Love's Usuries Part 17

Carol had by nature that light quality of intellectual exuberance which, ornamental and active as foam, has no kinship with real erudition. They were speaking of Yate's career, the first steps, the coveted Victoria Cross, the laurels, and a warm blush underlay the bronze of the young soldier's cheek.

"A year ago," she said, "I was rampant with your ambition, now I cannot forget that the rungs of a soldier's ladder are made of dead men."

"What are a few lives compared with a country's greatness?"

"Only a subtraction from a multiplicity of mourners whom death rejects, the numberless babes bereft, the women starved of love."

"Surely love were a petty consideration, a paralysis to the hand of----"

"Don't you remember what Byron says?" she uttered, her glance fastening itself on the floating mists of sunset, "'Love is of man's life a thing apart, 'tis woman's whole existence.' If war costs him his life, it takes her whole existence too!"

"Yes, but--but--" stammered Yate, fighting with a wave of sentimentality deeper than any to which he had been accustomed, "women nowadays don't love in that way."

"The more fools they if they do," she answered, flippantly, coming abruptly from the clouds, and flicking at a gnat with the stem of her fan. "Have some tea, it is iced and flavoured with lemon peel, _a la Russe_."

"No tea, thanks. There is Burnley waving at us. I think he has an engagement, and means me to be off."

"Not yet, surely. If you are not booked for anything you need not hurry."

"Thanks. I should be glad to stay. I say, Harry, there's no good dragging me to the Waymans, is there?"

"Besides," interposed Carol, as her mother approached, "he has not been introduced to mamma."

"I beg your pardon," said Burnley, posing himself with mock formality, "Mrs Silver, let me present to you my friend Yate Tyndall--he's poor but pleasant."

"The fact of poverty is an unpleasantness of itself," affirmed Yate, extending a hearty hand to Carol's mother.

The expression of the salutation was scarcely valedictory, and Harry Burnley found himself doomed to solitary departure.

II.

There was--after the manner of suburban vogue--a tennis club in Weytown.

To this the _elite_ of Weytown society, composed mostly of shelved officers in various degrees of dilapidation, and their growing families, belonged. Here the Burnleys and Silvers had met, from the years of teetotum to those of flirtation, and here, outside the cabalistically marked acre, in their search for truant tennis b.a.l.l.s, had Carol and Rosser commenced the engagement which some said was serious, and others declared to be but a boy and girl pastime.

When the Burnleys' visitor, Yate Tyndall, appeared upon the scene, which he did almost immediately after his introduction to the Silvers, there was spoon diet for the gossips in plenty. Where Carol was, there the six feet two of the lumbering youth perambulated also; where she was not--and the colour of her caprices was changeable as the iridescence of soap-suds--there, _pro tem._, was the soldierly figure extinct.

Burnley laughed, then he chaffed, then he warned. Reminiscences of Rosser were flaunted, dabbed forth like blisters, their unpleasantness being excused by their curative intent; but to no avail. Then Harry, never tolerant of home tattle, suddenly lent himself as its mouthpiece.

Carol was a flirt--nay, more; Rosser, her childhood's one chum, her girlhood's sweetheart, had been but two months absent, and she had picked up with, to her, the merest stranger, etc. etc. Harry further hinted at spiderly instincts, and hummed, "Will you walk into my parlour" somewhat portentously. The fact was that there was slight abrasion of his own heart's surface, but that he overlooked to view himself heroically, as most of us do, and believed his animus was purely in the interest of his friend. But the friend rejected salvation--flouted it--and in a few days the subject was emphatically--Yate could be repulsively emphatic when roused--closed between them.

On the tennis ground Carol and her new admirer made an almost daily group. They seldom played, but they wore flannels in compliment to the surroundings, and dallied with time in talking what one, at least, of them believed to be philosophy. But, as before said, Carol's moods were never stationary. She had a mischievous wit and an effervescent, infectious sprightliness about her--it was a const.i.tutional characteristic rather than the immediate outcome of gaiety. This made acquaintances consider her one of the happiest girls in the world. But of late her friends were p.r.o.ne to notice a suspicious drowsy pinkness of the eyelids, a sad pucker of the lip corners which argued complexly with the gusts of exuberance that followed any fit of pre-occupation. And Yate, as he grew in knowledge of her, could have testified to other moods still--ugly ones--had he not been too neck-deep in emotion, too loyal, too profoundly worshipful of the secrets of Nature to notice anything but beauty in the characteristics of an ungarnished reality like hers. Besides this, though he was but a youth, he had cosmopolitan blood in his veins, and cosmopolitan dilution means poetry at a very early age--poetry which clothes womanhood with mystery, and makes her a ravishing mixture of puny weakness and irresistible strength. To him she was the handwriting on the wall of Belshazzar, a sign for wonderment and awe and dumb prostration, a problem too sublime for solution, though the key to many exalted enigmas lay, alas! merely with Rosser.

Of this Yate suspected a little--a very little. He never fully knew--nor indeed did she--how far the man was responsible for the development of the ineradicable events which crowded that autumn-tinted period. Once he spoke of him. It was when they had rambled from the tennis regions to where the edge of an adjacent common was banked with trees and dotted with seats arabesqued with initials by the playful penknives of holiday hordes. She had been capricious all day--moody, petulant--snappish, in vulgar phrase.

"Won't you tell me what bothers you?" he said, addressing the coil of her hair, for her face was bent to some hieroglyphics traced by her sunshade in the sandy ground.

"You!" she blurted.

"Shall I go?" he asked, meekly. "I've offered to do so often if it would make you happier."

"It wouldn't--nothing would make me happier."

"Why are you miserable?"

"I'm not," she muttered, and a heavy tear fell with a thud on the back of her glove.

He lifted the hand to his lips and kissed away the drop before it had time to sink in.

"Would it make you glad to know that if this were poison I would take it, to share even so much of you?"

"It _is_ poison, rank, acid poison, straight out of my wicked heart----"

"Then empty it; let me drain it, that there may be room for nothing but love."

"Love is a vaster emptiness--it is only a shadow thrown by ourselves."

"You have proved it so?" he questioned, anxiously. "You have loved?"

"I have loved," she breathed, with a weary accent on the middle word.

There was a long pause while they looked intently into the evening mists, which were weaving themselves into a veil of purple tissue over the horizon. A horrible tremor had seized him, and his next words, when they found voice, came thickly out from the burial place of a sob.

"Was it--was it Rosser?"

She merely bowed her head without looking at him.

He rose mutely, stretched his arms to right and left, drew himself to full length like some huge dog wakened from slumber, then for some moments he stood with hands clenched on his stick before he spoke.

"I suppose it must be 'good-bye.'"...

She looked at him dreamily.

"Need it?"

He leapt to her side.

"Do you mean that you do not want me to go--that you would rather I stayed?"

"Much rather."

"And he?"

"He has ceased to exist for me!"

A torrent of hot blood seemed to burst from Yate's frozen brain, as watershoots from the glaciers in summer.

"G.o.d! have you given him up?"

"I made a misstatement. I should have said _I have ceased to exist for him_."