The Firing Line Part 58

Her mouth curved gravely as a perplexed child's; she looked down at the table where his sun-burnt hand now lay lightly across hers.

"I wished to speak to you about myself--if, somehow you could help me to say what--what is very difficult for a girl to say to a man--even when she loves him.... I don't think I can say it, but I'll try."

"Then if you'll come to the balcony--"

"No, I can't trust you--or myself--unless we promise each other."

"Have I got to do that again?"

"Yes, if I am to go with you. I promise! Do you?"

"If I must," he said with very bad grace--so ungraciously in fact that as they pa.s.sed from the eastern corridor on to the Spanish balcony she forgot her own promise and slipped her hand into his in half-humourous, half-tender propitiation.

"Are you going to be disagreeable to me, Garry?"

"You darling!" he said; and, laughing, yet secretly dismayed at her own perversion, she hurriedly untwisted her fingers from his and made a new and fervid promise to replace the one just broken.

The moonlight was magnificent, silvering forest, dune, and chaparral.

Far to the east a thin straight gleam revealed the sea.

She seated herself under the wall, lying back against it; he lay extended on the marble shelf beside her, studying the moonlight on her face.

"What was it you had to tell me, s.h.i.+ela? Remember I am going in the morning."

"I've turned cowardly; I cannot tell you.... Perhaps later.... Look at the Seminole moon, Garry. They have such a pretty name for it in March--Tau-sau-tchusi--'Little Spring Moon'! And in May they call it the 'Mulberry Moon'--Kee-ha.s.si, and in November it is a charming name--Hee-wu-li--'Falling Leaf Moon'!--and August is Hyothlucco--'Big Ripening Moon.' ... Garry, this moonlight is filling my veins with quicksilver. I feel very restless, very heathenish." ... She cast a slanting side-glance at him, lips parting with soundless laughter; and in the witchery of the moon she seemed exquisitely unreal, head tipped back, slender throat and shoulders snow-white in the magic l.u.s.tre that enveloped them.

Resting one bare arm on the marble she turned, chin on shoulder, looking mischievously down at him, lovely, fresh, perfect as the Cherokee roses that spread their creamy, flawless beauty across the wall behind her.

Imperceptibly her expression changed to soft friendliness, to tenderness, to a hint of deeper emotion; and her lids drooped a little, then opened gravely under the quick caress of his eyes; and very gently she moved her head from side to side as reminder and refusal.

"Another man's wife," she said deliberately.... "Thy neighbour's wife.... That's what we've done!"

Like a cut of a whip her words brought him upright to confront her, his blood tingling on the quick edge of anger.

For always, deep within him, lay that impotent anger latent; always his ignorance of this man haunted him like the aftermath of an ugly dream.

But of the man himself she had never spoken since that first day in the wilderness. And then she had not named him.

Her face had grown very serious, but her eyes remained unfathomable under his angry gaze.

"Is there any reason to raise that spectre between us?" he demanded.

"Dear, has it ever been laid?" she asked sorrowfully.

The muscles in his cheeks tightened and his eyes narrowed unpleasantly.

Only the one feature saved the man from sullen commonness in his suppressed anger--and that was his boyish mouth, clean, sweet, n.o.bly moulded, giving the lie to the baffled brutality gleaming in the eyes.

And the spark died out as it had come, subdued, extinguished when he could no longer sustain the quiet surprise of her regard.

"How very, very young you are after all," she said gently. "Come nearer.

Lift your sulky, wicked head. Now ask my pardon for not understanding."

"I ask it.... But when you speak of him--"

"Hush. He is only a shadow to you--scarcely more to me. He must remain so. Do you not understand that I wish him to remain a shadow to you--a thing without substance--without a name?"

He bent his head, nodding almost imperceptibly.

"Garry?"

He looked up in response.

"There is something else--if I could only say it.... I might if you would close your eyes." ... She hesitated, half-fearful, then drew his head down on her knees, daintily, using her finger-tips only in the operation.

"Are you listening to what I am trying to tell you?"

"Yes, very intently."

"Then--it's about my being afraid--of love.... Are you listening?... It is very difficult for me to say this.... It is about my being afraid....

I used to be when I did not know enough to be. And now, Garry, when I am less ignorant than I was--when I have divined enough of my unknown self to be afraid--dearest, I am not."

She bent gently above the boyish head lying face downward on her knees--waited timidly for some response, touched his hair.

"I am listening," he nodded.

She said: "My will to deny you, my courage to control myself seem to be waning. I love you so; and it is becoming so much worse, such a blind, unreasoning love.... And--do you think it will grow so much worse that I could be capable of anything ign.o.ble? Do you think I might be mad enough to beg my freedom? I--I don't know where it is leading me, dear. Do you?

It is that which bewilders me--that I should love you so--that I should not be afraid to love you so.... Hush, dear! Don't speak--for I shall never be able to tell you this if you speak, or look at me. And I want to ask you a question. May I? And will you keep your eyes covered?"

"Yes."

"Then--there are memories which burn my cheeks--hus.h.!.+--I do not regret them.... Only, what am I changing into that I am capable of forgetting--everything--in the happiness of consenting to things I never dreamed of--like this"--bending and laying her lips softly against his cheek.... "That was wrong; it ought to frighten me. But it does not."

He turned, looking up into the flushed young face and drew it closer till their cheeks touched.

"Don't look at me! Why do you let me drift like this? It is madness--to give up to each other the way we do--"

"I wish we could give up the world for each other."

"I wish so too. I would--except for the others. Do you suppose I'd hesitate if it were not for them?"

They looked at each other with a new and subtler audacity.

"You see," she said with a wistful smile, "_this_ is not s.h.i.+ela Cardross who sits here smiling into those brown eyes of yours. I think I died before you ever saw me; and out of the sea and the mist that day some changeling crept into your boat for your soul's undoing. Do you remember in Ingoldsby--'The cidevant daughter of the old Plantagenet line '?"

They laughed like children.

"Do you think our love-tempted souls are in any peril?" he asked lightly.

The question arrested her mirth so suddenly that he thought she must have misunderstood.