The Firing Line Part 60

"What do you mean?"--in soft consternation.

"That there is no hope left for us--and that we are both pretty young, both in love, both close to desperation. At times I tell you I feel like a cornered beast--feel like showing my teeth at the world--like tearing you from it at any cost. I'd do it, too, if it were not for your father and mother. You and I could stand it."

"I would let you do it--if it were not for them," she said.

They looked at one another, both pale.

"Would you give up the whole moral show for me?" he demanded.

"Yes."

"You'd get a first-rate scoundrel."

"I wouldn't care if it were you."

"There's one thing," he said with a bluntness bordering on brutality, "all this is changing me into a man unfit to touch you. I warn you."

"What!"

"I tell you not to trust me!" he said almost savagely. "With heart and soul and body on fire for you--mad for you--I'm not to be trusted!"

"And I?" she faltered, deadly pale.

"You don't know what you're saying!" he said violently.

"I--I begin to think I do.... Garry--Garry--I am learning very fast!...

How can I let you go!"

"The idea is," he said grimly, "for me to go before I go insane.... And never again to touch you--"

"Why?"

"Peril!" he said. "I'm just a plain blackguard, s.h.i.+ela."

"Would it change you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Not to touch me, not to kiss me. Could you go on always just loving me?... Because if you could not--through the years that are coming--I--I had rather take the risk--with you--than lose you."

He stood, head bent, not trusting himself to speak or look at her.

"Good-night," she said timidly.

He straightened up, stared at her, and turned on his heel, saying good night in a low voice.

"Garry!"

"Good-night," he muttered, pa.s.sing on.

Her heart was beating so violently that she pressed her hand to it, leaning against the door sill.

"Garry!" she faltered, stretching out the other hand to him in the darkness, "I--I do not care about the--risk--if you care to--kiss me--"

He swung round from the shadows to the dimly lighted sill; crossed it.

For a moment they looked into one another's eyes; then, blinded, she swayed imperceptibly toward him, sighing as his arms tightened and her own crept up around his neck.

She yielded, resigning lips, and lids, and throat, and fragrant hair, and each slim finger in caress unending.

Conscious of nothing save that body and soul were safe in his beloved keeping, she turned to him in all the pa.s.sion of a guiltless love, whispering her adoration, her faith, her trust, her wors.h.i.+p of the man who held her; then, adrift once more, the breathless magic overwhelmed her; and she drew him to her, closer, desperately, hiding her head on his breast.

"Take me away, Garry," she stammered--"take me with you. There is no use--no use fighting it back. I shall die if you leave me.... Will you take me? I--will be--everything that--that you would have me--that you might wish for--in--in a--wife--"

She was crying now, crying her heart out, her face crushed against his shoulder, clinging to him convulsively.

"Will you take me, Garry? What am I without you? I cannot give you up! I will not.... n.o.body can ask that of me--How can they ask that of me?--to give you up--to let you go out of my little world for ever--to turn from you, refuse you!... What a punishment for one instant's folly! If they knew they would not let me suffer this way!--They would want me to tell them--"

His dry lips unclosed. "Then _tell_ them!" he tried to say, but the words were without sound; and, in the crisis of temptation, at the very instant of yielding, suddenly he knew, somehow, that he would not yield.

It came to him calmly, without surprise or shock, this stupid certainty of himself. And at the same moment the crisis was pa.s.sing, leaving him stunned, impa.s.sive, half senseless as the resurgent pa.s.sion battered at his will power, to wreck and undo it--deafening, imperative, wave on wave, in vain.

The thing to do was to hold on. One of them was adrift; the other dared not let go; he seemed to realise it, somehow. Odd bits of phrases, old-fas.h.i.+oned sayings, maxims long obsolete came to him without reason or sequence--"Greater love hath no man--no man--no man--" and "As ye do unto the least of these "--odd bits of phrases, old-fas.h.i.+oned sayings, maxims, alas! long obsolete, long buried with the wisdom of the dead.

He held her still locked in his arms. From time to time, unconsciously, as her hot grief spent itself, he bent his head, laying his face against hers, while his haggard, perplexed gaze wandered about the room.

In the dimness the snowy bed loomed beside them; pink roses patterned curtain and wall; the tiny night-light threw a roseate glow across her gown. In the fresh, sweet stillness of the room there was no sound or stir save their uneven breathing.

Very gently he lifted one of her hands and looked at it almost curiously--this small white hand so innocently smooth--as unblemished as a child's--this unsullied little hand that for an instant seemed to be slowly relaxing its grasp on the white simplicity around her--here in this dim, fresh, fragrant world of hers, called, intimately, her room.

And here where night and morning had so long held sacred all that he cared for upon earth--here in the white symbol of the world--her room--he gave himself again to her, without a word, without hope, knowing the end of all was near for them.

But it was she, not he, who must make the sign that ended all. And, after a long, long time, as she made no sign:

"Dearest," he breathed, "I know now that you will never go with me--for your father's sake."

That was premature, for she only clung the closer. He waited cautiously, every instinct alert, his head close to hers. And at last the hot fragrance of her tears announced the beginning of the end.

"s.h.i.+ela?"

A stifled sound from his shoulder where her head lay buried.

"Choose now," he said.

No answer.

"Choose."

She cowered in his arms. He looked at the little hand once more, no longer limp but clenched against his breast. And he knew that the end was close at hand, and he spoke again, forcing her to her victory.