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THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST
By E. NESBIT
Illustrated by CLARENCE F. UNDERWOOD
1906
To
Richard Reynolds
and
Justus Miles Forman
"Faire naitre un désir, le nourrir, le développer, le grandir, le
satisfaire, c'est un poeme tout entier."
--_Balzac_.
CONTENTS
BOOK I. THE GIRL
Chapter I. The Inevitable
Chapter II. The Irresistible
Chapter III. Voluntary
Chapter IV. Involuntary
Chapter V. The Prisoner
Chapter VI. The Criminal
Chapter VII. The Escape
BOOK II. THE MAN
Chapter VIII. The One and the Other
Chapter IX. The Opportunity
Chapter X. Seeing Life
Chapter XI. The Thought
Chapter XII. The Rescue
Chapter XIII. Contrasts
Chapter XIV. Renunciation
BOOK III. THE OTHER WOMAN
Chapter XV. On Mount Parnassus
Chapter XVI. "Love and Tupper"
Chapter XVII. Interventions
Chapter XVIII. The Truth
Chapter XIX. The Truth with a Vengeance
Chapter XX. Waking-up Time
BOOK IV. THE OTHER MAN
Chapter XXI. The Flight
Chapter XXII. The Lunatic
Chapter XXIII. Temperatures
Chapter XXIV. The Confessional
Chapter XXV. The Forest
Chapter XXVI. The Miracle
Chapter XXVII. The Pink Silk Story
Chapter XXVIII. "And so--"
PEOPLE OF THE STORY
Eustace Vernon. The Incomplete Amorist
Betty Desmond The Girl
The Rev. Cecil Underwood Her Step-Father
Miss Julia Desmond Her Aunt
Robert Temple The Other Man
Lady St. Craye The Other Woman
Miss Voscoe The Art Student
Madame Chevillon. The Inn-Keeper at Crez
Paula Conway A Soul in Hell
Mimi Chantal A Model
Village Matrons, Concierges, Art Students, Etc.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"'Oh, what a pity,' said Betty from the heart, 'that we aren't
introduced now!'"
"'Ah, don't be cross!' she said."
"Betty stared at him coldly."
"Betty looked nervously around--the scene was agitatingly unfamiliar."
"Unfinished, but a disquieting likeness."
"'No, thank you: it's all done now.'"
"On the further arm of the chair sat, laughing also, a very pretty
young woman."
"The next morning brought him a letter."
Book 1.--The Girl
CHAPTER I.
THE INEVITABLE.
"No. The chemises aren't cut out. I haven't had time. There are enough
shirts to go on with, aren't there, Mrs. James?" said Betty.
"We can make do for this afternoon, Miss, but the men they're getting
blowed out with shirts. It's the children's shifts as we can't make
shift without much longer." Mrs. James, habitually doleful, punctuated
her speech with sniffs.
"That's a joke, Mrs. James," said Betty. "How clever you are!"
"I try to be what's fitting," said Mrs. James, complacently.
"Talk of fitting," said Betty, "If you like I'll fit on that black
bodice for you, Mrs. Symes. If the other ladies don't mind waiting for
the reading a little bit."
"I'd as lief talk as read, myself," said a red-faced sandy-haired
woman; "books ain't what they was in my young days."
"If it's the same to you, Miss," said Mrs. Symes in a thick rich
voice, "I'll not be tried on afore a room full. If we are poor we can
all be clean's what I say, and I keeps my unders as I keeps my
outside. But not before persons as has real imitation lace on their
petticoat bodies. I see them when I was a-nursing her with her fourth.
No, Miss, and thanking you kindly, but begging your pardon all the
same."
"Don't mention it," said Betty absently. "Oh, Mrs. Smith, you can't
have lost your thimble already. Why what's that you've got in your
mouth?"
"So it is!" Mrs. Smith's face beamed at the gratifying coincidence. "It
always was my habit, from a child, to put things there for safety."
"These cheap thimbles ain't fit to put in your mouth, no more than
coppers," said Mrs. James, her mouth full of pins.
"Oh, nothing hurts you if you like it," said Betty recklessly. She had
been reading the works of Mr. G.K. Chesterton.
A shocked murmur arose.
"Oh, Miss, what about the publy kows?" said Mrs. Symes heavily. The
others nodded acquiescence.
"Don't you think we might have a window open?" said Betty. The May
sunshine beat on the schoolroom windows. The room, crowded with the
stout members of the "Mother's Meeting and Mutual Clothing Club," was
stuffy, unbearable.
A murmur arose far more shocked than the first.
"I was just a-goin' to say why not close the door, that being what
doors is made for, after all," said Mrs. Symes. "I feel a sort of
draught a-creeping up my legs as it is."
The door was shut.
"You can't be too careful," said the red-faced woman; "we never know
what a chill mayn't bring forth. My cousin's sister-in-law, she had
twins, and her aunt come in and says she, 'You're a bit stuffy here,
ain't you?' and with that she opens the window a crack,--not meaning
no harm, Miss,--as it might be you. And within a year that poor
unfortunate woman she popped off, when least expected. Gas ulsters,
the doctor said. Which it's what you call chills, if you're a doctor
and can't speak plain."
"My poor grandmother come to her end the same way," said Mrs. Smith,
"only with her it was the Bible reader as didn't shut the door through
being so set on shewing off her reading. And my granny, a clot of
blood went to her brain, and her brain went to her head and she was a
corpse inside of fifty minutes."
Every woman in the room was waiting, feverishly alert, for the pause
that should allow her to begin her own detailed narrative of disease.
Mrs. James was easily first in the competition.
"Them quick deaths," she said, "is sometimes a blessing in disguise to
both parties concerned. My poor husband--years upon years he lingered,
and he had a bad leg--talk of bad legs, I wish you could all have seen
it," she added generously.
"Was it the kind that keeps all on a-breaking out?" asked Mrs. Symes
hastily, "because my youngest brother had a leg that nothing couldn't
stop. Break out it would do what they might. I'm sure the bandages
I've took off him in a morning--"
Betty clapped her hands.
It was the signal that the reading was going to begin, and the matrons
looked at her resentfully. What call had people to start reading when
the talk was flowing so free and pleasant?
Betty, rather pale, began: "This is a story about a little boy called
Wee Willie Winkie."
"I call that a silly sort of name," whispered Mrs. Smith.
"Did he make a good end, Miss?" asked Mrs. James plaintively.
"You'll see," said Betty.
"I like it best when they dies forgiving of everybody and singing
hymns to the last."
"And when they says, 'Mother, I shall meet you 'ereafter in the better
land'--that's what makes you cry so pleasant."
"Do you want me to read or not?" asked Betty in desperation.
"Yes, Miss, yes," hummed the voices heavy and shrill.
"It's her hobby, poor young thing," whispered Mrs. Smith, "we all 'as
'em. My own is a light cake to my tea, and always was. Ush."
Betty read.
When the mothers had wordily gone, she threw open the windows, propped
the door wide with a chair, and went to tea. She had it alone.
"Your Pa's out a-parishing," said Letitia, bumping down the tray in
front of her.
"That's a let-off anyhow," said Betty to herself, and she propped up a
Stevenson against the tea-pot.
After tea parishioners strolled up by ones and twos and threes to
change their books at the Vicarage lending library. The books were
covered with black calico, and smelt of rooms whose windows were never
opened.
When she had washed the smell of the books off, she did her hair very
carefully in a new way that seemed becoming, and went down to supper.
Her step-father only spoke once during the meal; he was luxuriating in
the thought of the _Summa Theologiae_ of Aquinas in leather still
brown and beautiful, which he had providentially discovered in the
wash-house of an ailing Parishioner. When he did speak he said:
"How extremely untidy your hair is, Lizzie. I wish you would take more
pains with your appearance."
When he had withdrawn to his books she covered three new volumes for
the library: the black came off on her hands, but anyway it was clean
dirt.
She went to bed early.
"And that's my life," she said as she blew out the candle.
Said Mrs. James to Mrs. Symes over the last and strongest cup of tea:
"Miss Betty's ailing a bit, I fancy. Looked a bit peaky, it seemed to
me. I shouldn't wonder if she was to go off in a decline like her
father did."
"It wasn't no decline," said Mrs. Symes, dropping her thick voice,
"'e was cut off in the midst of his wicked courses. A judgment if
ever there was one."
Betty's blameless father had been killed in the hunting field.
"I daresay she takes after him, only being a female it all turns to
her being pernickety in her food and allus wanting the windows open.
And mark my words, it may turn into a decline yet, Mrs. Symes, my
dear."
Mrs. Symes laughed fatly. "That ain't no decline," she said, "you take
it from me. What Miss Betty wants is a young man. It is but nature
after all, and what we must all come to, gentle or simple. Give her a
young man to walk out with and you'll see the difference. Decline
indeed! A young man's what she wants. And if I know anything of gells
and their ways she'll get one, no matter how close the old chap keeps
her."
Mrs. Symes was not so wrong as the delicate minded may suppose.
Betty did indeed desire to fall in love. In all the story books the
main interest of the heroine's career began with that event. Not that
she voiced the desire to herself. Only once she voiced it in her
prayers.
"Oh, God," she said, "do please let something happen!"
That was all. A girl had her little reticences, even with herself,
even with her Creator.
Next morning she planned to go sketching; but no, there were three
more detestable books to be put into nasty little black cotton coats,
the drawing-room to be dusted--all the hateful china--the peas to be
shelled for dinner.
She shelled the peas in the garden. It was a beautiful green garden,
and lovers could have walked very happily down the lilac-bordered
paths.
"Oh, how sick I am of it all!" said Betty. She would not say, even to
herself, that what she hated was the frame without the picture.
As she carried in the peas she passed the open window of the study
where, among shelves of dull books and dusty pamphlets, her
step-father had as usual forgotten his sermon in a chain of references
to the Fathers. Betty saw his thin white hairs, his hard narrow face
and tight mouth, the hands yellow and claw-like that gripped the thin
vellum folio.
"I suppose even he was young once," she said, "but I'm sure he doesn't
remember it."
He saw her go by, young and alert in the sunshine, and the May air
stirred the curtains. He looked vaguely about him, unlocked a drawer
in his writing-table, and took out a leather case. He gazed long at
the face within, a young bright face with long ringlets above the
formal bodice and sloping shoulders of the sixties.
"Well, well," he said, "well, well," locked it away, and went back to
_De Poenis Parvulorum_.
"I _will_ go out," said Betty, as she parted with the peas. "I don't
care!"
It was not worth while to change one's frock. Even when one was
properly dressed, at rare local garden-party or flower-show, one never
met anyone that mattered.
She fetched her sketching things. At eighteen one does so pathetically
try to feed the burgeoning life with the husks of polite
accomplishment. She insisted on withholding from the clutches of the
Parish the time to practise Beethoven and Sullivan for an hour daily.
Daily, for half an hour, she read an improving book. Just now it was
The French Revolution, and Betty thought it would last till she was
sixty. She tried to read French and German--Télémaque and Maria
Stuart. She fully intended to become all that a cultured young woman
should be. But self-improvement is a dull game when there is no one to
applaud your score.
What the gardener called the gravel path was black earth, moss-grown.
Very pretty, but Betty thought it shabby.
It was soft and cool, though, to the feet, and the dust of the white
road sparkled like diamond dust in the sunlight.
She crossed the road and passed through the swing gate into the park,
where the grass was up for hay, with red sorrel and buttercups and
tall daisies and feathery flowered grasses, their colours all tangled
and blended together like ravelled ends of silk on the wrong side of
some great square of tapestry. Here and there in the wide sweep of
tall growing things stood a tree--a may-tree shining like silver, a
laburnum like fine gold. There were horse-chestnuts whose spires of
blossom shewed like fat candles on a Christmas tree for giant
children. And the sun was warm and the tree shadows black on the
grass.
Betty told herself that she hated it all. She took the narrow
path--the grasses met above her feet--crossed the park, and reached
the rabbit warren, where the chalk breaks through the thin dry turf,
and the wild thyme grows thick.
A may bush, overhanging a little precipice of chalk, caught her eye. A
wild rose was tangled round it. It was, without doubt, the most
difficult composition within sight.
"I will sketch that," said Eighteen, confidently.
For half an hour she busily blotted and washed and niggled. Then she
became aware that she no longer had the rabbit warren to herself.
"And he's an artist, too!" said Betty. "How awfully interesting! I
wish I could see his face."
But this his slouched Panama forbade. He was in white, the sleeve and
breast of his painting jacket smeared with many colours; he had a
camp-stool and an easel and looked, she could not help feeling, much
more like a real artist than she did, hunched up as she was on a
little mound of turf, in her shabby pink gown and that hateful garden
hat with last year's dusty flattened roses in it.
She went on sketching with feverish unskilled fingers, and a pulse
that had actually quickened its beat.
She cast little glances at him as often as she dared. He was certainly
a real artist. She could tell that by the very way he held his
palette. Was he staying with people about there? Should she meet him?
Would they ever be introduced to each other?
"Oh, what a pity," said Betty from the heart, "that we aren't
introduced _now_!"
Her sketch grew worse and worse.
"It's no good," she said. "I can't do anything with it."
She glanced at him. He had pushed back the hat. She saw quite plainly
that he was smiling--a very little, but he _was_ smiling. Also he was
looking at her, and across the fifteen yards of gray turf their eyes
met. And she knew that he knew that this was not her first glance at
him.
She paled with fury.
"He has been watching me all the time! He is making fun of me. He
knows I can't sketch. Of course he can see it by the silly way I hold
everything." She ran her knife around her sketch, detached it, and
tore it across and across.
The stranger raised his hat and called eagerly.
"I say--please don't move for a minute. Do you mind? I've just got
your pink gown. It's coming beautifully. Between brother artists--Do,
please! Do sit still and go on sketching--Ah, do!"
Betty's attitude petrified instantly. She held a brush in her hand,
and she looked down at her block. But she did not go on sketching. She
sat rigid and three delicious words rang in her ears: "Between brother
artists!" How very nice of him! He hadn't been making fun, after all.
But wasn't it rather impertinent of him to put her in his picture
without asking her? Well, it wasn't she but her pink gown he wanted.
And "between brother artists!" Betty drew a long breath.
"It's no use," he called; "don't bother any more. The pose is gone."
She rose to her feet and he came towards her.
"Let me see the sketch," he said. "Why did you tear it up?" He fitted
the pieces together. "Why, it's quite good. You ought to study in
Paris," he added idly.
She took the torn papers from his hand with a bow, and turned to go.
"Don't go," he said. "You're not going? Don't you want to look at my
picture?"
Now Betty knew as well as you do that you musn't speak to people
unless you've been introduced to them. But the phrase "brother
artists" had played ninepins with her little conventions.
"Thank you. I should like to very much," said Betty. "I don't care,"
she said to herself, "and besides, it's not as if he were a young man,
or a tourist, or anything. He must be ever so old--thirty; I shouldn't
wonder if he was thirty-five."
When she saw the picture she merely said, "Oh," and stood at gaze. For
it _was_ a picture--a picture that, seen in foreign lands, might well
make one sick with longing for the dry turf and the pale dog violets
that love the chalk, for the hum of the bees and the scent of the
thyme. He had chosen the bold sweep of the brown upland against the
sky, and low to the left, where the line broke, the dim violet of the
Kentish hills. In the green foreground the pink figure, just roughly
blocked in, was blocked in by a hand that knew its trade, and was
artist to the tips of its fingers.
"Oh!" said Betty again.
"Yes," said he, "I think I've got it this time. I think it'll make a
hole in the wall, eh? Yes; it is good!"
"Yes," said Betty; "oh, yes."
"Do you often go a-sketching?" he asked.
"How modest he is," thought Betty; "he changes the subject so as not
to seem to want to be praised."
Aloud she answered with shy fluttered earnestness: "Yes--no. I don't
know. Sometimes."
His lips were grave, but there was the light behind his eyes that goes
with a smile.
"What unnecessary agitation!" he was thinking. "Poor little thing, I
suppose she's never seen a man before. Oh, these country girls!" Aloud
he was saying: "This is such a perfect country. You ought to sketch
every day."
"I've no one to teach me," said Betty, innocently phrasing a long-felt
want.
The man raised his eyebrows. "Well, after that, here goes!" he said to
himself. "I wish you'd let _me_ teach you," he said to her, beginning
to put his traps together.
"Oh, I didn't mean that," said Betty in real distress. What would he
think of her? How greedy and grasping she must seem! "I didn't mean
that at all!"
"No; but I do," he said.
"But you're a great artist," said Betty, watching him with clasped
hands. "I suppose it would be--I mean--don't you know, we're not rich,
and I suppose your lessons are worth pounds and pounds."
"I don't give lessons for money," his lips tightened--"only for love."
"That means nothing, doesn't it?" she said, and flushed to find
herself on the defensive feebly against--nothing.
"At tennis, yes," he said, and to himself he added: "_Vieux jeu_, my
dear, but you did it very prettily."
"But I couldn't let you give me lessons for nothing."
"Why not?" he asked. And his calmness made Betty feel ashamed and
sordid.
"I don't know," she answered tremulously, "but I don't think my
step-father would want me to."
"You think it would annoy him?"
"I'm sure it would, if he knew about it."
Betty was thinking how little her step-father had ever cared to know
of her and her interests. But the man caught the ball as he saw it.
"Then why let him know?" was the next move; and it seemed to him that
Betty's move of rejoinder came with a readiness born of some practice
at the game.
"Oh," she said innocently, "I never thought of that! But wouldn't it
be wrong?"
"She's got the whole thing stereotyped. But it's dainty type anyhow,"
he thought. "Of course it wouldn't be wrong," he said. "It wouldn't
hurt him. Don't you know that nothing's wrong unless it hurts
somebody?"
"Yes," she said eagerly, "that's what I think. But all the same it
doesn't seem fair that you should take all that trouble for me and get
nothing in return."
"Well played! We're getting on!" he thought, and added aloud: "But
perhaps I shan't get nothing in return?"
Her eyes dropped over the wonderful thought that perhaps she might do
something for _him_. But what? She looked straight at him, and the
innocent appeal sent a tiny thorn of doubt through his armour of
complacency. Was she--after all? No, no novice could play the game so
well. And yet--
"I would do anything I could, you know," she said eagerly, "because it
is so awfully kind of you, and I do so want to be able to paint. What
can I do?"
"What can you do?" he asked, and brought his face a little nearer to
the pretty flushed freckled face under the shabby hat. Her eyes met
his. He felt a quick relenting, and drew back.
"Well, for one thing you could let me paint your portrait."
Betty was silent.
"Come, play up, you little duffer," he urged inwardly.
When she spoke her voice trembled.
"I don't know how to thank you," she said.
"And you will?"
"Oh, I will; indeed I will!"
"How good and sweet you are," he said. Then there was a silence.
Betty tightened the strap of her sketching things and said:
"I think I ought to go home now."
He had the appropriate counter ready.
"Ah, don't go yet!" he said; "let us sit down; see, that bank is quite
in the shade now, and tell me--"
"Tell you what?" she asked, for he had made the artistic pause.
"Oh, anything--anything about yourself."
Betty was as incapable of flight as any bird on a limed twig.
She walked beside him to the bank, and sat down at his bidding, and he
lay at her feet, looking up into her eyes. He asked idle questions:
she answered them with a conscientious tremulous truthfulness that
showed to him as the most finished art. And it seemed to him a very
fortunate accident that he should have found here, in this unlikely
spot, so accomplished a player at his favorite game. Yet it was the
variety of his game for which he cared least. He did not greatly
relish a skilled adversary. Betty told him nervously and in words
ill-chosen everything that he asked to know, but all the while the
undercurrent of questions rang strong within her--"When is he to teach
me? Where? How?"--so that when at last there was left but the bare
fifteen minutes needed to get one home in time for the midday dinner
she said abruptly:
"And when shall I see you again?"
"You take the words out of my mouth," said he. And indeed she had.
"She has no _finesse_ yet," he told himself. "She might have left that
move to me."
"The lessons, you know," said Betty, "and, and the picture, if you
really do want to do it."
"If I want to do it!--You know I want to do it. Yes. It's like the
nursery game. How, when and where? Well, as to the how--I can paint
and you can learn. The where--there's a circle of pines in the wood
here. You know it? A sort of giant fairy ring?"
She did know it.
"Now for the when--and that's the most important. I should like to
paint you in the early morning when the day is young and innocent and
beautiful--like--like--" He was careful to break off in a most natural
seeming embarrassment. "That's a bit thick, but she'll swallow it all
right. Gone down? Right!" he told himself.
"I could come out at six if you liked, or--or five," said Betty,
humbly anxious to do her part.
He was almost shocked. "My good child," he told her silently, "someone
really ought to teach you not to do all the running. You don't give a
man a chance."
"Then will you meet me here to-morrow at six?" he said. "You won't
disappoint me, will you?" he added tenderly.
"No," said downright Betty, "I'll be sure to come. But not to-morrow,"
she added with undisguised regret; "to-morrow's Sunday."
"Monday then," said he, "and good-bye."
"Good-bye, and--oh, I don't know how to thank you!"
"I'm very much mistaken if you don't," he said as he stood bareheaded,
watching the pink gown out of sight.
"Well, adventures to the adventurous! A clergyman's daughter, too! I
might have known it."
CHAPTER II.
THE IRRESISTIBLE.
Betty had to run all the way home, and then she was late for dinner.
Her step-father's dry face and dusty clothes, the solid comfort of the
mahogany furnished dining room, the warm wet scent of mutton,--these
seemed needed to wake her from what was, when she had awakened, a
dream--the open sky, the sweet air of the May fields and _Him_.
Already the stranger was Him to Betty. But, then, she did not know his
name.
She slipped into her place at the foot of the long white dining table,
a table built to serve a dozen guests, and where no guests ever sat,
save rarely a curate or two, and more rarely even, an aunt.
"You are late again, Lizzie," said her step-father.
"Yes, Father," said she, trying to hide her hands and the fact that
she had not had time to wash them. A long streak of burnt sienna
marked one finger, and her nails had little slices of various colours
in them. Her paint-box was always hard to open.
Usually Mr. Underwood saw nothing. But when he saw anything he saw
everything. His eye was caught by the green smudge on her pink sleeve.
"I wish you would contrive to keep yourself clean, or else wear a
pinafore," he said.
Betty flushed scarlet.
"I'm very sorry," she said, "but it's only water colour. It will wash
out."
"You are nearly twenty, are you not?" the Vicar inquired with the dry
smile that always infuriated his step-daughter. How was she to know
that it was the only smile he knew, and that smiles of any sort had
long grown difficult to him?
"Eighteen," she said.
"It is almost time you began to think about being a lady."
This was badinage. No failures had taught the Reverend Cecil that his
step-daughter had an ideal of him in which badinage had no place. She
merely supposed that he wished to be disagreeable.
She kept a mutinous silence. The old man sighed. It is one's duty to
correct the faults of one's child, but it is not pleasant. The
Reverend Cecil had not the habit of shirking any duty because he
happened to dislike it.
The mutton was taken away.
Betty, her whole being transfigured by the emotions of the morning,
stirred the stewed rhubarb on her plate. She felt rising in her a sort
of wild forlorn courage. Why shouldn't she speak out? Her step-father
couldn't hate her more than he did, whatever she said. He might even
be glad to be rid of her. She spoke suddenly and rather loudly before
she knew that she had meant to speak at all.
"Father," she said, "I wish you'd let me go to Paris and study art.
Not now," she hurriedly explained with a sudden vision of being taken
at her word and packed off to France before six o'clock on Monday
morning, "not now, but later. In the autumn perhaps. I would work very
hard. I wish you'd let me."
He put on his spectacles and looked at her with wistful kindness. She
read in his glance only a frozen contempt.
"No, my child," he said. "Paris is a sink of iniquity. I passed a week
there once, many years ago. It was at the time of the Great
Exhibition. You are growing discontented, Lizzie. Work is the cure for
that. Mrs. Symes tells me that the chemises for the Mother's sewing
meetings are not cut out yet."
"I'll cut them out to-day. They haven't finished the shirts yet,
anyway," said Betty; "but I do wish you'd just think about Paris, or
even London."
"You can have lessons at home if you like. I believe there are
excellent drawing-mistresses in Sevenoaks. Mrs. Symes was recommending
one of them to me only the other day. With certificates from the High
School I seem to remember her saying."
"But that's not what I want," said Betty with a courage that surprised
her as much as it surprised him. "Don't you see, Father? One gets
older every day, and presently I shall be quite old, and I shan't have
been anywhere or seen anything."
He thought he laughed indulgently at the folly of youth. She thought
his laugh the most contemptuous, the cruelest sound in the world. "He
doesn't deserve that I should tell him about Him," she thought, "and I
won't. I don't care!"
"No, no," he said, "no, no, no. The home is the place for girls. The
safe quiet shelter of the home. Perhaps some day your husband will
take you abroad for a fortnight now and then. If you manage to get a
husband, that is."
He had seen, through his spectacles, her flushed prettiness, and old
as he was he remembered well enough how a face like hers would seem to
a young man's eyes. Of course she would get a husband? So he spoke in
kindly irony. And she hated him for a wanton insult.
"Try to do your duty in that state of life to which you are called,"
he went on: "occupy yourself with music and books and the details of
housekeeping. No, don't have my study turned out," he added in haste,
remembering how his advice about household details had been followed
when last he gave it. "Don't be a discontented child. Go and cut out
the nice little chemises." This seemed to him almost a touch of kindly
humour, and he went back to Augustine, pleased with himself.
Betty set her teeth and went, black rage in her heart, to cut out the
hateful little chemises.
She dragged the great roll of evil smelling grayish unbleached calico
from the schoolroom cupboard and heaved it on to the table. It was
very heavy. The scissors were blunt and left deep red-blue
indentations on finger and thumb. She was rather pleased that the
scissors hurt so much.
"Father doesn't care a single bit, he hates me," she said, "and I hate
him. Oh, I do."
She would not think of the morning. Not now, with this fire of
impotent resentment burning in her, would she take out those memories
and look at them. Those were not thoughts to be dragged through the
litter of unbleached cotton cuttings. She worked on doggedly,
completed the tale of hot heavy little garments, gathered up the
pieces into the waste-paper basket and put away the roll.
Not till the paint had been washed from her hands, and the crumbled
print dress exchanged for a quite respectable muslin did she
consciously allow the morning's memories to come out and meet her
eyes. Then she went down to the arbour where she had shelled peas only
that morning.
"It seems years and years ago," she said. And sitting there, she
slowly and carefully went over everything. What he had said, what she
had said. There were some things she could not quite remember. But she
remembered enough. "Brother artists" were the words she said oftenest
to herself, but the words that sank themselves were, "young and
innocent and beautiful like--like--"
"But he couldn't have meant me, of course," she told herself.
And on Monday she would see him again,--and he would give her a
lesson!
