Paul Kelver Part 49

"You do not mind my loving you?"

"I cannot help it, can I? Nor can you."

She seated herself on a stone bench facing a sun-dial, and leaning hack, her hands clasped behind her head, looked at me and laughed.

"I shall always love you," I answered, "but it is with a curious sort of love. I do not understand it myself."

"Tell me," she commanded, still with a smile about her lips, "describe it to me."

I was standing over against her, my arm resting upon the dial's stone column. The sun was sinking, casting long shadows on the velvety gra.s.s, illuminating with a golden light her upturned face.

"I would you were some great queen of olden days, and that I might be always near you, serving you, doing your bidding. Your love in return would spoil all; I shall never ask it, never desire it. That I might look upon you, touch now and then at rare intervals with my lips your hand, kiss in secret the glove you had let fall, the shoe you had flung off, know that you knew of my love, that I was yours to do with as you would, to live or die according to your wish. Or that you were priestess in some temple of forgotten G.o.ds, where I might steal at daybreak and at dusk to gaze upon your beauty; kneel with clasped hands, watching your sandalled feet coming and going about the altar steps; lie with pressed lips upon the stones your trailing robes had touched."

She laughed a light mocking laugh. "I should prefer to be the queen.

The role of priestess would not suit me. Temples are so cold." A slight shiver pa.s.sed through her. She made a movement with her hand, beckoning me to her feet. "That is how you shall love me, Paul," she said, "adoring me, worshipping me--blindly. I will be your queen and treat you--as it chooses me. All I think, all I do, I will tell you, and you shall tell me it is right. The queen can do no wrong."

She took my face between her hands, and bending over me, looked long and steadfastly into my eyes. "You understand, Paul, the queen can do no wrong--never, never." There had crept into her voice a note of vehemence, in her face was a look almost of appeal.

"My queen can do no wrong," I repeated. And she laughed and let her hands fall back upon her lap.

"Now you may sit beside me. So much honour, Paul, shall you have to-day, but it will have to last you long. And you may tell me all you have been doing, maybe it will amuse me; and afterwards you shall hear what I have done, and shall say that it was right and good of me."

I obeyed, sketching my story briefly, yet leaving nothing untold, not even the transit of the Lady 'Ortensia, ashamed of the episode though I was. At that she looked a little grave.

"You must do nothing again, Paul," she commanded, "to make me feel ashamed of you, or I shall dismiss you from my presence for ever. I must be proud of you, or you shall not serve me. In dishonouring yourself you are dishonouring me. I am angry with you, Paul. Do not let me be angry with you again."

And so that pa.s.sed; and although my love for her--as I know well she wished and sought it should--failed to save me at all times from the apish voices whispering ever to the beast within us, I know the desire to be worthy of her, to honour her with all my being, helped my life as only love can. The glory of the morning fades, the magic veil is rent; we see all things with cold, clear eyes. My love was a woman. She lies dead. They have mocked her white sweet limbs with rags and tatters, but they cannot cheat love's eyes. G.o.d knows I loved her in all purity! Only with false love we love the false. Beneath the unclean clinging garments she sleeps fair.

My tale finished, "Now I will tell you mine," she said. "I am going to be married soon. I shall be a Countess, Paul, the Countess Huescar--I will teach you how to p.r.o.nounce it--and I shall have a real castle in Spain. You need not look so frightened, Paul; we shall not live there.

It is a half-ruined, gloomy place, among the mountains, and he loves it even less than I do. Paris and London will be my courts, so you will see me often. You shall know the great world, Paul, the world I mean to conquer, where I mean to rule."

"Is he very rich?" I asked.

"As poor," she laughed, "as poor as a Spanish n.o.bleman. The money I shall have to provide, or, rather, poor dear Dad will. He gives me t.i.tle, position. Of course I do not love him, handsome though he is.

Don't look so solemn, Paul. We shall get on together well enough.

Queens, Paul, do not make love matches, they contract alliances. I have done well, Paul; congratulate me. Do you hear, Paul? Say that I have acted rightly."

"Does he love you?" I asked.

"He tells me so," she answered, with a laugh. "How uncourtier-like you are, Paul! Do you suggest that any man could see me and not love me?"

She sprang to her feet. "I do not want his love," she cried; "it would bore me. Women hate love they cannot return. I don't mean love like yours, devout little Paul," she added, with a laugh. "That is sweet incense wafted round us that we like to scent with our noses in the air.

Give me that, Paul; I want it, I ask for it. But the love of a hand, the love of a husband that one does not care for--it would be horrible!"

I felt myself growing older. For the moment my G.o.ddess became a child needing help.

"But have you thought--" I commenced.

"Yes, yes," she interrupted me quickly, "I have thought and thought till I can think no more. There must be some sacrifice; it must be as little as need be, that is all. He does not love me; he is marrying me for my money--I know that, and I am glad of it. You do not know me, Paul. I must have rank, position. What am I? The daughter of rich old Hasluck, who began life as a butcher in the Mile End Road. As the Princess Huescar, society will forget, as Mrs."--it seemed to me she checked herself abruptly--"Jones or Brown it would remember, however rich I might be. I am vain, Paul, caring for power--ambition. I have my father's blood in me. All his nights and days he has spent in gaining wealth; he can do no more. We upstarts have our pride of race. He has done his share, I must do mine."

