________________________________________________
_ The breakfast-things were not yet cleared away. A plate freaked with
fine strains of marmalade, an empty toast-rack, a broken roll--these
and other things bore witness to a day inaugurated in the right
spirit.
Away from them, reclining along his window-seat, was the Duke. Blue
spirals rose from his cigarette, nothing in the still air to trouble
them. From their railing, across the road, the Emperors gazed at him.
For a young man, sleep is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not
for him in the night any so hideous a phantasmagoria as will not
become, in the clarity of next morning, a spruce procession for him to
lead. Brief the vague horror of his awakening; memory sweeps back to
him, and he sees nothing dreadful after all. "Why not?" is the sun's
bright message to him, and "Why not indeed?" his answer. After hours
of agony and doubt prolonged to cock-crow, sleep had stolen to the
Duke's bed-side. He awoke late, with a heavy sense of disaster; but
lo! when he remembered, everything took on a new aspect. He was in
love. "Why not?" He mocked himself for the morbid vigil he had spent
in probing and vainly binding the wounds of his false pride. The old
life was done with. He laughed as he stepped into his bath. Why should
the disseizin of his soul have seemed shameful to him? He had had no
soul till it passed out of his keeping. His body thrilled to the cold
water, his soul as to a new sacrament. He was in love, and that was
all he wished for . . . There, on the dressing-table, lay the two
studs, visible symbols of his love. Dear to him, now, the colours of
them! He took them in his hand, one by one, fondling them. He wished
he could wear them in the day-time; but this, of course, was
impossible. His toilet finished, he dropped them into the left pocket
of his waistcoat.
Therein, near to his heart, they were lying now, as he looked out at
the changed world--the world that had become Zuleika. "Zuleika!" his
recurrent murmur, was really an apostrophe to the whole world.
Piled against the wall were certain boxes of black japanned tin, which
had just been sent to him from London. At any other time he would
certainly not have left them unopened. For they contained his robes of
the Garter. Thursday, the day after to-morrow, was the date fixed for
the investiture of a foreign king who was now visiting England: and
the full chapter of Knights had been commanded to Windsor for the
ceremony. Yesterday the Duke had looked keenly forward to his
excursion. It was only in those too rarely required robes that he had
the sense of being fully dressed. But to-day not a thought had he of
them.
Some clock clove with silver the stillness of the morning. Ere came
the second stroke, another and nearer clock was striking. And now
there were others chiming in. The air was confused with the sweet
babel of its many spires, some of them booming deep, measured
sequences, some tinkling impatiently and outwitting others which had
begun before them. And when this anthem of jealous antiphonies and
uneven rhythms had dwindled quite away and fainted in one last
solitary note of silver, there started somewhere another sequence; and
this, almost at its last stroke, was interrupted by yet another, which
went on to tell the hour of noon in its own way, quite slowly and
significantly, as though none knew it.
And now Oxford was astir with footsteps and laughter--the laughter and
quick footsteps of youths released from lecture-rooms. The Duke
shifted from the window. Somehow, he did not care to be observed,
though it was usually at this hour that he showed himself for the
setting of some new fashion in costume. Many an undergraduate, looking
up, missed the picture in the window-frame.
The Duke paced to and fro, smiling ecstatically. He took the two studs
from his pocket and gazed at them. He looked in the glass, as one
seeking the sympathy of a familiar. For the first time in his life, he
turned impatiently aside. It was a new kind of sympathy he needed
to-day.
The front door slammed, and the staircase creaked to the ascent of two
heavy boots. The Duke listened, waited irresolute. The boots passed
his door, were already clumping up the next flight. "Noaks!" he cried.
The boots paused, then clumped down again. The door opened and
disclosed that homely figure which Zuleika had seen on her way to
Judas.
