The Great Amulet Part 15

Half an hour later she came up to him, where he stood, laughing and talking in a group of men.

"I am tired, Theo," she said in a low tone. "Mr Maurice is getting my dandy for me. But don't come away if you'd rather stop on."

Their eyes locked for an instant.

"Is that likely?" he asked, a gleam in his own.

"I don't know."

"You do know. Look sharp and get your things on."

Michael Maurice did not hurry himself over the congenial task of settling his _deesse veritable_ among the cus.h.i.+ons of her dandy,--a hybrid conveyance, half canoe, half cane lounge, slung from the shoulders of four men, by an ingenious arrangement of straps and cross poles. Closer acquaintance had deepened his admiration: but a nameless something in her manner warned him that it must not be expressed in his usual promiscuous fas.h.i.+on. She had refused, very sweetly but decisively, the honour of appearing in his great picture. But Desmond had succ.u.mbed to the temptation of procuring a portrait of her and 'little Paul.' "At the worst, I can sell a pony to pay for it," he had said, in answer to her remonstrance. "And I shall think it cheap at the price!"

And now, as the dandy-bearers turned to mount the ascent, he came to his wife's side. She had drawn off her gloves, and one hand rested on the woodwork of her canoe. He covered it with his own, walking by her thus, for a few steps, in silence: and it was enough.

"Mount now," she commanded him softly. "And let's hurry home, I've ever so much to tell you."

He obeyed: and they journeyed upward to familiar music of hoof-beats, and the murmur of _jhampannies_, wrapt about by the magic of a night so still that all the winds seemed to have gone round with the sun to the other side of the world.

A tray set with gla.s.s and silver awaited them in the drawing-room.

Honor, entering first, slipped the long cloak from her shoulders with a satisfied sigh, a sense of pa.s.sing from the unreal to the real, which she often experienced on returning from a dance: and underlying all, a profound pity for the lone and ill-mated women, in a world of oddments and misfits, who have never felt the thrill of such home-comings as this of hers to-night. Then she swept round, and fronted her husband:--a gleaming figure, like a statue cut in ivory; no colour anywhere, save the living tints of her face and eyes and hair.

"Well?" she laughed, on a low clear note of happiness. "I hope you are properly ashamed of yourself!"

But before the words were out, he had her in his arms; and for a supreme moment the great illusion was theirs that they were not two, but one, as the Book decrees.

Then she pushed him gently into a chair, and kneeling beside him drew his arm around her, resting her head against his in a fas.h.i.+on inexpressibly tender. The natural dignity that was hers set a high value on such sweet familiarities: and if Desmond submitted to them in silence, it was because the man in him was too deeply moved for speech.

Then she told him, at some length, all that she had gleaned of the past and present relations between Lenox and his wife.

"Now, do you see how I came to lose sight of everything for the time being?" she concluded, smiling up at him. "So far as I can gather, things seem to be at a deadlock, unless one can persuade him to take the first step forward."

"And you want to play Providence, as usual? Is that it?"

"Don't laugh at me, Theo! I am in earnest. I would gladly move heaven and earth to put things straight between them."

"But this seems a case of moving a Scot. A far tougher job, I can tell you!"

"Well, I think I moved him a little to-night; and he is coming round to-morrow for a ride." Desmond frowned; and she made haste to add; "Now that is just where I must have your co-operation, Theo, or I can do nothing. I want you to trust me, and give me a free hand for these next few weeks. Will you, . . please?"

"Does that mean I am to let you be about with Lenox as much as you choose?"

"Probably not more than I have been so far. I only want to be sure that whatever I do you won't speak to me again as you did to-night."

She felt the muscles of his arm tighten.

"I think you may feel sure of that much," he said. "But you are asking a very hard thing of me, Honor. Lenox is a thorough good chap; and I don't want to be driven into disliking him. It isn't as if I were a saint, like Paul. I'm just a man, and a grasping one at that! What's more, I am very jealous for you; and I have the right to be. Society doesn't recognise philanthropic motives. It takes you and your acts at their face value . . ."

"I know, I know,"--she straightened herself impulsively; her hands clasped, her bare arms laid across his knees. "And I'll be ever so circ.u.mspect, dearest, I promise you. But oh, Theo, . . . don't you understand? It is just because we are so blessedly happy, you and I, that the thought of what those two foolish people are missing troubles me so sorely."

Such an appeal was irresistible. They had lived deeply enough, these two, to know the real importance of happiness.

"Bless your big heart," he answered warmly. "I understand right enough. By all means help 'em if you can. I'll not baulk you. But it's a delicate task; and I don't quite see how you are going to set about it."

"Nor do I,--yet. One can only trust to intuition, and the inspiration of the moment. From the little he said, it seems that the first move ought to come from her: and possibly my intimacy with him may help to bring her to her senses. Everything depends, of course, on how much she cares. That's still an unknown quant.i.ty. But she dislikes me already; which is a promising sign!--Now I am going to fill your pipe, and pour you out a peg; and we'll enjoy ourselves till it's time for second supper!"

