Maurice Guest Part 52

He rose, locked the letters up again, rested his arm on the lid of the piano, his head on his arm. The more he toyed with his inclination to go to her, the more absorbent it became, and straightway it was an ungovernable longing: it came over him with a dizzy force, which made him close his eyes; and he was as helpless before it as the drunkard before his craving to drink. Standing thus, he saw with a flash of insight that, though he went away as far as steam could carry him, he would never, as long as he lived, be safe from overthrows of this kind.

It was something elemental, which he could no more control than the flow of his blood. And he did not even stay to excuse himself to himself: he went headlong to her, with burning words on his lips.

"My poor boy," she said, when he ceased to speak. "Yes, I know what it is--that sudden rage that comes over one, to rush back, at all costs, no matter what happens afterwards.--I'm so sorry for you, Maurice. It is making me unhappy."

"You are not to be unhappy. It shall not happen again, I promise you.--Besides, I shall soon be gone now." But at his own words, the thought of his coming desolation pierced him anew. "Give me just one straw to cling to! Tell me you won't forget me all at once; that you will miss me and think of me--if ever so little."

"You asked me that the other night. Was what I said then, not answer enough?--And besides, in these last four days, since I have been alone, I've learnt just how much I shall miss you, Maurice. It's my punishment, I suppose, for growing so dependent on anyone."

"You must go away, too. You can't stay here by yourself. We must both go, in opposite directions, and begin afresh."

She did not reply at once. "I shouldn't know where to go," she said, after a time. "Will nothing else do, Maurice? Is there no other way?--Oh, why can't we go on being friends, as we were!"

He shook his head. "I've struggled against it so long--you don't know.

I've never really been your friend--only I couldn't hurt you before, by telling you. And it has worn me out; I'm good for nothing.

Louise!--think, just once more--ask yourself, once more, if it's quite impossible, before you send me into the outer darkness."

She was silent.

"I don't ask you to love me," he went on, in a low voice. "I've come down from that, in these wretched days. I would be content with less, much less. I only ask you to let yourself be loved--as I could love you. If only you could say you liked me a little, all the rest would come, I'm confident of it. In time, I should make you love me. For I would take, oh, such care of you! I want to make you happy, only to make you happy. I've no other wish than to show you what happiness is."

"It sounds so good ... you are good, Maurice. But the future--tell me, have thought of the future?"

"I should think I have.--Do you suppose it means nothing to me to be so despicably poor as I am? To have absolutely nothing to offer you?"

She took his hand. "That's not what I mean. And you know it. Come, let us talk sensibly this afternoon, and look things straight in the face.--You want to marry me, you say, and let the rest come? That is very, very good of you, and I shall never forget it.--But what does it mean, Maurice? You have been here a little over a year now, haven't you?--and still have about a year to stay. When that's over, you will go back to England. You will settle in some small place, and spend your life, or the best part of your life, there--oh, Maurice, you are my kind friend, but I tell you frankly, I couldn't face life in an English provincial town. I'm not brave enough for that."

He gleaned a ray of hope from her words. "We could live here--anywhere you liked. I would make it possible. I swear I would."

She shook her head, and went on, with the same reasonable sweetness.

"And then, there's another thing. If I married you, sooner or later you would have to take me home to your people. Have you really thought of that, and how you would feel about it, when it came to the point?--No, no, it's impossible for me to marry you."

"But that--that American!--you would have married him?"

"That was different," she said, and her voice grew thinner. "It's the knowing that tells, Maurice. You would have that still to learn. You don't realise it yet, but afterwards, it would come home to you.--Listen! You have always been kind to me, I owe you such a debt of grat.i.tude, that I'm going to be frank, brutally frank with you. I've told you often that I shall never really care for anyone again. You know that, don't you? Well, I want to tell you, too--I want you to understand quite, quite clearly that ... that I belonged to him altogether--entirely--that I ... Oh, you know what I mean!"

Maurice covered his face with his hands. "The past is the past. It should never be mentioned between us. It doesn't matter--nothing matters now."

"You say that--every one says that--beforehand," she answered; and not only her words, but also her way of saying them, seemed to set her down miles away from him, on a lonely pinnacle of experience. "Afterwards, you would think differently."

"Louise, if you really cared, it would be different. You wouldn't say such things, then--you would be only too glad not to say them."

