I.

His first love; this is what his heart called her. But his head and a poignant memory offered many negations. There was, for instance, the girl who sold papers outside bounds, when fourteen-year-old effervescence converted a toast-and-water emotion into an intoxicating passion. And his best chum, Harry's sister, whom he had never seen, but whose photograph had lodged in his breast pocket—she, for a short time, had presided in that revolutionary area called his heart. He had the photograph still, with its central yellowy patches, which betrayed repeated collisions with an ardent nose above the place aimed at by his moustacheless lips. When the down began to grow like the feathers on a nestling bird, there had been someone else—a fairy all gauze and wings, a chameleon creature that changed her soft transparencies under the magic of limelight for a limited sum nightly during the pantomime season. Being somewhat of an idealist, his mind retained the fairy element in spite of rather harsh contradictions in the way of healthy appetite, indifferent pronunciation, and dubious finery. Of course he recovered the illusion, as he had recovered the measles, and, moreover, allowed his fancy a few other experimental flights before he encountered Carol Silver.

The introduction was made by Harry Burnley at the time when, let loose from Sandhurst, their movements hung on the voice of the Gazette; it was made with reluctance, for Harry was well versed in his friend's inflammability, and had himself for Carol more than a brotherly regard. However, the day was Sunday, and opportunities for detaching himself from Tyndall being scarce, Harry could but pursue his customary route to the Silvers' house, accompanied by his friend and guest.

But Yate Tyndall was not thrust under fire without warning.

"She's an awfully nice girl," jerked his chum, as they crunched the gravelled drive to the house; "but it's no good fooling around in that quarter—everyone knows she's gone on Rosser, some say engaged, but I don't think it's come to that."

"What's he in?" questioned Yate, soldier-like believing that every man that is a man and not a vegetable must be "in" something.

"Oh, he's waiting for the Gazette as we are. He scraped in through the militia, as much to his own amazement as to everyone else's."

Yate's opinion of Miss Silver's suitor shrivelled.

He was himself a mightily clever youngster who had passed into Sandhurst straight from the schoolroom. Perhaps fate had favoured him in providing on the mother's side some German profundity and on the father's a sturdy vertebral column and proportionate wrappings of British muscle; perhaps it had not, for inside the profundity was a luxuriant growth of romance, and through the British muscle coursed subdued but dangerous fires.

"He's a good-looking chap," explained Harry—for Rosser was an old friend—"a dashing rider, and a capital shot—everyone likes him."

"Lucky fellow," grunted Yate. "I've often observed that the failures are quite the most popular."

"Because it's their popularity that does for them." Harry, who had occupied a humble position on the nethermost hem of the Sandhurst list, was conscious that his own anxiety for cavalry was due rather to the "beggars can't be choosers" system of the idle and popular ones than to a direct equestrian penchant.

"And women pet them; they'd prefer a fool who can pot rabbits and do a barn-dance to Homer himself," growled Yate.

"I expect Homer in the flesh was a bit flabby," said Harry, contemplatively rubbing the knob of his stick over an immaculate chin. At this moment the door was opened, and they were invited to follow straight through the house to where the conservatory gave on to a rose garden; Miss Silver and her mother were there reading, said the maid.

From the top of the steps Yate caught a pretty glimpse of Sabbath repose. The lawn and the standard roses were formal enough, but there were acacia trees on the left, and, under them, grouped artistically, an Indian drugget, a tea table, and long basket chairs. In one of these Carol lay curled up like the letter S, with head deep in a frilled cushion. Harry, from his point of vantage, whispered, "She reminds me of a lettuce." The soft green of a shimmering tea gown tipped with transparencies of lemon-tinted gauze was gratifying to parched eyes in over-ripe midsummer.

Yate frowned. He was not on friendly enough terms to appreciate a joke which might be overheard.

Harry proceeded to shout a jovial self-announcement, upon which she lifted her eyes from what seemed an absorbing theme.

Yate's quick glance, in the moment of introduction, observed the book was upside down. Her thoughts had evidently been fixed on something more intensely earnest still. Rosser, perhaps, he thought to himself—he had already begun to detest Rosser.

