Part 14

They never woke in his veins even a momentary ardour, and now, his pulse beat under them no whit the faster, but he had begun to grow susceptible to the quickened throb of hers. The shy renouncement of her self-restraint, as she let the secrets of her being pass, between queer little moods of resistance, into the strangeness of his power, moved him to a sense of protective tenderness he had never felt before.

VIII

It was shortly after he had said a last good-bye to Lettice Nevern that Caragh's troubles began afresh.

He had the best intention to acquire the married habit, or a habit, at any rate, that should differ widely from the one he had.

With that object he secluded himself for a fortnight from the life to which he was accustomed, and denied his company, for reasons which they vigorously disbelieved, to his friends.

He could allow himself the theatre, having never cherished lime-lit illusions, nor hovered to dispel them about the stage door. He had always what he was pleased to call a frugal taste in beauty, and had never made a bid for any that was 'priced'!

But the theatres only served him for a week, and even so with some exaggeration of what he wished to see. At the end of a second, he decided that a wife was as essential as repentance to a change of life, and dropped back into his old ways.

And the devil, who, perhaps as a reprisal for the deficiencies of his own abode, takes a pleasure in knocking the bottom out of every sort of domicile, at once put his foot through the flooring of Maurice Caragh's reform.

At least he met Laura Marton at the dinner which closed his fortnight's sojourn in the wilderness.

He was suffering from those two weeks of his own society, but, probably, even without that preparation, he would have capitulated to her charm.

To speak of him, so consecutively, in the hands of three women gives too crowded an impression of his susceptiveness. No trait was, in fact, further from his character.

Three years were passed since he met Ethel Vernon, and he had not harboured in all of them so much as a vexed thought about a woman's face.

He was pleased so far from easily, that he might very readily have failed throughout his life to have been pleased at all. But when pleased, it was on the instant and absorbingly. Ten seconds he had suggested as an average requirement for falling in love, but it is questionable if any of his own declensions had taken half that time. Nor was proximity at all essential. He could not recall, he admitted modestly, having discovered that a woman was adorable at more than a hundred yards. But he had no wish to exalt his own experience into a standard: he could believe in anything up to half a mile.

In that, such was the delicacy of his distinctions, he was perfectly sincere; but it was that delicacy which made them so prohibitive to adorations even at half a mile.

Laura Marton might, perhaps, have tested such a distance successfully, she was so perfectly his conception of a type.

He conceived a good deal in types, and preferred the typical even to the length of its deficiencies.

Deficiency did indeed play a part in Laura Marten's attractions, since the broad mouth, the long eyes, and the drowsy luxuriance of her figure were without everything that could make them harmless.

She came under the superbs in Caragh's catalogue, and to the superb he was almost a stranger.

That, perhaps, speeded his intimacy.

"You can take it for granted that I think you magnificent," he said at their first meeting.

This was their last. It epitomized sufficiently what had happened in the interval. Some of it might be accounted for by his having told her that the next interval was for ever.

The occasion was a dance at a big house in Grosvenor Square. It was Caragh's last appearance as a bachelor in town, since he started on the morrow for a trip which the owners of a new Atlantic liner were taking in her round the Isles. He was to be dropped at Ballindra, where his marriage, for recent family reasons, was after all to take place.

He was seated on a lounge in a blind passage near the top of the house, and, though still early in the evening, he had been sitting there for some time.

He knew the house more intimately than most of those who were seeking for such seats, and this one was left to him and his partner entirely undisturbed. The music floated up the stairs with varying distinctness, as the dancers choked the entrances to the great gallery below.

He was leaning back, with his arms half folded and a hand upon his mouth, looking straight before him.

Laura Marton, sitting sideways with one white arm along the top of the lounge and the sweep of her amber-coloured skirts against his feet, bent forward insistently towards him; a braid of gold across her splendid shoulders, and a band of turquoise in her brown hair.