"But you need not be mere Mrs. anybody commonplace," I argued. "Why not wait? You will meet someone who can give you position and whom at the same time you can love. Would that not be better?"

"He will never come, the man I could love," she answered. "Because, my little Paul, he has come already. Hush, Paul, the queen can do no wrong."

"Who is he?" I asked. "May I not know?"

"Yes, Paul," she answered, "you shall know; I want you to know, then you shall tell me that I have acted rightly. Do you hear me, Paul?--quite rightly--that you still respect me and honour me. He could not help me.

As his wife, I should be less even than I am, a mere rich n.o.body, giving long dinner-parties to other rich n.o.bodies, living amongst City men, retired trades-people; envied only by their fat, vulgarly dressed wives, courted by seedy Bohemians for the sake of my cook; with perhaps an opera singer or an impecunious n.o.bleman or two out of Dad's City list for my show-guests. Is that the court, Paul, where you would have your queen reign?"

"Is he so commonplace a man," I answered, "the man you love? I cannot believe it."

"He is not commonplace," she answered. "It is I who am commonplace. The things I desire, they are beneath him; he will never trouble himself to secure them."

"Not even for love of you?"

"I would not have him do so even were he willing. He is great, with a greatness I cannot even understand. He is not the man for these times.

In old days, I should have married him, knowing he would climb to greatness by sheer strength of manhood. But now men do not climb; they crawl to greatness. He could not do that. I have done right, Paul."

"What does he say?" I asked.

"Shall I tell you?" She laughed a little bitterly. "I can give you his exact words, 'You are half a woman and half a fool, so woman-like you will follow your folly. But let your folly see to it that your woman makes no fool of herself.'"

The words were what I could imagine his saying. I heard the strong ring of his voice through her mocking mimicry.

"Hal!" I cried. "It is he."

"So you never guessed even that, Paul. I thought at times it would be sweet to cry it out aloud, that it could have made no difference, that everyone who knew me must have read it in my eyes."

"But he never seemed to take much notice of you," I said.

She laughed. "You needn't be so unkind, Paul. What did I ever do for you much more than snub you? We boys and girls; there is not so much difference between us: we love our masters. Yet you must not think so poorly of me. I was only a child to him then, but we were locked up in Paris together during the entire siege. Have not you heard? He did take a little notice of me there, Paul, I a.s.sure you."

Would it have been better, I wonder, had she followed the woman and not the fool? It sounds an easy question to answer; but I am thinking of years later, one winter's night at Tiefenkasten in the Julier Pa.s.s. I was on my way from San Moritz to Chur. The sole pa.s.senger, I had just climbed, half frozen, from the sledge, and was thawing myself before the stove in the common room of the hotel when the waiter put a pencilled note into my hand:

"Come up and see me. I am a prisoner in this d.a.m.ned hole till the weather breaks. Hal."

I hardly recognised him at first. Only the poor ghost he seemed of the Hal I had known as a boy. His long privations endured during the Paris siege, added to the superhuman work he had there put upon himself, had commenced the ruin of even his magnificent physique--a ruin the wild, loose life he was now leading was soon to complete. It was a gloomy, vaulted room that once had been a chapel, lighted dimly by a cheap, evil-smelling lamp, heated to suffocation by one of those great green-tiled German ovens now only to be met with in rare out-of-the-way world corners. He was sitting propped up by pillows on the bed, placed close to one of the high windows, his deep eyes flaring like two gleaming caverns out of his drawn, haggard face.

"I saw you from the window," he explained. "It is the only excitement I get, twice a day when the sledges come in. I broke down coming across the Pa.s.s a fortnight ago, on my way from Davos. We were stuck in a drift for eighteen hours; it nearly finished my last lung. And I haven't even a book to read. By G.o.d! lad, I was glad to see your frosted face ten minutes ago in the light of the lantern."

He grasped me with his long bony hand. "Sit down, and let me hear my voice using again its mother tongue--you were always a good listener--for the last eight years I have hardly spoken it. Can you stand the room? The windows ought to be open, but what does it matter? I may as well get accustomed to the heat before I die."

I drew my chair close to the bed, and for awhile, between his fits of coughing, we talked of things that were outside our thoughts, or, rather, Hal talked, continuously, boisterously, meeting my remonstrances with shouts of laughter, ending in wild struggles for breath, so that I deemed it better to let him work his mad mood out.

Then suddenly: "What is she doing?" he asked. "Do you ever see her?"

"She is playing in--" I mentioned the name of a comic opera then running in Paris. "No; I have not seen her for some time."

He laid his white, wasted hand on mine. "What a pity you and I could not have rolled ourselves into one, Paul--you, the saint, and I, the satyr.