Her face brightened when she greeted them, and she commenced talking with almost excited volubility.

"I'm so glad you've come."

Harry's expression widened to a grin; his mouth was one of those expansive ones which are born grinning. It sealed for him the reputation of good nature.

"Sunday in the suburbs is such a dull thing, one feels quite asphyxiated, even to the marrow," she said, addressing herself to Harry, and veering weathercock-wise in the direction of Tyndall.

"I thought ladies saved that day for gossip and scandal?" said Yate, dropping, after the fashion of male monsters, into the smallest of chairs indicated by her. Harry had appropriated a footstool, which brought his grasshopper outlines against the green of her gown, and was already resuming his customary pastime of sucking the knob of his walking stick, a survival of babyhood which was doubtless responsible for the awning-like upper lip wherein lurked his impressive joviality.

"Oh, so they do, but at this season of the year all the women wear their old bonnets and their faded summer gowns—they're not even worth abusing."

"Then you do enjoy a little vinegar?" volunteered Yate, with eyes that declared her all honey.

"No, it's too crude; but I like spice—just a pinch or two to leaven appreciation."

Mrs Silver at this moment loomed expansively in the distance. Harry leapt up to join her, and only the acacia leaves above were eavesdroppers to the rest of the conversation. It flowed evenly, sometimes stopping against an impedimental stone of argument—occasionally gushing with iridescent bubbles from the force of energetic collision. Yate was a serious thinker and a confident talker. Carol had by nature that light quality of intellectual exuberance which, ornamental and active as foam, has no kinship with real erudition. They were speaking of Yate's career, the first steps, the coveted Victoria Cross, the laurels, and a warm blush underlay the bronze of the young soldier's cheek.

"A year ago," she said, "I was rampant with your ambition, now I cannot forget that the rungs of a soldier's ladder are made of dead men."

"What are a few lives compared with a country's greatness?"

"Only a subtraction from a multiplicity of mourners whom death rejects, the numberless babes bereft, the women starved of love."

"Surely love were a petty consideration, a paralysis to the hand of——"

"Don't you remember what Byron says?" she uttered, her glance fastening itself on the floating mists of sunset, "'Love is of man's life a thing apart, 'tis woman's whole existence.' If war costs him his life, it takes her whole existence too!"

"Yes, but—but—" stammered Yate, fighting with a wave of sentimentality deeper than any to which he had been accustomed, "women nowadays don't love in that way."

"The more fools they if they do," she answered, flippantly, coming abruptly from the clouds, and flicking at a gnat with the stem of her fan. "Have some tea, it is iced and flavoured with lemon peel, a la Russe."

"No tea, thanks. There is Burnley waving at us. I think he has an engagement, and means me to be off."

"Not yet, surely. If you are not booked for anything you need not hurry."

"Thanks. I should be glad to stay. I say, Harry, there's no good dragging me to the Waymans, is there?"

"Besides," interposed Carol, as her mother approached, "he has not been introduced to mamma."

"I beg your pardon," said Burnley, posing himself with mock formality, "Mrs Silver, let me present to you my friend Yate Tyndall—he's poor but pleasant."

"The fact of poverty is an unpleasantness of itself," affirmed Yate, extending a hearty hand to Carol's mother.

The expression of the salutation was scarcely valedictory, and Harry Burnley found himself doomed to solitary departure.

II.

There was—after the manner of suburban vogue—a tennis club in Weytown. To this the Élite of Weytown society, composed mostly of shelved officers in various degrees of dilapidation, and their growing families, belonged. Here the Burnleys and Silvers had met, from the years of teetotum to those of flirtation, and here, outside the cabalistically marked acre, in their search for truant tennis balls, had Carol and Rosser commenced the engagement which some said was serious, and others declared to be but a boy and girl pastime.

When the Burnleys' visitor, Yate Tyndall, appeared upon the scene, which he did almost immediately after his introduction to the Silvers, there was spoon diet for the gossips in plenty. Where Carol was, there the six feet two of the lumbering youth perambulated also; where she was not—and the colour of her caprices was changeable as the iridescence of soap-suds—there, pro tem., was the soldierly figure extinct.