Sensitive reader, start not at the apparition! Oxford is a plexus of
anomalies. These two youths were (odd as it may seem to you) subject
to the same Statutes, affiliated to the same College, reading for the
same School; aye! and though the one had inherited half a score of
noble and castellated roofs, whose mere repairs cost him annually
thousands and thousands of pounds, and the other's people had but one
little mean square of lead, from which the fireworks of the Crystal
Palace were clearly visible every Thursday evening, in Oxford one roof
sheltered both of them. Furthermore, there was even some measure of
intimacy between them. It was the Duke's whim to condescend further in
the direction of Noaks than in any other. He saw in Noaks his own foil
and antithesis, and made a point of walking up the High with him at
least once in every term. Noaks, for his part, regarded the Duke with
feelings mingled of idolatry and disapproval. The Duke's First in Mods
oppressed him (who, by dint of dogged industry, had scraped a Second)
more than all the other differences between them. But the dullard's
envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they
will come to a bad end. Noaks may have regarded the Duke as a rather
pathetic figure, on the whole.
"Come in, Noaks," said the Duke. "You have been to a lecture?"
"Aristotle's Politics," nodded Noaks.
"And what were they?" asked the Duke. He was eager for sympathy in his
love. But so little used was he to seeking sympathy that he could not
unburden himself. He temporised. Noaks muttered something about
getting back to work, and fumbled with the door-handle.
"Oh, my dear fellow, don't go," said the Duke. "Sit down. Our Schools
don't come on for another year. A few minutes can't make a difference
in your Class. I want to--to tell you something, Noaks. Do sit down."
Noaks sat down on the edge of a chair. The Duke leaned against the
mantel-piece, facing him. "I suppose, Noaks," he said, "you have never
been in love."
"Why shouldn't I have been in love?" asked the little man, angrily.
"I can't imagine you in love," said the Duke, smiling.
"And I can't imagine YOU. You're too pleased with yourself," growled
Noaks.
"Spur your imagination, Noaks," said his friend. "I AM in love."
"So am I," was an unexpected answer, and the Duke (whose need of
sympathy was too new to have taught him sympathy with others) laughed
aloud. "Whom do you love?" he asked, throwing himself into an
arm-chair.
"I don't know who she is," was another unexpected answer.
"When did you meet her?" asked the Duke. "Where? What did you say to
her?"
"Yesterday. In the Corn. I didn't SAY anything to her."
"Is she beautiful?"
"Yes. What's that to you?"
"Dark or fair?"
"She's dark. She looks like a foreigner. She looks like--like one of
those photographs in the shop-windows."
"A rhapsody, Noaks! What became of her? Was she alone?"
"She was with the old Warden, in his carriage."
Zuleika--Noaks! The Duke started, as at an affront, and glared. Next
moment, he saw the absurdity of the situation. He relapsed into his
chair, smiling. "She's the Warden's niece," he said. "I dined at the
Warden's last night."
Noaks sat still, peering across at the Duke. For the first time in his
life, he was resentful of the Duke's great elegance and average
stature, his high lineage and incomputable wealth. Hitherto, these
things had been too remote for envy. But now, suddenly, they seemed
near to him--nearer and more overpowering than the First in Mods had
ever been. "And of course she's in love with you?" he snarled.
Really, this was for the Duke a new issue. So salient was his own
passion that he had not had time to wonder whether it were returned.
Zuleika's behaviour during dinner . . . But that was how so many young
women had behaved. It was no sign of disinterested love. It might mean
merely . . . Yet no! Surely, looking into her eyes, he had seen there
a radiance finer than could have been lit by common ambition. Love,
none other, must have lit in those purple depths the torches whose
clear flames had leapt out to him. She loved him. She, the beautiful,
the wonderful, had not tried to conceal her love for him. She had
shown him all--had shown all, poor darling! only to be snubbed by a
prig, driven away by a boor, fled from by a fool. To the nethermost
corner of his soul, he cursed himself for what he had done, and for
all he had left undone. He would go to her on his knees. He would
implore her to impose on him insufferable penances. There was no
penance, how bittersweet soever, could make him a little worthy of
her.
"Come in!" he cried mechanically. Entered the landlady's daughter.
"A lady downstairs," she said, "asking to see your Grace. Says she'll
step round again later if your Grace is busy."
"What is her name?" asked the Duke, vacantly. He was gazing at the
girl with pain-shot eyes.
"Miss Zuleika Dobson," pronounced the girl.
He rose.
"Show Miss Dobson up," he said.
Noaks had darted to the looking-glass and was smoothing his hair with
a tremulous, enormous hand.