The long soft fawn gloves were crumpled in her lap, and her left arm, which hung straight and bare beside her, tapped a turquoise fan against her ankle as she waited for his reply.

"I know," he sighed. "You don't and you can't see it: what's the use of my saying it again? You're sure no woman would care for what I'm giving her, if she only knew. I daresay; but, you see, she's not going to know. She's going to luxuriate in an apparent adoration. That's easier than to be happy with one that's inapparent, however actual. And it's a lot likelier that the make-believe will last; because--well, because there's nothing in it not to."

He smiled whimsically at his own English, but the girl's face darkened with a frown.

"It makes no difference how you put it," she exclaimed hotly; "the thing's detestable! You'll only look at it from your point of view; and because it's costing you so much, you think it must be worth all that to the girl. But it's not! You're getting her life, and everything that's in her and of her, and you're getting it for a lie! You think it's a fine lie, I know, the sort of lie that life is all along. You've told me that! Oh, yes, you have; or something like it. But what are _you_ that you should handle a woman as if you had made her, and lie to her like a god! Do you think you're big enough to make that seem fair?"

"Ah, you don't understand," he murmured still staring before him, afraid to stir the fire in her smouldering eyes. "I'm doing this because I'm so small."

Her incredulous gasp was almost a repudiation; but she said nothing and he went on:

"Because the love that's worth perfidies and desertion and all the other personal superlatives will never come my way. I thought it would: yes! once, long ago. But it hasn't, and it won't. If I was big enough!"--he caught his breath--"Ah, that's another matter. For _that_ love excuses everything--'red ruin and the breaking up of laws'--because it's bigger, and better, and more enduring than the world itself. But it isn't mine."

He stopped, and faced for an instant the furious blaze of her eyes. Then he said more slowly:

"So the next best thing seemed, for a man like me, to make a good girl's dreams come true; her dreams of love, and honour, and a man's desire ... when one is the man, and can."

"You're not the man!" she cried. "And it's wicked and cruel to pretend to be."

"Look here!" he said persuasively. "Suppose that you were as poor a thing as I am; suppose that you, too, had come to look for no more from love than it means to me, and that some one came along who took you for an angel; a man young and strong and pure with the one great passion of a lifetime showing all over him; and that, in too weak or too kind a moment you had let him take you in his arms, and let him believe then as true the dreams that he had dreamt of you, and sealed with your kisses the vows which he had sworn. Well! when you'd come to realize that all his strength and sweetness hung on his belief in you, would you call it wicked and cruel to go on with the pretence?"

She made no answer for some moments. The grip of her white fingers relaxed upon the couch and the fan hung quiet against her ankle as she continued to absorb him with her devouring eyes.

"You've forgotten _me_," she whispered at length.

"No," he protested; "you can't say that, can you? I told you at once."

"Told me what?" she demanded.

"That I was not free," he said.

"Yes," she exclaimed, "the very first time you spoke to me. As if I were certain to lose my heart if I had not been warned. I hated you pretty hotly for it too, I can assure you. And you might have saved yourself the trouble. I'd been told it before."

"Before?"

"Yes, by Ethel Vernon. She said, when she heard I was to meet you, 'He's going to marry a girl that he doesn't care a sou for.' How did she know?"

"She didn't know," he said.

"How did she guess then? Had you been in love with her?"

"Yes."

"She with you?"

"You forget," he said gravely: "she's a married woman."

"I did forget," she smiled. "And was there no one you were in love with between her and me?"

"I'm not in love with you," he said.

She smiled again, drearily. "Does it do you any good to say that?" she asked.

"No," he answered; "I said it for you."

"For me?" she objected.

"Yes," he replied; "you said I'd forgotten you."

"Do you call that remembering?" she enquired ruefully.

"Don't you?" he murmured. "Would I have said it for myself?"

"Said what?" she asked.

"That I'm not in love with you?"

"I daresay," she said.

