The man without a heart

Chapter I / WAS sad and weary-hearted

And I thought I’d take a rest,

So I hopped the train , and started To the place I loved the best —

To my home-town once again ,

Just to ease my tired brain;

But instead of peace and quiet—to wanton riot I went home again.

You’d never know that old home-town of mine — You’d never seen such changes in the time!

The old Y.M.C.A. is now a cabaret —

And the girls all look so sweet — yes! so neat — yes! And deuced pretty too.

And the men who’ve stayed home all their lives Are dancing every night with other fellows’ wives, You’d never know that old home-town of mine!

The song with its queer mixture of comedy and pathos, and the loud rasping voice of the singer, stopped, as the gramophone ran down with a whir. The man on the terrace outside the long, open window moved restlessly, and frowned as he leaned on the low balustrade and looked into the moonlit garden below.

You’d never know that old home-town of mine!

The words were true enough, as far as he was concerned; he had not believed it possible for any¬ thing to change as utterly and completely as this England after an absence of seventeen years.

He had kept the memory of its wide fields and winding lanes an unfading picture in his memory, and had idealized its men and women, always com¬ paring them favourably with those hard workers with whom he had rubbed shoulders and roughed it in the backwoods. And one fortnight of the holiday of which he had dreamed, and for which he had longed for many years, had sufficed to bit¬ terly disillusion him.

He had come home to a town which had swal¬ lowed up the village of his youth, to fields covered with ugly modern stuccoed houses, to his mother’s grave, and the crushing realization that the mar¬ riage of his only and adored sister had turned out a disastrous failure.

In the room behind him some one started the gramophone again, and the crowd of noisy people in Linda’s drawing-room took up the chorus of the song, singing it lustily.

. . . And the men who’ve stayed home all their lives

Are dancing every night with other fellows’ wives , You'd never know that old home-town of mine!

Rufus Asher smiled grimly to himself in the darkness. What had happened to England—to every one—that life as he had known it seventeen years ago should seem completely upside down, and a mockery of all the old memories and tradi¬ tions he had held so dear?

Last night he had tried to speak of it to Linda, to put his thoughts into uneloquent speech, and she had laughed at him.

“My dear old thing, you’re talking like a back number!” she said, rubbing her cheek lightly against his sleeve. “You forget that it’s seventeen years since you were home, and in that time we’ve all progressed. Nobody’s shocked at anything now; we just take it all for granted.”

He turned round, his back to the garden, and looked at the gay crowd in the room beyond the window.

They seemed happy enough. Most of the women were young and beautifully dressed; most of the men looked strong and fit for better things, so Asher thought, as he watched them fox-trotting.

This modern style of dancing was new and dis¬ tasteful to him; as the music stopped once more, he turned hastily and moved further along the ter¬ race into the shadows, anxious to escape observa¬ tion.

He knew he had not been a success at his sister’s house-party, and the knowledge made him ill at ease.

“You’re not very sociable, you know,” Linda had chided him earlier in the evening. “Talk about us changing! You’ve changed more than we have, Ruffo! I told every one what a rip you used to be, but you’ve left it all behind, haven’t you?”

Was that true, he wondered, and he thought of the change in Linda’s face—her too bright eyes that never seemed to smile—and anger stirred in his heart.

Only four years ago she had written to him in rapture; she had met the most wonderful man in the world. The letter bubbled over with happi¬ ness and the glory of romance; it had stirred his lonely heart with envy and a faint jealousy, as he realized that he could no longer expect to be first in her life.

As children he and Linda had adored one an¬ other, and after he went abroad she had never fail¬ ed to write to him each week, until she married Ed¬ mund Hyde. The change had come then, as he had known it must come; her letters had grown few and far between, and less confidential and spon¬ taneous. It had seemed as though she purposely avoided answering his questions, or telling him any¬ thing of her home-life; but until he came back to England he had not suspected that she was unhappy in her marriage.

