IV.
“You are a very lucky young man,” said Peggie Le Moyne to her cousin, when he had told her of the invitation. “Of course Jacqueline was cornered, and gave it perforce, but there is a potency in hospitality that works both ways. Besides, when a man has seen a woman in her home she can never be altogether formal to him again.”
“I feel as though I were sneaking in through the back door, all the same,” Merrington replied, more moodily than was his wont.
Notwithstanding his misgivings, Jacqueline met her guest with a graciousness that made her adorable in his sight. Driven from her vantage ground though she was by her cousin’s outspoken invitation to Merrington, there was no hint of anything but cordiality in her welcome.
It was her more strictly feminine side that she exhibited that evening. There was nothing about her save the delicate tan of her skin to remind Merrington that the girl of the surf and sun-flooded beach was one with the dainty and charming woman in the trailing muslin, with the soft masses of her hair dark above the small head.
“Why did you never mention to me your friendship with my cousin?” she asked him after dinner, finding herself for the moment alone with him in the dimly lit parlor. He answered with native frankness:
“You never encouraged me to talk about myself, and, to tell you the truth, I never thought of anyone when with you--except yourself.”
“Dick has been telling me of your long friendship.”
“It has never brought me anything that I would less wish to part with than this pleasure to-night.”
“I do not know,” she said, musingly, yet with a precision nearer akin to her former treatment of him than she had shown that evening, “that pleasures are what we should value most in our friendships. You remember what Burns says about them?”
“Is that a hint or a threat?” he asked, smiling.
She colored slowly and threw him a question that changed the subject.
“Will you go with Dick and me to see the mob to-night? He does not know the delights of this place. Indeed, I think he came down resigned to boredom, until he met you.” She appealed to Brinton for confirmation of her remark as he sauntered in.
“Don’t make me fib after a full dinner, Jack,” he protested. “Besides, it isn’t anything like what I expected.”
“There,” she laughed, rising; “but now we are going to take you out and realize your expectations, Mr. Merrington and I.”
As they walked along under the pulsing stars, the void of the sea broken before them in crested waves that gleamed ghostly, a strange disinclination for speech beset Merrington. The fact that he could, without any sense of restraint, rather with a feeling of intimacy that sent delirious thrills along his veins, be with Jacqueline as one sharing her mood and interest so surely that he turned to silence in preference to words, placed, as it were, a bewitching perspective to his love. The mood changed, indeed, by the time they reached the crowded portion of the board walk, for it was not Merrington’s nature to keep silence long in the midst of jollification, and the Saturday night spirit was abroad. Moreover, he suddenly found himself alone with Jacqueline.
“I never had a brother,” she remarked, coming to a standstill by the railing of the walk, “but if they hold themselves any freer to do cavalier things than cousins, I am glad I hadn’t.” She showed annoyance in the glance she sent at the laughing party her cousin had joined. “Maybe he will leave them soon,” she added.
“I hope not. I am sure he won’t. The taste of cousins and brothers is always poor, but it is to be depended on.”
“You are right,” she said, severely. “He does not deserve to have us wait for him.”
Under the lower pavilion, the band was playing a Hungarian rhapsody, and the crowd had packed itself close to listen. Merrington followed Jacqueline slowly through the current moving in the middle. She stopped so abruptly that he pressed upon her, and steadied himself by a touch upon her arm.
“Why should we go on?” she asked, facing him. “Dick is joined to his idols, let him alone. Shall we walk back where we may be quiet? Or do you care for the crowd?”
He did not heed her last question, so rapturous was the music of her other. He led her through the slowly moving impact of people, impatient until he might get her beyond and to himself. Neither said very much until they were where the crowd ceased to make itself felt, and the night reclaimed its darkness from the glare of the many electric lights of the gala part of the town.
He was madly palpitant under the almost somber calm which he preserved outwardly. His passion, like a fever long incubating, leaped suddenly into full force by no conscious volition of his own. That evening, with Jacqueline in her home, the spell of the woman with the halo of domesticity around her had swept his love into an ardent desire--the desire of the man to have the woman he loves in a home of his own. And now he was with her alone under the throbbing stars, and something other than her former intolerance of him was keeping Jacqueline wordless. He knew that it was something very different, knew it by the instinct of the lover, and his heart bounded at her silence. When he spoke, Jacqueline shivered at the ground-roll of emotion which his words seemed to break into a momentary surge.
“I am very glad that Brinton came today.”
She nodded, acquiescent. She had meant to speak, but the words stuck.
“When the avalanche is ready,” he murmured, “or the sea is at the flood, a touch of nature’s breath--and the thing is done.”
“How prosaically you drop your figures,” she said, with a nervous laugh. “What are you trying to say?”
“Jacqueline!”
She started away from him, her face, very white, turned to his.
“Do I frighten you?”
“Yes,” she whispered, her eyes held by his penetrating gaze.
Merrington smiled.
“And yet,” he said, so low that the words seemed to her almost as breathing in her ears, “I would give every drop of blood, every fiber in my body, to make you happy, for I love you with every drop of my blood.”
“Mr. Merrington----” she began, but he cut her short.
“Listen to me,” he said, guiding her into the little balcony that projected from the walk just where they were, and overhung the beach. “No man, since man and woman were made for each other, has wanted a woman more than I want you. Every bit of myself, body and soul, soul and body, I offer you, Jacqueline, in return for your love.”
“I have no love for you,” she breathed, slowly.
“You must have. Such love as I have for you compels love in return.”
She looked away, struggling with herself. At last her words came, strained and muffled.
“I have always disliked you. You know it.”
“I would rather have your love at once, of course,” he said, with a patience that sat well upon his power, “but I am not afraid of your dislike.” He held out his hands impulsively. “Jacqueline, you must be my wife. You are going to be my wife.”
She was silent, accepting, with a dullness of compliance, the overmastering sense of his determination, her will for the moment existing as something benumbed within her. The dashing of the sea beneath them broke through its own monotony, and, with her consciousness of it, a remembrance of Merrington’s early words rushed to her mind. She drew herself up with a snapping of the spell that had held her.
“You told me once that you had never been conquered, but the days are past when a man carries a wife by storm. Shall we go on, Mr. Merrington?”
“Jacqueline, do you love me?”
She had started forward, but at the tense question, fell back against the railing of the balcony. There was that in the calm of Merrington’s manner that left her breathless.
“I believe you do love me in your heart of hearts,” he said, the passion of his tones thrilling through the words, though he stood rigidly erect before her. “You may not know it, but you do, and I am going to make you know it, because I cannot live without your love, which, being mine, you shall not keep from me.”
“Oh!” she cried, facing him at her full height, “how I hate you for that! Love you! From the first moment you spoke to me I have disliked you. You are a cave-dweller! A savage! Such men as you don’t want wives. They want mates.”