Traffics and Discoveries Part 44

"Now you understand," she whispered, across the packed shadows.

"Yes, I understand--now. Thank you."

"I--I only hear them." She bowed her head in her hands. "I have no right, you know--no other right. I have neither borne nor lost--neither borne nor lost!"

"Be very glad then," said I, for my soul was torn open within me.

"Forgive me!"

She was still, and I went back to my sorrow and my joy.

"It was because I loved them so," she said at last, brokenly. "_That_ was why it was, even from the first--even before I knew that they--they were all I should ever have. And I loved them so!"

She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the shadow.

"They came because I loved them--because I needed them. I--I must have made them come. Was that wrong, think you?"

"No--no."

"I--I grant you that the toys and--and all that sort of thing were nonsense, but--but I used to so hate empty rooms myself when I was little." She pointed to the gallery. "And the pa.s.sages all empty. ... And how could I ever bear the garden door shut? Suppose----"

"Don't! For pity's sake, don't!" I cried. The twilight had brought a cold rain with gusty squalls that plucked at the leaded windows.

"And the same thing with keeping the fire in all night. _I_ don't think it so foolish--do you?"

I looked at the broad brick hearth, saw, through tears I believe, that there was no unpa.s.sable iron on or near it, and bowed my head.

"I did all that and lots of other things--just to make believe. Then they came. I heard them, but I didn't know that they were not mine by right till Mrs. Madden told me----"

"The butler's wife? What?"

"One of them--I heard--she saw. And knew. Hers! _Not_ for me. I didn't know at first. Perhaps I was jealous. Afterwards, I began to understand that it was only because I loved them, not because----... Oh, you _must_ bear or lose," she said piteously. "There is no other way--and yet they love me. They must! Don't they?"

There was no sound in the room except the lapping voices of the fire, but we two listened intently, and she at least took comfort from what she heard. She recovered herself and half rose. I sat still in my chair by the screen.

"Don't think me a wretch to whine about myself like this, but--but I'm all in the dark, you know, and _you_ can see."

In truth I could see, and my vision confirmed me in my resolve, though that was like the very parting of spirit and flesh. Yet a little longer I would stay since it was the last time.

"You think it is wrong, then?" she cried sharply, though I had said nothing.

"Not for you. A thousand times no. For you it is right.... I am grateful to you beyond words. For me it would be wrong. For me only...."

"Why?" she said, but pa.s.sed her hand before her face as she had done at our second meeting in the wood. "Oh, I see," she went on simply as a child. "For you it would be wrong." Then with a little indrawn laugh, "and, d'you remember, I called you lucky--once--at first. You who must never come here again!"

She left me to sit a little longer by the screen, and I heard the sound of her feet die out along the gallery above.

MRS. BATHURST

FROM LYDEN'S "IRENIUS"

ACT III. Sc. II.

Gow.--Had it been your Prince instead of a groom caught in this noose there's not an astrologer of the city----

PRINCE.--Sacked! Sacked! We were a city yesterday.

Gow.--So be it, but I was not governor. Not an astrologer, but would ha'

sworn he'd foreseen it at the last versary of Venus, when Vulcan caught her with Mars in the house of stinking Capricorn. But since 'tis Jack of the Straw that hangs, the forgetful stars had it not on their tablets.

PRINCE.--Another life! Were there any left to die? How did the poor fool come by it?

Gow.--_Simpliciter_ thus. She that d.a.m.ned him to death knew not that she did it, or would have died ere she had done it. For she loved him. He that hangs him does so in obedience to the Duke, and asks no more than "Where is the rope?" The Duke, very exactly he hath told us, works G.o.d's will, in which holy employ he's not to be questioned. We have then left upon this finger, only Jack whose soul now plucks the left sleeve of Destiny in h.e.l.l to overtake why she clapped him up like a fly on a sunny wall. Whuff! Soh!

PRINCE.--Your cloak, Ferdinand. I'll sleep now.

FERDINAND.--Sleep, then.. He too, loved his life?

Gow.--He was born of woman ... but at the end threw life from him, like your Prince, for a little sleep ... "Have I any look of a King?" said he, clanking his chain--"to be so baited on all sides by Fortune, that I must e'en die now to live with myself one day longer?" I left him railing at Fortune and woman's love.

FERDINAND.--Ah, woman's love!

_(Aside)_ Who knows not Fortune, glutted on easy thrones, Stealing from feasts as rare to coneycatch, Privily in the hedgerows for a clown With that same cruel-l.u.s.tful hand and eye, Those nails and wedges, that one hammer and lead, And the very gerb of long-stored lightnings loosed Yesterday 'gainst some King.

MRS. BATHURST The day that I chose to visit H.M.S. _Peridot_ in Simon's Bay was the day that the Admiral had chosen to send her up the coast. She was just steaming out to sea as my train came in, and since the rest of the Fleet were either coaling or busy at the rifle-ranges a thousand feet up the hill, I found myself stranded, lunchless, on the sea-front with no hope of return to Cape Town before five P.M. At this crisis I had the luck to come across my friend Inspector Hooper, Cape Government Railways, in command of an engine and a brake-van chalked for repair.

"If you get something to eat," he said, "I'll run you down to Glengariff siding till the goods comes along. It's cooler there than here, you see."

I got food and drink from the Greeks who sell all things at a price, and the engine trotted us a couple of miles up the line to a bay of drifted sand and a plank-platform half buried in sand not a hundred yards from the edge of the surf. Moulded dunes, whiter than any snow, rolled far inland up a brown and purple valley of splintered rocks and dry scrub. A crowd of Malays hauled at a net beside two blue and green boats on the beach; a picnic party danced and shouted barefoot where a tiny river trickled across the flat, and a circle of dry hills, whose feet were set in sands of silver, locked us in against a seven-coloured sea. At either horn of the bay the railway line, cut just above high water-mark, ran round a shoulder of piled rocks, and disappeared.

"You see there's always a breeze here," said Hooper, opening the door as the engine left us in the siding on the sand, and the strong south-easter buffeting under Elsie's Peak dusted sand into our tickey beer. Presently he sat down to a file full of spiked doc.u.ments. He had returned from a long trip up-country, where he had been reporting on damaged rolling- stock, as far away as Rhodesia. The weight of the bland wind on my eyelids; the song of it under the car roof, and high up among the rocks; the drift of fine grains chasing each other musically ash.o.r.e; the tramp of the surf; the voices of the picnickers; the rustle of Hooper's file, and the presence of the a.s.sured sun, joined with the beer to cast me into magical slumber. The hills of False Bay were just dissolving into those of fairyland when I heard footsteps on the sand outside, and the clink of our couplings.

"Stop that!" snapped Hooper, without raising his head from his work. "It's those dirty little Malay boys, you see: they're always playing with the trucks...."

"Don't be hard on 'em. The railway's a general refuge in Africa," I replied.

"'Tis--up-country at any rate. That reminds me," he felt in his waistcoat- pocket, "I've got a curiosity for you from w.a.n.kies--beyond Buluwayo. It's more of a souvenir perhaps than----"

"The old hotel's inhabited," cried a voice. "White men from the language.

Marines to the front! Come on, Pritch. Here's your Belmont. Wha--i--i!"

The last word dragged like a rope as Mr. Pyecroft ran round to the open door, and stood looking up into my face. Behind him an enormous Sergeant of Marines trailed a stalk of dried seaweed, and dusted the sand nervously from his fingers.

"What are you doing here?" I asked. "I thought the _Hierophant_ was down the coast?"