He had never met Hyde before, but he had con¬ ceived an instant dislike for him, although the man was a gentleman.

“What do you think of Edmund?” Linda had inquired, rather nervously, at the end of his first day with her, and he had answered the question by asking another.

“Are you happy, Linda?”

It had not needed her flush or faltering eyes to tell him; he had known already, but she had tried her best to deceive him. After listening pa¬ tiently for a few moments, he took her hand in his big clasp, holding it gently as he said:

“You can trust me; tell me what is the matter.”

But she had only laughed constrainedly and drawn her hand away.

“You are imagining things, Ruffo. There’s nothing the matter. I suppose we all get disap¬ pointed with marriage; it never turns out as we think it will.”

That was so like a woman!—to try and protect the man she had married. He had not dared ask the inevitable question: “Is there another woman?” but he had sworn in his heart that he would find out, and that if Hyde was playing a crooked game he should be made to answer for it.

And then, as if guessing his thoughts, Linda had cried out:

“You won’t say anything to him, will you, Ruffo, dear? Promise me you won’t tell any one!”

“I shall not speak of it,” he promised her; but since then he had watched his sister’s husband as a cat watches a mouse, furtively, and without ex¬ citing suspicion, but so far unsuccessfully.

The fellow was clever—too clever to be honest, Rufus told himself savagely, as the dancers came crowding out of the drawing-room on to the ter¬ race; and he rose to his feet to look for the one woman of the many in his sister’s house-party who had escaped his condemnation.

Barbara Weir was different from all the others, or so he believed.

His queer, critical mind had placed her apart with his dead mother and adored sister—the only two women who had sounded the depths of his affections. She had come to stay with Linda the day after his own arrival. She was young, twentythree perhaps, and full of the joy of living.

“Not pretty! Oh, decidedly not pretty,” so Linda had said one day when they had been speak¬ ing of her. “But there is something attractive about her, don’t you think, Ruffo, dear?”

Rufus had not spoken to her many times, but she had not avoided him as most of the women did, and she laughed in friendly fashion at his pessimism, defending her friends against his bitter condemnation.

He interested even while he puzzled her, and sometimes she felt a tinge of fear when she was in his company. There was something so ruthless about him, so intolerant. Physically he was very tall and powerfully built, almost a lumbering man, one might say, with a shock of thick, unruly, red hair, which had been responsible for his name of Rufus, and a hard, rather lined face.

He had been for years very close to the seamy side of life, and it had left its mark upon him; he had learnt to distrust people, and to make friendships slowly; but where his affections were aroused he was capable of extreme jealousy, and the thought that Edmund Hyde was not treating Linda well at times almost drove him to frenzy for her sake.

Barbara Weir had laughed at his blunt philos¬ ophy.

“You’re a cave man, you know,” she told him. “You’re the sort of man who would pick a woman up in your arms and carry her off whether she wished to go or not.”

He had agreed grimly.

“Perhaps I am. At any rate, I am the sort of man who would commit murder if I saw another fellow flirting with my wife, as some of them do here.”

She had wrinkled her up her brows as she an¬ swered him.

“You don’t approve of us, of course, but we’re very harmless, really we are.”

He thought of that now, as he saw her coming towards him along the terrace. She was with a youth who was leaning down to her, talking ear¬ nestly, and Rufus heard her laugh and saw her shake her head; then her eyes fell on him, and she came quickly forward.

“Bad man! I’ve been looking for you every¬ where,” she said.

She dismissed the youth beside her with a little nod, and turned again to Asher.

“I’m running away from an unwanted partner,” she told him, candidly. “Will you take pity on me?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t dance.”

“I know you don’t, and I don’t want to dance. It’s so hot in the drawing-room. Don’t you think it would be nice in the garden?”

“Anywhere you wish.”

They went down the terrace steps to the lawn below; it was a warm, still night, with a romantic crescent moon climbing high above the dark trees, and the air was filled with the faint perfume of sleeping flowers.

