Chapter VIII

Liddiard was returning to Somerset in three days' time. Before their parting that day above Penlock, he had urged for their next meeting as soon as she was free of household duties the following day.

"Only three more chances," said he, "of being with you, and when I thought most I understood you, understood you so well that my arms seemed the only place in which to hold you, I find I understand you less than ever. You don't ask what it means. You don't say "What are we going to do?" I've told you I love you, but you don't appear to want to know anything about the future. It seems to me that any other girl would be wanting to know what was to become of her. You're so quiet--so silent."

Climbing back down the cliffs, holding on to one of the pine trees in her descent, Mary had turned and smiled at him. It was an inscrutable smile to Liddiard. It was not that he tried to understand it. It was, as it penetrated his mind, that he knew it to be quite impossible of comprehension. More it was as if Nature had smiled upon him, than the mere bright light of the parting of a woman's lips. In its illumination it seemed to reveal to him the vision of himself in a strange powerlessness. He felt like some tool of a workman as it lies idle on the bench, waiting the moment for those hands to pick it up and give it purpose. So it appeared to him might a carpenter have smiled with pleasure at the chisel he knew his hands could wield for perfect work. All the more that he had meant to say dried into silence on his lips.

"I don't want to know anything about the future," said Mary as she walked on, "I know you love me and I think I understand what you love and why you love. I know I'm not sophisticated. I've no experience of the world. I don't pretend to understand these things in the light of experience. I haven't got any wisdom about it, but I feel it's not unreal or impossible for you to love me and love your wife as well. I don't feel I want you to say you don't love your wife in order to prove that you love me. I think it would finish everything in my mind if you said you didn't love her. I'm not thinking about the future, because there is no future as you used the word. I don't ask what we're going to do, because I know what we're going to do."

"What are we going to do?" he asked.

"In two days' time," she replied, "you're going home to Somerset and I'm going to stay on here in Bridnorth."

Suddenly she turned again swiftly and barred his passage as he came along down the cliff path behind her.

"Why don't you understand me?" she asked abruptly. "It all seems so plain. Don't you realize how I've been brought up? I know there's a certain sacredness in marriage. I've been trained to regard it as one of the most unbreakable ties in the world. I wouldn't dream of expecting or claiming anything from you, however much you said you loved me. Whatever happened, I shouldn't dream of that. You're half afraid of it. I can see you are. I don't love you any the less because I see it. It seems natural you should be afraid. It seems to me most men would be with most women. But you needn't be."

She had let him be drawn close to her again. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked with all his passion into her eyes.

"That's the first time you've said you loved," he whispered. "Do you know what it sounded like to me?"

She shook her head.

"Like an organ playing in an empty church. My God! You're wonderful."

Then she had let him kiss her again; again, herself, being the one to draw away when emotion rose to stifling in her throat. Again was he obedient to her wishes.

They had arranged to meet the next morning on the cliffs. Liddiard had promised he would bring lunch.

"They'll think we're up at the Golf dub," he had said, for already in their minds had appeared that urgency for deception which should secure for them the certainty of their meeting.

But the next morning, after her conversation with Jane, Mary dispatched a note to Liddiard at the White Hart Hotel.

He tore it open with fingers that had dread in them.

"Meet me on the beach at 11.30," she had written, "near the bathing tents. Don't bother about lunch."

With a sudden chill it struck him. It was all over. The night had brought her calmer thoughts. Emotion was steadied in her now. She was not going to trust herself alone with him again. It was all finished. On an impulse he took a piece of paper and wrote on it--

"Have been called back to Somerset this morning; so sorry I shall have no opportunity to say good-by."

When he had written, he stared at it, reading it again and again.

Was not this the best? It was too wonderful to be true; too wonderful to last. He knew himself well enough to realize that any prolonged deception with his wife would be impossible. He had the honesty of his emotions; the courage of his thoughts. He could not practice deception with any ease. Wonderful as it was, could any wonder compensate for the utter wrecking of his home? It was not as though in the wonder that had come to her, she refused to recognize his wife. That was what brought him such amaze of her. Any other woman he would have expected to be jealous, exacting, cruel. She appeared to be none of these.

What, in the name of God, was it she wanted? The sudden wish to understand, the sudden curiosity to find out communicated with the energy in his fingers. He tore up the note he had written and flung the pieces away, sending back the messenger without a reply.

It was playing with life, a sport that in other men earned for them his deepest contempt. It was playing with life, yet the call to it was greater than he could or cared to resist.

At half-past eleven, he went down to the beach where all the inhabitants of Bridnorth sat and whiled away their time till the midday meal, and there he found her, dressed with more care and more effect than she had ever been before. She was lying down under the warm shade of a brilliantly colored parasol and, as he approached her, it seemed to him that there was a deeper beauty in her then than in any other woman in the world.

"Why this?" he said as he sat down. "Here of all places? Do you know very nearly I didn't come?"

"Yes, I was afraid of that," she replied. "Afraid for a moment. Not really afraid. But I couldn't explain in my note."

"What is it then?"

"We were seen yesterday."

"Who by?"

"My sister--Jane."

"Seen where?"

"By that gate in the bracken."

He screwed up his mouth and bit at a piece of loose skin on his lip.

"What's she going to do?" he asked.

"Nothing. What can she do? No one must know if we meet again--that's all. We must be more careful."

He stared at her in bewildered astonishment.

"I don't understand you," he muttered. "Sometimes you seem like adamant when your voice is softest of all."

She looked at him and with her eyes told him that she loved him and with a little odd twist of her lips, which scarcely she herself knew of, she kissed his lips and at that distance at which he sat from her, he felt the kiss like a leaf falling with a flutter to the ground.

"What do you mean--we must be more careful?" he said thickly. "What do you mean by that? How can we be more careful? Where else could we hope to be more alone than on those cliffs--unless--unless--" His breath clung in his throat. He swallowed it back and went on in a hoarse voice--"Unless it were the time we went there."

"What time?" she asked.

"Night," said he. "Midnight and all the hours of early morning."

She lay back on her cushion beneath the warm shadow of her parasol and closed her eyes, saying nothing while he sat staring at the curved line of her throat.