Part 50 (1/2)

He turned his face to the sinking sun. It shone like a smouldering furnace behind bars of inky cloud.

”You told me once,” he said, speaking with obvious constraint, ”that you did not think you would ever live with him again.”

She stifled a sigh in her throat. ”I thought so then.”

”And what has happened to make you change your mind?”

Anne was silent. She could not have seen the fire that leapt and darted in the dusky eyes had she been looking at him, but she was not looking.

Her chin was back upon her hand. She was gazing out into the darkening world with the eyes of a woman who sees once more departed visions.

”I think,” she said slowly at length, as he waited immovably for her answer, ”that I see my duty more clearly now than then.”

”Duty! Duty!” he said impatiently. ”Duty is your fetish. You sacrifice your whole life to it. And what do you get in return? A sense of virtue perhaps, nothing more. There isn't much warming power in virtue. I've tried it and I know!” He broke off to utter a very bitter laugh. ”And so I've given it up,” he said. ”It's a trail that leads to nowhere.”

Anne's brows drew together for an instant. ”I hoped you might come to think otherwise,” she said.

He shrugged his shoulders. ”How can I? I've lived the life of a saint for the past six months, and I am no nearer heaven than when I began. It's too slow a process for me. I wasn't made to plough an endless furrow.”

”We all of us say that,” said Anne, with her faint smile. ”But do we any of us really know what we were made for? Are we not all in the making still?”

He thrust out his chin. ”I can't be abstruse tonight. I know what I was made for, and I know what you were made for. That--anyway for tonight--is all that matters.”

He spoke almost brutally, yet still he held himself as it were aloof. He was staring unblinking into the sunset. Already the furnace was dying down. The thunder-clouds were closing up. The black bars had drawn together into one immense ma.s.s, advancing, ominous. Only through a single narrow slit the red light still shone.

Mutely they watched it pa.s.s, Anne with her sad eyes fixed and thoughtful, Nap still with that suggestion of restrained activity as if he watched for a signal.

Gradually the rift closed, and a breathless darkness came.

Anne uttered a little sigh. ”I wish the storm would break,” she said. ”I am tired of waiting.”

As if in answer, out of the west there rose a long low rumble.

”Ah!” she said, and no more.

For as if the signal had come, Nap turned with a movement incredibly swift, a movement that was almost a spring, and caught her up into his arms.

”Are you tired of waiting, my Queen--my Queen?” he said, and there was a note of fierce laughter in his words. ”Then--by heaven--you shall wait no longer!”

His quick breath scorched her face, and in a moment, almost before she knew what was happening, his lips were on her own. He kissed her as she had never been kissed before--a single fiery kiss that sent all the blood in tumult to her heart. She shrank and quivered under it, but she was powerless to escape. There was sheer unshackled savagery in the holding of his arms, and dismay thrilled her through and through.

Yet, as his lips left hers, she managed to speak, though her voice was no more than a gasping whisper. ”Nap, are you mad? Let me go!”

But he only held her faster, faster still.

”Yes, I am mad,” he said, and the words came quick and pa.s.sionate, the lips that uttered them still close to her own. ”I am mad for you, Anne. I wors.h.i.+p you. And I swear that while I live no other man shall ever hold you in his arms again. Anne--G.o.ddess--queen--woman--you are mine--you are mine--you are mine!”

Again his lips pressed hers, and again from head to foot she felt as if a flame had scorched her. Desperately she began to resist him though terribly conscious that he had her at his mercy. But he quelled her resistance instantly, with a mastery that made her know more thoroughly her utter impotence.

”Do you think that you can hold me in check for ever?” he said. ”I tell you it only makes me worse. I am a savage, and chains of that sort won't hold me. What is the good of fighting against fate? You have done it as long as I have known you; but you are beaten at last. Oh, you may turn your face from me. It makes no difference now. I've played for this, and I've won! You have been G.o.ddess to me ever since the day I met you.