The Great Amulet Part 2

"I'm not a 'society woman,' remember; and setting aside your companionship, I should prefer a 'G.o.d-forsaken place' on the Indian Frontier to St. John's Wood or Upper Tooting, any day! I am prepared to find it all very interesting."

"So you may, at the start. But the interest is likely to wear thin after the first few years of it."

"Well, perhaps by that time we shall have arrived at the enchanted palace, and then nothing else will matter at all!--There now; I've done all I can to my sketch for the present. Shall we go on?"

Lenox roused himself, not without reluctance, and they went on accordingly.

Towards the summit, trees grew rare: and they found the solitary hotel perched aloft, upon an open s.p.a.ce; a hive of restless shifting human life, set in the midst of the changeless hills.

After a short interview with the manager's wife, they found themselves alone again, in the private sitting-room engaged by Lenox. A wood fire burned merrily in the open hearth, for September evenings are chilly at that alt.i.tude; and the windows, looking westward, gave generous admittance to a flood of afternoon sunlight.

Eldred, standing on the hearth-rug, surveyed all things in an access of silent satisfaction; while Quita moved lightly to and fro, frankly interested in details.

"Oh, how I love the cleanness and emptiness of these Swiss rooms!" she exclaimed at last. "They make one feel so unspeakably wholesome and good. And we are actually going to have dinner here, you and I? Just our two selves! How strange!"

On a sudden impulse she came close to him, and standing before him, took the lapels of his coat, one in each hand.

"Eldred, . . . I don't seem able to take it in at all! Other brides have so much of external paraphernalia to emphasise the fact they have closed one chapter of life, and begun another. But except for that dreamlike half-hour in church, you and I seem merely to have come away together for an everyday outing; and there is nothing anywhere, . . .

except this,"--she lifted the third finger of her left hand,--"to make me realise that we are actually . . . married."

She spoke the last word under her breath; and almost before it was out, he had caught her to himself, and kissed her fervently, again and again.

"Does that help you to realise it a little better, . . . my wife?" he whispered; and for answer she drew in a long breath that was almost a sob. He released her at once; and as she faced him, flushed and breathless, he saw that tears stood in her eyes.

"Why, . . . why did you never . . . kiss me . . . like that before?"

she asked very low.

"G.o.d knows I have wanted to, a hundred times," he answered. "But I think I was afraid you might . . . hate it. Why do you ask, though?

Would it have made any difference between us if I had?"

"I can't tell; . . . oh, I can't tell! Only . . . you have been so restrained, so unlike an . . . ordinary lover, that I never dreamed it could mean as much to you . . . as all that . . ." She pulled herself together with an effort. "Now I am going to take off my things," she said. "Don't come, please. I want to get away by myself."

A moment later he stood alone, between the sunlight and the firelight, gazing blankly at the door that hid her from view; and wondering whether he had advanced or r.e.t.a.r.ded matters by his unpremeditated flash of self-revelation.

II.

"A turn, and we stand in the heart of things."

--Browning.

When Eldred Lenox sailed from India six months earlier, he would have scouted as impossible the suggestion that he might bring a wife back with him on his return: and his uncompromising avoidance of women, from boyhood upward, had seemed to justify him in his a.s.surance. But Nature is inexorable. She has her own methods of accomplishing those things that are necessary to a man's salvation; and behold in three months the impossible had come to pa.s.s. The giant Mirabeau was right:--"_ce bete de mot_" ought by now to be struck out of our dictionaries.

Lenox knew little of half measures: and, having succ.u.mbed,--in spite of himself, in spite of inherent prejudices and convictions,--he succ.u.mbed heart and soul. That which he had unduly scorned, he now unduly exalted. Only Time and the woman could lead him into the Middle Way, which is the way of truth. For beneath the surface hardness of the Scot lurked the fire, the imaginative force, the proud sensitiveness of the Celt: a heritage from his Cornish mother, whose untimely death had left her two younger sons in the hands of a bachelor uncle, of red-hot Calvinistic views. Their father--a man of an altogether different stamp--had met his boys on rare occasions, and ardently desired to know more of them: but an Afghan knife had ended his career before he could find leisure to complete their acquaintance. The history of Anglo-India is one long chronicle of such minor tragedies.

Thus fire-eating Jock Lenox had exercised iron rule over his charges, unhampered by parental interference: had reared them in an unquestioning fear of G.o.d, and an unquestioning distrust of more than half His creatures; had impressed upon them, in season and out of season, that woman was the one fatal element in a man's life, the author of nine-tenths of its tragedy, complexity, and crime.

Yet "one touch of Nature" had annulled, in three months, the work of twenty years. So much for education!

For a while Lenox stood motionless where his wife had left him, as though life itself were suspended until her return: for despite the glory of autumn sunshine, of leaping flames upon the hearth, the room, robbed of her presence, seemed colourless, dead.

Then, as the minutes pa.s.sed and she did not reappear, restlessness took possession of him; sure sign that he was very deeply moved. He crossed to the open window, but even the colossal calm of the mountains failed to quell the tumult of pa.s.sion in his veins. Her last words left him anxious. There could be no peace till he had interpreted them to his full satisfaction; and the power of interpreting a woman's words could not be reckoned among his attributes.

