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THE IMMORTAL MOMENT
Books by
MAY SINCLAIR
The Helpmate
The Divine Fire
Two Sides of a Question
Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson
Etc., etc.
[Illustration: "Kitty's face ... pleaded with the other face in the
glass."]
THE IMMORTAL MOMENT
The Story of Kitty Tailleur
_By_
MAY SINCLAIR
ILLUSTRATED AND DECORATED BY
C. COLES PHILLIPS.
NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY PAGE & CO.
1908
COPYRIGHT, 1908 BY
MAY SINCLAIR
PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1908
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING
THE SCANDINAVIAN
PUBLISHERS' NOTE
THIS STORY APPEARS IN ENGLAND
UNDER THE TITLE "KITTY TAILLEUR"
ILLUSTRATIONS
"Kitty's face ... pleaded with the other face
in the glass" FRONTISPIECE
"She stood there, strangely still ... before the
pitiless stare that went up to her appealing face" 10
"'You won't be tied to me a minute longer than
you like'" 208
"'I want to make you loathe me ... never see me
again'" 268
[Illustration: THE IMMORTAL MOMENT]
THE IMMORTAL MOMENT
CHAPTER I
They came into the hotel dining-room like young persons making their
first entry into life. They carried themselves with an air of subdued
audacity, of innocent inquiry. When the great doors opened to them they
stood still on the threshold, charmed, expectant. There was the magic of
quest, of pure, unspoiled adventure in their very efforts to catch the
head-waiter's eye. It was as if they called from its fantastic
dwelling-place the attendant spirit of delight.
You could never have guessed how old they were. He, at thirty-five, had
preserved, by some miracle, his alert and slender adolescence. In his
brown, clean-shaven face, keen with pleasure, you saw the clear,
serious eyes and the adorable smile of seventeen. She, at thirty, had
kept the wide eyes and tender mouth of childhood. Her face had a child's
immortal, spiritual appeal.
They were charming with each other. You might have taken them for bride
and bridegroom, his absorption in her was so unimpaired. But their names
in the visitors' book stood as Mr. Robert Lucy and Miss Jane Lucy. They
were brother and sister. You gathered it from something absurdly alike
in their faces, something profound and racial and enduring.
For they combined it all, the youth, the abandonment, the innocence,
with an indomitable distinction.
They made their way with easy, unembarrassed movements, and seated
themselves at a table by an open window. They bent their brows together
over the menu. The head-waiter (who had flown at last to their high
summons) made them his peculiar care, and they turned to him with the
helplessness of children. He told them what things they would like,
what things (he seemed to say) would be good for them. And when he went
away with their order they looked at each other and laughed, softly and
instantaneously.
They had done the right thing. They both said it at the same moment,
smiling triumphantly into each other's face. Southbourne was exquisite
in young June, at the dawn of its season. And the Cliff Hotel promised
what they wanted, a gay seclusion, a refined publicity.
If you were grossly rich, you went to the big Hotel Metropole, opposite.
If you were a person of fastidious tastes and an attenuated income, you
felt the superior charm of the Cliff Hotel. The little house, the joy of
its proprietor, was hidden in the privacy of its own beautiful grounds,
having its back to the high road and its face to the open sea. They had
taken stock of it that morning, with its clean walls, white as the
Cliff it stood on; its bay windows, its long, green-roofed veranda,
looking south; its sharp, slated roofs and gables, all sheltered by the
folding Downs.
They did not know which of them had first suggested Southbourne.
Probably they had both thought of it at the same moment, as they were
thinking now. But it was she who had voted for the Cliff Hotel, in
preference to lodgings. She thought that in an hotel there would be more
scope, more chance of things happening.
Jane was always on the look-out for things happening. He saw her now,
with her happy eyes, and her little, tilted nose, sniffing the air,
scanning the horizon.
