University of Virginia Library

7. CHAPTER VII.
CHECKMATE!

“I DO not love you, Maverick Hayle.”

May sweetness was in the breakfast-room;
broken, warm airs from the river; a breath of
yellow jonquils, and a shadow of a budding bough;
on a level with the low window-sill a narcissus
with a red eye winked steadily. The little silver
service was in the breakfast-room, in sharp
rilievo against a mourning-dress and the curve of
a womanly, warm arm. Maverick Hayle, struck
dumb upon his feet, where he stood half pushing
back his chair, was in the breakfast-room.

On either side of the tiny teapot the man's
face and the woman's lay reflected; it was a
smooth, octagonal little teapot, and the two faces
struck upon it without distortion; hung, like
delicate engraving, as if cut into the pretty toy.
There was something very cosey and homelike
about this senseless little teapot, and there was

something very lonely and cold about the man's
face and the woman's, fixed and separated by the
wee width of the polished thing.

Both faces in the teapot were a trifle pale.
Both faces out of the teapot were a trifle paler.

“It is not possible!” exclaimed the man,
instinctively.

“It is quite possible,” explained the woman,
calmly.

His face in the teapot flushed now scorching
red. Hers in the teapot only whitened visibly.

The young man flung himself back into his
chair and ground his teeth. The young woman
sat and looked at the teapot and trembled.

“I do not believe it, Perley!” said her plighted
husband, fiercely.

“I do not love you, Maverick,” repeated Perley,
firmly. “I have been afraid of it for a long time.
I am very certain of it now. Maverick, Maverick,
I am very sorry! I told you we should both be
very sorry! But you could not understand.”

“If it was your foolish furor over a parcel of
factory-girls that I could not understand —”
began Maverick.

But Perley sternly stopped him.

“Never mind about the poor little factory-girls,
Maverick. It is you that I do not love.”

This was a thrust which even Maverick Hayle
could not lightly parry; he was fond of Perley
and fond of himself, and he writhed in his chair
as if it actually hurt him.

“I do not know how it is nor why it is,” said
Perley, sadly, “but I feel as if there had been a
growing away between us for a great while. It
may be that I went away and you stood still; or
that we both went away and both in different
ways; or that we had never, Maverick, been in
the same way at all, and did not know it. You
kissed me, and I did not know it!”

“And if I kiss you again, you will not know
it,” said Maverick, with an argument of smothered
passion in his voice.

“I would rather,” said the lady, evenly, “that
you did not kiss me again.”

Her face in the teapot shone as if a silver veil
fell over it. His face in the teapot clouded and
dropped.

“We have loved each other for a long time,
Perley,” said the young man in a husky voice.

“A long time,” said Perley, sorrowfully.

“And were very happy.”

“Very happy.”

“And should have had — I had thought we
should have had such a pleasant life!”

“A miserable life, Maverick; a most miserable
life.”

“What in Heaven's name has come over you,
Perley!” expostulated the young man. “There
is no other man —”

“No other man,” said Perley, thoughtfully,
“could come between you and me. I do not see,
Maverick, how I could ever speak of love to any
other man.” This she said with her head bent,
and with grave, far-reaching eyes. “A woman
cannot do that thing. I mean there 's nothing in
me that understands how she can do it. I was
very fond of you, Maverick.”

“That is a comfort to me now,” said Maverick,
bitterly.

“I was fond of you, Maverick. I promised to
be your wife. I do not think I could ever say that
to another man. The power to say it has gone
with the growing away. There was the love
and the losing, and now there 's only the sorrow.
I gave you all I had to give. You used it up, I

think. But the growing-away came just the
same. I do not love you.”

“You women do not understand yourselves
any better than you do the rest of the world!”
exclaimed the rejected lover with a bewildered
face. “Why should we grow away? You have
n't thought how you will miss me.”

“I shall miss you,” said Perley. “Of course I
shall miss you, Maverick. So I should miss the
piano, if it were taken out of the parlor.”

Maverick made no reply to this. He felt more
humiliated than pained, as was natural. When
a man becomes only an elegant piece of furniture
in a woman's life, to be dusted at times,
and admired at others, and shoved up garret at
last by remorseless clean fingers that wipe the
cobwebs of him off, it will be generally found
that he endures the annoyance of neglected furniture
— little more. The level that we strike in
the soul that touches us most nearly is almost
sure to be the high-water mark of our own.

Now Maverick, it will be seen, struck no tide-mark
in Perley. It had never been possible for
him to say to the woman, “Thus far shalt thou
go.” Men say that to women, and women to

men. The flood mistakes a nilometer for a
boundary line, placidly. It is one of the bittersweet
blunders of love, that we can stunt ourselves
irretrievably for the loved one's sake, and
be only a little sadder, but never the wiser,
for it.

Perley Kelso thus swept herself over and
around her plighted husband; and in her very
fulness lay his content. He would probably
have loved her without a question, and rested in
her, without a jar, to his dying day. A man
often so loves and so rests in a superior woman.
He thinks himself to be the beach against which
she frets herself; he is the wreck which she has
drowned.

Maverick Hayle, until this morning in the
breakfast-room, had loved Perley in this unreasonable,
unreasoning, and, I believe, irreclaimable
masculine manner; had accepted her as serenely
as a child would accept the Venus de Milo for a
ninepin. One day the ninepin will not roll.
There is speculation in the beautiful dead eyes
of the marble. The game is stopped. He
gathers up his balls and sits down breathless.

“But you love me!” cries the player. “It

must be that you love me at times. It must be
that you will love me in moods and minutes,
Perley. I cannot have gone forever out of all
the moods and minutes of your life. I have
filled it too long.”

He filled it, forsooth! Perley slightly, slowly,
sadly smiled.

“If there is any love in the world, Maverick,
that ought to be independent of moods and
master of all moods, it is the love that people
marry on. Now I 'm neither very old nor very
wise, but I am old enough and wise enough to
understand that it is only that part of me which
gets tired, and has the blues, and minds an
easterly storm, and has a toothache, and wants
to be amused, and wants excitement, and — somebody
the other side of a silver teapot — which
loves you. I do not love you, Maverick Hayle!”

“In that case,” said Maverick, after a pause,
“it is rather awkward for me to be sitting here
any longer.”

“A little.”

“And I might as well take your blessing —
and my hat.”

“Good by,” said Perley, very sadly.

“Good by,” said Maverick, very stiffly.

“You 'll tell your father?” asked the young
lady.

“We 're in an awkward fix all around,” said
the young man, shortly. “I suppose we shall
have to make up our minds to that.”

“But you and I need not be on awkward
terms, — need we?” asked Perley.

“Of course not. `Mutual thing; and part
excellent friends,”' bitingly from Maverick.

“But I shall always be — a little fond of you!”
urged the woman, with a woman's last clutch at
the pleasantness of an old passion.

“Perley,” said Maverick, suddenly holding out
his hand, “I won't be cross about it. I 've
never deserved that you should be any more
than a little fond of me. You 've done the honorable
thing by me, and I suppose I ought to
thank you.”

He shut the door of the breakfast-room upon a
breath of yellow jonquils, and a shadow of a budding
bough, and the narcissus winking steadily;
upon the little silver service, and the curving,
womanly, warm arm, and the solitary face that
hung engraved upon the senseless little teapot.