not like that. It's their humility that makes them care so much to be admired."
"I see," he smiled. "But I don't object to the admiration; that's inevitable; only to the way it's paid."
"But how is a woman to know if you don't tell her?"
"Do you ask?" he said.
"I?" she questioned. "Why?"
"I thought the last fortnight would have taught you that," he said quietly.
Her eyes flashed upon him ere she could prevent them, and from the flash her cheeks took colour as though they faced a flame.
But she was playing with the shells in her hand again before he noticed that she had moved her head, but the tip of her forefinger trembled as she pushed the tiny pink heap across her palm.
"Taught me what?" she murmured.
"What I couldn't say," he replied, adding determinedly, as she would not help him, "how much I admired you."
She turned her face half way towards him with a little pathetic distrustful smile.
"Couldn't you see it?" he said.
Her under lip quivered as her mouth moved to answer him; then, as though afraid to trust the simplest word to it, she shook her head.
Caragh saw the quiver, and every fibre in him seemed resonant with that vibration; seemed to ring with pity and tenderness and shame, as a bell reverberates to a mere thread of sound.
The thing was happening which had never happened to him before; with which, in a varied adventure with women, he had never had to charge his soul; for, until to-day, he had not stolen wittingly a girl's love.
"I thought it was plain enough," he went on warily; "I couldn't have given my eyes much more to say."
"Oh, your eyes!" came her deprecation.
He waited a second.
"Well, you see," he temporized, "I'm shy, and I didn't know how else to say it, but I hoped you'd understand."
He let the vague uncommitting words slip slowly from him, as a man pays out a cable which he cannot make fast, with rocks astern of him, and the last fathom at any moment in his fingers. Would she come to his help, he wondered, with a laugh or a light word, or must he go on to the inevitable end.
Lettice said nothing; her glance, lifted from her hand, looked away past him absently across the bay. But in its aversion he read that she understood—more even than he asked; understood that a man may be craven enough to let his eyes do what his lips dare not. She was not coming to his help; but he might, so her silence said, jump overboard and save himself, and let her and his honour go together upon the rocks.
"Well!" he went on in lighter tones, as though to suggest their adoption, "I'm afraid my mute eloquence was wasted. Must I stoop to speech?"
The girl's eyes still gazed dreamily across the water.
"What for?" she said.
She might, as many a woman would, have left his hesitation no alternative; have given with some touch of tenderness, of reluctance, even of acerbity, that hint of the expected from which, for his honour, there could be no appeal. But she chose not to. Perhaps it was her diffidence that decided, perhaps her pride.
Anyway she left to him the freedom of his embarrassment, such as it was.
He must extricate himself, but he himself should choose how. It was clear that he had not chosen when he spoke again.
"You see," he said, with the same airy extenuation; "I'm such a bad talker that I leave as little as possible to my tongue. It is so often, to my thought, like the nervous listener who insists on supplying the last word to a sentence; the wrong word, but the word one has, out of good manners, to use."
She was looking at him now, but with no meaning in her eyes.
"That's why," he continued, "I couldn't trust it to say how ... how grateful I was for you."
"Forme?" she questioned.
"You see I can't trust it yet," he pleaded ruefully. "Yes,foryou: for everything about you that's so delightful and unlooked for; the charm——"
At that her eyes stopped him. He had looked up suddenly as though he felt the blaze of them hot upon his face.
"AmIin the show-pen?" she said quietly.
That settled it, he felt. Well, she had every right to her challenge; he had put it into her mouth.
It was characteristic, curiously enough, of his fortuitous nature, that, despite the unedifying fashion in which his intention had hitherto hung and veered—nosing, as it were, the wind of opportunity for a flaw that suited it—he put his helm over now with irrevocable decision.
"You've cause to ask that," he said with a smile, "since I left out the only reason that seems to make admiration speakable."
"Yes?" she asked simply. "What is it?"
He raised himself from his elbow, on to his wrist, with one knee beneath him, straightening himself with respectful homage to the occasion.
"Adoration!" he replied. "No man's eulogies can be an insult to the woman he adores."
Her eyes, brave enough before, would not meet that, and he saw the vain attempt to steady the rebellious tenderness of her lips. Their tremor touched him as it had before; his voice lost its little air of drama and dropped into the boyish plainness which so well became it.
"Please," he explained, "I should have said that first: only I didn't, because I thought you knew it. I'm not silly enough to suppose it matters whether I adore you or not, except just as an apology, the only apology for what I oughtn't to have said."
She was looking down deliberately at the hand on which she leant, and even her lips were hid from him. He bent towards her and put his hand over hers upon the sand.
