Deadham Hard Part 31

"You think she enjoyed it too? I am glad."

Then after an interval of silence, her whole figure alert, her speech eager:

"See there--see there, Colonel Sahib--yes, far, far out to sea--aren't those the lights of a ship?"

"Yes," he answered--"creeping westward--bound for Toulon, most likely, or possibly for Ma.r.s.eilles."

And he would have moved forward. But Damaris unaccountably lingered.

Carteret waited a good three to four minutes to suit her convenience; but the delay told on him. The night and hour down here by the sh.o.r.e, on the confines of the silent town, were too full of poetry, too full of suggestion, of the fine-drawn excitement of things which had been and might not impossibly again be. It was dangerous to loiter, and in such company, though waves might beat out a constant reminder with merciless pertinacity upon the beach.

"Come, dear witch, come," he at last urged her. "We still have more than a mile to go and a pretty stiff hill to climb. It grows late, you will be abominably tired to-morrow. Why this fascination for a pa.s.sing steamer, probably some unromantic, villainously dirty old tramp too, you would not condescend to look at by daylight."

"Because,"--Damaris began. She came nearer to him, her expression strangely agitated.--"Oh! Colonel Sahib, if I could only be sure it wasn't treacherous to tell you!"

"Tell me what? One of the many things it would never occur to you to confide to Mrs. Frayling?" he said, trying to treat her evident emotion lightly, to laugh it off.

"To Henrietta? Of course not. It would be unpardonable, hateful to tell Henrietta."

She flushed, her face looking, for the moment, dark from excess of colour.

"You are the only person I could possibly tell."

Carteret moved aside a few steps. He too felt strangely agitated. Wild ideas, ideas of unholy aspect, presented themselves to him--ideas, again, beyond words entrancing and sweet. He fought with both alike, honestly, manfully. Returned and took Damaris' hand quietly, gently in both his.

"Look here, dear witch," he said, "all this evening a--to me--unknown spirit has possessed you. You haven't been like yourself. You have made me a little anxious, a little alarmed on your account."

"Oh! it isn't only this evening," she caught him up. "It has been going on for weeks."

"So I have seen--and that is not good for you, isn't for your happiness.

So, if I am--as you say--the only person you care to acquaint with this matter, had not you better tell me here and now? Better worry yourself no more with mysteries about it, but let us, once and for all, have the thing out?"

"I should be thankful," Damaris said simply, looking him in the eyes--"if I could be sure I wasn't sacrificing some one else--their pride I mean--their--their honour."

For a few seconds Carteret paused, meeting her grave and luminous glance. Then:

"I think you may risk it," he said. "I promise you this some-one-else's honour shall be sacred to me as my own. Without your direct request no word of what you choose to tell me will ever pa.s.s my lips."

"Ah! I'm very sure of that,"--Her smile, her voice bore transparent testimony to a faith which went, somewhat giddily, not only to her hearer's heart but to his head. "It isn't a question of your repeating anything; but of your thinking differently of some one you care for very much--and who is almost as dependent on you, Colonel Sahib, as I am myself. At least I fear you might.--Oh! I am so perplexed, I'm in such a maze," she said. "I've nothing to go on in all this, and I turn it over and over in my mind to no purpose till my head aches. You see I can't make out whether this--the thing which began it all and happened oh! long ago--is extraordinary--one which you--and most people like you--in your position, I mean--would consider very wrong and disgraceful; or whether it often happens and is just accepted, taken for granted, only not talked about."

Carteret felt cold all down his spine. For what, in G.o.d's name, could this supremely dear and--as he watched her grave and sweetly troubled countenance--supremely lovely child, be driving at?

"And I care so dreadfully much," she went on. "It is the story of the darling little green jade elephant over again--like its being broken and spoilt. Only now I'm grown up I don't give in and let it make me ill.

There was a time even of that--of illness, I mean--at first just before you came to The Hard last autumn. But I wouldn't suffer it, I would not let the illness go on. I got over that. But then a second crisis occurred soon after we came here; and I thought Henrietta's kindness opened a way out. So I rushed about whenever and wherever she invited me to rush. But as I told you this evening--just before we had our two dances, you remember."

"Am I likely to forget!" Carteret murmured under his breath.

"The rushing about has not proved a success. I thought it would help to stifle certain longings and keep me nearer to my father--more at one with him. But it didn't, it made me neglect him. You see--you see"--the words were dragged from her, as by active suffering and distress of mind--"I had to choose between him and another person. One cannot serve two masters. I choose him. His claim was the strongest in duty. And I love to see him satisfied and peaceful. He always ranked first in everything I felt and did ever since I can remember; and I so want him to stay first.

But I have been pulled two ways, and seem to have got all astray somehow lately. I haven't been really true to myself any more than to him--only frivolous and busy about silly pleasures."

"Don't let the frivolity burden your precious conscience," Carteret comfortably told her, touched by the pathos of her self-reproach. For her sincerity was surely, just now, unimpeachable and she a rare creature indeed! Love, he could less than ever banish; but surely he might utterly banish distrust and fear?--"As frivolity goes, dear witch, and greed of pleasure, yours have been innocent enough both in amount and in quality, heaven knows!"

