By RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
SID NORTON could not recall a time when he had not been in love. From his earliest boyhood, falling in love had been a habit with him; and his heart, if he might be said to retain possession of an organ that was always being lost to some new face, was a sort of sentimental graveyard, a veritable necropolis of dead love-affairs—dead, but unforgotten; for, incorrigible lover as Sid was, his memory would sometimes go flitting from grave to grave, like a butterfly, philandering even with the past.
In spite of these excursions, and in defiance of the apparent paradox of the statement, Sid Norton found himself in love—for the first and last time. This he said of himself gravely, not only in private to the lady who was credited with this marvel but also in public to his intimate friends. He said it, and there was no doubt that he meant it.
Now Rosamund Lowther was an exceedingly clever young woman, an adept in the management of the emotional male, and easily Sid Norton’s match in experienced flirtation. The friends of both watched the progress of their sudden volcanic attachment with cynical expectancy, and when, after six months of a trance-like courtship, during which it might be said that the infatuated pair had never taken their eyes off each other, Sid Norton suddenly sailed for Europe, you can imagine the sensation and comment it caused. Neither vouchsafed any explanation; their engagement remained intact, at all events there was no formal bulletin to the contrary; and the thing was a piquant mystery to all but the two concerned. For them it was their whimsical secret.
One late summer afternoon a week or two before, the two enamoured ones had been seated side by side in the old orchard of the Lowther country home. Both were very evidently happy, but Sid’s face was absolutely idiotic with bliss. The something so “utter” in Sid’s look touched Rosamund’s elfish sense of humour, and, though she was just as much in love herself, she could not refrain from a gay little teasing laugh.
“Is he so happy, little boy?” she said, lifting up his chin, and looking whimsically into his face.
Sid’s answer was silent and long, and when it was ended, Rosamund continued, holding his face at arm’s length, and looking into it with quizzical seriousness.
“But, aren’t you just a little frightened sometimes?”
“Frightened?”
“Yes! when you think that—it’s for life!”
“Ah! thank God,” answered Sid rapturously.
“No, but think—for life! No more pretty flirtations, no more butterfly by-paths—only me—me—till the end. Be honest—doesn’t that make cold shivers run up and down your back?”
“You angel,” exclaimed the abject one, attempting to answer her as before.
“No, no; listen to me. I am serious. Do you realise that you are in a cage, my cage, for life—that escape is impossible—that it will be in vain to beat on the bars—that only I have the key—that you are there for better or for worse—that you are there, I repeat, for life—that there is no help for it—nothing to do but make the best of it—do you realise that?”
The sense of certitude, of absolute possession, which Rosamund, comedian as she was, infused into her voice, was irresistible, and Sid laughed, laughed for joy that the girl he loved had such attractive brains as well.
“What a delightful fancy!” he exclaimed.
“Fancy, do you call it? Try and escape, my boy, and you will see how much of a fancy it is.”
“Divine, adorable fact, of course, I mean. O Rosamund, how glad I am that it is true. Let us take the key and throw it into the river. I never want to be free again as long as I live!”
“No use if you did!” with a saucy toss of the confident little head.
“My poor boy,” she went on presently, in a caressing motherly tone, “I really can’t help being rather sorry for you, you who have been so used to your freedom; you such a wicked, wicked wanderer. How will you ever endure it? Tell me the truth now—man to man, as they say—right at the bottom of your heart, aren’t you just a tiny bit wistful sometimes for the old freedom?”
“Never,” answered Sid, with portentous sincerity.
“Never! Quite sure? Don’t you ever feel a little homesick for some one of your old loves, and wonder what it would be like to see her again?”
Sid shook his head with emphasis.
Rosamund, and for that matter, all Sid’s world, was well acquainted with the main lines of his amatorious history, and knew something of the various divinities who had figured in it. Besides, Sid, a promising young lawyer, with known literary leanings, had put his heart on record beyond withdrawal by the publication of a volume of verse entitled “The Nine Muses.” The volume consisted of love-verses addressed to various ladies to whom Sid had from time to time, or simultaneously, been devoted; and though, of course, they figured under fanciful names, their identities were no secret to the learned gossips of Sid’s circle. This book had been a thorn in Sid’s side since he had met and loved Rosamund, a thorn which she sometimes amused herself by using to his discomfiture. She had the volume with her this afternoon, and as she turned to it, with malicious merriment in her eye, Sid knew that she meditated some of her merciless raillery.
