Chapter Four.
Lawless meanwhile had renewed his acquaintance with Van Bleit. On leaving Mrs Lawless’ residence he had driven as he had come back to Cape Town, and, dismounting from the taxi outside his hotel, was in the act of paying the driver when Van Bleit passed him with the stream of business men homeward bound while he stood upon the kerb feeling for the change. But that scar on Lawless’ face was unmistakable, and Van Bleit, arrested by it, paused in his rapid march and glanced inquiringly at him. Then he came back and waited until Lawless had paid and dismissed his driver.
When the tall, spare man with the ugly scar faced round, it was to find the broad figure of Van Bleit blocking his passage. He held out his hand as carelessly as though they had met the day before.
“God, man!” said Van Bleit sharply. “Where have you sprang from? It’s a matter of nearly five years since we met, I believe, if one bothered to calculate; and it seems almost a lifetime. It takes me back into the past to see you. What are you doing here?”
“Damned if I know,” Lawless answered laconically.
Van Bleit laughed.
“Grit, you haven’t altered,” he said.
He scrutinised the thin, handsome face intently. Then he looked from the man to the hotel before which the latter had alighted.
“Stopping here?” he asked.
Lawless nodded, and Van Bleit’s manner warmed.
“I’ve made lots of inquiries about you, but could never learn anything,” he said. “I feared you had gone under, but,” with a glance at the hotel front, “this scarcely looks like it.”
“On the contrary,” Lawless answered, “I’m on top at present. I’ve been under and afloat several times since last we met.”
“You struck it rich at the mines, I suppose?”
Lawless laughed unexpectedly.
“Yes,” he lied. “I struck it rich at the mines. Any man might who wasn’t a fool.”
Van Bleit looked cunningly intelligent.
“True,” he answered. “If a man wants to get there in Africa it don’t do for him to be squeamish. You didn’t earn your nickname, Grit, in being over soft.”
At the mention of his nickname, Lawless looked fierce.
“Damn you!” he said irritably. “If I remember rightly I owe that to you. It sticks closer than my own. That nickname has landed me in for many a ridiculous adventure. Men seem to imagine that I’m a survival of the mediaeval desperado; and I am offered any shady undertaking that entails the slightest risk.”
“They pay best, those undertakings,” Van Bleit responded drily; and Lawless, regretting the speech as soon as it was made, answered indifferently:
“Very likely. But a man doesn’t sweep sewers when he has his pockets lined.”
He advanced towards his hotel. Van Bleit walked beside him, and together they passed from the glare of the pavement into the shaded coolness of the vestibule.
“Come and drink to the good old times,” he said,—“and to many more good times ahead.”
He led the way into the lounge. When they were seated, with drinks on a table in front of them, he asked:
“What are you doing to-night? If you’ve nothing more amusing on hand, will you dine with me?”
“If you care to repeat the invitation on some future occasion, you will see how readily I shall respond,” Van Bleit answered. “But this evening I am dining at my cousin’s. I don’t know if that kind of thing amuses you,” he added, after a moment’s reflection, “but, if it does, I am confident my cousin would be delighted to welcome a friend of mine. Get into your togs, and I’ll pick you up on my way. It’s at the Smythes’. Smythe himself is a beastly prig, but my cousin is a good sort; and she gets hold of the right people, and gives one the right things to eat. What do you say?”
“Not for me,” Lawless answered. “I’m not long returned to civilisation. I’ll look on at the game for a while. You go and eat your dinner, and make yourself agreeable—I trust both the meal and the company will come up to expectation—and give me to-morrow evening.”
“Good!”
Van Bleit hesitated, looked at Lawless uncertainly, looked about him, changed colour; then looked at Lawless again.
“The company for me to-night will consist of one,” he jerked out in a burst of half-eager, half-reluctant confidence.
His listener smiled unsympathetically.
“The one and only She of the moment; eh?”
“Man, you wouldn’t say that if you could see her,” Van Bleit returned, his manner unusually earnest. “She is the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“That’s a tall order,” Lawless replied drily. “If my memory serve me, you have happened across perfection a few times in your career.”
“Never before,” Van Bleit asserted. “My God, Lawless—”
He broke off abruptly, and stared at the other curiously, his mouth agape.
“I had forgotten... it’s the same name,” he said. “Are you by any chance related to Mrs Lawless?—at present living at Rondebosch.”
“We are connected by marriage,” Lawless answered. He removed the cigar from his mouth and trimmed the ash deliberately. “If you want to stand high in the lady’s good graces, you will be well advised not to mention my name. We do speak when accident throws us together, but I believe I state the bare truth when I say that the fact of our paths seldom crossing gives mutual satisfaction.”
“Yes! In-laws don’t always hit it, of course. I never got on with my brother-in-law. I was glad when the beast died. Still, I regret the breach in this instance; the relationship might have served me, I’m going in to win. Grit. You give me your good wishes, I hope?”
“In consideration of what I have told you, I wonder what my good wishes are worth?” Lawless returned. “But I’ll give you a bit of good advice. The lady is puritanical, unpleasantly so. You will never win her favour in the character in which I have known you. Are you going in for reform?”
“I’ll go in for anything,” Van Bleit answered promptly; “but I’ll get my own way.” He leant forward and laid a hand on the other’s shoulder. “And when I’ve got it,” he said boastfully, “there’ll be other changes... We’ll close all family dissensions—my friends will be my wife’s. She’ll soon see things from my view.”
Lawless looked carelessly amused.