Burnley laughed, then he chaffed, then he warned. Reminiscences of Rosser were flaunted, dabbed forth like blisters, their unpleasantness being excused by their curative intent; but to no avail. Then Harry, never tolerant of home tattle, suddenly lent himself as its mouthpiece. Carol was a flirt—nay, more; Rosser, her childhood's one chum, her girlhood's sweetheart, had been but two months absent, and she had picked up with, to her, the merest stranger, etc. etc. Harry further hinted at spiderly instincts, and hummed, "Will you walk into my parlour" somewhat portentously. The fact was that there was slight abrasion of his own heart's surface, but that he overlooked to view himself heroically, as most of us do, and believed his animus was purely in the interest of his friend. But the friend rejected salvation—flouted it—and in a few days the subject was emphatically—Yate could be repulsively emphatic when roused—closed between them.

On the tennis ground Carol and her new admirer made an almost daily group. They seldom played, but they wore flannels in compliment to the surroundings, and dallied with time in talking what one, at least, of them believed to be philosophy. But, as before said, Carol's moods were never stationary. She had a mischievous wit and an effervescent, infectious sprightliness about her—it was a constitutional characteristic rather than the immediate outcome of gaiety. This made acquaintances consider her one of the happiest girls in the world. But of late her friends were prone to notice a suspicious drowsy pinkness of the eyelids, a sad pucker of the lip corners which argued complexly with the gusts of exuberance that followed any fit of pre-occupation. And Yate, as he grew in knowledge of her, could have testified to other moods still—ugly ones—had he not been too neck-deep in emotion, too loyal, too profoundly worshipful of the secrets of Nature to notice anything but beauty in the characteristics of an ungarnished reality like hers. Besides this, though he was but a youth, he had cosmopolitan blood in his veins, and cosmopolitan dilution means poetry at a very early age—poetry which clothes womanhood with mystery, and makes her a ravishing mixture of puny weakness and irresistible strength. To him she was the handwriting on the wall of Belshazzar, a sign for wonderment and awe and dumb prostration, a problem too sublime for solution, though the key to many exalted enigmas lay, alas! merely with Rosser.

Of this Yate suspected a little—a very little. He never fully knew—nor indeed did she—how far the man was responsible for the development of the ineradicable events which crowded that autumn-tinted period. Once he spoke of him. It was when they had rambled from the tennis regions to where the edge of an adjacent common was banked with trees and dotted with seats arabesqued with initials by the playful penknives of holiday hordes. She had been capricious all day—moody, petulant—snappish, in vulgar phrase.

"Won't you tell me what bothers you?" he said, addressing the coil of her hair, for her face was bent to some hieroglyphics traced by her sunshade in the sandy ground.

"You!" she blurted.

"Shall I go?" he asked, meekly. "I've offered to do so often if it would make you happier."

"It wouldn't—nothing would make me happier."

"Why are you miserable?"

"I'm not," she muttered, and a heavy tear fell with a thud on the back of her glove.

He lifted the hand to his lips and kissed away the drop before it had time to sink in.

"Would it make you glad to know that if this were poison I would take it, to share even so much of you?"

"It is poison, rank, acid poison, straight out of my wicked heart——"

"Then empty it; let me drain it, that there may be room for nothing but love."

"Love is a vaster emptiness—it is only a shadow thrown by ourselves."

"You have proved it so?" he questioned, anxiously. "You have loved?"

"I have loved," she breathed, with a weary accent on the middle word.

There was a long pause while they looked intently into the evening mists, which were weaving themselves into a veil of purple tissue over the horizon. A horrible tremor had seized him, and his next words, when they found voice, came thickly out from the burial place of a sob.

"Was it—was it Rosser?"

She merely bowed her head without looking at him.

He rose mutely, stretched his arms to right and left, drew himself to full length like some huge dog wakened from slumber, then for some moments he stood with hands clenched on his stick before he spoke.

"I suppose it must be 'good-bye.'"...

She looked at him dreamily.

"Need it?"

He leapt to her side.

"Do you mean that you do not want me to go—that you would rather I stayed?"

"Much rather."

"And he?"

"He has ceased to exist for me!"

A torrent of hot blood seemed to burst from Yate's frozen brain, as watershoots from the glaciers in summer.

