Love and Lucy Part 23

He listened and learned; he was confounded, he was deeply touched. He might have been humiliated, and so frozen; he might have been offended, and so bitter; but he was neither. Her tears, her sobs, her clinging, her burning cheeks, the flood of her words, or the sudden ebb which left her speechless--all this taught him what he might be to a woman who dared give him so much. He said very little himself, and exacted the last dregs from her cup. He drank it down like a thirsty horse. Probably it was as sweet for him to drink as for her to pour; for love is a strange affair and can be its own poison and antidote.

At the end he forgot his magnanimity, so great was his need of hers.

"You have opened my eyes to my own fatuity. You have made me what I never thought I could be. I am your lover--do you know that? And I have been your husband for how long? Your husband, Lucy, and now your lover. Never let these things trouble you any more."

She clung to him with pa.s.sion. "I love you," she said. "I adore you.

If I've been wicked, it was to prove you good to me, and to crush me to the earth. Love me again--I am yours forever."

Later she was able to talk freely to him, as of a thing past and done.

"It's very odd; I can't understand it. You didn't begin to love me until he did, and then you loved me for what he saw in me. Isn't that true?"

"I couldn't tell you," he said, "because I don't know what he did see."

"He thought I was pretty--"

"So you are--"

"He thought that I liked to be noticed--"

"Well, and you do--"

"Of course. But it never struck you."

"No--fool that I was."

"I love you for your foolishness."

"Yes, but you didn't."

"No," she said quickly. "No! because you wouldn't allow it. You must let women love before you can expect them to be meek."

He laughed. "Do you intend to be meek?"

Then it was her turn to laugh. "I should think I did! That's my pride and joy. You may do what you like now."

He found that a hard saying; but it is a very true one.

The departure was made early. Lucy came down to breakfast, and the boys; but Margery Dacre did not appear. Vera of course did not. Noon was her time. The boys were to cross the fiord with them and return in the boat. Lucy would not go, seeing what was the matter with Urquhart.

Urquhart indeed was in a parlous frame of mind. He was very grim to all but the boys. He was to them what he had always been. Polite and very quiet in his ways with Lucy, he had no word for either of his companions. James treated him with deference; Francis Lingen, who felt himself despised, was depressed.

"Jolly party!" said Lancelot, really meaning it, and made Urquhart laugh. But Lucy shuddered at such a laugh. She thought of the wolves in the Zoological Gardens when at sundown they greet the night. It made her blood feel cold in her veins.

"If no one's going to enjoy himself, why does anybody go?" she said at a venture. James protested that he was going to enjoy himself prodigiously. As for Lingen, he said, it would do him no end of good.

"I jolly well wish I could go," was Lancelot's fishing shot, and Lucy, who was really sorry for Urquhart, was tempted to urge it. But James would not have heard of such a thing, she knew.

Then they went, with a great deal of fuss and bustle. James, a great stickler for the conventions, patted her shoulder for all good-bye.

Urquhart waited his chance.

"Good-bye, my dear," he said. "I've had my innings here. You won't see me again, I expect. I ask your pardon for many things--but I believe that we are pretty well quits. Trust me with your James, won't you?

Good-bye." He asked her that to secure himself against whims.

She could do no more than give him her hand. He kissed it, and left her. The boat was pushed out. Urquhart took the helm, with Lancelot in the crook of his arm. He turned once and waved his cap.

"There goes a man any woman could love," she told herself. If she had a regret she had it not long. "Some natural tears they shed, but dried them soon."

They made a good landing, bestowed their gear in a cart, and set out for a long climb to Brattebo, which they reached in the late afternoon--a lonely farm on the side of a naked hill. They slept there, and were to rise at four for the snow-field.

