The Tyranny of Weakness

by Charles Neville Buck

With a low and bitter laugh—or the fragment of a laugh, she turned and left the room.

After weeks of patient silence, Tollman asked once more, "Conscience, is there still no hope for me?" To his surprise she met his questioning gaze very directly and answered,

"That depends on your terms."

"I make no terms," he hastened to declare. "I only petition."

"If you ask a wife who can be a real wife to you—who can give you all her love and life—then the answer must still be no," she went on steadily with something like a doggedness of resignation. "I can't lie to you. I have only a broken heart. Beyond friendship and gratitude, I have nothing to offer you. I can't even promise that I will ever stop loving—him. But—" her words came with the flatness of unending soul-fag—"I suppose I can give you the lesser things; fidelity, respect; all the petty allegiance that can go on without fire or spirit."

"I will take what you can give me," he declared, and at the sudden ring of autumnal ardor in his voice and the avid light in his eyes, she found herself shivering with fastidious distaste. She did not read the eyes with full understanding, yet instinctively she shrank, for they held the animal craving of a long-suppressed desire—the physical love of a man past his youth which can satisfy itself with mere possession. "I will take what you can give me, and I shall win your love in the end. I have no fear; no doubts. I lack the lighter charms of a youthful cavalier, but I believe I have still the strength and virility of a man." He swelled a little with the strutting spirit of the mating male. "You will learn that my heart is still the heart of a boy where you are conceded and that our life won't be a shadowed thing."

"I must have time to think," she said faintly. "I don't—don't know yet."

Driven by wanderlust and an unappeasable discontent, Stuart Farquaharson had been in many remote places. Around those towns which were Meccas for tourists he made wide detours. His family had jealously kept its honor untarnished heretofore and though he bore himself with a stiffer outward pride than ever, he inwardly felt that fingers of scandal were pointing him out, through no misdeed of his own. Now he was back in Cairo from the Sudan and the upper Nile, almost as brown and hard of tissue as the Bedouins with whose caravans he had traveled and for the first time in many weeks he could regain touch with his mail. That was a matter of minor importance, but his novel had come from the press on the day he sailed out of New York harbor and perhaps there awaited him at Shepheard's some report from his publisher. That gentleman had predicted success with an abundant optimism. Stuart himself had been sceptical. Now he would know.

He sent his luggage ahead and drifted on foot with the tide. What a place this would be, he reflected, to idle time away with the companionship of love. His eyes narrowed painfully with a memory of how Conscience and he had once talked of spending a honeymoon in Egypt. That seemed as long ago as the age of Egypt itself and yet not long enough to have lost its sting. Grunting and lurching along the asphalt, with bells tinkling from their trappings, went a row of camels and camel-riders. They threaded their unhurried way on cushioned hoofs through a traffic of purring roadsters and limousines. Drawn by undersized stallions, an official carriage clattered by. Its fez-crowned occupant gazed superciliously out as the gaudily uniformed members of his kavasse ran alongside yelling to the crowds to make way for the Pasha! Fakirs led their baboons, magicians carried cobras in wicker trays, and peddlers hawked their scarabs and souvenirs. Against the speckless overhead blue, rose the graceful domes and minarets of mosques and the fringed tops of palms.