But the resemblance, Warner had divined at once, was superficial, and the first interview had justified his instinct. Anne was a child in many ways; the other, although younger in years, had been cool, shrewd, calculating, making no false moves in any game she chose to play. Warner knew that if he had discovered a gold mine in Nevis and won her, he should have hated her long since.
But Anne Percy! He could not make the same mistake twice. And had he met her when he had a decent home and an honoured name to offer her he believed that he could have found happiness in her till the end of his life. Nor, had she loved him, would she have been influenced by worldly considerations. He had seen little of women of the great normal middle class. Conditions had thrown him with the very high or the very low, and experience taught him that the former when unmarried were all angling for husbands, and the latter for patrons. Therefore had he created a world of ideal women--one secret of his popularity, for every woman that read his poems looked into the poet's magic mirror and saw herself; and he had found happiness in creating, as poets must. Even since his ostracism there had been many hours of sustained happiness and moments of rapture when he had quite forgotten his position among men. And Anne Percy, in her radiant presence, drove his ideals into the shadows and covered them with cobwebs! And he could never claim her! Even were he not a poor broken creature, with little alive in him but that still flickering soul dwelling in his faded unspeakable body, he would not even offer the commonest attentions to this uncommon girl who was worthy of the best of men. Nor did he wish to suffer any more deeply than he did at present. To know her better would be to love her more. When she left the island he hoped to relegate her to the plane upon which he dwelt in dreams, and forget that she had not been a created ideal.
But he was sometimes surprised at the strength of his suffering and his longing. He was so unutterably tired, had been for years, so weary in mind and body through excess and misery and remorse, so bitterly old, that he was amazed there should be moments when he experienced the fleeting hopes and deep despair of any other lover of his years. He left his bed at night and went out and walked about the island, or rowed until he was lost under the stars; he dreamed miserably of her over his books, or hid in the cane fields to watch her swing by in the early morning, divested of that hideous hoop-skirt, and unconsciously mimicking the undulating gait of the coloured women she passed. He had replenished his wardrobe and was becoming as dandified as any blood in Bath House, having borrowed from Hunsdon against his next remittance. And as he was eating regularly for the first time in years--less and less of the concoctions of his own worthless servants--and drinking not at all, there was no doubt that he was improving in appearance as well as in health, in vitality. The last word rose in his brain to-day for the first time. Could it be that this mortal lassitude might leave him, neck and heel? That red blood would run in his veins once more? To what end? He was none the less disgraced, none the less unfit to aspire to the hand of Anne Percy. Not only would the world denounce her if she yielded, but his own self-contempt was too deep to permit him to take so much innocent loveliness to himself. But the thought often maddened him, and to-day, as he looked up and caught her eyes fixed upon him, suddenly to be withdrawn with a deep blush, he had to control himself from abruptly leaving the church. More than once he had suspected an interest, which in happier conditions might have developed very rapidly. There was no doubt that his work meant more to her than to any woman he had ever met, and he was convinced that she avoided him both from a natural shrinking and because her strong common sense compelled her to see him as he was, forbade her imagination to transmute his battered husk into the semblance of what was left of his better self. But she could love him. That was the thought that sent the blood to his head and drove him from his pillow.