Chapter XI

Nielsen sat at one of many little marble-topped tables outside a café. It was dark, and the lights of the street avenue shone dubiously on either side through the foliage of the lime trees. From the interior of the café, at his back, the dull clack of dominoes and the flap of waiters’ slippered feet against the boarded floor came gently to his ears, with the occasional sharper sounds of men’s voices. Through the widely-opened doors and windows stray whiffs of rough, black tobacco, and of garlic, made their way to his nose. The thin strains of harp and mandolin quavered drawlingly into the warm air from a _cantina_ lower down the street, and frogs croaked hoarsely in chorus from the bed of the dried watercourse under the bridge.

Nielsen sipped his coffee, smoking quietly. He leant slightly forward, with his shoulders squared, his knees apart, and the rim of his hat pulled forward on his high forehead.

The café was nearly opposite the Hôtel Milano, which stood back from the road in its own garden. Nielsen watched the windows of the hotel, and the vague silhouettes of people’s figures against the lighted verandah. The lines of his pale, squarely-moulded face expressed a gently weary resignation, and he remained undisturbed by the wheeling of mosquitoes and the perpetual futile appearances of the unkempt Italian waiters.

That afternoon he had seen Jocelyn for the first time since the day at Bordighera. On that occasion he had been in earnest, with an earnestness that, upon reflection, had caused him surprise. He was aware that he would repeat his conduct under similar circumstances, but the idea of marriage had become so foreign to him in the course of his broken existence, that he was compelled to look upon himself as having deviated from the path of sanity. He had, moreover, been making love to women, more or less harmlessly, for so long, that an acquired cynicism informed him that these things were all a matter of degree, the end of the affair requiring a greater or less absence of the object of attraction. Man of the world, he acutely recognised that without a sustained and zealous siege he had no chance with Jocelyn; he salved his vanity by thinking that, with it, success was possible--even probable. In this way rebuff lost its sting, painful exertion became unnecessary.

The girl had a great attraction for him. She was always “in the picture,” her graceful personality was never marred by her surroundings. She had no taint of “insularity.” Without self-sufficiency, she seemed sufficient unto herself. All this appealed to the cosmopolitan in him. It was not too much to say, that she more nearly approached the _persona grata_ of his fastidious imagination than any woman he had ever met. She was therefore dangerous, he reflected in her absence--in her presence he did not reflect at all, want of reflection in the presence of women having become habitual to him. At this particular moment he was profoundly puzzled.

He had found Jocelyn singularly absorbed, silent and unresponsive. She pleaded headache. Certainly she looked ill, but he had a disquieting feeling that there was something on her mind. She had sat dumb while he talked with her aunt, detailing gossip of the inner life of Monte Carlo, which the soul of that lady loved. When he spoke to her, she was _distraite_, and returned monosyllabic answers. He was not vain enough to attribute her manifest discomfort to his own presence, and, for the first time since he had known her, he came away without feeling the power of her attraction, experiencing instead a sensation of uneasiness and of curiosity, that was purely benevolent, and very characteristic.

He had dined at the café, and sat in the dusk waiting till the time for his return train.

A man walking hurriedly on the other side of the street went up through the gates of the hotel garden. Nielsen followed the figure negligently with his eyes, and saw it pass and repass the end of the verandah, and then stand motionless for a long time in the shadow of a tree. The faint inquisitiveness he felt in his movements died away presently in the countless, inconsequent reflections of one not compelled by circumstances to think steadily of any given thing. He yawned, looked at his watch, and throwing away his cigarette stepped out of the circle of light into the road leading to the railway station. As he did so, the man came suddenly down the garden path at a great pace, gesticulating with his clenched hands, passed close without seeing him, and hurried away in the direction of the town, muttering to himself. Nielsen stopped abruptly in recognition. He called after him--

“Hallo! Legard!” The man turned.

“Ah!” he said, “Good-night!”

His face was momentarily in the full glare of the café lights; the hat was slouched over it, but the line of his moustache was visible, black against the lower part. The movement of turning had seemed mechanical, the words sounded leaden. In another moment he was gone, walking faster than before, his shoulders hunched up to his ears in a way that suggested pain, and his hands thrust suddenly deep into his pockets as if to keep them still.

Nielsen stood looking after him.

“When a man talks to himself aloud, it is bad!” he said to himself. “When he talks, and clenches his hands _comme ça_, ah! that is very bad! That man is suffering!” He shrugged his shoulders, pointing mechanically with his stick after the figure.

“Yes, yes--I know. I do not like him, but I am sorry for him--he suffers verry grreatly.” He shook his head gravely, as he turned into the station.

