'I WANT to love you, Colin.'

She moved a little closer to him and put her hand up, timidly, to his shoulder. His breath came quickly, but he did not lose his self-control. He knew that he must go gently with her. She drew her hand down his coat sleeve and let it rest like a snowflake on his--a contrast in its smallness and whiteness to the great brown hand beneath. She looked at that, smiling whimsically, and he saw her smile, and reddened. But he did not know that she found a pleasure in the sight of his hand--scrupulously kept, the nails as well trimmed as a bushman's nails can be, while showing the traces of manual labour.

'How ridiculous they are together!' she said softly 'But I like your hand, Colin. It's different from the other men's hands.'

He was glad she said 'the other men's,' and not 'the other man's'.

Through all the gusts of pa.s.sionate tenderness that went out to her, there was always rankling the thought of 'that other man.'

CHAPTER 3

They had only one more talk, in the real sense, before their marriage, and that was an unpremeditated but natural outrush of the vague jealousy which slumbered at the core of McKeith's love. It was on the last evening, and it made an ineffaceable impression upon him.

They were standing, after dinner, close together by the bal.u.s.trade of the terrace.

It was a clear night, with a young moon, and the stars set deep in blue so dark that the sky gave an impression of solidity. The air was full of scents and of a soft balminess, with the faint nip of an early May in the Southern hemisphere.

He had folded her light scarf round the child-like shoulders. The touch of his big hand stirred her--it had not often done so in that peculiar way. It roused something in her that she had thought dead or drugged to sleep, and took her back for an emotional moment to a certain late summer evening at Hurlingham, when she and Willoughby Maule had stood in the garden together under the stars. There came to her an almost fierce reaction against that moment. She felt a distinct emotion now, but it was different--less tumultuous, and bringing her a soft sense of enfoldment.

She slipped her hand gently into McKeith's, and they remained thus for nearly a minute without speaking. He was the first to break the silence.

'Bridget,' he said impetuously, 'we're going to be husband and wife to-morrow. It makes me tremble, darling--with happiness and hope, and with fear, too. What have I done, a rough Bushy like me--to win a woman like you? Well you know how I think about that. And I don't believe in a man belittling himself to the woman he loves, though it's just because he loves her so that he feels unworthy of her. And then it comes over me again--badly sometimes--how little I really know of you, and of your life, and of your feelings towards the other men you must have had to do with--one other man in especial, may be, that you've loved, or may have thought you loved. That's what I want to know about, my dear.'

Her face was turned from his as she answered:

'What's the good of your knowing, Colin? Whatever there was is past.'

'But IS it past. Over and over again, I've started to ask you and have pulled back. Now it's got like a festering sore in my heart, and I'm afraid it will go on festering unless I'm satisfied. There WAS somebody in especial--a man you cared for and might have married if he had been a finer sort of chap than he turned out to be?'

She looked at him sharply.

'How do you know? Has Rosamond Tallant been telling you?'

'No,' he said, with complete candour. 'There wasn't a word of that sort pa.s.sed between us--and I wouldn't have heeded it if there had.'

'Joan, then? No, I'm sure Joan Gildea wouldn't have talked behind my back.'

'You may bet your life on that. Joan hasn't said anything about whatever love-affairs you may have had.'

'Every girl has had love-affairs. I'm no exception to the rule. There's been no real harm in them. Let them lie--buried in oblivion. They're not worth resurrecting.'

'No, but,'--he persisted--thinking all the while of that letter--'Bridget, I must ask you this one thing. Is there any man in the world you care for more than you care for me? I know,' he added sadly, 'that you don't love in the way I love you--in the way I'd like to be loved by you. I know that's too much to expect--yet.'

The melancholy note in his speech touched her.

'I told you that I do WANT to love you, Colin--only I can't help being what I am,' she said softly. She looked up at him in the pale brightness of the thin moon and myriad stars. He stood with the faint illumination from the open windows of Government House upon his fine head and his neat fair beard. It intensified the gleam in his earnest blue eyes, while it softened his angularities and bush roughness, and as she looked up at him, she could not help feeling what a splendid fellow he was! What a MAN! So much finer than that other man to whom she had nearly given herself! Ah, she had had an escape! Under all his show of romantic adventure, his ardent protestations, his magnetic charm, that other man had been utterly sophisticated, worldly, self-interested. He had shown this in his money-grabbing, in his disloyalty both to the woman he had professed to love, and to the woman he had married for her fortune. Thinking of him in this way, Lady Bridget felt that in time she might come to care a great deal more for Colin McKeith.

He caught up her last words.

'Yes, I know that you WANT to love me Biddy, and I hope with all my heart and soul that you will--or else--' he broke off, his face darkening.

'Or else--what?'

'I don't know. It would be h.e.l.l. I can't think such a thing at this moment. If it comes--well, I'll face it as I've had to face other ugly things. Don't let us speak of the possibility!'

She sensed some quality in him that she had not realised before.

'You frighten me a little, Colin. It's as if I may any day come up before something I wasn't prepared for; and yet--I rather like it.'

He smiled at her.

'I'm glad you like it, anyway. You seem to me such a child, Biddy, though you are always telling me you are such an old soul. I can't for the life of me make out what you mean by that.'

'Oh! A soul that has come back and back, and has lived a great many--perhaps naughty--lives.'

'H'm! Yes! Well, one life is good enough for me, and as we can't prove the other thing, what does it matter anyhow? I wouldn't want you in another life if you were going to be quite a different person. I want you as you are in this one. And so I reckon would any man who has ever been in love with you. Let us go back now to what I was asking you.

Biddy, there WAS a man--one man that you did care for? You've admitted as much.'

'Yes--I suppose there was.'

'And not so long before you came out here?'

'I suppose that's true too.'

'Bridget!--do you know what's been festering in my mind--the thought that you might be marrying me in a fit of pique--a sort of reaction.

Biddy--tell me honestly, my dear, if it's anything of that sort?'

She seemed to be considering.

'I don't quite know how to answer you, Colin--if I'm to be absolutely honest. And I'd always rather tell you the truth.'

'Thank G.o.d for that. Let there be truth between us--truth at any cost.'

'You see,' she said slowly. 'My whole coming out here--everything I've done lately, has been done in reaction against all I've done and felt before.'

'Would you have married that man--if everything had been on the square?'

'What do you mean by "on the square"? I've done nothing to be properly ashamed of!'

'No--no--I was thinking only of him, Biddy, did you love that man?--really love him?'

'I'm not sure yet whether I'm capable of what you'd call loving really.

I had a violent attraction to him,'--he remembered the phrase--'I confess I did feel it dreadfully when he married someone else. Now it doesn't hurt me. And of course, he has gone out of my life altogether.

I'm glad he has, and I hope he will keep on the other side of the world.'

'Well, let it stop at that.' He drew a breath of relief. 'I don't believe you really cared for him. If you had, you couldn't take it as you do. I'll never bother you again about that man. And, oh, my dear--my dear--it doesn't seem to me possible that you shouldn't come to love me, when I love you as I do--with my whole heart and soul--I worship you, Biddy. And I'll not say again that I'm unworthy of you--a man who loves a woman like that CAN'T be unworthy.'