“So you are running away from an unwanted partner,” Rufus said. “What is the matter? Does he tear your frock, or tread on your toes?”

“Neither. I could forgive him those things; but he tried to make love to me.”

“And you don’t like being made love to?”

“Not by boys.”

“And when does a man cease to be a boy, Miss Weir?”

She laughed.

“Is that a riddle? If so, I give it up; but I think some of you are boys all your lives.”

“A happy state of mind, surely.”

“I don’t know.”

They strolled a little way without speaking, then Rufus said, diffidently:

“I wonder if you would mind very much if I smoke a pipe? I have been longing for one all the evening, but my sister tells me that such things are not done in this enlightened company.”

Barbara laughed.

“Please do. I like a pipe; it makes a man look

IT so happy and at ease. Of course, you abominate cigarettes?”

“I do.”

“I thought so; you seem to abominate every¬ thing that men—most men, I mean—usually like.”

“Is that a compliment?”

She hesitated.

“I am not sure,” she said at last.

Rufus turned it over in his mind, then he in¬ quired interestedly:

“What sort of things do I abominate that most men like, Miss Weir?”

She spread her hands with a vague little gesture.

“Well—dancing, and most of the other things we do here to amuse ourselves; and they’re really very harmless amusements, Mr. Asher.”

“Are they?” His voice was cynical. “Is flirt¬ ing with another man’s wife, or another woman’s, husband, included in that very ‘harmless’ category,, may I inquire?”

She was silent for a moment, then she said, de¬ fensively:

“But every one does it, and it doesn’t mean anything.” He felt her eyes upon him. “You don’t like women, Mr. Asher.”

He hesitated.

■“Present company and my sister always ex¬ cepted, no/’ he said.

She laughed.

“Please don’t be polite. I can bear the truth. Of course Linda adores you; she thinks there is nobody in the world like you.”

“Perhaps that is fortunate for the world.”

She stood still.

“Would you mind if we sit down? I believe I’m tired. There is a seat round the big oak tree over there.”

He went with her silently, and sat down beside her, his back to the tree’s gnarled trunk.

“I wish I’d got a brother,” Barbara said, sud¬ denly. “I should have loved him just as much as Linda loves you. I’ve never had any one really of my own. Mother died when I was three, and my father died in India when I was over here at boarding school,” she said. “Ugh! how I loathed boarding school. I ran away once, but they found me, and I had to go back.”

“Quite right, too,” Asher said, calmly.

She turned indignant eyes upon him.

‘“What do you mean? How can you possibly judge?”

“All girls and women need discipline,” he told her. “You know the old saying, ‘A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree; the more you beat them, the better they be.’ Those sentiments are my own entirely.”

He spoke half in fun, but she took him seri¬ ously.

“I think you are a very hard man,” she said.

Rufus struck a match with which to light his pipe, shading it with his hands from the night breeze, and in its sudden flame he saw her face; a very indignant face it was at the moment, with eyes that were angry and rebellious. The flame flickered and went out, and he said:

“How can you have formed an opinion of my character? We have only known one another for twelve days.”

“Fourteen,” she corrected him, promptly. “I came the day after you did, you know.”

“Fourteen, then,” he amended his words. “And so in that time you consider you have correctly judged my character?”

She laughed.

/“I believe in instinct, and in first impressions, and mine are both generally right.”j

“And so—I am a hard man.”

“Yes, I think so. I think you would always let your heart be governed by your head; and if people are like that, it really means that they have no heart at all.”

“I am much obliged to you.”

“Well—you asked me,” she said, deprecatingly.

“I did, please go on! I am very interested.”

She shifted her position a little, tilting her head backwards, so that the moonlight fell full upon her face.

“Linda told us a lot about you before you came,” she said. “But you are different from what she said. I thought you would be quite young—in your ways, I mean—and very jolly! I thought you would like us all very much, and that we should like you-”

“And instead?” he questioned, as she broke off.

