Love's Usuries Part 8

"Threw him over!" A line of Tennyson regarding the value of coronets flashed across her. She wondered with a girlish contemplative scepticism how this bronzed physique, this heroic modelling, this almost womanly gentleness of expression had failed, having won, to hold.

Hour after hour pa.s.sed in the usual s.h.i.+pboard routine, by which every day became the exact counterpart of its forerunner. Only to Elsie was each moment a joy and a revelation. It was impossible to disregard the fact that, from being a juvenile of no account, she had developed into a personage--a personage, whose humble servitor society had been ready enough to serve. In the conquest there was no elation such as might have existed for maturer women. She was too absorbed with the all ruling presence to heed what happened around. The wind was only fresh when it carried his voice to her ear, the waves only buoyant when they danced beneath their mutual pacings; day was light, because she shared it with him; night was dark, because they were apart.

At last Mrs Willis betrayed signs of alarm. "A mild flirtation is all very well, but people will talk; you must really be careful, Elsie! What will Victor Dorrien say when he comes to claim his bride?"

Dorrien! His bride! The words mentally thrust Bradshaw into the binding of Keats; she suffocated as though she had steamed direct from Eden to seaside lodgings. Was she indeed affianced to this almost unremembered lover of her childhood, and was she indeed journeying straight into his arms? How came it that the purpose of her voyage had been almost forgotten, that the seconds had grown so full of actuality as to outsize the horizon, the zenithed suns.h.i.+ne so blinding, that all surroundings seemed enveloped in atmospheric haze?

Each morning in her cabin she registered a vow that the coming day should be the last of illusion, that the stern facts of destiny should be faced; each night her fevered, impatient brain cried for dawn, to prove by the sight of the n.o.ble outlines, the sound of the beloved voice, that the end was not yet come. It was scarcely his utterances that attracted; perhaps the knowledge of his soul grew best from what he failed to say, what he failed to seem. But she saw the weary boredom of his eyes change to fire as her glance sought his, and she knew her lightest speech sped like spores upon the wind to find a root and resting place within his heart. She yearned to hint at her projected fate--she yearned, yet dreaded. Dissection of the sentimental mosaic of years is no facile undertaking, so many sc.r.a.ps and fragments go to the gradual making of the romantic whole, and she dared not approach the culminating tangle of the love story without explaining in detail the nascence and growth of the dilemma.

Thus with the course of the vessel drifted the craft of emotion, past Suez, through the broil of the Red Sea, out again into a sapphire ocean.

Mrs Willis, looking ahead, saw breakers and imminent wreck.

"You are both mad," she thundered at Elsie. "This must cease; you must tell him that in a few days, immediately on your arrival in Bombay in fact, you are to marry."

"I cannot."

"But, child, think of it. What can you do? You _must_ go to Dorrien's sister's house--it is all arranged--you will be married the next day.

You know I do not land, and that there will be no one but the Dorriens to take care of you. You could not even return to England without delay that would be scandalous."

All this poured in a breath from the agitated chaperone, who had awakened too late to a sense of her responsibilities.

"I will tell him to-morrow--to-morrow night ... it will be the last,"

sobbed Elsie to the pillows in her restricted berth. And when dinner was ended, the final meal on board--for the vessel was steaming extra knots per hour in order to reach port at daybreak--these lovers met for their farewell. They paced the dimly-lighted deck in silence, with weighted feet, and hearts that scarcely pulsed lest the b.u.mper of anguish might run over. Then, behind the wheel, where the gusts of laughter from the expectant and happy travellers could not reach them, they halted--still silent, staring with parched, despairing eyes at the swirling water and the long track of dimpled silver that spread like the trail of an ocean comet in their wake. The night showed serene and purple, a universe in regal repose, only the s.h.i.+p, throbbing with insensate activity, rushed panting to doom; on, on, on, while precious moments flashed fast--a shower of jewels falling into the abyss, never to be retrieved. There was no Joshua to hold time in a spell; nothing to stay the deepening hours from waning into a disastrous dawn.

She spoke. His profile cut dark against the ocean reflections; there was no fear of meeting his eyes.

"To-morrow morning we shall touch Bombay. I am going there to be married, Captain Aylmer." Silence again. The s.h.i.+p's machinery rotated evenly--mercilessly. His face was sunk in shadow, she could but guess that her speech was heard.

"Is it not news to you?"

Her words, like drunken footsteps on stony soil, reeled despite an affectation of steadiness.

"No; I was told you would marry unless----"

"Unless what?" she quavered.

"Unless you changed your mind--refused."

"Mr Dorrien's sister is my only friend in Bombay. If I refuse--leave her house--I shall be alone. I shall be helpless when Mrs Willis and you are gone."

A light hand, hot and feverish, shot its flame through his thin coat sleeve. He s.h.i.+vered.

"That is what I am coming to. Stand away from me--do not look at me--I want to say something which sticks very hard."

He shrank back into deeper shadow. There was horrible stillness. She stood transfixed, chilling, as Lot's wife must have stood when crystal after crystal replaced the warm and buoyant rivulets of being.

"Elsie--I may call you that just once--you must not refuse. If you do, you will be without any friends.h.i.+p but mine--and my friends.h.i.+p would be worse than deadliest enmity. The reason you must have guessed. It has kept me tongue-tied till now--a coward, a blackguard, some might say.

The reason is because"--his voice blurred hoa.r.s.ely through a strangled sob--"because I am married already."

A convulsive gasp from her--scarcely audible--no word.