“I do wish, Rosamund, you would let me forget that wretched book. I wish it were at the bottom of the sea. I’ll have the whole edition destroyed. I will, to-morrow….”
“O that would be sacrilege!” interrupted Rosamund, mockingly; “besides, I should still have my copy.”
“I will manage to get it from you,” retorted Sid, making a clutch at his printed past.
“Even if you should,” answered Rosamund, retaining possession of the book, “I should still remember some of the poems by heart. They are so beautiful…. This, for instance, to ‘Myrtilla’….”
“Do be quiet, Rosamund….”
“No, I insist, … I don’t think you know how beautiful they are yourself. Listen:
I know a little starlit spring—
Last night I leaned upon the brink,
And to the dimpled surface pressed
My hallowed lips to drink.
And now the sun is up, and I
Am with a dream athirst;
O was it good to drink that spring,
Or was the spring accurst?
Accurst, that he who drinks therein
Shall long, even as I,
To drink again, yet never drink
Again until he die.
“Truly now,” Rosamund continued, “doesn’t hearing that make you a bit thirsty again for your little starlit spring? It is not too late. I am sure that if you were to go back to her, she would let you drink all you want…. I happen to know that she isn’t married yet?”
Sid sat dumb under the raillery, with set, gloomy face. Turning over a page or two, Rosamund began again.
“Here is one of my favourites,” she said, ignoring Sid’s silence. “It is to Meriel:
Was there a moon in the sky,
Was there a wind in the tree,
I only remember that you and I
Sat somewhere with you and me.
I only remember the joy—the joy—
And the ache of going away:
O little girl, here’s a little boy
Will love you till Judgment Day.”
As she finished reading this, Rosamund let the book close in her lap, and her mood seemed suddenly to have changed to a thoughtful seriousness. She repeated, as if to herself, the last two lines.
“O little girl, here’s a little boy
Will love you till Judgment Day—”
she said over slowly, as though weighing every word; and there was something in her voice that might have suggested that in playfully pressing this thorn into Sid’s side, she had unexpectedly pricked herself. Sid sat on in the same attitude of patient gloom. Presently, observing her silence, he turned to her.
“Are you finished?” he said.
“Yes!” she answered. “Yes!” with a certain aloofness in her voice, which Sid, with the painful sensitiveness of a lover, did not miss.
“Is there anything the matter?” he asked.
“No,” she answered, speaking slowly, and with the same serious quietness of tone, as though she were thinking hard. “No! but I’ve got an idea. That last poem has set me thinking….”
“Curse the poem,” exclaimed Sid desperately, seizing hold of the volume.
“You can take it,” said Rosamund, to his surprise, “I don’t think I want to see it again either.”
“But surely, you are not allowing it to trouble you. It is all past and gone, and one cannot have reached thirty without some experiences. Even you, dear….”
“O yes, I know, but there’s a peculiarly deep ring about those last two lines, Sid—
O little girl, here’s a little boy
Will love you till Judgment day—
whatever you may say, you meant them pretty badly, Sid,” she added, turning upon him eyes whose recent mirth was replaced by a questioning gravity.
“Of course I meant them at the time, or thought I meant them. Besides, poetry always exaggerates,” answered Sid, writhing with explanation.
“No, Sid, don’t belittle your old feelings. That doesn’t help. Rather the reverse,” and then once more she repeated the lines musingly as if to herself. Then she turned to Sid with a sudden decision of manner, as if her mind was made up.
“Sid, that was a very deep feeling. How do you know that it is not still alive?”
Sid made the usual despairing protestations. Rosamund regarded them but little.
“I wonder,” she continued, “if you really know your own mind. I wonder. You think you love me now, but then you thought you loved her then—till Judgment Day. Sid! Now see, I’m going to tell you my idea….”
Sid looked at her expectantly, waiting with anxious eyes. Then, with something of a return to her gayer manner, she went on:
“You remember what we were saying just now about your cage. Well, I’m going to let you out for a month or two.”