“Instead—well, you don’t like us at all! We know that! And I think we’re all too much afraid to dare to like you! It would seem like an im¬ pertinence.” • >

“What nonsense!” he protested.

“Oh, no, it isn’t,” she insisted. “Do you re¬ member that first night at dinner? You sat oppo¬ site to me, and you kept looking at me with such disapproval. I suppose you were shocked because I smoked and didn’t refuse a cocktail and liqueur.

At any rate, I know I thought that you were the kind of man I should not like to offend.”

Rufus frowned.

“That sounds rather as if you are afraid of me.”

She nodded.

“Yes, I believe I am,” she admitted, frankly. “You see, you’re hard, aren’t you, and intolerant, and critical? You think we’re all just the limit here, don’t you, Mr. Asher?”

He did not deny it.

“You must remember that I have lived for more than seventeen years amongst very different peo¬ ple.”

“Still, you need not have shown so quickly that you disliked us.”

“I am sorry. I apologize for my rudeness. It was quite unintentional.”

He leaned forward, his hands hanging loosely between his knees, staring at the big house before them, with its many lighted windows.

“Linda says that I am old-fashioned, Miss Weir,” he said, suddenly. “And perhaps she is right. “I’ve been away for so long, and it had always been the dream of my life to save enough money to be able to come home—for good! Well, I’ve come, and I wish I had not.”

“Oh—but why? Have things changed so much?”

“Yes.”

She gave a quick sigh.

“That’s the war!” she said.

Asher laughed shortly.

“The poor old war! Everything is laid at its door. We are lucky to have such a plausible ex¬ cuse and likely reason for everything we do.”

“Were you in France?” she asked.

“No, they sent me to German East. I would rather have gone to France. We didn’t do much good in the particular spot where I was, except get fevers and home-sickness. I was there three years before I crocked up.”

“What did you do then?”

“They sent me back to Australia, and I got fit again; then the war came to an end, and I sold my various possessions, set my house in order, as soon as I could, and came home.”

“To a changed, dissolute England!” she said, mockingly.

“To a changed England, certainly,” he agreed, in his quiet voice. “Everything had changed, to me, at least! My mother was dead, and the old house where I was born, and over which I had sentimentalized for seventeen years, had been hemmed in by horrible, new, stuccoed villas, and was used as a factory for somebody’s patent pills. I find myself a square peg in a round hole, Miss Weir; even my sister-”

Barbara interrupted quickly:

“Oh, but she hasn’t changed, surely?”

“I think she has changed most of all. I left her happy and contented, without a care in the world, and I come back to find her none of these things.”

She turned her head away.

“She always seems to be having a good time.”

He made rather a violent gesture of repulsion.

“Do you call this sort of thing a good time? This life of artificiality? Always mixing with this v crowd of dressed-up puppets? Never being your natural self for one moment? ... If you call this having a good time, you have never lived at all, Miss Weir.”

“Never lived!” She looked at him with a strange expression in her eyes. The many lights from the house shone full on his hard, rugged face, revealing its intense earnestness, and she said again: “Never lived! What do you call living, then, Mr. Asher?”

He laughed.

“Freedom! The country! To be able to ride miles over prairie-land where there are no stuccoed abominations! To be able to breathe and go your own untrammelled way! To spend your days where nobody judges you by the cut of your coat or the brand of cigars you smoke. Where men and women are good pals and hard workers. Where at the end of the day you are dog-tired with honest work, and not because you have been straining every nerve to go one better than the

man who lives next door. Where-” He broke

off, conscious of her regard. “I beg your pardon; you should have stopped me. I am afraid I am an intolerable bore, Miss Weir.”

“I am very interested; please go on.”

But he rose determinedly to his feet.

“I have been extraordinarily eloquent for me, but I have nothing more to say. Shall we go back to the house?”

She did not move for a moment. Then she rose slowly and stood beside him.

“You are a strange man, Mr. Asher,” she said.

“A hard man, as you told me just now,” he an¬ swered.