He knew Jane and her adventures well. They were purely, pathetically
vicarious. Jane was the thrall of her own sympathy. So was he. At a hint
she was off, and he after her, on wild paths of inference, on perilous
oceans of conjecture. Only he moved more slowly, and he knew the end of
it. He had seen, before now, her joyous leap to land, on shores of
manifest disaster. He protested against that jumping to conclusions. He,
for his part, took conclusions in his stride.
But Jane was always listening for a call from some foreign country of
the soul. She was always entering surreptitiously into other people's
feelings. They never caught her at it, never suspected her soft-footed,
innocent intrusions.
She was wondering now whether they would have to make friends with any
of the visitors. She hoped not, because that would spoil it, the
adventure. People had a way of telling her their secrets, and Jane
preferred not to be told. All she wanted was an inkling, a clue; the
slenderer the better.
The guests as yet assembled were not conspicuously interesting.
There was a clergyman dining gloomily at a table by himself. There was a
gray group of middle-aged ladies next to him. There was Colonel Hankin
and his wife. They had arrived with the Lucys in the hotel 'bus, and
their names were entered above Robert's in the visitors' book. They
marked him with manifest approval as one of themselves, and they looked
all pink perfection and silver white propriety. There was the old lady
who did nothing but knit. She had arrived in a fly, knitting. She was
knitting now, between the courses. When she caught sight of the Lucys
she smiled at them over her knitting. They had found her, before dinner,
with her feet entangled in a skein of worsted. Jane had shown tenderness
in disentangling her.
It was almost as if they had made friends already.
Jane's eyes roamed and lighted on a fat, wine-faced man. Lucy saw them.
He teased her, challenged her. She didn't think, did she, she could do
anything with him?
No. Jane thought not. He wasn't interesting. There was nothing that you
could take hold of, except that he seemed to be very fond of wine, poor
old thing. But then, you had to be fond of something, and perhaps it was
his only weakness. What did Robert think?
Robert did not hear her. He was bending forward, looking beyond her,
across the room toward the great doors. They had swung open again, with
a flash of their glass panels, to give passage to a lady.
She came slowly, with the irresistible motion of creatures that divide
and trouble the medium in which they move. The white, painted wainscot
behind her showed her small, eager head, its waving rolls and crowning
heights of hair, black as her gown. She had a sweet face, curiously
foreshortened by a low forehead and the briefest of chins. It was white
with the same whiteness as her neck, her shoulders, her arms--a
whiteness pure and profound. This face she kept thrust a little forward,
while her eyes looked round, steadily, deliberately, for the place where
she desired to be. She carried on her arm a long tippet of brown fur. It
slipped, and her effort to recover it brought her to a standstill.
The large, white room, half empty at this season, gave her up bodily to
what seemed to Lucy the intolerable impudence of the public gaze.
She was followed by an older lady who had the air of making her way with
difficulty and vexation through an unpleasantly crowded space. This lady
was somewhat oddly attired in a white dress cut high with a Puritan
intention, but otherwise indiscreetly youthful. She kept close to the
tail of her companion's gown, and tracked its charming evolutions with
an irritated eye. Her whole aspect was evidently a protest against the
publicity she was compelled to share.
[Illustration: "She stood there, strangely still ... before the pitiless
stare that went up to her appealing face."]
Lucy was not interested in her. He was watching the lady in black who
was now standing in the middle of the room. Her elbow touched the
shoulder of a young man on her left. The fur tippet slipped again and
lay at the young man's feet. He picked it up, and as he handed it to her
he stared into her face, and sleeked his little moustache above a
furtive, objectionable smile. His companion (Jane's uninteresting man),
roused from communion with the spirit of Veuve Cliquot, fixed on the
lady a pair of blood-shot eyes in a brutal, wine-dark face.
She stood there, strangely still, it seemed to Lucy, before the pitiless
stare that went up, right and left, to her appealing face. She was
looking, it seemed to him, for her refuge.
She moved forward. The Colonel, pinker than ever in his perfection,
lowered his eyes as she approached. She paused again in her progress
beside the clergyman on her right. He looked severely at her, as much as
to say, "Madam, if you drop that thing in _my_ neighbourhood, I shall
not attempt to pick it up."
