Part 13

They talked on under the stars till Harry Vernon stumbled out on to the balcony from the darkness of the room, and began at once an energetic account of his evening at the Casino. He never consulted the interest of his hearers, but his voluble information generally made his interest theirs. He was to inspect, on the morrow, more than most men would have cared to look at in a week, and he was certain to see it all with the weighty sense of responsibility to his country which only an under secretary can acquire. He apologized to his wife for leaving her introduction to the city with one as incompetent as Caragh to do it justice.

"He probably knows it a great deal better than you ever will," she laughed.

"He probably does," replied her husband with a grin, "but the parts he knows best he won't be able to show you."

Caragh threw a cushion at the speaker's head as he turned to say good-night to his wife.

VI

He went downstairs, and out on to the quay, turning southward along the river towards the Fövámház.

For a foreigner he knew Pest well, but his knowledge only led him now by its loneliest avenue. He stood for a long while, his back to the empty market-place--which glowed by day with the red and orange of autumn ripeness--his elbows on the broad stone embankment, gazing out across the swirling river on which the starlight slid and shivered in darting streaks of gold.

He hated himself for what had taken place that evening, as he had often with equal reason hated himself before.

Somehow he seemed to lack the personal seriousness which saved men from treating their own affairs with the humorous tolerance which they extended to their neighbours! Life appeared to him the same comic spectacle from whatever point one saw it. Fate was often just as funny when it killed as when it crowned you, and however intimately they might annoy him, he never could keep back a laugh at its queer ways.

It was Fate's whim at present to make him look like a scoundrel by a deed that was probably as decent as any he would ever do, and the irony of his ill-luck so tickled him that, in laughing at it, he had become really abominable.

A sentimentalist with a sense of humour cut, as he could see, a very poor figure; it were better, so far as appearances went, to be a pompous fool.

Self-esteem is so widespread a virtue that the world, whatever it may say, is always impressed even by ridiculous dignity, and its one universally unconvincing spectacle is the man laughing at himself. Besides, when a man finds himself absurd, what is he likely to think imposing?

Yet, for all his humour, Caragh sighed. For the moment, as on many previous moments, he craved the solemn personal point of view to make life seem for once of some importance and give him a taste of undiluted tears.

His reflections were interrupted by something rubbing against his leg.

It proved to be a little white dog, and he addressed some whimsical advice to it about the time of night before looking out again upon the river. But as the animal made no sign of movement, but merely shivered against his ankle, he lifted it up and set it on the parapet before him.

From an inspection there he found it to be all but starved, with just strength enough to stand.

He was indifferent to dogs, and felt that the wisest course, as he explained to it, would be to drop the trembling creature into the water and out of a world that had used it so ill.

But he was very far from indifferent to the waif-like loneliness that gazed at him from its eyes, and, tucking it resignedly under his wrap, he turned back to the hotel.

He spent an hour there, feeding it with some biscuits that remained from his raft journey, soaked in whisky and water, and then, since the little thing refused to rest but on the bed, he made the best of its odorous presence beside him, and only cursed his own soft-heartedness when waked occasionally by its tongue.

On the morrow he began to show Ethel Vernon the city, and for two days she was too interested and fatigued to find fault with him. She had discovered the terrier, and enthusiastically adopted it, to Caragh's relief, being as devoted to dogs as he was apathetic.

But on the third evening, when they were sitting again together upon the balcony after a quiet afternoon, she spoke her disappointment.

The night was as splendidly blue as it had been when they sat there before; and she, dressed in black, with blue-black sequins woven over her bodice and scattered upon her skirt, looked to be robed in some dark cluster of starlight in her corner of the balcony.

They had been talking of matters in which neither took much interest; then after a long pause she said quietly, "Why are you so different?"

"I?" he exclaimed.

"Oh, please don't pretend," she sighed. "What is it?"

"I told you," he said doggedly, "the other night."

