"At least not in devotion to you, so you will not miss him. And you have nothing to regret, if he _was_ the fashion--thanks to Maria--for awhile; a young girl should never suffer detrimentals to hang about her. Which of your beaux do you fancy most?" she demanded in a tone elaborately playful.

"Which? Oh, Lord Hunsdon is the better man, and Mr. Abergenny the better beau."

"I don't fancy that Mr. Abergenny's attentions are ever very serious,"

said Mrs. Nunn musingly. "He certainly could make any young lady the fashion, but he is fickle and must marry fortune. But Hunsdon--he is quite independent, and as steady as"--she glanced about in search of a simile, remembered West Indian earthquakes, and added lamely--"as the Prince Consort himself." Then she felt that the inspiration had been a happy one, and continued with more animation than was her wont: "You know they are really friendly."

"Who?"

"The Prince Consort and Hunsdon. It is almost an intimacy."

"Why not? I suppose a prince must have friends like other people, and there are not many of his rank in England. I do not see how the Prince Consort could do better than Hunsdon. The Queen certainly must approve."

"I am glad you so warmly commend Hunsdon. I have the highest respect for him myself--the very greatest."

"If you mean that you wish me to marry him, Aunt Emily--have you ever reflected that it might cool your friendship with Lady Hunsdon? She does not like me and I am sure would oppose the match. I may add, however, that Lord Hunsdon has so far made no attempt to address me."

"I don't fancy you are more blind than everybody else in Bath House. I am gratified, indeed, to see that you are not. You are mistaken in thinking that your marriage with Hunsdon would affect my friendship with Maria. It is true that she has conceived the notion that you have an independent spirit, and is in favour of Mary Denbigh at present; but she is too much a woman of the world not to accept the inevitable.

And we have been friends for five-and-forty years. She could not get along without me. I have not been idle in this matter. I sing your praises to her, a.s.sure her that you have never crossed my will in anything. Last night I told her how sweetly you had submitted to buying that coloured gown, and to wear that fillet--it becomes you marvellously well. I have also told her what a tractable daughter you were."

"I couldn't help myself. I had not a penny of my own----"

"One of the unwritten laws of the world you now live in is to tell the least of all you know. The fact remains. You _were_ tractable--submissive. You never made a scene for poor Harold in your life."

"He wouldn't have known if I had."

"Well, well, I am sure you are submissive, and always will be when your interest demands it. I admire a certain amount of spirit, and your difference from all these other girls, whatever it is, makes you very attractive to the young men. Abergenny says that you are an out-of-door G.o.ddess, which I think very pretty; but on the whole I prefer Hunsdon's protest: that you are the most womanly woman he ever set eyes on."

"It has more sense. I never read in any mythology of indoor G.o.ddesses.

Opinion seems to differ, however. Lady Mary said to me yesterday: 'You are so masculine, dear Miss Percy. You make us all look the merest females!'"

"Mary Denbigh is a cat. You know she is a cat. She would give Maria many a scratch if she caught Hunsdon. But she will not. It is all in your own hands, my dear."

Anne did not make the hoped for response. She did not even blush, and Mrs. Nunn continued, anxiety creeping into her voice: "You need never be much thrown with Maria. She would settle herself in the dower house which is almost as fine as Hunsdon Towers. In town she has her own house in Grosvenor Square. Hunsdon House in Piccadilly--one of the greatest mansions in London--would be all your own."

But she could not command the attention of her niece again, and permitting herself to conclude that the maiden was lost in a pleasing reverie, she subsided into silence, closed her eyes to the beauty of land and sea, and also declined into reverie, drowsy reverie in which pictures of herself in all the glory of near kinship to a beautiful and wealthy young peeress, were mixed with speculations upon her possible luck at cards that night. She had lost heavily of late and it was time she retrieved her fortunes.

At dinner and in the saloon later the talk was all of the poet's disappearance. Some held out for the known eccentricities of genius, others avowed themselves in favour of the theory that respectable society had risen to its surfeit the night before. The natural reaction had set in and he was enjoying himself once more in his own way and wondering that he had submitted to be bored so long. Anne went to bed her mind a chaos of doubt and terror.

CHAPTER XVI

She would have overslept again had it not been for the faithful maid with her coffee. She sprang out of bed at once, a trifle disburdened by the thought of a long ramble alone in the early morning, and, postponing her swim in the tanks below until her return, dressed so hurriedly that had hats been in vogue hers no doubt would have gone on back foremost. She was feverishly afraid of being intercepted, although such a thing had never occurred, the other women being far too elegant to rise so early, and a proper sense of decorum forbidding the young men to offer their escort.