"Go!" said the Duke, pointing to the door. Noaks went, quickly. Echoes
of his boots fell from the upper stairs and met the ascending susurrus
of a silk skirt.
The lovers met. There was an interchange of ordinary greetings: from
the Duke, a comment on the weather; from Zuleika, a hope that he was
well again--they had been so sorry to lose him last night. Then came a
pause. The landlady's daughter was clearing away the breakfast-things.
Zuleika glanced comprehensively at the room, and the Duke gazed at the
hearthrug. The landlady's daughter clattered out with her freight.
They were alone.
"How pretty!" said Zuleika. She was looking at his star of the Garter,
which sparkled from a litter of books and papers on a small
side-table.
"Yes," he answered. "It is pretty, isn't it?"
"Awfully pretty!" she rejoined.
This dialogue led them to another hollow pause. The Duke's heart beat
violently within him. Why had he not asked her to take the star and
keep it as a gift? Too late now! Why could he not throw himself at her
feet? Here were two beings, lovers of each other, with none by. And
yet . . .
She was examining a water-colour on the wall, seemed to be absorbed by
it. He watched her. She was even lovelier than he had remembered; or
rather her loveliness had been, in some subtle way, transmuted.
Something had given to her a graver, nobler beauty. Last night's nymph
had become the Madonna of this morning. Despite her dress, which was
of a tremendous tartan, she diffused the pale authentic radiance of a
spirituality most high, most simple. The Duke wondered where lay the
change in her. He could not understand. Suddenly she turned to him,
and he understood. No longer the black pearl and the pink, but two
white pearls! . . . He thrilled to his heart's core.
"I hope," said Zuleika, "you aren't awfully vexed with me for coming
like this?"
"Not at all," said the Duke. "I am delighted to see you." How
inadequate the words sounded, how formal and stupid!
"The fact is," she continued, "I don't know a soul in Oxford. And I
thought perhaps you'd give me luncheon, and take me to see the
boat-races. Will you?"
"I shall be charmed," he said, pulling the bell-rope. Poor fool! he
attributed the shade of disappointment on Zuleika's face to the
coldness of his tone. He would dispel that shade. He would avow
himself. He would leave her no longer in this false position. So soon
as he had told them about the meal, he would proclaim his passion.
The bell was answered by the landlady's daughter.
"Miss Dobson will stay to luncheon," said the Duke. The girl withdrew.
He wished he could have asked her not to.
He steeled himself. "Miss Dobson," he said, "I wish to apologise to
you."
Zuleika looked at him eagerly. "You can't give me luncheon? You've got
something better to do?"
"No. I wish to ask you to forgive me for my behaviour last night."
"There is nothing to forgive."
"There is. My manners were vile. I know well what happened. Though
you, too, cannot have forgotten, I won't spare myself the recital. You
were my hostess, and I ignored you. Magnanimous, you paid me the
prettiest compliment woman ever paid to man, and I insulted you. I
left the house in order that I might not see you again. To the
doorsteps down which he should have kicked me, your grandfather
followed me with words of kindliest courtesy. If he had sped me with a
kick so skilful that my skull had been shattered on the kerb, neither
would he have outstepped those bounds set to the conduct of English
gentlemen, nor would you have garnered more than a trifle on account
of your proper reckoning. I do not say that you are the first person
whom I have wantonly injured. But it is a fact that I, in whom pride
has ever been the topmost quality, have never expressed sorrow to any
one for anything. Thus, I might urge that my present abjectness must
be intolerably painful to me, and should incline you to forgive. But
such an argument were specious merely. I will be quite frank with you.
I will confess to you that, in this humbling of myself before you, I
take a pleasure as passionate as it is strange. A confusion of
feelings? Yet you, with a woman's instinct, will have already caught
the clue to it. It needs no mirror to assure me that the clue is here
for you, in my eyes. It needs no dictionary of quotations to remind me
that the eyes are the windows of the soul. And I know that from two
open windows my soul has been leaning and signalling to you, in a code
far more definitive and swifter than words of mine, that I love you."