He clutched at a rail and resumed almost grimly, cauterising his gaping wound with reality's searing iron,

"My wife is in a sanatorium, mentally deranged. A virtuous woman, but she was wedded to mysticism and morphia, and loved me never a bit."

The fall of pitiful tears, tears from the sweet blue of her guileless eyes, came hissing against the red-hot cicatrice. His strength almost failed. Such innocence, such loneliness needed protection. But his! This man who had brought down wild beasts in the open, found deadlier tussle in the confines of his brain. He quavered--his firm jaws clenched.

Reason is muscular, but nature is subtle and crafty. With a jerk, a twist, reason is overthrown, but it takes time and heart's blood to stretch nature p.r.o.ne and panting.

When he next spoke his voice was hard--uneven.

"Elsie, for G.o.d's sake help me! Don't cry, or I must open my arms and hold you in them for ever, come what may. We have needed no words to translate love's language in--no signs to show we were each to each the complement that Heaven has made and laws of men have marred; we shall need no oath to bind us to remembrance. Good-bye. Some day, when you are older, you may know what it costs a fellow to protect a woman from her greatest enemy--himself."

The sound smote her heart, harsh and grating, like rusty steel. She could not scan the ashen mask that hid the rage of conflict; merciful darkness had enveloped the death struggle with a gossamer pall. There was not even a clasp of hands to tell his going; she knew it, but still stood there, as the vessel glided on into the sweltering night's maturity over a placid sea, under a placid sky, while human pa.s.sions raged and rent themselves in useless agony.

Two hours later all was silent; most of the pa.s.sengers, overcome with the tropical temperature and restlessness, were sinking into the fevered sleep that comes only when night's noon has turned a cool shoulder to the scorchings of the day. On the open deck, to catch what breeze there might be, the men slumbered, with forms inartistically outspread; the women, in a more sheltered nook, though not far removed, were stretched on couches all in a row like shrouded corpses awaiting the resurrection.

Night looked down as on some pillaged city where only the dead are left to keep each other ghostly company. Suddenly, from among them there uprose a small, white wraith--lithe, barefooted, with wandering hair. It fled, looking nor right nor left--its footfall light as snowflakes--straight on, to where the s.h.i.+p's track threw a ruffled tongue across the stillness of the water. In a single flash the silver ripples gaped, parted, closed again, enfolding in the bosom of the deep the fair frail atom--an atom that seemed, in the immensity, scarce larger than the feather from a seagull's wing. Then the serene face of the ocean smiled smoothly as ever, hugging its hidden secret till the bursting of the grand chorus when the sea gives up its dead.

And Burton Aylmer, afar off, with outstretched, grey-flanneled limbs, lay motionless, his hands clasped beneath his head, his eyes staring with haggard scepticism at the floating ultramarine of the heavens. His lips moved as though framing a prayer, but he was only muttering to himself, parrot-wise, the burden of the ritual that bound him to "a virtuous woman, wedded to mysticism and morphia," who loved him "never a bit."

Some Crazy Patchwork.

"Oh, love's but a dance, Where time plays the fiddle."

I.

She was const.i.tutionally a matchmaker, and though recognising the infirmity was not without its advantages, I refused to be made an accessory after the fact. I declined to lend myself to the introduction of my best masculine friend, Lorraine, to my best feminine one, Clair Conway. There was no petty jealousy at bottom of the dissent, for sixty winters had rolled over this philosophic head; it was merely that I s.h.i.+rked the responsibility of meddling with Fate.

But my sister, Sarah Sargent, had no such qualms. "Matchmaker!" she exclaimed. "Perhaps so--a woman without romance is like an exotic without scent; and what woman could know a lovely girl, and a man who is intellectually gifted and eligible to boot, without planning to introduce them?"

About Clair Conway's beauty there admitted little dispute, though it was complex to apprehend. Every feature was in drawing, but nowhere arrogantly cla.s.sical. A faint sc.u.mbling, which poets might have described as the mists of youth's Aurora, endowed the face with a soothing indefinitude. In effect, it acted like dew on summer turf which drapes the emerald crispness in silver sheen. The only obvious irregularity was a contumacious tooth which peeped impertinently over the centre of the lower lip, dimpling its fulness with a tiny shadow. In that dimple lurked the most fascinating lisp that was ever modelled--a lisp not sufficiently full-bodied to disturb the accent, but strong minded enough to put stress upon it. Her figure was in the bud. It had small natural curves, which hinted at feminality, but it was fitted far too well; the tailor had forced a masculine exactness which was foreign to the subject and to the statuesque creasings of her neck.

To me from her youth she had always been a centre of interest. She was like some half-studied volume of _belles lettres_--full of temptations, subtleties, prose melodies, poetic realisms. Her speech was fragile, and her words, subdued by their pa.s.sage through the dimple, lagged now and then. Her expression was seldom either animated or pensive; never did green and yellow melancholy chase the vermeil from her cheek, seldom did excitement heighten it. She was as serene as innocence and as clean-eyed, the very woman I would have wors.h.i.+pped had youth quickened in my veins.

"I knew Philip would admire her," my sister related, when describing the kettledrum she had given in furtherance of her scheme, "so I introduced them at once!"

"Lorraine's fancies are protean, my good Sarah. They are the result of appreciative faculty. Someone--I think Emerson--says that 'love is a mutual perception of the same truth,' or something to that effect.

Unfortunately, as the artist soul is always in pursuit of new truths, the deduction is perilous."