Part 12

Caragh found at his rooms, when he arrived in London, in the forefront of his correspondence, a letter and a telegram.

Both were from Lady Ethel Vernon, and had an appositeness with which their recipient could very readily have dispensed.

They had been propped against a photograph of the sender, a coincidence not remarkable considering the number of her likenesses which the room held.

These agreed in the presentment of a woman, dark and slight, with a finely carried head, deep eyes that might be passionate, and a mouth that knew something of disdain.

Caragh took up one of the portraits when he had read his letter, looked at it along while without expression, and set it down again. The letter, which bore a foreign postmark and was some days old, spoke to the writer's probable departure with her husband for Budapest, where the latter, who had been an under secretary, wished to study some question of religious politics which was to come before the House of Deputies.

It groaned at the necessity of such a sojourn at such a season, and suggested, if a hint so imperious could be called suggestion, that Maurice Caragh's presence might be required in the Hungarian capital. The telegram merely added that it was.

Caragh picked up an English Bradshaw, and after turning its pages absently for five minutes in search of continental routes, realized the inadequacy of the volume, took up his hat, and went out.

Piccadilly dozed in the September sun, with a strange air of tired quietness, inert and listless as a weary being.

A stale warm haze of sunlight filled the air, silent, unstirred, that made a misty thickness in the plumage of the trees, while from some by-street were blown pale vapours with the smoky reek of bitumen, which told of autumn's leisurely repairs.

The dust on the roadway rose about the spray of a water-cart, and beyond it rumbled a solitary bus. On the park-stand waited, driverless, a worn four-wheeler, its horse asleep; and, here and there along the forsaken pavement, desultory figures, which the season never saw there, came and went.

Caragh, on the doorstep of his club, inhaled gratefully the dormant air, which sank like an opiate into the senses. How happy if those for whose pleasure this highway rang, worn and sleepless, during the hours of June, could only imitate in their recessions the soothing passiveness of its repose.

But the reflection led him to the banks of the Danube, and so, by the Orient express, indoors. There he lunched, looked out his train, worked through his letters, and went out into the dozing afternoon.

If he had ever been before in London during its first September days he felt he had been there to no purpose. He had missed it all. The silence, the sense of space, the strange exhausted air, the curious people moving aimlessly about, like the queer creatures that sometimes take possession of a deserted warren.

He strolled vaguely through the deserted streets, out of which suddenly the inhabitants had sunk as water through a sieve. A housemaid's laughing challenge from a doorway to the grocer's boy rang round an empty square. A lean cat went softly along the pavement, yet one could hear the fall of her pads. Everywhere blinds were drawn behind the windows. The place was in mourning for a people that died annually, like seedling flowers.

Caragh drifted from street to street, amused, philosophic, in that oblivion to his own before and after of which he was so profusely capable.

When he was tired he returned to the club. Then he remembered; and, after deciding regretfully against the adequateness of a telegram, wrote four pages of penitent affection, which he hoped might read more exhilarating in Ballindra than he could pretend to find them.

With their execution his consciousness quickened, and he spent a melancholy evening at the play. Two days later he was in Vienna.

V

"Here!" cried Harry Vernon, tossing his wife a telegram he had just opened, "this is meant for you. Caragh's coming on from Komarom by raft."

"By _raft_?" exclaimed the lady as she caught the envelope. "What's that?"

"One of those crawling timber things you see going by," replied Vernon, gazing meditatively across the river; "it's rather the sort of thing one imagines Caragh would do: invests him with the charm of the unexpected."

His wife was frowning as she read the message.

"What does he mean by such a piece of fooling," she said petulantly, "when he knows I'm here alone!"

"Never having been married, he probably thinks there's me," suggested her husband blandly.

"Well, there's you and about twenty ill-dressed Germans who can't even speak their own language, or no one; mostly no one. It's not amusing in a place like this. When will he be here?"

Harry Vernon put his finger on the bell. "We'll find out," he said.

