The Tigress

"You know him, or did. He says he owes you something, and – "

"What is his name?" she demanded, interrupting.

"I thought you'd ask that before. But you wished to place him for yourself, didn't you? And I'm afraid you'll have to. You see, when he volunteered it was on certain conditions; and that he was not to be known in the premises was one of them."

"But you've told me everything but his name."

"That was especially stipulated."

"And I am never to be any the wiser?" she inquired. "That seems hardly fair. Since I can't pay him I certainly should be permitted to thank him."

"I'll take your thanks to him."

"No. I wish to thank him myself, in person."

"You want him to come here?"

"I want him to come here – just as soon as I am fit to be seen."

"He'll come to-day, if you say so," he surprised her with.

"Oh, no, no, no. Not while I'm like this."

"But he's seen you worse than this, remember. He's been in this room a dozen – a score of times."

"Here!" she exclaimed, amazed.

"Of course. While your eyes were bandaged. While the transfer was made."

"Then he saw how awful I was?"

"I fancy he didn't regard you as awful. He seemed – "

But she wouldn't let him go on. "Send him this evening," she commanded, "and I'll have the lights arranged so that I can see him while I myself am veiled by the kindly shadow."

When the surgeon was gone Nina fell to wondering once more. There were flirtations she had totally forgotten; there was no question about that. But she had always been rather a stickler for caste, and she couldn't at all reconcile the sheep-raising and the stone-quarrying with any of her lightly amorous adventures.

Perhaps, after all, she had been on the wrong track. Certainly she had been on the wrong track. This man owed her something, the perplexing Pottow had said, meaning evidently a debt of gratitude.

Then it couldn't be one of those. They were the last persons to think themselves in arrears of that kind. It must be some one she had befriended. She supposed she had befriended poor men on occasions, but she couldn't recall individual cases.

Possibly it was a coachman or gardener, or one of the tenantry at some place she had been years agone.

Or – why, to be sure! – some private from the ranks, who had completed his service, fallen heir to a little farm and a little quarry here in Somersetshire, and settled down to the prosaic life of a plodding civilian.

The idea robbed the prospect of the meeting of most of its interest. And it was the only idea she could accept. She even forgot to tell Delphine that she was expecting a caller, and she forgot, too, to have the lights arranged as she had planned.

When, therefore, her maid came to her with the announcement that a gentleman was calling – a gentleman who wouldn't give his name, but said that he came at Dr. Pottow's suggestion – she was not in the least prepared.

"Does he seem a gentleman, Delphine?" she asked, interested afresh.

"Oh, oui, madame! A young gentleman, and good-looking."

"Have you ever seen him before?"

"Of a certainty, madame. Here, with Dr. Pottow."

"But you never heard his name?"

"Never, madame."

Then, hastily, she had her arrange the lights and give her a fan with which to mask the lower part of her features where the now healing burns were still more or less unsightly.

And then she waited – sure still that she was to be disappointed.

She heard the steps at length in the passage, and fixed her eyes upon the door. But the light was not very good there, either – she had had it concentrated as far as possible on the chair placed for the visitor at least four yards from her bedside, toward the foot and facing her.

He was in the room now, just over the threshold, bowing at what must have seemed to him just a black shadow, and save that he was tall, and that his figure was gracefully slender, what she saw meant nothing to her whatever. He hadn't even spoken, so there was no voice to recognize.

As he came forward, though, there was something in his walk and carriage that seemed familiar, though she couldn't place them for the life of her.

"Do sit down," she urged. "There! I'd rather you wouldn't come nearer."

Still he didn't speak. But he sat down as she bade him with the light full on his face, and she saw he was Gerald Andrews.

It was quite a minute before she could speak. Then, "You – of all the persons in the world!" she breathed barely above a whisper.

"It is odd that we should meet again here under such circumstances," he agreed, pleasantly amused over her astonishment. "And yet not so singular, either. It's a tight little island, this, and any two persons on it are more or less likely to run across each other in time."

"But I thought you were still in India," she said.

"It's three years since I came home. The governor died suddenly, and – well, there were things to be looked after."