"The other night?" she repeated. "What, when we were here?"

"Yes," he said.

She reflected for a moment. "About that girl, the one in Ireland? Do you mean that?"

"I do," he said.

"Do you mean it was true?" she asked with increasing tenseness.

"Quite true," he said.

"But you were laughing," she protested incredulously. "I took it for a joke."

"I'm always laughing," he said grimly; "but I wish I hadn't been then. It was so serious that I couldn't be. But it's no good explaining that; you can't understand."

Her mind was set on something different--on something to her of more moment than a man's absurd reasons for being trivial. It was some time before she spoke.

"You asked her to marry you?" she pondered slowly, only half in question, as though scarcely able to realize what he had done.

"I did," he said; "how else should we be engaged?"

"Oh, dozens of ways," she answered: "she might have asked you."

"Well, she didn't," he said stoutly.

"I wonder if you know," she mused; "men don't. And did you want to marry her?"

"Would I have asked her otherwise?" he demanded.

"Oh, yes," she sighed; "very possibly. Men often propose because they can think of nothing else to say. And have you wanted to be married long?"

"What do you mean?" he said.

"Three months?" she queried.

The light little head was tilted sideways in old fascinating way. It was not so dark but he might have seen it had he not been staring at the stars. He might even have noticed, had he looked closer, how wide her eyes were, and how unsteady the small mouth.

"Why three months?" he said.

"Wasn't it three months ago we were at Bramley Park?" she went on reflectively. "Can you still remember what you told me there?"

"Was it different from what I'd told you everywhere?" he parried.

"No--o!" she murmured, with a long wavering breath; "not until to-night. You said you could never, while I lived, think of marrying another woman."

"Yes," he assented; "I remember. We were looking down at the moonlight on the lake."

"We were," she said. "And you had your hand on mine. You put it there; you put it there as you spoke. Were you thinking how wonderfully easy it was to fool a woman?"

"I've never fooled you, nor tried to fool you," he answered quietly. "I've cared for you too much for that. No, not in the common way; but because you've always been such an honest and good friend to me. Some women insist on being fooled; they make any sort of truth to them impossible. You made a lie."

"So it seems now," she said wistfully.

"No," he replied, "it seems now just the opposite. But I can't help that."

"You could have helped it ... once," she said.

"Oh, we can always help things once," he objected.

"Did you know her when we were at Bramley?"

"Yes, very slightly."

"Very slightly, only three months ago," she repeated incredulously.

"Yes," he said.

There was a pause. Ethel Vernon's fingers were playing nervously with a ring.

"When did you want to marry her?" she asked at length.

He hesitated in his turn.

"I can't tell you that," he said.

"Why?" she questioned. "Don't you know?"

"I know perfectly," he said.

"Well?" she queried. Then, as he made no response, "Haven't I the right to know?"

"I can't say," he answered. "I haven't the right to tell you."

"Why?"

"It isn't only mine to tell," he said.

"It's hers, you mean?" she exclaimed. "Everything's hers, I suppose, now; everything that you once could call your own! Did you ever share your life with _me_ in that fashion?"

"You forget," he said gravely. "_She_ shares herself."

Ethel Vernon leaned towards him fiercely. "Do you mean----" she began impetuously, and stopped.

He turned and looked steadily into her angry eyes. Her quick breath spread the starlight to a vague and smoky blueness among the gleaming sequins on her breast. "Yes," he said, "that is probably what I _do_ mean. First or last, whatever you may call her, it's the woman's self that counts."

She remained for a moment with her eyes still passionately alight, and something visible even in the dusk upon her face which she would and would not say. Then her mouth hardened, and she flung herself back in her chair.

"I hate you," she cried.

"No," he said with a sigh; "you hate the fact. Every woman does whom it doesn't profit."

