Part 17 (2/2)
”Me?”
”Yes, you. With all your beliefs, there was a time, if I'm not much mistaken, when you were pleased to doubt the existence of your charming self?”
She looked up with a smile of pleasure and of perfect comprehension. He could hardly have said anything more delicately caressing to her self-love. It seemed, then, that every word she had uttered in his hearing had been weighed and treasured up. She could hardly be supposed to know that this power of noticing and preserving such little personal details was one of the functions of the literary organism. If a woman like Miss Fraser had been flattered by it, what must have been its effect on the susceptible Audrey?
”So you remember that too?” she said, softly.
”Yes; it impressed me at the time. Now I know you better I don't wonder at it. It's the fault of your very lovely and feminine idealism, but you seem to me to have hardly any hold on the fact of existence, to be unable to realise it. If I could only give you the sense of life--make you feel the movement, the pa.s.sion, the drama of it! My books have a little of that; they've got the right atmosphere, the _smell_ of life.
But never mind my books. I don't want you to have another literary craze--I beg your pardon, I mean phase; you seem to have had an artistic one lately.”
He rose to go.
”I've always cared for the great things of life,” said she.
”Ah yes--the great things, stamped with other people's approval. I want you to love life itself, so that you may be yourself, and feel yourself being.”
Her whole nature responded as the strings of the violin to the bow of the master. ”Life” was one of those words which specially stirred her sensibility. As Wyndham had foreseen, it was a word to conjure with; and now, as he had willed, the idea of it possessed her. She repeated mechanically--
”Life--to love life for itself----”
”And first--you must know life in order to love it.”
She sighed slightly, as if she had taken in a little more breath to say good-bye. The ideal was flown. She had received the stamp of Wyndham's spirit, as if it had been iron upon wax. It was her way of being herself and feeling herself being.
The same evening she wrote a little note to Ted that ran thus:--
”DEAREST TED,--I have been thinking it all over, ever since yesterday, and I am convinced that my only right course is to break off our engagement. It has all been a mistake--mine and yours. Why should we not recognise it, instead of each persisting in making the other miserable? I release you from your promise to me, and will always remain very affectionately yours, AUDREY CRAVEN.”
She had just sent the note to the post, when a servant came in with a telegram. It was from Hardy, announcing his arrival at Queenstown. And she had trusted to her engagement to Ted for protection against Vincent's claim.
If she had only waited!
CHAPTER XV
”Great strength and safety with heaviest charges.” ”Absolute immunity from all risk of blowing open.” ”The combination of a perfect trigger action with a perfect c.o.c.king action.” Ted Haviland was standing outside the window of a gunsmith's shop in the King's Road, Chelsea, reading the enticing legends in which Mr. Webley sets forth the superiority of his wares above those of all other makers. It was the second day after he had got Audrey's letter. In his least hopeful moods he had never expected that blow; and when it fell, as a bolt from the blue, he was stunned and could not realise that he was struck. He imagined all kinds of explanations to account for Audrey's conduct. It was a misunderstanding, a sudden freak; there was some mystery waiting to be solved; some one--his cousin Nettie probably--had spread some story about him which had reached Audrey. The scandal already spread in the family would have been enough; she could hardly have identified its loudly dressed heroine as herself. It only remained for him to clear his character. Anything, anything rather than believe in what all healthy youth revolts against--the irrevocable, the end.
He had tried three times to see Audrey, and she was ”not at home”; though the third time he had seen her go into the house not two minutes before. That instant he had turned away with a stinging mist in his eyes and the blood surging in his brain. His thoughts now leaped to the end as blindly as they had shrunk from it before. He had no definite idea of shooting himself when he turned into the King's Road--his one object was to go in any direction rather than home; but the shop window, with its stacks of rifles and cards displaying ”Mark I.” revolvers, arranged on them like the spokes of a wheel, caught his attention. He was possessed with the desire to have a revolver of his own, no matter for what purpose.
He had just chosen a ”Mark I.,” and was going into the shop to buy it, when he heard his name called in a loud hearty voice, ”Ted, you bounder!
stop!” and his arm was pulled with a grip that drew him backward from the doorstep.
”Hardy!”
He knew the voice, but it was hard to recognise the man. A thick black beard, a face that might have been tanned with bark, trousers tucked into high boots, and tightened with a belt like a horse-girth, an old Norfolk jacket stained with travel and the chase, a canvas s.h.i.+rt laced with a red cord and ta.s.sels, and a plate-like hat of grey felt flapping about his ears, made Hardy look something like a cowboy or a bandit. So singular was the apparition that had plucked Ted back from the abyss, that the Furies and the infernal phantoms vanished into smoke before it.
It brought with it a breath of Atlantic seas and of winds from the far West.
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