Nina smiled, thinking of what Dr. Pottow had told her.

"Where's little boy blue that looks after the sheep?" she quoted. "Was that it?"

"Yes," he answered, "the sheep were part of it. But the quarry is the biggest job."

She wondered how she could be so rude to him after all he had done. Somehow it didn't just seem to her a gentleman's work. But he wasn't ashamed of it, evidently. And she was glad of that.

"I read in the newspapers about your misfortune," he told her. "I'm glad you came to Pottow. He's the best man on scars in all England."

"Scars," she repeated, remembering. But it would be ruder still to ask him about his. She wondered whether he really did think of her every time he shaved.

"He took an old scar out for me – a very delicate bit of work, too."

"How vain you must be!" she exclaimed.

"No; it was hardly vanity. I was ashamed of it, not for what it was, but for what it meant. It symbolized cowardice, and I was ashamed of that."

"I remember," she said; "but I'll forget it, if you'd rather."

"I would rather."

"You're stronger now, aren't you? I'm so glad."

Then for the first time came something of that old boyish lilt in his voice that recalled the Simla days – days prior to the night of the season's last dance at Viceregal Lodge, which wasn't the end of everything, after all.

"Are you glad, really?" he asked, delighted. "Do you care just that little bit?"

"Indeed I am," she told him. "I care a great deal – for your happiness. I want you to be happy."

"I'm hardly that," he confessed. "That is, I haven't been. But I'm very nearly so this evening."

She must have experienced some little emotion, for she forgot her fan for an instant and left her chin unmasked. But she lifted it again almost instantly.

"How good you have been to me!" she murmured. "I didn't deserve such sacrifice."

"It wasn't a sacrifice. It was a delight. Besides, it was the least I could do to make good for being a cad when you were in trouble."

Even in the shadow he could see that she didn't understand. Her eyes showed him that.

"I lost my head," he confessed. "I wasn't only weak; I was half wild. It was I that told Dinghal all you'd ever said to me. It was I, really, who started the horrid stories that got about. I feel I can never do enough to wipe that out."

To his surprise she showed no resentment. "I dare say that all you said wasn't half the truth. I did kill poor Darling, you know."

His brow contracted to a frown.

"You didn't," he protested. "You couldn't – you couldn't have meant to. If you had any part in it, it was accidental."

She didn't insist. All she said was: "I don't see why you should think so well of me, Gerald. I was perfectly horrid to you."

"Were you?" he asked, dreaming. "You were very good to me, too. I can't forget that. I don't want to. It's that and that only I care to remember."

"Would you think it good of me if I should let you come every day to see me?" she asked suddenly, with fresh impulse. "It's a privilege I've allowed no one."

"Oh, will you?" he cried, delighted. "I would be glad."

"I've seen no one but Dr. Pottow, you know; not even my oldest, dearest friends. Not my own people."

His smile was rapturous.

"I know it," he said. "Have you heard what you are called here? No? Well, you are 'the mysterious widow of Bath.'"

"Isn't that funny?" she laughed. "Fancy how dull I have been! You will come and amuse me, won't you, Gerald?"

"Every day. And if ever I bore you, or you'd rather not see me, say so. You'll do that?"

"I'll do that. And" – she hesitated just an instant – "and you mustn't neglect your sheep or your freestone, you know. If you don't come I'll know a lamb has strayed from the fold and you're out on the hill looking for it. Do you carry a crook?"

"My shepherds do," he said solemnly.

"Send me some south-down mutton, Gerald. I'm so fond of chops." And at that he laughed.

"I'm not going to be teased," he said and stood up. But Nina made him sit down again. She was enjoying his call so much. She made him stay another hour.

He came every day after that, as she bade him. She usually set the hour herself, and he arrived on the minute.

He sent her the magnificent skin of a tiger he had shot in India, and sometimes it pleased her to crouch on this, sensuously delighted by the contact, while remembering with a curious mingling of emotions how Kneedrock had declared her to be the reincarnation of just such another creature of the jungle, cruel, remorseless, blood-lusting – a tigress in the guise of a woman.

But she could never bear to look on that skin again after events that were soon to come.