Sunday was incredibly wearisome. Her Sunday-school class had never
been so tiresome nor so soaked in hair-oil. In church she was shocked
to find herself watching, from her pew in the chancel, the entry of
late comers--of whom He was not one. No afternoon had ever been half
so long. She wrote up her diary. Thursday and Friday were quickly
chronicled. At "Saturday" she paused long, pen in hand, and then wrote
very quickly: "I went out sketching and met a gentleman, an artist. He
was very kind and is going to teach me to paint and he is going to
paint my portrait. I do not like him particularly. He is rather old,
and not really good-looking. I shall not tell father, because he is
simply hateful to me. I am going to meet this artist at 6 to-morrow.
It will be dreadful having to get up so early. I almost wish I hadn't
said I would go. It will be such a bother."
Then she hid the diary in a drawer, under her confirmation dress and
veil, and locked the drawer carefully.
He was not at church in the evening either. He had thought of it, but
decided that it was too much trouble to get into decent clothes.
"I shall see her soon enough," he thought, "curse my impulsive
generosity! Six o'clock, forsooth, and all to please a clergyman's
daughter."
She came back from church with tired steps.
"I do hope I'm not going to be ill," she said. "I feel so odd, just as
if I hadn't had anything to eat for days,--and yet I'm not a bit
hungry either. I daresay I shan't wake up in time to get there by
six."
She was awake before five.
She woke with a flutter of the heart. What was it? Had anything
happened? Was anyone ill? Then she recognized that she was not
unhappy. And she felt more than ever as though it were days since she
had had anything to eat.
"Oh, dear," said Betty, jumping out of bed. "I'm going out, to meet
Him, and have a drawing-lesson!"
She dressed quickly. It was too soon to start. Not for anything must
she be first at the rendezvous, even though it were only for a
drawing-lesson. That "only" pulled her up sharply.
When she was dressed she dug out the diary and wrote:
"This is terrible. Is it possible that I have fallen in love with
him? I don't know. 'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?'
It is a most frightful tragedy to happen to one, and at my age too.
What a long life of loneliness stretches in front of me! For of
course he could never care for me. And if this _is_ love--well, it
will be once and forever with me, I know.
"That's my nature, I'm afraid. But I'm not,--I can't be. But I never
felt so unlike myself. I feel a sort of calm exultation, as if
something very wonderful was very near me. Dear Diary, what a
comfort it is to have you to tell everything to!"
It seemed to her that she must certainly be late. She had to creep
down the front stairs so very slowly and softly in order that she
might not awaken her step-father. She had so carefully and silently to
unfasten a window and creep out, to close the window again, without
noise, lest the maids should hear and come running to see why their
young mistress was out of her bed at that hour. She had to go on
tiptoe through the shrubbery and out through the church yard. One
could climb its wall, and get into the Park that way, so as not to
meet labourers on the road who would stare to see her alone so early
and perhaps follow her.
Once in the park she was safe. Her shoes and her skirts were wet with
dew. She made haste. She did not want to keep him waiting.
But she was first at the rendezvous, after all.
She sat down on the carpet of pine needles. How pretty the early
morning was. The sunlight was quite different from the evening
sunlight, so much lighter and brighter. And the shadows were
different. She tried to settle on a point of view for her sketch, the
sketch he was to help her with.
Her thoughts went back to what she had written in her diary. If that
_should_ be true she must be very, very careful. He must never guess
it, never. She would be very cold and distant and polite. Not
hail-fellow well-met with a "brother artist," like she had been
yesterday. It was all very difficult indeed. Even if it really did
turn out to be true, if the wonderful thing had happened to her, if
she really was in love she would not try a bit to make him like her.
That would be forward and "horrid." She would never try to attract any
man. Those things must come of themselves or not at all.
She arranged her skirt in more effective folds, and wondered how it
would look as one came up the woodland path. She thought it would look
rather picturesque. It was a nice heliotrope colour. It would look
like a giant Parma violet against the dark green background. She hoped
her hair was tidy. And that her hat was not very crooked. However
little one desires to attract, one may at least wish one's hat to be
straight.
She looked for the twentieth time at her watch, the serviceable silver
watch that had been her mother's. Half-past six, and he had not come.
Well, when he did come she would pretend she had only just got there.
Or how would it be if she gave up being a Parma violet and went a
little way down the path and then turned back when she heard him
coming? She walked away a dozen yards and stood waiting. But he did
not come. Was it possible that he was not coming? Was he ill--lying
uncared for at the Peal of Bells in the village, with no one to smooth
his pillow or put eau-de-cologne on his head?
She walked a hundred yards or so towards the village on the spur of
this thought.
Or perhaps he had come by another way to the trysting place? That
thought drove her back. He was not there.
Well, she would not stay any longer. She would just go away, and come
back ever so much later, and let him have a taste of waiting. She had
had her share, she told herself, as she almost ran from the spot. She
stopped suddenly. But suppose he did _not_ wait? She went slowly back.
She sat down again, schooled herself to patience.
What an idiot she had been! Like any school-girl. Of course he had
never meant to come. Why should he? That page in her diary called out
to her to come home and burn it. Care for him indeed! Not she! Why she
hadn't exchanged ten words with the man!
"But I knew it was all nonsense when I wrote it," she said. "I only
just put it down to see what it would look like."
* * * * *
Mr. Eustace Vernon roused himself, and yawned.
"It's got to be done, I suppose. Buck up,--you'll feel better after
your bath! Jove! Seven o'clock. Will she have waited? She's a keen
player if she has. It's just worth trying, I suppose."
The church clock struck the half-hour as he turned into the wood.
Something palely violet came towards him.
"So you _are_ here," he said. "Where's the pink frock?"
"It's--it's going to the wash," said a stiff and stifled voice. "I'm
sorry I couldn't get here at six. I hope you didn't wait long?"
"Not very long," he said, smiling; "but--Great Heavens, what on earth
is the matter?"
"Nothing," she said.
"But you've been--you are--"
"I'm not," she said defiantly,--"besides, I've got neuralgia. It
always makes me look like that."
"My Aunt!" he thought. "Then she _was_ here at six and--she's been
crying because I wasn't and--oh, where are we?" "I'm so sorry you've
got neuralgia," he said gently, "but I'm awfully glad you didn't get
here at six. Because my watch was wrong and I've only just got here,
and I should never have forgiven myself if you'd waited for me a
single minute. Is the neuralgia better now?"
"Yes," she said, smiling faintly, "much better. It was rather sharp
while it lasted, though."
"Yes," he said, "I see it was. I am so glad you did come. But I was so
certain you wouldn't that I didn't bring any of my traps. So we can't
begin the picture to-day. Will you start a sketch, or is your
neuralgia too bad?"
He knew it would be: and it was.
So they merely sat on the pine carpet and talked till it was time for
her to go back to the late Rectory breakfast. They told each other
their names that day. Betty talked very carefully. It was most
important that he should think well of her. Her manner had changed, as
she had promised herself it should do if she found she cared for him.
Now she was with him she knew, of course, that she did not care at
all. What had made her so wretched--no, so angry that she had actually
cried, was simply the idea that she had been made a fool of. That she
had kept the tryst and he hadn't. Now he had come she was quite calm.
She did not care in the least.
He was saying to himself: "I'm not often wrong, but I was off the line
yesterday. All that doesn't count. We take a fresh deal and start
fair. She doesn't know the game, _mais elle a des moyens_. She's never
played the game before. And she cried because I didn't turn up. And so
I'm the first--think of it, if you please--absolutely the first one!
Well: it doesn't detract from the interest of the game. It's quite a
different game and requires more skill. But not more than I have,
perhaps."
They parted with another tryst set for the next morning. The brother
artist note had been skilfully kept vibrating.
Betty was sure that she should never have any feeling for him but mere
friendliness. She was glad of that. It must be dreadful to be really
in love. So unsettling.
CHAPTER III.
VOLUNTARY.
Mr. Eustace Vernon is not by any error to be imagined as a villain of
the deepest dye, coldly planning to bring misery to a simple village
maiden for his own selfish pleasure. Not at all. As he himself would
have put it, he meant no harm to the girl. He was a master of two
arts, and to these he had devoted himself wholly. One was the art of
painting. But one cannot paint for all the hours there are. In the
intervals of painting Vernon always sought to exercise his other art.
One is limited, of course, by the possibilities, but he liked to have
always at least one love affair on hand. And just now there were
none--none at least possessing the one charm that irresistibly drew
him--newness. The one or two affairs that dragged on merely meant
letter writing, and he hated writing letters almost as much as he
hated reading them.
The country had been unfortunately barren of interest until his eyes
fell on that sketching figure in the pink dress. For he respected one
of his arts no less than the other, and would as soon have thought of
painting a vulgar picture as of undertaking a vulgar love-affair. He
was no pavement artist. Nor did he degrade his art by caricatures drawn
in hotel bars. Dairy maids did not delight him, and the mood was rare
with him in which one finds anything to say to a little milliner. He
wanted the means, not the end, and was at one with the unknown sage
who said: "The love of pleasure spoils the pleasure of love."
There is a gift, less rare than is supposed, of wiping the slate clean
of memories, and beginning all over again: a certain virginity of soul
that makes each new kiss the first kiss, each new love the only love.
This gift was Vernon's, and he had cultivated it so earnestly, so
delicately, that except in certain moods when he lost his temper, and
with it his control of his impulses, he was able to bring even to a
conservatory flirtation something of the fresh emotion of a schoolboy
in love.
Betty's awkwardnesses, which he took for advances, had chilled him a
little, though less than they would have done had not one of the
evil-tempered moods been on him.
He had dreaded lest the affair should advance too quickly. His own
taste was for the first steps in an affair of the heart, the delicate
doubts, the planned misunderstandings. He did not question his own
ability to conduct the affair capably from start to finish, but he
hated to skip the dainty preliminaries. He had feared that with Betty
he should have to skip them, for he knew that it is only in their
first love affairs that women have the patience to watch the flower
unfold itself. He himself was of infinite patience in that pastime. He
bit his lip and struck with his cane at the buttercup heads. He had
made a wretched beginning, with his "good and sweet." his "young and
innocent and beautiful like--like." If the girl had been a shade less
innocent the whole business would have been muffed--muffed hopelessly.
To-morrow he would be there early. A ship of promise should be--not
launched--that was weeks away. The first timbers should be felled to
build a ship to carry him, and her too, of course, a little way
towards the enchanted islands.
He knew the sea well, and it would be pleasant to steer on it one to
whom it was all new--all, all.
"Dear little girl," he said, "I don't suppose she has ever even
thought of love."
He was not in love with her, but he meant to be. He carefully thought
of her all that day, of her hair, her eyes, her hands; her hands were
really beautiful--small, dimpled and well-shaped--not the hands he
loved best, those were long and very slender,--but still beautiful.
And before he went to bed he wrote a little poem, to encourage himself:
Yes. I have loved before; I know
This longing that invades my days,
This shape that haunts life's busy ways
I know since long and long ago.
This starry mystery of delight
That floats across my eager eyes,
This pain that makes earth Paradise,
These magic songs of day and night,
I know them for the things they are:
A passing pain, a longing fleet,
A shape that soon I shall not meet,
A fading dream of veil and star.
Yet, even as my lips proclaim
The wisdom that the years have lent,
Your absence is joy's banishment
And life's one music is your name.
I love you to the heart's hid core:
Those other loves? How can one learn
From marshlights how the great fires burn?
Ah, no--I never loved before!
When he read it through he entitled it, "The Veil of Maya," so that it
might pretend to have no personal application.
After that more than ever rankled the memory of that first morning.
"How could I?" he asked himself. "I must indeed have been in a gross
mood. One seems sometimes to act outside oneself altogether. Temporary
possession by some brutal ancestor perhaps. Well, it's not too late."
Next morning he worked at his picture, in the rabbit-warren, but his
head found itself turning towards the way by which on that first day
she had gone. She must know that on a day like this he would not be
wasting the light,--that he would be working. She would be wanting to
see him again. Would she come out? He wished she would. But he hoped
she wouldn't. It would have meant another readjustment of ideas. He
need not have been anxious. She did not come.
He worked steadily, masterfully. He always worked best at the
beginning of a love affair. All of him seemed somehow more alive, more
awake, more alert and competent. His mood was growing quickly to what
he meant it to be. He was what actors call a quick study. Soon he
would be able to play perfectly, without so much as a thought to the
"book," the part of Paul to this child's Virginia.
Had Virginia, he wondered, any relations besides the step-father whom
she so light-heartedly consented to hoodwink? Relations who might
interfere and pray and meddle and spoil things?
However ashamed we may be of our relations they cannot forever be
concealed. It must be owned that Betty was not the lonely orphan she
sometimes pretended to herself to be. She had aunts--an accident that
may happen to the best of us.
A year or two before Betty was born, a certain youth of good birth
left Harrow and went to Ealing where he was received in a family in
the capacity of Crammer's pup. The family was the Crammer and his
daughter, a hard-headed, tight-mouthed, black-haired young woman who
knew exactly what she wanted, and who meant to get it. Poverty had
taught her to know what she wanted. Nature, and the folly of
youth--not her own youth--taught her how to get it. There were several
pups. She selected the most eligible, secretly married him, and to the
day of her death spoke and thought of the marriage as a love-match. He
was a dreamy youth, who wrote verses and called the Crammer's daughter
his Egeria. She was too clever not to be kind to him, and he adored
her and believed in her to the end, which came before his twenty-first
birthday. He broke his neck out hunting, and died before Betty was
born.
His people, exasperated at the news of the marriage, threatened to try
to invalidate it on the score of the false swearing that had been
needed to get the boy of nineteen married to the woman of twenty-four.
Egeria was frightened. She compromised for an annuity of two hundred
pounds, to be continued to her child.
The passion of this woman's life was power. One cannot be very
powerful with just two hundred a year, and a doubtful position as the
widow of a boy whose relations are prepared to dispute one's marriage.
Mrs. Desmond spent three years in thought, and in caring severely for
the wants of her child. Then she bought four handsome dresses, and
some impressive bonnets, went to a Hydropathic Establishment, and
looked about her. Of the eligible men there Mr. Cecil Underwood
seemed, on enquiry, to be the most eligible. So she married him. He
resisted but little, for his parish needed a clergywoman sadly. The
two hundred pounds was a welcome addition to an income depleted by the
purchase of rare editions, and at the moment crippled by his recent
acquisition of the Omiliac of Vincentius in its original oak boards
and leather strings; and, above all, he saw in the three-year-old
Betty the child he might have had if things had gone otherwise with
him and another when they both were young.
Mrs. Desmond had felt certain she could rule a parish. Mrs. Cecil
Underwood did rule it--as she had known she could. She ruled her
husband too. And Betty. When she caught cold from working all day
among damp evergreens for the Christmas decorations, and, developing
pneumonia, died, she died resentfully, thanking God that she had
always done her duty, and quite unable to imagine how the world would
go on without her. She felt almost sure that in cutting short her
career of usefulness her Creator was guilty of an error of judgment
which He would sooner or later find reason to regret.
Her husband mourned her. He had the habit of her, of her strong
capable ways, the clockwork precision of her household and parish
arrangements. But as time went on he saw that perhaps he was more
comfortable without her: as a reformed drunkard sees that it is better
not to rely on brandy for one's courage. He saw it, but of course he
never owned it to himself.
Betty was heart-broken, quite sincerely heart-broken. She forgot all
the mother's hard tyrannies, her cramping rules, her narrow bitter
creed, and remembered only the calm competence, amounting to genius,
with which her mother had ruled the village world, her unflagging
energy and patience, and her rare moments of tenderness. She
remembered too all her own lapses from filial duty, and those memories
were not comfortable.
Yet Betty too, when the self-tormenting remorseful stage had worn
itself out, found life fuller, freer without her mother. Her
step-father she hated--had always hated. But he could be avoided. She
went to a boarding-school at Torquay, and some of her holidays were
spent with her aunts, the sisters of the boy-father who had not lived
to see Betty.
She adored the aunts. They lived in a world of which her village world
did not so much as dream; they spoke of things which folks at home
neither knew of nor cared for; and they spoke a language that was not
spoken at Long Barton. Of course, everyone who was anyone at Long
Barton spoke in careful and correct English, but no one ever troubled
to turn a phrase. And irony would have been considered very bad form
indeed. Aunt Nina wore lovely clothes and powdered her still pretty
face; Aunt Julia smoked cigarettes and used words that ladies at Long
Barton did not use. Betty was proud of them both.
It was Aunt Nina who taught Betty how to spend her allowance, how to
buy pretty things, and, better still, tried to teach her how to wear
them. Aunt Julia it was who brought her the Indian necklaces, and
promised to take her to Italy some day if she was good. Aunt Nina
lived in Grosvenor Square and Aunt Julia's address was most often,
vaguely, the Continent of Europe. Sometimes a letter addressed to some
odd place in Asia or America would find her.
But when Betty had left school her visits to Aunt Nina ceased. Mr.
Underwood feared that she was now of an age to be influenced by
trifles, and that London society would make her frivolous. Besides he
had missed her horribly, all through her school-days, though he had
yielded to the insistence of the aunts. But he had wanted Betty badly.
Only of course it never occurred to him to tell her so.
So Betty had lived on at the Rectory carrying on, with more or less of
success, such of her Mother's Parish workings as had managed to
outlive their author, and writing to the aunts to tell them how bored
she was and how she hated to be called "Lizzie."
She could not be expected to know that her stepfather had known as
"Lizzie" the girl who, if Fate had been kind, would have been his wife
or the mother of his child. Betty's letters breathed contempt of
Parish matters, weariness of the dulness of the country, and
exasperation at the hardness of a lot where "nothing ever happened."
Well, something had happened now.
The tremendous nature of the secret she was keeping against the world
almost took Betty's breath away. It was to the adventure, far more
than to the man, that her heart's beat quickened. Something had
happened.
Long Barton was no longer the dullest place in the world. It was the
centre of the universe. See her diary, an entry following a gap where
a page had been torn out:
"Mr. V. is very kind. He is teaching me to sketch. He says I shall do
very well when I have forgotten what I learned at school. It is so
nice of him to be so straightforward. I hate flattery. He has begun my
portrait. It is beautiful, but he says it is exactly like me. Of
course it is his painting that makes it beautiful, and not anything to
do with me. That is not flattery. I do not think he could say anything
unless he really thought it. He is that sort of man, I think. I am so
glad he is so good. If he were a different sort of person perhaps it
would not be quite nice for me to go and meet him without any one
knowing. But there is nothing _of that sort_. He was quite different
the first day. But I think then he was off his guard and could not
help himself. I don't know quite what I meant by that. But, anyway, I
am sure he is as good as gold, and that is such a comfort. I revere
him. I believe he is really noble and unselfish, and so few men are,
alas!"
The noble and unselfish Vernon meanwhile was quite happy. His picture
was going splendidly, and every morning he woke to the knowledge that
his image filled all the thoughts of a good little girl with gray dark
charming eyes and a face that reminded one of a pretty kitten. Her
drawing was not half bad either. He was spared the mortifying labour
of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. In one of his arts
as in the other he decided that she had talent. And it was pleasant
that to him should have fallen the task of teacher in both
departments. Those who hunt the fox will tell you that Reynard enjoys,
equally with the hounds and their masters, the pleasures of the chase.
Vernon was quite of this opinion in regard to his favourite sport. He
really felt that he gave as much pleasure as he took. And his own
forgettings were so easy that the easy forgetting of others seemed a
foregone conclusion. His forgetting always came first, that was all.
But now, the Spring, her charm and his own firm _parti pris_ working
together, it seemed to him that he could never forget Betty, could
never wish to forget her.
Her pretty conscious dignity charmed him. He stood still to look at
it. He took no step forward. His role was that of the deeply
respectful "brother artist." If his hand touched hers as he corrected
her drawing, that was accident. If, as he leaned over her, criticising
her work, the wind sent the end of her hair against his ear, that
could hardly be avoided in a breezy English spring. It was not his
fault that the little thrill it gave him was intensified a
hundred-fold when, glancing at her, he perceived that her own ears had
grown scarlet.
Betty went through her days in a dream. There were all the duties she
hated--the Mothers' meetings, the Parish visits when she tried to
adjust the quarrels and calm the jealousies of the stout aggressive
Mothers, the carrying round the Parish Magazine. There were no long
hours, now. In every spare moment she worked at her drawing to please
him. It was the least she could do, after all his kindness.
Her step-father surprised her once hard at work with charcoal and
board and plumb-line, a house-maid posing for her with a broom. He
congratulated himself that his little sermon on the advantages of
occupation as a cure for discontent had borne fruit so speedy and so
sound.
"Dear child, she only wanted a word in season," he thought. And he
said:
"I am glad to see that you have put away vain dreams, Lizzie. And your
labours will not be thrown away, either. If you go on taking pains I
daresay you will be able to paint some nice blotting-books and screens
for the School Bazaar."
"I daresay," said Betty, adding between her teeth, "If you only knew!"
"But we mustn't keep Letitia from her work," he added, vaguely
conscientious. Letitia flounced off, and Betty, his back turned, tore
up the drawing.
And, as a beautiful background to the gross realism of Mothers'
meetings and Parish tiresomenesses, was always the atmosphere of the
golden mornings, the dew and the stillness, the gleam of his white
coat among the pine-trees. For he was always first at the tryst now.
Betty was drunk; and she was too young to distinguish between
vintages. When she had been sober she had feared intoxication. Now she
was drunk, she thanked Heaven that she was sober.
CHAPTER IV.
INVOLUNTARY.
Six days of sunlight and clear air, of mornings as enchanting as
dreams, of dreams as full of magic as May mornings. Then an
interminable Sunday hot and sultry, with rolling purple clouds and an
evening of thunder and heavy showers. A magenta sunset, a night
working, hidden in its own darkness, its own secret purposes, and a
Monday morning gray beyond belief, with a soft steady rain.
Betty stood for full five minutes looking out at the straight fine
fall, at the white mist spread on the lawn, the blue mist twined round
the trees, listening to the plash of the drops that gathered and fell
from the big wet ivy leaves, to the guggle of the water-spout, the
hiss of smitten gravel.
"He'll never go," she thought, and her heart sank.
He, shaving, in the chill damp air by his open dimity-draped window,
was saying:
"She'll be there, of course. Women are all perfectly insensible to
weather."
Two mackintoshed figures met in the circle of pines.
"You have come," he said. "I never dreamed you would. How cold your
hand is!"
He held it for a moment warmly clasped.
"I thought it might stop any minute," said Betty; "it seemed a pity to
waste a morning."
"Yes," he said musingly, "it would be a pity to waste a morning. I
would not waste one of these mornings for a kingdom."
Betty fumbled with her sketching things as a sort of guarantee of good
faith.
"But it's too wet to work," said she. "I suppose I'd better go home
again."
"That seems a dull idea--for me," he said; "it's very selfish, of
course, but I'm rather sad this morning. Won't you stay a little and
cheer me up?"
Betty asked nothing better. But even to her a tete-a-tete in a wood,
with rain pattering and splashing on leaves and path and resonant
mackintoshes, seemed to demand some excuse.
"I should think breakfast and being dry would cheer you up better than
anything," said she. "And it's very wet here."
"Hang breakfast! But you're right about the wetness. There's a shed in
the field yonder. A harrow and a plough live there; they're sure to be
at home on a day like this. Let's go and ask for their hospitality."
"I hope they'll be nice to us," laughed Betty; "it's dreadful to go
where you're not wanted."
"How do you know?" he asked, laughing too. "Come, give me your hand
and let's run for it."
They ran, hand in hand, the wet mackintoshes flapping and slapping
about their knees, and drew up laughing and breathless in the dry
quiet of the shed. Vernon thought of Love and Mr. Lewisham, but it was
not the moment to say so.
"See, they are quite pleased to see us," said he, "they don't say a
word against our sheltering here. The plough looks a bit glum, but
she'll grow to like us presently. As for harrow, look how he's smiling
welcome at you with all his teeth."
"I'm glad he can't come forward to welcome us," said Betty. "His teeth
look very fierce."
"He could, of course, only he's enchanted. He used to be able to move
about, but now he's condemned to sit still and only smile till--till
he sees two perfectly happy people. Are you perfectly happy?" he asked
anxiously.
"I don't know," said Betty truly. "Are you?"
"No--not quite perfectly."
"I'm so glad," said Betty. "I shouldn't like the harrow to begin to
move while we're here. I'm sure it would bite us."
He sighed and looked grave. "So you don't want me to be perfectly
happy?"
She looked at him with her head on one side.
"Not here," she said. "I can't trust that harrow."
His eyelids narrowed over his eyes--then relaxed. No, she was merely
playing at enchanted harrows.
"Are you cold still?" he asked, and reached for her hand. She gave it
frankly.
"Not a bit," she said, and took it away again. "The run warmed me. In
fact--"
She unbuttoned the mackintosh and spread it on the bar of the plough
and sat down. Her white dress lighted up the shadows of the shed.
Outside the rain fell steadily.
"May I sit down too? Can Mrs. Plough find room for two children on her
lap?"
She drew aside the folds of her dress, but even then only a little
space was left. The plough had been carelessly housed and nearly half
of it was where the rain drove in on it. So that they were very close
together.
So close that he had to throw his head back to see clearly how the
rain had made the short hair curl round her forehead and ears, and how
fresh were the tints of face and lips. Also he had to support himself
by an arm stretched out behind her. His arm was not round her, but it
might just as well have been, as far as the look of the thing went. He
thought of the arm of Mr. Lewisham.
"Did you ever have your fortune told?" he asked.
"No, never. I've always wanted to, but Father hates gipsies. When I
was a little girl I used to put on my best clothes, and go out into
the lanes and sit about and hope the gipsies would steal me, but they
never did."
"They're a degenerate race, blind to their own interests. But they
haven't a monopoly of chances--fortunately." His eyes were on her
face.
"I never had my fortune told," said Betty. "I'd love it, but I think I
should be afraid, all the same. Something might come true."
Vernon was more surprised than he had ever been in his life at the
sudden involuntary movement in his right arm. It cost him a conscious
effort not to let the arm follow its inclination and fall across her
slender shoulders, while he should say:
"Your fortune is that I love you. Is it good or bad fortune?"
He braced the muscles of his arm, and kept it where it was. That
sudden unreasonable impulse was a mortification, an insult to the man
whose pride it was to believe that his impulses were always planned.
"I can tell fortunes," he said. "When I was a boy I spent a couple of
months with some gipsies. They taught me lots of things."
His memory, excellently trained, did not allow itself to dwell for an
instant on his reason for following those gipsies, on the dark-eyed
black-haired girl with the skin like pale amber, who had taught him,
by the flicker of the camp-fire, the lines of head and heart and life,
and other things beside. Oh, but many other things! That was before he
became an artist. He was only an amateur in those days.
"Did they teach you how to tell fortunes--really and truly?" asked
Betty. "We had a fortune-teller's tent at the School Bazaar last year,
and the youngest Smithson girl dressed up in spangles and a red dress
and said she was Zara, the Eastern Mystic Hand-Reader, and Foreteller
of the Future. But she got it all out of Napoleon's Book of Fate."
"I don't get my fortune-telling out of anybody's book of anything," he
said. "I get it out of people's hands, and their faces. Some people's
faces are their fortunes, you know."