She waved aside a remonstrant ejaculation from Sid.
“Yes! and you are to spend the last breath of freedom in finding out if there is still any truth left in these old impassioned statements. That is, you will go to Myrtilla, and see if you still want to drink of that ‘little starlit spring,’ and you will go to Meriel and see, well … about Judgment Day! And, while you are on pilgrimage, there are one or two other ‘muses’ it might be well to make quite sure about.”
Sid interrupted with impatient incredulity, not believing her serious. But the more he expostulated, the firmer she became.
“I declare, the idea grows on me!” she said. “I wonder it never occurred to me before. Now that it has, I must insist on your carrying it out—for my sake. When I think of your nature, in the light of all this printed experience, I should not really feel safe otherwise. Of course, your cage is strong, I know. So long as I care to keep the key, your escape is impossible. But then, I should not like to find some day in the future, that, secure as you were, you were in secret pining to be off after some little starlit spring on the other side of the bars. So, Sid, I’m sorry, but you must pack up right away, and go on pilgrimage.”
In vain Sid protested that it was preposterous, that he was incapable of seriously undertaking any such fanciful absurdity. Rosamund remained obdurate. She would never marry him, she said, till he had subjected himself to the proposed ordeal.
“Besides, if you refuse,” she continued, “I shall always feel that you were afraid of it, secretly afraid that the temptations of it would be too strong for your faith.”
To this Sid made a singularly blundering retort, which he tried in vain to take back as he uttered it, to the effect that, however certain one was of one’s love, there was no sense in playing with fire. This settled the matter.
“Fire!” laughed Rosamund mercilessly—he admitted the danger then!
After that there was no argument—and this is the explanation of Sid Norton’s sudden departure for Europe.
Say what you will, the test was a little unfair. So Sid Norton said to himself, as he paced the moonlit deck in mid-ocean, and strove to analyse his feelings toward the situation in which Rosamund’s whim had placed him. He thought of the lady of old time who had thrown her glove into the arena. Of course, no lover could decline such a challenge … but he hastily dismissed the image as unfortunate, for he was not allowed to admit the existence of the lions. To recognise any possibility of danger in his present so-called ordeal was in itself an unfaithfulness. To admit that there was any element of an ordeal in his fantastic adventure was to fail right away. To confess any temptation in the circumstances was a sufficient backsliding. And yet would any man in a like situation, dealing honestly with his own thoughts, declare confidently that there was no danger here to a true love? The answer of theory and idealism would of course be that there could evidently be none. The words “true love” imply that, and a certain old writer has disparaged “a fugitive and cloistered virtue” that shrinks from taking the open field against temptation. Which is all very beautiful, but another saying as to the relation of discretion to valour comes nearer to the truth of a human nature, which, with the best will in the world, is apt to be sorely tripped up in the very moment of its strength by some half-forgotten weakness.
Sid Norton’s love for Rosamund Lowther was no less real and deep than he deemed it. She was for him the divine event toward which his whole life had deviously moved. To lose her love would be loss irremediable. She was that final joy and enchantment which he had pursued from face to face, yet found only at last in hers. She was the fairy tale of life come true. He had no wish, no hope, no aim, beyond her. With his meeting her life had at last seriously begun. Its future success was to be the making perfect this love which she had brought him. This was the serious truth about Sid Norton; it represented the serious responsible self which had at length asserted its domination over the warring minor selves that had preceded it—the self he seriously wished to go on being. But alas! in this multiple being called man those minor selves, though conquered and perhaps mortally wounded, are apt to die hard, and occasionally one of them, in a last dying flash of vitality, will gain the upper hand, and, in some fleeting but fatal moment, tragically belie the self that is real and lasting. Sid, who was learned in his own psychology, knew himself, or rather him-selves, too well to be vaingloriously confident that no such disastrous aberration on the part of one or other of his dead or dying selves might not in some unguarded moment betray him. He did not, of course, seriously fear it, and it seemed impossible indeed, as out there on the midnight ocean he lifted up his eyes to the moon, as though she were the silver spirit of his love.
Still, like a wise soldier, he prayed hard that night not to be led into temptation.