In her heart she knew that he was right, and did not contradict him.

The busy little clock on the writing-table ticked away a few seconds.

With a jerk, Maurice rose to his feet. Louise remained sitting, and he looked down on her black head. His gaze was so insistent that she felt it, and raised her eyes. His forlorn face moved her.

"Why is it--what is the matter with me?--that I must upset your life like this? I can't bear to see you so unhappy.--And yet I haven't done anything, have I? I have always been honest with you; I've never made myself out to be better than I am. There must be something wrong with me, I think, that no one can ever be satisfied to be just my friend.--Yet with you I thought it was different. I thought things could go on as they were. Maurice, isn't it possible? Say it is! Show me just one little spark of good in myself!"

"I'm not different from other men, Louise. I deluded myself long enough, G.o.d knows!"

She made a despondent gesture, and turned away. "Well, then, if either of us should go, I'm the one. You have your work. I do nothing; I have no ties, no friends--I never even seem to have been able to make acquaintances. And if I went, you could stay quietly on. In time, you would forget me.--If I only knew where to go! I am so alone, and it is all so hard. I shall never know what it is to be happy myself, or to make anyone else happy--never!" and she burst into tears.

It was his turn now to play the comforter. Drawing a. chair up before her, he took her hand, and said all he could think of to console her.

He could bear anything, he told her, but to see her unhappy. All would yet turn out to be for the best. And, on one point, she was to set her mind at rest: her going away would not benefit him in the least. He would never consent to stay on alone, where they had been so much together.

"I've nothing to look forward to, nothing," she sobbed. "There's nothing I care to live for."

As soon as she was quieter, he left her.

For an hour or more Louise lay huddled up on the sofa, with her face pressed to her arm.

When she sat up again, she pushed back her heavy hair, and, clasping her hands loosely round her knees, stared before her with vacant eyes.

But not for long; tired though she was, and though her head ached from crying, there was still a deep residue of excitement in her. The level beams of the sun were pouring blindly into the room; the air was dense and oppressive. She rose to her feet and moved about. She did not know what to do with herself: she would have liked to go out and walk; but the dusty, jarring light of the summer streets frightened her. She thought of music, of the theatre, as a remedy for the long evening that yawned before her: then dismissed the idea from her mind. She was in such a condition of restlessness, this night, that the fact of being forced to sit still between two other human beings, would make her want to scream.

The sun was getting low; the foliage of the trees in the opposite gardens was black, with copper edges, against the refulgence of the sky. She leaned her hands on the sill, and gazed fixedly at the stretch of red and gold, which, like the afterglow of a fire, flamed behind the trees. Her eyes were filled with it. She did not think or feel: she became one, by looking, with the sight before her. As she stood there, nothing of her existed but her two widely opened eyes; she was a miracle wrought by the sunset; she WAS the sunset--in one of those vacancies of mind, which all intense gazers know.

How long she had remained thus she could not have told, when a strange thing happened to her. From some sub-conscious layer of her brain, which started into activity because the rest of it was so pa.s.sive, a small, still thought glided in, and took possession of her mind. At first, it was so faint that she hardly grasped it; but, once established there, it became so vivid that, with one sweep, it blotted out trees and sunset; so real that it seemed always to have been present to her. Without conscious effort on her part, the solution to her difficulties had been found; a decision had been arrived at, but not by her; it was the work of some force outside herself.

She turned from the window, and pressed her hands to her blinded eyes.

Good G.o.d! it was so simple. To think that this had not occurred to her before!--that, throughout the troubled afternoon, the idea had never once suggested itself! There was no need of loneliness and suffering for either of them. He might stay; they both might stay; she could make him happy, and ward off the change she so dreaded.--Who was she to stick at it?

But she remained dazed, doubtful as it were of this peaceful ending; her hand still covered her eyes. Then, with one of the swift movements by which it was her custom to turn thought into action, she went to the writing-table, and scrawled a few, big words.

MAURICE, I HAVE FOUND A WAY. COME BACK TO-MORROW EVENING.

She hesitated only over the last two words, and, before writing them, sat with her chin in her hand, and deliberately considered. Then she addressed the envelope, and stamped it: it would be soon enough if he got it through the post, the following morning.

