The Claw Part 13

"Come, love," said Anthony to me simply and softly, and drew me down the stairway. In the kindly darkness he kissed me again in a strong, sweet, wonderful way, and for one more radiant moment I felt the almost anguished joy--half terror and half exquisite peace--that comes to a girl who, loving for the first time, finds herself in the arms of the one right man in all the world for her.

"Say you love me," he pa.s.sionately whispered, and I as pa.s.sionately whispered back:

"I love you--I love you. There is no one in the world like you."

"I believe there is a search-party out for us," said Gerry Deshon as soon as we came from the post-office. "We've spied about five couples all diligently looking the other way."

"Any excuse to get out into the moonlight," laughed Anthony. He had his careless-eyed, impa.s.sive mask on once more.

"And it is plain that some one has already begun to prepare the banquet," cried Mr Hunloke. "I smell a most outrageous smell of Welsh rarebit desecrating the night air."

I remember very little in detail of the rest of that enchanted night. I know that every one was very gay and merry, and none more so than I, with a heart singing like a bird in my breast. After scrambling in the kitchen for hours, laughing, blacking our hands and smearing our features, getting smoke in our eyes and ashes down our throats from three large fires out of doors, a banquet was served in the preparing of which at least fifty people had a hand and the like of which was never seen before or since in Mashonaland. The odour thereof permeated to every hut and home and lured men from their beds. People I had never seen before arrived upon the scene and joined in the proceedings--even the frumps and dowds and the business-like men. We were all--

"Glad together in gladsome mood And joyful in joyous l.u.s.tre."

Anthony brewed a bowl of punch flavoured with blue beads that ravished the hearts of all men who tasted it; and Gerry Deshon brewed an opposition bowl which he called "potheen" and engaged attention to by monotonously beating a kaffir tom-tom over it, the sound of which brought the remaining stragglers into camp.

By twelve o'clock, when the moon was low in the heavens but the campfires blazed high, almost every one in the town was seated round the white cloths spread upon the stubbly gra.s.s. I recognised the postmaster's beautifully embroidered tea-cloth among the rest. No one gave a thought to gra.s.s-ticks or mosquitoes. How should they when the feast was eaten to the strains of the postmaster's banjo and his charming tenor voice serenading us with some of the wild, sweet melodies of Ireland to which Moore has put words. But of course, with the innate melancholy of the Celt, he could not refrain from tempering our merriment with woe, and at our blithest he suddenly subdued us with the sad fierce Song of Fionnuala:

"Silent, O Moyle, be the roar of thy water.

Break not, ye breezes, your chain of repose, While murmuring mournfully Lir's lonely daughter Tells to the night stars the tale of her woes.

"When shall the swan her death-song singing Sleep with wings in darkness furled?

When will Heaven its sweet bell ringing Call my spirit from this stormy world?"

Did the Irish gift of foresight descend for a moment upon that one of Ireland's sons, I wonder? For it was strange, looking back long after, to reflect that never before had little Fort George indulged in such a gay and merry revel, nor ever did again. That was her swan-song.

Afterwards she slept, with wings in darkness furled.

During the evening Anthony and I were side by side once more, and under cover of all the jesting and laughter around us we added another brief little chapter to the history of our love. The firelight was glinting on the points of blue in his ears, and impulsively I put up a finger and touched one of them.

"Why do you wear them?"

He looked steadily into the fire and did not answer at once.

"If you object to them I will not wear them any longer," he said at last. But there was a note in his voice that chilled my heart.

"Why did you ever wear them?" I asked, and almost choked on the words remembering what Mrs Valetta had said, "Is it true that some woman put them there?"

He turned and faced me quickly, looking into mine with those eyes of his which I knew could not lie.

"Not a woman, Deirdre, a girl--a little girl of ten. My sister put them in for a whim a few days before she died--and they've been there ever since. You are the only woman in the world I would take them out for."

I remembered how they said he had almost killed a man for jeering at them, how much chaff he had stood from his friends on the subject. I knew that his sister had been dear to him.

"No, no," I cried swiftly. "You must never take them out. Wear them always. I love them. To me they seem part of you."

