it was in the following june that caragh found himself preparing for his final visit to ballindra. lettice nevern and her brother had been in town for some six weeks during the winter, and his business affairs having straightened themselves, and enabled him to anticipate a sufficiently plausible income for two people, he had asked arthur nevern formally for his sister's hand.
nevern understood the proposal and the man who made it so slightly, that, displeased by the prospective loss of an admirable housekeeper, he began to pile up, breathlessly, inflated obstacles to its fulfilment.
caragh heard him out.
"it's a confounded nuisance, of course, for you," he said; "these sort of things always are for somebody. that's why i've waited to get my side of it square before bothering you, so that you'd know for certain from the outset when your sister would be leaving you. we're not going to decide where to settle till we can look at places together, so that won't make for delay, but she refuses to be hurried over her kit, as it's to provide six months' food for some pet school of hers in ballindra, so i've given her till july. the only question is, would you sooner the wedding was over there or here?"
arthur nevern stared at the younger man's directness, but he discovered speedily that he might stare as he pleased.
the little that lettice had was in her own right, and caragh had asked no more with her from the man before him.
nevern was thus left with nothing to refuse but his consent, and that, apparently, was of no consequence to those who asked it.
he gave it at last as ungraciously as he could, and agreed later that the ceremony should be in london, in order to share its expense with an aunt of his who had offered her house.
he twitted caragh with his impatience, and caragh smiled.
his smile touched a point of humour unlikely to tickle a future brother-in-law, but he suggested that a man's hurry to be married seldom appealed to his friends.
he might have added that the reasons for it in his own case did not appeal to himself, but they were too serious and disconcerting even for his sense of the ridiculous.
they were, put briefly, the possible attraction of another woman; and it was his despairing self-contempt that goaded him to dispose, so high-handedly, of any obstacles to his marriage with lettice nevern.
it was particularly characteristic of him, that while reflecting almost every hour on some fantastic chance that might avert their union, he applied his foot with an almost unmannerly intolerance to any of the reasonable hindrances in its way. that was of a piece, no doubt, with his marked aversion from any form of moral hedging, and his preferred fondness for an honest lie.
he had stayed at budapest for three days after his confession, to keep ethel vernon company till her husband's engagements were at an end. he had asked her if she wished him to remain, and she had said indifferently that he must please himself. he did not please himself; but he did not go.
the terms on which they met and spoke were strained and curious.
caragh in his perverse fashion found them stimulating. ethel made not the faintest reference to what he had told her, but she treated him neither with the familiar plainness into which they had fallen, nor as a common and secure acquaintance.
there was about her bearing an extraordinary delicacy and distance such as a girl uses to deny herself to the man to whom, unconscious, she has, proudly and irretrievably, given her heart.
having exhausted the interests of the town, they spent the time in long drives to the places she expressed a wish to see in the country; an occupation not pre-eminently adapted to an evasive relationship.
on the fourth morning she said to him, simply:
"i can't stand it any more. you must go."
"have i been a brute?" he asked.
"no," she said; "you've been extremely nice. perhaps that's why. i don't know: i've tried not to know. perhaps i may feel differently when i meet you again. i can't say. i daresay not. but i can't go on as we are. you don't mind my asking, do you? i don't think you wanted to stay. why should you? i can make up something to henry about your going: there's always the telegraph to account for things. and don't write, please, unless i ask you to. i'm going to try to forget you—if i can. what's the use of doing anything else? i've been a fool enough as it is."
there was in caragh's eye the remembrance of days when it seemed as if that desired oblivion would be his to seek, days when his devotion had appeared to be quite obliterated from her memory by the surprising splendour of some one else.
that was, of course, the last thing of which he could remind her, but it was, too, the last he could forget.
he had accepted the real misery of those days without murmuring; at least he might use their ancient poison as an anodyne now. not to excuse, nor to exalt himself, but to dilute, as it were, now that he had to drink it, the cup of her indignation.
it made the sour of that seem, at least, not quite so much of his own mixing to remember that, twice at least in the last two years, he might have drifted from her on occasions when her attention was too engrossed by another to notice that he was gone.