"I know they are," she said a little sadly, "but everybody's got a
hand and a fortune, whether they've got that sort of fortune-face or
not."
"But the fortunes of the fortune-faced people are the ones one likes
best to tell."
"Of course," she admitted wistfully, "but what's going to happen to
you is just as interesting to _you_, even if your face isn't
interesting to anybody. Do you always tell fortunes quite truly; I
mean do you follow the real rules? or do you make up pretty fortunes
for the people with the pretty fortune-faces."
"There's no need to 'make up.' The pretty fortunes are always there
for the pretty fortune-faces: unless of course the hand contradicts
the face."
"But can it?"
"Can't it? There may be a face that all the beautiful things in the
world are promised to: just by being so beautiful itself it draws
beautiful happenings to it. But if the hand contradicts the face, if
the hand is one of those narrow niggardly distrustful hands, one of
the hands that will give nothing and take nothing, a hand without
courage, without generosity--well then one might as well be born
without a fortune-face, for any good it will ever do one."
"Then you don't care to tell fortunes for people who haven't fortune
faces?"
"I should like to tell yours, if you would let me. Shall I?"
He held out his hand, but her hand was withheld.
"I ought to cross your hand with silver, oughtn't I?" she asked.
"It's considered correct--but--"
"Oh, don't let's neglect any proper precaution," she said. "I haven't
got any money. Tell it me to-morrow, and I will bring a sixpence."
"You could cross my hand with your watch," he said, "and I could take
the crossing as an I.O.U. of the sixpence."
She detached the old watch. He held out his hand and she gravely
traced a cross on it.
"Now," he said, "all preliminary formalities being complied with, let
the prophet do his work. Give me your hand, pretty lady, and the old
gipsy will tell you your fortune true."
He held the hand in his, bending back the pink finger-tips with his
thumb, and looked earnestly at its lines. Then he looked in her face,
longer than he had ever permitted himself to look. He looked till her
eyes fell. It was a charming picture. He was tall, strong, well-built
and quite as good-looking as a clever man has any need to be. And she
was as pretty as any oleograph of them all.
It seemed a thousand pities that there should be no witness to such a
well-posed tableau, no audience to such a charming scene. The pity of
it struck Destiny, and Destiny flashed the white of Betty's dress, a
shrill point of light, into an eye a hundred yards away. The eye's
owner, with true rustic finesse, drew back into the wood's shadow,
shaded one eye with a brown rustic hand, looked again, and began a
detour which landed the rustic boots, all silently, behind the shed,
at a spot where a knot-hole served as frame for the little picture.
The rustic eye was fitted to the knot-hole while Vernon holding
Betty's hand gazed in Betty's face, and decided that this was no time
to analyse his sensations.
Neither heard the furtive rustic tread, or noted the gleam of the pale
rustic eye.
The labourer shook his head as he hurried quickly away. He had
daughters of his own, and the Rector had been kind when one of those
daughters had suddenly come home from service, ill, and with no
prospect of another place.
"A-holdin' of hands and a-castin' of sheep's eyes," said he. "We knows
what that's the beginnings of! Well, well, youth's the season for
silliness, but there's bounds--there's bounds. And all of a mornin' so
early too. Lord above knows what it wouldn't be like of a evenin'." He
shook his head again, and made haste.
Vernon had forced his eyes to leave the face of Betty.
"Your fortune," he was saying, "is, curiously enough, just one of
those fortunes I was speaking of. You will have great chances of
happiness, if you have the courage to take them. You will cross the
sea. You've never travelled, have you?"
"No,--never further than Torquay; I was at school there, you know; and
London, of course. But I should love it. Isn't it horrid to think that
one might grow quite old and never have been anywhere or done
anything?"
"That depends on oneself, doesn't it? Adventures are to the
adventurous."
"Yes, that's all very well--girls can't be adventurous."
"Yes,--it's the Prince who sets out to seek his fortune, isn't it? The
Princess has to sit at home and wait for hers to come to her. It
generally does if she's a real Princess."
"But half the fun must be the seeking for it," said Betty.
"You're right," said he, "it is."
The labourer had reached the park-gate. His pace had quickened to the
quickening remembrance of his own daughter, sitting at home silent and
sullen.
"Do you really see it in my hand?" asked Betty,--"about my crossing
the sea, I mean."
"It's there; but it depends on yourself, like everything else."
"I did ask my step-father to let me go," she said, "after that first
day, you know, when you said I ought to study in Paris."
"And he wouldn't, of course?"
"No; he said Paris was a wicked place. It isn't really, is it?"
"Every place is wicked," said he, "and every place is good. It's all
as one takes things."
The Rectory gate clicked sharply as it swung to behind the labourer.
The Rectory gravel scrunched beneath the labourer's boots.
Yes, the Master was up; he could be seen.
The heavy boots were being rubbed against the birch broom that, rooted
at Kentish back doors, stands to receive on its purple twigs the
scrapings of Kentish clay from rustic feet.
"You have the artistic lines very strongly marked," Vernon was saying.
"One, two, three--yes, painting--music perhaps?"
"I am very fond of music," said Betty, thinking of the hour's daily
struggle with the Mikado and the Moonlight Sonata. "But three arts.
What could the third one be?" Her thoughts played for an instant with
unheard-of triumphs achieved behind footlights--rapturous applause,
showers of bouquets.
"Whatever it is, you've enormous talent for it," he said; "you'll find
out what it is in good time. Perhaps it'll be something much more
important than the other two put together, and perhaps you've got even
more talent for it than you have for others."
"But there isn't any other talent that I can think of."
"I can think of a few. There's the stage,--but it's not that, I fancy,
or not exactly that. There's literature--confess now, don't you write
poetry sometimes when you're all alone at night? Then there's the art
of being amusing, and the art of being--of being liked."
"Shall I be successful in any of the arts?"
"In one, certainly."
"Ah," said Betty, "if I could only go to Paris!"
"It's not always necessary to go to Paris for success in one's art,"
he said.
"But I want to go. I'm sure I could do better there."
"Aren't you satisfied with your present Master?"
"Oh!"--It was a cry of genuine distress, of heartfelt disclaim. "You
_know_ I didn't mean that! But you won't always be here, and when
you've gone--why then--"
Again he had to control the involuntary movement of his left arm.
"But I'm not going for months yet. Don't let us cross a bridge till we
come to it. Your head-line promises all sorts of wonderful things. And
your heart-line--" he turned her hand more fully to the light.
In the Rector's study the labourer was speaking, standing shufflingly
on the margin of the Turkey carpet. The Rector listened, his hand on
an open folio where fat infants peered through the ornamental
initials.
"And so I come straight up to you, Sir, me being a father and you the
same, Sir, for all the difference betwixt our ways in life. Says I to
myself, says I, and bitter hard I feels it too, I says: 'George,' says
I, 'you've got a daughter as begun that way, not a doubt of
it--holdin' of hands and sittin' close alongside, and you know what's
come to her!'"
The Rector shivered at the implication.
"Then I says, says I: 'Like as not the Rector won't thank you for
interferin'. Least said soonest mended,' says I."
"I'm very much obliged to you," said the Rector difficultly, and his
hand shook on Ambrosius's yellow page.
"You see, Sir," the man's tone held all that deferent apology that
truth telling demands, "gells is gells, be they never so up in the
world, all the world over, bless their hearts; and young men is young
men, d--n them, asking your pardon, Sir, I'm sure, but the word
slipped out. And I shouldn't ha' been easy if anything had have gone
wrong with Miss, God bless her, all along of the want of a word in
season. Asking your pardon, Sir, but even young ladies is flesh and
blood, when it comes to the point. Ain't they now?" he ended
appealingly.
The Rector spoke with an obvious effort, got his hand off the page and
closed the folio.
"You've done quite right, George," he said, "and I'm greatly obliged
to you. Only I do ask you to keep this to yourself. You wouldn't have
liked it if people had heard a thing like that about your Ruby
before--I mean when she was at home."
He replaced the two folios on the shelf.
"Not me, Sir," George answered. "I'm mum, I do assure you, Sir. And if
I might make so bold, you just pop on your hat and step acrost
directly minute. There's that little hole back of the shed what I told
you of. You ain't only got to pop your reverend eye to that there, and
you'll see for yourself as I ain't give tongue for no dragged scent."
"Thank you, George," said the Rector, "I will. Good morning. God bless
you."
The formula came glibly, but it was from the lips only that it came.
Lizzie--his white innocent Lily-girl! In a shed--a man, a stranger,
holding her hand, his arm around her, his eyes--his lips perhaps,
daring--
The Rector was half way down his garden drive.
"Your heart-line," Vernon was saying, "it's a little difficult. You
will be deeply beloved."
To have one's fortune told is disquieting. To keep silence during the
telling deepens the disquiet curiously. It seemed good to Betty to
laugh.
"Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor," she said, "which am I going to
marry, kind gipsy?"
"I don't believe the gipsies who say they can see marriage in a hand,"
he answered gravely, and Betty feared he had thought her flippant, or
even vulgar; "what one sees are not the shadows of coming conventions.
One sees the great emotional events, the things that change and mould
and develop character. Yes, you will be greatly beloved, and you will
love deeply."
"I'm not to be happy in my affairs of the heart then." Still a careful
flippancy seemed best to Betty.
"Did I say so? Do you really think that there are no happy love
affairs but those that end in a wedding breakfast and bridesmaids,
with a Bazaar show of hideous silver and still more hideous crockery,
and all one's relations assembled to dissect one's most sacred
secrets?"
Betty had thought so, but it seemed coarse to own it.
"Can't you imagine," he went on dreamily, "a love affair so perfect
that it could not but lose its finest fragrance if the world were
called to watch the plucking of love's flower? Can't you imagine a
love so great, so deep, so tender, so absolutely possessing the whole
life of the lover that he would almost grudge any manifestation of it?
Because such a manifestation must necessarily be a repetition of some
of the ways in which unworthy loves have been manifested, by less
happy lovers? I can seem to see that one might love the one love of a
life-time, and be content to hold the treasure in one's heart, a
treasure such as no other man ever had, and grudge even a word or a
look that might make it less the single perfect rose of the world."
"Oh, dear!" said Betty to herself.
"But I'm talking like a book," he said, and laughed. "I always get
dreamy and absurd when I tell fortunes. Anyway, as I said before, you
will be greatly beloved. Indeed, unless your hand is very untruthful,
which I'm sure it never could be, you are beloved now, far more than
you can possibly guess."
Betty caught at her flippancy but it evaded her, and all she found to
say was, "Oh," and her eyes fell.
There was a silence. Vernon still held her hand, but he was no longer
looking at it.
A black figure darkened the daylight.
The two on the plough started up--started apart. Nothing more was
wanted to convince the Rector of all that he least wished to believe.
"Go home, Lizzie," he said, "go to your room," and to her his face
looked the face of a fiend. It is hard to control the muscles under a
sudden emotion compounded of sorrow, sympathy and an immeasurable
pity. "Go to your room and stay there till I send for you."
Betty went, like a beaten dog.
The Rector turned to the young man.
"Now, Sir," he said.
CHAPTER V.
THE PRISONER.
When Vernon looked back on that interview he was honestly pleased with
himself. He had been patient, he had been kind even. In the end he had
been positively chivalrous. He had hardly allowed himself to be
ruffled for an instant, but had met the bitter flow of Mr. Underwood's
biblical language with perfect courtesy.
He regretted, of course, deeply, this unfortunate misunderstanding.
Accident had made him acquainted with Miss Desmond's talent, he had
merely offered her a little of that help which between brother
artists--The well-worn phrase had not for the Rector the charm it had
had for Betty.
The Rector spoke again, and Mr. Vernon listened, bare-headed, in
deepest deference.
No, he had not been holding Miss Desmond's hand--he had merely been
telling her fortune. No one could regret more profoundly than he,--and
so on. He was much wounded by Mr. Underwood's unworthy suspicions.
The Rector ran through a few texts. His pulpit denunciations of
iniquity, though always earnest, had lacked this eloquence.
Vernon listened quietly.
"I can only express my regret that my thoughtlessness should have
annoyed you, and beg you not to blame Miss Desmond. It was perhaps a
little unconventional, but--"
"Unconventional--to try to ruin--"
Mr. Vernon held up his hand: he was genuinely shocked.
"Forgive me," he said, "but I can't hear such words in connection
with--with a lady for whom I have the deepest respect. You are heated
now, Sir, and I can make every allowance for your natural vexation.
But I must ask you not to overstep the bounds of decency."
The Rector bit his lip, and Vernon went on:
"I have listened to your abuse--yes, your abuse--without defending
myself, but I can't allow anyone, even her father, to say a word
against her."
"I am not her father," said the old man bitterly. And on the instant
Vernon understood him as Betty had never done. The young man's tone
changed instantly.
"Look here," he said, and his face grew almost boyish, "I am really
most awfully sorry. The whole thing--what there is of it, and it's
very little--was entirely my doing. It was inexcusably thoughtless.
Miss Desmond is very young and very innocent. It is I who ought to
have known better,--and perhaps I did. But the country is very dull,
and it was a real pleasure to teach so apt a pupil."
He spoke eagerly, and the ring of truth was in his voice. But the
Rector felt that he was listening to the excuses of a serpent.
"Then you'd have me believe that you don't even love her?"
"No more than she does me," said Vernon very truly. "I've never
breathed a word of love to her," he went on; "such an idea never
entered our heads. She's a charming girl, and I admire her immensely,
but--" he sought hastily for a weapon, and defended Betty with the
first that came to hand, "I am already engaged to another lady. It is
entirely as an artist that I am interested in Miss Betty."
"Serpent," said the Rector within himself, "Lying serpent!"
Vernon was addressing himself silently in terms not more flattering.
"Fool, idiot, brute to let the child in for this!--for it's going to
be a hell of a time for her, anyhow. And as for me--well, the game is
up, absolutely up!"
"I am really most awfully sorry," he said again.
"I find it difficult to believe in the sincerity of your repentance,"
said the Rector frowning.
"My regret you may believe in," said Vernon stiffly. "There is no
ground for even the mention of such a word as repentance."
"If your repentance is sincere"--he underlined the word--"you will
leave Long Barton to-day."
Leave without a word, a sign from Betty--a word or a sign to her? It
might be best--if--
"I will go, Sir, if you will let me have your assurance that you will
say nothing to Miss Desmond, that you won't make her unhappy, that
you'll let the whole matter drop."
"I will make no bargains with you!" cried the Rector. "Do your worst!
Thank God I can defend her from you!"
"She needs no defence. It's not I who am lacking in respect and
consideration for her," said Vernon a little hotly, "but, as I say,
I'll go--if you'll just promise to be gentle with her."
"I do not need to be taught my duty by a villain, Sir!--" The old
clergyman was trembling with rage. "I wish to God I were a younger
man, that I might chastise you for the hound you are." His upraised
cane shook in his hand. "Words are thrown away on you! I'm sorry I
can't use the only arguments that can come home to a puppy!"
"If you were a younger man," said Vernon slowly, "your words would not
have been thrown away on me. They would have had the answer they
deserved. I shall not leave Long Barton, and I shall see Miss Desmond
when and how I choose."
"Long Barton shall know you in your true character, Sir, I promise
you."
"So you would blacken her to blacken me? One sees how it is that she
does not love her father."
He meant to be cruel, but it was not till he saw the green shadows
round the old man's lips that he knew just how cruel he had been. The
quivering old mouth opened and closed and opened, the cold eyes
gleamed. And the trembling hand in one nervous movement raised the
cane and struck the other man sharply across the face. It was a
hysterical blow, like a woman's, and with it the tears sprang to the
faded eyes.
Then it was that Vernon behaved well. When he thought of it afterwards
he decided that he had behaved astonishingly well.
With the smart of that cut stinging on his flesh, the mark of it
rising red and angry across his cheek, he stepped back a pace, and
without a word, without a retaliatory movement, without even a change
of facial expression he executed the most elaborately courteous bow,
as of one treading a minuet, recovered the upright and walked away
bareheaded. The old clergyman was left planted there, the cane still
jigging up and down in his shaking hand.
"A little theatrical, perhaps," mused Vernon, when the cover of the
wood gave him leave to lay his fingers to his throbbing cheek, "but
nothing could have annoyed the old chap more."
However effective it may be to turn the other cheek, the turning of it
does not cool one's passions, and he walked through the wood angrier
than he ever remembered being. But the cool rain dripping from the
hazel and sweet chestnut leaves fell pleasantly on his uncovered head
and flushed face. Before he was through the wood he was able to laugh,
and the laugh was a real laugh, if rather a rueful one. Vernon could
never keep angry very long.
"Poor old devil!" he said. "He'll have to put a special clause in the
general confession next Sunday. Poor old devil! And poor little Betty!
And poorest me! Because, however, we look at it, and however we may
have damn well bluffed over it, the game _is_ up--absolutely up."
When one has a definite end in view--marriage, let us say, or an
elopement,--secret correspondences, the surmounting of garden walls,
the bribery of servants, are in the picture. But in a small sweet
idyll, with no backbone of intention to it, these things are
inartistic. And Vernon was, above and before all, an artist. He must
go away and he knew it. And his picture was not finished. Could he
possibly leave that incomplete? The thought pricked sharply. He had
not made much progress with the picture in these last days. It had
been pleasanter to work at the portrait of Betty. If he moved to the
next village? Yes, that must be thought over.
He spent the day thinking of that and of other things.
The Reverend Cecil Underwood stood where he was left till the man he
had struck had passed out of sight. Then the cane slipped through his
hand and fell rattling to the ground. He looked down at it curiously.
Then he reached out both hands vaguely and touched the shaft of the
plough. He felt his way along it, and sat down, where they had sat,
staring dully before him at the shadows in the shed, and at the steady
fall of the rain outside. Betty's mackintosh was lying on the floor.
He picked it up presently and smoothed out the creases. Then he
watched the rain again.
An hour had passed before he got stiffly up and went home, with her
cloak on his arm.
Yes, Miss Lizzie was in her room--had a headache. He sent up her
breakfast, arranging the food himself, and calling back the maid
because the tray lacked marmalade.
Then he poured out his own tea, and sat stirring it till it was cold.
She was in her room, waiting for him to send for her. He must send for
her. He must speak to her. But what could he say? What was there to
say that would not be a cruelty? What was there to ask that would not
be a challenge to her to lie, as the serpent had lied?
"I am glad I struck him," the Reverend Cecil told himself again and
again; "_that_ brought it home to him. He was quite cowed. He could do
nothing but bow and cringe away. Yes, I am glad."
But the girl? The serpent had asked him to be gentle with her--had
dared to ask him. He could think of no way gentle enough for dealing
with this crisis. The habit of prayer caught him. He prayed for
guidance.
Then quite suddenly he saw what to do.
"That will be best," he said; "she will feel that less."
He rang and ordered the fly from the Peal of Bells, went to his room
to change his old coat for a better one, since appearances must be
kept up, even if the heart be breaking. His thin hair was disordered,
and his tie, he noticed, was oddly crumpled, as though strange hands
had been busy with his throat. He put on a fresh tie, smoothed his
hair, and went down again. As he passed, he lingered a moment outside
her door.
Betty watching with red eyes and swollen lips saw him enter the fly,
saw him give an order, heard the door bang. The old coachman clambered
clumsily to his place, and the carriage lumbered down the drive.
"Oh, how cruel he is! He might have spoken to me _now_! I suppose he's
going to keep me waiting for days, as a penance. And I haven't really
done anything wrong. It's a shame! I've a good mind to run away!"
Running away required consideration. In the meantime, since he was out
of the house, there was no reason why she should not go downstairs.
She was not a child to be kept to her room in disgrace. She bathed her
distorted face, powdered it, and tried to think that the servants,
should they see her, would notice nothing.
Where had he gone? For no goal within his parish would a hired
carriage be needed. He had gone to Sevenoaks or to the station.
Perhaps he had gone to Westerham--there was a convent there, a
Protestant sisterhood. Perhaps he was going to make arrangements for
shutting her up there! Never!--Betty would die first. At least she
would run away first. But where could one run to?
The aunts? Betty loved the aunts, but she distrusted their age. They
were too old to sympathise really with her. They would most likely
understand as little as her step-father had done. An Inward Monitor
told Betty that the story of the fortune-telling, of the seven stolen
meetings with no love-making in them, would sound very unconvincing to
any ears but those of the one person already convinced. But she would
not be shut up in a convent--no, not by fifty aunts and a hundred
step-fathers!
She would go to Him. He would understand. He was the only person who
ever had understood. She would go straight to him and ask him what to
do. He would advise her. He was so clever, so good, so noble. Whatever
he advised would be _right_.
Trembling and in a cold white rage of determination, Betty fastened on
her hat, found her gloves and purse. The mackintosh she remembered had
been left in the shed. She pictured her step-father trampling fiercely
upon it as he told Mr. Vernon what he thought of him. She took her
golf cape.
At the last moment she hesitated. Mr. Vernon would not be idle. What
would he be doing? Suppose he should send a note? Suppose he had
watched Mr. Underwood drive away and should come boldly up and ask for
her? Was it wise to leave the house? But perhaps he would be hanging
about the church yard, or watching from the park for a glimpse of her.
She would at least go out and see.
"I'll leave a farewell letter," she said, "in case I never come back."
She found her little blotting-book--envelopes, but no paper. Of
course! One can't with dignity write cutting farewells on envelopes.
She tore a page from her diary.
"You have driven me to this," she wrote. "I am going away, and in time
I shall try to forgive you all the petty meannesses and cruelties of
all these years. I know you always hated me, but you might have had
some pity. All my life I shall bear the marks on my soul of the bitter
tyranny I have endured here. Now I am going away out into the world,
and God knows what will become of me."
She folded, enveloped, and addressed the note, stuck a long hat-pin
fiercely through it, and left it, patent, speared to her pin-cushion,
with her step-father's name uppermost.
"Good-bye, little room," she said. "I feel I shall never see you
again."
Slowly and sadly she crossed the room and turned the handle of the
door. The door was locked.
Once, years ago, a happier man than the Reverend Cecil had been Rector
of Long Barton. And in the room that now was Betty's he had had iron
bars fixed to the two windows, because that room was the nursery.
* * * * *
That evening, after dinner, Mr. Vernon sat at his parlour window
looking idly along the wet bowling-green to the belt of lilacs and the
pale gleams of watery sunset behind them. He had passed a disquieting
day. He hated to leave things unfinished. And now the idyll was ruined
and the picture threatened,--and Betty's portrait was not finished,
and never would be.
"Come in," he said; and his landlady heavily followed up her tap on
his door.
"A lady to see you, Sir," said she with a look that seemed to him to
be almost a wink.
"A lady? To see me? Good Lord!" said Vernon. Among all the thoughts of
the day this was the one thought that had not come to him.
"Shall I show her in?" the woman asked, and she eyed him curiously.
"A lady," he repeated. "Did she give her name?"
"Yes, Sir. Miss Desmond, Sir. Shall I shew her in?"
"Yes; shew her in, of course," he answered irritably.
And to himself he said:
"The Devil!"
CHAPTER VI.
THE CRIMINAL.
If you have found yourself, at the age of eighteen, a prisoner in your
own bedroom you will be able to feel with Betty. Not otherwise. Even
your highly strung imagination will be impotent to present to you the
ecstasy of rage, terror, resentment that fills the soul when locked
door and barred windows say, quite quietly, but beyond appeal: "Here
you are, and here, my good child, you stay."
All the little familiar objects, the intimate associations of the
furniture of a room that has been for years your boudoir as well as
your sleeping room, all the decorations that you fondly dreamed gave to
your room a _cachet_--the mark of a distinctive personality,--these
are of no more comfort to you than would be strange bare stone walls
and a close unfamiliar iron grating.
Betty tried to shake the window bars, but they were immovable. She
tried to force the door open, but her silver buttonhook was an
insufficient lever, and her tooth-brush handle broke when she pitted
it in conflict against the heavy, old-fashioned lock. We have all read
how prisoners, outwitting their gaolers, have filed bars with their
pocket nail-scissors, and cut the locks out of old oak doors with the
small blade of a penknife. Betty's door was only of pine, but her
knife broke off short; and the file on her little scissors wore itself
smooth against the first unmoved bar.
She paced the room like a caged lioness. We read that did the lioness
but know her strength her bars were easily shattered by one blow of
her powerful paw. Betty's little pink paws were not powerful like the
lioness's, and when she tried to make them help her, she broke her
nails and hurt herself.
It was this moment that Letitia chose for rapping at the door.
"You can't come in. What is it?" Betty was prompt to say.
"Mrs. Edwardes's Albert, Miss, come for the Maternity bag."
"It's all ready in the school-room cupboard," Betty called through the
door. "Number three."
She resisted an impulse to say that she had broken the key in the lock
and to send for the locksmith. No: there should be no scandal at Long
Barton,--at least not while she had to stay in it.
She did not cry. She was sick with fury, and anger made her heart beat
as Vernon had never had power to make it.
"I will be calm. I won't lose my head," she told herself again and
again. She drank some water. She made herself eat the neglected
breakfast. She got out her diary and wrote in it, in a handwriting
that was not Betty's, and with a hand that shook like totter-grass.
"What will become of me? What has become of _him_? My step-father must
have done something horrible to him. Perhaps he has had him put in
prison; of course he couldn't do that in these modern times, like in
the French revolution, just for talking to some one he hadn't been
introduced to, but he may have done it for trespassing, or damage to
the crops, or something. I feel quite certain something has happened
to him. He would never have deserted me like this in my misery if he
were free. And I can do nothing to help him--nothing. How shall I live
through the day? How can I bear it? And this awful trouble has come
upon him just because he was kind to another artist. The world is
very, very, very cruel. I wish I were dead!" She blotted the words and
locked away the book. Then she burnt that farewell note and went and
sat in the window-seat to watch for her step-father's return.
The time was long. At last he came. She saw him open the carriage door
and reach out a flat foot, feeling for the carriage step. He stepped
out, turned and thrust a hand back into the cab. Was he about to hand
out a stern-faced Protestant sister, who would take her to Westerham,
and she would never be heard of again? Betty set her teeth and waited
anxiously to see if the sister seemed strong. Betty was, and she would
fight for her liberty. With teeth and nails if need were.
It was no Protestant sister to whom the Reverend Cecil had reached his
hand. It was only his umbrella. Betty breathed again.
Well, now at least he'll come and speak to me: he must come himself;
even _he_ couldn't give the key to the servants and say: "Please go
and unlock Miss Lizzie and bring her down!"
Betty would not move. "I shall just stay here and pretend I didn't
know the door was locked," said she.
But her impatience drove her back to the caged-lioness walk and when
at last she heard the key turn in the door she had only just time to
spring to the window-seat and compose herself in an attitude of
graceful defiance.
It was thrown away.
The door only opened wide enough to admit a dinner tray pushed in by a
hand she knew. Then the door closed again.
The same thing happened with tea and supper.