CHAPTER XXII

CATASTROPHE

They were up and away before the light, taking only one guide with them, a sinewy, dark man with a clubbed beard on his chin. If they had had two it had been better, and Urquhart, who knew that, made a great fuss; but to no purpose. All the men were at the saeters, they were told; haymaking was in full swing out there. There was nothing to be done. Urquhart was put out, and in default of another man of sense made James his partner in griefs. "I know these chaps," he said. "When they are alone they lose their heads. The least little difficulty, they shy off and turn for home. I judge this man of ours to have the heart of a mouse. He don't want to go at all. If there are two of them they egg each other on. They talk it over. Each tries to be the bolder man."

"But is there going to be any difficulty?" James enquired, surveying the waste through his eyegla.s.s. "I don't see why there should be."

"You never know," Urquhart said curtly; but presently he was more confidential. "Don't tell that a.s.s Lingen; but it might be quite difficult to get off this place."

James stared about him. "You know best. But is it harder to get off than on?"

"Of course it is, my dear chap," said Urquhart, quite in his old vein of good-tempered scorn. "We are going up on the north side, where the snow is as hard as a brick."

"Ah," said James, "now I see. And we go down on the south, where it's as soft--"

"Where it may be as soft as a bran-mash. Or blown over into cornices."

James saw, or said that he did. In his private mind he judged Urquhart of trying to intimidate him. The vice of the expert! But he noticed that the guide had a coil of rope, and that Urquhart carried a shovel.

It was easy going until near noon, with no snow to speak about. They climbed a series of ridges, like frozen waves; but each was higher than the last, and took them closer to the clouds. When they lunched under the shelter of some tumbled rocks a drifting rain blew across the desolation.

"Jolly!" said James, but quite happily. Lingen shivered.

"My dear man," said Urquhart, "just you wait. I'll surprise you in a quarter of an hour's time." He spoke in his old way, as hectoring whom he tolerated. James noticed it, and was amused. He hadn't yet had time to be angry with this rascal; and now he began to doubt whether he should. After all, he had gained so very much more than he had lost.

Honour? Oh, that be jiggered. Something too much of his own honour.

Why, it was through Urquhart's attack upon Lucy that he had found out what Lucy was. Urquhart, at this time, was marching rather in front of him: James looked him over. A hardy, impudent rogue, no doubt--with that square, small head on him, that jutting chin--and his pair of blue eyes which would look through any woman born and burn her heart to water. Yes, and so he had had Lucy's heart--as water to be poured over his feet. By Heaven, when he thought of it, he, James Adolphus, had been the greater rogue: to play the Grand Turk; to h.o.a.rd that lovely, quivering creature in his still seraglio; to turn the key, and leave her there! And Jimmy Urquhart got in by the window. Of course he did. He was not an imaginative man by nature; but he was now a lover and had need to enhance his mistress. How better do that than by calling himself a d----d fool (the greatest blame he knew)? It follows that if he had been a fool, Urquhart had not! Impudent dog, if you like, but not a fool. Now, for the life of him, James could not despise a man who was not a fool. Nor could he hate one whom he had bested. He did not hate Urquhart; he wasn't angry with him; he couldn't despise him. On the contrary, he was sorry for him.

But now the miracle happened, and one could think of nothing else. As they tramped through the cold mist, over snow that was still crisp and short with frost, the light gained by degrees. The flying fog became blue, then radiant: quite suddenly they burst into the sun. The dazzling field stretched on all sides so far as the eye could see.

Snow and cloud, one could not distinguish them; and above them the arch of hyaline, a blue interwoven with light, which throbbed to the point of utterance, and drowned itself in the photo-sphere. The light seemed to make the sun, to climb towards the zenith, to ma.s.s and then to burst in flame. All three men took it in, each in his fashion.

Lingen was greatly moved; Urquhart became jocular.

"Well," he said to Macartney, "what do you make of that? That's worth coming up for. That ought to extenuate a good deal." James was quick to notice the phrase.

"Oh," he said, "you can show me things. I'm very much obliged to you.

This is a wonder of the world."