His pa.s.sionate glance made me almost afraid as he whispered back under cover of the chatter and laughter around us:

"You shall kiss them in for me, my heart, and they shall never leave me again until I die." When I looked away from him it was to see Maurice Stair's pale, handsome face opposite, staring before him with moody eyes.

My last recollection before we went indoors, after good-nights all round and many handshakings, was the sight of Tommy Dennison seated at the summit of the glorified tea-house (which was Anthony Kinsella's hut) performing on the flute in a most subtle manner while the mad Irishman, once more happy, sang:

"Oh, did you ne'er hear of the Blarney?

That's found near the banks of Killarney."

Alone in my room at last, I threw myself down on my knees and thanked G.o.d in broken words for my happiness. Joy enfolded my spirit like a misty veil of happiness through which the future was touched with the light of the eternal hills. With the rosary between my fingers and the lovely Latin words of the Angelical Salutation on my lips, I thought of my mother too and longed pa.s.sionately for her to know of the wonderful thing that had come to me, so that even in my prayers my thoughts flew out from me across the rolling s.p.a.ces of stars to the still place of peace where my faith told me her soul rested, waiting; and when at last I rose from my knees it was with a strange feeling that she _knew_, that her mother-spirit was with me, enfolding me, rejoicing with me that all was well, that not tragedy but wonderful, undreamed-of happiness had come to her Deirdre for whom she had feared so much.

Afterwards I thought to fall swiftly into the waves of silence and oblivion with my dream in my heart. But late as it was, Judy, who had just come in, lingered before the mirror brus.h.i.+ng her hair, and she _would_ talk. She had gone into Mrs Valetta's hut and stayed for quite an hour, and now in her pink dressing-gown, her fair hair down her back, she was full of little endless languid words that had no meaning for me wrapped in my new found happiness. I closed my eyes and strove to sleep in spite of her, but she presently said something that dragged me back from sleep and in one moment blurred out the radiance of my dream.

"And I want to warn you of one thing, Deirdre. Don't be beguiled into a flirtation with Anthony Kinsella. He's the most dangerous man in the country."

After an ice-cold moment I answered her in a voice that sounded to me like some one else's.

"What do you mean, Judy? Why do you say that to me?"

She was plaiting her hair then, and had a hairpin between her lips so that her voice was a little indistinct, but her words fell like gunshots into my ears.

"Well, you seemed to like him, rather. You were a good deal together this evening, weren't you? Of course I know that you are well able to take care of yourself, but a flirtation with Tony Kinsella should not be embarked upon even by the most experienced hand. For one thing, he is married."

My heart stopped beating in my breast, and a pain that I thought would have choked me shot up from it to my throat. For a little time I was in such purely physical pain that I believed I was dying. My eyes blurred over, and dimly as through a great darkness I saw Judy's face reflected in the gla.s.s, the gleam of her rings as her fingers moved in and out of her fair pale hair, while her voice went monotonously, relentlessly on.

"I always knew there was _something_, but until Mrs Valetta told me to-night I did not know what it was. She has known him for years in Kimberley and at the Cape. It appears that when he was twenty-five (a good many years ago I should say) he married a very lovely girl belonging to an old Cape family--she and Mrs Valetta were at school together. He was wildly in love with his wife, but she like most Cape girls was a desperate flirt, and no sooner were they married than she began indulging in perhaps harmless flirtations, but extremely indiscreet ones, considering whom she had married. They began to be unhappy, and then suddenly came an awful climax when he almost killed some soldier man in Cape Town (the man's recovery was a miracle) and then separated from his wife, but first of all he sent her to England, and insisted on her staying there. He gave her a large income but he has never lived with her since, and she has never been out here, though every one knows she is still alive. The worst feature of the business is the way he has always carried on intrigues with women ever since, nearly always married women. His method is peculiar. He commences a friends.h.i.+p with a woman, becomes her devoted slave, and gets her well talked about, and when she is wildly in love with him and ready to throw her bonnet over the windmill he calmly backs out, tells the woman it was her friends.h.i.+p he wanted, not her love, and walks off. Did you ever hear of anything so horrible? Evidently the idea is to get revenge on all women for his own wife's infidelities, but it seems incredibly brutal, doesn't it?"