Zuleika, listening to him, had grown gradually paler and paler. She
had raised her hands and cowered as though he were about to strike
her. And then, as he pronounced the last three words, she had clasped
her hands to her face and with a wild sob darted away from him. She
was leaning now against the window, her head bowed and her shoulders
quivering.
The Duke came softly behind her. "Why should you cry? Why should you
turn away from me? Did I frighten you with the suddenness of my words?
I am not versed in the tricks of wooing. I should have been more
patient. But I love you so much that I could hardly have waited. A
secret hope that you loved me too emboldened me, compelled me. You DO
love me. I know it. And, knowing it, I do but ask you to give yourself
to me, to be my wife. Why should you cry? Why should you shrink from
me? Dear, if there were anything . . . any secret . . . if you had
ever loved and been deceived, do you think I should honour you the
less deeply, should not cherish you the more tenderly? Enough for me,
that you are mine. Do you think I should ever reproach you for
anything that may have--"
Zuleika turned on him. "How dare you?" she gasped. "How dare you speak
to me like that?"
The Duke reeled back. Horror had come into his eyes. "You do not love
me!" he cried.
"LOVE you?" she retorted. "YOU?"
"You no longer love me. Why? Why?"
"What do you mean?"
"You loved me. Don't trifle with me. You came to me loving me with all
your heart."
"How do you know?"
"Look in the glass." She went at his bidding. He followed her. "You
see them?" he said, after a long pause. Zuleika nodded. The two pearls
quivered to her nod.
"They were white when you came to me," he sighed. "They were white
because you loved me. From them it was that I knew you loved me even
as I loved you. But their old colours have come back to them. That is
how I know that your love for me is dead."
Zuleika stood gazing pensively, twitching the two pearls between her
fingers. Tears gathered in her eyes. She met the reflection of her
lover's eyes, and her tears brimmed over. She buried her face in her
hands, and sobbed like a child.
Like a child's, her sobbing ceased quite suddenly. She groped for her
handkerchief, angrily dried her eyes, and straightened and smoothed
herself.
"Now I'm going," she said.
"You came here of your own accord, because you loved me," said the
Duke. "And you shall not go till you have told me why you have left
off loving me."
"How did you know I loved you?" she asked after a pause. "How did you
know I hadn't simply put on another pair of ear-rings?"
The Duke, with a melancholy laugh, drew the two studs from his
waistcoat-pocket. "These are the studs I wore last night," he said.
Zuleika gazed at them. "I see," she said; then, looking up, "When did
they become like that?"
"It was when you left the dining-room that I saw the change in them."
"How strange! It was when I went into the drawing-room that I noticed
mine. I was looking in the glass, and"-- She started. "Then you were
in love with me last night?"
"I began to be in love with you from the moment I saw you."
"Then how could you have behaved as you did?"
"Because I was a pedant. I tried to ignore you, as pedants always do
try to ignore any fact they cannot fit into their pet system. The
basis of my pet system was celibacy. I don't mean the mere state of
being a bachelor. I mean celibacy of the soul--egoism, in fact. You
have converted me from that. I am now a confirmed tuist."
"How dared you insult me?" she cried, with a stamp of her foot. "How
dared you make a fool of me before those people? Oh, it is too
infamous!"
"I have already asked you to forgive me for that. You said there was
nothing to forgive."
"I didn't dream that you were in love with me."
"What difference can that make?"
"All the difference! All the difference in life!"
"Sit down! You bewilder me," said the Duke. "Explain yourself!" he
commanded.
"Isn't that rather much for a man to ask of a woman?"
"I don't know. I have no experience of women. In the abstract, it
seems to me that every man has a right to some explanation from the
woman who has ruined his life."
"You are frightfully sorry for yourself," said Zuleika, with a bitter
laugh. "Of course it doesn't occur to you that _I_ am at all to be
pitied. No! you are blind with selfishness. You love me--I don't love
you: that is all you can realise. Probably you think you are the first
man who has ever fallen on such a plight."
Said the Duke, bowing over a deprecatory hand, "If there were to pass
my window one tithe of them whose hearts have been lost to Miss
Dobson, I should win no solace from that interminable parade."