"Dear," he said humbly, "it seems so idle to say I love you, that I only dare to say it—as an excuse. Will you let it stand at that, and forgive me just because of it? You needn't tell me that I have no claim, and never had the least encouragement to speak of such a thing. I know that. It's inconsiderate and presumptuous, and there's only me to blame. But some day, perhaps, you won't mind remembering that I worshipped you, and try to be a little sorry for me after all."
But what she tried, not over successfully, was to say his name. Yet her lips proclaimed it with such a tremulous appropriation as to answer all his other questions.
Maurice had never known an hour so disordered as that which followed his declaration. His mind was like a locomotive factory trying at a moment's notice to make balloons. It was a scene of astounding and fantastic compromises.
The attitude for the occasion appeared to be a clear high joyousness tinged with the overwhelming sense of an unlooked-for favour.
Something approaching that in appearance he did certainly achieve; enough to make for the girl the moment of its immense significance; to give it the acclamation, the splendour of crowning circumstance.
His gladness, like the colour of a flag that suddenly dyes the air with victory, brought the strangest, the most assuring tumult to her heart. She heard it, as the beleaguered hear the guns that end their siege, too faint, too happy, too amazed to answer.
He heard it with amazement too; heard in his own mouth the note of triumph, of a triumph which seemed to put an end to all his hopes, to mock with its thin pretence the lost promise of such a moment, the passionate exultation which it might have yielded him.
Yet he heard it; that was something; and, though he hardly knew what he was saying, he could read its radiant answer upon the girl's face. If he was missing the full measure of the hour—and that was to put his misfortune meagrely—she at least had not suspected it. He had that single satisfaction—but, to his schooling, a supreme one—the reflection, as he voiced it to his trouble, that he was 'playing the game.'
He was inspired to suggest tea. They had brought it with them, and, though it might have seemed a higher compliment to forget both that and the hour, it was one that Maurice had not the pluck to pay. He still felt to be an intruder to the occasion, to be sustaining what some one else had achieved. The sense of duplicity made him clumsy as a man under a load; he could not use with a lover's audacity the exquisite immaturity of the moment. The very kisses which her eyes expected left a traitor's taste upon his lips.
Action, though it was but tea-making, gave him breathing space; it dismissed, for a while at least, the most protesting part of him from service into which so breathlessly it had been pressed.
With a kettle in his hand, and under shelter of the hamper, his irresponsible buoyancy came back to him, his humorous appreciation of circumstance even when it told so heavily against himself; and his talk across the table he was spreading was only a shade too vivid to be a lover's. Its gay note was thrown up by the girl's silence; a silence lightened only by a happy nod or smile. She seemed to wish, sitting intently there, to feel her senses afloat on the invading flood of his devotion, as a boat is floated by the incoming tide.
It was for that she sat so still, unwilling by any impulse of her own, to dilute her consciousness of this strange strong thing, which crept to her very skin and carried her away, surgingly intimate as the living sea.
Maurice had set her silence down to shyness, till something in the soft rapture of her face told him its true meaning. The pathos of that and, for him, the shame of it, hurt him as an air too rare to breathe.
The thought of this woman measuring with grateful wonderment the magnitude of a thing which had no existence, but in which he had brought her to believe, wrung him with a keen distress.
And in that sharp moment of shame and pity he came very near loving her; came near enough, at any rate, to dedicate the future to her illusion.
As he knelt before her on the sand, offering her a tea-cup in both his hands as though it were some sacrifice to an idol, he realized, by the glance which accepted both the humour and the service, what a big thing he had in hand. It was big enough even, so he found before long, to hide his own immense disappointment, which shrank into a small affair beside that which she must never be allowed to feel.
He had received his discomfiture from a false trust in Fate, but hers would come from a false trust in him.
So Maurice reflected as he watched Miss Nevern trying to persuade herself that cake on such an occasion was as easy to consume as cake on any other. In that, however, despite an excellent intention, she did not succeed; and her failure, absurd as it might sound, lit in him a pride of responsibility which her "I love you" had not. Here, at any rate, was an unequivocal effect; beyond evasion he was chargeable with this; and no priestly sacrament could have so pledged his allegiance as that little dryness of her throat. She set down her half-emptied cup with the prettiest pretence of satiety, a pretence which Caragh, with the hot thirst of a wound upon him, and having already drained the tea-pot, felt it best became him to ignore.
The wind, which had died at mid-day, freshened in the shadows of the September evening, and ruffled the flat face of the water into one rich dark hue.
Along the northern shore of the bay the shade of the bluff had fallen, and made a leaden edging to the sea.
Southward the low sun blazed, a dull rose-red, against the scarp of cliff, and turned the further waters and the dim head-lands beyond them to a wine-dipped purple.
"It's as solemnly gorgeous as you could well have it," Maurice affirmed as he hauled in the boat, "and we're going out of this spiny harbour under all sail to show we take the display in a proper spirit."