It was not till after supper that Betty, gazing out on the pale watery
sunset, found it blurred to her eyes. There was no more hope now. She
was a prisoner. If He was not a prisoner he ought to be. It was the
only thing that could excuse his silence. He might at least have gone
by the gate or waved a handkerchief. Well, all was over between them,
and Betty was alone in the world. She had not cried all day, but now
she did cry.
* * * * *
Vernon always prided himself on having a heart for any fate, but this
was one of the interviews that one would rather have avoided. All day
he had schooled himself to resignation, had almost reconciled himself
to the spoiling of what had promised to be a masterpiece. Explications
with Betty would brush the bloom off everything. Yet he must play the
part well. But what part? Oh, hang all meddlers!
"Miss Desmond," said the landlady; and he braced his nerves to meet a
tearful, an indignant or a desperate Betty.
But there was no Betty to be met; no Betty of any kind.
Instead, a short squarely-built middle-aged lady walked briskly into
the room, and turned to see the door well closed before she advanced
towards him.
He bowed with indescribable emotions.
"Mr. Eustace Vernon?" said the lady. She wore a sensible short skirt
and square-toed brown boots. Her hat was boat-shaped and her abundant
hair was screwed up so as to be well out of her way. Her face was
square and sensible like her shoulders, and her boots. Her eyes dark,
clear and near sighted. She wore gold-rimmed spectacles and carried a
crutch-handled cane. No vision could have been less like Betty.
Vernon bowed, and moved a chair towards her.
"Thank you," she said, and took it. "Now, Mr. Vernon, sit down too,
and let's talk this over like reasonable beings. You may smoke if you
like. It clears the brain."
Vernon sat down and mechanically took out a cigarette, but he held it
unlighted.
"Now," said the square lady, leaning her elbows on the table and her
chin on her hands, "I am Betty's aunt."
"It is very good of you to come," said Vernon helplessly.
"Not at all," she briskly answered. "Now tell me all about it."
"There's nothing to tell," said Vernon.
"Perhaps it will clear the ground a little if I say at once that I
haven't come to ask your intentions, because of course you haven't
any. My reverend brother-in-law, on the other hand, insists that you
have, and that they are strictly dishonourable."
Vernon laughed, and drew a breath of relief.
"I fear Mr. Underwood misunderstood,--" he said, "and--"
"He is a born misunderstander," said Miss Julia Desmond. "Now, I'm
not. Light your cigarette, man; you can give me one if you like, to
keep you in countenance. A light--thanks. Now will you speak, or shall
I?"
"You seem to have more to say than I, Miss Desmond."
"Ah, that's because you don't trust me. In other words, you don't know
me. That's one of the most annoying things in life: to be really an
excellent sort, and to be quite unable to make people see it at the
first go-off. Well, here goes. My worthy brother-in-law finds you and
my niece holding hands in a shed."
"We were not," said Vernon. "I was telling her fortune--"
"It's my lead now," interrupted the lady. "Your turn next. He being
what he is--to the pure all things are impure, you know--instantly
draws the most harrowing conclusions, hits you with a stick.--By the
way, you behaved uncommonly well about that."
"Thank you," said Vernon, smiling a little. It is pleasant to be
appreciated.
"Yes, really very decently, indeed. I daresay it wouldn't have hurt a
fly, but if you'd been the sort of man he thinks you are--However
that's neither here nor there. He hits you with a stick, locks the
child into her room--What did you say?"
"Nothing," said Vernon.
"All right. I didn't hear it. Locks her in her room, and wires to my
sister. Takes a carriage to Sevenoaks to do it too, to avoid scandal.
I happen to be at my sister's, on my way from Cairo to Norway, so I
undertake to run down. He meets me at the station, and wants me to go
straight home and blackguard Betty. But I prefer to deal with
principals."
"You mean--"
"I mean that I know as well as you do that whatever has happened has
been your doing and not that dear little idiot's. Now, are you going
to tell me about it?"
He had rehearsed already a form of words in which "Brother artists"
should have loomed large. But now that he rose, shrugged his shoulders
and spoke, it was in words that had not been rehearsed.
"Look here, Miss Desmond," said he, "the fact is, you're right. I
haven't any intentions--certainly not dishonourable ones. But I was
frightfully bored in the country, and your niece is bored, too--more
bored than I am. No one ever understands or pities the boredom of the
very young," he added pensively.
"Well?"
"Well, that's all there is to it. I liked meeting her, and she liked
meeting me."
"And the fortune-telling? Do you mean to tell me you didn't enjoy
holding the child's hand and putting her in a silly flutter?"
"I deny the flutter," he said, "but--Well, yes, of course I enjoyed
it. You wouldn't believe me if I said I didn't."
"No," said she.
"I enjoyed it more than I expected to," he added with a frankness that
he had not meant to use, "much more. But I didn't say a word of
love---only perhaps--"
"Only perhaps you made the idea of it underlie every word you did
speak. Don't I know?" said Miss Desmond. "Bless the man, I've been
young myself!"
"Miss Betty is very charming," said he, "and--and if I hadn't met
her--"
"If you hadn't met her some other man would. True; but I fancy her
father would rather it had been some other man."
"I didn't mean that in the least," said Vernon with some heat. "I
meant that if I hadn't met her she would have gone on being bored, and
so should I. Don't think me a humbug, Miss Desmond. I am more sorry
than I can say that I should have been the means of causing her any
unhappiness."
"'Causing her unhappiness,'--poor little Betty, poor little trusting
innocent silly little girl! That's about it, isn't it?"
It was so like it that he hotly answered:
"Not in the least."
"Well, well," said Miss Desmond, "there's no great harm done. She'll
get over it, and more's been lost on market days. Thanks."
She lighted a second cigarette and sat very upright, the cigarette in
her mouth and her hands on the handle of her stick.
"You can't help it, of course. Men with your coloured eyes never can.
That green hazel--girls ought to be taught at school that it's a
danger-signal. Only, since your heart's not in the business any more
than her's is--as you say, you were both bored to death--I want to ask
you, as a personal favour to me, just to let the whole thing drop. Let
the girl alone. Go right away."
"It's an unimportant detail, and I'm ashamed to mention it," said
Vernon, "but I've got a picture on hand--I'm painting a bit of the
Warren."
"Well, go to Low Barton and put up there and finish your precious
picture. You won't see Betty again unless you run after her."
"To tell the truth," said Vernon, "I had already decided to let the
whole thing drop. I'm ashamed of the trouble I've caused her and--and
I've taken rooms at Low Barton."
"Upon my word," said Miss Desmond, "you are the coldest lover I've
ever set eyes on."
"I'm not a lover," he answered swiftly. "Do you wish I were?"
"For Betty's sake, I'm glad you aren't. But I think I should respect
you more if you weren't quite so arctic."
"I'm not an incendiary, at any rate," said he, "and that's something,
with my coloured eyes, isn't it?"
"Well," she said, "whatever your temperature is, I rather like you. I
don't wonder at Betty in the least."
Vernon bowed.
"All I ask is your promise that you'll not speak to her again."
"I can't promise that, you know. I can't be rude to her. But I'll
promise not to go out of my way to meet her again." He sighed.
"As, yes--it is sad--all that time wasted and no rabbits caught."
Again Miss Desmond had gone unpleasantly near his thought. Of course
he said:
"You don't understand me."
"Near enough," said Miss Desmond; "and now I'll go."
"Let me thank you for coming," said Vernon eagerly; "it was more than
good of you. I must own that my heart sank when I knew it was Miss
Betty's aunt who honoured me with a visit. But I am most glad you
came. I never would have believed that a lady could be so reasonable
and--and--"
"And gentlemanly?" said the lady. "Yes,--it's my brother-in-law who is
the old woman, poor dear! You see, Mr. Vernon, I've been running round
the world for five and twenty years, and I've kept my eyes open. And
when I was of an age to be silly, the man I was silly about had your
coloured eyes. He married an actress, poor fellow,--or rather, she
married him, before he could say 'knife.' That's the sort of thing
that'll happen to you, unless you're uncommonly careful. So that's
settled. You give me your word not to try to see Betty?"
"I give you my word. You won't believe in my regret--"
"I believe in that right enough. It must be simply sickening to have
the whole show given away like this. Oh, I believe in your regret!"
"My regret," said Vernon steadily, "for any pain I may have caused
your niece. Do please see how grateful I am to you for having seen at
once that it was not her fault at all, but wholly mine."
"Very nicely said: good boy!" said Betty's aunt. "Well, my excellent
brother-in-law is waiting outside in the fly, gnashing his respectable
teeth, no doubt, and inferring all sorts of complications from the
length of our interview. Good-bye. You're just the sort of young man I
like, and I'm sorry we haven't met on a happier footing. I'm sure we
should have got on together. Don't you think so?"
"I'm sure we should," said he truly. "Mayn't I hope--"
She laughed outright.
"You have indeed the passion for acquaintance without introduction,"
she said. "No, you may _not_ call on me in town. Besides, I'm never
there. Good-bye. And take care of yourself. You're bound to be bitten
some day you know, and bitten badly."
"I wish I thought you forgave me."
"Forgive you? Of course I forgive you! You can no more help making
love, I suppose--no, don't interrupt: the thing's the same whatever
you call it--you can no more help making love than a cat can help
stealing cream. Only one day the cat gets caught, and badly beaten,
and one day you'll get caught, and the beating will be a bad one,
unless I'm a greater fool than I take myself for. And now I'll go and
unlock Betty's prison and console her. Don't worry about her. I'll see
that she's not put upon. Good night. No, in the circumstances you'd
better _not_ see me to my carriage!"
She shook hands cordially, and left Vernon to his thoughts.
Miss Desmond had done what she came to do, and he knew it. It was
almost a relief to feel that now he could not try to see Betty however
much he wished it,--however much he might know her to wish it. He
shrugged his shoulders and lighted another cigarette.
* * * * *
Betty, worn out with crying, had fallen asleep. The sound of wheels
roused her. It seemed to rain cabs at the Rectory to-day.
There were voices in the hall, steps on the stairs. Her door was
unlocked and there entered no tray of prisoner's fare, no reproachful
step-father, no Protestant sister, but a brisk and well-loved aunt,
who shut the door, and spoke.
"All in the dark?" she said. "Where are you, child?"
"Here," said Betty.
"Let me strike a light. Oh, yes, there you are!"
"Oh, aunt,--has he sent for you?" said Betty fearfully. "Oh, don't
scold me, auntie! I am so tired. I don't think I can bear any more."
"I'm not going to scold you, you silly little kitten," said the aunt
cheerfully. "Come, buck up! It's nothing so very awful, after all.
You'll be laughing at it all before a fortnight's over."
"Then he hasn't told you?"
"Oh, yes, he has; he's told me everything there was to tell, and a lot
more, too. Don't worry, child. You just go straight to bed and I'll
tuck you up, and we'll talk it all over in the morning."
"Aunty," said Betty, obediently beginning to unfasten her dress, "did
he say anything about _Him_?"
"Well, yes--a little."
"He hasn't--hasn't done anything to him, has he?"
"What could he do? Giving drawing lessons isn't a hanging matter,
Bet."
"I haven't heard anything from him all day,--and I thought--"
"You won't hear anything more of him, Betty, my dear. I've seen your
Mr. Vernon, and a very nice young man he is, too. He's frightfully cut
up about having got you into a row, and he sees that the only thing he
can do is to go quietly away. I needn't tell you, Betty, though I
shall have to explain it very thoroughly to your father, that Mr.
Vernon is no more in love with you than you are with him. In fact he's
engaged to another girl. He's just interested in you as a promising
pupil."
"Yes," said Betty, "of course I know that."
CHAPTER VII.
THE ESCAPE.
"It's all turned out exactly like what I said it was going to, exactly
to a T," said Mrs. Symes, wrapping her wet arms in her apron and
leaning them on the fence; "if it wasn't that it's Tuesday and me
behindhand as it is, I'd tell you all about it."
"Do the things good to lay a bit in the rinse-water," said Mrs. James,
also leaning on the fence, "sorter whitens them's what I always say. I
don't mind if I lend you a hand with the wringing after. What's turned
out like you said it was going to?"
"Miss Betty's decline." Mrs. Symes laughed low and huskily. "What did
I tell you, Mrs. James?"
"I don't quite remember not just at the minute," said Mrs. James; "you
tells so many things."
"And well for some people I do. Else they wouldn't never know nothing.
I told you as it wasn't no decline Miss Betty was setting down under.
I said it was only what's natural, her being the age she is. I said
what she wanted was a young man, and I said she'd get one. And what do
you think?"
"I don't know, I'm sure."
"She did get one," said Mrs. Symes impressively, "that same week, just
as if she'd been a-listening to my very words. It was as it might be
Friday you and me had that little talk. Well, as it might be the
Saturday, she meets the young man, a-painting pictures in the
Warren--my Ernest's youngest saw 'em a-talking, and told his mother
when he come home to his dinner."
"To think of that, and me never hearing a word!" said Mrs. James with
frank regret.
"I knew it ud be 'Whistle and I'll come to you, my lad,'" Mrs. Symes
went on with cumbrous enjoyment, "and so it was. They used to keep
their rondyvoos in the wood--six o'clock in the morning. Mrs. Wilson's
Tom used to see 'em reg'lar every day as he went by to his work."
"Lor," said Mrs. James feebly.
"Of course Tom he never said nothing, except to a few friends of his
over a glass. They enjoyed the joke, I promise you. But old George
Marbould--he ain't never been quite right in his head, I don't think,
since his Ruby went wrong. Pity, I always think. A great clumsy
plain-faced girl like her might a kept herself respectable. She hadn't
the temptation some of us might have had in our young days."
"No indeed," said Mrs. James, smoothing her hair, "and old
George--what silliness was he up to this time?"
"Why he sees the two of 'em together one fine morning and 'stead of
doing like he'd be done by he ups to the Vicarage and tells the old
man. 'You come alonger me, Sir,' says he, 'and have a look at your
daughter a-kissin' and huggin' up in Beale's shed, along of a perfect
stranger.' So the old man he says, 'God bless you,'--George is proud
of him saying that--and off he goes, in a regular fanteague, beats the
young master to a jelly, for all he's an old man and feeble, and shuts
Miss up in her room. Now that wouldn't a been _my_ way."
"No, indeed," said Mrs. James.
"I should a asked him in," said Mrs. Symes, "if it had been a gell of
mine, and give him a good meal with a glass of ale to it, and a tiddy
drop of something to top up with, and I'd a let him light his nasty
pipe,--and then when he was full and contented I'd a up and said,
'Now my man, you've 'ad time to think it over, and no one can't say as
I've hurried you nor flurried you. But it's time as we began talking.
So just you tell me what you're a-goin to do about it. If you 'ave the
feelings of a man,' I'd a said 'you'll marry the girl.'"
"Yes, indeed," said Mrs. James with emotion.
"Instead of which, bless your 'art, he beats the young man off with a
stick, like as if he was a mad dog; and young Miss is a goin' to be
sent to furrin parts to a strick boardin' school, to learn her not to
have any truck with young chaps."
"'Ard, I call it," said Mrs. James.
"An' well you may--crooil 'ard. How's he expect the girl to get a
husband if he drives the young fellers away with walking-sticks? Pore
gell! I shouldn't wonder but what she lives and dies a maid, after
this set-out."
"We shall miss 'er when she goes," said Mrs. James.
"I don't say we shan't. But there ain't no one as you can't get on
without if you're put to it And whether or not, she's going to far
foreign parts where there ain't no young chaps."
"Poor young thing," said Mrs. James, very sympathetic. "I think I'll
drop in as I'm passing, and see how she takes it."
"If you do," said Mrs. Symes, unrolling her arms, white and wrinkled
with washing, to set them aggressively on her lips, "it's the last
word as passes between us, Mrs. James, so now you know."
"Lord, Maria, don't fly out at me that way." Mrs. James shrank back:
"How was I to know you'd take it like that?"
"Do you suppose," asked Mrs. Symes, "as no one ain't got no legs
except you? _I'm_ a going up, soon as I've got the things on the line
and cleaned myself. I only heard it after I'd got every blessed rag in
soak, or I'd a gone up afore."
"Mightn't I step up with you for company?" Mrs. James asked.
"No, you mightn't. But I don't mind dropping in as I come home, to
tell you about it. One of them Catholic Nunnery schools, I expect,
which it's sudden death to a man but to set his foot into."
"Poor young thing," said Mrs. James again.
* * * * *
Betty was going to Paris.
There had been "much talk about and about" the project. Now it was to
be.
There had been interviews.
There was the first in which the elder Miss Desmond told her
brother-in-law in the plain speech she loved exactly what sort of a
fool he had made of himself in the matter of Betty and the
fortune-telling.
When he was convinced of error--it was not easily done--he would have
liked to tell Betty that he was sorry, but he belonged to a generation
that does not apologise to the next.
The second interview was between the aunt and Betty. That was the one
in which so much good advice was given.
"You know," the aunt wound up, "all young women want to be in love,
and all young men too. I don't mean that there was anything of that
sort between you and your artist friend. But there might have been.
Now look here,--I'm going to speak quite straight to you. Don't you
ever let young men get monkeying about with your hands; whether they
call it fortune-telling or whether they don't, their reason for doing
so is always the same--or likely to be. And you want to keep your
hand--as well as your lips--for the man you're going to marry. That's
all, but don't you forget it. Now what's this I hear about your
wanting to go to Paris?"
"I did want to go," said Betty, "but I don't care about anything now.
Everything's hateful."
"It always is," said the aunt, "but it won't always be."
"Don't think I care a straw about not seeing Mr. Vernon again," said
Betty hastily. "It's not that."
"Of course not," said the aunt sympathetically.
"No,--but Father was so hateful--you've no idea. If I'd--if I'd run
away and got married secretly he couldn't have made more fuss."
"You're a little harsh--just a little. Of course you and I know
exactly how it was, but remember how it looked to him. Why, it
couldn't have looked worse if you really _had_ been arranging an
elopement."
"He _hadn't_ got his arm around me," insisted Betty; "it was somewhere
right away in the background. He was holding himself up with it."
"Don't I tell you I understand all that perfectly? What I want to
understand is how you feel about Paris. Are you absolutely off the
idea?"
"I couldn't go if I wasn't."
"I wonder what you think Paris is like," mused the aunt. "I suppose
you think it's all one wild razzle-dazzle--one delirious round of--of
museums and picture galleries."
"No, I don't," said Betty rather shortly.
"If you went you'd have to work."
"There's no chance of my going."
"Then we'll put the idea away and say no more about it. Get me my
Continental Bradshaw out of my dressing-bag: I'm no use here. Nobody
loves me, and I'll go to Norway by the first omnibus to-morrow
morning."
"Don't," said Betty; "how can you say nobody loves you?"
"Your step-father doesn't, anyway. That's why I can make him do what I
like when I take the trouble. When people love you they'll never do
anything for you,--not even answer a plain question with a plain yes
or no. Go and get the Bradshaw. You'll be sorry when I'm gone."
"Aunt Julia, you don't really mean it."
"Of course not. I never mean anything except the things I don't say.
The Bradshaw!"
Betty came and sat on the arm of her aunt's chair.
"It's not fair to tease me," she said, "and tantalise me. You know how
mizzy I am."
"No. I don't know anything. You won't tell me anything. Go and get--"
"Dear, darling, pretty, kind, clever Aunt," cried Betty, "I'd give my
ears to go."
"Then borrow a large knife from cook, and sharpen it on the front
door-step! No--I don't mean to use it on your step-father. I'll have
your pretty ears mummified and wear them on my watch-chain. No--mind
my spectacles! Let me go. I daresay it won't come to anything."
"Do you really mean you'd take me?"
"I'd take you fast enough, but I wouldn't keep you. We must find a
dragon to guard the Princess. Oh, we'll get a nice tame kind puss-cat
of a dragon,--but that dragon will not be your Aunt Julia! Let me go,
I say. I thought you didn't care about anything any more?"
"I didn't know there could be anything to care for," said Betty
honestly, "especially Paris. Well, I won't if you hate it so, but oh,
aunt--" She still sat on the floor by the chair her aunt had left, and
thought and thought. The aunt went straight down to the study.
"Now, Cecil," she said, coming briskly in and shutting the door,
"you've made that poor child hate the thought of you and you've only
yourself to thank."
"I know you think so," said he, closing the heavy book over which he
had been stooping.
"I don't mean," she added hastily, for she was not a cruel woman,
"that she really hates you, of course. But you've frightened her, and
shaken her nerves, locking her up in her room like that. Upon my word,
you are old enough to know better!"
"I was so alarmed, so shaken myself--" he began, but she interrupted
him.
"I didn't come in and disturb your work just to say all that, of
course," she said, "but really, Cecil, I understand things better than
you think. I know how fond you really are of Betty."
The Reverend Cecil doubted this; but he said nothing.
"And you know that I'm fond enough of the child myself. Now, all this
has upset you both tremendously. What do you propose to do?"
"I--I--nothing I thought. The less said about these deplorable affairs
the better. Lizzie will soon recover her natural tone, and forget all
about the matter."
"Then you mean to let everything go on in the old way?"
"Why, of course," said he uneasily.
"Well, it's your own affair, naturally," she spoke with a studied air
of detachment which worried him exactly as it was meant to do.
"What do you mean?" he asked anxiously. He had never been able wholly
to approve Miss Julia Desmond. She smoked cigarettes, and he could not
think that this would have been respectable in any other woman. Of
course, she was different from any other woman, but still--. Then the
Reverend Cecil could not deem it womanly to explore, unchaperoned, the
less well-known quarters of four continents, to penetrate even to
regions where skirts were considered improper and side-saddles were
unknown. Even the nearness of Miss Desmond's fiftieth birthday hardly
lessened at all the poignancy of his disapproval. Besides, she had not
always been fifty, and she had always, in his recollection of her,
smoked cigarettes, and travelled alone. Yet he had a certain
well-founded respect for her judgment, and for that fine luminous
common-sense of hers which had more than once shewn him his own
mistakes. On the rare occasions when he and she had differed he had
always realized, later, that she had been in the right. And she was
"gentlemanly" enough never once to have said: "I told you so!"
"What do you mean?" he asked again, for she was silent, her hands in
the pockets of her long coat, her sensible brown shoes sticking
straight out in front of her chair.
"If you really want to know, I'll tell you," she said, "but I hate to
interfere in other people's business. You see, I know how deeply she
has felt this, and of course I know you have too, so I wondered
whether you hadn't thought of some little plan for--for altering the
circumstances a little, so that everything will blow over and settle
down, so that when you and she come together again you'll be better
friends than ever."
"Come together again," he repeated, and the paper-knife was still
restless, "do you want me to let her go away? To London?"
Visions of Lizzie, in unseemly low-necked dresses surrounded by crowds
of young men--all possible Vernons--lent a sudden firmness to his
voice, a sudden alertness to his manner.
"No, certainly not," she answered the voice and the manner as much as
the words. "I shouldn't dream of such a thing. Then it hadn't occurred
to you?"
"It certainly had not."
"You see," she said earnestly, "it's like this--at least this is how I
see it: She's all shaken and upset, and so are you, and when I've
gone--and I must go in a very little time--you'll both of you simply
settle down to thinking over it all, and you'll grow farther and
farther apart!"
"I don't think so," said he; "things like this always right themselves
if one leaves them alone. Lizzie and I have always got on very well
together, in a quiet way. We are neither of us demonstrative."
"Now Heaven help the man!" was the woman's thought. She remembered
Betty's clinging arms, her heartfelt kisses, the fervency of the voice
that said, "Dear darling, pretty, kind, clever Aunt! I'd give my ears
to go." Betty not demonstrative! Heaven help the man!
"No," she said, "I know. But when people are young these thinks
rankle."
"They won't with her," he said. "She has a singularly noble nature,
under that quiet exterior."
Miss Desmond drew a long breath and began afresh.
"Then there's another thing. She's fretting over this--thinks now that
it was something to be ashamed of; she didn't think so at the time, of
course."
"You mean that it was I who--"
This was thin ice again. Miss Desmond skated quickly away from it
with, "Well, you see, I've been talking to her. She really _is_
fretting. Why she's got ever so much thinner in the last week."
"I could get a locum," he said slowly, "and take her to a Hydropathic
Establishment for a fortnight."
"Oh dear, oh dear!" said Miss Desmond to herself. Aloud she said:
"That _would_ be delightful, later. But just now--well, of course it's
for you to decide,--but it seems to me that it would be better for you
two to be apart for a while. If you're here alone together--well, the
very sight of you will remind each other--That's not grammar, as you
say, but--"
He had not said anything. He was thinking, fingering the brass bosses
on the corners of the divine Augustine, and tracing the pattern on the
stamped pigskin.
"Of course if you care to risk it," she went on still with that fine
air of detachment,--"but I have seen breaches that nothing could heal
arise in just that way."
Two people sitting down together and thinking over everything they had
against each other.
"But I've nothing against Lizzie."
"I daresay not," Miss Desmond lost patience at last, "but she has
against you, or will have if you let her stay here brooding over it.
However if you like to risk it--I'm sorry I spoke." She got up and
moved to the door.
"No, no," he said hastily, "do not be sorry you spoke. You have given
me food for reflection. I will think it all over quietly and--and--"
he did not like to talk about prayers to Miss Desmond somehow,
"and--calmly and if I see that you are right--I am sure you mean most
kindly by me."
"Indeed I do," she said heartily, and gave him her hand in the manly
way he hated. He took it, held it limply an instant, and repeated:
"Most kindly."
He thought it over for so long that the aunt almost lost hope.
"I have to hold my tongue with both hands to keep it quiet. And if I
say another word I shall spoil the song," she told Betty. "I've done
my absolute best. If that doesn't fetch him, nothing will!"
It had "fetched him." At the end of two interminable days he sent to
ask Miss Desmond to speak to him in the study. She went.
"I have been thinking carefully," he said, "most carefully. And I feel
that you are right. Perhaps I owe her some amends. Do you know of any
quiet country place?"
Miss Desmond thought Betty had perhaps for the moment had almost
enough of quiet country places.
"She is very anxious to learn drawing," he said, "and perhaps if I
permitted her to do so she might understand it as a sign that I
cherish no resentment on account of what has passed. But--"
"I know the very thing," said the Aunt, and went on to tell of Madame
Gautier, of her cloistral home in Paris where she received a few
favoured young girls, of the vigilant maid who conducted them to and
from their studies, of the quiet villa on the Marne where in the
summer an able master--at least 60 or 65 years of age--conducted
sketching parties, to which the students were accompanied either by
Madame herself, or by the dragon-maid.
"I'll stand the child six months with her," she said, "or a year even.
So it won't cost you anything. And Madame Gautier is in London now.
You could run up and talk to her yourself."
"Does she speak English?" he asked, anxiously, and being reassured
questioned further.
"And you?" he asked. And when he heard that Norway for a month and
then America en route for Japan formed Miss Desmond's programme for
the next year he was only just able to mask, with a cough, his deep
sigh of relief. For, however much he might respect her judgment, he
was always easier when Lizzie and her Aunt Julia were not together.