There was nothing said between them for some minutes, and Caragh could hear the silk ripple as her foot swung to and fro among the ruchings of her skirt. The sound brought back another silence, when she had sat beside him on an English summer evening in a dusk almost as deep; brought back the hour from that scented night when, with the spells of strangeness still upon her charm, he had listened to her ankles' silken whisper, and felt in the dark the unendurable sweetness of her presence rob his life of its desires.

He was carried so far by the memory that the change in her voice startled him when she spoke again.

"What did you tell her about me," she demanded.

"I didn't tell her anything," he said.

"She hasn't asked about your past?"

"Not yet."

"You think she won't?"

"Oh, no, I don't," he smiled.

"And when she does! Will you tell her the usual lie?"

"Did I tell it to you?"

"You didn't ask me to marry you," she thrust back. "One treats the woman differently that one's going to _share_."

"Yes," he admitted doubtfully, "it's very possible one does. Only I think the sharing works the other way. One tells her the truth in common honesty."

"Never!" she exclaimed. "You tell her the truth in transcendental lunacy, and wish you'd bitten your tongue out five minutes later when you see she thinks you a sweep."

He turned towards her with a smile. "I'm afraid my transcendental lunacies are about done," he said.

She laughed. "To judge by the last of them," she retorted.

"The last of them!" he exclaimed reprovingly. "You shouldn't speak of marriage by so wild a name."

"I don't," she said shortly; "only of yours. Will you swear to me that you love her?"

"Willingly," he answered, "if you're unwise enough to ask."

"To ask for an oath which would have no meaning?"

"None whatever," he replied. "What would you expect?"

"The truth!" she said. "Isn't it due to me?"

"Yes," he admitted, "and you've had it; though it hasn't been easy. Consider if a man is likely to relish the sort of confession that I've made to you?"

"You couldn't very well avoid it," she reminded him.

"Oh, yes, I could," he said. "I might have quarrelled with you--you're uncommonly easy to quarrel with--and then ... when you heard of my engagement you'd have put it down to pique."

"You thought of doing that?" she asked distrustfully.

"Yes, I thought of that and of a dozen other ways of--well, of taking you in," he admitted, "and of getting out of it myself."

"It doesn't sound very brave," she said softly.

"No, it sounds uncommon paltry, I've no doubt," he agreed. "I funked it, and I tried to think it would have been kinder as well as pleasanter to keep you in the dark. Would it?"

She shook her head.

"Well, I don't know," he reflected doubtfully; "I fancy you'd sooner have thought that you had done it than that I had, however little you might have liked it. And you'd have been a bit sorry for me, instead of thinking me a beast."

"I'm sorry for you as it is," she answered quietly.

"What do you mean?" he exclaimed.

"I don't believe you love her," she said unsteadily.

"Oh, well," he murmured with a shrug; "then I can't persuade you."

She shook her head again--the little tossing shake which reminded Caragh sharply of how she used to tease him, through the curls that sometimes fall across her eyes. He was looking at the stars before she spoke again.

"I think there's one thing you might tell me which wouldn't hurt her if I knew," she said persuadingly. "Was it because you'd come to care less for me that ... that you ... that you asked her?"

He rose from his seat, and leant against the iron trellis of the balcony, looking out across the river.

"Was it?" she pleaded.

"No!" he said to the night. He turned presently and took a step to enter the room. "Time I went," he said, checking his progress as he passed her chair.

She laid her fingers upon his sleeve. "Morrie!" she whispered.

He stooped and kissed her face, while her detaining hand slipped with a soft pressure into his.

Then she let it go, and sat, listening, as the sound of his footsteps died away beyond the room; sat gazing out at the moving sky, with a face from which the light had faded, till Henry Vernon's voice surprised her dreams.

VII

It was in the following June that Caragh found himself preparing for his final visit to Ballindra. Lettice Nevern and her brother had been in town for some six weeks during the winter, and his business affairs having straightened themselves, and enabled him to anticipate a sufficiently plausible income for two people, he had asked Arthur Nevern formally for his sister's hand.