Kneedrock himself never saw the rug.

As he was leaving one afternoon Andrews heard voices in the vestibule. The housemaid was sending away an insistent caller.

"Mrs. Darling doesn't see any one," he heard her say.

"But I'm sure she'll see me," the persistent male voice continued. "You just take her my card."

"She forbids me to fetch cards," rejoined the housemaid. "I'm sorry, sir."

He heard the jingle of silver coin. The caller was about to resort to bribery. As a privileged one, out of compassion for Nina, he would lend his aid. He might pretend he was the attending surgeon or physician, and that it was by his orders that the patient was denied visitors.

He drew the door, which was slightly ajar, wider. He made a third in the vestibule. And then he recognized the caller. It was Lord Kneedrock.

Nibbetts recognized him, too. He shrugged his hulking shoulders and thrust his handful of coins back into his pocket. Then he turned to the housemaid again.

"I understand," he said in his penetrating undertone. "I quite understand. Mrs. Darling sees no one."

Then he reopened the outer door and stalked lumberingly away.

CHAPTER XXIV

The Disinterested Married Man

There was a house-party at Puddlewood, and all the kinsfolk and friends who haunted Bellingdown were there.

"Who's seen Nina?" asked the duchess.

"No one," answered Waltheof laconically.

"Too bad, when she's so entertaining," said the duke. "I always say there's no one like Nina. I say, Doody, don't I say there's nobody like Nina?"

"Everybody knows what you think of Mrs. Darling," affirmed the duchess calmly. "But I do wonder what she looks like!"

Charlotte Grey had been to Bath, but had not succeeded in seeing the recluse. She got as far as Delphine, and that was all.

"Madame ne reçoit personne," said the French maid.

"Nibbetts has been, too," said Kitty Bellingdown. "And he was equally unsuccessful."

"I thought she'd have seen you," ventured the duchess.

"I thought so, too; but it appears not," returned Kneedrock gloomily.

Meanwhile the Carleigh split-up had occurred, but the fact had not yet reached this bureau of family and friendly counsel.

Strolling ruminantly on the promenade at Nice, Caryll's heart turned thirstily toward the giver of oblivion.

"I don't care what she looks like, I must see her," he said, and he left by that night's Paris rapide.

On the journey to Bath he did a great deal of thinking. He hadn't been happy for weeks – not since the night Mrs. Veynol came so suddenly into his paradise in Madeira.

It is idle for a man to hope to keep his perfect balance in a desperate flirtation with his own mother-in-law. One might as well contemplate tight-rope feats on a newly thrown and, consequently, not firm rope.

Carleigh realized that he hadn't made any manner of success of the task. And the worst of it was that his wife didn't in the least care.

When Sibylla had killed her daughter's betrothal, the daughter had rebelled slightly. She had been pale – but she appeared happy.

Now, however, when the marriage had gone under, she exhibited neither reluctance nor grief. She did not resent losing her husband in the least. She only yawned and said: "Why don't you bolt with mama?" and then read further.

It was all very distressing – exceedingly distressing. But now he was nearing Bath and Nina. And that meant consolation.

Nina, receiving his card, experienced a rush of vivid anticipation. Is there any situation so piquant as that of meeting the man one did not marry after he has "hashed it" with another woman?

Her embargo had been lifted that morning, and the precious new skin – partly Gerald's, partly her own – which the specialist had worked so hard to foster into beauty was at last firm enough to stand the gaze of the most critical of all judges – the man that one might have married.

Carleigh, waiting in the drawing-room, was far more nervous than she was. He had been told that she was horribly disfigured, and he expected to find her so.

Now he could hear her step in the passage. She was outside there in the chill hall. Then the latch clicked, the portière swung, and – he was rising to touch Nina Darling's hand again.

After all these months! The bedroom and the bandages rushed back upon his memory, and he was prepared to need self-control when he should look up. But when he did look up he saw, with a curious jump in his heart, that she was not scarred.

Then in the same instant that he realized she was unchanged he knew himself to be greatly changed – branded on brow as well as in soul. And he felt that through and through.