"God! have you given him up?"

"I made a misstatement. I should have said I have ceased to exist for him."

"That means that you love him?"

She faced round angrily.

"How dare you suggest such things of me? Do you think that women like I are made the same as slippers, to wait till footsore wanderers have need of them? Do you imagine I would waste an eyelash in weeping for milk wantonly spilt?"

"Yet you cried?" he ventured, very softly.

"I cried from desolation. Can't you understand the loss of the illusion being more lamentable even than the loss of the reality? Come, let us go back," she added, "it is growing dark."

They wandered homewards lingeringly. The summer dusk was full of sweet mystery, of hazy, promising indefinitude; the heath led to the high road, and from thence they came under the darkness of trees, copper-beech and acacia trees, which made a fringed avenue along the back of the Silvers' orchard.

They halted as they reached the wicket. Each longed to express something, but the something was in so many volumes they could not decide whence to light on their quotation. At last she said:—

"I feel you are good and loyal and true. I wish I were worthy you."

He took her hand in his wide palms and smiled.

"Don't flatter me—if flattery it can be called. I question whether saintliness in broadcloth is lovable; but I appreciate the compliment the more for its being undeserved."

"Boy, you are frivolous; if you weren't so good I should not have qualms about——"

"Do you know," he interposed abruptly, "how the Orientals prostrate themselves before their divinity? I would do more."

He flung himself on the ground at her feet, his forehead against the earth, and with a quick touch placed his head beneath her heel.

She uttered a sharp cry and stooped to him—to lift him. Had it been Rosser's, she thought, the act would have loomed magnificent; as it was, the combined self-abasement—the devotion, the allegiance of it—was crude and colourless. For her there were no passionate illuminations to preserve the margin of the sublime. She had argued love to be but the shadow cast by ourselves, and at that moment her soul's lamp lighted only conceptions that were blurred, formless, and grotesque.

But as he rose he caught her in his arms, and she did not resist them. She lay inert, like a wounded animal after long strife, and pleaded as though for physical or mental refuge.

"Make me love you! Make me love you!"

And so he kissed her.

It was a kiss that might have awakened a statue to tenderness. The wine of her lips, as he pressed and bruised and crushed them, intoxicated him. He forgot Rosser.

III.

The next day a stone Galatea faced the mirror. There was a purple stain upon her mouth—a tiny swelling that would not disappear. It was scarcely perceptible, but it burnt brand-like on her heart; it glared at, and mocked her, and seemed to beckon with horrible witch-like fingers along the grimy gutters that fringe the paved paths to despair.

Loveless surrender! What more unredeemed debasement! Yet she would have vowed her being to lifelong slavery for Gordon Rosser's sake, and held such sacrifice but glorification. One kiss! What was it? Was it gold or was it mud? Mud, mud, mud, which only the magic of love's alchemy could transmute to gold and pearl. Yet the mud had served its purpose. Was it not sufficient to defile the temple that had been consecrated to an unworthy idol, break down its altars, obliterate all memory of misguided worship—child-like, unreasoning faiths?

But her revenge—her curse on the falsity had come home to roost. It not only branded her—it seared the innocent! Poor, poor Yate! What had he done that a suffering girl should have clung to him to avert mental death in an ocean of despond, while he had imagined it but a dancing duet on the waves of love? And she had aided the deception. It had been to gain time, to kill regret, to help in wrenching the weeds she had mistaken for flowers from the garden of her life. Well, she had failed, and the travesty must cease. But before it ceased that which she had striven to do as a duty to herself she would now do as a duty to Yate. She chose paper and a pen with deliberation, and wrote very proportionately and legibly:—

She reserved the posting till night, after the coming of Yate, who was due at dinner. In the evening the young man arrived. He had fought his way on foot through a deluge of rain and a thundering blast. The tussle suited his mood, which had rebelled against the suavity of conveyance to his enchanting goal. A handsome colour glowed through the tan of his cheeks, and the sombre green-grey of his eyes shone gallant and golden with the illuminations of love. At first glimpse of him Carol recognised in his personality that almost godlike quality which welds mere dust into heroes. What devotion he was prepared to give her! A crown of sovereignty to lift the chosen one above princes and peoples, pain and penury, and privation. But the diadem was too large, too massive; her poor ignoble head might sink under it. And then princes and peoples would become but a mob, antagonistic or inane, and the pinch of pain, privation, and penury would eternally grip at the strings of her love-famished heart.

