Grit Lawless Part 36

He tipped the man and went to his room to dress. He wondered why she should wish to see him, and recalled with an unaccountable irritation what Julie Weeber had confided to him as the result of her unaided observation. He had a natural antipathy towards scenes, and he disliked above all things listening to a dissertation on his moral delinquencies.

When he had dined he hired a taxi and drove to Rondebosch. He told the driver to wait for him, and went inside the garden and up the path to the door. His visit was expected. The servant who admitted him helped him out of the light overcoat he wore to cover his dress suit, and conducted him to the drawing-room, where Mrs Lawless waited to receive him, pacing restlessly up and down, up and down, her face white even in the warm glow of the lights, and her eyes darkly luminous in their pale setting.

She came to a halt when she heard his step in the hall, and took up a book as though she would appear to occupy herself, but put it down again with instinctive dislike towards posing. His step came nearer, she put out a hand and grasped the back of a chair, gripping it tightly, her nervousness painfully apparent in the trembling of her lips.

And then the door opened...

A sudden calm overspread her features at sight of him, her stiffened att.i.tude relaxed. The hand that had gripped the chair-back rested upon it easily; the other, that hung clenched at her side, fell loosely open.

It seemed as though the appearance of this man for whom she had waited in a state of great nervous excitement quieted her agitation, as though his ready response to the summons that conflicting emotions had dictated and held her back from sending before, brought relief. It was a very composed and dignified woman that confronted Lawless' gaze, a woman gowned simply in black, which suited her brilliant beauty, with a single deep red rose at her breast where the slight opening revealed the slender throat.

He advanced into the room and stood quite close to her, looking steadily into the dark glowing eyes.

"I don't know whether this prompt response to your note is inconvenient," he said. "But it was now or not at all. Had you left it until to-morrow you would have missed me."

"You are leaving Cape Town again?" she asked... "When?"

"To-morrow morning."

"And where do you go?"

"Up the line," he answered... "Not very far."

She flushed quickly. Some instinct told her that he was going to rejoin the companion in whose society he had left Cape Town before. A chilled look came into her eyes. It seemed that whenever she held out a hand across the distances that separated them a great wall of his making rose between them to divide them more certainly than before. And he invariably made her aware of this wall at the very outset, so that her every effort during the difficult interviews between them was but an ineffectual hurling of herself against this impa.s.sable barrier. She moved from behind the chair and seated herself.

"I'm sorry," she said simply. "Won't you sit down?" He accepted the invitation, and leaning back surveyed her with a thoughtful interest that was critical rather than admiring, and intensely curious. She had some purpose in sending for him, he supposed. He wondered, with a slight impatience, why she distressed herself so unnecessarily. They had come long ago to the parting of the ways,--it was a mistake to go out of one's road in order that the paths should recross merely to separate again.

"I had no idea you would be leaving--so soon," she said. "I wasn't aware you were in Cape Town until I pa.s.sed you that morning in the car."

"I had only just got back," he explained.

"Afterwards I was sorry--that I didn't stop," she went on slowly, labouring somewhat over the sentences. "But--I was surprised. And I felt a little diffident about asking you to come out... I knew you would come, of course... That's why, perhaps."

"My only wonder is that you take the trouble," he returned. "Plainly, you don't get any joy of it... And hasn't it ever occurred to you that it's painful for me as well? My life hasn't been wholly without regrets. You remind me of the old Inquisitorial system--continually stretching a man on the rack for some imaginary good purpose. And you rack yourself in the process... Where's the sense in it, anyway?"

"I have thought," she said,--"I have tried--"

She got up abruptly from her seat and turned her back on him and walked slowly down the long room, and stood by the fireplace with her elbow on the mantel and her face dropped on her hand. He remained seated where he was, and leaning forward, his hands between his knees, watched her with interest. She made a curiously striking and graceful picture, standing there with her half-averted face, the warm lamp-light falling on her black-robed figure. There was a restrained yet dramatic appeal in her att.i.tude that touched him, and in the long drooping line of neck and shoulder as it was turned towards him was a suggestion of weakness that commended itself to his masculine mind. She looked lonely, and sad, he considered.

