She was a small and rather fragile-looking girl, with big blue eyes and a cloud of golden hair. She had a sweet expression, and her left wrist was in a sling. She looked up at Mortimer as if she had at last found something that amounted to something. I am inclined to think it was a case of love at first sight on both sides.
"Fine weather we"re having," said Mortimer, who was a capital conversationalist.
"Yes," said the girl.
"I like fine weather."
"So do I."
"There"s something about fine weather!"
"Yes."
"It"s--it"s--well, fine weather"s so much finer than weather that isn"t fine," said Mortimer.
He looked at the girl a little anxiously, fearing he might be taking her out of her depth, but she seemed to have followed his train of thought perfectly.
"Yes, isn"t it?" she said. "It"s so--so fine."
"That"s just what I meant," said Mortimer. "So fine. You"ve just hit it."
He was charmed. The combination of beauty with intelligence is so rare.
"I see you"ve hurt your wrist," he went on, pointing to the sling.
"Yes. I strained it a little playing in the championship."
"The championship?" Mortimer was interested. "It"s awfully rude of me,"
he said, apologetically, "but I didn"t catch your name just now."
"My name is Somerset."
Mortimer had been bending forward solicitously. He overbalanced and nearly fell off his chair. The shock had been stunning. Even before he had met and spoken to her, he had told himself that he loved this girl with the stored-up love of a lifetime. And she was Mary Somerset! The hotel lobby danced before Mortimer"s eyes.
The name will, of course, be familiar to you. In the early rounds of the Ladies" Open Golf Championship of that year n.o.body had paid much attention to Mary Somerset. She had survived her first two matches, but her opponents had been nonent.i.ties like herself. And then, in the third round, she had met and defeated the champion. From that point on, her name was on everybody"s lips. She became favourite. And she justified the public confidence by sailing into the final and winning easily. And here she was, talking to him like an ordinary person, and, if he could read the message in her eyes, not altogether indifferent to his charms, if you could call them that.
"Golly!" said Mortimer, awed.
Their friendship ripened rapidly, as friendships do in the South of France. In that favoured clime, you find the girl and Nature does the rest. On the second morning of their acquaintance Mortimer invited her to walk round the links with him and watch him play. He did it a little diffidently, for his golf was not of the calibre that would be likely to extort admiration from a champion. On the other hand, one should never let slip the opportunity of acquiring wrinkles on the game, and he thought that Miss Somerset, if she watched one or two of his shots, might tell him just what he ought to do. And sure enough, the opening arrived on the fourth hole, where Mortimer, after a drive which surprised even himself, found his ball in a nasty cuppy lie.
He turned to the girl.
"What ought I to do here?" he asked.
Miss Somerset looked at the ball. She seemed to be weighing the matter in her mind.
"Give it a good hard knock," she said.
Mortimer knew what she meant. She was advocating a full iron. The only trouble was that, when he tried anything more ambitious than a half-swing, except off the tee, he almost invariably topped. However, he could not fail this wonderful girl, so he swung well back and took a chance. His enterprise was rewarded. The ball flew out of the indentation in the turf as cleanly as though John Henry Taylor had been behind it, and rolled, looking neither to left nor to right, straight for the pin. A few moments later Mortimer Sturgis had holed out one under bogey, and it was only the fear that, having known him for so short a time, she might be startled and refuse him that kept him from proposing then and there. This exhibition of golfing generalship on her part had removed his last doubts. He knew that, if he lived for ever, there could be no other girl in the world for him. With her at his side, what might he not do? He might get his handicap down to six--to three--to scratch--to plus something! Good heavens, why, even the Amateur Championship was not outside the range of possibility. Mortimer Sturgis shook his putter solemnly in the air, and vowed a silent vow that he would win this pearl among women.
Now, when a man feels like that, it is impossible to restrain him long.
For a week Mortimer Sturgis"s soul sizzled within him: then he could contain himself no longer. One night, at one of the informal dances at the hotel, he drew the girl out on to the moonlit terrace.
"Miss Somerset----" he began, stuttering with emotion like an imperfectly-corked bottle of ginger-beer. "Miss Somerset--may I call you Mary?"
The girl looked at him with eyes that shone softly in the dim light.
"Mary?" she repeated. "Why, of course, if you like----"
"If I like!" cried Mortimer. "Don"t you know that it is my dearest wish? Don"t you know that I would rather be permitted to call you Mary than do the first hole at Muirfield in two? Oh, Mary, how I have longed for this moment! I love you! I love you! Ever since I met you I have known that you were the one girl in this vast world whom I would die to win! Mary, will you be mine? Shall we go round together? Will you fix up a match with me on the links of life which shall end only when the Grim Reaper lays us both a stymie?"
She drooped towards him.
"Mortimer!" she murmured.
He held out his arms, then drew back. His face had grown suddenly tense, and there were lines of pain about his mouth.
"Wait!" he said, in a strained voice. "Mary, I love you dearly, and because I love you so dearly I cannot let you trust your sweet life to me blindly. I have a confession to make, I am not--I have not always been"--he paused--"a good man," he said, in a low voice.
She started indignantly.
"How can you say that? You are the best, the kindest, the bravest man I have ever met! Who but a good man would have risked his life to save me from drowning?"
"Drowning?" Mortimer"s voice seemed perplexed. "You? What do you mean?"
"Have you forgotten the time when I fell in the sea last week, and you jumped in with all your clothes on----"
"Of course, yes," said Mortimer. "I remember now. It was the day I did the long seventh in five. I got off a good tee-shot straight down the fairway, took a baffy for my second, and---- But that is not the point.
It is sweet and generous of you to think so highly of what was the merest commonplace act of ordinary politeness, but I must repeat, that judged by the standards of your snowy purity, I am not a good man. I do not come to you clean and spotless as a young girl should expect her husband to come to her. Once, playing in a foursome, my ball fell in some long gra.s.s. n.o.body was near me. We had no caddies, and the others were on the fairway. G.o.d knows----" His voice shook. "G.o.d knows I struggled against the temptation. But I fell. I kicked the ball on to a little bare mound, from which it was an easy task with a nice half-mashie to reach the green for a snappy seven. Mary, there have been times when, going round by myself, I have allowed myself ten-foot putts on three holes in succession, simply in order to be able to say I had done the course in under a hundred. Ah! you shrink from me! You are disgusted!"
"I"m not disgusted! And I don"t shrink! I only shivered because it is rather cold."
"Then you can love me in spite of my past?"
"Mortimer!"
She fell into his arms.
"My dearest," he said presently, "what a happy life ours will be. That is, if you do not find that you have made a mistake."
"A mistake!" she cried, scornfully.
"Well, my handicap is twelve, you know, and not so darned twelve at that. There are days when I play my second from the fairway of the next hole but one, days when I couldn"t putt into a coal-hole with "Welcome!" written over it. And you are a Ladies" Open Champion. Still, if you think it"s all right----. Oh, Mary, you little know how I have dreamed of some day marrying a really first-cla.s.s golfer! Yes, that was my vision--of walking up the aisle with some sweet plus two girl on my arm. You shivered again. You are catching cold."
"It is a little cold," said the girl. She spoke in a small voice.