I
All afternoon since three o'clock he had sat cooling his heels in a
corner of the hotel veranda. And all afternoon he had been a
spectacle of interest to the beautiful cosmopolitan creature who
watched him from her seat under the palm tree in the corresponding
corner.
She had two men with her, and when she was not occupied with one or
both of them she turned her splendid eyes, gaily or solemnly, on
Oscar Thesiger. And every time she turned them Thesiger in his
corner darkened and flushed and bit his moustache and twirled it,
while his eyes answered hers as he believed they meant him to
answer. Oscar Thesiger was not a cosmopolitan himself for nothing.
And all the time while he looked at her he was thinking, thinking
very miserably, of little Vera Walters.
She had refused him yesterday evening without giving any reason.
Her cruelty (if it wasn't cruelty he'd like to know what it was)
remained unexplained, incomprehensible to Oscar Thesiger.
For, if she didn't mean to marry him, why on earth had they asked
him to go abroad with them? Why had they dragged him about with them
for five weeks, up and down the Riviera? Why was he there now,
cooling his heels in the veranda of the Hotel Mediterranee, Cannes?
That was where the cruelty, the infernal cruelty came in.
And her reasons--if she had only given him her reasons. It was all
he asked for. But of course she hadn't any.
What possible reason could she have? It wasn't as if he'd been a bad
lot like her French brother-in-law, Paul de Vignolles (good Lord,
the things he knew about de Vignolles!). He was, as men go, a decent
sort. He had always known where to draw the line (de Vignolles
didn't). And he wasn't ugly, like de Vignolles. On the contrary, he
was, as men go, distinctly good looking; he knew he was; the glances
of the beautiful and hypothetical stranger assured him of it, and he
had looked in the glass not half an hour ago to reassure himself.
Solid he was, and well built, and he had decorative points that
pleased: a fresh color, eyes that flashed blue round a throbbing
black, a crisp tawny curl in his short moustache and shorter hair.
He was well off; there wasn't a thing she wanted that he couldn't
give her. And he was the admired and appreciated friend of her
admired and appreciated sister, Agatha de Vignolles.
And for poor little Vera, as far as he could see, the alternatives
to marrying him were dismal. It was either marrying a Frenchman,
since Agatha had married one, or living forever with that admired
and appreciated woman, looking after the little girls, Ninon and
Odette. She had been looking after them ever since he had first met
her and fallen, with some violence, in love with her.
It was a bit late now to go back on all that. It had been an
understood thing. Vera herself had understood it, and she--well, she
had lent herself to it very sweetly, shyly, and beautifully, as Vera
would. If she hadn't he wouldn't have had a word to say against her
decision.
It wasn't as if she had been a cold and selfish woman like her
sister. She wasn't cold; and, as for selfish, he had seen her with
Agatha and the little girls. It was through the little girls that he
had made love to her, that being the surest and shortest way. He had
worked it through Ninon and Odette; he had carried them on his back
by turns that very afternoon, in the heat of the sun, all the way,
that terrible winding way, up the Californie Hill to the Observatory
at the top, where they had sat drinking coffee and eating brioches,
he and Vera and Ninon and Odette. What on earth did she suppose he
did it for?
But she hadn't supposed anything; she had simply understood, and had
been adorable to him all afternoon. Not that she had said much (Vera
didn't say things); but her eyes, her eyes had given her away; they
had been as soft for him as they had been for Ninon and Odette.
Why, oh why, hadn't he done it, then?
He couldn't, because of those two infernal, bilingual little
monkeys. They were clinging to her skirts all the way down the hill.
They were all going to Nice the next day; and that evening the de
Vignolles had gone down to the Casino and Vera hadn't gone. It would
have been all right if the children had not been allowed to sit up
to see the conjuror conjuring in the lounge. But they had sat up;
and that had brought it to ten o'clock before he had Vera for a
minute to himself.
He may have chosen his moment badly (it wasn't easy to choose it
well, living, as the de Vignolles did, in public), and perhaps, if
they hadn't had that little difference of opinion, he and she---- It
was in the evening that they had had it, between the conjuring
tricks and the children's chatter, in the public, the intolerably
public lounge, and it was only a difference of opinion, opinion
concerning the beauty of the beautiful and hypothetical lady who was
looking at him then, who had never ceased to look at him and Vera
and the children when any of them were about.
Thesiger couldn't get Vera to say that the lady was beautiful, and
the little that she did say implied that you couldn't be beautiful
if you looked like that. She was not beautiful (Thesiger had
admitted it) in Vera's way, and on the whole he was glad to think
that Vera didn't look like that; but there was, he had contended, a
beauty absolute and above opinion, and the lady had it. That was
all. Perhaps, now he came to think of it, he ought not to have drawn
Vera's attention to her; for he knew what Vera had thought of her by
the things she hadn't said, and, what was worse, he knew what Paul
de Vignolles thought by the things he _had_ said, things implying
that, if the lady were honest, appearances were against her. Of her
and of her honesty Thesiger didn't feel very sure himself. He found
himself continually looking at her to make sure. He had been looking
at her then, across the little table in the lounge where she and her
two men sat drinking coffee and liqueurs. She kept thrusting her
face between the two as she talked; she had a rose in her bronze
hair, which made him dubious; and when their eyes met, as they were
always meeting (how could he help it?), his doubt leaped in him and
fastened on her face. Her face had held him for a moment so with all
his doubt, and he had stared at her and flamed in a curious
excitement born of Vera's presence and of hers, while he smiled to
himself furtively under the moustache he bit.
And then he had seen Vera looking at him.
For a moment she had looked at him, with wide, grave eyes that
stayed wide until she turned her head away suddenly.
And the lady, who was the cause of it all, had got up and removed
herself, softly and, for her, inconspicuously, taking her two men
with her out into the garden and the night.
Of course he had understood Vera. He had seen that it was jealousy,
feminine jealousy. And that was why, in the drawing-room afterward,
he had hurried up with his proposal, to make it all straight.
And she had refused him without giving any reasons. She had gone off
to Nice by the one-forty-four train with the de Vignolles, Paul and
Agatha and Ninon and Odette; she had left him in the great, gay,
exotic hotel above the palm trees, above the rose and ivory town,
above the sea; left him alone with the loveliness that made him mad
and miserable; left him cooling his heels on the veranda, under the
gaze, the distinctly interested gaze, of the beautiful and
hypothetical stranger.