In this spirit of discreet valour, he had, on embarking, after making a survey of his fellow-passengers, congratulated himself on the singular unseductiveness of the array feminine. As in the days of Odysseus, the siren remains one of the most dreaded dangers of those that go down to the sea in ships, and Sid’s previous crossings had not been uneventful in this respect.
On coming on deck rather late next forenoon, Sid was immediately aware, before he traced his impression to its cause, of a subtle attractive change in the human atmosphere—just, as in early spring, suddenly, one morning, we come out into the air, and know, before we have seen them, that there are flowers in the garden. So poor Sid’s terribly sensitive instinct warned him immediately of the unexpected presence of a beautiful woman. Casting his eyes along the prosaic line of deck chair mummies, he saw that his instinct had not been at fault. A beautiful woman had blossomed there in the night. With the vividness of almond stars among the bare boughs, she shone among the other passengers, an apparition of fragrance, all dew and danger. One of the chairs had remained vacant up till this morning. It was the chair next to Sid’s own, and it was with a quick thrill in which pleasure was quaintly blended with alarm, that he realised that it was in this chair that the apparition was sitting.
“So it is,” sighed Sid, with an inward smile, “that heaven leads us not into temptation.”
He did not seat himself at once, but walked the deck several turns, partly to reconnoitre the fair enemy, and partly with the heroic resolve of seeking out the deck steward and having his chair removed to a less perilous position. This extreme measure, however, struck him as both eccentric as well as cowardly, and the reconnaissance finally decided the matter. After all, the voyage so far had been dull enough, and his love for Rosamund surely called for no such fanatical self-denial.
So presently he found himself seated by the side of the apparition, pleasantly enveloped in a delicate exhalation of violets, and luxuriously conscious of the proximity of a beautiful, breathing woman. For a while the first conventional reserves protected him. He took up his book and appeared absorbed in it. She, too, was reading. One of those modern novels sufficiently artistic and emotionally speculative to arouse one’s interest in the personality of its reader, and to afford a ready freemasonry of communication between strangers not unwilling to make each other’s acquaintance.
After a brief preoccupation with literature, both readers lost interest in their books at the same moment, and both, with a bored sigh, allowed them to decline upon their steamer-rug knees, with an artfully synchronised sympathy. Then their eyes met, and two of a kind recognised each other and smiled. Nature had created them fully equipped flirts. They only needed to look at each other to know it; and, straightway, headlong, with the good excuse of marine ennui upon them, they followed the law of their natures—Sid, however, with a strong brake on, a restraint, which, with the comprehension of sorceresses, his companion felt and interpreted, and inwardly resolved to overcome.
“Strange, how everything is a bore at sea! even the most interesting book,” said the siren.
“Even the sea,” assented Sid.
“Have you really the courage to say that you think the sea ridiculously overrated?”
Sid had.
“I love courage,” she answered, looking at him in a laughing, challenging way.
“You necessitate it,” was the answer, according to the eternal formula; and so the sea began to be less of a bore, and continued being less and less so each succeeding day, till the last evening of the voyage had come.
They were nearing the sad shores of the shamrock, and they had escaped from the after-dinner promenade, and had made themselves cosey near the bow of the ship, in some nook of windlass and sailing tackle close to the bulwark, where they could watch the phosphorescent spume of the ship’s course, and speak of it, if necessary.
So far, though not entirely satisfied with himself, Sid had combined faithfulness with flirtation in a blending so adroit that the ache of his conscience was just bearable; and, he told himself, that Rosamund, of all women, would be the last to withhold her admiration from so brilliant a feat of sentimental tight-rope walking. Any student of the ars amatoria knows how fine is the line between faithfulness and unfaithfulness, finer far than a hair from the beloved’s head; and Sid had the right to congratulate himself with his deft-footed adhesion to that moonbeam of a path. The siren was too expert herself in such perilous experiment not to have observed and admired Sid’s achievement, and, naturally, she was piqued by it to a special effort of conquest this last evening. Not, of course, that she really cared for Sid, any more than he cared for her. It was merely two flirts making a trial of strength, the old eternal duel between man and woman; but, for once, the man had most to lose—and that Sid kept reiterating to himself: for this momentary diversion he might lose Rosamund, lose his whole life, and the meaning of it—for this!