“Two people may use the same pair of binoculars,” he remarked, “but they almost invariably alter the focus. I never attempted the absurdity of trying to make a woman see through my long-distance lens. Their horizon is generally contracted, and few see beyond that restricted line of their imagination. With your experience, Karl, I should have imagined you had long ago discovered that woman, while appearing the most pliable of substances, is as difficult to bend as wrought iron.”
Van Bleit smiled unpleasantly.
“When I can’t bend a thing, I break it,” he answered.
Lawless regretted when it was too late that he had refused Van Bleit’s invitation to dine at his cousin’s. He might have got some amusement out of the evening, and the closer he shadowed the Dutchman the better for the success of his undertaking. He decided that in future he would avail himself of such a chance as Van Bleit’s offer had promised; by his refusal he had sacrificed a move in the game. That in going to the Smythes’ he would perforce meet Mrs Lawless did not weigh with him: there was as much space between four walls as in the universe if one person did not desire to be brought into contact with another. And he had no intention of inflicting himself upon her. He knew her opinion of him; it was not sufficiently complimentary to cause him to seek her society. Nevertheless he experienced some curiosity to again encounter this woman whose hard purity made her so severe a judge in human affairs,—to measure weapons with her once more. There came to him sometimes in the lonely watches of the night the belief that one day, despite past failures, he would pit his strength against hers successfully. He never attempted to determine the line his conduct should take in the case of victory; it sufficed for him that the moment should fashion the event. But with the passing years that dream of his triumph steadily receded. He had even given up the expectation of seeing her again... And now he had met her... He had spoken with her... And their sympathies were as widely divergent as ever they had been...
He got up and paced the room restlessly for some time. His thoughts worried him so that inaction became unbearable. He left the hotel, and wandered forth into the city in search of such diversion as it could provide. But his mind still worked round the recent extraordinary events, of which the interview of the afternoon had not been the least surprising; and almost insensibly his footsteps turned in the direction of the Smythes’ house. For two hours he patrolled the roadway for the purpose of getting a glimpse of the face he had seen so nearly only that afternoon.
When eventually Mrs Lawless came forth she was attended by Van Bleit, who saw her into her motor, and closing the door on her, leant upon it confidentially while he made some low-toned remark to her where she sat inside in the dark. Lawless was too far off to hear their voices, but he judged fairly well from the pantomime what was taking place, and he saw by the street light the admiration in Van Bleit’s face. His own face, when presently the motor passed him, was as expressionless as a mask. The woman seated inside did not see him. She was sitting very straight and motionless. The smile had faded from the beautiful lips, and her eyes looked sad. Then the motor flashed out of sight, and the man was left standing stiffly in the shadowy roadway like a sentinel on guard.
The moon shone out suddenly through a rift in the heavy clouds, throwing the tall figure into strong relief, and revealing his face distinctly, stern and set, the scar on his cheek showing livid in the silvery light. As though the unexpected brilliance disturbed him, he altered his rigid attitude abruptly, swung round, and started to walk. He walked rapidly, unconscious of his surroundings in the turmoil of his thoughts. By a process of introspection his mind worked back continually. He regarded himself in a detached, impartial light, as if it were a stranger upon whom he looked, a stranger whose actions he was called upon to criticise and pass judgment upon. Not until that night had he ever considered his actions in a condemnatory light. Life was only a chance... Things had just happened... That had been his philosophy. And he had acted upon it until the thing happened that meant the finish of his career in the Army. He had finished himself socially shortly after that event.
His dismissal from the Service had cut him deeply, and he had bitterly resented it. He had enemies. That was what he had asserted at the time, what he still believed. The other affair he treated as a midsummer-night’s madness, and spoke of as such. He refused to consider it more seriously. But the midsummer-night’s madness had been responsible for more than the wrecking of his career. And it was of that he was thinking chiefly as he walked along the warm, dusty road between the motionless trees that lined the pathway and cast long black distorted shadows upon the ground. He had not called it a midsummer’s madness always; he had thought of it—ay, and spoken of it—once as Love. And he had believed the world well lost at the time. But that form of madness is transitory. He had come out of the sickness extraordinarily sane,—scarcely penitential, but with a proper appreciation of the truth of certain lines that came to his sobered senses unbidden, yet with an appropriateness that suggested some occult influence, probably conscience, working upon his mind:
“If a man would give all the substance of his house for love,
He would be utterly despised.”
In a sense, he had done that; and he had won the despite such conduct merited. He had been mad. He said it again to himself, muttering the words under his breath. Then he smiled grimly at the thought behind the words. Poor creature of circumstance! To be cured of one form of madness only to develop another!
The ever-revolving wheel of fate turned relentlessly, now bearing him, a mere puppet, upward, now downward in its revolutions. The wheel had been turning steadily downward for a long while now. He wondered whether, when it began to rise again, it would still bear him with it, or whether before that time it would have broken him utterly and left him in the uttermost depths.
Chapter Five.
For eight years Lawless had led an adventurous life, consorting chiefly with men who, like himself, were outside the pale of society. He had earned a livelihood how he could, sometimes working for his bread with his hands, at others fairly affluent; but improvident always, giving away recklessly in his prosperous days what later he knew he would need for himself. It was during one of his poorer periods that he had happened across Simmonds, the man who had since introduced him to Colonel Grey, and so helped him towards a good thing when his fortunes chanced to be at a particularly low ebb. The tide had turned with surprising swiftness.
