Part 10

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 Measure of a Man

I

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 carry _me_. 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.