Part 27 (1/2)

He glanced at the cables in silence, while Krool watched him narrowly, covertly, with a depth of purpose which made his face uncanny.

”That will do, Krool; wake me at seven,” he said, quietly, but with suppressed malice in his tone.

Why was it that at that moment he could, with joy, have taken Krool by the neck and throttled him? All the bitterness, anger and rage that he had felt an hour ago concentrated themselves upon Krool--without reason, without cause. Or was it that his deeper Other Self had whispered something to his mind about Krool--something terrible and malign?

In this new mood he made up his mind that he would not see Jasmine till the morning. How late she was! It was one o'clock, and yet this was not the season. She had not gone to a ball, nor were these the months of late parties.

As he tossed in his bed and his head turned restlessly on his pillow, Krool's face kept coming before him, and it was the last thing he saw, ominous and strange, before he fell into a heavy but troubled sleep.

Perhaps the most troubled moment of the night came an hour after he went to bed.

Then it was that a face bent over him for a minute, a fair face, with little lines contracting the ripe lips, which were redder than usual, with eyes full of a fevered brightness. But how harmonious and sweetly ordered was the golden hair above! Nothing was gone from its l.u.s.tre, nothing robbed it of its splendour. It lay upon her forehead like a crown. In its richness it seemed a little too heavy for the tired face beneath, almost too imperial for so slight and delicate a figure.

Rudyard stirred in his sleep, murmuring as she leaned over him; and his head fell away from her hand as she stretched out her fingers with a sudden air of pity--of hopelessness, as it might seem from her look.

His face restlessly turned to the wall--a vexed, stormy, anxious face and head, scarred by the whip of that overlord more cruel and tyrannous than Time, the Miserable Mind.

She drew back with a little shudder. ”Poor Ruddy!” she said, as she had said that evening when Ian Stafford came to her after the estranging and scornful years, and she had watched Rudyard leave her--to her fate and to her folly.

”Poor Ruddy!”

With a sudden frenzied motion of her hands she caught her breath, as though some pain had seized her. Her eyes almost closed with the shame that reached out from her heart, as though to draw the veil of her eyelids over the murdered thing before her--murdered hope, slaughtered peace: the peace of that home they had watched burn slowly before their eyes in the years which the locust had eaten.

Which the locust had eaten--yes, it was that. More than once she had heard Rudyard tell of a day on the veld when the farmer surveyed his abundant fields with joy, with the gay sun flaunting it above; and suddenly there came a white cloud out of the west, which made a weird humming, a sinister sound. It came with s.h.i.+ning scales glistening in the light and settled on the land acre upon acre, morgen upon morgen; and when it rose again the fields, ready for the harvest, were like a desert--the fields which the locust had eaten. So had the years been, in which Fortune had poured gold and opportunity and unlimited choice into her lap. She had used them all; but she had forgotten to look for the Single Secret, which, like a key, unlocks all doors in the House of Happiness.

”Poor Ruddy!” she said, but even as she said it for the second time a kind of anger seemed to seize her.

”Oh, you fool--you fool!” she whispered, fiercely. ”What did you know of women! Why didn't you make me be good? Why didn't you master me--the steel on the wrist--the steel on the wrist!”

With a little burst of misery and futile rage she went from the room, her footsteps uneven, her head bent. One of the open letters she carried dropped from her hand onto the floor of the hall outside. She did not notice it. But as she pa.s.sed inside her door a shadowy figure at the end of the hall watched her, saw the letter drop, and moved stealthily forward towards it. It was Krool.

How heavy her head was! Her wors.h.i.+pping maid, near dead with fatigue, watched her furtively, but avoided the eyes in the mirror which had a half-angry look, a look at once disturbed and elated, reckless and pitiful. Lablanche was no reader of souls, but there was something here beyond the usual, and she moved and worked with unusual circ.u.mspection and lightness of touch. Presently she began to unloose the coils of golden hair; but Jasmine stopped her with a gesture of weariness.

”No, don't,” she said. ”I can't stand your touch tonight, Lablanche.

I'll do the rest myself. My head aches so. Good-night.”

”I will be so light with it, madame,” Lablanche said, protestingly.

”No, no. Please go. But the morning, quite early.”

”The hour, madame?”

”When the letters come, as soon as the letters come, Lablanche--the first post. Wake me then.”

She watched the door close, then turned to the mirror in front of her and looked at herself with eyes in which brooded a hundred thoughts and feelings: thoughts contradictory, feelings opposed, imaginings conflicting, reflections that changed with each moment; and all under the spell of a pa.s.sion which had become in the last few hours the most powerful influence her life had ever known. Right or wrong, and it was wrong, horribly wrong; wise or unwise, and how could the wrong be wise!

she knew she was under a spell more tyrannous than death, demanding more sacrifices than the G.o.ds of h.e.l.las.

Self-indulgent she had been, reckless and wilful and terribly modern, taking sweets where she found them. She had tried to squeeze the orange dry, in the vain belief that Wealth and Beauty can take what they want, when they want it, and that happiness will come by purchase; only to find one day that the thing you have bought, like a slave that revolts, stabs you in your sleep, and you wake with wide-eyed agony only to die, or to live--with the light gone from the evening sky.

Suddenly, with the letters in her hand with which she had entered the room, she saw the white rose on her pillow. Slowly she got up from the dressing-table and went over to the bed in a hushed kind of way. With a strange, inquiring, half-shrinking look she regarded the flower. One white rose. It was not there when she left. It had been brought from the hall below, from the great bunch on the Spanish table. Those white roses, this white rose, had come from one who, selfish as he was, knew how to flatter a woman's vanity. From that delicate tribute of flattery and knowledge Rudyard had taken this flowering stem and brought it to her pillow.

It was all too malevolently cynical. Her face contracted in pain and shame. She had a soul to which she had never given its chance. It had never bloomed. Her abnormal wilfulness, her insane love of pleasure, her hereditary impulses, had been exercised at the expense of the great thing in her, the soul so capable of memorable and beautiful deeds.