"Even if it had not been true?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "I daresay," she said.

"Do you?" he smiled. "It's a good deal to dare." He drew a long unsteady breath. "Well," he sighed, "suppose it wasn't?"

"Wasn't true?" she said.

"Wasn't true," he repeated slowly. "Suppose that I've--wilfully--lied to you. Suppose that the hour I saw your face brought my lost dreams back to me; suppose that in you I found the woman for want of whom all my days have in despair been wasted; the one woman who could have made life splendid, and love passionate and ceaseless and supreme. Or, no! not even that, not even that! Suppose only that I felt your fascination as any man might feel it; that I was just bewitched by your beauty; that every day without its glamour was the darkness of death, and the thought of other men possessing it an unendurable torment. Suppose which you please, whichever seems to you simplest, or strangest, or most deplorable--and tell me again you think it was for my own sake that I was silent!"

The musing tone in which he had begun was gone before he ended. He had turned to her, even as he leaned a little back and away against the end of the lounge; his shoulders were squared, and his brows drawn above the gray eyes which gazed almost defiantly into her face.

And as his mood hardened hers had melted.

Darkness had spread again across her eyes; spread as the night above a lighted river--its depths a-glimmer with strange reflections, and her lips had fallen softly apart from their disdainful smile into an unconscious baby sweetness, through which she breathed.

She was listening with an absorbed intentness, with all her senses crowding to her ears.

Even her splendid carriage was relaxed; her bosom drooped; dark hollows showed about her throat; her chin sank, till the white shoulder on which she leaned almost touched a tiny ear; the fan slipped from her other hand and hung by the loop about her wrist.

Her eyes met his as he ended; and, as it were, beneath the long silence of that look he could hear the brushing sound of the breath between her parted lips, like the far-off pulse of the sea.

But he missed so the other change which came to her; came, as it were, when the senses which had been away, so tensely listening, returned with their news. They brought back no erectness to her bearing, but deepened and coloured her drooping beauty till its languor became in itself a mien, a seduction that grew more perilous and overpowering with each quickening breath that filled her breast.

But of all that Caragh noticed nothing. He saw only those wavering lights in the liquid darkness of her eyes, a darkness that spread about him till he felt the draught and swirl of its unknown waters.

It was from that he was taken by the sudden fastening of the girl's hands about his face, and he woke with a flash of enlightenment to all that was in hers.

He tried to shake his head, but she only tightened her fingers about it and drew it towards her, smiling, with a strength that astonished him.

"Don't," he said.

But she pressed her wrists against his cheeks till his mouth was crushed between them, and drew him closer; closer to the strange smile upon her lips--cruel, passionate, triumphant, and yet adoringly fond--which seemed to come from beyond the borders of the world he knew.

Then, with a bird's swiftness, her lips were against his face, bruising it with the wildness of her kisses, as she held it in a clutch that pained him to the plundering madness of her mouth.

Unable to speak, he caught her wrists to draw them from his face, but at the touch of her skin his hands lost the power to help him, and hung idly like heavy bracelets upon her arms.

They had slipped to her elbows and fallen unclasped from them, when, as suddenly as she had seized it, she thrust his face from her to the full length of her arms and held it there, gazing into it with the fury of despoiled possession, which had the same savage strangeness as her smile.

Caragh's eyes were gravely distressed. "Don't, don't!" he pleaded.

Then she opened her hands and threw his face out of them away from her, with a little low crying laugh horrible to hear, and sat, leaning sideways and motionless, her head propped on her wrist, looking away from him across the back of the lounge.

Caragh merely straightened himself in the corner where she had flung him. He did not turn to look at her, and said nothing.

There was something in what had happened past explaining; its very lawlessness made it natural, put it outside of everything, in a place by itself where there were no measurements, where there was no proportion.

He was unconscious of any surprising experience, and did not give a thought to what might be passing in the girl's mind.