* * * * *

That supreme point, when for a time human nature recoils before suffering in a great lassitude, had not been reached by Giles Legard. Four days of torture had left him still capable of feeling.

Into his bedroom in the little grey villa the moon struck keenly and coldly; there was no other light. He had thrown off coat and waistcoat, and sat motionless, with his head bent on his arms folded across the back of his chair. Upon the table in front of him was a torn envelope and a half sheet of paper, folded and re-folded with innumerable creases. The room was empty of all other furniture except the bed, beside which, on a great rug of deerskin stretched over the bare panelling of the floor, Shikari lay, his head between his paws. In the bright moonlight all colours in the room gave way in a harsh contrasting of black and white, and outside the sea gleamed through the tops of the ghostly olives in silver ridges. Every now and then a loosened tendril of creeper swayed with the breath of a newly-born sea wind across the widely-opened casement. From his wife’s bedroom underneath came an occasional sound of hollow coughing.

Legard sat with his back turned to the window. The moonlight over the sea brought to him an agonising spasm of memory.... In return for an hour of mad, intoxicating passion, he had bartered everything! He took up the sheet of paper, looking at it dully as he twisted it in his hands. He had bartered everything! The thought was old, it seemed to him centuries since he had first realised it. Everything! There was not a shred left to him of his honour, or his self-respect; that did not seem to matter, he was beyond feeling it. But in that single hour of madness he had taken the happiness of the woman he loved--and with it his own--taken it, as it were, in his two hands, and flung it into the dust. Taken her well-being, her reserve, and her pride, and flung them brutally into the dust.

He read the letter mechanically again and again.

“I have tried, but I cannot see you. When you came near everything seemed to cry out at me. It is better that you should keep away--for you and for me. I cannot answer for myself.” That was all. No hope! No single stroke of the pen brought relief to his aching spirit.

He held the sheet of paper to catch the full of the moonlight; and her face rose above it, as he had seen it the one time since that night--a delicate, oval face, cold as the moonlight itself; averted and unseizable eyes, profound and dark, with the lids drooping over them and circles of black beneath; lips drawn together, cruelly set; cheeks colourless; between the brows a slight furrow; and over all the waving dark hair gathered back from the low forehead.

As nearly as a man may read the soul of a woman, he had read hers, with a vision supernaturally sharpened by pain. He had seen in her face the shame, the agony of violated reserve, the bitter wounding of her pride--the pride, which for no single moment had foreseen that ending. He had known that she was thinking, “I am a thing apart, but for the accident of concealment, a thing of shame.” He had recognised that in the reaction of her feelings there was a physical repulsion to himself, a desire to hurt because she had been hurt. He had understood what it was costing her to go about as usual, and keep her vizor down to the world. He had known in her a courage he did not possess himself, an untameable pride. All this he had seen in that face. That which he had not seen was the mysterious weakness of woman, the greatest and the most pitiful of all qualities.

He rose from his seat, went into his dressing-room, and poured some brandy from a shooting flask. When he had drunk it he came back again to his bedroom. He walked up and down once or twice softly, clenching his hands, and mechanically taking care that his footsteps made no noise on the bare, slippery floor. Then he put his hand into the breastpocket of his coat, took out a revolver, and dropped it into the table-drawer. As he did so he gave a queer little laugh. He had carried it about with him for three days, and it was like parting with an old friend. It had been comforting to feel the weight of it in his pocket, with the thought that there was always that escape from the grinding torture of the slowly moving hours.

He shut the drawer with a bang of finality. The brandy had cleared his brain, and he saw that for several reasons the end was not that way. He must see it out. He began to perceive also that it was a grimmer and a harder thing than he had imagined for a human being to abandon hope; and yet, as the bang of the shut drawer echoed in the silent room, he felt that it was even more grim and hard to go on living. He knew all the time that, of those two thoughts, he would never find out which was the truer, because of a deeply-rooted instinct, cowardly-heroic, which would drive him to live while he was sane.

He threw himself at full length upon the floor, pressing his face into the soft rug, and Shikari woke up to lick his outstretched hands. The moonlight passed on over the house and left him there.

Some time in the dense darkness he crawled to his knees, and bowed himself against the bed in a prayer, unconvinced, faithless, and voiceless, a mere straining after rest in the hard pressure of his face against the cool covering of the bed, after peace in the touch of his knees upon the floor.

He fell asleep so. When he woke it was with a vague contempt of himself that had no sting in it, and, half-dressed as he was, he fell asleep again upon the bed in sheer exhaustion.