CHAPTER EIGHT.

THE PROMISE OF LIFE.

"I have been trying to meet you ever since I came to Durban," said the boy, in a voice that all the world might hear, so young it was and eager.

There was a stir among that portion of the world present in Mrs Carr-Ellison’s drawing-room. The man playing beautiful, desultory modulations on the grand piano struck a passionate chord and quivered off into the treble softly so that he might hear the woman’s answer; several scandalised skirts shivered and seemed to whisper, but the woman on the high-backed, gold satin sofa, did not disturb herself. She sat unsmiling, her head resting against the back of the sofa, her arms stretched wide on either side of her.

She had the despairing, unlighted eyes that tell of a soul’s light gone out, and her mouth drooped bitterly at the corners; but her hair was very beautifully arranged, and her pale gown with its gloomy sleeves and silvery bands must have taken some weeks to design.

"I saw your picture on Le Poer’s table, and I told him to give me an introduction to you; but the beggar wouldn’t," the boy went on; and the skirts drawn closer, whispered again. Le Poer was the fastest man in the fastest military set in Maritzburg; what was Miss Wilde’s picture doing on his table? Really, these writing women were very queer, one never knew what they were up to, coming from Heaven knows where, and settling down in rooms without a chaperone, writing for newspapers.

"Oh!" the sphinx woman had spoken at last but her voice was very tired and uninterested. She was used to having men try to meet her, and candour did not appeal to her very much. She had long ago worn out her interest in the obvious, and walked through life now with ears only for the silences, and eyes only for the things not seen, unless they were the traces of pain quivering the surface under which she lived. She was always interested in pain.

The boy’s persistence worried her; his words seemed very crude. Yet a certain vigour in his voice drew her eyes up to where, waiting for one or other of the men at her side to move, he stood before her. It occurred to her then that for so tall a man he stood up with remarkable calmness and indifference where everyone was seated.

"The stage," she thought, then mused as to how, if she were writing of him, she could best describe the young untidy way his hair grew above his forehead.

"Ragged would be too extravagant," were the words that formed themselves in her mind with a sense of familiarity that puzzled her, until in a flash she remembered that the night before she had seen him on the stage, and had thought the same thought about his hair.

"Ah! the apothecary!" she exclaimed, and sitting up, stared back into his blue, intense eyes.

"She is really a little mad," thought Mrs Carr-Ellison, who, at first distressed at the girl’s unsociability to a strange guest, was now filled with vague embarrassment to see them staring into each other’s eyes and babbling of apothecaries. She did not appreciate that to Dolores Wilde the boy had changed suddenly into a man—​a man who had lived and suffered and understood; and that with the memory of how, in the few lines assigned to him as the starving seller of drugs and potions in Shakespeare’s greatest romance—​he had supplied the touch of tragedy that to her made the play real life, her inmost soul leaped out to him as a comrade. While, though she knew it not, her hands were already at his heart-strings.

Mrs Carr-Ellison did not see these things, because they were not to be seen. She only thought that it was very queer and Bohemian of Miss Wilde to behave so, and a very bad example for her daughter Gwen, who was observing the proceedings with all her eyes and ears; so she interrupted that touching of spirit hands with a commonplace.

"Mr Scarlett," she said, "do take Miss Wilde into the verandah, and get some ices for yourselves."

They refused the ices earnestly, sharing a smile; but they were glad to go. He followed the trails of her strange gown through the wide dim-lit verandahs, and found her a chair in a far corner where the light from above fell palely into her eyes, and restless shadows of maidenhair fern played about her drooping mouth.

"Your picture spoke to me from Le Poer’s table," he said, as though there had been no interruption, "and then he told me all about you. Do you mind? Ever since I have wanted to speak to you, and tell you that you shall not always be sad. Look here,"--his expressions were very boyish,--"I have had my life broken up too, and yet I am beginning to be glad again, and you must. You are too sweet and splendid to be always sad."

"You are very young," she answered quietly, wondering why she did not resent the first spoken sympathy anyone had dared to offer her in all these years. "For me—​I am an old woman."

He was twenty-eight, and she was a year younger, but he knew how sorrow ages the heart, and understood. He moved a pot of fern away from her feet, because it seemed to blur the picture of her, sitting there, and a crumple it had made in the hem of her gown he smoothed out with the simplicity of a child and the gentle hands of a woman.

"I am not so young. I have tasted the rough of the world and some of its joys, and I still love the joys. You are in danger of loving its sorrows so much that you will not be able to be happy again when you have the chance."

"I shall never have the chance, boy, not in this world anyhow; the gods will take care of that."

"Well, in the next then," he persisted. "I have all sorts of splendid theories about our failures here being our triumphs there, haven’t you? Don’t you—​when things go all askew, find yourself building on what comes—​after?"

Her lips curved in a wry smile. Truth to tell, this world had treated her so ill that she had but small hope of the next.

He went on speaking with an amazing buoyancy in his voice.

"If death were not so hemmed in with the sickness and horrors that frighten a man! If it would only come to one quickly, out in the open air and sunshine—​in a rush of living excitement—​how many of us would stay, I wonder?"

"I would," she cried, with a shiver, "I would."