“Nonsense! What is it?”
“Mary Chaworth is married.”
“Is that all?” he had replied coldly; but an expression, peculiar, impossible to describe, had passed over his face. He had never afterward seen her or spoken her name.
“Mary!” he murmured, and his hand set down the bottle on the table. Love—such love as his verses told of—he had come to consider purely subjective, a mirage, a simulacrum to which actual life possessed no counterpart. Yet at that moment he was feeling the wraith of an old thrill, his nostrils smelling a perfume like a dead pansy’s ghost.
He withdrew his hand from the bottle and his fingers clenched. How it hurt him—the sudden stab! For memory had played him a trick; it had dragged a voice out of the past. It was her voice—her words that she had uttered in a careless sentence meant for other ears, one that through those years had tumbled and reëchoed in some under sea-cavern of his mind—“Do you think I could ever care for that lame boy?”
He smiled grimly. She had been right. Nature had set him apart, made him a loup-garou, a solitary hob-goblin. He had been unclubbable, sauvage, even at Cambridge. And yet he had had real friendships there; one especially.
Gordon’s free hand fumbled for his fob and his fingers closed on a little cornelian heart. It had been a keepsake from his college classmate, Matthews, drowned in the muddy waters of the Cam.
He released the bottle hurriedly, strode to the window and flung it open. A gust of rain struck his face and spluttered in the candle, and the curtain flapped like the wing of some ungainly bird. Out in the dark, beneath a clump of larches, glimmered whitely the monument he had erected to “Boatswain,” his Newfoundland. The animal had gone mad.
“Some curse hangs over me and mine!” he muttered. “I never could keep alive even a dog that I liked or that liked me!”
A combined rattle and crash behind him made him turn. The wind had blown shut the door of the cabinet with a smart bang, and a yellow object, large and round, had toppled from its shelf, fallen and rolled to his very feet.