The siren, who had not known him for three days without knowing all about him, estimated accurately with what she had to contend. For the woman flirt there is no incentive like—Another Woman! It was not this quite attractive man whose scalp she was after. It was the woman to whom he was so ridiculously constant that she burned to humiliate.
Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way. I said that the line is fine, and often, to sincere observers, the adherence to it has a somewhat technical value. Was it casuistry or simplicity in Sid that made him feel that his faith was still intact so long as he had not actually—kissed the siren? We live in a legal, concrete world, a world that judges us by our definite completed actions rather than by our feelings, or our cunningly restricted evasions of the penalty. A kiss—whatever the motive—is a concrete decisive act. A kiss is evidence. The desire to kiss, however powerful, is not. Now Sid had not yet kissed the siren. According to any external tribunal, Sid was still faithful to his Rosamund.
This unkissed kiss, so to say, was the key of the castle; at all events from the siren’s point of view. Sid’s heart, to tell the truth, ached with a sincerer standard; but, at all events, be its value what it might, this unkissed kiss was the redoubt on which he had hoisted his colours, to fly or fall. And it was to be no easy fight, he realised, as the siren nestled herself into a comfortable position in that sheltered nook of windlass and sailing-tackle, and phosphorescence and gold-dust stars, and the importunate surge of the sea.
He braced himself with the thought of Rosamund as with a prayer. He crossed himself with the remembrance of his last look as they had parted. It may sound laughable that anyone should arm himself so cap-à-pie against a kiss, yet the stakes in any contest are represented by some apparently trivial symbol. A kiss was the symbol here; and the siren, at all events, did not under-rate its symbolic value. She fought for it as though it had been the cross of the Legion of Honour, fought with all the delicate skill of an artist, and she laughed softly now and again as she came near winning, winning—the kiss that belonged to another woman.
She was terribly beautiful was the siren, terribly everything that a seductive woman can be. The atmosphere about her was a dreamy whirlpool, of which the vortex was her lips, and Sid felt himself being drawn closer and closer to that vortex. How he longed to throw up his arms and drown—but, instead, suddenly, brusquely, rudely, he sprang up.
“I won’t,” he cried abruptly, and left her.
It was not gracefully done, but it was the only way he could do it. Victories are seldom graceful. In the thick of battle it is occasionally necessary to be impolite. Suddenly Sid had seen, as it were, luridly embodied the moment he had told himself might some day come—the moment of temptation. Here was he face to face with it at last, one of those terrible moments of trial which divide the past from the future, and challenge us to decide then and there, once and for all, what we really mean about ourselves; one of those moments that cannot be postponed, but must be met and fought just how and when they come; and, as Sid realised all the moment meant, those perfumed alluring lips so dangerously near to his filled him with a veritable terror, and his heart almost stopped beating with dread of succumbing. Poor Sid, he had been so accustomed to take such kisses as they came with a light heart; but now suddenly, as in a lightning flash, he seemed to see the meaning of those mysterious standards by which the faith of men and women has been immemorially judged, a meaning he had never suspected before; and he saw, too, the divine beauty of them; and the vivid revelations thus made to him, not a moment too soon, had given him that strength to cry out “I won’t,” and tear himself away.
As with a burning heart, he arraigned himself before himself in the solitude of his stateroom, it seemed at first that his victory had been but a poor one, a victory only in name. He had desired to kiss the siren—it was impossible to deny that; and surely the very wish to do so was unfaithfulness; and the only reason that had restrained him—was it not the fear of losing Rosamund? No, it was more than that, and with the realisation that it was really more than that—a real aspiration, however feeble, toward the better way of loving, a repugnance for the old way, and a genuine preference, very young and tender indeed as yet, for a finer ideal—he grew a little comforted. Yes, it had been a victory, a greater one than it had seemed. He had not really wanted to kiss the siren, after all, in spite of compromising appearances—not really deep down. It was only an old habit of the surface that had momentarily got the better of him! And, though it may sound like casuistry, it was not so. Poor boy, it might not have seemed a brilliant victory to the looker-on. But flirtation is a habit that dies hard, and, till he had known Rosamund, the mere idea of faithfulness to a woman had never remotely entered into his mind. This passage with the siren, however, had proved him so far on the road to regeneration as to have developed an actual preference for being faithful! He was himself surprised at the feeling, and it filled him with a certain awe, made him almost a little frightened, though curiously happy. Did he really love one woman like that at last? Just one woman, out of all the women in the world? Yes, just one woman. It was a wonderful feeling.