It is just such quiet hours of heart-to-heart intimacy that const.i.tute true marriage. For in these uneventful moments links are forged and soldered strong enough to resist the buffeting of storms, or the deadlier, corrosive influence of those minor miseries which poison the very core of life.

A handful of stars--visible through the open gla.s.s door into the verandah--had began to pale, when Desmond lifted his wife to her feet, and blew out the lamp. In the profound stillness their footsteps and low laughter sounded up the wooden stairs. Then a door shut somewhere in the house, and the night absorbed them into herself.

CHAPTER VIII.

"Ce n'est pas le mort qui separe le plus les individus."

--De Coulevain.

And what of Lenox, after Honor Desmond's sympathetic exertions on his behalf?

He went straight from her side to the cloak-room; and thence slowly back to his unhomelike rooms at the hotel; a dark solitary figure, with bent head, and a heart full of tumultuous hopes and fears. The events of the evening had stirred him as he had not been stirred since those early days of torment, of undignified oscillation between yearning and despair: and now, at last, love unsteadied for the first time the foundations of his pride; brought home to him the cardinal truth that all the beauty and terror of life spring from the inexorable law of duality that links man and woman, act and consequence, with the same pa.s.sionless unconcern.

All the way up the hill, this man--who loved night and her manifestations as most men love the morning--had no thought to spare for the splendour of the heavens or the shrouded majesty of earth, so absorbed was he in framing and rejecting possible letters to his wife, who, for all he knew, had already half-lost her heart to another man.

The small sitting-room where Brutus, the faithful, awaited his coming, was more or less a replica of his larger one at Dera Ishmael: the chronically disordered table, books, pipes, sketches, his inseparable friends, the bull terrier, and the brown tobacco-jar. All these, the familiars of his lonely hours, gave him silent greeting as he crossed the threshold. But for once his spirit failed to respond. The witchery of his wife's lips and eyes; the distracting music of her laughter; that one poignant moment of contact with her living, palpitating self, and Honor Desmond's belief in an undreamed-of possibility, had kindled the man's repressed pa.s.sion as a lighted match kindles dry powder; had revived in him the common human need, which neither ambition nor work, however absorbing, has yet been known to satisfy.

"My G.o.d," he thought. "If I believed I had a ghost of a chance to get hold of her again, I'd go back to that infernal ballroom this minute!"

He turned, as if to carry out his resolve: but at the last, shut down the flood-gates of emotion, fell back on years of self-discipline, and told his heart he was a fool. He had yet to learn that there is a folly worth more than all the wisdom of philosophers, the folly of a man who loves a woman better than his own soul.

Going over to the table, he turned up the lamp, acknowledged the ponderous jubilations of Brutus, and took the damaged pipe out of his pocket. Then he stood looking at it thoughtfully, as it lay in the palm of his hand; an eloquent testimony to that which had been starved, denied, trampled upon for years,--with this result! Smiling half-scornfully at his new-found sentimentalism, he put the pieces into an empty cigarette tin, and thrust it into the top drawer of his table.

As he did so, a strange thought invaded his mind. Some day, perhaps, he would show it to her; and how delightfully she would laugh at him for his pardonable foolishness!

But in the meantime the wooing and winning of her still remained to be achieved; a unique position for a husband!

Absorbed in thoughts evoked by the bare possibility of success, Lenox mechanically drew out his empty tobacco-pouch, opened the jar, and thrust a hand into its capacious depths.

Then he started; and two lines of vexation furrowed his forehead. For his fingers, descending in search of the good brown leaf, that was more to him than meat and drink, encountered only a chill hardness,--the bottom of the jar.

He had not emptied it when filling his pouch that morning; and being much preoccupied had not even noticed how little was left. Evidently, during his absence, a hotel servant had helped himself to the remaining handful, and a clear ten days must elapse before the arrival of a fresh consignment from home.

He gathered up the remaining sc.r.a.ps, and gazed at them blankly. His consignments were carefully timed to overlap one another. By rights the jar should have contained quite a fortnight's supply of his elixir vitae: and it took him one or two seconds to grasp the full significance of that which had befallen him.

"Great Heaven! I must have been overdoing it like blazes this last month," he reflected grimly, "And how about the next ten days?"

He stood aghast before that simple question, and its obvious answer.

It was as if the earth has opened under his feet; as if he had suddenly discovered that only a thin crust intervened between himself and the crater of a volcano. And he had travelled hitherward blindly; goaded by the threefold necessity to work, and sleep, and forget. Thus, stealthily, inexorably, a habit creeps upon a man; enclosing him mesh by mesh in a network imponderable as spun silk, tenacious as steel wire. A sudden movement, a break in the hypnotic influence of routine, and he wakes to find himself prisoned in a web of his own weaving.