Part 16 (1/2)

At last she rose and walked unsteadily forward. He followed her in mute misery. In a moment or two they found themselves on the outskirts of the deserted heath. How beautiful stretched the gorsy rolling country! The sun was setting in great burning furrows of gold and green--a panorama to take one's breath away. The beauty and peace of Nature pa.s.sed into the poet's soul.

”Forgive me, dearest,” he begged, taking her hand.

She drew it away sharply. ”I cannot forgive you. You have shown yourself in your true colours.”

Her unreasonableness angered him again. ”What do you mean? I only came in accordance with our long-standing arrangement. You have put me off long enough.”

”It is fortunate I did put you off long enough to discover what you are.”

He gasped. He thought of all the weary months of waiting, all the long comedy of telegrams and express letters, the far-off flirtations of the cosy corner, the baffled elopement to Paris. ”Then you won't marry me?”

”I cannot marry a man I neither love nor respect.”

”You don't love me!” Her spontaneous kiss in his sober Oxford study seemed to burn on his angry lips.

”No, I never loved you.”

He took her by the arms and turned her round roughly. ”Look me in the face and dare to say you have never loved me.”

His memory was buzzing with pa.s.sionate phrases from her endless letters. They stung like a swarm of bees. The sunset was like blood-red mist before his eyes.

”I have never loved you,” she said obstinately.

”You--!” His grasp on her arms tightened. He shook her.

”You are bruising me,” she cried.

His grasp fell from her arms as though they were red-hot. He had become a woman beater.

THE ETERNAL FEMININE

He wore a curious costume, representing the devil carrying off his corpse; but I recognised him at once as the lesser lion of a London evening party last season. Then he had just returned from a Polar expedition, and wore the glacier of civilisation on his breast.

To-night he was among the maddest of the mad, dancing savagely with the Bacchantes of the Latin Quarter at the art students' ball, and some of his fellow-Americans told me that he was the best marine painter in the _atelier_ which he had joined. More they did not pause to tell me, for they were anxious to celebrate this night of nights, when, in that fine spirit of equality born of belonging to two Republics, the artist lowers himself to the level of his model.

The young Arctic explorer, so entirely at home in this more tropical clime, had relapsed into respectability when I spoke to him. He was sitting at a supper-table smoking a cigarette, and gazing somewhat sadly--it seemed to me--at the pandemoniac phantasmagoria of screaming dancers, the glittering cosmopolitan chaos that multiplied itself riotously in the mirrored walls of the great flaring ball-room, where under-dressed women, waving many-coloured paper lanterns, rode on the shoulders of grotesquely clad men prancing to joyous music. For some time he had been trying hard to get some one to take the money for his supper; but the frenzied waiters suspected he was clamouring for something to eat, and would not be cajoled into attention.

Moved by an impulse of mischief, I went up to him and clapped him on his corpse, which he wore behind.

There was a death-mask of papier-mache on the back of his head with appropriate funereal drapings down the body.

”I'll take your money,” I said.

He started, and turned his devil upon me. The face was made Mephistophelian, and the front half of him wore scarlet.

”Thanks,” he said, laughing roguishly, when he recognised me. ”It's darned queer that Paris should be the place where they refuse to take the devil's money.”