An obsequious waiter pointed out a table next to the middle-aged
ladies. She shook her head at the middle-aged ladies. She turned in her
course, and her eyes met Lucy's. He said something to his sister. Jane
rose and changed her seat, thus clearing the way to a table that stood
beside theirs, empty, secluded in the bay of the window.
The lady in black came swiftly, as if to the place of her desire. The
glance that expressed her gratitude went from Lucy to Jane and from Jane
to Lucy, and rested on him for a moment.
As the four grouped themselves at their respective tables, the lady in
white, seated with her back to the window, commanded a front and side
view of Jane. The lady in black sat facing Lucy.
She put her elbows on the table and turned her face (her profile was
remarkably pretty) to her companion.
"Well," said she, "don't you want to sit here?"
"Oh," said the older woman, "what does it matter where we sit?"
She spoke in a small, crowing voice, the voice, Lucy said to himself, of
a rather terrible person. She shivered.
"Poor lamb, does it feel a draught down its little back?"
The lady rose and put her fur tippet on the shivering shoulders. They
shrank from her, and she drew it closer and fastened it with caressing
and cajoling fingers. There was about her something impetuous and
perverse, a wilful, ungovernable tenderness. Her hands had the swiftness
of things moved by sweet, disastrous impulses.
The white person (she was quite terrible) undid the fastening and shook
her shoulders free of the fur. It slid to the floor for the third time.
Lucy rose from his place, picked up the fur and restored it to its
owner.
The quite terrible person flushed with vexation.
"You see," said the lady, "the trouble you've given that nice man."
"Oh don't! he'll hear you."
"If he does, he won't mind," said the lady.
He did hear her. It was difficult not to hear, not to look at her, not
to be interested in every movement that she made. Her charm, however,
was powerless over her companion.
Their voices, to Lucy's relief, sank low. Then suddenly the companion
spoke.
"Of course," said she, "if you _want_ all the men to look at you----"
Lucy looked no more. He heard the lady draw in her breath with a soft,
sharp sound, and he felt his blood running scarlet to the roots of his
hair.
"I believe" (the older lady spoke almost vindictively) "you like it."
The head-waiter, opportune in all his approaches, brought coffee at that
moment. Lucy turned his chair slightly, so that he presented his back
to the speaker, and to the lady in black his side-face, shaded by his
hand, conspicuously penitential.
Jane tried to set everybody at their ease by talking in a clear, cool
voice about the beautiful decorations, the perfect management of the
hotel. The two drank their coffee hastily and left the table. In the
doorway Lucy drew the head-waiter aside.
"Who," said he, "is that lady in the window?"
"The lady in the window, sir? Miss Keating, sir."
"I mean--the other lady."
The head-waiter looked reproachfully at Lucy and apologetically at Jane.
"The lady in black, sir? You want to know her name?"
"Yes."
"Her _name_, sir, is Mrs. Tailleur."
His manner intimated respectfully that Lucy would not like Mrs.
Tailleur, and that, if he did, she would not be good for him.
The brother and sister went out into the hotel garden. They strolled up
and down the cool, green lawns that overhung the beach.
Lucy smoked and was silent.
"Jane," he said presently, "could _you_ see what she did?"
"I was just going," said Jane, "to ask you that."
"Upon my soul, I can't see it," said he.
"Nor I," said Jane.
"Could you see what _I_ did?"
"What you did?"
"Yes, I. _Did_ I look at her?"
"Well, yes; certainly you looked at her."
"And you think she minded?"
"No; I don't think she minded very much."
"Come, she couldn't have liked it, could she?"
"I don't know. I don't think she noticed it. You see" (Jane was off on
the adventure) "she's in mourning for her husband. He has been dead
about two years. He wasn't very kind to her, and she doesn't know
whether to be glad or sorry he's dead. She's unhappy and afraid."
"I say, how do you know all that?"
"I know," said Jane, "because I see it in her face; and in her clothes.
I always see things."
He laughed at that.