He went up to town, and found Madame Gautier, the widow of a French
pastor, established in a Bloomsbury boarding-house. She was a woman
after his own heart--severe, simple, earnest. If he had to part with
his Lizzie, he told himself in the returning train, it could be to no
better keeper than this.
He himself announced his decision to Betty.
"I have decided," he said, and he spoke very coldly because it was so
very difficult to speak at all, "to grant you the wish you expressed
some time ago. You shall go to Paris and learn drawing."
"Do you really mean it?" said Betty, as coldly as he.
"I am not in the habit of saying things which I do not mean."
"Thank you very much," said Betty. "I will work hard, and try that the
money shan't be wasted."
"Your aunt has kindly offered to pay your expenses."
"When do I go?" asked Betty.
"As soon as your garments can be prepared. I trust that I shall not
have cause to regret the confidence I have decided to place in you."
His phrasing was seldom well-inspired. Had he said, "I trust you, my
child, and I know I shan't regret it," which was what he meant, she
would have come to meet him more than half-way. As it was she said,
"Thank you!" again, and left him without more words. He sighed.
"I don't believe she is pleased after all; but she sees I am doing it
for her good. Now it comes to the point her heart sinks at the idea of
leaving home. But she will understand my motives."
The one thought Betty gave him was:
"He can't bear the sight of me at all now! He's longing to be rid of
me! Well, thank Heaven I'm going to Paris! I will have a grass-lawn
dress over green, with three rows of narrow lace insertion, and a hat
with yellow roses and--oh, it can't be true. It's too good to be true.
Well, it's a good thing to be hated sometimes, by some people, if they
only hate you enough!"
* * * * *
"'So you're going to foreign parts, Miss,' says I."
Mrs. Symes had flung back her bonnet strings and was holding a
saucerful of boiling tea skilfully poised on the fingers of one hand.
"'Yes, Mrs. Symes,' says she, 'don't you wish you was going too?' she
says. And she laughed, but I'm not easy blinded, and well I see as she
only laughed to 'ide a bleedin' 'art. 'Not me, Miss,' says I; 'nice
figure I should look a-goin' to a furrin' boardin' school at my time
of life.'
"'It ain't boardin' school,' says she. 'I'm a-going to learn to paint
pictures. I'll paint your portrait when I come home,' says she, and
laughs again--I could see she done it to keep the tears back.
"'I'm sorry for you, Miss, I'm sure,' I says, not to lose the chance
of a word in season, 'but I hope it'll prove a blessing to you--I do
that.'"
"'Oh, it'll be a blessing right enough,' says she, and keeps on
laughing a bit wild like. When the art's full you can't always stop
yourself. She'd a done better to 'ave a good cry and tell me 'er
troubles. I could a cheered her up a bit p'raps. You know whether I'm
considered a comfort at funerals and christenings, Mrs. James."
"I do," said Mrs. James sadly; "none don't know it better."
"You'd a thought she'd a bin glad of a friend in need. But no. She
just goes on a-laughing fit to bring tears to your eyes to hear her,
and says she, 'I hope you'll all get on all right without me.'"
"I hope you said as how we should miss her something dreadful," said
Mrs. James anxiously, "Have another cup."
"Thank you, my dear. Do you take me for a born loony? Course I did.
Said the parish wouldn't be the same without her, and about her pretty
reading and all. See here what she give me."
Mrs. James unrolled a violet petticoat.
"Good as new, almost," she said, looking critically at the hem.
"Specially her being taller'n me. So what's not can be cut away, and
no loss. She kep' on a-laughing an' a-smiling till the old man he come
in and he says in his mimicking way, 'Lizzie,' says 'e, 'they're
a-waitin' to fit on your new walkin' costoom,' he says. So I come
away, she a-smiling to the last something awful to see."
"Dear, dear," said Mrs. James.
"But you mark my words--she don't deceive _me_. If ever I see a
bruised reed and a broken 'art on a young gell's face I see it on
hers this day. She may laugh herself black in the face, but she won't
laugh me into thinking what I knows to be far otherwise."
"Ah," said Mrs. James resignedly, "we all 'as it to bear one time or
another. Young gells is very deceitful though, in their ways, ain't
they?"
Book 2.--The Man
CHAPTER VIII.
THE ONE AND THE OTHER.
"Some idiot," remarked Eustace Vernon, sipping Vermouth at a little
table, "insists that, if you sit long enough outside the Café de la
Paix, you will see everyone you have ever known or ever wanted to know
pass by. I have sat here for half-an-hour--and--_voila_."
"You met me, half an hour ago," said the other man.
"Oh, _you_!" said Vernon affectionately.
"And your hat has gone off every half minute ever since," said the
other man.
"Ah, that's to the people I've known. It's the people I've wanted to
know that are the rarity."
"Do you mean people you have wanted to know and not known?"
"There aren't many of those," said Vernon; "no it's--Jove, that's a
sweet woman!"
"I hate the type," said the other man briefly: "all clothes--no real
human being."
The woman was beautifully dressed, in the key whose harmonies are only
mastered by Frenchwomen and Americans. She turned her head as her
carriage passed, and Vernon's hat went off once more.
"I'd forgotten her profile," said Vernon, "and she's learned how to
dress since I saw her last. She's quite human, really, and as charming
as anyone ought to be."
"So I should think," said the other man. "I'm sorry I said that, but I
didn't know you knew her. How's trade?"
"Oh, I did a picture--well, but a picture! I did it in England in the
Spring. Best thing I've done yet. Come and see it."
"I should like to look you up. Where do you hang out?"
"Eighty-six bis Rue Notre Dame des Champs," said Vernon. "Everyone in
fiction lives there. It's the only street on the other side that
authors seem ever to have dreamed of. Still, it's convenient, so I
herd there with all sorts of blackguards, heroes and villains and what
not. Eighty-six bis."
"I'll come," said the other man, slowly. "Do you know, Vernon, I'd
like awfully to get at your point of view--your philosophy of life?"
"Haven't you got one, my dear chap!--'sufficient unto' is my motto."
"You paint pictures,", the other went on, "so very much too good for
the sort of life you lead."
Vernon laughed.
"My dear Temple," he said, "I live, mostly, the life of a vestal
virgin."
"You know well enough I'm not quarrelling with the way you spend your
evenings," said his dear Temple; "it's your whole outlook that doesn't
match your work. Yet there must be some relation between the two,
that's what I'd like to get at."
There is a bond stronger than friendship, stronger than love--a bond
that cannot be forged in any other shop than the one--the bond between
old schoolfellows. Vernon had sometimes wondered why he "stood so
much" from Temple. It is a wonder that old schoolfellows often feel,
mutually.
"The subject you've started," said he, "is of course, to me, the most
interesting. Please develop your thesis."
"Well then, your pictures are good, strong, thorough stuff, with
sentiment--yes, just enough sentiment to keep them from the brutality
of Degas or the sensualism of Latouche. Whereas you, yourself, seem to
have no sentiment."
"I? No sentiment! Oh, Bobby, this is too much! Why, I'm a mass of it!
Ask--"
"Yes, ask any woman of your acquaintance. That's just it--or just part
of it. You fool them into thinking--oh, I don't know what; but you
don't fool me."
"I haven't tried."
"Then you're not brutal, except half a dozen times in the year when
you--And I've noticed that when your temper goes smash your morals go
at the same time. Is that cause or effect? What's the real you like,
and where do you keep it?"
"The real me," said Vernon, "is seen in my pictures, and--and
appreciated by my friends; you for instance, are, I believe, genuinely
attached to me."
"Oh, rot!" said Bobby.
"I don't see," said Vernon, moving his iron chair to make room for two
people at the next table, "why you should expect my pictures to rhyme
with my life. A man's art doesn't rhyme with his personality. Most
often it contradicts flatly. Look at musicians--what a divine art, and
what pigs of high priests! And look at actors--but no, one can't; the
spectacle is too sickening."
"I sometimes think," said Temple, emptying his glass, "that the real
you isn't made yet. It's waiting for--"
"For the refining touch of a woman's hand, eh? You think the real me
is--Oh, Temple, Temple, I've no heart for these childish imaginings!
The real me is the man that paints pictures, damn good pictures, too,
though I say it."
"And is that what all the women think?
"Ask them, my dear chap; ask them. They won't tell you the truth."
"They're not the only ones who won't. I should like to know what you
really think of women, Vernon."
"I don't think about them at all," lied Vernon equably. "They aren't
subjects for thought but for emotion--and even of that as little as
may be. It's impossible seriously to regard a woman as a human being;
she's merely a dear, delightful, dainty--"
"Plaything?"
"Well, yes--or rather a very delicately tuned musical instrument. If
you know the scales and the common chords, you can improvise nice
little airs and charming variations. She's a sort of--well, a penny
whistle, and the music you get depends not on her at all, but on your
own technique."
"I've never been in love," said Temple; "not seriously, I mean," he
hastened to add, for Vernon was smiling, "not a life or death matter,
don't you know; but I do hate the way you talk, and one of these days
you'll hate it too."
Miss Desmond's warning floated up through the dim waters of half a
year.
"So a lady told me, only last Spring," he said. "Well, I'll take my
chance. Going? Well, I'm glad we ran across each other. Don't forget
to look me up."
Temple moved off, and Vernon was left alone. He sat idly smoking
cigarette after cigarette, and watched the shifting crowd. It was a
bright October day, and the crowd was a gay one.
Suddenly his fingers tightened on his cigarette,--but he kept the
hand that held it before his face, and he bent his head forward.
Two ladies were passing, on foot. One was the elder Miss Desmond--she
who had warned him that one of these days he would be caught--and the
other, hanging lovingly on her aunt's arm, was, of course, Betty. But
a smart, changed, awakened Betty! She was dressed almost as
beautifully as the lady whose profile he had failed to recognise, but
much more simply. Her eyes were alight, and she was babbling away to
her aunt. She was even gesticulating a little, for all the world like
a French girl. He noted the well-gloved hand with which she emphasized
some point in her talk.
"That's the hand," he said, "that I held when we sat on the plough in
the shed and I told her fortune."
He had risen, and his feet led him along the road they had taken. Ten
yards ahead of him he saw the swing of the aunt's serviceable brown
skirt and beside it Betty's green and gray.
"I am not breaking my word," he replied to the Inward Monitor. "Who's
going out of his way to speak to the girl?"
He watched the brown gown and the green all the way down the Boulevard
des Capucines, saw them cross the road and go up the steps of the
Madeleine. He paused at the corner. It was hard, certainly, to keep
his promise; yet so far it was easy, because he could not well recall
himself to the Misses Desmond on the ground of his having six months
ago involved the one in a row with her relations, and discussed the
situation afterwards with the other.
"I do wonder where they're staying, though," he told himself. "If one
were properly introduced--?" But he knew that the aunt would consider
no introduction a proper one that should renew his acquaintance with
Betty.
"Wolf, wolf," he said, "let the fold alone! There's no door for you,
and you've pledged your sacred word as an honourable wolf not to jump
any more hurdles."
And as he stood musing, the elder Miss Desmond came down the church
steps and walked briskly away.
Some men would, doubtless, have followed her example, if not her
direction. Vernon was not one of these. He found himself going up the
steps of the great church. He had as good a right to go into the
Madeleine as the next man. He would probably not see the girl. If he
did he would not speak. Almost certainly he would not even see her.
But Destiny had remembered Mr. Vernon once more. Betty was standing
just inside the door, her face upturned, and all her soul in her eyes.
The mutterings of the organ and the voices of boys filled the great
dark building.
He went and stood close by her. He would not speak. He would keep his
word. But she should have a chance of speaking. His eyes were on her
face. The hymn ended. She exhaled a held breath, started and spoke.
"You?" she said, "_you_?" The two words are spelled alike. Spoken,
they are capable of infinite variations. The first "you" sent Vernon's
blood leaping. The second froze it to what it had been before he met
her. For indeed that little unfinished idyll had been almost forgotten
by the man who sat drinking Vermouth outside the Café de la Paix.
"How are you?" he whispered. "Won't you shake hands?"
She gave him a limp and unresponsive glove.
"I had almost forgotten you," she said, "but I am glad to see
you--because--Come to the door. I don't like talking in churches."
They stood on the steps behind one of the great pillars.
"Do you think it is wise to stand here?" he said. "Your aunt might see
us."
"So you followed us in?" said Betty with perfect self-possession.
"That was very kind. I have often wished to see you, to tell you how
much obliged I am for all your kindness in the Spring. I was only a
child then, and I didn't understand, but now I quite see how good it
was of you."
"Why do you talk like that?" he said. "You don't think--you can't
think it was my fault?"
"Your fault! What?"
"Why, your father finding us and--"
"Oh, _that_!" she said lightly. "Oh, I had forgotten that! Ridiculous,
wasn't it? No, I mean your kindness in giving so many hours to
teaching a perfect duffer. Well, now I've seen you and said what I had
to say, I think I'll go back."
"No, don't go," he said. "I want to know--oh, all sorts of things! I
can see your aunt from afar, and fly if she approaches."
"You don't suppose," said Betty, opening her eyes at him, "that I
shan't tell her I've seen you?"
He had supposed it, and cursed his clumsiness.
"Ah, I see," she went on, "you think I should deceive my aunt now
because I deceived my step-father in the Spring. But I was a child
then,--and besides, I'm fond of my aunt."
"Did you know that she came to see me?"
"Of course. You seem to think we live in an atmosphere of deceit, Mr.
Vernon."
"What's the matter with you?" he said bluntly, for finer weapons
seemed useless. "What have I done to make you hate me?"
"I hate you? Oh, no--not in the least," said Betty spitefully. "I am
very grateful to you for all your kindness."
"Where are you staying?" he asked.
"Hotel Bête," said Betty, off her guard, "but--"
The "but" marked his first score.
"I wish I could have called to see your aunt," he said carelessly,
"but I am off to Vienna to-morrow."
Betty believed that she did not change countenance by a hair's
breadth.
"I hope you'll have a delightful time," she said politely.
"Thanks. I am sure I shall. The only consolation for leaving Paris is
that one is going to Vienna. Are you here for long?"
"I don't know." Betty was on her guard again.
"Paris is a delightful city, isn't it?"
"Most charming."
"Have you been here long?"
"No, not very long."
"Are you still working at your painting? It would be a pity to give
that up."
"I am not working just now."
"I see your aunt," he said hurriedly. "Are you going to send me away
like this? Don't be so unjust, so ungenerous. It's not like you--my
pupil of last Spring was not unjust."
"Your pupil of last Spring was a child and a duffer, Mr. Vernon, as I
said before. But she is grateful to you for one thing--no, two."
"What's the other?" he asked swiftly.
"Your drawing-lessons," she demurely answered.
"Then what's the one?"
"Good-bye," she said, and went down the steps to meet her aunt. He
effaced himself behind a pillar. In spite of her new coldness, he
could not believe that she would tell her aunt of the meeting. And he
was right, though Betty's reasons were not his reasons.
"What's the good?" she asked herself as she and her aunt walked across
to their hotel. "He's going away to-morrow, and I shall never see him
again. Well, I behaved beautifully, that's one thing. He must simply
loathe me. So that's all right! If he were staying on in Paris, of
course I would tell her."
She believed this fully.
He waited five minutes behind that pillar, and then had himself driven
to the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, choosing as driver a man with a
white hat, in strict accordance with the advice in Baedeker, though he
had never read any of the works of that author.
This new Betty, with the smart gown and the distant manner, awoke at
the same time that she contradicted his memories of the Betty of Long
Barton. And he should not see her again. Of course he was not going to
Vienna, but neither was he going to hang round the Hotel Bête, or to
bribe Franz or Elise to smuggle notes to Miss Betty.
"It's never any use trying to join things on again," he told himself.
"As well try to mend a spider's web when you have put your boot
through it."
'No diver brings up love again
Dropped once
In such cold seas!'
"But what has happened? Why does she hate me so? You acted very
nicely, dear, but that wasn't indifference. It was hatred, if ever
I've seen it. I wonder what it means? Another lover? No--then she'd be
sorry for me. It's something that belongs to me--not another man's
shadow. But what I shall never know. And she's prettier than ever,
too. Oh, hang it!"
His key turned in the lock, and on the door-mat shewed the white
square of an envelope--a note from the other woman, the one whose
profile he had not remembered. She was in Paris for a time. She had
seen him at the Paix, had wondered whether he had his old rooms, had
driven straight up on the chance of being able to leave this--wasn't
that devotion?--and would he care to call for her at eight and they
could dine somewhere and talk over old times? One familiar initial,
that of her first name, curled in the corner and the card smelt of
jasmine--not of jasmine-scent in bottles, but of the real flower. He
had never known how she managed it.
Vernon was not fond of talking over old times, but Betty would be
dining at the Hotel Bête--some dull hole, no doubt; he had never heard
of it. Well, he could not dine at the Bête, and after all one must
dine somewhere. And the other woman had never bored him. That is a
terrible weapon in the hands of a rival. And Betty had been most
unjust. And what was Betty to him, anyway? His thoughts turned to the
American girl who had sketched with him in Brittany that Summer. Ah,
if she had not been whisked back to New York by her people, it would
not now be a question of Betty or of the Jasmine lady. He took out
Miss Van Tromp's portrait and sat looking at it: it was admirable, the
fearless poise of the head, the laughing eyes, the full pouting lips.
Then Betty's face and the face of the Jasmine lady came between him
and Miss Van Tromp.
"Bah," he said, "smell, kiss, wear--at last throw away. Never keep a
rose till it's faded." A little tide of Breton memories swept through
him.
"Bah," he said again, "she was perfectly charming, but what is the use
of charm, half the world away?"
He pulled his trunk from the front of the fire-place, pushed up the
iron damper, and made a little fire. He burned all Miss Van Tromp's
letters, and her photograph--but, from habit, or from gratitude, he
kissed it before he burned it.
"Now," said he as the last sparks died redly on the black embers, "the
decks are cleared for action. Shall I sentimentalise about
Betty--cold, cruel, changed Betty--or shall I call for the Jasmine
lady?"
He did both, and the Jasmine lady might have found him dull. As it
happened, she only found him _distrait_, and that interested her.
"When we parted," she said, "it was I who was in tears. Now it's you.
What is it?"
"If I am in tears," he roused himself to say, "it is only because
everything passes, 'tout lasse, tout passe, tout casse.'"
"What's broken now?" she asked; "another heart? Oh, yes! you broke
mine all to little, little bits. But I've mended it. I wanted
frightfully to see you to thank you!
"This is a grateful day for women," thought Vernon, looking the
interrogatory.
"Why, for showing me how hearts are broken," she explained; "it's
quite easy when you know how, and it's a perfectly delightful game. I
play it myself now, and I can't imagine how I ever got on before I
learned the rules."
"You forget," he said, smiling. "It was you who broke my heart. And
it's not mended yet."
"That's very sweet of you. But really, you know, I'm very glad it was
you who broke my heart, and not anyone else. Because, now it's mended,
that gives us something to talk about. We have a past. That's really
what I wanted to tell you. And that's such a bond, isn't it? When it
really _is_ past--dead, you know, no nonsense about cataleptic
trances, but stone dead."
"Yes," he said, "it is a link. But it isn't the past for me, you know.
It can never--"
She held up a pretty jewelled hand.
"Now, don't," she said. "That's just what you don't understand. All
that's out of the picture. I know you too well. Just realize that I'm
the only nice woman you know who doesn't either expect you to make
love to her in the future or hate you for having done it in the past,
and you'll want to see me every day. Think of the novelty of it."
"I do and I do," said he, "and I won't protest any more while you're
in this mood. Bear with me if I seem idiotic to-night--I've been
burning old letters, and that always makes me like a funeral."
"Old letters--mine?"
"I burned yours long ago."
"And it isn't two years since we parted! How many have there been
since?"
"Is this the Inquisition or is it Durand's?"
"It's somewhere where we both are," she said, without a trace of
sentiment; "that's good enough for me. Do you know I've been married
since I saw you last? _And_ left a widow--in a short three months it
all happened. And--well I'm not very clever, as you know, but--can you
imagine what it is like to be married to a man who doesn't understand
a single word you say, unless it's about the weather or things to eat?
No, don't look shocked. He was a good fellow, and very happy till the
motor accident took him and left me this."
She shewed a scar on her smooth arm.
"What a woman it is for surprises! So he was very happy? But of course
he was."
"Yes, of course, as you say. I was a model wife. I wore black for a
whole year too!"
"Why did you marry him?"
"Well, at the time I thought you might hear of it and be disappointed,
or hurt, or something."
"So I am," said Vernon with truth.
"You needn't be," said she. "You'll find me much nicer now I don't
want to disappoint you or hurt you, but only to have a good time, and
there's no nonsense about love to get in the way, and spoil
everything."
"So you're--But this isn't proper! Here am I dining with a lady and I
don't even know her name!"
"I know--I wouldn't put it to the note. Didn't that single initial
arouse your suspicions? Her name? Her title if you please! I married
Harry St. Craye. You remember how we used to laugh at him together."
"That little--I beg your pardon, Lady St. Craye."
"Yes," she said, "De mortuis nil nisi bonum: of the dead nothing but
the bones. If he had lived he would certainly have beaten me. Here's
to our new friendship!"
"Our new friendship!" he repeated, raising his glass and looking in
her eyes. Lady St. Craye looked very beautiful, and Betty was not
there. In fact, just now there was no Betty.
He went back to his room humming a song of Yvette Guilbert's. There
might have been no flowering May, no buttercup meadows in all the
world, for any thought of memory that he had of them. And Betty was a
thousand miles away.
That was at night. In the morning Betty was at the Hotel Bête, and the
Hotel Bête was no longer a petty little hotel which he did not know
and never should know. For the early post brought him a letter which
said:
"I am in Paris for a few days and should like to see you if you can
make it convenient to call at my hotel on Thursday."
This was Tuesday.
The letter was signed with the name of the uncle from whom Vernon had
expectations, and at the head of the letter was the address:
"Hôtel Bête,
Cité de Retraite,
Rue Boissy d'Anglais."
"Now bear witness!" cried Vernon, appealing to the Universe, "bear
witness that this is _not_ my fault!"
CHAPTER IX.
THE OPPORTUNITY.
Vernon in those two days decided that he did not wish to see Betty
again. She was angry with him, and, though he never for an instant
distrusted his power to dissipate the cloud, he felt that the lifting
of it would leave him and her in that strong light wherein the frail
flower of sentiment must wither and perish. Explications were fatal to
the delicate mystery, the ethereal half-lights, that Vernon loved.
Above all things he detested the _trop dit_.
Already a mood of much daylight was making him blink and shrink. He
saw himself as he was--or nearly--and the spectacle did not please
him. The thought of Lady St. Craye was the only one that seemed to
make for any sort of complacency. The thought of Temple rankled oddly.
"He likes me, and he dislikes himself for liking me. Why does he like
me? Why does anyone like me? I'm hanged if I know!"
This was the other side of his mood of most days, when the wonder
seemed that everyone should not like him. Why shouldn't they?
Ordinarily he was hanged if he knew that.
He had expected a note from Lady St. Craye to follow up his dinner
with her. He knew how a woman rarely resists the temptation to write
to the man in whom she is interested, even while his last words are
still ringing in her ears. But no note came, and he concluded that
Lady St. Craye was not interested. This reassured while it piqued.
The Hotel Bête is very near the Madeleine, and very near the heart of
Paris--of gay Paris, that is,--yet it might have been a hundred miles
from anywhere. You go along the Rue Boissy, and stopping at a gateway
you turn into a dreary paved court, which is the Cité de la Retraite.
Here the doors of the Hotel Bête open before you like the portals of a
mausoleum. There is no greeting from the Patronne; your arrival gives
rise to no pleasant welcoming bustle. The concierge receives you, and
you see at once that her cheerful smile is assumed. No one could
really be cheerful at the Hotel Bête.
Vernon felt as though he was entering a family vault of the highest
respectability when he passed through its silent hall and enquired for
Mr. James Vernon.
Monsieur Vernon was out. No, he had charged no one with a billet for
monsieur. Monsieur Vernon would doubtless return for the déjeûner; it
was certain that he would return for the diner. Would Monsieur wait?
Monsieur waited, in a little stiff salon with glass doors, prim
furniture, and an elaborately ornamental French clock. It was silent,
of course. One wonders sometimes whether ornamental French Ormolu
clocks have any works, or are solid throughout. For no one has ever
seen one of them going.
There were day-old English papers on the table, and the New York
Herald. Through the glass doors he could see everyone who came in or
went out. And he saw no one. There was a stillness as of the tomb.
Even the waiter, now laying covers for the déjeûner, wore list
slippers and his movements were silent as a heron's ghost-gray flight.
He came to the glass door presently.
"Did Monsieur breakfast?"
Vernon was not minded to waste two days in the pursuit of uncles. Here
he was, and here he stayed, till Uncle James should appear.
Yes, decidedly, Monsieur breakfasted.
He wondered where the clients of the hotel had hidden themselves. Were
they all dead, or merely sight-seeing? As his watch shewed him the
approach of half-past twelve he found himself listening for the tramp
of approaching feet, the rustle of returning skirts. And still all was
silent as the grave.
The sudden summoning sound of a bell roused him from a dreamy wonder
as to whether Betty and her aunt had already left. If not, should he
meet them at déjeûner? The idea of the possible meeting amused more
than it interested him. He crossed the hall and entered the long bare
salle á manger.
By Heaven--he was the only guest! A cover was laid for him only--no,
at a distance of half the table for another. Then Betty and her aunt
had gone. Well, so much the better.
He unfolded his table-napkin. In another moment, doubtless, Uncle
James would appear to fill the vacant place.
But in another moment the vacant place was filled--and by Betty--Betty
alone, unchaperoned, and bristling with hostility. She bowed very
coldly, but she was crimson to the ears. He rose and came to her
holding out his hand.
With the waiter looking on, Betty had to give hers, but she gave it in
a way that said very plainly:
"I am very surprised and not at all pleased to see you here."
"This is a most unexpected pleasure," he said very distinctly, and
added the truth about his uncle.
"Has Monsieur Vernon yet returned?" he asked the waiter who hovered
anxiously near.
"No, Monsieur was not yet of return."
"So you see," his look answered the speech of her hand, "it is not my
doing in the least."
"I hope your aunt is well," he went on, the waiter handing baked eggs
the while.
"Quite well, thank you," said Betty. "And how is your wife? I ought to
have asked yesterday, but I forgot."
"My wife?"
"Oh, perhaps you aren't married yet. Of course my father told me of
your engagement."
She crumbled bread and smiled pleasantly.
"So _that's_ it," thought Vernon. "Fool that I was to forget it!"
"I am not married," he said coldly, "nor have I ever been engaged to
be married."
And he ate eggs stolidly wondering what her next move would be. It was
one that surprised him. For she leaned towards him and said in a
perfectly new voice:
"Couldn't you get Franz to move you a little more this way? One can't
shout across these acres of tablecloth, and I've heaps of things to
tell you."
He moved nearer, and once again he wronged Betty by a mental
shrinking. Was she really going to own that she had resented the news
of his engagement? She was really hopeless. He began to bristle
defensively.