"I should like to believe so--but all that's relative, isn't it? The real wrongness of what you do, depends upon the level of rightness you start from, I mean."

"Insatiable casuist!" Carteret tenderly laughed at her.

And with that, by common though unspoken consent, they walked onward again.

Even while so doing, however, both were sensible that this resumption of their homeward journey marked a period in, rather than the conclusion of, their conversation. Some outside compelling force--so in any case it appeared to Carteret--encompa.s.sed them. It was useless to turn and double, indulge in gently playful digression. That force would inevitably make them face the innermost of their own thought, their own emotion, in the end. In obedience to which unwelcome conviction, Carteret presently brought himself to ask her:

"And about this other person--for we have wandered a bit from the point at issue, haven't we?--whose interests as I gather clash, for some reason, with those of your father, and whose pride and honour you are so jealously anxious to safeguard."

"His pride, yes," Damaris said quickly, her head high, a warmth in her tone. "His honour is perfectly secure, in my opinion."

"Whose honour is in danger then?--Dear witch, forgive me, but don't you see the implication?"

Damaris looked around at him with unfathomable eyes. Her lips parted, yet she made no answer.

After a pause Carteret spoke again, and, to his own hearing, his voice sounded hoa.r.s.e as that of the tideless sea upon the beach yonder.

"Do you mean me to understand that the conflict between your father's interests and those of this other person--this other man's--arise from the fact that you love him?"

"Yes," Damaris calmly declared.

"Love him,"--having gone thus far Carteret refused to spare himself. He turned the knife in the wound--"Love him to the point of marriage?"

There, the word was said. Almost unconsciously he walked onward without giving time for her reply.--He moistened his lips, weren't they dry as a cinder? He measured the height to which hope had borne him, to-night, by the shock, the positive agony of his existing fall. At the young girl, _svelte_ and graceful, beside him, he could not look; but kept his eyes fixed on the ma.s.s of the wooded promontory, dark and solid against the more luminous tones of water and of sky, some half-mile distant. Set high upon the further slope of it, from here invisible, the Grand Hotel fronted--as he knew--the eastward trending coast. Carteret wished the distance less, since he craved the shelter of that friendly yellow-washed caravanserai. He would be mortally thankful to find himself back there, and alone, the door of his bachelor quarters shut--away from the beat of the waves, away from the subtle glory of this Venus-ridden moon now drawing down to her setting. Away, above all, from Damaris--delivered from the enchantments and perturbations, both physical and moral, her delicious neighbourhood provoked.

But from that fond neighbourhood, as he suddenly became aware, he was in some sort delivered already. For she stopped dead, with a strange choking cry; and stood solitary, as it even seemed forsaken, upon the wide grey whiteness of the asphalt of the esplanade. Behind her a line of lamps--pale burning under the moonlight--curved, in perspective, with the curving of the bay right away to the lighthouse. On her left the crowded houses of the sleeping town, slashed here and there with sharp edged shadows, receded, growing indistinct among gardens and groves. The scene, as setting to this single figure, affected him profoundly, taken in conjunction with that singular cry. He retraced the few steps dividing him from her.

"Marriage?" she almost wailed, putting out her hands as though to prevent his approach. "No--no--never in life, Colonel Sahib. You quite dreadfully misunderstand."

"Do I?" Carteret said, greatly taken aback, while, whether he would or no, unholy ideas again flitted through his mind maliciously a.s.sailing him.

"It has nothing to do with that sort of loving. It belongs to something much more beautifully part of oneself--something of one's very, very own, right from the very beginning."

"Indeed!" he said, sullenly, even roughly, his habitual mansuetude giving way before this--for so he could not but take it--contemptuous flinging of his immense tenderness, his patient, unswerving devotion, back in his face. "Then very certainly I must plead guilty to not understanding, or if you prefer it--for we needn't add to our other discomforts by quarrelling about the extra syllable--of misunderstanding. In my ignorance, I confess I imagined the love, which finds its crown and seal of sanct.i.ty in marriage, can be--and sometimes quite magnificently is--the most beautiful thing a man has to give or a woman to receive."

Damaris stared at him, her face blank with wonder.

Set at regular intervals between the tall blue-grey painted lamp standards, for the greater enjoyment of visitors and natives, stone benches, of a fine antique pattern, adorn St. Augustin's esplanade. Our much-perplexed maiden turned away wearily and sat down upon the nearest of these. She held up her head, bravely essaying to maintain an air of composure and dignity; but her shoulders soon not imperceptibly quivered, while, try hard as she might, setting her teeth and holding her breath, small plaintive noises threatened betrayal of her tearful state.

Carteret, quite irrespective of the prescience common to all true lovers where the beloved object's welfare is concerned, possessed unusually quick and observant hearing. Those small plaintive noises speedily reached him and pierced him as he stood staring gloomily out to sea.

Whereupon he bottled up his pain, shut down his natural and admirably infrequent anger, and came over to the stone bench.

"You're not crying, dearest witch, are you?" he asked her.

"Yes, I am," Damaris said. "What else is there left for me to do?--Everyone I care for I seem to make unhappy. Everything I do goes wrong. Everything I touch gets broken and spoilt somehow."

"Endless tragedies of little green jade elephants?" he gently bantered her.