Nevern understood the proposal and the man who made it so slightly, that, displeased by the prospective loss of an admirable housekeeper, he began to pile up, breathlessly, inflated obstacles to its fulfilment.

Caragh heard him out.

"It's a confounded nuisance, of course, for you," he said; "these sort of things always are for somebody. That's why I've waited to get my side of it square before bothering you, so that you'd know for certain from the outset when your sister would be leaving you. We're not going to decide where to settle till we can look at places together, so that won't make for delay, but she refuses to be hurried over her kit, as it's to provide six months' food for some pet school of hers in Ballindra, so I've given her till July. The only question is, would you sooner the wedding was over there or here?"

Arthur Nevern stared at the younger man's directness, but he discovered speedily that he might stare as he pleased.

The little that Lettice had was in her own right, and Caragh had asked no more with her from the man before him.

Nevern was thus left with nothing to refuse but his consent, and that, apparently, was of no consequence to those who asked it.

He gave it at last as ungraciously as he could, and agreed later that the ceremony should be in London, in order to share its expense with an aunt of his who had offered her house.

He twitted Caragh with his impatience, and Caragh smiled.

His smile touched a point of humour unlikely to tickle a future brother-in-law, but he suggested that a man's hurry to be married seldom appealed to his friends.

He might have added that the reasons for it in his own case did not appeal to himself, but they were too serious and disconcerting even for his sense of the ridiculous.

They were, put briefly, the possible attraction of another woman; and it was his despairing self-contempt that goaded him to dispose, so high-handedly, of any obstacles to his marriage with Lettice Nevern.

It was particularly characteristic of him, that while reflecting almost every hour on some fantastic chance that might avert their union, he applied his foot with an almost unmannerly intolerance to any of the reasonable hindrances in its way. That was of a piece, no doubt, with his marked aversion from any form of moral hedging, and his preferred fondness for an honest lie.

He had stayed at Budapest for three days after his confession, to keep Ethel Vernon company till her husband's engagements were at an end. He had asked her if she wished him to remain, and she had said indifferently that he must please himself. He did not please himself; but he did not go.

The terms on which they met and spoke were strained and curious.

Caragh in his perverse fashion found them stimulating. Ethel made not the faintest reference to what he had told her, but she treated him neither with the familiar plainness into which they had fallen, nor as a common and secure acquaintance.

There was about her bearing an extraordinary delicacy and distance such as a girl uses to deny herself to the man to whom, unconscious, she has, proudly and irretrievably, given her heart.

Having exhausted the interests of the town, they spent the time in long drives to the places she expressed a wish to see in the country; an occupation not pre-eminently adapted to an evasive relationship.

On the fourth morning she said to him, simply:

"I can't stand it any more. You must go."

"Have I been a brute?" he asked.

"No," she said; "you've been extremely nice. Perhaps that's why. I don't know: I've tried not to know. Perhaps I may feel differently when I meet you again. I can't say. I daresay not. But I can't go on as we are. You don't mind my asking, do you? I don't think you wanted to stay. Why should you? I can make up something to Henry about your going: there's always the telegraph to account for things. And don't write, please, unless I ask you to. I'm going to try to forget you--if I can. What's the use of doing anything else? I've been a fool enough as it is."

There was in Caragh's eye the remembrance of days when it seemed as if that desired oblivion would be his to seek, days when his devotion had appeared to be quite obliterated from her memory by the surprising splendour of some one else.

That was, of course, the last thing of which he could remind her, but it was, too, the last he could forget.

He had accepted the real misery of those days without murmuring; at least he might use their ancient poison as an anodyne now. Not to excuse, nor to exalt himself, but to dilute, as it were, now that he had to drink it, the cup of her indignation.

It made the sour of that seem, at least, not quite so much of his own mixing to remember that, twice at least in the last two years, he might have drifted from her on occasions when her attention was too engrossed by another to notice that he was gone.