He found it a little difficult at first to realise this unexpected change of fortune, even more difficult to adapt himself to it. Doubtless it was the influence of Van Bleit that eventually drew him from his misanthropic habits and plunged him, somewhat reluctantly, into the vortex of Cape Town society. The Smythes and Van Bleit introduced him everywhere. Lawless had no record at the Cape. He became known as a man of means, and it was rumoured that his family held a good position in England. The fact that he was connected by marriage with the beautiful Mrs Lawless added to his popularity; and the vague information, given by a would-be know-all, that he had once been in the Army and had left under a cloud was discredited by the civilian population. But the men in the Service, especially the man at Government House who was a relation of Mrs Lawless, remembered certain things; the years that had rolled by since Lawless’ disgrace were not so many as to have put the affair so entirely out of mind that by a little hard thinking the reason of his dismissal could not be recalled. It was a reason for which few men have any sympathy. But, perhaps because it is not the custom in the Service for one man to give another away, perhaps, too, because this particular man was connected, however remotely, with the most beautiful woman in Cape Town, those who remembered the facts held their peace, and the discreditable whisper died from sheer atrophy.
A certain section of Cape Town society took Lawless up. Among men he was very popular, and the women decided that he was extraordinarily fascinating, if a trifle too reserved. He was a man with very little small talk. Where he recognised a sympathetic personality he left trivialities alone and plunged straightway into the depths. Every emotion he betrayed or called forth was of the most profound. Young girls found him irresistible, but, fortunately for them, he had no taste for anything but a matured intellect. He admired youth externally, but he avoided intercourse with it.
One exception he made in favour of a girl he first saw in a railway carriage while he was returning from Symons Bay to Cape Town in the heat of a late afternoon. The girl was travelling with her mother and sister, and Lawless would scarcely have noticed her but for the persistence of her gaze, which, without her volition, remained unwaveringly fixed upon the scar on his face. His attention was attracted towards her long before she realised that she was observed. He saw her eyes riveted on the scar, and watched her, carelessly at first, but with increasing interest as he marked the effect of his disfigurement upon her. She stared at the long deep seam with wide, surprised eyes; then, her imaginative mind conjuring up a battle-field with all the paraphernalia of war, she pictured the moment when that swift relentless slash of the bayonet had been given and received; and he saw the big eyes darken, and an almost imperceptible shudder shake her slender frame. His own eyes twinkled humorously, and, drawn perhaps by their magnetism, the girlish gaze lifted unexpectedly and met his. If he thought to see her betray a swift confusion, he was disappointed. Apparently it was the most natural thing in the world that this man should be staring into her eyes, and that she should return his stare, not boldly, nor with any thought of intercourse, but with a degree of reverence such as a young girl feels for a brave man.
The rest of the journey was a duel of looks.
When he got out at the terminus, Lawless stood on the platform and waited until the girl and her party alighted. He gave no outward sign of recognition when she passed him, lifting her eyes gravely for a moment to his face; but the inscrutable grey eyes conveyed far more of meaning than the mere raising of his hat could possibly have done, or even a furtive attempt at speech. The girl went home with her mind full of him. She made a hero of him in her thoughts. Always she pictured him in the forefront of the battle; she saw him dashing forward against great odds, to be cut down even while he led his men to victory, waving them forward over his fallen body. She invested him with all the attributes which a youthful feminine mind conceives befitting a god of war.
A few weeks later he met her at a ball. He was introduced to her at her request. He had attended the dance more to please Van Bleit than himself, and was standing, a little out of it, near the doorway when one of the committee came up to him with the announcement that he wished to introduce him to Miss Weeber.
Lawless followed him indifferently. When he discovered that Miss Weeber was the girl of the train, the indifference gave place to a satisfaction that not even the girlish admission that she had solicited the introduction could damp. He was extraordinarily pleased.
“I knew we should meet some time,” he said. “It was written... But I never pictured it like this. I have imagined you in an unconventional setting with the veld for a background... illimitable space—a selfish picture—with only you—and me...”
“And we meet in the heart of a crowd,” she said, and smiled. She liked the imaginative picture that he drew.
“Things are always different in life,” he replied, “from what we would have. But I’ll not quarrel with the occasion; we will make the most of it. Will you let me see your card?”
She handed it to him.
“It is almost empty,” she explained. “We have only just arrived.”
“That,” he replied gravely, “is fortunate for me. I claim every waltz you have left.”
“Oh no?” she returned quickly. “I couldn’t allow that.”
“Then every other one,” he said; and duly initialled the dances and returned her her programme.
The quiet mastery of his manner, the assumption that what pleased him would be equally agreeable to her, robbed her of the power to protest. She was glad and yet discomfited at the number of dances he had claimed; and she scribbled subsequent partners’ names on the card herself, not choosing that others should see those frequently recurring initials. She was also a little apprehensive of what her mother would think if she noticed, as she could scarcely fail to do, how often she danced with the same man. But she would not have forgone one of those dances whatever the penalty.
Lawless had acted on an impulse in initialling her programme as he had done—a recurrence, even though slight, of the old midsummer madness. She attracted him. She was not exactly pretty, but there was the charm of youth in her favour, and an inexplicable something about her that piqued his curiosity. Also the very obvious fact that she took a romantic interest in him because of an old wound considerably amused him. It was so distinctly feminine. How shall a world in which the mothers of the nations love nothing better than the clash of arms enjoy universal peace?
He recognised that the scar was the fundamental attraction. But for it she would probably never have noticed him; because of it she singled him out from among his fellows, and through it he lived daily in her memory, figuring as greater than the race generally—a modern Achilles with the vulnerable spot in the face. The thing became an obsession. Lawless was conscious even while he danced with her of the fascination the scar held for her; her eyes seldom strayed from it, and between the dances, when he led her to the more secluded places for sitting out, she leant back in her seat and watched it with undiminished interest, while he fanned her and cynically wondered what she would make of the tale if he told her the history of the scar...