But they did not. The combined intelligence of the hotel was unequal to coping with the ways of a timber raft; it made obliging guesses, tranquilly ridiculous, as a concession to good manners, which, with easy indifference to distance, endowed Caragh's new mode of motion with any rate of progress between that of a perambulator and of an express train.

Ethel Vernon bit her lip as her husband drew out, with huge relish, in his profuse execrable German the ambagious ignorance of the hotel staff.

"Well," he laughed, as the last witness withdrew, "it seems you may expect Caragh any moment from lunch-time until this day month. If only these good people had named an hour at which he couldn't possibly turn up we should have known when to look for him."

"He may come when he pleases," said his wife indifferently.

"It's a way he has," remarked the other, smiling.

Lady Ethel determined before his arrival to see everything in the city which Caragh might wish to show her.

The effort would bore her considerably, but she hoped for some compensation from his chagrin. The city was, however, for the following days, almost obliterated by pelting rain.

But even that brought a measure of consolation. Ethel sat at her window, and watched the green river grow turbid and swollen under the streaming skies.

"I hope he likes his raft," she murmured grimly.

But it was her husband who on that aspiration had the first news. He had paid a visit to Vacz, and meant to return by water. On the pier he found Caragh, whose curiosity in raft travel was satisfied, and who yearned for dry clothes. They travelled by the same boat, and Maurice explained that his adventure dated back many years in design, which a chance meeting with a timber merchant at Gyor enabled him to execute. He gave an account of the raft-men, their hardihood, humour, and riparian morality.

"I see," said Vernon, amused and interested. "Pity it's not the sort of thing that appeals to a woman!"

Caragh looked at him doubtfully.

"I suppose it's not," he said.

"I mean as a reason for having kept her waiting," Vernon continued.

"Must think of something else," soliloquized the other dolefully.

Vernon laughed.

"There's always that happy alternative for a Celt. Oh, by the way," he cried, with sudden remembrance, "how's the lady?"

"Which lady?" Caragh enquired.

"The lady you're going to marry in that green isle of yours. We heard of her from Miss Persse, who'd been staying over there, at Bally--something or other."

"Miss Nevern?" Caragh suggested absently, looking across the river; he was not a man very easy to surprise.

"That's the name!" said Vernon. "When does it come off?"

"I'm afraid you'll have to ask Miss Persse," replied the other slowly; "I'm not in her confidence."

"Well, I'm sorry," the politician said. "I hoped you were going to settle down and lead an honest life."

"I've kept out of prison--and Parliament, so far," replied Caragh thoughtfully.

"Your things turned up all right, and I took a room for them," Vernon explained, as they landed at the Ferencz Jozsef Quay and went up to the hotel. "The place is so full over this religious Bill that it's hard to get in anywhere."

He went up with Caragh to see if the right room had been reserved.

"We're dining down below at seven; everything's early here. Kapitany is coming, the leader of the opposition in the Magnates."

Caragh got out of his wet things in which he had lived during the two days of rain, took a bath, and dressed. There were still two hours to dinner, and he debated for a moment if he should go in search of Ethel Vernon. Something in his remembrance of her husband's smile, however, seemed to deprecate hurry, and he was aware that the man who knew not how to wait came only to the things he had not wanted.

As he doubted what to do, he remembered vividly where he was. While he loitered, under an apricot twilight the Váczi-utcza was becoming silvered with its thousand lamps.

At that hour the brilliant merry little street would be filling, between its walls of blazing windows, across the breadth of its asphalte road, with a stream of men and women; men of fine carriage and women with splendid eyes; laughing, chattering, flaunting, flirting, strolling idly to and fro.

He would sit there again, as he had sat so often, to sip his coffee and watch the crowd.

On his way a postman, running into him, gave a fresh jolt to his memory.