Suddenly it occurred to him that he had pocketed two unopened envelopes before starting for church. He drew them out; rather because he needed some definite occupation, than because he felt curious as to their contents. Men of his type are rarely overburdened with correspondents.

The first was a business letter. He read it with scant attention, and returned it to his breast-pocket. The second envelope bore the handwriting of his senior subaltern, now in England on short leave.

The two men were close friends; but Eldred's last letter had been written four months ago; and the envelope in his hand contained Richardson's tardy response. He broke the seal with a smile at thought of his subaltern's astonishment when he should learn the truth. The letter was longer than usual; and in glancing through it hurriedly, the name Miss Maurice caught his eye. "Great Scott!" he muttered aloud; then, with quickened interest, began upon the second page, ignoring the opening.

"Wonder if you have run across the Maurices in Zermatt," wrote Max Richardson, with no faintest prevision of the circ.u.mstances in which the thoughtless lines would be read by his friend. "Artists both of them, brother and sister; and a rather remarkable couple, I'm told.

She seems to have made a hit at the Academy; and the cousins I'm staying with are very keen about her. I happened to mention that I was writing to a chap in Zermatt, and they begged me to ask if you had heard or seen anything of this Miss Maurice. There's a bit of a romance about her; that's what has p.r.i.c.ked their interest. Seems she was engaged to Sir Roger Bennet this season. A swell in the Art patron line. Lost his heart at first sight. But evidently on closer acquaintance found her rather a handful, and too much of a Bohemian to suit his British taste! At all events there was a flare-up over something about three months ago, and Sir Roger backed out, politely but definitely. It seems that Miss Maurice was a good deal cut up.

Went off to Zermatt with her brother. And now rumour has it that she is engaged, if not married, to some other chap out there, I suppose by way of a gentle intimation to Sir Roger that he hasn't broken her heart. My cousins are eaten up with curiosity to know if it's true.

Women appear to be capable of that sort of thing. But it strikes a mere man as playing rather low down on a luckless devil who has done her no harm: and I don't envy him his hasty bargain, or the repenting at leisure that's bound to follow. Lord, what fools we men are! And how easily we lose our heads over a woman! All except you--the Great Invulnerable, looking down upon our folly from the superior height of a snow-peak. . . ."

Lenox read no further. The last words enraged him, like a blow between the eyes, and set the blood hammering in his temples. It would seem, at times, that Fate selects with fiendish nicety the psychological moment when her arrows will strike deepest, and stick fastest. Thus, when his thirst was at its height, Lenox found the cup dashed from his lips; and that by the hand of his best friend:--a master-stroke of Olympian comedy.

With a curse he flung the letter on to the table.

Wounded love, wounded pride, and baulked desire so clashed in him that clear thought was impossible. He only knew that he had been deliberately deceived, the most intolerable knowledge to a man incapable of deceit: and with the knowledge all the natural savage in him sprang to life. If Richardson had appeared before him in the flesh, it is doubtful whether he could have stayed his hand: the more so, since he believed that the man had written the truth: that this girl--whom it seemed that he had wooed with quite unnecessary reverence--had taken the best he could give, and utilised it as a mere salve for her wounded vanity.

He understood now why her heart had proved more difficult of access than her hand. He had believed it unawakened; had dreamed, as lovers will, of warming it into life with the fire of his own great love: and lo, he found himself forestalled by this execrable man in England.

Clearly he had been a fool;--an infatuated fool! He stabbed himself with the epithet: and a vivid memory of his uncle's stock cynicisms turned the knife in the wound. All the prejudices and tenets of his youth rushed back upon him now: an avenging host, mocking at his discomfiture; narrowing his judgment; blinding him to the woman's point of view.

And while he still stood battling with himself in a vain effort to regain his shaken self-control, the bedroom door opened, and his wife came quickly towards him.

His changed aspect arrested her: and the sight of her facing him thus, with the sunlight in her eyes and on her hair, her young purity of outline emphasised by the simplicity of her dress, so stirred his senses, that, in defiance of pride, the whole heart of him went out to her, claiming her for his own. But it is at just such crises that habit reveals itself as the hand of steel in a silken glove; and before she could open her lips, Jock Lenox had stretched out a ghostly arm from his grave in Aberdeen, and shut to the door of his nephew's heart.

Quita glanced hurriedly from the discarded letter to her husband's face.

"My dear, . . . what has gone wrong? You look terrible. Have you had bad news?"

The irony of the question brought a smile to his lips.

"Yes. I have had bad news. Read it for yourself." And he pushed the letter towards her.

"Why? Who is it from?"

"A friend of mine, in England, who seems to know a good deal more about you than I do."

"What on earth do you mean?" she asked sharply.

"You know well enough what I mean. Read that letter if your memory needs refreshing."

Her first instinct was indignant refusal. Then curiosity conquered.

Besides, she wanted above all things to gain time: and while she read, her husband watched her keenly, with G.o.d knows what of forlorn hope at his heart.

But a twisted truth is more formidable than a lie; and intuition warned Quita that Lenox was in no mood to appreciate the fine shades of distinction between the literal facts and Max Richardson's free translation of the same. His frankly masculine comments fired her cheeks; and at the sight Lenox could restrain himself no longer.