Before the evening was very far advanced he did tell her its history—with reservations. She asked for it, a little diffidently, a little apologetically, but, as he felt, with an irresistible curiosity there was no subduing.
“I want to know so badly,” she said, colouring brightly. “I’ve wondered about it ever since I saw you first... You must think it very rude of me. ... Of course you’ve noticed me staring. It’s abominable, but I can’t help it. It’s such a grim souvenir—and splendid too in its way. I’ve wanted to ask you about it a dozen times this evening, and I’ve been afraid of annoying you. And yet, why should curiosity annoy when it isn’t unkind? ... I wish you’d tell me... Will you?”
“Better curb your curiosity. You will be disillusioned otherwise,” he replied. “It was about the most unromantic moment in my life when I received that.”
“Your life must have been very full of adventure,” she answered with simple and unconscious flattery.
He smiled grimly.
“It hasn’t lacked experience of sorts,” he admitted.
She looked up into his face, and her eyes were wonderfully soft, and big with admiration. He was tempted to stoop and kiss the fresh, young, slightly parted lips. He wondered whether she would resent it if he did. But the inclination that moved him to take the liberty was hardly strong enough to cause him to put it into effect.
“Won’t you let me judge?” she asked presently.
“Judge what?” he said. He had forgotten for the moment the drift of the conversation; his mind was intent upon her. Then he saw her eyes fasten on the scar again, and, remembering her curiosity, laughed. “Oh, that! ... I was forgetting... There isn’t much to tell, as a matter of fact. It represents one lurid moment, and then a blank... I received that slash over the jaw from one of my own Tommies—we were fighting on opposite sides at the time... The only satisfaction I got out of it was when later I learnt that the man next me had settled the reckoning for me.”
“Oh!” the girl whispered, and her soft eyes hardened. Behind the hardness there lurked conflicting emotions of pity and horror. Naked fact seemed so much grimmer, so much more significant of the hatred and the actuality of war than her heroic imagining. She had drawn for herself a splendid elaborated picture of dash and courage and the glory of battle, and in a few words he had blotted her picture from the canvas and set up in its place the rugged and brutal reality. But the reality, though it hurt, was far more impressive, than her carefully stage-managed adaptation.
“He deserved death,” she said. “How dastardly to attempt to kill his own officer! ... A deserter, too!”
“No, not a deserter,” he contradicted quietly.
“But you said he was fighting on the opposite side!” She looked up at him suddenly. “Was it during the Boer war?”
“Yes.”
He played with her fan, which he was holding, opening and closing it absently, bringing the sticks together with a little click. Then abruptly he shut it with a snap and laid it back in her lap.
“There are necessarily two sides to every question, and generally much to be said on both,” he remarked in his sharp, incisive manner. “The man who was fighting on the Boers’ side had been dismissed the Service, and I suppose, having the killing lust in him, he gave his services where they were appreciated.”
“That’s treachery,” she said.
He smiled at her cynically.
“I’d like your definition of treachery... I imagine you hold the popular exaggerated ideal of man’s duty to the State. Fine thinking is all very well in theory, but put it to the test, and where are you? ... This world is built for the practical, not for the sentimentalist. A thousand years hence we may be sufficiently civilised to make the ideal life possible. Then we shall be satisfied to recognise one another’s good qualities, instead of overlooking them in the eagerness of our eternal search after the bad. But that will entail social and political revolution—and the abolition of war.”
“You say that!” she cried, catching on to the part of his speech which she understood.—“You!—a soldier!”
“My only right to the title now is that of soldier of fortune,” he replied.
She looked a little surprised.
“Of course I knew you had left the Army,” she said. “But once a soldier always a soldier.”
“On the principle that the leopard cannot change his spots!”
“I’ve only heard that applied to vicious tendencies,” she said.
“Very true,” he returned with a harshness of tone and manner that she was puzzled to account for. “There is never any hope for the damned in this world... When a man has been evil we see to it that we keep him so.”
Had it been possible for him to displease her, he knew that he would have done so then. As it was, his sentiments disappointed her. She could not understand, and therefore had no sympathy with, a cynical outlook on life. And he was lacking in self-appreciation. She was a type of womanhood who enjoys a heroic pose,—a type that is unconsciously responsible for the braggart and the egotist. He was perfectly aware that he might have made a fine story out of the scar that appealed to her so powerfully, that he could have posed as a very god in her eyes; but he was either lacking in conceit, or the desire to stand high in her regard was not sufficiently strong to incline him to be boastful. And the scar was one of the distinctions he was least proud of. It marked the most gallingly unsuccessful period in a life which, it seemed to him, had been one big futile promise. Few men had had better chances, fewer still had been hedged about as he had been by conflicting and destructive forces. His very temperament was opposed to a successful career. And yet he had all the gifts—and he knew it—that go towards the making of a successful man. He was bigger than the majority, a man who even as a failure was bound to make his mark. But a mental superiority only made him realise more certainly his inadequacy in other respects. He chafed at the knowledge of wasted powers, the perversion of ideas, and the lowering of talents to fit the altered conditions of his life. Some men adapt themselves to evil fortune, but to the man who realises his essential place in the scheme of things, to be forced to take a position on a lower plane is humiliating to the point of revolt. Time had accustomed Lawless to his downfall; but his resignation was no reconciled submission, it was at best acceptance of the irremediable.