But, with her, to resolve was to act; she was ill at ease under enforced procrastination; and had often to fight against a burning impatience, when circ.u.mstances delayed the immediate carrying out of her will. In this case, however, she had voluntarily postponed Maurice's return for twenty-four hours, when he might have been with her in less than one: for, in her mind, there lurked the seductive thought of a long, summer day, with an emotion at its close to which she could look forward.

In the meantime, she was puzzled how to fill up the evening. After all, she decided to go to the theatre, where she arrived in time to hear the last two acts of AIDA. From a seat in the PARQUET, close to the orchestra, she let the showy music play round her. Afterwards, she walked home through the lilac-haunted night, went to bed, and at once fell asleep.

Next morning, she wakened early--that was the sole token of disturbance, she could detect in herself. It was very still; there was a faint twittering of birds, but the noises of the street had not yet begun. She lay in the subdued yellow light of her room, with one arm across her eyes.

Fresh from sleep, she understood certain things as never before. She saw all that had happened of late--her slow recovery, her striving and seeking, her growing friendship with Maurice--in a different light. On this morning, too, she was able to answer one of the questions that had puzzled her the night before. She saw that the relations in which they had stood to each other, during the bygone months, would have been impossible, had she really cared for him. She liked him, yes, had always liked him; and, in addition, his patience and kindness had made her deeply grateful to him. But that was all. Neither his hands, nor his voice, nor his eyes, nor anything he did, had had the power to touch her--SO to touch her, that her own hands and eyes would have met his half-way; that the old familiar craving, which was partly fear and partly attraction, would have made her callous to his welfare. Had there been a breath of this, things would have come to a climax long ago. Hot and eager as she was, she could not have lived on coolly at his side--and, at this moment, she found it difficult to make up her mind whether she admired Maurice or the reverse, for having been able to carry his part through.

And yet, though no particle of personal feeling drew her to him, she, too, had suffered, in her own way, during these weeks of morbid tension, when he had been incapable either of advancing or retreating.

How great the strain had been, she recognised only in the instant when he had spanned the breach, in clear, unmistakable words. If he had not done it, she would have been forced to; for she could never find herself to rights, for long, in half circ.u.mstances: if she were not to grow bewildered, she had to see her road simple and straight before her. His words to her after they had been on the river together--more, perhaps, his bold yet timid kisses--had given her back strength and a.s.surance. She was no longer the miserable instrument on which he tried his changes of mood; she was again the giver and the bestower, since she held a heart and a heart's happiness in the hollow of her hand.

What people would think and say was a matter of indifference to her: besides, they practically believed the worst of her already. No; she had nothing to lose and, it might be, much to gain. And after all, it meant so little! The first time, perhaps; or if one cared too much. But in this case, where she had herself well in hand, and where there was no chance of the blind desire to kill self arising, which had been her previous undoing; where the chief end aimed at was the retention of a friend--here, it meant nothing at all.

The thought that she might possibly have scruples on his part to combat, crossed her mind. She stretched her arm straight above her head, then laid it across her eyes again. She would like him none the less for these scruples, did they exist: now, she believed that, at heart, she had really appreciated his reserve, his holding back, where others would have been so ready to pounce in. For the first time, she considered him in the light of a lover, and she saw him differently. As if the mere contemplation of such a change brought her nearer to him, she was stirred by a new sensation, which had him as its object. And under the influence of this feeling, she told herself that perhaps just in this gentler, kindlier love, which only sought her welfare, true happiness lay. She strained to read the future. There would be storms neither of joy nor of pain; but watchful sympathy, and the fine, manly tenderness that shields and protects. Oh, what if after all her pa.s.sionate craving for happiness, it was here at her feet, having come to her as good things often do, unexpected and unsought!

She could lie still no longer; she sprang up, with an alacrity that had been wanting in her movements of late. And throughout the long day, this impression, which was half a hope and half a belief was present to her mind, making everything she did seem strangely festive. She almost feared the moment when she would see him again, lest anything he said should dissipate her hope.

When he came, her eyes followed him searchingly. With an instinct that was now morbidly sharpened, Maurice was aware of the change in her, even before he saw her eyes. His own were one devouring question.

She made him sit down beside her.

"What is it, Louise? Tell me--quickly. Remember, I've been all day in suspense," he said, as seconds pa.s.sed and she did not speak.