There would be a letter awaiting him from Lettice! He paused a moment, mentally to locate the post-office, and to taste the curious sedate pleasure the anticipation brought. It was the first letter he had received from her, and the first of such a kind that had ever come to him from any woman. He found it in the big busy building behind the Laktanya, and, slipping it into his pocket, turned back to the gay Váczi-utcza, already filled with a piercing ineffectual whiteness under the clear rose and amethyst of the evening sky.

There, with a green tumbler before him, in a kavehaz much patronized of the garrison, he sat and read his letter, looking out absently between its sentences at the lighted faces in the street.

It was a shy sweet formal little note, not lavish of endearment, less so even than her lips had been, and with something evasive and unaccustomed about it which touched Caragh, like the shrinking of a child's hand from an unfamiliar texture.

He had completely forgotten her existence half an hour earlier, yet he was surprised to find how tenderly he thought of her, when he thought of her at all. Women, before now, had often filled his thoughts to an aching tension; he had read their letters with a leaping pulse; but he had felt for none of them as he did for this frank girl, who escaped so easily from his remembrance and had never warmed his blood.

He bought a basket of saffron roses on his way back and sent it up to Ethel Vernon. She was sitting at table when he came down to dinner, talking volubly across it to a ruddy white-haired old gentleman with a soldier's face and shoulders. She greeted him with charming animation, introduced him to Kapitany, mentioned his adventure, and wove his tongue at once into their talk. Fine manners and the tact of entertainment were traditions in her family since there had been an earldom of Dalguise, and the famous Hungarian, noting the adroitness with which she piloted Caragh's ethical opinions into the traffic of politics, thought her a very clever woman, and him a very fortunate young man.

With his own good fortune Caragh was less impressed. He had not expected that his roses would be worn, but he wished that a frock had not been selected which seemed so much to miss them.

He knew Ethel Vernon well enough to make out the meaning of her primrose and heliotrope, and she, alas! knew him well enough to be certain that he could not miss it. The delicacy of his perception had supplied her before with forms of punishment, which she used on him the more deliberately since no one else of her acquaintance was hurt by them at all. Her courtesy, which so appealed to Kapitany, seemed to Caragh like a frozen forceps feeling for his nerves. They were both of them beyond the use of courtesies, which may lead back along the road of friendship as far, and faster, than they have led forward. Her affability seemed that night to thrust Caragh back to the days spent in fascinated speculation on the advice in Ethel Vernon's eyes. He had taken it, or supposed he had taken it, in the end, and for nearly three years now she had stood for everything of woman's interest and adjustment in his life. That, for him, was a considerable stretch of constancy, for which however he took no credit. It was due, as he had once suggested, to her bewildering inconstancy to herself, which produced in her captive a sense of attachment to half a dozen women.

Her inconstancy in those three years had not, it was true, been confined altogether to herself. She had forsaken her own high places more than once or twice to follow strange gods. There were certain astounding admirations to her account for men whom Caragh found intolerable.

She found them so herself after a brief experience, and always returned to him more charming for her mistakes, with the wry face of a child who comes from some unprofitable misdemeanour to be scolded and consoled.

So, with mutual concessions and disillusionment, their alliance--never worse than indiscreet--took the shape of a serene affection. On her part somewhat appropriative, and touched perhaps on his with sentiment; yet, in the main, that rare arrangement between man and woman, a loyal and tender comradeship.

Caragh had, in consequence, cause to feel embarrassed by the news he carried.

Projects for his marriage had often made a jest between them, but neither had ever taken the idea seriously, and its development would come to her, as he knew, with all the baseness of a betrayal.

His sense of the cruelty of what he had to tell her endued him with a strange numbness and indifference to the fashion in which during dinner her hurt pride stabbed at him under the caresses of her manner. Beside her just resentment, this irritation because he had dared to keep her waiting seemed not to matter. He was so sorry for all she was to suffer because of him, that no lesser feeling seemed to count. He listened to Vernon's politics, to Kapitany's eulogy of _fogash_, but he was thinking only of what he had to say.