The girl had risen at the conclusion of his trenchant speech, and stood, holding her fan loosely in both hands, looking up at him in the dim rosy glow of the Chinese lanterns. She wore white with a string of pearls round the slender throat. Lawless, looking down at her, observed how thin her shoulders were. The prettiest part of her neck was hidden—the concession to youthful modesty.
“The band is playing the next dance,” she said.
“Yes,” he answered. But he did not move at once. “You are dancing it, I suppose?”
She nodded. At the moment she wished that she had been less eager to fill her card. He was sitting out most of the dances. She had watched him hanging about doorways looking on with a slightly bored curiosity, and once or twice she had passed him on her partner’s arm seated alone on the stoep. His aloofness appealed to her imagination. Everything in connection with him interested her tremendously. She was even tempted to skip the next dance, and trust to her partner not finding her in this secluded and dimly lit place. It was not so much the knowledge that such conduct was unworthy, as the fear that he might think less highly of her, that kept her to her engagement.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shall look forward to our next waltz.”
She smiled up at him suddenly, and stooping deliberately he held her by both arms and kissed her on the lips.
It had been an impulse, not an irresistible impulse; he had made no effort at resistance. The red young lips appealed to him,—the girlish homage appealed to him. She was altogether fresh and delightful. And she did not resent his conduct. For a moment she drew back startled, a little confused, a little undecided as to what she ought to do; the next instant self-consciousness vanished; she was pathetically proud and pleased and grateful that this hero of her imagination should feel sufficiently kindly towards her to wish to kiss her. She remained quite quiet under his hands, blushing, with eyes downcast, and a little fleeting smile playing tenderly about her mouth. He removed his hands from her shoulders, and offered her his arm.
“Your partner will be getting perfectly rabid,” he said. “I suppose I must take you back now to the madding crowd, kind little friend...”
Afterwards he wondered at himself. The thing was absurd... A girl in her first season! It puzzled him to think what the attraction could be. She was not even especially good-looking. A starving man is no epicure, he told himself; and determined—but did not keep his resolve—to leave the thing alone.
Chapter Six.
The band was playing a barn dance when Lawless and his companion re-entered the ball-room, and most of the dancers had already taken the floor. A disconsolate-looking youth, who was wandering aimlessly round the room with his gaze continually on the exits, hurried towards them when they appeared in the doorway, and eagerly claimed his partner.
“I thought you had forgotten,” he said to her reproachfully, “that this was our dance.”
“Oh no!” she answered as she took his arm. “Only I didn’t hear the music quite at once.”
She let him lead her straightway among the throng of dancers, and was surprised to find how little the excitement of the exercise moved her, to whom dancing had once seemed an all-sufficient joy. Her partner’s rather commonplace, but heretofore entirely satisfying, conversation pleased her no more than the movement. That dance was altogether the dullest and most stupid affair in which she had taken part. Other dull dances were to follow. Throughout the evening she rather unfairly compared each of her partners with the man who was already enshrined in her heart and worshipped as a hero.
Lawless, having handed Miss Weeber over, retired to the stoep to smoke. Van Bleit was there, and several other men who possessed assertive thirsts and a settled belief in a reservation of strength. There was a small bar fixed up at one end of the stoep. Lawless made his way to it, and Van Bleit joined him, but refused to drink. He chaffed Lawless good-naturedly on his partiality.
“It’s most marked, old chap,” he said. “Why don’t you ring the changes? I overheard quite the best-looking girl in the room declare she was dying to dance with you, and I as good as promised to introduce you. She’s keeping the supper dance open.”
“Then you’d better book it yourself, Karl,” the other answered indifferently.
“I’m not booking anything,” Van Bleit replied with a quiet smile. “I’m reserving myself until She arrives.”
Lawless emptied his glass hastily and set it down.
“You don’t mean,” he said, moving away from the buffet, “that Mrs Lawless is coming to-night?”
“Why wouldn’t I mean that?” Van Bleit asked, looking at him curiously.
“It’s close on midnight, man. And... this kind of show...”
“She isn’t such a puritan as you imagine,” Van Bleit rejoined.—“I ought to know something about that by now... And she promised me she would come to-night. There was something—some rotten music she was going to hear first with the Smythes. Then they were coming on here.”
He pitched away his cigar and twirled the ends of his big moustache into fine points curving upward, which gave him, he imagined, a distinguished and military appearance. He was well enough to look upon without going to this excess of trouble.
“She’s not keen on dancing,” he added complacently; “but I’ve had her out on the floor once or twice. Her waltzing! ... it isn’t dancing... it’s a poem. And the satisfaction of her nearness! ... Just to hold her in one’s arms! ... Oh Lord! Lawless, if you only knew what it felt like! But you’re too damned self-contained to understand. You simply sneer till I want to hit the look off your face. I wonder whether any woman ever warmed your fish-blood, and set your pulses beating a fraction of a second quicker!”
“You seem to forget my violent partiality of this evening,” Lawless returned sarcastically.
“Pshaw! It’s no bread-and-butter miss who’ll set your veins on fire.” And then, the man having a kink in his nature which made him peculiarly evil, he added: “It’s quite a safe game, though. There are no interfering male relations. The mother is the widow of a wool-merchant. They’re not well off; and she’d welcome a wealthy son-in-law. Incidentally, there is no reason why a man shouldn’t amuse himself.”
“I will make the mother’s acquaintance to-night,” Lawless answered, and struck a match and lighted himself a cigarette. Van Bleit was sucking cachous for the sweetening of his breath. The smell of musk irritated Lawless’ nostrils. “It takes some living up to,” he observed drily.
“What does?”
“Being enamoured of a goddess.”
“Oh?” Van Bleit laughed sheepishly.