And she, sitting there with that wrecked air of passion, seemed as utterly indifferent how she appeared to him.

"You were right," he said at length, looking straight before him: "I've done it all for myself."

She gave him, without turning, a glance from her exhausted eyes, but took no further notice.

"I'm going back because I _daren't_ fail her. I think too little of myself, God knows, to risk thinking less. Can you understand that? I was falling lower and lower, losing hope that I could ever be constant to anything that loved me. Then she came. It hadn't mattered with the others. I was only something to them that any one could be. But she was different--different because she had never loved before, and I meant everything to her that love can mean to a woman's life, everything that is sacred and tender and divine. And I saw in keeping her love pure and happy the one thing that could lift me out of the pit and let me look myself in the face again. It's the one chance that's been given me, and if I can't take it I'm done for. Yes, it's sheer selfishness, as you said; but I'm going back to her. Do you understand?"

She did not move nor look round at him. "You love me," she said dully.

"It makes no difference," he answered.

She gave a little mirthless laugh.

"But it will," she said; "it will. You'll remember me when she can't understand you, and my kisses when you're sick of hers, and my arms when she's asleep beside you. You won't think _then_ that it makes no difference. You won't say _then_ that she was the one chance for you. You'll remember then that a woman loved you whose love was all that you had dreamed. Maurice, Maurice, you're not the sort of man that makes a saint!"

He turned to her and put out his hand. "I'm going," he said. "Good-bye!"

She laid her left hand in it. Hers was quite cold, but she shivered as she touched him. "Will you come back to me ever?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"Never?"

"Never, never!"

"If you want me, you must say," she went on impassively. "It won't matter what I'm doing--I mean if I'm married, or anything. If you want me, I'll come to you. But you must say. Love ... ah! you don't know what it means!"

He left her with a pressure of the hand, and she caught a glimpse of him as he groped his way towards the stairs. But she did not stir, nor try to stop him.

IX

Caragh sat with his back to the saloon skylight, watching the cloud-shadows racing over the soft green Irish coast.

Between him and it was a heaving space of dark blue water, crested here and there with gleaming white.

The gale of the night was blowing itself out, but the wind still sang against the spars that swung to and fro through a wider arc of the sky than most of the guests on board found compatible with an appearance at breakfast.

Woolly flocks of white cloud came up from the Atlantic, raced through the clear blue overhead, and huddled down together behind the land.

It was a day boisterous with the joy of life, but Caragh's face showed no appreciation of its quality. His chair slid forward and back with the rolling deck, but his eyes were fixed gloomily upon the green hills, and he paid no heed to his own movement.

His sombre absorption gave him the appearance of being affected by the floundering seas; but he never suffered from sea-sickness and was grateful to the gale for having cleared the deck of the ship's jovial company.

He wished to be by himself, and yet it was himself that he was most anxious to evade; it was from self-sickness that he was suffering.

He had spoken the truth in telling Laura Marton that the faith in Lettice Nevern's eyes was his one hope of deliverance. He believed, if he could respond to that, even with the honest dishonesty which alone was possible--if he could, as he told her, "make a good girl's dreams come true"--that he might in time build up for himself an artificial constancy, and so regain his self-esteem.

That hope seemed not too high, face to face with the woman who was doing her best to shatter it. It sustained him while he was fighting her fascination--successfully, as he told himself; while he was dragging his weakness in a wounded sort of triumph, out of her reach; while he was hurrying his things on board the day after.

But there, unluckily, his victory ended. Seated apathetically in a deck-chair on the _Candia_, watching the long coast slip by from Thanet to the Lizard, the leaden turmoil of the Channel, and then the clouded purples of the Kerry Hills, he learnt how superficial was his advantage, how deeply he was in bondage.

He had, indeed, got out from England, but he had brought so little of himself away that it seemed an impertinence to offer it to any woman in marriage. His heart--or at least what in such affairs is called the heart--and all those cravings of the body which go with the heart were, and would remain, in Laura Marten's keeping.