After dinner the Hungarian carried Vernon off to the club, and his hostess offered to keep Caragh until her husband's return.

He followed her upstairs to her sitting-room, and out on to a little balcony which overlooked the Danube.

The night had in it still the soft warmth of the September day, but the sky was dyed with violet, in which the stars were growing white. The river swept beneath them in a leaden humming flood, and beyond it the Castle and Hill of Buda stood black among the stars.

Ethel dropped into a low cane chair, and Caragh, seated upon the balustrade, took a long look at the darkening air before he turned and spoke to her.

He knew that an explanation was expected of him, reasonable, but not so reasonable as to evade reproaches; and an apology, not humble enough to be beneath reproof. He tendered both; and if they left his censor with quite false impressions, that, he reflected ruefully, came of the perverse requirements of a woman's mind.

Looking down at her lifted face below him, pale under the purple heaven as though penetrated by the night, and still estranged, despite his pleading, over so trumpery a cause, he wondered how much, because of her beauty, woman had lost in understanding.

Beauty Ethel Vernon had in its most provoking, most illusive form. It came and went like the scent of a flower, left her passive and unpersuading, or lit her radiantly as a kindled lamp.

Even the shape of her spread skirts in the chair beneath him had in its vagueness something, some soft glow of sense, which made it expressive, and which made it hers. And he was anxious for peace, for peace at any price, from such a needless strife. What he had to tell her would be hard enough any way; but it was, at all events, something with the dignity of fate. He could not speak of it while fighting this little foolish fit of outraged pride, and he would not speak of it while his tidings might seem to be touched with the malice of his punishment. For one moment he was tempted to let this idle quarrel grow into a cause of rupture--so easy with an offended woman--and thus be spared speech at all. It would be easier, more considerate for her, inclination told him, and ah! so acceptably easier and more considerate for himself. But the temptation was not for long. In all his unprofitable vacillations he had shirked nothing to which he had set his name. The only chance to get square with folly was, he knew, by paying the price of it, and the one gain possible in this worst of his blunders seemed to be its pain. He would go through with that.

Yet, though he had his chance that evening, had it thrust upon him, he did not take it. There is a limit even to one's appetite for pain.

But he made peace, having swallowed his scolding and admitted that the ways of men were mad. The talk turned to easier topics, and he looked with less apprehension at the silken shadow in the chair.

Then, with a sudden air of remembrance, Ethel put the question which had clung for hours to the end of her tongue.

"Oh! by the way, am I to congratulate you?"

"Well, I don't know," he said. "About what?"

"Oh, that's absurd!" she exclaimed with a nervous laugh: "Isn't there a Miss Nevin?"

"Two or three, I daresay," he conceded.

"Miss Persse only mentioned one," she said, looking keenly at the dark silhouette of his figure perched on the iron trellis among the stars. "But she wrote that you could tell us a good deal about _her_."

"I can," he allowed serenely; "she's a charming creature."

"Sufficiently charming to be charmed by you?"

"So I flatter myself," he said. "I don't know even that I wouldn't put it--to be charmed _only_ by me."

"Ah, that's too superlative," she sighed derisively.

"To be said of any woman? Possibly! You're a woman and you ought to know," he reflected. "But she's the sort of woman one says rather more of than one ought."

"And rather more to than one ought."

"Well, yes, perhaps. One forgets, of course; but I fancy I must have said a good deal."

"She could listen to a good deal, no doubt," said Ethel Vernon slowly.

"She could listen absorbingly," he replied with ardour.

"And you said all you knew?"

"Heaven pity a poor woman! no! You forget my attainments. I said all that I was hopelessly ignorant of. That proved infinitely more attractive."

"I daresay it did," she agreed shortly. "Your ignorance of what you shouldn't say to a woman is past belief."

"I don't think it passed hers," he said pensively. "She hasn't your capacity for distrust."

"She'll acquire it," returned the other drily. "And what do you do in that sort of place? I heard you sailed with her."