The temptation of the siren had been the gross one of the senses. The finer and subtler trial had yet to come. Rosamund had so far compromised with her original decree as to consent to limit Sid’s ordeal to one out of his nine muses. She would be content, she said, with his seeing Meriel, she, whom you may remember he was to love till Judgment Day; for Rosamund was right in thinking that, of all Sid’s previous feelings, his love for Meriel had been most serious. Indeed, it had been a feeling apart from all others, and it had always shone wistfully in Sid’s memory as a lost sacred thing that had come into his life too early, before his heart had been ready for it. A magic gift of loving it had been, but he had taken it carelessly with the rest, and realised all it had been only when it was far away. He recalled looks out of Meriel’s eyes which told him long after that she had known he was not ready for the love she could give him, and, unconsciously, the occasional thought of this old shortcoming of his had prepared him for—Rosamund, of whom Meriel came to seem in his mind a beautiful prophecy. Thus old love dies that new may live, or rather lives on in giving its life to the new. Certainly, Sid could never have loved Rosamund more had he not loved Meriel so much.
Yet, what if it should prove that Rosamund in her turn had only been developing him toward repossession of his old dream! Love moves in a mysterious way. How strange if this interval of experience had been meant to bring him back, at last worthy of them, to Meriel’s arms at last. He could not deny that his love for Rosamund had been haunted sometimes by moonlit memories of Meriel’s face, though he could with equal truth say that the new love was greater than the old one, because of its inclusion of stable human elements which his fairy dream of Meriel had lacked. Meriel had been a dream-woman, but hardly a human woman; but Rosamund was both. Yet, almost without his knowing it, there had been lurking in the background of his consciousness a vague curiosity—it was hardly more—as to what it would seem like to see Meriel again; what her face would seem like, how her voice would sound. He did not for a moment fear the result, yet he sometimes felt that he would like to try the experiment; but all these feelings had been of the very shadowiest, hardly rippling the surface of consciousness; so when Rosamund had suddenly made her odd proposal, they had seemed phantom nothings indeed compared with the aching reality of a month’s exile from her side.
All that had been Meriel had passed into Sid’s love for Rosamund. Meriel herself could only be a ghost, however beautifully visible and audible, a fair house of dreams from which the dreams had departed. Yet, for all that, it was not without some agitation that Sid found himself at length in the quaint little seaside town, whence a ferryboat would take him to a village across the bay, high over which Meriel and her mother lived, looking over the sea. Her ghost began to grow more and more luminous with memories, as a pale moon fills with silver as the night deepens. He stood on the deck of the little boat, and as it drew near to the landing-place he could see clearly on the hillside the old white house with its trellises and its terraced gardens descending the hill. He could see plainly the little bower where one summer evening they had sat together, and she had suddenly put her hand in his and said, “My life is in your hands. ”
His heart beat fast as his memories crowded in upon him, and it made him almost frightened to think that in a few short moments he would really be looking at her again. He felt as though he were about to see someone who had been dead a long time, and had come to life again startlingly, as in dreams. Then there suddenly floated over the water from the village music very mournful and sweet, and he could see a long line of dark figures moving slowly up the tortuous village street. At the first strains of the music a great foreboding had swept through Sid’s heart. What if Meriel were dead, and, as in a fairy tale, he had come to meet her—carried through the streets to the tomb. The idea pleased his fancy, with its picturesque pathos; but no! that music was not for Meriel. It was a soldier’s death music, yet its solemn valedictory chords seemed to Sid’s ears to be playing the requiem of a great passion, fitly ushering him with their voluptuous melancholy to the grave of his beautiful love.
He took his way thoughtfully up through the climbing village, but there was a subdued excitement in his face which Rosamund might have construed as an undue eagerness to face his coming ordeal. At last he turned the well-known corner of the lane, and there was the house, facing the aery infinite of the sea. How poignantly familiar it all was; yet, why instantly did something tell him, something blank about the expression of the very windows, that—Meriel was not there.