[Illustration: "'Ah, don't be cross!' she said"]
"Anything you care to tell me will of course be of the greatest
possible interest," he was beginning, but Betty interrupted him.
"_Ah, don't be cross_!" she said. "I know I was perfectly horrid
yesterday, but I own I was rather hurt."
"Hold back," he adjured her, inwardly, "for Heaven's sake, hold back!"
"You see," she went on, "you and I were such good friends--you'd been
so kind--and you told me--you talked to me about things you didn't
talk of to other people,--and when I thought you'd told my step-father
a secret of yours that you'd never told me, of course I felt
hurt--anyone would have."
"I see," said he, beginning to.
"Of course I never dreamed that he'd lied, and even now I don't see--"
Then suddenly she did see and crimsoned again.
"He didn't lie," said Vernon carefully, "it was I. But I would never
have told him anything that I wouldn't have told you--nor half that I
did tell you."
The waiter handed pale meat.
"Yes, the scenery in Brittany is most charming; I did some good work
there. The people are so primitive and delightful too."
The waiter withdrew, and Betty said:
"How do you mean--he didn't lie?"
"The fact is," said Vernon, "he--he did not understand our friendship
in the least. I imagine friendship was not invented when he was young.
It's a tiresome subject, Miss Desmond; let's drop it--shall we?"
"If you like," said she, chilly as December.
"Oh, well then, just let me say it was done for your sake, Miss
Desmond. He had no idea that two people should have any interests in
common except--except matters of the heart, and the shortest way to
convince him was to tell him that my heart was elsewhere. I don't like
lies, but there are some people who insist on lies--nothing else will
convince them of the truth. Here comes some abhorrent preparation of
rice. How goes it with art?"
"I have been working very hard," she said, "but every day I seem to
know less and less."
"Oh, that's all right! It's only that every day one knows more and
more--of how little one does know. You'll have to pass many milestones
before you pass out of that state. Do they always feed you like this
here?"
"Some days it's custard," said Betty, "but we've only been here a
week."
"We're friends again now, aren't we?" he questioned suddenly.
"Yes--oh, yes!"
"Then I may ask questions. I want to hear what you've been doing since
we parted, and where you've been, and how you come to Paris--and where
your aunt is, and what she'll say to me when she comes in."
"She likes you," said Betty, "and she won't come in, but Madame
Gautier will. Aunt Julia went off this morning--she couldn't delay any
longer because of catching the P. & O. at Brindisi; and I'm to wait
here till Madame Gautier comes at three. Auntie came all the way back
from America to see whether I was happy here. She _is_ a dear!"
"And who is Madame Gautier? Is she also a dear? But let's have our
coffee in the salon--and tell me everything from the beginning."
"Yes," said Betty, "oh, yes!"
But the salon window was darkened by a passing shape.
"My uncle, bless him!" said Vernon. "I must go. See, here's my card!
Won't you write and tell me all about everything? You will, won't
you?"
"Yes, but you musn't write to me. Madame Gautier opens all our
letters, and friendships weren't invented when she was young either.
Good-bye."
Vernon had to go towards the strong English voice that was filling the
hall with its inquiries for "Ung Mossoo--ung mossoo Anglay qui avoir
certainmong etty icy ce mattan."
Five minutes later Betty saw two figures go along the pavement on the
other side of the decorous embroidered muslin blinds which, in the
unlikely event of any happening in the Cite de la Retraite, ensure its
not being distinctly seen by those who sojourn at the Hotel Bête.
Betty instantly experienced that feminine longing which makes women
write to lovers or friends from whom they have but now parted, and she
was weaker than Lady St. Craye. There was nothing to do. Her trunks
were packed. She had before her two hours, or nearly, of waiting for
Madame Gautier. So she wrote, and this is the letter, erasures and
all. Vernon, when he got it, was most interested in the erasures here
given in italics.
Dear Mr. Vernon:
I am very glad we are good friends again, and I should like to tell
you everything that has happened. (_After you, after he--when my
step-father_). After the last time I saw you (_I was very unhappy
because I wanted to go to Paris_) I was very anxious to go to Paris
because of what you had said. My aunt came down and was very kind.
(_She told me_) She persuaded my step-father to let me go. I think
(_we_) he was glad to get rid of me, for (_somehow_) he never did
care about me, any more than I did about him. There are a great many
(_other_) things that he does not understand. Of course I was wild
with joy and thought of nothing but (_what you_) work, and my aunt
brought me over. But I did not see anything of Paris then. We went
straight on to Joinville where Madame Gautier has a villa, and
(_we_) my aunt left me there, and went to Norway. It was all very
strange at first, but I liked it. Madame Gautier is very strict; it
was like being at school. Sometimes I almost (_forgot_) fancied that
I was at school again. There were three other girls besides me, and
we had great fun. The Professor was very nice and encouraging. He is
very old. So is everybody who comes to the house--(_but_) it
(_was_) is jolly, because when there are four of you everything is
so interesting. We used to have picnics in the woods, and take it in
turn to ride in the donkey-cart. And there were musical evenings
with the Pastor and the Avocat and their wives. It was very amusing
sometimes. Madame Gautier had let her Paris flat, so we stayed at
Joinville till a week ago, and then my Aunt walked in one day and
took me to Paris for a week. I did enjoy that. And now aunt has
gone, and Madame Gautier is taking the inventory and getting the
keys, and presently she will come for me, I shall go with her to the
Rue Vaugirard, Number 62. It will be very nice seeing the other
girls again and telling them all about (_everything_) my week in
Paris. I am so sorry that I shall not have the pleasure of seeing
you again, but I am glad we met--because I do not like to think my
friends do not trust me.
Yours sincerely,
Betty Desmond.
That was the letter which Betty posted. But the first letter she wrote
was quite different. It began:
"You don't know, you never will know what it is to me to know that
you did not deceive me. My dear friend, my only friend! And how I
treated you yesterday! And how nobly you forgave me. I shall see you
again. I must see you again. No one else has ever understood me."
And so on to the "True and constant friend Betty."
She burned this letter.
"The other must go," she said, "that's the worst of life. If I sent
the one that's really written as I feel he'd think I was in love with
him or some nonsense. But a child who was just in two syllables might
have written the other. So _that's_ all right."
She looked at her watch. The same silver watch with which she had once
crossed the hand of one who told her fortune.
"How silly all that was!" she said. "I have learned wisdom now. Nearly
half-past three. I never knew Madame late before."
And now Betty began to watch the windows for the arrival of her
chaperone; and four o'clock came, and five, but no Madame Gautier.
She went out at last and asked to see the Patronne, and to her she
explained in a French whose fluency out-ran its correctness, that a
lady was to have called for her at three. It was now a quarter past
five. What did Madame think she should do?
Madame was lethargic and uninterested. She had no idea. She could not
advise. Probably Mademoiselle would do well to wait always.
The concierge was less aloof.
But without doubt Madame, Mademoiselle's friend had forgotten the
hour. She would arrive later, certainly. If not, Mademoiselle could
stay the night at the hotel, where a young lady would be perfectly
well, and go to Madame her friend in the morning.
But Betty was not minded to stay the night alone at the Hótel Bête.
For one thing she had very little money,--save that in the fat
envelope addressed to Madame Gautier which her aunt had given her. It
contained, she knew, the money to pay for her board and lessons during
the next six months,--for the elder Miss Desmond was off to India,
Japan and Thibet, and her horror of banks and cheques made her very
downright in the matter of money. That in the envelope was all Betty
had, and that was Madame Gautier's. But the other part of the
advice--to go to Madame Gautier's in the morning? If in the morning,
why not now?
She decided to go now. No one opposed the idea much. Only Franz seemed
a little disturbed and the concierge tepidly urged patience.
But Betty was fretted by waiting. Also she knew that Vernon and his
uncle might return at any moment. And it would perhaps be awkward for
him to find her there--she would not for the world cause him a
moment's annoyance. Besides he might think she had waited on the
chance of seeing him again. That was not to be borne.
"I will return and take my trunks," she said; and a carriage was
called.
There was something very exhilarating in driving through the streets
of Paris, alone, in a nice little carriage with fat pneumatic tires.
The street lamps were alight, and the shops not yet closed. Almost
every house seemed to be a shop.
"I wonder where all the people live," said Betty.
The Place de la Concorde delighted her with its many lamps and its
splendid space.
"How glorious it would be to live alone in Paris," she thought, "be
driven about in cabs just when one liked and where one liked! Oh, I am
tired of being a school-girl! I suppose they won't let me be grown up
till I'm so old I shall wish I was a school-girl again."
She loved the river with its reflected lights,--but it made her
shudder, too.
"Of course I shall never be allowed to see the Morgue," she said;
"they won't let me see anything real. Even this little teeny tiny bit
of a drive, I daresay it's not comme il faut! I do hope Madame won't
be furious. She couldn't expect me to wait forever. Perhaps, too,
she's ill, and no one to look after her. Oh, I'm sure I'm right to
go."
The doubt, however, grew as the carriage jolted through narrower
streets, and when it drew up at an open carriage-door, Betty jumped
out, paid the coachman, and went in quite prepared to be scolded.
She went through the doorway and stood looking for the list of names
such as are set at the foot of the stairs leading to flats in London.
There was no such list. From a lighted doorway on the right came a
babel of shrill, high-pitched voices. Betty looked in at the door and
the voices ceased.
"Pardon, Madame," said Betty. "I seek Madame Gautier."
Everyone in the crowded stuffy lamplit little room drew a deep breath.
"Mademoiselle is without doubt one of Madame's young ladies?"
Perhaps it was the sudden hushing of the raised voices, perhaps it was
something in the flushed faces that all turned towards her. To her
dying day Betty will never know why she did not say "Yes." What she
did say was:
"I am a friend of Madame's. Is she at home?"
"No, Mademoiselle,--she is not at home; she will never be at home
more, the poor lady. She is dead, Mademoiselle--an accident, one of
those cursed automobiles ran over her at her very door, Mademoiselle,
before our eyes."
Betty felt sick.
"Thank you," she said, "it is very sudden."
"Will Mademoiselle leave her name?" the concierge asked curiously.
"The brother of Madame, he is in the commerce at Nantes. A telegramme
has been sent--he arrives to-morrow morning. He will give Mademoiselle
details."
Again Betty said what she had not intended to say. She said:
"Miss Brown." Perhaps the brother in the commerce vaguely suggested
the addition, "of Manchester."
Then she turned away, and got out of the light into the friendly dusk
of the street.
"Tiens, but it is droll," said the concierge's friend, "a young girl,
and all alone like that."
"Oh, it is nothing," said the concierge; "the English are mad--all!
Their young girls run the streets at all hours, and the Devil guards
them."
Betty stood in the street. She could not go back to that circle of
harpy faces, all eagerly tearing to pieces the details of poor old
Madame Gautier's death. She must be alone--think. She would have to
write home. Her father would come to fetch her. Her aunt was beyond
the reach of appeal. Her artist-life would be over. Everything would
be over. She would be dragged back to the Parishing and the Mothers'
meetings and the black-cotton-covered books and the Sunday School.
And she would never have lived in Paris at all!
She walked down the street.
"I can't think--I _must_ think! I'll have this night to myself to
think in, anyway. I'll go to some cheap hotel. I have enough for
that."
She hailed a passing carriage, drove to the Hotel Bête, took her
luggage to the Gare du Nord, and left it there.
Then as she stood on the station step, she felt something in her hand.
It was the fat letter addressed to Madame Gautier. And she knew it was
fat with bank notes.
She unfastened her dress and thrust the letter into her bosom,
buttoning the dress carefully over it.
"But I won't go to my hotel yet," she said. "I won't even look for
one. I'll see Paris a bit first."
She hailed a coachman.
"Go," she said, "to some restaurant in the Latin Quarter--where the
art students eat."
"And I'm alone in Paris, and perfectly free," said Betty, leaning back
on the cushions. "No, I won't tell my coachman to drive along the Rue
Notre Dame des Champs, wherever that is. Oh, it is glorious to be
perfectly free. Oh, poor Madame Gautier! Oh dear, oh dear!" She held
her breath and wondered why she could feel sorry.
"You are a wretch," she said, "poor Madame was kind to you in her hard
narrow way, and now is she lying cold and dead, all broken up by that
cruel motor car."
The horror of the picture helped by Betty's excitement brought the
tears and she encouraged them.
"It is something to find one is not entirely heartless," she said at
last, drying her eyes, as the carriage drew up at a place where there
were people and voices and many lights.
CHAPTER X.
SEEING LIFE.
The thoughts of the two who loved her were with Betty that night. The
aunt, shaken, jolted, enduring much in the Paris, Lyons and
Mediterranean express thought fondly of her.
"She's a nice little thing. I must take her about a bit," she mused,
and even encouraged her fancy to play with the idea of a London
season--a thing it had not done for years.
The Reverend Cecil, curtains drawn and lamp alight, paused to think of
her even in the midst of his first thorough examination of his newest
treasure in Seventeenth Century Tracts, "The Man Mouse baited and
trapped for nibbling the margins of Eugenius Philalethes, being an
assault on Henry Moore." It was bound up with, "The Second Wash, or
the Moore scoured again," and a dozen others. A dumpy octavo, in brown
leather, he had found it propping a beer barrel in the next village.
"Dear Lizzie!--I wonder if she will ever care for really important
things. There must be treasures upon treasures in those boxes on the
French quays that one reads about. But she never would learn to know
one type from another."
He studied the fire thoughtfully.
"I wonder if she does understand how much she is to me," he thought.
"Those are the things that are better unsaid. At least I always think
so when she's here. But all these months--I wonder whether girls like
you to _say things_, or to leave them to be understood. It is more
delicate not to say them, perhaps."
Then his thoughts went back to the other Lizzie, about whom he had
never felt these doubts. He had loved her, and had told her so. And
she had told him her half of the story in very simple words--and most
simply, and without at all "leaving things to be understood" they had
planned the future that never was to be. He remembered the day when
sitting over the drawing-room fire, and holding her dear hand he had
said:
"This is how we shall sit when we are old and gray, dearest." It had
seemed so impossibly far-off then.
And she had said:
"I hope we shall die the same day, Cec."
But this had not happened.
And he had said:
"And we shall have such a beautiful life--doing good, and working for
God, and bringing up our children in the right way. Oh, Lizzie, it's
very wonderful to think of that happiness, isn't it?"
And she had laid her head on his shoulder and whispered:
"I hope we shall have a little girl, dear."
And he had said:
"I shall call her Elizabeth, after my dear wife."
"She must have eyes like yours though."
"She will be exactly like both of us," he had said, and they sat hand
in hand, and talked innocently, like two children, of the little child
that was never to be.
He had wanted them to put on her tombstone, Lizzie daughter of ----
and affianced wife of Cecil Underwood, but her mother had said that
_there_ there was no marrying or giving in marriage. In his heart the
Reverend Cecil had sometimes dared to hope that that text had been
misunderstood. To him his Lizzie had always been "as the angels of God
in Heaven."
Then came the long broken years, and then the little girl--Elizabeth,
his step-child.
The pent-up love of all his life spent itself on her: a love so fond,
so tender, so sacred that it seemed only self-respecting to hide it a
little from the world by a mask of coldness. And Betty had never seen
anything but the mask.
"I think, when I see her, I will tell her all about my Lizzie," he
said. "I wonder if she knows what the house is like without her. But
of course she doesn't, or she would have asked to come home, long ago.
I wonder whether she misses me very much. Madame Gautier is kind, she
says; but no stranger can make a home, as love can make it."
Meanwhile Betty dining alone at a restaurant in the Boulevard St.
Michel, within a mile of the Serpent, ordered what she called a nice
dinner--it was mostly vegetables and sweet things--and ate it with
appetite, looking about her. The long mirrors, the waiters were like
the ones in London restaurants, but the people who ate there they were
different. Everything was much shabbier, yet much gayer.
Shopkeeping-looking men were dining with their wives; some of them had
a child, napkin under chin, solemnly struggling with a big soup spoon
or upturning on its little nose a tumbler of weak red wine and water.
There were students--she knew them by their slouched hats and beards a
day old--dining by twos and threes and fours. No one took any more
notice of Betty than was shewn by a careless glance or two. She was
very quietly dressed. Her hat even was rather an unbecoming brown
thing. When she had eaten, she ordered coffee, and began to try to
think, but thinking was difficult with the loud voices and the
laughter, and the clink of glasses and the waiters' hurrying transits.
And at the back of her mind was a thought waiting for her to think it.
And she was afraid.
So presently she paid her bill, and went out, and found a tram, and
rode on the top of it through the lighted streets, on the level of the
first floor windows and the brown leaves of the trees in the
Boulevards, and went away and away through the heart of Paris; and
still all her mind could do nothing but thrust off, with both hands,
the thought that was pushing forward towards her thinking. When the
tram stopped at its journey's end she did not alight, but paid for,
and made, the return journey, and found her feet again in the
Boulevard St. Michel.
Of course, she had read her Trilby, and other works dealing with the
Latin Quarter. She knew that in that quarter everyone is not
respectable, but everyone is kind. It seemed good to her to go to a
café, to sit at a marble topped table, and drink--not the strange
liqueurs which men drink in books, but homely hot milk, such as some
of the other girls there had before them. It would be perfectly
simple, as well as interesting, to watch the faces of the students,
boys and girls, and when she found a nice girl-face, to speak to it,
asking for the address of a respectable hotel.
So she walked up the wide, tree-planted street feeling very Parisian
indeed, as she called it the "Boule Miche" to herself. And she stopped
at the first Café she came to, which happened to be the Café
d'Harcourt.
She did not see its name, and if she had it would naturally not have
conveyed any idea to her. The hour was not yet ten, and the Café
d'Harcourt was very quiet. There were not a dozen people at the little
tables. Most of them were women. It would be easy to ask her little
questions, with so few people to stare and wonder if she addressed a
stranger.
She sat down, and ordered her hot milk and, with a flutter, awaited
it. This was life. And to-morrow she must telegraph to her
step-father, and everything would end in the old round of parish
duties; all her hopes and dreams would be submerged in the heavy
morass of meeting mothers. The thought leapt up.--Betty hid her eyes
and would not look at it. Instead, she looked at the other people
seated at the tables--the women. They were laughing and talking among
themselves. One or two looked at Betty and smiled with frank
friendliness. Betty smiled back, but with embarrassment. She had heard
that French ladies of rank and fashion would as soon go out without
their stockings as without their paint, but she had not supposed that
the practice extended to art students. And all these ladies were
boldly painted--no mere soupçon of carmine and pearl powder, but good
solid masterpieces in body colour, black, white and red. She smiled in
answer to their obvious friendliness, but she did not ask them for
addresses. A handsome black-browed scowling woman sitting alone
frowned at her. She felt quite hurt. Why should anyone want to be
unkind?
Men selling flowers, toy rabbits, rattling cardboard balls, offered
their wares up and down the row of tables. Betty bought a bunch of
fading late roses and thought, with a sudden sentimentality that
shocked her, of the monthly rose below the window at home. It always
bloomed well up to Christmas. Well, in two days she would see that
rose-bush.
The trams rattled down the Boulevard, carriages rolled by. Every now
and then one of these would stop, and a couple would alight. And
people came on foot. The café was filling up. But still none of the
women seemed to Betty exactly the right sort of person to know exactly
the right sort of hotel.
Of course she knew from books that Hotels keep open all night,--but
she did not happen to have read any book which told of the reluctance
of respectable hotels to receive young women without luggage, late in
the evening. So it seemed to her that there was plenty of time.
A blonde girl with jet black brows and eyes like big black beads was
leaning her elbows on her table and talking to her companions, two
tourist-looking Germans in loud checks. They kept glancing at Betty,
and it made her nervous to know that they were talking about her. At
last her eyes met the eyes of the girl, who smiled at her and made a
little gesture of invitation to her, to come and sit at their table.
Betty out of sheer embarrassment might have gone, but just at that
moment the handsome scowling woman rose, rustled quickly to Betty,
knocking over a chair in her passage, held out a hand, and said in
excellent English:
"How do you do?"
Betty gave her hand, but "I don't remember you," said she.
"May I join you?" said the woman sitting down. She wore black and
white and red, and she was frightfully smart, Betty thought. She
glanced at the others--the tourists and the blonde; they were no
longer looking at her.
"Look here," said the woman, speaking low, "I don't know you from
Adam, of course, but I know you're a decent girl. For God's sake go
home to your friends! I don't know what they're about to let you out
alone like this."
"I'm alone in Paris just now," said Betty.
"Good God in Heaven, you little fool! Get back to your lodging. You've
no business here."
"I've as much business as anyone else," said Betty. "I'm an artist,
too, and I want to see life."
"You've not seen much yet," said the woman with a laugh that Betty
hated to hear. "Have you been brought up in a convent? You an artist!
Look at all of us! Do you need to be told what _our_ trade is?"
"Don't," said Betty; "oh, don't."
"Go home," said the woman, "and say your prayers--I suppose you _do_
say your prayers?--and thank God that it isn't your trade too."
"I don't know what you mean," said Betty.
"Well then, go home and read your Bible. That'll tell you the sort of
woman it is that stands about the corners of streets, or sits at the
Café d'Harcourt. What are your people about?"
"My father's in England," said Betty; "he's a clergyman."
"I generally say mine was," said the other, "but I won't to you,
because you'd believe me. My father was church organist, though. And
the Vicarage people were rather fond of me. I used to do a lot of
Parish work." She laughed again.
Betty laid a hand on the other woman's.
"Couldn't you go home to your father--or--something?" she asked
feebly.
"He's cursed me forever--Put it all down in black and white--a regular
commination service. It's you that have got to go home, and do it
_now_, too." She shook off Betty's hand and waved her own to a man who
was passing.
"Here, Mr. Temple--"
The man halted, hesitated and came up to them.
"Look here," said the black-browed woman, "look what a pretty flower
I've found,--and here of all places!"
She indicated Betty by a look. The man looked too, and took the third
chair at their table. Betty wished that the ground might open and
cover her, but the Boule Miche asphalt is solid. The new-comer was
tall and broad-shouldered, with a handsome, serious, boyish face, and
fair hair.
"She won't listen to me--"
"Oh, I did!" Betty put in reproachfully.
"You talk to her like a father. Tell her where naughty little girls go
who stay out late at the Café d'Harcourt--fire and brimstone, you
know. She'll understand, she's a clergyman's daughter."
"I really do think you'd better go home," said the new-comer to Betty
with gentle politeness.
"I would, directly," said Betty, almost in tears, "but--the fact is I
haven't settled on a hotel, and I came to this café. I thought I could
ask one of these art students to tell me a good hotel, but--so that's
how it is."
"I should think not," Temple answered the hiatus. Then he looked at
the black-browed, scowling woman, and his look was very kind.
"Nini and her German swine were beginning to be amiable," said the
woman in an aside which Betty did not hear. "For Christ's sake take
the child away, and put her safely for the night somewhere, if you
have to ring up a Mother Superior or a Governesses' Aid Society."
"Right. I will." He turned to Betty.
"Will you allow me," he said, "to find a carriage for you, and see you
to a hotel?"
"Thank you," said Betty.
He went out to the curbstone and scanned the road for a passing
carriage.
"Look here," said the black-browed woman, turning suddenly on Betty;
"I daresay you'll think it's not my place to speak--oh, if you don't
think so you will some day, when you're grown up,--but look here. I'm
not chaffing. It's deadly earnest. You be good. See? There's nothing
else that's any good really."
"Yes," said Betty, "I know. If you're not good you won't be happy."
"There you go," the other answered almost fiercely; "it's always the
way. Everyone says it--copybooks and Bible and everything--and no one
believes it till they've tried the other way, and then it's no use
believing anything."
"Oh, yes, it is," said Betty comfortingly, "and you're so kind. I
don't know how to thank you. Being kind _is_ being good too, isn't
it?"
"Well, you aren't always a devil, even if you are in hell. I wish I
could make you understand all the things I didn't understand when I
was like you. But nobody can. That's part of the hell. And you don't
even understand half I'm saying."
"I think I do," said Betty.
"Keep straight," the other said earnestly; "never mind how dull it is.
I used to think it must be dull in Heaven. God knows it's dull in the
other place! Look, he's got a carriage. You can trust him just for
once, but as a rule I'd say 'Don't you trust any of them--they're all
of a piece.' Good-bye; you're a nice little thing."
"Good-bye," said Betty; "oh, good-bye! You _are_ kind, and good!
People can't all be good the same way," she added, vaguely and seeking
to comfort.
"Women can," said the other, "don't you make any mistake. Good-bye."
She watched the carriage drive away, and turned to meet the spiteful
chaff of Nini and her German friends.
"Now," said Mr. Temple, as soon as the wheels began to revolve,
"perhaps you will tell me how you come to be out in Paris alone at
this hour."
Betty stared at him coldly.
"I shall be greatly obliged if you can recommend me a good hotel," she
said.
"I don't even know your name," said he.
"No," she answered briefly.
"I cannot advise you unless you will trust me a little," he said
gently.
"You are very kind,--but I have not yet asked for anyone's advice."
"I am sorry if I have offended you," he said, "but I only wish to be
of service to you."
[Illustration: "She stared at him coldly"]
"Thank you very much," said Betty: "the only service I want is the
name of a good hotel."
"You are unwise to refuse my help," he said. "The place where I found
you shews that you are not to be trusted about alone."
"Look here," said Betty, speaking very fast, "I dare say you mean
well, but it isn't your business. The lady I was speaking to--"
"That just shews," he said.
"She was very kind, and I like her. But I don't intend to be
interfered with by any strangers, however well they mean."
He laughed for the first time, and she liked him better when she had
heard the note of his laughter.
"Please forgive me," he said. "You are quite right. Miss Conway is
very kind. And I really do want to help you, and I don't want to be
impertinent. May I speak plainly?"
"Of course."
"Well the Café d'Harcourt is not a place for a respectable girl to go
to."
"I gathered that," she answered quietly. "I won't go there again."
"Have you quarreled with your friends?" he persisted; "have you run
away?"
"No," said Betty, and on a sudden inspiration, added: "I'm very, very
tired. You can ask me any questions you like in the morning. Now: will
you please tell the man where to go?"
The dismissal was unanswerable.
He took out his card-case and scribbled on a card.
"Where is your luggage?" he asked.
"Not here," she said briefly.
"I thought not," he smiled again. "I am discerning, am I not? Well,
perhaps you didn't know that respectable hotels prefer travellers who
have luggage. But they know me at this place. I have said you are my
cousin," he added apologetically.
He stopped the carriage. "Hôtel de l'Unicorne," he told the driver and
stood bareheaded till she was out of sight.
The Thought came out and said: "There will be an end of Me if you see
that well-meaning person again." Betty would not face the Thought, but
she was roused to protect it.
She stood up and touched the coachman on the arm.
"Go back to the Cafe d'Harcourt," she said. "I have forgotten
something."
That was why, when Temple called, very early, at the Hôtel de
l'Unicorne he heard that his cousin had not arrived there the night
before--Had not, indeed, arrived at all.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"It's a pity," he said. "Certainly she had run away from home. I
suppose I frightened her. I was always a clumsy brute with women."