“A hard man—-yes!” she insisted. “I should not like to have you for an enemy.”

They went back to the house, and she was claimed for the next dance immediately, so Asher went along the terrace to a window beyond the drawing-room, which stood open, a dim light burn¬ ing within.

It was a handsomely appointed smoking-room, and at first sight it seemed to be deserted, but as he went forward some one stirred in a big chaif, and his sister half rose from its depths, sinking back with a little relieved sigh.

“Only you, Ruffo! Fm so hot and tired! I came here to rest for a moment.” A smile strug¬ gled over her face as she met his eyes.

“Are you tired too?” she asked. “Or merely bored?”

“Both, perhaps.” He sat down on the arm of her chair, and she leaned her head against him.

“It’s good to have you home,” she said, softly.

He looked down with troubled eyes at her averted face. She looked what she was, an un¬ happy woman.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked, ab¬ ruptly, and she roused herself with an effort and sat up.

“Nothing particular. I saw you in the garden with Barbie Weir just now. Do you like her, Ruffo?”

“I hardly know her.”

“Hardly know her! When you’ve been in this house together for a fortnight! Nowadays that’s long enough for people to fall in love and get en¬ gaged and married too.”

“Say divorced as well, and the story will be complete,” he said, cynically.

She held up hands of mock dismay.

“I would never dare say such a thing, to you.”

“You need not mind. I am rapidly becoming acclimatized.”

He got up and walked to the window, where he stood looking into the garden, his big figure blocking out the moonlight.

“Barbie’s going away to-morrow,” Linda said, suddenly. “Did she tell you? I’m sorry; she’s an asset to a party like this.”

Going away! A crushing sense of dismay filled his heart. How could he tolerate the house when when she was not there?

Linda went on vaguely.

“I wonder she hasn’t got married! She must have had plenty of chances. Not that I can recommend matrimony exactly, but when youVe got no money and no home of your own it has its points, I suppose.”

“Where is she going?”

“I didn’t ask, and she didn’t tell me. She hasn’t any relations, you know.”

“And no money, did you say?”

“Well, she can’t have much. Her father was in the Army, and you know what Army pay is. I suppose she’s got a certain amount, or she couldn’t live.” She shot a mischievous glance at her brother’s broad back. “If she was any one else I might be tempted to believe she wasn’t quite —well, circumspect! But as it’s Barbie-”

“Miss Weir is a lady,” Rufus said, stiffly.

Linda laughed.

“Ruffo, you rude boy! Aren’t all my guests ladies? What are you suggesting?”

“I’m not suggesting anything.”

There was a little silence, then he turned and came back to her. “Linda, what are you going to do with your life?”

He stood looking down at her, his hands thrust into his pockets, his eyes affectionately tender. She looked up, then swiftly away again, the colour rushing headlong to her cheeks.

“Do with it? What do you mean, Ruffo?”

“What I say. If you’re not happy-”

She got up and slipped a hand through his arm, laying her cheek against his coat-sleeve.

“I’ve made my bed, I suppose I’ve got to lie on it,” she said, in a constrained little voice. “Don’t worry your dear old head about me.”

“But I must worry about you; I can’t help it.”

“I know; but there’s no need. You can’t help me or alter things.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “Leave me alone, Ruffo, dear. I’m best left alone.” She kissed him again, passing a hand tenderly over his rough hair. “You’re the sort of man I should like to have married,” she told him, with a little emotional catch in her voice. “A big, bullying sort of squaw-man, who would stand no nonsense, and yet be—oh, so kind!”

Rufus laughed gruffly, and thought of Barbara Weir. “A man without a heart,” she had called him.

“And now we must go back and make ourselves agreeable,” Linda said.

She went over to the mirror and powdered her nose and reddened her lips, Rufus watching dis¬ contentedly.

“Why do you use that stuff?” he demanded.

She looked back at him and laughed.

“Why? Because every one else does, I sup¬ pose.”

“Good Lord, what a reason!”