"I don't believe a word of it," I said, suffocating with pain and anger and distress. "He is incapable of such--" I sank among my pillows again but I could not shut out Judy's cruel words.

"I know--I felt like that too--he is so charming, and has such nice eyes. It is hard to believe he could be such a brute--but you would have had to believe Nonie Valetta to-night. It is clear that she is one of his victims. Of course her husband is a dreadful cad and they say kicks her, and that no doubt makes her the bitter and wretched woman she is, but every one knows she is desperate about Kinsella. She as good as admitted it to-night though she knows how I detest that kind of thing and that she would get no sympathy--but she told me, looking as white as a ghost, that I ought to warn you as she had warned Anna Cleeve some months ago, that he is married. It was really too bad of him to start a flirtation with Anna Cleeve. They were always riding together and so on and every one thought it would come to an engagement, and then suddenly the whole thing came to a full stop, and now they never speak to each other. The only people who knew the real reason were he and Anna Cleeve, but now it appears that Mrs Valetta told Anna that he was a married man and that she should tax him with it, and Anna did. She asked him point blank and instead of answering he laughed in her face and said, 'It is women like you and Mrs Valetta who kick a man's soul into h.e.l.l.' Then he walked off and has never spoken to her since. One would think that her brother would have risen in arms against such treatment, but no! The curious thing is that men are always ready to believe in Tony Kinsella. Anna Cleeve is practically engaged to Herbert Stanfield now, a Salisbury man, but she is frightfully unhappy, and every one says it was nothing but pique made her do it. Mr Stanfield is very nice but Tony Kinsella would spoil any woman's taste for a merely nice man--he is so alive and vivid and extraordinarily bigger than most men about--don't you think so? Anyway, I thought I'd just warn you, dear. As I told Mrs Valetta, I was sure there was not the slightest necessity--that you've had heaps of good offers and threw over one of the best matches in England because you were so hard to please (too hard, I think, but that's neither here nor there). Anyway, I let her know that it was very unlikely you would consider any man out here good enough for you. All the same, I know how fascinating Anthony Kinsella is and it is just as well that you should know these things--so there you are. And now good-night. I'm so dead tired, aren't you?

What a crazy night!"

A crazy night indeed! I don't know how I lived through what was left of it. My body lay still and anguished, but my mind wandered in a wilderness of wretchedness and misery where it sometimes seemed no gleam of hope or happiness could ever penetrate again. I had said that I believed no word of it all, but left alone with Judy's haunting tale ringing in my head, how was it possible to dismiss the whole thing as a tissue of lies from beginning to end? Facts, such as his marriage, must be true. No woman would invent a thing that could be so easily disproved. He must have been married at some time (oh, G.o.d! that thought was hard to bear even if she had died since). If she hadn't died--ah! that was too terrible to think of. Then what of Anna Cleeve?

and Mrs Valetta? Blind as I wished to be I knew there was some truth in both these tales. Deaf as I had tried to be, had I not heard everywhere round me hints of his intimacies with women? Had he not said to me with exceeding bitterness: "You will hear my name blown back upon the breeze of fame--of a kind"? And then: "You cannot love me without sorrow, Deirdre."

Oh! was it all true? Could it be true? Darkness engulfed me. I know not how I pa.s.sed the terrible year-long hours. But at last my little silver travelling-clock struck five and I found myself staring at the first red stripes of dawn upon the walls.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

WAR CALLS.

"Off thro' the dark with the stare to rely on, (Alpha, Centauri, and something Orion)."

When we met at the breakfast table the bloom of the dawn was on none of us. Mrs Valetta was pale and haggard as a murderess. Judy, cross and dishevelled, had a black smudge on her nose and was utterly out of tune with life because the boys had all mysteriously disappeared during the night, and she had been obliged to get the breakfast herself. I was not left long in ignorance of my own worn and unlovely appearance.

"You look like a ghost, Deirdre," said my sister-in-law. "No more midnight revels for you! Really, dear, you are dreadfully white and your lips have quite a blue tint. What on earth is the matter?"

"I should think Miss Saurin's heart must be seriously affected," said Mrs Valetta dryly, but though she smiled her eyes gave me a look like a flash of lightning--so blue and angry and burning it was. I knew at last why she hated me. Judy glanced at me again with a shade of anxiety.