“In these days, when most women smoke themselves, I should consider such precaution unnecessary.”
“Women appreciate it,” Van Bleit responded. “It’s a tribute of masculine homage.”
“One of those tributes,” Lawless answered, “that cost so little either in the way of self-sacrifice or money that men don’t mind offering them. But love asks bigger things. That’s where the majority of us jib. Love is over exacting; we quarrel with it on account of its demands... I suppose where a man’s love was big enough to understand, it would be equal to removing mountains and draining the ocean... In lesser cases it contents itself with sucking sweets.”
“You are trying to make out that you know something about it, I suppose?” Van Bleit said, slightly nettled.
Lawless laughed.
“I should never attempt the moving of mountains,” he replied.
Mrs Lawless arrived during the extras that followed immediately upon the supper dance. The ball-room was empty, save for a few couples, mostly young enthusiasts who preferred to make the most of their opportunity when the floor was not so crowded, and to sup later when the refreshment-room too had thinned, and the faithful Van Bleit. He insisted upon taking her in to supper. She had come with the Smythes; and she turned to Mrs Smythe at the mention of supper and lifted protesting shoulders.
“One cannot keep on eating,” she said.
“Karl can,” Mrs Smythe responded.
“I’m famished,” he said. “I’ve been waiting until you arrived. In fairness to me you must come and see me through.”
Smythe pointed to the revolving couples.
“We shan’t get seats,” he said; “they’re crowded out, you see.”
“Oh! I’ll find room. There isn’t such a crush as all that.”
“Well, you can take the ladies. There’s a limit to human endurance... a drink will satisfy me.”
“We shall have to go,” Mrs Smythe said, slipping a gloved hand within Mrs Lawless’ arm. “When I have determined people to deal with I never argue. It is so much less trouble to give in.”
Van Bleit conducted his party to the supper-room, and found seats for three at a table near the door.
“What a pity Theo didn’t come,” Mrs Smythe remarked, with a glance at the vacant chair on her right.
She looked round the crowded room and nodded to several acquaintances. There was a confusion of sound that yet was not noisy,—the hum of talk and laughter, the frequent popping of champagne corks, a soft continuous rustle of movement, and the clatter of knives and forks. She glanced smilingly across Van Bleit, who was trying to catch the attention of a waiter, to where Mrs Lawless sat, leaning forward looking away from her towards the next table.
“Zoë, the sight of all these people feeding makes me hungry,” she said.
“Of course you’re hungry,” Van Bleit responded. “You can’t sit up all night on nothing.”
But Mrs Lawless apparently did not hear. She was gazing with unconscious intensity at a man at the table on the opposite side of the opening. He had his face towards her; but he had seen her entry, and, having watched her while he could do so unobserved, he now gave his undivided attention to the girl beside him.
Mrs Lawless regarded the girl with critical interest. There was nothing especially remarkable about her in any way. She was young and fresh-looking, and wore a simple white frock, and a pearl necklace the beads of which were of a size to open up doubts as to their genuineness in an inquiring mind. Mrs Lawless did not question the pearls; she accepted them, as she accepted the peerless youth of the wearer, as parts of a whole the effect of which was pleasing.
She turned in response to a question of Van Bleit’s as to what she would eat, and answered carelessly:
“Oh! anything.”
He ordered for the three of them, and then sat back in his seat and surveyed the scene at his leisure. He saw Lawless at the table opposite with the girl he had danced with most of the evening; but he made no reference to him. He acknowledged the acquaintance before Mrs Lawless, but, remembering what Lawless had told him concerning her disapproval of himself, he never admitted intimacy for fear of prejudicing his cause. Mrs Smythe, on the other hand, made no concealment of her liking for her friend’s discredited kinsman. She did not often speak of him to Mrs Lawless, recognising that the subject was rather more painful than the ordinary family dispute, but nothing would have given her greater pleasure than to assist towards a reconciliation between them. With that end in view she had given Lawless an open invitation to her house, thinking that perhaps if occasionally brought together by chance they might eventually, if only for the sake of appearance, smooth over their differences and close the breach. Continued feud was the invariable result of an exaggerated sense of dignity on both sides, and it was old-fashioned. But Lawless very seldom availed himself of her kindness, and had managed his few visits so far when Mrs Lawless had not been present. She more than suspected design in this, and it helped to strengthen her belief that the estrangement had originated with him, and that he was responsible for its continuation.
“You don’t like that chicken,” Van Bleit remarked abruptly to Mrs Lawless, observing that she was only trifling with the food upon her plate. “Let me send it away and get you something else.”
“Please, don’t,” she remonstrated. “I’ve already dined. I’m just keeping you in countenance.”
“But that’s rotten for you,” he expostulated. “If I had really thought it would bore you, I wouldn’t have brought you here. Drink some more champagne then, if you won’t eat.”
“I’m not in the least bored,” she replied, flashing a brilliant smile at him. “To eat is not my sole source of amusement. There is plenty to interest me here for an hour, if you are inclined to stay that time.”
“I’m not,” he returned. “I’m longing to try the floor. I’ve not danced yet... I’ve been waiting. You’ll give me the first waltz after supper?”
She met his bold, eager gaze pensively, her splendid dreamy eyes expressing a slight hesitation.
“You know I don’t care for dancing,” she said.
“Yes, I know. But... just one waltz!” He leaned nearer to her. “You won’t disappoint me? ... I have waited through the entire evening for this.”
She smiled at the extravagance, but faintly, and looked away across the crowded room with its numberless small tables, and the gay, careless, laughing company that filled them.
“Oh! if you make so much of it!” she said.