“It’s as good as any other,” she protested. She waved her hand to him and disappeared through the French window on to the terrace again, and after a moment Rufus slowly followed.

The gramophone was still playing, and as he passed the drawing-room window he stopped for a moment and looked in.

There were many couples dancing, but he could not see Barbara Weir, and he strolled on to the far end of the terrace, and sat down in the shadows, pulling out his pipe again and mechanically fill¬ ing it.

So she was going away. He wondered why she had not told him; it would have been quite an ordinary thing to have casually mentioned it; and again that crushing sense of dismay swept through him.

He had told her that he regretted having re¬ turned to England, but it had not been the truth; he was glad that he had come home; it had been more than worth while that in return for his many disappointments he had met her; perhaps some day he would be able to tell her, and then . . » his thoughts scattered as hurried footsteps sounded along the terrace, and the soft sound of a woman’s dress, and then a voice, nervous and almost on the verge of tears, spoke in a broken whisper.

“I was afraid I should not be able to get away. I thought we should not have a moment together after all.”

Asher made a convulsive movement as if to rise, then sat passive once more, his hands gripping the chair-arms, his teeth clenched over the stem of his pipe, which he had refilled but had not had time to light.

And the soft, shaken voice said again with in¬ creasing emotion:

“Oh, I’m glad, glad it’s going to end at last! I couldn’t have borne any more. Edmund, are you sure, sure that it’s all right? That you will never be sorry?”

There followed a man’s laugh, and the answer in a man’s deep voice.

“As sure as I am that to-morrow’s sun will rise.”

They passed close to where Asher sat—the girl and the man to whose arm she clung—so close that her skirts brushed him, and the faint perfume, which he could have sworn to, even if he had not been sure of the voice with its unwonted agitation, for a second seemed to make the night air more fragrant.

Then came the sound of whispered words and a woman’s sobbing laugh.

And to every word that followed Rufus Asher listened with calculating deliberation, his head craned forward, his eyes narrowed beneath their heavy brows, till the gramophone, starting again in the drawing-room, drowned the two voices.

People trooped back from the garden, where they had been spending the interval, and the girl at the dark end of the terrace beyond where Rufus sat moved.

“We must go back; they will miss us and won¬ der.”

Asher heard the rustle of her frock, and her nervous laugh, as her companion rose quickly, bar¬ ring her way.

“You will not fail, promise me, Barbie?”

“Do you need to ask?”

And then against the moonlit sky the two figures were blotted into one in a close embrace, and Asher bit his lip till the blood wetted it, to keep back a groan that rose from his heart, and crushed his clenched hands against his eyes.

That hound Hyde and Barbara Weir! For a moment he saw the world red.

When he looked up again they had gone, the terrace was deserted. He rose unsteadily to his feet, and stood looking up at the sky with its crescent moon and blue-black, limitless spaces be¬ yond, the cool night air beating on his relentless face.

You’d never know that old home-town of mine — You’d never seen such changes in the time!

The old Y.M.C.A. is now a cabaret —

And the girls all look so sweet — yes! so neat — yes! And deuced pretty too . . . .

And men who’ve stayed home all their lives Are dancing every night with other fellows’ wives, You’d never know that old home-town of mine .

The doggerel lines mocked and tortured him. He had thought her so different from the rest! How she must have laughed!

She had called him a hard man; well, she should learn how right she had been.

All that was cruel and brutal in his nature seemed to rise to the surface. He smarted with pain because he recognized his own weakness towards her; he burned with indignation for Linda’s sake, and for the insult offered to her beneath her own roof.

And although he did not recognize or admit it, bitterest jealousy was tearing from his heart the remaining roots of his belief in the goodness of human nature and of mankind.

He had placed this girl in a little niche apart, with the sainted memory of his mother and his love for his sister, and she had been unworthy of even his casual regard.

The day for which he had watched and waited had come at last, and he would not neglect to take full advantage of it, and make the girl who had ruined Linda’s happiness pay to the uttermost farthing.