CHAPTER XI.
THE THOUGHT.
The dark-haired woman was still ably answering the chaff of Nini and
the Germans. And her face was not the face she had shewn to Betty.
Betty came quietly behind her and touched her shoulder. She leapt in
her chair and turned white under the rouge.
"What the devil!--You shouldn't do that!" she said roughly; "You
frightened me out of my wits."
"I'm so sorry," said Betty, who was pale too. "Come away, won't you? I
want to talk to you."
"Your little friend is charming," said one of the men in thick
German-French. "May I order for her a bock or a cerises?"
"Do come," she urged.
"Let's walk," she said. "What's the matter? Where's young Temple?
Don't tell me he's like all the others."
"He meant to be kind," said Betty, "but he asked a lot of questions,
and I don't want to know him. I like you better. Isn't there anywhere
we can be quiet, and talk? I'm all alone here in Paris, and I do want
help. And I'd rather you'd help me than anyone else. Can't I come home
with you?"
"No you can't."
"Well then, will you come with me?--not to the hotel he told me of,
but to some other--you must know of one."
"What will you do if I don't?"
"I don't know," said Betty very forlornly, "but you _will_, won't you.
You don't know how tired I am. Come with me, and then in the morning
we can talk. Do--do."
The other woman took some thirty or forty steps in silence. Then she
asked abruptly:
"Have you plenty of money?"
"Yes, lots."
"And you're an artist?"
"Yes--at least I'm a student."
Again the woman reflected. At last she shrugged her shoulders and
laughed. "Set a thief to catch a thief," she said. "I shall make a
dragon of a chaperon, I warn you. Yes, I'll come, just for this one
night, but you'll have to pay the hotel bill."
"Of course," said Betty.
"This _is_ an adventure! Where's your luggage?"
"It's at the station, but I want you to promise not to tell that
Temple man a word about me. I don't want to see him again. Promise."
"Queer child. But I'll promise. Now look here: if I go into a thing at
all I go into it heart and soul; so let's do the thing properly. We
must have some luggage. I've got an old portmanteau knocking about.
Will you wait for me somewhere while I get it?"
"I'd rather not," said Betty, remembering the Germans and Nini.
"Well then,--there'd be no harm for a few minutes. You can come with
me. This is really rather a lark!"
Five minutes' walking brought the two to a dark house. The woman rang
a bell; a latch clicked and a big door swung open. She grasped Betty's
hand.
"Don't say a word," she said, and pulled her through.
It was very dark.
The other woman called out a name as they passed the door of the
concierge, a name that was not Conway, and her hand pulled Betty up
flight after flight of steep stairs. On the fifth floor she opened a
door with a key, and left Betty standing at the threshold till she had
lighted a lamp.
Then "Come in," she said, and shut the door and bolted it.
The room was small and smelt of white rose scent; the looking-glass
had a lace drapery fastened up with crushed red roses; and there were
voluminous lace and stuff curtains to bed and window.
"Sit down," said the hostess. She took off her hat and pulled the
scarlet flowers from it. She washed her face till it shewed no rouge
and no powder, and the brown of lashes and brows was free from the
black water-paint. She raked under the bed with a faded sunshade till
she found an old brown portmanteau. Her smart black and white dress
was changed for a black one, of a mode passée these three years. A
gray chequered golf cape and the dulled hat completed the
transformation.
"How nice you look," said Betty.
The other bundled some linen and brushes into the portmanteau.
"The poor old Gladstone's very thin still," she said, and folded
skirts; "we must plump it out somehow."
When the portmanteau was filled and strapped, they carried it down
between them, in the dark, and got it out on to the pavement.
"I am Miss Conway now," said the woman, "and we will drive to the
Hotel de Lille. I went there one Easter with my father."
With the change in her dress a change had come over Miss Conway's
voice.
At the Hotel de Lille it was she who ordered the two rooms,
communicating, for herself and her cousin, explained where the rest of
the luggage was, and gave orders for the morning chocolate.
"This is very jolly," said Betty, when they were alone. "It's like an
elopement."
"Exactly," said Miss Conway. "Good night."
"It's rather like a dream, though. I shan't wake up and find you gone,
shall I?" Betty asked anxiously.
"No, no. We've all your affairs to settle in the morning."
"And yours?"
"Mine were settled long ago. Oh, I forgot--I'm Miss Conway, at the
Hotel de Lille. Yes, we'll settle my affairs in the morning, too. Good
night, little girl."
"Good night, Miss Conway."
"They call me Lotty."
"My name's Betty and--look here, I can't wait till the morning." Betty
clasped her hands, and seemed to be holding her courage between them.
"I've come to Paris to study art, and I want you to come and live with
me. I know you'd like it, and I've got heaps of money--will you?"
She spoke quickly and softly, and her face was flushed and her eyes
bright.
There was a pause.
"You silly little duffer--you silly dear little duffer."
The other woman had turned away and was fingering the chains of an
ormolu candlestick on the mantelpiece.
Betty put an arm over her shoulders.
"Look here," she said, "I'm not such a duffer as you think. I know
people do dreadful things--but they needn't go on doing them, need
they?"
"Yes, they need," said the other; "that's just it."
Her fingers were still twisting the bronze chains.
"And the women you talked about--in the Bible--they weren't kind and
good, like you; they were just only horrid and not anything else. You
told _me_ to be good. Won't you let me help you? Oh, it does seem such
cheek of me, but I never knew anyone before who--I don't know how to
say it. But I am so sorry, and I want you to be good, just as much as
you want me to. Dear, dear Lotty!"
"My name's Paula."
"Paula dear, I wish I wasn't so stupid, but I know it's not your
fault, and I know you aren't like that woman with the Germans."
"I should hope not indeed," Paula was roused to flash back; "dirty
little French gutter-cat."
"I've never been a bit of good to anyone," said Betty, adding her
other arm and making a necklace of the two round Paula's neck, "except
to Parishioners perhaps. Do let me be a bit of good to you. Don't you
think I could?"
"You dear little fool!" said Paula gruffly.
"Yes, but say yes--you must! I know you want to. I've got lots of
money. Kiss me, Paula."
"I won't!--Don't kiss me!--I won't have it! Go away," said the woman,
clinging to Betty and returning her kisses.
"Don't cry," said Betty gently. "We shall be ever so happy. You'll
see. Good night, Paula. Do you know I've never had a friend--a
girl-friend, I mean?"
"For God's sake hold your tongue, and go to bed! Good night."
Betty, alone, faced at last, and for the first time, The Thought. But
it had changed its dress when Miss Conway changed hers. It was no
longer a Thought: it was a Resolution.
Twin-born with her plan for saving her new friend was the plan for a
life that should not be life at Long Barton.
All the evening she had refused to face The Thought. But it had been
shaping itself to something more definite than thought. As a
Resolution, a Plan, it now unrolled itself before her. She sat in the
stiff arm-chair looking straight in front of her, and she saw what she
meant to do. The Thought had been wise not to insist too much on
recognition. Earlier in the evening it would have seemed merely a
selfish temptation. Now it was an opportunity for a good and noble
act. And Betty had always wanted so much to be noble and good.
Here she was in Paris, alone. Her aunt, train-borne, was every moment
further and further away. As for her step-father:
"I hate him," said Betty, "and he hates me. He only let me come to get
rid of me. And what good could I do at Long Barton compared with what
I can do here? Any one can do Parish work. I've got the money Aunt
left for Madame Gautier. Perhaps it's stealing. But is it? The money
was meant to pay to keep me in Paris to study Art. And it's not as if
I were staying altogether for selfish reasons--there's Paula. I'm sure
she has really a noble nature. And it's not as if I were staying
because He is in Paris. Of course, that would be _really wrong_. But
he said he was going to Vienna. I suppose his uncle delayed him, but
he'll certainly go. I'm sure it's right. I've learned a lot since I
left home. I'm not a child now. I'm a woman, and I must do what I
think is right. You know I must, mustn't I?"
She appealed to the Inward Monitor, but it refused to be propitiated.
"It only seems not quite right because it's so unusual," she went on;
"that's because I've never been anywhere or done anything. After all,
it's my own life, and I have a right to live it as I like. My
step-father has never written to Madame Gautier all these months. He
won't now. It's only to tell him she has changed her address--he only
writes to me on Sunday nights. There's just time. And I'll keep the
money, and when Aunt comes back I'll tell her everything. She'll
understand."
"Do you think so?" said the Inward Monitor.
"Any way," said Betty, putting her foot down on the Inward Monitor,
"I'm going to do it. If it's only for Paula's sake. We'll take rooms,
and I'll go to a Studio, and work hard; and I won't make friends with
gentlemen I don't know, or anything silly, so there," she added
defiantly. "Auntie left the money for me to study in Paris. If I tell
my step-father that Madame Gautier is dead, he'll just fetch me home,
and what'll become of Paula then?"
Thus and thus, ringing the changes on resolve and explanation, her
thoughts ran. A clock chimed midnight.
"Is it possible," she asked herself, "that it's not twelve hours since
I was at the Hotel Bête--talking to Him? Well, I shall never see him
again, I suppose. How odd that I don't feel as if I cared whether I
did or not. I suppose what I felt about him wasn't real. It all seems
so silly now. Paula is real, and all that I mean to do for her is
real. He isn't."
She prayed that night as usual, but her mind was made up, and she
prayed outside a closed door.
Next morning, when her chocolate came up, she carried it into the next
room, and, sitting on the edge of her new friend's bed, breakfasted
there.
Paula seemed dazed when she first woke, but soon she was smiling and
listening to Betty's plans.
"How young you look," said Betty, "almost as young as me."
"I'm twenty-five."
"You don't look it--with your hair in those pretty plaits, and your
nightie. You do have lovely nightgowns."
"I'll get up now," said Paula. "Look out--I nearly upset the tray."
Betty had carefully put away certain facts and labelled them: "Not to
be told to anyone, even Paula." No one was to know anything about
Vernon. "There is nothing to know really," she told herself. No one
was to know that she was alone in Paris without the knowledge of her
relations. Lots of girls came to Paris alone to study art. She was
just one of these.
She found the lying wonderfully easy. It did not bring with it,
either, any of the shame that lying should bring, but rather a sense
of triumphant achievement, as from a difficult part played
excellently.
She paid the hotel bill, and then the search for rooms began.
"We must be very economical, you know," she said, "but you won't mind
that, will you? I think it will be rather fun."
"It would be awful fun," said the other. "You'll go and work at the
studio, and when you come home after your work I shall have cooked the
déjeûner, and we shall have it together on a little table with a nice
white cloth and a bunch of flowers on it."
"Yes; and in the evening we'll go out, to concerts and things, and
ride on the tops of trams. And on Sundays--what does one do on
Sundays?"
"I suppose one goes to church," said Paula.
"Oh, I think not when we're working so hard all the week. We'll go
into the country."
"We can take the river steamer and go to St. Cloud, or go out on the
tram to Clamart--the woods there are just exactly like the woods at
home. What part of England do you live in?"
"Kent," said Betty.
"My home's in Devonshire," said Paula.
It was a hard day: so many stairs to climb, so many apartments to see!
And all of them either quite beyond Betty's means, or else little
stuffy places, filled to choking point with the kind of furniture no
one could bear to live with, and with no light, and no outlook except
a blank wall a yard or two from the window.
They kept to the Montparnasse quarter, for there, Paula said, were the
best ateliers for Betty. They found a little restaurant, where only
art students ate, and where one could breakfast royally for about a
shilling. Betty looked with interest at the faces of the students, and
wondered whether she should ever know any of them. Some of them looked
interesting. A few were English, and fully half American.
Then the weary hunt for rooms began again.
It was five o'clock before a _concierge, unexpected amiable_ in face
of their refusal of her rooms, asked whether they had tried Madame
Bianchi's--Madame Bianchi where the atelier was, and the students'
meetings on Sunday evenings,--Number 57 Boulevard Montparnasse.
They tried it. One passes through an archway into a yard where the
machinery, of a great laundry pulses half the week, up some wide
wooden stairs--shallow, easy stairs--and on the first floor are the
two rooms. Betty drew a long breath when she saw them. They were
lofty, they were airy, they were light. There was not much furniture,
but what there was was good--old carved armoires, solid divans
and--joy of joys--in each room a carved oak, Seventeenth Century
mantelpiece eight feet high and four feet deep.
"I _must_ have these rooms!" Betty whispered. "Oh, I could make them
so pretty!"
The rent of the rooms was almost twice as much as the sum they fixed
on, and Paula murmured caution.
"Its no use," said Betty. "We'll live on bread and water if you like,
but we'll live on it _here_."
And she took the rooms.
"I'm sure we've done right," she said as they drove off to fetch her
boxes: "the rooms will be like a home, you see if they aren't. And
there's a piano too. And Madame Bianchi, isn't she a darling; Isn't
she pretty and sweet and nice?"
"Yes," said Paula thoughtfully; "it certainly is something that you've
got rooms in the house of a woman like that."
"And that ducky little kitchen! Oh, we shall have such fun, cooking
our own meals! You shall get the déjeûner but I'll cook the dinner
while you lie on the sofa and read novels 'like a real lady.'"
"Don't use that expression--I hate it," said Paula sharply. "But the
rooms are lovely, aren't they?"
"Yes, it's a good place for you to be in--I'm sure of that," said the
other, musing again.
When the boxes were unpacked, and Betty had pinned up a few prints and
photographs and sketches and arranged some bright coloured Liberty
scarves to cover the walls' more obvious defects--left by the removal
of the last tenant's decorations--when flowers were on table and
piano, the curtains drawn and the lamps lighted, the room did, indeed,
look "like a home."
"We'll have dinner out to-night," said Paula, "and to-morrow we'll go
marketing, and find you a studio to work at."
"Why not here?"
"That's an idea. Have you a lace collar you can lend me? This is not
fit to be seen."
Betty pinned the collar on her friend.
"I believe you get prettier every minute," she said. "I must just
write home and give them my address."
She fetched her embroidered blotting-book.
"It reminds one of bazaars," said Miss Conway.
* * * * *
57 Boulevard Montparnasse.
My dear Father:
This is our new address. Madame Gautier's tenant wanted to keep on
her flat in the Rue de Vaugirard, so she has taken this one which
is larger and very convenient, as it is close to many of the best
studios. I think I shall like it very much. It is not decided yet
where I am to study, but there is an Atelier in the House for ladies
only, and I think it will be there, so that I shall not have to go
out to my lessons. I will write again as soon as we are more
settled. We only moved in late this afternoon, so there is a lot to
do. I hope you are quite well, and that everything is going on well
in the Parish. I will certainly send some sketches for the Christmas
sale. Madame Gautier does not wish me to go home for Christmas; she
thinks it would interrupt my work too much. There is a new girl, a
Miss Conway. I like her very much. With love,
Yours affectionately,
E. Desmond.
She was glad when that letter was written. It is harder to lie in
writing than in speech, and the use of the dead woman's name made her
shiver.
"But I won't do things by halves," she said.
"What's this?" Paula asked sharply. She had stopped in front of one of
Betty's water colours.
"That? Oh, I did it ages ago--before I learned anything. Don't look
at it."
"But _what_ is it?"
"Oh, only our house at home."
"I wonder," said Paula, "why all English Vicarages are exactly alike."
"It's a Rectory," said Betty absently.
"That ought to make a difference, but it doesn't. I haven't seen an
English garden for four years."
"Four years is a long time," said Betty.
"You don't know how long," said the other. "And the garden's been
going on just the same all the time. It seems odd, doesn't it? Those
hollyhocks--the ones at the Vicarage at home are just like them. Come,
let's go to dinner!"
CHAPTER XII.
THE RESCUE.
When Vernon had read Betty's letter--and holding it up to the light he
was able to read the scratched-out words almost as easily as the
others--he decided that he might as well know where she worked, and
one day, after he had called on Lady St. Craye, he found himself
walking along the Rue de Vaugirard. Lady St. Craye was charming. And
she had been quite right when she had said that he would find a
special charm in the companionship of one in whose heart his past
love-making seemed to have planted no thorns. Yet her charm, by its
very nature--its finished elegance, its conscious authority--made him
think with the more interest of the unformed, immature grace of the
other woman--Betty, in whose heart he had not had the chance to plant
either thorns or roses.
How could he find out? Concierges are venal, but Vernon disliked base
instruments. He would act boldly. It was always the best way. He would
ask to see this Madame Gautier--if Betty were present he must take his
chance. It would be interesting to see whether she would commit
herself to his plot by not recognizing him. If she did that--Yet he
hoped she wouldn't. If she did recognize him he would say that it was
through Miss Desmond's relatives that he had heard of Madame Gautier.
Betty could not contradict him. He would invent a niece whose parents
wished to place her with Madame. Then he could ask as many questions
as he liked, about hours and studios, and all the details of the life
Betty led.
It was a simple straight-forward design, and one that carried success
in its pocket. No one could suspect anything.
Yet at the very first step suspicion, or what looked like it, stared
at him from the eyes of the concierge when he asked for Madame
Gautier.
"Monsieur is not of the friends of Madame?" she asked curiously.
He knew better than to resent the curiosity. He explained that he
desired to see Madame on business.
"You will see her never," the woman said dramatically; "she sees no
one any more."
"Is it that she is ill?"
"It is that she is dead,--and the dead do not receive, Monsieur." She
laughed, and told the tale of death circumstantially, with grim relish
of detail.
"And the young ladies--they have returned to their parents?"
"Ah, it is in the young ladies that Monsieur interests himself? But
yes. Madame's brother, who is in the Commerce of Nantes, he restored
instantly the young ladies to their friends. One was already with her
aunt."
Vernon had money ready in his hand.
"What was her name, Madame--the young lady with the aunt?"
"But I know not, Monsieur. She was a new young lady, who had been with
Madame at her Villa--I have not seen her. At the time of the
regrettable accident she was with her aunt, and doubtless remains
there. Thank you, Monsieur. That is all I know."
"Thank you, Madame. I am desolated to have disturbed you. Good day."
And Vernon was in the street again.
So Betty had never come to the Rue Vaugirard! The aunt must somehow
have heard the news--perhaps she had called on the way to the
train--she had returned to the Bête and Betty now was Heaven alone
knew where. Perhaps at Long Barton. Perhaps in Paris, with some other
dragon.
Vernon for a day or two made a point of being near when the
studios--Julien's, Carlorossi's, Delacluse's, disgorged their
students. He did not see Betty, because she was not studying at any of
these places, but at the Atelier Bianchi, of which he never thought.
So he shrugged his shoulders, and dined again with Lady St. Craye, and
began to have leisure to analyse the emotions with which she inspired
him. He had not believed that he could be so attracted by a woman with
whom he had played the entire comedy, from first glance to last
tear--from meeting hands to severed hearts. Yet attracted he was, and
strongly. He experienced a sort of resentment, a feeling that she had
kept something from him, that she had reserves of which he knew
nothing, that he, who in his blind complacency had imagined himself to
have sucked the orange and thrown away the skin, had really, in point
of fact, had a strange lovely fruit snatched from him before his blunt
teeth had done more than nibble at its seemingly commonplace rind.
In the old days she had reared barriers of reserve, walls of reticence
over which he could see so easily; now she posed as having no
reserves, and he seemed to himself to be following her through a
darkling wood, where the branches flew back and hit him in the face so
that he could not see the path.
"You know," she said, "what makes it so delightful to talk to you is
that I can say exactly what I like. You won't expect me to be clever,
or shy, or any of those tiresome things. We can be perfectly frank
with each other. And that's such a relief, isn't it?"
"I wonder whether it would be--supposing it could be?" said he.
They were driving in the Bois, among the autumn tinted trees where the
pale mist wreaths wandered like ghosts in the late afternoon.
"Of course it could be; it is," she said, opening her eyes at him
under the brim of her marvel of a hat: "at least it is for simple folk
like me. Why don't you wear a window in your breast as I do?"
She laid her perfectly gloved hand on her sables.
"Is there really a window? Can one see into your heart?"
"_One_ can--not the rest. Just the one from whom one feareth nothing,
expecteth nothing, hopeth nothing. That's out of the Bible, isn't it?"
"It's near enough," said he. "Of course, to you it's a new sensation
to have the window in your breast. Whereas I, from innocent childhood
to earnest manhood, have ever been open as the day."
"Yes," she said, "you were always transparent enough. But one is so
blind when one is in love."
Her calm references to the past always piqued him.
"I don't think Love is so blind as he's painted," he said: "always as
soon as I begin to be in love with people I begin to see their
faults."
"You may be transparent, but you haven't a good mirror," she laughed;
"you don't see yourself as you are. It isn't when you begin to love
people that you see their faults, is it? It's really when they begin
to love you."
"But I never begin to love people till they begin to love me. I'm too
modest."
"And I never love people after they've done loving me. I'm too--"
"Too what?"
"Too something--forgetful, is it? I mean it takes two to make a
quarrel, and it certainly takes two to make a love affair."
"And what about all the broken hearts?"
"What broken hearts?"
"The ones you find in the poets and the story books."
"That's just where you do find them. Nowhere else.--Now, honestly, has
your heart ever been broken?"
"Not yet: so be careful how you play with it. You don't often find
such a perfect specimen--absolutely not a crack or a chip."
"The pitcher shouldn't crow too loud--can pitchers crow? They have
ears, of course, but only the little pitchers. The ones that go to the
well should go in modest silence."
"Dear Lady," he said almost impatiently, "what is there about me that
drives my friends to stick up danger boards all along my path? 'This
way to Destruction!' You all label them. I am always being solemnly
warned that I shall get my heart broken one of these days, if I don't
look out."
"I wish you wouldn't call me dear Lady," she said; "it's not the mode
any more now."
"What may I call you?" he had to ask, turning to look in her eyes.
"You needn't call me anything. I hate being called names. That's a
pretty girl--not the dark one, the one with the fur hat."
He turned to look.
Two girls were walking briskly under the falling leaves. And the one
with the fur hat was Betty. But it was at the other that he gazed even
as he returned Betty's prim little bow. He even turned a little as the
carriage passed, to look more intently at the tall figure in shabby
black whose arm Betty held.
"Well?" said Lady St. Craye, breaking the silence that followed.
"Well?" said he, rousing himself, but too late. "You were saying I
might call you--"
"It's not what I was saying--it's what you were looking. Who is the
girl, and why don't you approve of her companion?"
"Who says I don't wear a window in my breast?" he laughed. "The girl's
a little country girl I knew in England--I didn't know she was in
Paris. And I thought I knew the woman, too, but that's impossible:
it's only a likeness."
"One nice thing about me is that I never ask impertinent questions--or
hardly ever. That one slipped out and I withdraw it. I don't want to
know anything about anything and I'm sorry I spoke. I see, of course,
that she is a little country girl you knew in England, and that you
are not at all interested in her. How fast the leaves fall now, don't
they?"
"No question of your's could be im--could be anything but flattering.
But since you _are_ interested--"
"Not at all," she said politely.
"Oh, but do be interested," he urged, intent on checking her
inconvenient interest, "because, really, it is rather interesting when
you come to think of it. I was painting my big picture--I wish you'd
come and see it, by the way. Will you some day, and have tea in my
studio?"
"I should love it. When shall I come?"
"Whenever you will."
He wished she would ask another question about Betty, but she
wouldn't. He had to go on, a little awkwardly.
"Well, I only knew them for a week--her and her aunt and her
father--and she's a nice, quiet little thing. The father's a
parson--all of them are all that there is of most respectable."
She listened but she did not speak.
"And I was rather surprised to see her here. And for the moment I
thought the woman with her was--well, the last kind of woman who
could have been with her, don't you know."
"I see," said Lady St. Craye. "Well, it's fortunate that the dark
woman isn't that kind of woman. No doubt you'll be seeing your little
friend. You might ask her to tea when I come to see your picture."
"I wish I could." Vernon's manner was never so frank as when he was
most on his guard. "She'd love to know you. I wish I could ask them to
tea, but I don't know them well enough. And their address I don't know
at all. It's a pity; she's a nice little thing."
It was beautifully done. Lady St. Craye inwardly applauded Vernon's
acting, and none the less that her own part had grown strangely
difficult. She was suddenly conscious of a longing to be alone--to let
her face go. She gave herself a moment's pause, caught at her fine
courage and said:
"Yes, it is a pity. However, I daresay it's safer for her that you
can't ask her to tea. She _is_ a nice little thing, and she might fall
in love with you, and then, your modesty appeased, you might follow
suit! Isn't it annoying when one can't pick up the thread of a
conversation? All the time you've been talking I've been wondering
what we were talking about before I pointed out the fur hat to you.
And I nearly remember, and I can't quite. That is always so worrying,
isn't it?"
Her acting was as good as his. And his perception at the moment less
clear than hers.
He gave a breath of relief. It would never have done to have Lady St.
Craye spying on him and Betty; and now he knew that she was in Paris
he knew too that it would be "him and Betty."
"We were talking," he said carefully, "about calling names."
"Oh, thank you!--When one can't remember those silly little things
it's like wanting to sneeze and not being able to, isn't it? But we
must turn back, or I shall be late for dinner, and I daren't think of
the names my hostess will call me then. She has a vocabulary, you
know." She named a name and Vernon thought it was he who kept the talk
busy among acquaintances till the moment for parting. Lady St. Craye
knew that it was she.
The moment Betty had bowed to Mr. Vernon she turned her head in answer
to the pressure on her arm.
"Who's that?" her friend asked.
Betty named him, and in a voice genuinely unconcerned.
"How long have you known him?"
"I knew him for a week last Spring: he gave me a few lessons. He is a
great favourite of my aunt's, but we don't know him much. And I
thought he was in Vienna."
"Does he know where you are?"
"No."
"Then mind he doesn't."
"Why?"
"Because when girls are living alone they can't be too careful.
Remember you're the person that's responsible for Betty Desmond now.
You haven't your aunt and your father to take care of you."
"I've got you," said Betty affectionately.
"Yes, you've got me," said her friend.
Life in the new rooms was going very easily and pleasantly. Betty had
covered some cushions with the soft green silk of an old evening dress
Aunt Julia had given her; she had bought chrysanthemums in pots; and
now all her little belongings, the same that had "given the _cachet_"
to her boudoir bedroom at home lay about, and here, in this foreign
setting, did really stamp the room with a pretty, delicate,
conventional individuality. The embroidered blotting-book, the silver
pen-tray, the wicker work-basket lined with blue satin, the long
worked pin-cushion stuck with Betty's sparkling hat-pins,--all these,
commonplace at Long Barton were here not commonplace. There was
nothing of Paula's lying about. She had brought nothing with her, and
had fetched nothing from her room save clothes--dresses and hats of
the plainest.
The experiments in cooking were amusing; so were the marketings in odd
little shops that sold what one wanted, and a great many things that
one had never heard of. The round of concerts and theatres and
tram-rides had not begun yet. In the evenings Betty drew, while Paula
read aloud--from the library of stray Tauchnitz books Betty had
gleaned from foreign book-stalls. It was a very busy, pleasant
home-life. And the studio life did not lack interest.