He took her hand – both hands – in his and gazed thirstily into her eyes – a serene violet-blue.

"I've blundered, too," he said as a greeting. "I've made an unhappy marriage, too, now. I have more sympathy for you than I had. But she never plays with guns, unfortunately."

He laughed, really quite gaily, for he was awfully glad to feel her hand in his again. And she laughed as well.

"It's funny how people talk, isn't it?" she said. "Of course I never had anything to do with it; but people like to talk – after all these years, too. It was just an accident."

And it was just the other day that she had insisted the reverse. But that was to another man – a different type of man.

He laughed and put his arm about her. "Kiss me, dear," he said. "I'm so very unhappy."

If she had averted her head he would have been her slave afresh; but she didn't avert her head. Instead she kissed him placidly – so placidly that he almost started.

"You see you're married now," she told him and drew her hand out of his and went and sat down.

He felt stunned and sick. It was as if there was no bottom anywhere for a little. But then he remembered.

"Nina," he said, calling her again that which in all the fervor of his nomenclature during the passionate, passed-by period he had so often voiced. "Nina, I've come to ask a great kindness at your hands – two, in fact."

She sat quiet, staring at him with those lash-veiled eyes that had driven him and so many, many others not quite mad; and, had the lesson he had spent months conning in such a hell as may exist amid our earthly surroundings been a bit less bitter and thorough, he must have felt that near-madness course in his veins again. But he was seared so that no near-madness was for him any more.

"How you've changed!" she observed, not seeming to notice his speech, and speaking herself in a certain tone of absolute childlike wonder, which was not the least of the weapons in her arsenal of personal persuasion. "Why, you've lines across your forehead – at your age, too! Lines that I can see even from here."

"Never mind," he said; and then some impulse led him to go over and kneel beside her, conscious only of an acute wonder as to what would come next. "Never mind, dear girl, listen to me."

She put her hand upon his head. "And white hairs," she pursued, tracing them with an astonished finger. "At your age, too. One – five. Why, I can count eight."

"Never mind," he repeated, pulling down the impertinent finger and wondering as he did so that its fresh imprisonment left him so pitifully, piteously unthrilled. "Never mind – I don't care what I look like any more.

"It's all so futile – life is so empty – things seem to me so very, very trivial. What are wrinkles beside things – untellable things – that stone one's immortality and make one wish that on the Judgment Day God Himself wouldn't know!"

Even as he spoke he caught himself questioning whether she believed him – whether his words stirred any feeling in her.

She dropped her eyes and pulled her hand free.

"I know what you mean," she said in a toneless voice. "I had such secrets, too. But they're not what people fancy them to be. People think I killed my husband; but I didn't. I did what you've done – what we all do. I killed myself."

He looked at her. It was such a pitiless, relentless glare – that into which her words thrust his consciousness.

"I can't believe that yours were like mine," he said miserably. "No one can ever have done what I have done. Yes, you're right – and it has killed me."

She didn't seem greatly interested.

"But I didn't come to talk of that," he exclaimed quickly. "I came to ask of you two things. Will you grant them?"

She turned her head, leaving only her profile showing. "Certainly not," she said. "I will grant you nothing."

"You mustn't say that. You don't know what I'm asking."

"You're married," she told him, "and I won't have a thing to do with you. I hate the love-making of married men. It's dangerous, too, for they always talk."

That dull, heavy red that had been crimson before he took on chains stole over his face.

"I'll tell you without asking, then," he said. "It may not be the great and tremendous thing to you that it is to me. I think, perhaps, that you may even laugh."

"Very likely," she assented.

He rose and went to the chimney-piece and stood there, striving for greater quietude. It was a long moment – minutes long.

Then, finally, he threw over his shoulder, "Nina, you must hear me. I'm going away. I'm going to cut it all. Suetonius was pretty bad, but you can be tracked by a mother-in-law until life becomes hideous. I – "

"But everybody knew why your betrothal was called off," she said with simple finality; "and then you deliberately married the girl even after that."

"I know – I know – I know," he cried in irritation; "but those things must be written in the Book of Fate. Some curses must be launched beyond recall. At any rate, it's done. We both know that."