The sea had never been a stiller, hotter blue, the mountain more golden, the sky more like an opening rose. But she strode on seeing nothing. Sleep had given her no rest and she was in a torment of spirit that was a new experience in her uneventful life. She recalled the angry astonished eyes of Warner as she danced with all the abandon of a girl at her first ball. No doubt he had thought her vain and frivolous, the average young lady at whose approach he fled when he could. No doubt he thought her in love with Abergenny, whose habit of turning female heads was well known to him, and upon whom she had certainly beamed good will. No doubt he had expected her to manage to pa.s.s him, knowing his diffidence, and offer her congratulations; whereas she had taken no notice of him whatever. No doubt--oh, no doubt--he had rushed off in a fury of disappointment and disgust, and all the good work of the past weeks had been undone, all her plans of meeting him a year hence as handsome and fine a man as he had every right to be, were frustrated. She had for some time past detected signs that apathy was gradually relieving a naturally fine spirit of its heavy burden, that his weary indifference was giving place to a watchful alertness, which in spite of the old mask he continued to wear, occasionally manifested itself in a flash of the eye or a quiver of the nostril. Anne could not doubt that he loved her, inexperienced in such matters as she might be. However she may have kept him at a distance her thoughts had seldom left him, and he had betrayed himself in a hundred ways.

Had she been half interested in Hunsdon or Abergenny and they had been so unreasonable as to rush off and disappear merely because she had enjoyed her first ball-room triumphs as any girl must, she would have been both derisive and angry at the liberty; but Warner inspired no such feminine ebullition. He was a great and sacred responsibility, one, moreover, that she had a.s.sumed voluntarily. That he had unexpectedly fallen in love with her but deepened this responsibility, and she had betrayed her trust, she had betrayed her trust!

She left the road suddenly and struck upward into one of the sheltered gorges, sat down in the shadow of the jungle and wept with the brief violence of a tropical storm in summer. Relief was inevitable. When the paroxism was over she found a shaded seat under a cocoanut tree and determined not to return to the hotel for breakfast, nor indeed until she felt herself able to endure the sight of mere people; and endeavoured to expel all thought of Warner from her still tormented mind. In the distance she could see Monserrat and Antigua, gray blurs on the blue water, she could hear the singing of negroes in the cane fields far away, but near her no living thing moved save the monkeys in the tree tops, the blue b.u.t.terflies, the jewelled humming-birds. On three sides of her was a dense growth of banana, cocoanut and palm trees, cactus, and a fragrant shrub covered with pink flowers. Almost overhanging her was the collar of forest about the cone, and the ever-faithful snow-white cloud that only left the brow of Nevis to creep down and embrace her by night. She took off her bonnet and wished as she had rarely done before that she might never leave this warm fragrant poetic land. It was made for such as she, whose whole nature was tuned to poetry and romance, even if denied the gift of expression--or of consummation! Why should she not remain here? She had some money, quite enough to rent or even build a little house in one of these high solitudes, where she could always look from her window and see the sapphire sea, that so marvellously changed to chrysoprase near the silver palm-fringed sh.o.r.e, inhale these delicious scents, and dream and dream in this caressing air. She hated the thought of London. The world had no real call for her. She wondered at her submission to the will of a woman who had not the least comprehension of her nature. On Nevis would she stay, live her own life, find happiness in beauty and solitude, since the highest happiness was not for her; and at this point she heard a step in the jungle.

She sprang to her feet startled, but even before the heavy leaves parted she knew that it was Warner. When he stood before her he lifted his hat politely and dropped it on the ground, and although he did not smile he certainly was sober.

The relief, the reaction, was so great that the blood rushed to Anne's brow, the tears to her eyes. She made no attempt to speak at once and he looked at her in silence. Perhaps it was the mountain solitude that gave his spirit greater freedom; perhaps it was merely the effect of the beneficial regime of the past two months; there might be another reason less easy of a.n.a.lysis; but she had never seen him so a.s.sured, so well, so much a man of his own world. His shoulders were quite straight, his carriage was quite erect, there was colour in his face and his eyes were bright. Nor did the haunted, tormented expression she had so often seen look out at her. These were the eyes of a man who had returned to his place among men. He looked young, buoyant.

She spoke finally. "I--we all thought--you disappeared so abruptly--_what_ am I saying?"

"You believed that I had returned to the pit out of which you--you alone, mind you--had dragged me. You might have known me better."

