Part 11

"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."

"_For_ me?" she questioned.

"You see I can't trust it yet," he pleaded ruefully. "Yes, _for_ you: 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.

"Am _I_ in 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.

II

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.

III

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.

IV