he would have liked in the friendliest fashion to have led her memory to those days, to show her how dispensable he was; only, he reflected one never knew how a woman would take that sort of consolation: he was not very sure if he would value it himself.
and when it came to his good-byes, he felt anything but fitted for the consoler's office. he had come to pest bitterly grieved to lose a friend; but he left it like a baffled lover.
the shy strangeness of her manner and the proud distance in her eyes had brought again about ethel vernon the glamour of days when his heart beat quicker at her approach.
with every hour of indifference the old provocation in her presence grew. he felt that to stay would be but to yield to it again, and he heard with a dismal relief her sentence of exile.
he set himself rigidly to pack his things, yet where to go he could not determine. that invisible bond which tied him to the future made all the difference to a man's plans. the east beckoned—he was half way to it—and the green harbours of the asian coast.
but that meant money, as he knew of old, and it was lack of money that had deferred his vow. in all honesty he could not spend upon himself what he had half pledged to another. he turned disconsolately towards home.
he drifted about during the autumn from one shoot to another. it was his ordinary occupation for three months of the year, yet now it seemed unusual. it seemed outside a new continuity of existence which had begun for him.
but he devoted himself to settling his affairs, and was able in consequence, as has been narrated, to propose himself as an unwelcome relative when arthur nevern was in town.
caragh had looked forward doubtfully to meeting lettice again, under conditions which might suit her so much less well as a background than the open downs and the sea. but his forebodings were gloomy enough to be disappointed.
she had some art in dress, as he had noted from her evening frocks, and if in the daytime she seemed for town sometimes a trifle decorative, it was a decoration on which those who passed her bestowed an approving eye. she needed a certain amplitude to set her off. the big fur collar, and the expansive hat made the modelling of her face seem daintier than it was. with her hat off, her prettiness owed everything to the fair fine hair that curled almost to her eyes. maurice had once brushed it back in a playful moment, but he never risked the disillusionment again. he needed every aid to his attachment that artifice could supply.
she seemed, on her part, to be aware that her beauty required management. it was not of a sort to be worn with a disdainful indifference as to how it might strike you.
it had to be looked after, or it didn't strike you at all. she kept a conscious eye upon her fringe, and she left occasionally, as caragh had noticed, a harmless confederate with her complexion on the lapels of his coat.
he brushed off the powder with a mixed sense of regret and gratitude. he was sorry she needed it but, since the need was there, better she had the wit to know it and the ambition to look her best. better far than to suppose with an arrogant vanity that to his infatuation nothing could come amiss.
of what, indeed, came most amiss she probably had not a suspicion. the breezy life of ballindra had admitted few mental interests, and, in the country, character, which it develops, often has the air of mind. in lettice, whose character was charming, the resemblance had deceived caragh. but in london, where character sinks and mind is on the surface, his estimate was corrected.
he endured dreary plays in which she delighted; he sat bravely at ballad concerts; he listened without a groan to her enthusiasms upon domestic art; he tried to read the books she praised.
the outlook was depressing. the same fear touched him that must have fallen upon babel. here, for life was a companion who on its finer interests would never understand a word he said. he might, perhaps, bring her painfully to a sense of her unsuspected ineptitude; might make her mechanically conscious of the commonplace; might shake her faith in ignorance as a standard of art. he might in fact taint the sincerity of her admirations. that was all.
in art—and art is but the tenderer appreciation of life—they would never use the same language, never understand each other's speech. the marvelling thrill of familiar strangeness, of joyous apprehension, which the subtlety of art can wake in the initiate, they would never share.
that was not much to miss, perhaps; but, when caragh tried to think of something its absence would not affect, he stopped in dismay.
yet apart from her appearance, in spite of her deficiencies, the girl's love wrought a change in him of which, with surprise, he found himself aware.
it became less of an effort to return her caresses, and her kisses no longer made him feel guilty of impersonating her lover.
they never woke in his veins even a momentary ardour, and now, his pulse beat under them no whit the faster, but he had begun to grow susceptible to the quickened throb of hers. the shy renouncement of her self-restraint, as she let the secrets of her being pass, between queer little moods of resistance, into the strangeness of his power, moved him to a sense of protective tenderness he had never felt before.