He would have liked in the friendliest fashion to have led her memory to those days, to show her how dispensable he was; only, he reflected one never knew how a woman would take that sort of consolation: he was not very sure if he would value it himself.

And when it came to his good-byes, he felt anything but fitted for the consoler's office. He had come to Pest bitterly grieved to lose a friend; but he left it like a baffled lover.

The shy strangeness of her manner and the proud distance in her eyes had brought again about Ethel Vernon the glamour of days when his heart beat quicker at her approach.

With every hour of indifference the old provocation in her presence grew. He felt that to stay would be but to yield to it again, and he heard with a dismal relief her sentence of exile.

He set himself rigidly to pack his things, yet where to go he could not determine. That invisible bond which tied him to the future made all the difference to a man's plans. The East beckoned--he was half way to it--and the green harbours of the Asian coast.

But that meant money, as he knew of old, and it was lack of money that had deferred his vow. In all honesty he could not spend upon himself what he had half pledged to another. He turned disconsolately towards home.

He drifted about during the autumn from one shoot to another. It was his ordinary occupation for three months of the year, yet now it seemed unusual. It seemed outside a new continuity of existence which had begun for him.

But he devoted himself to settling his affairs, and was able in consequence, as has been narrated, to propose himself as an unwelcome relative when Arthur Nevern was in town.

Caragh had looked forward doubtfully to meeting Lettice again, under conditions which might suit her so much less well as a background than the open downs and the sea. But his forebodings were gloomy enough to be disappointed.

She had some art in dress, as he had noted from her evening frocks, and if in the daytime she seemed for town sometimes a trifle decorative, it was a decoration on which those who passed her bestowed an approving eye. She needed a certain amplitude to set her off. The big fur collar, and the expansive hat made the modelling of her face seem daintier than it was. With her hat off, her prettiness owed everything to the fair fine hair that curled almost to her eyes. Maurice had once brushed it back in a playful moment, but he never risked the disillusionment again. He needed every aid to his attachment that artifice could supply.

She seemed, on her part, to be aware that her beauty required management. It was not of a sort to be worn with a disdainful indifference as to how it might strike you.

It had to be looked after, or it didn't strike you at all. She kept a conscious eye upon her fringe, and she left occasionally, as Caragh had noticed, a harmless confederate with her complexion on the lapels of his coat.

He brushed off the powder with a mixed sense of regret and gratitude. He was sorry she needed it but, since the need was there, better she had the wit to know it and the ambition to look her best. Better far than to suppose with an arrogant vanity that to his infatuation nothing could come amiss.

Of what, indeed, came most amiss she probably had not a suspicion. The breezy life of Ballindra had admitted few mental interests, and, in the country, character, which it develops, often has the air of mind. In Lettice, whose character was charming, the resemblance had deceived Caragh. But in London, where character sinks and mind is on the surface, his estimate was corrected.

He endured dreary plays in which she delighted; he sat bravely at ballad concerts; he listened without a groan to her enthusiasms upon domestic art; he tried to read the books she praised.

The outlook was depressing. The same fear touched him that must have fallen upon Babel. Here, for life was a companion who on its finer interests would never understand a word he said. He might, perhaps, bring her painfully to a sense of her unsuspected ineptitude; might make her mechanically conscious of the commonplace; might shake her faith in ignorance as a standard of art. He might in fact taint the sincerity of her admirations. That was all.

In art--and art is but the tenderer appreciation of life--they would never use the same language, never understand each other's speech. The marvelling thrill of familiar strangeness, of joyous apprehension, which the subtlety of art can wake in the initiate, they would never share.

That was not much to miss, perhaps; but, when Caragh tried to think of something its absence would not affect, he stopped in dismay.

Yet apart from her appearance, in spite of her deficiencies, the girl's love wrought a change in him of which, with surprise, he found himself aware.

It became less of an effort to return her caresses, and her kisses no longer made him feel guilty of impersonating her lover.