Her mother met him as he turned into the garden, but Meriel was not there. She had been married—yesterday.
That is what the music had meant.
“So ‘Judgment Day’ is married!” said Rosamund, when Sid had once more returned to his cage to report himself. “It’s too bad of her,” she continued, “for she has quite spoiled my little plan. My test has been no test at all.”
“It was all I needed,” answered Sid. He was thinking of the siren, about whom, like a wise lover, he had kept silence. Too much confession is a dangerous weakness, and we are usually the best judges of our own actions. The siren had been but the process of an experiment. All that concerned Rosamund was the result.
“I wish I could have seen you, Sid, when you heard about ‘Judgment Day.’ I’d give anything to know what you really felt; but, of course, you’ll never tell me.”
Sid smiled, but said nothing.
“Weren’t you disgusted with her for daring to do it without your consent? The bare idea of a woman who had loved you daring to have any new life on her own account! I am sure you had pictured her spending her days looking dreamily over the sea—waiting for your return. I know you had.”
As a matter of fact Sid had, and his feelings on hearing of Meriel’s marriage had been exceedingly mixed. It was perhaps as well that Rosamund had no record of them.
“Won’t you tell me what you really felt—just for fun? You can be honest, I shan’t mind.”
But Sid was too wise to be honest. He knew where these heart-to-heart confessions, just for fun, were apt to lead.
“I had no feelings. My one thought from beginning to end was to get back to my cage—and never go out of it again.”
“You were relieved then? You had been a little frightened, eh? Yes, you know you had, and you were glad to be let off the ordeal—now, weren’t you?”
Sid certainly had been, but he steadily refused to be drawn. And then Rosamund suddenly changed her tactics.
“But you haven’t asked anything about me during your retrospective pilgrimage!” she said.
“You!” exclaimed Sid, a look of peculiarly masculine surprise coming into his face.
“O yes, me! I suppose you imagined me during your absence sitting here, à la ‘Judgment Day’, docilely awaiting your return.”
“What do you mean, Rosamund?” asked Sid, anxiously.
“I mean that you seem to forget that I, too, had made previous engagements for Judgment Day. When you were off pilgrimaging in the past—what was to hinder me from doing the same?”
“O Rosamund, you didn’t.”
“Didn’t I! I’d often wondered what it would be like to kiss Jack Meriden again, so your being away on your own affairs gave me a good opportunity.”
“You kissed him!” exclaimed Sid, in angry astonishment, all his masculine proprietorship in his face.
“Why not!” she answered, nodding her head affirmatively.
“You—kissed—him,” Sid repeated, grasping her wrists fiercely.
Rosamund shook herself free, with mocking laughter.
“Ah! there talks the man—the lord of creation. The man is to be allowed to go off and flirt with whom he pleases, but the woman, O no! While the man is engaged in these pleasing diversions, she must sit at home faithfully darning his socks. No, sir! I did kiss Jack Meriden, and it was a very nice kiss, too.”
“You did,” repeated Sid slowly, in an anguish of jealousy.
“You must remember, Sid,” she answered mockingly, “what a serious affair it was between us—quite a Judgment-Day affair. Those old memories die hard, as you, of all people, should know.”
“I only know that you—kissed—Jack—Meriden,” repeated Sid, rising to his feet; “and that I am going.”
He strode savagely across the lawn, making as if to leave the garden. Rosamund let him go some distance, and then called him back.
“Why should I come back?” he asked, sulkily.
“I want to tell you something,” she said in a caressing voice.
He came back to her side, and stood there.
“Well, what is it?” he asked stiffly.
“You must sit down. I can’t tell you that way.”
Sid sat down, with non-committal aloofness. She put her arm around his rigid shoulders, and whispered.
“You are the greatest goose that ever lived. I never kissed Jack Meriden. I love you—not as a man loves, but as a woman loves.”
“I love you the same way,” answered Sid, the storm-clouds suddenly swept from his face, “there is only one way of—loving. The other thing needs another name.”
And, with that, Rosamund snapped to the door of his cage forever.