“Ah! you don’t understand. Yes, she’s clever, open-minded, popular, and—well, charming. But you don’t know what it is to have moved, breathed, existed, and even triumphed in the mere smother and froth of life—the brilliant froth. There thoughts, sentiments, opinions, feelings, actions too, are nothing but agitation in empty space—to amuse life—a sort of superior debauchery, exciting and fatiguing, meaning nothing, leading nowhere. She is the creature of that circle. And I ask myself if she is obeying the uneasiness of an instinct seeking its satisfaction, or is it a revulsion of feeling, or is she merely deceiving her own heart by this dangerous trifling with romantic images. And everything is possible—except sincerity, such as only stark, struggling humanity can know. No woman can stand that mode of life in which women rule, and remain a perfectly genuine, simple human being. Ah! There’s some people coming out.”
He moved off a pace, then turning his head: “Upon my word! I would be infinitely obliged to you if you could throw a little cold water …” and at a vaguely dismayed gesture of Renouard, he added: “Don’t be afraid. You wouldn’t be putting out a sacred fire.”
Renouard could hardly find words for a protest: “I assure you that I never talk with Miss Moorsom—on—on—that. And if you, her father …”
“I envy you your innocence,” sighed the professor. “A father is only an everyday person. Flat. Stale. Moreover, my child would naturally mistrust me. We belong to the same set. Whereas you carry with you the prestige of the unknown. You have proved yourself to be a force.”
Thereupon the professor followed by Renouard joined the circle of all the inmates of the house assembled at the other end of the terrace about a tea-table; three white heads and that resplendent vision of woman’s glory, the sight of which had the power to flutter his heart like a reminder of the mortality of his frame.
He avoided the seat by the side of Miss Moorsom. The others were talking together languidly. Unnoticed he looked at that woman so marvellous that centuries seemed to lie between them. He was oppressed and overcome at the thought of what she could give to some man who really would be a force! What a glorious struggle with this amazon. What noble burden for the victorious strength.
Dear old Mrs. Dunster was dispensing tea, looking from time to time with interest towards Miss Moorsom. The aged statesman having eaten a raw tomato and drunk a glass of milk (a habit of his early farming days, long before politics, when, pioneer of wheat-growing, he demonstrated the possibility of raising crops on ground looking barren enough to discourage a magician), smoothed his white beard, and struck lightly Renouard’s knee with his big wrinkled hand.
“You had better come back tonight and dine with us quietly.”
He liked this young man, a pioneer, too, in more than one direction. Mrs. Dunster added: “Do. It will be very quiet. I don’t even know if Willie will be home for dinner.” Renouard murmured his thanks, and left the terrace to go on board the schooner. While lingering in the drawing-room doorway he heard the resonant voice of old Dunster uttering oracularly—
“… the leading man here some day. … Like me.”
Renouard let the thin summer portiere of the doorway fall behind him. The voice of Professor Moorsom said—
“I am told that he has made an enemy of almost every man who had to work with him.”
“That’s nothing. He did his work. … Like me.”
“He never counted the cost they say. Not even of lives.”
Renouard understood that they were talking of him. Before he could move away, Mrs. Dunster struck in placidly—
“Don’t let yourself be shocked by the tales you may hear of him, my dear. Most of it is envy.”
Then he heard Miss Moorsom’s voice replying to the old lady—
“Oh! I am not easily deceived. I think I may say I have an instinct for truth.”
He hastened away from that house with his heart full of dread.
VI
On board the schooner, lying on the settee on his back with the knuckles of his hands pressed over his eyes, he made up his mind that he would not return to that house for dinner—that he would never go back there any more. He made up his mind some twenty times. The knowledge that he had only to go up on the quarterdeck, utter quietly the words: “Man the windlass,” and that the schooner springing into life would run a hundred miles out to sea before sunrise, deceived his struggling will. Nothing easier! Yet, in the end, this young man, almost ill-famed for his ruthless daring, the inflexible leader of two tragically successful expeditions, shrank from that act of savage energy, and began, instead, to hunt for excuses.
No! It was not for him to run away like an incurable who cuts his throat. He finished dressing and looked at his own impassive face in the saloon mirror scornfully. While being pulled on shore in the gig, he remembered suddenly the wild beauty of a waterfall seen when hardly more than a boy, years ago, in Menado. There was a legend of a governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, on official tour, committing suicide on that spot by leaping into the chasm. It was supposed that a painful disease had made him weary of life. But was there ever a visitation like his own, at the same time binding one to life and so cruelly mortal!
The dinner was indeed quiet. Willie, given half an hour’s grace, failed to turn up, and his chair remained vacant by the side of Miss Moorsom. Renouard had the professor’s sister on his left, dressed in an expensive gown becoming her age. That maiden lady in her wonderful preservation reminded Renouard somehow of a wax flower under glass. There were no traces of the dust of life’s battles on her anywhere. She did not like him