Mrs Smythe, who was also gazing about her with more interest in the company than in the supper, here interposed with the irrelevant remark:
“I think Colonel Grey is the most distinguished-looking man I know.”
Van Bleit grunted.
“Oh! I know you don’t like him, Karl... It’s obvious that the antipathy is mutual. But that doesn’t make him any the less interesting from a woman’s point of view. What do you think, Zoë?”
“I think he is exactly what you describe him.”
Mrs Smythe looked at her in surprise. It was not the words, but the manner in which they were delivered, that arrested her attention.
“You don’t like him either,” she said.
Mrs Lawless smiled.
“He doesn’t like me,” she corrected. “And though I find that attitude interesting, it does not encourage affection on my side.”
“Impossible!” Van Bleit exclaimed incredulously. “Dear lady, you must be mistaken. I haven’t much of an opinion of him, but he can’t be such an unappreciative hog.”
The man referred to had risen, and, with his supper companion, now prepared to leave the room. They were not the first to make a move; the tables had thinned considerably since the entry of Van Bleit’s party. He paused for a second by Mrs Smythe’s chair and spoke to her, and bowed to Mrs Lawless. He did not see Van Bleit. Neither did he see Lawless. When he passed his table his head was turned towards his companion and he was deep in conversation with her.
Van Bleit watched him curiously, and the finely pointed ends of his moustache lifted slightly as the lips beneath it smiled.
“He rather overdoes it,” he murmured.
“Overdoes what?” his cousin questioned.
Van Bleit looked at her. He had not, as a matter of fact, intended the remark to be heard.
“His diplomacy.”
“You are pleased to be cryptic,” Mrs Smythe returned.
He suddenly laughed.
“I must have made my meaning very obscure when you’re not on it,” he said. “I was merely criticising the fellow’s habit of ignoring the people it doesn’t suit him to see. But come... Shall we go? You are neither of you eating, and I don’t care to feed alone.”
Lawless rose when they did, and, with his partner on his arm, followed them to the ball-room. The band was playing an extra, a waltz. He passed his arm around his companion’s waist and joined the throng of dancers, whose numbers momentarily increased as the supper-room emptied itself of diners.
Van Bleit was waltzing with Mrs Lawless. He had persuaded her to try the floor when it was not so crowded; but before the dance was far advanced the room had filled surprisingly, and dancing became difficult. A slight block occurred in one corner, and Van Bleit found himself held up temporarily with his partner, so closely wedged that he had much ado to keep the crowd from pressing on her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “When we get out of this we’ll find a seat somewhere outside.”
Mrs Lawless did not answer him. She was conscious of an arm pressing against her shoulder, pressing hard, and, looking up, met fully the keen grey piercing eyes of the man whom before that night she had not seen since the afternoon when he had called upon her at her house in Rondebosch. The arm, the shoulder of which pressed her shoulder, belonged to him. It encircled the girl who had sat beside him during supper, the girl in the white frock with the string of pearls about her neck. She leant against him, laughing, flushed, and happy, her eager eyes alight with excitement. It was all enjoyment to her; the crush with that strong arm to shield her was part of the fun.
Mrs Lawless scarcely noticed the girl; she looked above her, and for a long moment gazed back into the sombre dominating eyes, the owner of which surveyed her as he might have surveyed a stranger, with an intense yet aloof curiosity. In the quiet, steady, concentrated look he bent upon her, and in his grave, unsmiling face, there was an amount of interest, even of admiration, but no outward sign of recognition. The initiative, Mrs Lawless realised, was with her. She smiled faintly, a smile that was half-diffident, half-wistful; and then suddenly the crowd swayed, parted, and moved forward again; and Van Bleit steered his partner between the revolving couples to the nearest exit.
“What a beastly squeeze,” he said, when they emerged into the fresh air. “I’m afraid you will blame me for letting you in for that.”
Mrs Lawless sat down on a settee on the stoep. She was flushed and a little breathless; but it was not owing to the crush in the ball-room; she had been so well guarded that she had scarcely felt the inconvenience of the crowd. She looked at Van Bleit, and there was a gleam that was almost triumphant in her eyes.
“I’m not blaming you... As an experience, I enjoyed it,” she said, and laughed.
She put up a hand to her shoulder. She could still feel the impression of a man’s sleeve against her flesh. It had pressed hard. The man had stood like a rock, immovable and as firm; there had been no give in the shoulder that had, as it were, set itself against hers. In all probability, she decided, there was a red mark upon her arm. If Van Bleit had not been present she would have made an examination.
“I wish you would go and find me a wrap,” she asked him suddenly. “I brought one with me. It isn’t altogether wise to sit here without after getting so hot dancing.”
And when he had gone she moved deliberately into the brighter light that streamed forth through the open doorway of the ball-room, and pulling her sleeve aside examined the arm. The mark she had expected to discover was there, a faint pink stain upon the whiteness of the soft flesh. She lowered the sleeve over it gently, and her face quivered. And yet it was only a small matter that could not have caused her the least pain.
“I trust you were not hurt a while since?” a voice addressed her curtly from the doorway, and lifting her eyes for the second time that night, they encountered the keen gaze of the man who was responsible for the injury. She flushed quickly.
“No,” she answered, and hesitated, confused and obviously nervous.
He stepped out on to the stoep.
“Where’s your partner?” he asked abruptly.
She explained, and he turned and walked beside her away from the bright light and the sight and sound of the dancers. His own partner had been compelled to retire to the dressing-room to have some damage to her frock repaired. She would not be back to finish the dance, which was practically finished then; the music was getting faster and faster, and so were the hurrying feet.