"You should not put such a burden on me. You have character enough----"

"Oh yes, I had character enough, but doubtless you noticed when you first met me that I had ceased to exercise it. I went to the dogs quite deliberately, and, with my enfeebled will and frame, I should have stayed there, had not you magnetised me into your presence, where I was forced to behave if I would remain. Later, for reasons both prosaic and sentimental, I remained without effort. I have never had any real love of spirits, although I loved their effect well enough."

"You must have loved that oth--that woman very much."

"She made a fool of me. There is always a time in a man's life when he can be made a complete a.s.s of if the woman with the will to make an a.s.s of him happens along coincidently. I fancied myself sated with fame, tired of life, a remote and tragic figure among men--the trail of Byron is over us all. That was the moment for the great and fatal pa.s.sion, and the woman was all that a malignant fate could devise; not only to inspire the pa.s.sion, but to transform a frame of mind arbitrarily imagined into a sickening reality. From a romantic solitary being I became a prosaic outcast. Nor could I recall anything in the world I had left worth the sacrifice of the magician that gave me brief spells of happiness and oblivion. n.o.body pretended that it injured my work, and I remained in the pit."

"And your self-respect? You were satisfied? Oh surely--you looked--when I first saw you----"

"I loathed myself, of course. My brain was unaffected, was it not? I abhorred my body, and would willingly have slashed it off could I have gone on writing without it. Either I compelled my soul to stand aside, or I was made on that plan--I cannot tell; but my inner life was never polluted by my visible madness. I have been vile but I have never had a vile thought. I fancy you understand this. And when I am writing my ego does not exist at all--my worst enemies have never accused me of the egoism common to poets. I have lived in another realm, where I have remembered nothing of this. Had it been otherwise no doubt I should have put it all at an end long ago."

Anne had averted her eyes, caught in one of those inner crises where the faculties are almost suspended. She faltered out: "And after--when I come back next year, shall I find you like this?"

He paused so long before replying that she moved with uncontrollable excitement, and as she did so his eyes caught hers and held them.

The intensity of his gaze did not waver but he said, unsteadily, until his own excitement mastered him, "I have a.s.sured myself again and again that I never should dare to tell you that I loved you; that I was not fit to approach you; that I must let you go, and try to live with the memory of you. But now I remember nothing but that I love you. I can speak of what I have been, but I cannot recall it. I feel nothing but that I am a man in the restored vigour of youth in the presence of the woman I want. If love is egoistical then I am rampant this moment with egoism. If I could have the bliss of marrying you I never should return to the past even in thought. I am a poet no longer. I am nothing but a lover. I remember nothing, want nothing, but the perfection of human happiness I should find with you."

The words poured from his lips before he finished, and the trained monotony of his voice had gone to the winds. His face was violently flushed, his eyes flashing. "I dare!" he cried exultingly. "I dare! It would be heaven of a sort to have broken through those awful barriers even if you told me to go and never enter your presence again."

"I cannot do that! I cannot!" And then she flung her arms out from her deep womanly figure with a gesture expressive as much of maternal yearning as of youthful and irresistible pa.s.sion. "I will stay with you forever," she said.

CHAPTER XVII

Several hours later Miss Ogilvy, who was riding slowly along the road after a call at Bath House, suddenly drew rein and stared at an approaching picture. She had a pretty taste in art, had Miss Medora, and had painted all her island friends. Never had she longed more than at this moment for palette and brush. A tall supple figure was coming down the white road between the palms and the cane fields, clad in white, the bonnet hanging on the arm, the sun making a golden web on the chestnut hair. Never had the Caribbean Sea looked as blue as this girl's eyes. Even her cheeks were as pink as the flowers in her belt.

She seemed to float rather than walk, and about her head was a cloud of blue b.u.t.terflies. Miss Ogilvy had seen Anne striding many a morning, and it was the ethereal gait that challenged her attention as much as the beauty of the picture.

They were abreast in a moment, and although Miss Ogilvy prided herself upon the correctness of her deportment, she cried out impulsively, and with no formal greeting: "What, in heaven's name, dear Anne, has happened? I never saw any one look so beautiful--so--happy!"

"I am going to marry Byam Warner," said Anne.

Miss Ogilvy turned pale. She had intended to scheme for this very result, but confronted with the fact, her better nature prevailed, and she faltered out,

"Oh--oh--it is too great a risk! No woman should go as far as that. We are all willing to help him, but that you should be sacrificed--you--you of all----"