She showed him her renouncement of Rosser, and sent it forth to post. His heart bounded, for her composure deceived him and masked the cost of the decisive action.

After dinner, Mrs Silver, complaining of the elements outside and the leaden temperature within, retired to lie down in the adjacent boudoir. They were alone. On a distant pedestal a lamp, petalled like a poppy, threw sleepy rays across the room; at the piano some smaller flowers leant their rose blush to the winking candles. She was seated at the keys in a gown, gauzy white, with two dreamy hands expressing some twilight theme of Schumann's—a reverie of sorrow and sighing. He sat passive, but it was the passivity of the spinning-top. His greedy eyes looked at the wandering fingers and longed to detain them, leant on the mignonette which cast a languid breath from the muslin folds of her bodice—fastened gladly, almost possessively, on the tiny blue speck that marred the outline of her under lip. Poor sweet speck! Oh, that it might there remain for ever as seal royal of the eternity of his truth! At last she lifted her hands and rose. He rose in sympathy and advanced, half afraid; restrained by the indefinable awe with which we all approach joys that are too delicious to be seized.

For a moment she scanned him earnestly but not regretfully, and, as she gazed, she noted the passage of his eyes as they travelled conqueror-wise to the dark flaw on the margin of her mouth. His glance let loose the words that had swelled her heart with pent-up purpose.

She held out her hand. He grasped it eagerly; but there was a stiff wrist and elbow at the back of it which dictated the distance from him to her.

"Yate—Mr Tyndall—I want you to go away!"

"What!—now?—this moment?"

"Yes, and for ever!"

She spoke deliberately, without a quaver of sorrow, and every word on his heart spat like hailstones coming down a chimney on live coal.

His huge frame trembled and swayed an instant. Then he laughed. It was a jarring, joyless convulsion.

"You don't mean it—you are doing it to try me—say you don't, Carol, my darling."

"But I do," she explained. "Listen. I have behaved infamously to you. I will take all the blame. You were so good, so noble, so loving. You came just when I was dying of heartbreak—people do die of it, no matter what the philosophers say. You saved me, you lifted me to life and womanly pride, you prevented me from writing cringing letters to——in short you saved me from throwing myself at Mr Rosser's head. Nay, don't speak. I told you I had loved him."

"You love him still!" he cried.

"No. I showed you my letter this evening to prove it. But that is no reason for loving you."

"But you'll try and love me? I would make you—you said I might," he murmured, as though coaxing trust from a child.

"No," she said, disengaging her hand and brushing it across her eyes as if to sweep away a blighting memory. "No, it was then I knew myself, then I took courage to face the future without him—without you——"

"But because you refuse him, why——"

"I will not become a thief. Because my own gold has been filched and squandered I should be no less a thief were I to fill my purse with what I can never earn—never repay."

"My love is a free gift, Carol—I don't make reservations," he mumbled, hopelessly, for he knew her tones dictated rather than argued.

"Won't you see that it is because your gift is so lavish, so rare—because I cannot return—I cannot take it? Offerings of real worth cannot be so accepted without degradation. Dear Yate, good-bye. Some day when you have recovered this you will know I am right. Perhaps, even, you may place me, faults and all, in some special heart-niche reserved for defunct yet exotic truths."

She affected flippancy, but her mirth hung lank, like the curls of a drowning man.

He bent over her hand and kissed it.

Then he said thickly, in a drunkard's voice, "I'll go ... by the garden way——" and rushed out.

She heard the conservatory door bang behind him, and lost the sound of his footsteps in the howl of the storm.

They took him over the soaking lawn, along the orchard, out by the wicket, into the avenue of copper-beech and acacia where last night they had stood together. There he beat his head against the senseless bark of the dripping trees and wept aloud. And the burst of his sobs mingled with the roaring of the wind as it swept over him and expended its wild tumult against the closed windows of her house.