Maurice Guest (55 page)

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, God 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 passive, 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 God! 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 circumstances 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 lilachaunted 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 circumstances: 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 assurance. 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 passionate 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 passed and she did not speak.

"You got my note then?"

"What is it?—what did you mean?"

"Just a little patience, Maurice. You take one's breath away. You want to know everything at once. I sent for you because—oh, because . . . I want you to let us go on being friends."

"Is that all?" he cried, and his face fell. "When I have told you again and again that's just what I can't do?"

She smiled. "I wish I had known you as a boy, Maurice—oh, but as quite a young boy!" she said in such a changed voice that he glanced up in surprise. Whether it was the look she bent on him, or her voice, or her words, he did not know; but something emboldened him to do what he had often done in fancy: he slid to his knees before her, and laid his head on her lap. She began to smooth back his hair, and each time her hand came forward, she let it rest for a moment.—She wondered how he would look when he knew.

"You can't care for me, I know. But I would give my life to make you happy."

"Why do you love me?" She experienced a new pleasure in postponing his knowing, postponing it indefinitely.

"How can I say? All I know is how I love you—and how I have suffered."

"My poor Maurice," she said, in the same caressing way. "Yes, I shall always call you poor.—For the love I could give you would be worthless compared with yours."

"To me it would be everything.—If you only knew how I have longed for you, and how I have struggled!"

He took enough of her dress to bury his face in. She sat back, and looked over him into the growing dusk of the room: and, in the alabaster of her face, nothing seemed to live except her black eyes, with the half-rings of shadow.

Suddenly, with the unexpectedness that marked her movements when she was very intent, she leant forward again, and, with her elbow on her knee, her chin on her hand, said in a low voice: "Is it for ever?"

"For ever and ever."

"Say it's for ever." She still looked past him, but her lips had parted, and her face wore the expression of a child's listening to fairy-tales. At her own words, a vista seemed to open up before her, and, at the other end, in blue haze, shone the great good that had hitherto eluded her.

"I shall always love you," said the young man. "Nothing can make any difference."

"For ever," she repeated. "They are pretty words."

Then her expression changed; she took his head between her hands.

"Maurice . . . I'm older than you, and I know better than you, what all this means. Believe me, I'm not worth your love. I'm only the shadow of my old self. And you are still so young and so . . . so untried. There's still time to turn back, and be wise."

He raised his head.

"What do you mean? Why are you saying these things? I shall always love you. Life itself is nothing to me, without you. I want you . . . only you."

He put his arms round her, and tried to draw her to him. But she held back. At the expression of her face, he had a moment of acute uncertainty, and would have loosened his hold. But now it was she who knotted her hands round his neck, and gave him a long, penetrating look. He was bewildered; he did not understand what it meant; but it was something so strange that, again, he had the impulse to let her go. She bent her head, and laid her face against his; cheek rested on cheek. He took her face between his hands, and stared into her eyes, as if to tear from them what was passing in her brain. Over both, in the same breath, swept the warm, irresistible wave of self-surrender. He caught her to him, roughly and awkwardly, in a desperate embrace, which the kindly dusk veiled and redeemed.