She was right in every boast of her dominion over him. She was the woman for whom he had not waited, of whom long ago he had despaired. The woman who could have satisfied him body and soul, absorbing his desires, inspiring his dreams.

No partiality in the past had persuaded him to imagine that of any woman he had admired. They were just what they were--dainty, lovely, brilliant, bewitching; but nothing more to him than to any one who had a taste for them.

But here at last was the woman made for him, mad for him: warm with that fugitive spirit of sense which was in her only and for him alone.

He knew that, though he knew not how he knew it, as certainly, as responsively as a lock knows the wards of its key.

It was as a key that she had entered him; and within him, at her moving, the levers of a secret life had stirred--a strange new complexity of being which no mortal influence had disturbed before.

She had revealed to him all that life had not yielded him, all that now it could never yield, a correlation undreamed of between man and woman.

And she had come curiously too late. That was his bitterness. He would have sacrificed for her every other allegiance of the past, save this one which brought him no pleasure. From Lettice Nevern he could only come to her as a man debased for ever in his own esteem. Nothing could excuse such a betrayal, nothing could redeem him after it was done.

Happiness with the woman he must marry was out of the question; but happiness without her was now for him equally uncompassable. He had a choice only between two sorts of despair. Under such conditions it seemed improbable that he would prove a very cheerful companion, but such predictions were with Caragh especially difficult. His humour was always available for his own misfortunes, and in this case his fortune was too deplorable not to be concealed.

Since it entirely absorbed his unconscious thoughts his attention always seemed preoccupied; an abstraction which lent however, an agreeable effect of detachment from ordinary worries.

He was, perhaps for that reason, the serenest member of the ship's company, and the one most obligingly at the service of other men's affairs.

But on this windy morning he was allowed to reflect on his own adversities, till a shout from forward called his eyes towards the shore.

The _Candia_ had just cleared a long headland and opened the narrow bay beyond, where, canted slightly to starboard, lay a big three-master, the rags of her royals and a staysail slapping the wind, the long blue rollers breaking against her in spouts of foam.

She was evidently on the rocks, and yet an impracticable distance from the forbidding shore, which swept in a purple skirting of cliff about her. Dark figures could be seen moving on the bridge and in the rigging, and the flutter of a woman's skirts could be made out against the shrouds.

The _Candia_ stood in towards the shore, and her decks were soon crowded with excited passengers, waiting anxiously the lowering of a boat and speculating on the way in which a rescue would be attempted.

A line of colour ran up to the barque's peak, and was answered presently by a signal from the steamer; then the engines slowed and stopped.

The _Candia_ rolled ponderously in the long swell while another signal was exchanged the splash of the lead becoming suddenly audible in the silence.

The vessels were now not more than five hundred yards apart, and every detail could be seen upon the wreck.

Save for the few figures on the bridge and poop, all those on board her had taken to the rigging, as the sloping decks were swept by the heavier waves.

Several women could be seen on her, and the glass showed them to be lashed to the shrouds, and apparently exhausted.

Each fresh evidence of urgency increased the impatience on board the _Candia_. Yet no scheme of assistance seemed in progress. The engines were reversed, the _Candia_ backed in a trifle closer, the roar of the breakers began to make a continuous moil in the air, but the boats hung undisturbed on their davits.

The captain was on the bridge and could not be questioned, but presently Sir Anthony Palmer, who as chairman of the _Candia's_ company was superintending the cruise, was seen coming aft with a grave face.

He said, in answer to a volley of questions, that no help could be given till the sea went down and the tide had risen. A ledge of rocks lay between the two ships, already defined occasionally by a thrash of foam over which no boat could pass.

The stranger must have been carried across it at high water some hours earlier, had struck on a second ledge between that and the shore, and was now equally cut off from succour from the sea or from the land.