There was something so boyishly absurd in his determination, that Lettice, too numb with happiness to be determined about anything, went with a sigh of abdication into the bow, and leaning over the stem-post, with her fingers through the lower cringle in the luff, called the course with the quick decision of a river pilot.
But for one long strident scrape—during which each held a breath—against a sunken ledge which the helmsman found her too close hauled to clear, they came valorously into the open sea, and Maurice, sitting over the gunwale to windward with the sheet in his hand, brought Lettice aft to steer.
He had the position of vantage, for she sat a foot beneath him, and, unlike hers, his eyes owed no attention to the sail.
She begged him not to look at her; but, feeling that observation was to her advantage, he only complied for a moment with her request.
Observation was to his advantage too; for if, with shut eyes, it was easier to remember what he had lost in his new possession, with them open it was impossible to forget what he had gained.
Only a dull man would have called Lettice Nevern beautiful, but the dullest could not have thought her plain.
She had, in its most dainty shape, that perfect imperfection known as prettiness. Distractingly pretty, most women called her; and men who were not thought easy of distraction had justified the label. She had a figure a sculptor would have prized, full, buoyant, flexible, with the grace of splendid health in every line. It was a consolation, Maurice reflected, to be able to admire an acquisition, even though one did not desire it. She had, too, an admirable temper, an eye for what became her, a dozen interests in the open air. That made for mutual accommodation, and he could imagine nothing in her which could lessen his respect.
His ignorance of women was based on too wide an acquaintance to be neglected, yet he felt sure that Lettice was no coquette.
And despite the gaiety with which her face was so charmingly inscribed, she could endure quietness—enjoy it even, as four summers at Ballindra proved.
On the whole he felt cause to thank Providence, as a man might, able to nurse his damaged limbs after an accident, that the catastrophe was, for him, no worse.
He was beginning to wonder what it might be for her.
They raced home under more canvas than one who knew the shore winds of Ballindra would have cared to carry; but neither, for diverse reasons, was inclined to prudence, and the wake they blazed across that blue-black surface was a joy to see.
Caragh's right hand went to and fro, as though it held a bolting horse, and the sheet wore a deep red furrow about his palm.
Lettice kept her eyes on her work, for, as they felt the tide-race, it took some little coaxing through the stiffer gusts to hold the boat's nose on the Head in front of them.
The wind that swept the sea was channelled by the contour of the cliffs into blustering draughts that streamed from the deep cut coombes, with spaces almost of calm between them. Slantwise across these lay their course, and as the boat leapt, like a hurt thing, at each fresh blow, Maurice could feel the quick restraint of the girl's guiding fingers.
As his arm gave with the gust, the pressure of hers upon the tiller seemed to answer it, and that sensation of swift divination and subtle responsiveness between his hand and hers was worth the risk of an upset, and Maurice only wished it were less impossible to discover if Miss Nevern shared it. He supposed not. Women, so time had taught him, were seldom sensitive to the unexpected.
As they cleared the Head, and the mystery of the river lay in the dark hills before them, Caragh came again to his senses.
"Down helm!" he said.
She woke out of her reverie, but with her hand hard over.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"Shorten sail," he said, letting go the halyards.
"You're very cautious," she flouted.
"It's the timidity of sudden happiness," he smiled, making fast the first reef cringle to the boom; "you've given me too much to lose."
She touched for an instant the hand which clipped the leech beside her, and the print of her warm fingers came like an oath for sanctity, turning to truth what had had for his own ear but a jesting bitterness: she had given him too much to lose.
"Well!" he laughed, when they were going again, as the full draught of the river laid them over, and, ahead, the orange lights of Ballindra gleamed in the cleft purple of the land, "would you like that tuck out of her skirts?"
She set her lips, as they shaved the outmost ledges of the southern shore, and came about in the banging wind.
"You ought to row," she said, smiling.
"Not a doubt of it," he admitted blandly; "you've only to say the word."
But she did not. Though the harbour was not full, there were riding lights enough upon the water to make, in that dusk, the threading of their way exciting, even without the tide under them, which hummed and jumped against the quivering anchor-chains. But she was proud of her seamanship, and of her knowledge of the river, and conscious that the man who watched her could appreciate the skill in every turn of her wrist, and the pluck which kept it steady as they grazed the great black shapes of ships, or spun about as a straining cable snapped up at them out of the dark water.
Tim Moran, the old boatman who put them ashore, had a melancholy headshake at her rashness.
"Bedad, sor, it's not meself that larned her to be so vinturesome!" he explained apologetically to Caragh as he pocketed an unlooked-for piece of silver at the slip.
"She's a wilful little thing, I'm afraid," Maurice murmured, slipping his arm in hers, as they went up into the obscurity of the shore, "and rather given to running risks in the dark."
She gave him her face for answer; and the kiss he put upon it was her seal of safety in the darkest risk that she had run.