"Yes, we know that," she agreed simply.

"And now I am going away, and I'm not sure that I shall ever return. But I want an object in going, and I would rather have it something in connection with you than anything else on earth. I've thought what I want to do, and I wish you'd give me permission to do it.

"Of course there was a man you loved, and of course you love him yet. Equally of course he accounts for everything, and of course he's still alive or you'd be a better woman. If he was dead he'd have a hold over you that would keep you straight."

"How funny for you to know all that!" she exclaimed, opening her eyes very wide. "You certainly have been learning." Then she broke forth into laughter. "And if it were the duke now!"

"Don't laugh," he cried angrily. "I tell you I'm in earnest. I know that there's a man, and that he's somewhere. Well, then, I want to go where he is, and to see him face to face, and to try to right whatever separates you. I've got to get away – and far away – and I'll be able to build some sort of respect for myself if I know that I've a good purpose and a clean mission."

She wasn't laughing now. He was very much in earnest, and she had caught some of his seriousness. It was contagious.

"I understand what persons like you and me can suffer, and how much they need help, and how the mock of love unfulfilled can drive them into hideous rocks and sink them in a seething whirlpool of temptations. I can read your life like a book now – can read it by the lurid light of my own burning wreck. And so I know that whatever might happen you would be forgivable. And it's what I know – what I have learned – that I want to tell him. And whatever is wrong – if he believes it – if I can make him believe – However, it – " And there he stopped – broke off abruptly.

Nina was staring at him hard.

He had spoken so fast and in such a passion of pleading that he appeared to be for the moment breathless. She sat there before him in the low chair she had chosen, and her eyes were fixed on him.

He had poured forth the last phrases with his head bowed and his hands gripping the edge of the velvet-draped shelf behind him.

It was she who spoke next.

"There is no one for you to go to," she said – "no one in all the wide world. As to my husband, it was a kind of accident. But really I didn't care if it hadn't been. All my crimes are against myself. I've injured no one else. Do you understand?"

He nodded dumbly, feeling rather blank.

"There is no 'man' in my life," she went on. "I never have 'loved' as women are supposed to love. I've just liked men – liked them as such – that was all."

She paused briefly, looking at him, expecting some word; but he was silent.

"I've never been really bad," she continued. "I've never wanted to be bad. But I like to be kissed, and I've been so unhappy through just sheer loneliness that I could only remember a few of the commandments, and the marriage service not at all."

Sir Caryll Carleigh stood very still there, trying to read her meaning in her face, but failing.

"Pretty nearly every one thinks I was in love with Kneedrock," she pursued presently. "You may ask him about that if you like. And they think that we made way with poor Darling between us. But they are wrong."

She paused again, in doubt whether or not to say more – whether or not to tell the truth – the whole truth – as she had never told it before. Carleigh neither urged nor encouraged, but of her own free will she decided. It was due him in a way, and frank confession might probably be the best thing for her. She had carried the burden alone now for five years, always growing heavier, and the temptation to share it was too much for her.

"He was cleaning his gun, you see" – that was how she began it; just that simply – "and a cartridge shell stuck in the barrel. He tried to get it out, and then he held it – the gun, I mean – and asked me to try – with a sharp thing, you know. He thought that it was an empty shell and so did I. But it wasn't. That was all."

Carleigh shivered ever so slightly. "You cannot say that you didn't kill him, then," he declared.

She pursed her lips a bit thoughtfully. Already she felt better. She had not misjudged the effect – she was relieved.

"No; because of course I did. But, on the other hand, of course I didn't. Anyhow, it mattered very little. I was so mad over life and living that his death seemed a very small event to me. I couldn't remember a thing at first.

"The shot seemed to have stunned my memory. But it all came back later – horridly. The scene, I mean. Yet the event – the fact that poor Darling was gone – appeared of so little importance. And I foolishly expected the world to see it as I did."

"But the world didn't?"

"No" – she shook her head quite seriously – "the world chose to talk, and has talked ever since. So very stupidly, too."

Carleigh felt dazed. Nina's viewpoint was very puzzling at times.