“Do you care to sit down?” he asked, pausing before a couple of low chairs arranged in a sheltered corner of the less-frequented side of the stoep. She seated herself in one, and he took up a position behind the second, leaning forward with his arms on the back of it.
“Shall I stay... until Van Bleit returns?” he asked.
“Please do.”
She clutched at the arm of her chair, grasping it firmly. There were so many things she wanted to say to this man, and time was so short; at any moment they might be interrupted... The precious moments were slipping away... And he gave her so little help. His manner was so curt as to be almost repellent.
“Do you think it necessary,” she asked, “that when we meet it should be as strangers—almost enemies?”
“Aren’t we that?” he said. “I understood that I represented both to you.”
She was silent because his last words had recalled a hard thing she had once in the years gone by written to him in an hour of wounded anger: “I do not know you... I think I have never known you. You are a stranger to me, and, I see now, my greatest enemy...”
“It is for you,” he added, filling in the pause, “to determine our future relations... I am a little surprised that you should meet me as you have done. And I’m not sure that it wouldn’t have been happier for both if you had acted differently... The fires of yesterday are ashes on the hearth of to-day... I don’t know how it is with you, but the sight of greying embers chills me.”
She sat leaning forward, her eyes fixed unseeingly straight before her as though they sought to pierce the blackness that lay beyond the stoep. Some of the pain and bitterness that was in her heart shone through them, so that they looked tortured in the soft glow of the artificial lights. She gripped the arm of her chair more tightly, and, still staring into the darkness, said tonelessly:
“With women it is not usual to leave ashes lying on the hearth.”
“You sweep them up and throw them away,” he answered. “It is wiser so... One forgets.”
“Some do,” she rejoined slowly. “And others—collect their ashes carefully and kindle them anew.”
He looked at her closely.
“Foolish and futile,” he said. “Ashes can never give forth the glow and the heat of unspoilt fuel. A thing that is dead has served its end. It should then be applied to other uses; for it is impossible that it should ever again serve its original purpose.”
“If that is your philosophy,” she began.
“It is,” he interrupted shortly.
“Then with you the ashes remain ashes to despoil the hearth of to-day!”
“I brush them out of sight,” he returned lightly. “I have lived so long now amid the dust of such memories that I have learnt to turn my back upon the muddle till it no longer inconveniences me...” He smiled cynically, and added: “There was room for a retort there. You might have flung out at me that I have always shown a propensity for turning my back.”
She winced. His speech cut her more than he would have believed any words of his could wound her. It was with great difficulty that she kept back the tears.
“That wasn’t worthy of you,” she said.
He reddened suddenly.
“I beg your pardon... It was an ill-considered remark. But it’s one of the memories that sticks closest... The dust of it lies thick upon everything and clouds the rest of life.”
She sat back in the depths of her chair and turned her white face up to his; a great sadness and a great yearning showed in the beautiful eyes.
“I think you make too much of it,” she said... “The accident of a moment!”
“An accident that ruined my career,” he returned with great bitterness.
“Not ruined it,” she expostulated,—“checked it. You could have made a name and a place for yourself in spite of it.”
“And I didn’t.”
“And you have not,” she corrected,—“yet.”
He laughed abruptly.
“Think of the time that has been wasted,” he said. “You might have said all this to me years ago. I don’t say it would have made any difference... unless it were to keep green some corner of my heart. But encouragement to be efficacious should be given when life is hardest, not when one has learnt to adapt it to one’s needs. But it’s generous of you to offer even a belated encouragement. I don’t wish to appear ungrateful. It’s more than I have deserved—or, indeed, expected of you.”
She stretched out a hand and laid it on his arm.
“Don’t be bitter, Hugh... We both have made mistakes.”
He looked down at the white glove that rested on his sleeve, and his lips tightened. The arm inside the sleeve was tense. There was no more response than if she had touched instead the stuffed arm of the chair.
“Perhaps,” he allowed. “But we won’t add to our mistakes by growing sentimental.”
She removed her hand without speaking, and sat silent with strained face, curiously still and composed. He watched her in his aloof fashion. If he felt any interest in her beyond the ordinary interest that a man experiences in a beautiful woman, he concealed it admirably. He betrayed not the slightest regret when Van Bleit came hurrying up to them with a light wrap over his arm. He had had some difficulty in finding it. Mrs Smythe eventually assisted in the search. He was voluble and apologetic. He shot a suspicious glance at Lawless, standing at the back of the chair in the same position, leaning forward with his arms on the top of it, and then turned again to the quiet figure of the woman who had not spoken after the first smiling word of thanks.
“You moved,” he said. “I looked for you where I left you, but the seat was unoccupied.”
“It was quieter here,” she explained. She rose and stood while Van Bleit put the wrap around her shoulders, and, with an exaggerated air of devotion, drew it close about her throat. Lawless bowed to her and moved away, making a slow progress along the stoep against the stream of dancers, pouring forth from the ball-room in quest of air.
“Gods!” he mused, avoiding the stream mechanically while seeming not to see it. “What a queer trick of fate! What has brought her out here, I wonder? ... That’s what I should like to get at... What has brought her out here?”
When in the early hours of the morning Mrs Lawless appeared on the pavement on Van Bleit’s arm, Lawless was standing on the kerb beside the waiting motor in the act of lighting a cigar. He tossed away the match, and opened the door for her. Then he raised his hat, and turning silently, disappeared into the blackness beyond the lights of the car. She turned her head to look after him; but the darkness had swallowed the tall figure, and the throbbing of the engine drowned the sound of his rapidly retreating steps.