The Great Amulet | Page 6

done all I can to my sketch for the present. Shall we go on?"
Lenox roused himself, not without reluctance, and they went on accordingly.
Towards the summit, trees grew rare: and they found the solitary hotel perched aloft, upon an open space; a hive of restless shifting human life, set in the midst of the changeless hills.
After a short interview with the manager's wife, they found themselves alone again, in the private sitting-room engaged by Lenox. A wood fire burned merrily in the open hearth, for September evenings are chilly at that altitude; and the windows, looking westward, gave generous admittance to a flood of afternoon sunlight.
Eldred, standing on the hearth-rug, surveyed all things in an access of silent satisfaction; while Quita moved lightly to and fro, frankly interested in details.
"Oh, how I love the cleanness and emptiness of these Swiss rooms!" she exclaimed at last. "They make one feel so unspeakably wholesome and good. And we are actually going to have dinner here, you and I? Just our two selves! How strange!"
On a sudden impulse she came close to him, and standing before him, took the lapels of his coat, one in each hand.
"Eldred, . . . I don't seem able to take it in at all! Other brides have so much of external paraphernalia to emphasise the fact they have closed one chapter of life, and begun another. But except for that dreamlike half-hour in church, you and I seem merely to have come away together for an everyday outing; and there is nothing anywhere, . . . except this,"--she lifted the third finger of her left hand,--"to make me realise that we are actually . . . married."
She spoke the last word under her breath; and almost before it was out, he had caught her to himself, and kissed her fervently, again and again.
"Does that help you to realise it a little better, . . . my wife?" he whispered; and for answer she drew in a long breath that was almost a sob. He released her at once; and as she faced him, flushed and breathless, he saw that tears stood in her eyes.
"Why, . . . why did you never . . . kiss me . . . like that before?" she asked very low.
"God knows I have wanted to, a hundred times," he answered. "But I think I was afraid you might . . . hate it. Why do you ask, though? Would it have made any difference between us if I had?"
"I can't tell; . . . oh, I can't tell! Only . . . you have been so restrained, so unlike an . . . ordinary lover, that I never dreamed it could mean as much to you . . . as all that . . ." She pulled herself together with an effort. "Now I am going to take off my things," she said. "Don't come, please. I want to get away by myself."
A moment later he stood alone, between the sunlight and the firelight, gazing blankly at the door that hid her from view; and wondering whether he had advanced or retarded matters by his unpremeditated flash of self-revelation.

II.
"A turn, and we stand in the heart of things." --Browning.
When Eldred Lenox sailed from India six months earlier, he would have scouted as impossible the suggestion that he might bring a wife back with him on his return: and his uncompromising avoidance of women, from boyhood upward, had seemed to justify him in his assurance. But Nature is inexorable. She has her own methods of accomplishing those things that are necessary to a man's salvation; and behold in three months the impossible had come to pass. The giant Mirabeau was right:--"ce b��te de mot" ought by now to be struck out of our dictionaries.
Lenox knew little of half measures: and, having succumbed,--in spite of himself, in spite of inherent prejudices and convictions,--he succumbed heart and soul. That which he had unduly scorned, he now unduly exalted. Only Time and the woman could lead him into the Middle Way, which is the way of truth. For beneath the surface hardness of the Scot lurked the fire, the imaginative force, the proud sensitiveness of the Celt: a heritage from his Cornish mother, whose untimely death had left her two younger sons in the hands of a bachelor uncle, of red-hot Calvinistic views. Their father--a man of an altogether different stamp--had met his boys on rare occasions, and ardently desired to know more of them: but an Afghan knife had ended his career before he could find leisure to complete their acquaintance. The history of Anglo-India is one long chronicle of such minor tragedies.
Thus fire-eating Jock Lenox had exercised iron rule over his charges, unhampered by parental interference: had reared them in an unquestioning fear