The Light That Failed

‘I wish,’ she said, after a pause, ‘that I could see you again sometime.

You wish that, too?’

‘Yes, but it would have been better if – if – you had – shot straight over there – down by the breakwater.’

Maisie looked with large eyes for a moment. And this was the boy who only ten days before had decorated Amomma’s horns with cut-paper ham-frills and turned him out, a bearded derision, among the public ways! Then she dropped her eyes: this was not the boy.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said reprovingly, and with swift instinct attacked the side-issue. ‘How selfish you are! Just think what I should have felt if that horrid thing had killed you! I’m quite miserable enough already.’

‘Why? Because you’re going away from Mrs. Jennett?’

‘No.’

‘From me, then?’

No answer for a long time. Dick dared not look at her. He felt, though he did not know, all that the past four years had been to him, and this the more acutely since he had no knowledge to put his feelings in words.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I suppose it is.’

‘Maisie, you must know. I’m not supposing.’

‘Let’s go home,’ said Maisie, weakly.

But Dick was not minded to retreat.

‘I can’t say things,’ he pleaded, ‘and I’m awfully sorry for teasing you about Amomma the other day. It’s all different now, Maisie, can’t you see? And you might have told me that you were going, instead of leaving me to find out.’

‘You didn’t. I did tell. Oh, Dick, what’s the use of worrying?’

‘There isn’t any; but we’ve been together years and years, and I didn’t know how much I cared.’

‘I don’t believe you ever did care.’

‘No, I didn’t; but I do, – I care awfully now, Maisie,’ he gulped, – ‘Maisie, darling, say you care too, please.’

‘I do, indeed I do; but it won’t be any use.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I am going away.’

‘Yes, but if you promise before you go. Only say – will you?’ A second ‘darling’ came to his lips more easily than the first. There were few endearments in Dick’s home or school life; he had to find them by instinct. Dick caught the little hand blackened with the escaped gas of the revolver.

‘I promise,’ she said solemnly; ‘but if I care there is no need for promising.’

‘And do you care?’ For the first time in the past few minutes their eyes met and spoke for them who had no skill in speech…

‘Oh, Dick, don’t! Please don’t! It was all right when we said good-morning; but now it’s all different!’ Amomma looked on from afar.

He had seen his property quarrel frequently, but he had never seen kisses exchanged before. The yellow sea-poppy was wiser, and nodded its head approvingly. Considered as a kiss, that was a failure, but since it was the first, other than those demanded by duty, in all the world that either had ever given or taken, it opened to them new worlds, and every one of them glorious, so that they were lifted above the consideration of any worlds at all, especially those in which tea is necessary, and sat still, holding each other’s hands and saying not a word.

‘You can’t forget now,’ said Dick, at last. There was that on his cheek that stung more than gunpowder.

‘I shouldn’t have forgotten anyhow,’ said Maisie, and they looked at each other and saw that each was changed from the companion of an hour ago to a wonder and a mystery they could not understand. The sun began to set, and a night-wind thrashed along the bents of the foreshore.

‘We shall be awfully late for tea,’ said Maisie. ‘Let’s go home.’

‘Let’s use the rest of the cartridges first,’ said Dick; and he helped Maisie down the slope of the fort to the sea, – a descent that she was quite capable of covering at full speed. Equally gravely Maisie took the grimy hand. Dick bent forward clumsily; Maisie drew the hand away, and Dick blushed.

‘It’s very pretty,’ he said.

‘Pooh!’ said Maisie, with a little laugh of gratified vanity. She stood close to Dick as he loaded the revolver for the last time and fired over the sea with a vague notion at the back of his head that he was protecting Maisie from all the evils in the world. A puddle far across the mud caught the last rays of the sun and turned into a wrathful red disc. The light held Dick’s attention for a moment, and as he raised his revolver there fell upon him a renewed sense of the miraculous, in that he was standing by Maisie who had promised to care for him for an indefinite length of time till such date as – A gust of the growing wind drove the girl’s long black hair across his face as she stood with her hand on his shoulder calling Amomma ‘a little beast,’ and for a moment he was in the dark, – a darkness that stung. The bullet went singing out to the empty sea.

‘Spoilt my aim,’ said he, shaking his head. ‘There aren’t any more cartridges; we shall have to run home.’ But they did not run. They walked very slowly, arm in arm. And it was a matter of indifference to them whether the neglected Amomma with two pin-fire cartridges in his inside blew up or trotted beside them; for they had come into a golden heritage and were disposing of it with all the wisdom of all their years.

‘And I shall be – ’ quoth Dick, valiantly. Then he checked himself: ‘I don’t know what I shall be. I don’t seem to be able to pass any exams, but I can make awful caricatures of the masters. Ho! Ho!’

‘Be an artist, then,’ said Maisie. ‘You’re always laughing at my trying to draw; and it will do you good.’

‘I’ll never laugh at anything you do,’ he answered. ‘I’ll be an artist, and I’ll do things.’

‘Artists always want money, don’t they?’

‘I’ve got a hundred and twenty pounds a year of my own. My guardians tell me I’m to have it when I come of age. That will be enough to begin with.’

‘Ah, I’m rich,’ said Maisie. ‘I’ve got three hundred a year all my own when I’m twenty-one. That’s why Mrs. Jennett is kinder to me than she is to you. I wish, though, that I had somebody that belonged to me, – just a father or a mother.’

‘You belong to me,’ said Dick, ‘for ever and ever.’

‘Yes, we belong – for ever. It’s very nice.’ She squeezed his arm. The kindly darkness hid them both, and, emboldened because he could only just see the profile of Maisie’s cheek with the long lashes veiling the gray eyes, Dick at the front door delivered himself of the words he had been boggling over for the last two hours.

‘And I – love you, Maisie,’ he said, in a whisper that seemed to him to ring across the world, – the world that he would to-morrow or the next day set out to conquer.

There was a scene, not, for the sake of discipline, to be reported, when Mrs. Jennett would have fallen upon him, first for disgraceful unpunctuality, and secondly for nearly killing himself with a forbidden weapon.

‘I was playing with it, and it went off by itself,’ said Dick, when the powder-pocked cheek could no longer be hidden, ‘but if you think you’re going to lick me you’re wrong. You are never going to touch me again.

Sit down and give me my tea. You can’t cheat us out of that, anyhow.’

Mrs. Jennett gasped and became livid. Maisie said nothing, but encouraged Dick with her eyes, and he behaved abominably all that evening. Mrs. Jennett prophesied an immediate judgment of Providence and a descent into Tophet later, but Dick walked in Paradise and would not hear. Only when he was going to bed Mrs. Jennett recovered and asserted herself. He had bidden Maisie good-night with down-dropped eyes and from a distance.

‘If you aren’t a gentleman you might try to behave like one,’ said Mrs.

Jennett, spitefully. ‘You’ve been quarrelling with Maisie again.’

This meant that the usual good-night kiss had been omitted. Maisie, white to the lips, thrust her cheek forward with a fine air of indifference, and was duly pecked by Dick, who tramped out of the room red as fire. That night he dreamed a wild dream. He had won all the world and brought it to Maisie in a cartridge-box, but she turned it over with her foot, and, instead of saying ‘Thank you,’ cried – ‘Where is the grass collar you promised for Amomma? Oh, how selfish you are!’

CHAPTER II