"I sailed with her, I sat with her, I supped with her! The brother was obligingly occupied, and preoccupied, with the estate--which yields about half what it costs him--and so she had to look after me."

"Which wasn't difficult?"

"Simplicity itself," he smiled. "She had to look such a very little way; I was never out of her sight."

"Idyllic!"

"It was. We sailed from the hour the mists lifted till the moon rose to show us home. Or we sat together on little beaches with only the wide seas in sight."

"Where she made love to you?"

"Where she made love to me. On a strand of fairy shells, with a sapphire pool beside us and her little arm about my neck."

Ethel Vernon laughed. "You're about the only man I know who would have told her to remove it."

"I didn't tell her to remove it. I abandoned myself to the situation. You didn't ask, by the way, if she were pretty."

"No, I heard that you had stayed there for a fortnight."

Caragh chuckled. "A very sage deduction," he replied. "Well, she is pretty, though you mightn't think so. It's the sort of prettiness that tempts you in."

"That tempts you in?" she questioned irritably.

"Yes, tempts you in to the character. Like a lamp by the window of a cosy room. Makes you want to go in, and loll in a chair, and look at the pictures--there are pictures--and feel comfortably and gratefully at home. There's a kind of beauty, you know, to which one says, 'Yes, very charming; but, for heaven's sake, let's stay outside!'"

"But you didn't stay outside Miss Nevin's?" Ethel Vernon asked.

"Miss Nevern's," he corrected. "No, as I've told you, I went in, and walked round, and wondered how she had kept it so unspoiled. Most girls' minds are pasted over with appalling chromos of the emotions, as painted in fiction; and there's a stale taint of some one else's experience in everything they do and say; a precocious air of having been vicariously there before. It's quite stimulating to come across a woman who is fresh to what she feels."

"Like the beautiful Miss Nevern! And how did it end?"

"Oh, how _does_ it end?" he said with a sigh. "We vowed the endless everythings, and kissed, and parted. And here I am in Budapest!"

The lady in the chair looked up at him for some seconds with a slow smile upon her lips. "I wonder when you're going to be too old," she murmured, "to talk nonsense?"

"Oh, it wasn't nonsense," he answered mournfully.

She began some question as to his journey, but he checked it with a lifted finger and a sudden "Hush!"

She could only hear the dull rush of the river and the waning rumble of the town. Then above these floated, blown soft and faint as a thistle-seed against their faces, a bugle note from the black Castle of Buda across the stream.

A wailing cadence, twice repeated, and then the long melancholy call, with all its intricate phrases delicately clear, now that their ears were adjusted to the thread of sound, ending as it had opened with the falling cadence which left a last low mournful note upon the air.

"What is it?" she enquired as the sound faded.

"Last Post," he answered. "Wait!"

The gurgle of the river rose again, and the feebler murmur of the streets rejoined it. Then the call came once more; came with buoyant clearness through the blue night air, straight across the water.

The noises of the city seemed to cease, as though all stood listening to that fluting sweetness, and, when its last plaintive challenge died away, the slender echoes of other bugles could be heard repeating it to the distant barracks beyond the hill.

Long after the last was silent Caragh still stared out over the river at the girdle of lights along its further shore and the scattered tapers which burned beyond it up the Castle slope into the sky.

"That seems to impress you very much," said Ethel Vernon presently.

"It does impress me," he replied. "It doesn't seem to belong there."

He did not say why. It was seldom worth while to submit to a woman any sentiment that was unestablished. Convention was the passport to her understanding. But what, he wondered, had soldiers in common with that cry of the spent day? How were their blatant showy lives related to the impotent patience of its despair? It was as if some noisy roisterer had breathed a Nunc Dimittis.

But he only explained, when she pressed for his reason, that the call did not sound to him sufficiently truculent for a soldier's good-night.

He whistled its English equivalent. "That's more like it," he exclaimed. "The man who sleeps on that will sleep too deep to dream of anything but love, and blood, and beer."