"I know what you thought," he said. "I know what you tried to do. It was praiseworthy in many respects... But it was too late. If you would fashion the clay into a goodly shape you should hasten to do so while it is pliable. When once it is set you can only break it."

"You always make me feel," she said, without changing her position, "that I am directly responsible for the waste of your life."

"I don't admit that my life stands for waste," he replied coldly.

She lifted her face, and turning it slightly looked steadily in his direction.

"Perhaps," she said, "I am not qualified to judge. I only judge from what I see--from what I know you might have done if only you had willed it. And now--"

She looked away from him, and once more dropped her face upon her hand.

"Hugh," she said, and her voice was so low as to be scarcely louder than a whisper, "I asked you to come here to-night, because I felt that there was much in the past on my side that needed your forgiveness. I was hard... I see that now... When you wanted sympathy I failed you. And things happened to separate us. Perhaps it was less your fault than I imagined. But--there are certain things a woman finds it difficult to pardon."

"I have never blamed you," he interposed harshly.

He too got up, but he did not follow her. He stood leaning against one of the windows with his back to the outer air.

"I have blamed myself," she answered gently,--"often."

"You would," he said. "You're made like that. You'd bow your back to any burden you believed it to be your duty to bear. But you needn't imagine it your especial mission to undertake any burden on my account.

I wish from the bottom of my soul you could bring yourself to forget my existence."

"I can't do that," she answered... "I don't want to."

She moved from her position and came to a standstill in front of him with her hands locked together in an att.i.tude that was like a supplication in the nervous entwining of her fingers.

"I want you to lead a life more worthy of yourself," she said...

"worthier of the man I knew and loved. Oh, my dear! if you only knew how all these years you have been steadily breaking my heart... I can't bear it... I can't bear it, that you should lead the life you are leading... You are going back to that woman to-morrow... I know it.

Give her up, Hugh,--and this life of adventure,--for my sake--because I ask it. Don't go to-morrow. I hate the thought of your going... Stay here."

"Impossible," he answered with quiet decision. "I am pledged. I must go. I have no choice in the matter."

Her hands fell apart. She made a quick, almost a despairing gesture.

"And do I count for nothing in your life?" she asked pa.s.sionately. "You loved me once... in the years that are past--when you were younger. And I was young too--a girl. Ah! life, life! How full of promise it seems, and how each successive year fades and dims that promise! You were a king among men to me then... And now--you lead the life of a common adventurer, following reckless and dangerous enterprises, and enjoying your idle moments after the manner of a loose liver. Oh! my G.o.d! need this thing be? ... Why will you wantonly subjugate all that is fine in your nature? It was those finer qualities in you that I loved, and you are deliberately killing them."

Lawless had drawn himself instinctively straighter under the shower of words. He looked at her with hard, unresponsive eyes.

"I have no use for that kind of love," he said coldly. "It is of no human value. To love the imaginary saint in a man is not going to help the man when you make the inevitable discovery that the saint isn't there. If love is to be of any use it must be for the sinner as well."

He went nearer to her, and laughed harshly when he observed how she drew back involuntarily from his advance.

"When you can bring yourself," he said, "to suffer my touch without flinching; when you can feel glad for my lips to rest upon yours without consideration for where last they may have rested; when you can love me for myself--as I am--as you know me, a common adventurer, a profligate, then we may wipe out the intervening years... not before."

She was silent for a while after he had finished; and he knew that she was considering what he had uttered with such brutal frankness, weighing it in her mind.

Presently she said, moistening her dry lips before speaking:

"Will you promise not to go to-morrow? ... to break with the old life finally?"

"Bargain for bargain," he returned cynically. "You can't give freely, you see."

His face hardened, became more resolute.

"I can't do what you ask... It is out of the question. I am pledged irrevocably--promised. I can't draw back."

She moved away with a gesture of bitterness, and with her back towards him, stood, a reluctant tragic figure, with one hand on the back of the chair where she had stood when he entered.

"It is always the same," she whispered... "Always the same. Your desires--the desire of the moment, first. I don't believe you ever loved me, though at one time you professed so much."