Zuleika blushed. "Yet," she said more gently, "be sure they would all
be not a little envious of YOU! Not one of them ever touched the
surface of my heart. You stirred my heart to its very depths. Yes, you
made me love you madly. The pearls told you no lie. You were my
idol--the one thing in the wide world to me. You were so different
from any man I had ever seen except in dreams. You did not make a fool
of yourself. I admired you. I respected you. I was all afire with
adoration of you. And now," she passed her hand across her eyes, "now
it is all over. The idol has come sliding down its pedestal to fawn
and grovel with all the other infatuates in the dust about my feet."
The Duke looked thoughtfully at her. "I thought," he said, "that you
revelled in your power over men's hearts. I had always heard that you
lived for admiration."
"Oh," said Zuleika, "of course I like being admired. Oh yes, I like
all that very much indeed. In a way, I suppose, I'm even pleased that
YOU admire me. But oh, what a little miserable pleasure that is in
comparison with the rapture I have forfeited! I had never known the
rapture of being in love. I had longed for it, but I had never guessed
how wonderfully wonderful it was. It came to me. I shuddered and
wavered like a fountain in the wind. I was more helpless and flew
lightlier than a shred of thistledown among the stars. All night long,
I could not sleep for love of you; nor had I any desire of sleep, save
that it might take me to you in a dream. I remember nothing that
happened to me this morning before I found myself at your door."
"Why did you ring the bell? Why didn't you walk away?"
"Why? I had come to see you, to be near you, to be WITH you."
"To force yourself on me."
"Yes."
"You know the meaning of the term 'effective occupation'? Having
marched in, how could you have held your position, unless"--
"Oh, a man doesn't necessarily drive a woman away because he isn't in
love with her."
"Yet that was what you thought I had done to you last night."
"Yes, but I didn't suppose you would take the trouble to do it again.
And if you had, I should have only loved you the more. I thought you
would most likely be rather amused, rather touched, by my importunity.
I thought you would take a listless advantage, make a plaything of me
--the diversion of a few idle hours in summer, and then, when you had
tired of me, would cast me aside, forget me, break my heart. I desired
nothing better than that. That is what I must have been vaguely hoping
for. But I had no definite scheme. I wanted to be with you and I came
to you. It seems years ago, now! How my heart beat as I waited on the
doorstep! 'Is his Grace at home?' 'I don't know. I'll inquire. What
name shall I say?' I saw in the girl's eyes that she, too, loved you.
Have YOU seen that?"
"I have never looked at her," said the Duke.
"No wonder, then, that she loves you," sighed Zuleika. "She read my
secret at a glance. Women who love the same man have a kind of bitter
freemasonry. We resented each other. She envied me my beauty, my
dress. I envied the little fool her privilege of being always near to
you. Loving you, I could conceive no life sweeter than hers--to be
always near you; to black your boots, carry up your coals, scrub your
doorstep; always to be working for you, hard and humbly and without
thanks. If you had refused to see me, I would have bribed that girl
with all my jewels to cede me her position."
The Duke made a step towards her. "You would do it still," he said in
a low voice.
Zuleika raised her eyebrows. "I would not offer her one garnet," she
said, "now."
"You SHALL love me again," he cried. "I will force you to. You said
just now that you had ceased to love me because I was just like other
men. I am not. My heart is no tablet of mere wax, from which an
instant's heat can dissolve whatever impress it may bear, leaving it
blank and soft for another impress, and another, and another. My heart
is a bright hard gem, proof against any die. Came Cupid, with one of
his arrow-points for graver, and what he cut on the gem's surface
never can be effaced. There, deeply and forever, your image is
intagliated. No years, nor fires, nor cataclysm of total Nature, can
efface from that great gem your image."
"My dear Duke," said Zuleika, "don't be so silly. Look at the matter
sensibly. I know that lovers don't try to regulate their emotions
according to logic; but they do, nevertheless, unconsciously conform
with some sort of logical system. I left off loving you when I found
that you loved me. There is the premiss. Very well! Is it likely that
I shall begin to love you again because you can't leave off loving
me?"
The Duke groaned. There was a clatter of plates outside, and she whom
Zuleika had envied came to lay the table for luncheon.
A smile flickered across Zuleika's lips; and "Not one garnet!" she
murmured. _
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