Betty suffered a martyrdom of nervousness when first--a little
late--she entered the Atelier. It is a large light room; a
semi-circular alcove at one end, hung with pleasant-coloured drapery,
holds a grand piano. All along one side are big windows that give on
an old garden--once a convent garden where nuns used to walk, telling
their beads. The walls are covered with sketches, posters, studies.
Betty looked nervously round--the scene was agitatingly unfamiliar.
The strange faces, the girls in many-hued painting pinafores, the
little forest of easels, and on the square wooden platform the
model--smooth, brown, with limbs set, moveless as a figure of wax.
Betty got to work, as soon as she knew how one began to get to work.
It was her first attempt at a drawing from the life, saving certain
not unsuccessful caricatures of her fellow pupils, her professor and
her chaperon. So far she had only been set to do landscape, and
laborious drawings of casts from the antique. The work was much harder
than she had expected. And the heat was overpowering. She wondered how
these other girls could stand it. Their amused, half-patronising,
half-disdainful glances made her furious.
She rubbed out most of the lines she had put in and gasped for breath.
The room, the students, the naked brown girl on the model's throne,
all swam before her eyes. She got to the door somehow, opened and shut
it, and found herself sitting on the top stair with closed eyelids and
heart beating heavily.
[Illustration: "Betty looked nervously around--the scene was
agitatingly unfamiliar"]
Some one held water to her lips. She was being fanned with a
handkerchief.
"I'm all right," she said.
"Yes, it's hotter than usual to-day," said the handkerchief-holder,
fanning vigorously.
"Why do they have it so hot?" asked poor Betty.
"Because of the model, of course. Poor thing! she hasn't got a nice
blue gown and a pinky-greeny pinafore to keep her warm. We have to try
to match the garden of Eden climate--when we're drawing from a girl
who's only allowed to use Eve's fashion plates."
Betty laughed and opened her eyes.
"How jolly of you to come out after me," she said.
"Oh, I was just the same at first. All right now? I ought to get back.
You just sit here till you feel fit again. So long!"
So Betty sat there on the bare wide brown stair, staring at the
window, till things had steadied themselves, and then she went back to
her work.
Her easel was there, and her half-rubbed out drawing--No, that was not
her drawing. It was a head, vaguely but very competently sketched, a
likeness--no, a caricature--of Betty herself.
She looked round--one quick but quite sufficient look. The girl next
her, and the one to that girl's right, were exchanging glances, and
the exchange ceased just too late. Betty saw.
From then till the rest Betty did not look at the model. She looked,
but furtively, at those two girls. When, at the rest-time, the model
stretched and yawned and got off her throne and into a striped
petticoat, most of the students took their "easy" on the stairs: among
these the two.
Betty, who never lacked courage, took charcoal in hand and advanced
quite boldly to the easel next to her own.
How she envied the quality of the drawing she saw there. But envy does
not teach mercy. The little sketch that Betty left on the corner of
the drawing was quite as faithful, and far more cruel, than the one on
her own paper. Then she went on to the next easel. The few students
who were chatting to the model looked curiously at her and giggled
among themselves.
When the rest was over and the model had reassumed, quite easily and
certainly, that pose of the uplifted arms which looked so difficult,
the students trooped back and the two girls--Betty's enemies, as she
bitterly felt--returned to their easels. They looked at their
drawings, they looked at each other, and they looked at Betty. And
when they looked at her they smiled.
"Well done!" the girl next her said softly. "For a tenderfoot you hit
back fairly straight. I guess you'll do!"
"You're very kind," said Betty haughtily.
"Don't you get your quills up," said the girl. "I hit first, but you
hit hardest. I don't know you,--but I want to."
She smiled so queer yet friendly a smile that Betty's haughtiness had
to dissolve in an answering smile.
"My name's Betty Desmond," she said. "I wonder why you wanted to hit a
man when he was down."
"My!" said the girl, "how was I to surmise about you being down? You
looked dandy enough--fit to lick all creation."
"I've never been in a studio before," said Betty, fixing fresh paper.
"My!" said the girl again. "Turn the faucet off now. The model don't
like us to whisper. Can't stand the draught."
So Betty was silent, working busily. But next day she was greeted with
friendly nods and she had some one to speak to in the rest-intervals.
On the third day she was asked to a studio party by the girl who had
fanned her on the stairs. "And bring your friend with you," she said.
But Betty's friend had a headache that day. Betty went alone and came
home full of the party.
"She's got such a jolly studio," she said; "ever so high up,--and
busts and casts and things. Everyone was so nice to me you can't
think: it was just like what one hears of Girton Cocoa parties. We had
tea--such weak tea, Paula, it could hardly crawl out of the teapot! We
had it out of green basins. And the loveliest cakes! There were only
two chairs, so some of us sat on the sommier and the rest on the
floor."
"Were there any young men?" asked Paula.
"Two or three very, very young ones--they came late. But they might as
well have been girls; there wasn't any flirting or nonsense of that
sort, Paula. Don't you think _we_ might give a party--not now, but
presently, when we know some more people? Do you think they'd like it?
Or would they think it a bore?"
"They'd love it, I should think." Paula looked round the room which
already she loved. "And what did you all talk about?"
"Work," said Betty, "work and work and work and work and work:
everyone talked about their work, and everyone else listened and
watched for the chance to begin to talk about theirs. This is real
life, my dear. I am so glad I'm beginning to know people. Miss Voscoe
is very queer, but she's a dear. She's the one who caricatured me the
first day. Oh, we shall do now, shan't we?"
"Yes," said the other, "you'll do now."
"I said 'we,'" Betty corrected softly.
"I meant we, of course," said Miss Conway.
CHAPTER XIII.
CONTRASTS.
Vernon's idea of a studio was a place to work in, a place where there
should be room for all the tools of one's trade, and besides, a great
space to walk up and down in those moods that seize on all artists
when their work will not come as they want it.
But when he gave tea-parties he had store of draperies to pull out
from his carved cupboard, deeply coloured things embroidered in rich
silk and heavy gold--Chinese, Burmese, Japanese, Russian.
He came in to-day with an armful of fair chrysanthemums, deftly set
them in tall brazen jars, pulled out his draperies and arranged them
swiftly. There was a screen to be hung with a Chinese mandarin's
dress, where, on black, gold dragons writhed squarely among blue
roses; the couch was covered by a red burnous with a gold border.
There were Persian praying mats to lay on the bare floor, kakemonos to
be fastened with drawing pins on the bare walls. A tea cloth worked by
Russian peasants lay under the tea-cups--two only--of yellow Chinese
egg-shell ware. His tea-pot and cream-jug were Queen Anne silver,
heirlooms at which he mocked. But he saw to it that they were kept
bright.
He lighted the spirit-lamp.
"She was always confoundedly punctual," he said.
But to-day Lady St. Craye was not punctual. She arrived half an hour
late, and the delay had given her host time to think about her.
He heard her voice in the courtyard at last--but the only window that
looked that way was set high in the wall of the little corridor, and
he could not see who it was to whom she was talking. And he wondered,
because the inflection of her voice was English--not the exquisite
imitation of the French inflexion which he had so often admired in
her.
He opened the door and went to the stair head. The voices were coming
up the steps.
"A caller," said Vernon, and added a word or two. However little you
may be in love with a woman, two is better company than three.
The voices came up. He saw the golden brown shimmer of Lady St.
Craye's hat, and knew that it matched her hair and that there would be
violets somewhere under the brim of it--violets that would make her
eyes look violet too. She was coming up--a man just behind her. She
came round the last turn, and the man was Temple.
"What an Alpine ascent!" she exclaimed, reaching up her hand so that
Vernon drew her up the last three steps. "We have been hunting you
together, on both the other staircases. Now that the chase is ended,
won't you present your friend? And I'll bow to him as soon as I'm on
firm ground!"
Vernon made the presentation and held the door open for Lady St. Craye
to pass. As she did so Temple behind her raised eyebrows which said:
"Am I inconvenient? Shall I borrow a book or something and go?"
Vernon shook his head. It was annoying, but inevitable. He could only
hope that Lady St. Craye also was disappointed.
"How punctual you are," he said. "Sit here, won't you?--I hadn't
finished laying the table." He deliberately brought out four more
cups. "What unnatural penetration you have, Temple! How did you find
out that this is the day when I sit 'at home' and wait for people to
come and buy my pictures?"
"And no one's come?" Lady St. Craye had sunk into the chair and was
pulling off her gloves. "That's very disappointing. I thought I should
meet dozens of clever and interesting people, and I only meet two."
Her brilliant smile made the words seem neither banal nor impertinent.
Vernon was pleased to note that he was not the only one who was
disappointed.
"You are too kind," he said gravely.
Temple was looking around the room.
"Jolly place you've got here," he said, "but it's hard to find. I
should have gone off in despair if I hadn't met Lady St. Craye."
"We kept each other's courage up, didn't we, Mr. Temple? It was like
arctic explorers. I was beginning to think we should have to make a
camp and cook my muff for tea."
She held out the sable and Vernon laid it on the couch when he had
held it to his face for a moment.
"I love the touch of fur," he said; "and your fur is scented with the
scent of summer gardens, 'open jasmine muffled lattices,'" he quoted
softly. Temple had wandered to the window.
"What ripping roofs!" he said. "Can one get out on them?"
"Now what," demanded Vernon, "_is_ the hidden mainspring that impels
every man who comes into these rooms to ask, instantly, whether one
can get out on to the roof? It's only Englishmen, by the way;
Americans never ask it, nor Frenchmen."
"It's the exploring spirit, I suppose," said Temple idly; "the spirit
that has made England the Empire which--et cetera."
"On which the sun never sets. Yes--but I think the sunset would be one
of the attractions of your roof, Mr. Vernon."
"Sunset is never attractive to me," said he, "nor Autumn. Give me
sunrise, and Spring."
"Ah, yes," said Lady St. Craye, "you only like beginnings. Even
Summer--"
"Even Summer, as you say," he answered equably. "The sketch is always
so much better than the picture."
"I believe that is your philosophy of life," said Temple.
"This man," Vernon explained, "spends his days in doing ripping
etchings and black and white stuff and looking for my philosophy of
life."
"One would like to see that in black and white. Will you etch it for
me, Mr. Temple, when you find it?"
"I don't think the medium would be adequate," Temple said. "I haven't
found it yet, but I should fancy it would be rather highly coloured."
"Iridescent, perhaps. Did you ever speculate as to the colour of
people's souls? I'm quite sure every soul has a colour."
"What is yours?" asked Vernon of course.
"I'm too humble to tell you. But some souls are thick--body-colour,
don't you know--and some are clear like jewels."
"And mine's an opal, is it?"
"With more green in it, perhaps; you know the lovely colour on the
dykes in the marshes?"
"Stagnant water? Thank you!"
"I don't know what it is. It has some hateful chemical name, I
daresay. They have vases the colour I mean, mounted in silver, at the
Army and Navy Stores."
"And your soul--it is a pearl, isn't it?"
"Never! Nothing opaque. If you will force my modesty to the confession
I believe in my heart that it is a sapphire. True blue, don't you
know!"
"And Temple's--but you've not known him long enough to judge."
"So it's no use my saying that I am sure his soul is a dewdrop."
"To be dried up by the sun of life?" Temple questioned.
"No--to be hardened into a diamond--by the fire of life. No, don't
explain that dewdrops don't harden Into diamonds. I know I'm not
scientific, but I honestly did mean to be complimentary. Isn't your
kettle boiling over, Mr. Vernon?"
Lady St. Craye's eyes, while they delicately condoled with Vernon on
the spoiling of his tete-a-tete with her, were also made to indicate a
certain interest in the spoiler. Temple was more than six feet high,
well built. He had regular features and clear gray eyes, with well-cut
cases and very long dark lashes. His mouth was firm and its lines were
good. But for his close-cropped hair and for a bearing at once frank,
assured, and modest, he would have been much handsomer than a man has
any need to be. But his expression saved him: No one had ever called
him a barber's block or a hairdresser's apprentice.
To Temple Lady St. Craye appeared the most charming woman he had ever
seen. It was an effect which she had the habit of producing. He had
said of her in his haste that she was all clothes and no woman, now he
saw that on the contrary the clothes were quite intimately part of the
woman, and took such value as they had, from her.
She carried her head with the dainty alertness of a beautiful bird.
She had a gift denied to most Englishwomen--the genius for wearing
clothes. No one had ever seen her dress dusty or crushed, her hat
crooked. No uncomfortable accidents ever happened to her. Blacks never
settled on her face, the buttons never came off her gloves, she never
lost her umbrella, and in the windiest weather no loose untidy wisps
escaped from her thick heavy shining hair to wander unbecomingly round
the ears that were pearly and pink like the little shells of Vanessae.
Some of the women who hated her used to say that she dyed her hair. It
was certainly very much lighter than her brows and lashes. To-day she
was wearing a corduroy dress of a gold some shades grayer than the
gold of her hair. Sable trimmed it, and violet silk lined the loose
sleeves and the coat, now unfastened and thrown back. There were, as
Vernon had known there would be, violets under the brim of the hat
that matched her hair.
The chair in which she sat wore a Chinese blue drapery. The yellow
tea-cups gave the highest note in the picture.
"If I were Whistler, I should ask you to let me paint your portrait
like that--yes, with my despicable yellow tea-cup in your honourable
hand."
"If you were Mr. Whistler--or anything in the least like Mr.
Whistler--I shouldn't be drinking tea out of your honourable tea-cup,"
she said. "Do you really think, Mr. Temple, that one ought not to say
one doesn't like people just because they're dead?"
He had been thinking something a little like it.
"Well," he said rather awkwardly, "you see dead people can't hit
back."
"No more can live ones when you don't hit them, but only stick pins in
their effigies. I'd rather speak ill of the dead than the living."
"Yet it doesn't seem fair, somehow," Temple insisted.
"But why? No one can go and tell the poor things what people are
saying of them. You don't go and unfold a shroud just to whisper in a
corpse's ear: 'It was horrid of her to say it, but I thought you ought
to know, dear.'--And if you did, they wouldn't lie awake at night
worrying over it as the poor live people do.--No more tea, thank you."
"Do you really think anyone worries about what anyone says?"
"Don't you, Mr. Temple?"
He reflected.
"He never has anything to worry about," Vernon put in; "no one ever
says anything unkind about him. The cruelest thing anyone ever said of
him was that he would make as excellent a husband as Albert the Good."
"The white flower of a blameless life? My felicitations," Lady St.
Craye smiled them.
Temple flushed.
"Now isn't it odd," Vernon asked, "that however much one plumes
oneself on one's blamelessness, one hates to hear it attributed to one
by others? One is good by stealth and blushes to find it fame. I
myself--"
"Yes!" said Lady St. Craye with an accent of finality.
"What a man really likes is to be saint with the reputation of being a
bit of a devil."
"And a woman likes, you think, to be a bit of a devil, with the
reputation of a saint?"
"Or a bit of a saint with a reputation that rhymes to the reality.
It's the reputation that's important, isn't it?"
"Isn't the inward truth the really important thing?" said Temple
rather heavily.
Lady St. Craye looked at him in such a way as to make him understand
that she understood. Vernon looked at them both, and turning to the
window looked out on his admired roofs.
"Yes," she said very softly, "but one doesn't talk about that, any
more than one does of one's prayers or one's love affairs."
The plural vexed Temple, and he told himself how unreasonable the
vexation was.
Lady St. Craye turned her charming head to look at him, to look at
Vernon. One had been in love with her. The other might be. There is in
the world no better company than this.
Temple, always deeply uninterested in women's clothes, was noting the
long, firm folds of her skirt. Vernon had turned from the window to
approve the loving closeness of those violets against her hair. Lady
St. Craye in her graceful attitude of conscious unconsciousness was
the focus of their eyes.
"Here comes a millionaire, to buy your pictures," she said
suddenly,--"no--a millionairess, by the sound of her high-heeled
shoes. How beautiful are the feet--"
The men had heard nothing, but following hard on her words came the
sound of footsteps along the little corridor, an agitated knock on the
door.
Vernon opened the door--to Betty.
"Oh--come in," he said cordially, and his pause of absolute
astonishment was brief as an eye-flash. "This is delightful--"
And as she passed into the room he caught her eyes and, looking a
warning, said: "I am so glad to see you. I began to be afraid you
wouldn't be able to come."
"I saw you in the Bois the other day," said Lady St. Craye, "and I
have been wanting to know you ever since."
"You are very kind," said Betty. Her hat was on one side, her hair was
very untidy, and it was not a becoming untidiness either. She had no
gloves, and a bit of the velvet binding of her skirt was loose. Her
eyes were red and swollen with crying. There was a black smudge on her
cheek.
"Take this chair," said Vernon, and moved a comfortable one with its
back to the light.
"Temple--let me present you to Miss Desmond."
Temple bowed, with no flicker of recognition visible in his face. But
Betty, flushing scarlet, said:
"Mr. Temple and I have met before."
There was the tiniest pause. Then Temple said: "I am so glad to meet
you again. I thought you had perhaps left Paris."
"Let me give you some tea," said Vernon.
Tea was made for her,--and conversation. She drank the tea, but she
seemed not to know what to do with the conversation.
It fluttered, aimlessly, like a bird with a broken wing. Lady St.
Craye did her best, but talk is not easy when each one of a party has
its own secret pre-occupying interest, and an overlapping interest in
the preoccupation of the others. The air was too electric.
Lady St. Craye had it on her lips that she must go--when Betty rose
suddenly.
"Good-bye," she said generally, looking round with miserable eyes that
tried to look merely polite.
"Must you go?" asked Vernon, furious with the complicated emotions
that, warring in him, left him just as helpless as anyone else.
"I do hope we shall meet again," said Lady St. Craye.
"Mayn't I see you home?" asked Temple unexpectedly, even to himself.
Betty's "No, thank you," was most definite.
She went. Vernon had to let her go. He had guests. He could not leave
them. He had lost wholly his ordinary control of circumstances. All
through the petrifying awkwardness of the late talk he had been
seeking an excuse to go with Betty--to find out what was the matter.
He closed the door and came back. There was no help for it.
But there was help. Lady St. Craye gave it. She rose as Vernon came
back.
"Quick!" she said, "Shall we go? Hadn't you better bring her back
here? Go after her at once."
"You're an angel," said Vernon. "No, don't go. Temple, look after Lady
St. Craye. If you'll not think me rude?--Miss Desmond is in trouble,
I'm afraid."
"Of course she is--poor little thing. Oh, Mr. Vernon, do run! She
looks quite despairing. There's your hat. Go--go!"
The door banged behind her.
The other two, left alone, looked at each other.
"I wonder--" said she.
"Yes," said he, "it's certainly mysterious."
"We ought to have gone at once," said she. "I should have done, of
course, only Mr. Vernon so elaborately explained that he expected her.
One had to play up. And so she's a friend of yours?"
"She's not a friend of mine," said Temple rather ruefully, "and I
didn't know Vernon was a friend of hers. You saw that she wouldn't
have my company at any price."
"Mr. Vernon's a friend of her people, I believe. We saw her the other
day in the Bois, and he told me he knew them in England. Did you know
them there too? Poor child, what a woe-begone little face it was!"
"No, not in England. I met her in Paris about a fortnight ago, but she
didn't like me, from the first, and our acquaintance broke off short."
There was a silence. Lady St. Craye perceived a ring-fence of
reticence round the subject that interested her, and knew that she had
no art strong enough to break it down.
She spoke again suddenly:
"Do you know you're not a bit the kind of man I expected you to be,
Mr. Temple? I've heard so much of you from Mr. Vernon. We're such old
friends, you know."
"Apparently he can't paint so well with words as he does with oils.
May I ask exactly how flattering the portrait was?"
"It wasn't flattering at all.--In fact it wasn't a portrait."
"A caricature?"
"But you don't mind what people say of you, do you?"
"You are trying to frighten me."
"No, really," she said with pretty earnestness; "it's only that he has
always talked about you as his best friend, and I imagined you would
be like him."
Temple's uneasy wonderings about Betty's trouble, her acquaintance
with Vernon, the meaning of her visit to him, were pushed to the back
of his mind.
"I wish I were like him," said he,--"at any rate, in his paintings."
"At any rate--yes. But one can't have everything, you know. You have
qualities which he hasn't--qualities that you wouldn't exchange for
any qualities of his."
"That wasn't what I meant; I--the fact is, I like old Vernon, but I
can't understand him."
"That philosophy of life eludes you still? Now, I understand him, but
I don't always like him--not all of him."
"I wonder whether anyone understands him?"
"He's not such a sphinx as he looks!" Her tone betrayed a slight
pique--"Now, your character would be much harder to read. That's one
of the differences."
"We are all transparent enough--to those who look through the right
glasses," said Temple. "And part of my character is my inability to
find any glass through which I could see him clearly."
This comparison of his character and Vernon's, with its sudden
assumption of intimacy, charmed yet embarrassed him.
She saw both emotions and pitied him a little. But it was necessary to
interest this young man enough to keep him there till Vernon should
return. Then Vernon would see her home, and she might find out
something, however little, about Betty. But if this young man went she
too must go. She could not outstay him in the rooms of his friend. So
she talked on, and Temple was just as much at her mercy as Betty had
been at the mercy of the brother artist in the rabbit warren at Long
Barton.
But at seven o'clock Vernon had not returned, and it was, after all,
Temple who saw her home.
Temple, free from the immediate enchantment of her presence, felt the
revival of a resentful curiosity.
Why had Betty refused his help? Why had she sought Vernon's? Why did
women treat him as though he were a curate and Vernon as though he
were a god? Well--Lady St. Craye at least had not treated him as
curates are treated.
CHAPTER XIV.
RENUNCIATION.
Vernon tore down the stairs three and four at a time, and caught Betty
as she was stepping into a hired carriage.
"What is it?" he asked. "What's the matter?"
"Oh, go back to your friends!" said Betty angrily.
"My friends are all right. They'll amuse each other. Tell me."
"Then you must come with me," said she. "If I try to tell you here I
shall begin to cry again. Don't speak to me. I can't bear it."
He got into the carriage. It was not until Betty had let herself into
her room and he had followed her in--not till they stood face to face
in the middle of the carpet that he spoke again.
"Now," he said, "what is it? Where's your aunt, and--"
"Sit down, won't you?" she said, pulling off her hat and throwing it
on the couch; "it'll take rather a long time to tell, but I must tell
you all about it, or else you can't help me. And if you don't help me
I don't know what I shall do."
Despair was in her voice.
He sat down. Betty, in the chair opposite his, sat with hands
nervously locked together.
"Look here," she said abruptly, "you're sure to think that everything
I've done is wrong, but it's no use your saying so."
"I won't say so."
"Well, then--that day, you know, after I saw you at the Bête--Madame
Gautier didn't come to fetch me, and I waited, and waited, and at last
I went to her flat, and she was dead,--and I ought to have telegraphed
to my step-father to fetch me, but I thought I would like to have one
night in Paris first--you know I hadn't seen Paris at all, really."
"Yes," he said, trying not to let any anxiety into his voice. "Yes--go
on."
"And I went to the Café d'Harcourt--What did you say?"
"Nothing."
"I thought it was where the art students went. And I met a girl there,
and she was kind to me."
"What sort of a girl? Not an art student?"
"No," said Betty hardly, "she wasn't an art student. She told me what
she was."
"Yes?"
"And I--I don't think I should have done it just for me alone, but--I
did want to stay in Paris and work--and I wanted to help her to be
good--she _is_ good really, in spite of everything. Oh, I know you're
horribly shocked, but I can't help it! And now she's gone,--and I
can't find her."
"I'm not shocked," he said deliberately, "but I'm extremely stupid.
How gone?"
"She was living with me here.--Oh, she found the rooms and showed me
where to go for meals and gave me good advice--oh, she did everything
for me! And now she's gone. And I don't know what to do. Paris is such
a horrible place. Perhaps she's been kidnapped or something. And I
don't know even how to tell the police. And all this time I'm talking
to you is wasted time."
"It isn't wasted. But I must understand. You met this girl and she--"
"She asked your friend Mr. Temple--he was passing and she called out
to him--to tell me of a decent hotel, but he asked so many questions.
He gave me an address and I didn't go. I went back to her, and we went
to a hotel and I persuaded her to come and live with me."
"But your aunt?"
Betty explained about her aunt.
"And your father?"
She explained about her father.
"And now she has gone, and you want to find her?"
"Want to find her?"--Betty started up and began to walk up and down
the room.--"I don't care about anything else in the world! She's a
dear; you don't know what a dear she is--and I know she was happy
here--and now she's gone! I never had a girl friend before--what?"
Vernon had winced, just as Paula had winced, and at the same words.
"You've looked for her at the Café d'Harcourt?"
"No; I promised her that I'd never go there again."
"She seems to have given you some good advice."
"She advised me not to have anything to do with _you_" said Betty,
suddenly spiteful.
"That was good advice--when she gave it," said Vernon, quietly; "but
now it's different."
He was silent a moment, realising with a wonder beyond words how
different it was. Every word, every glance between him and Betty had,
hitherto, been part of a play. She had been a charming figure in a
charming comedy. He had known, as it were by rote, that she had
feelings--a heart, affections--but they had seemed pale, dream-like,
just a delightful background to his own sensations, strong and
conscious and delicate. Now for the first time he perceived her as
real, a human being in the stress of a real human emotion. And he was
conscious of a feeling of protective tenderness, a real, open-air
primitive sentiment, with no smell of the footlights about it. He was
alone with Betty. He was the only person in Paris to whom she could
turn for help. What an opportunity for a fine scene in his best
manner! And he found that he did not want a scene: he wanted to help
her.
"Why don't you say something?" she said impatiently. "What am I to
do?"
"You can't do anything. I'll do everything. You say she knows Temple.
Well, I'll find him, and we'll go to her lodgings and find out if
she's there. You don't know the address?"
"No," said Betty. "I went there, but it was at night and I don't even
know the street."
"Now look here." He took both her hands and held them firmly. "You
aren't to worry. I'll do everything. Perhaps she has been taken ill.
In that case, when we find her, she'll need you to look after her. You
must rest. I'm certain to find her. You must eat something. I'll send
you in some dinner. And then lie down."
"I couldn't sleep," said Betty, looking at him with the eyes of a
child that has cried its heart out.
"Of course you couldn't. Lie down, and make yourself read. I'll get
back as soon as I can. Good-bye." There was something further that
wanted to get itself said, but the words that came nearest to
expressing it were "God bless you,"--and he did not say them.
On the top of his staircase he found Temple lounging.
"Hullo--still here? I'm afraid I've been a devil of a time gone, but
Miss Desmond's--"
"I don't want to shove my oar in," said Temple, "but I came back when
I'd seen Lady St. Craye home. I hope there's nothing wrong with Miss
Desmond."
"Come in," said Vernon. "I'll tell you the whole thing."
They went into the room desolate with the disorder of half empty cups
and scattered plates with crumbs of cake on them.
"Miss Desmond told me about her meeting you. Well, she gave you the
slip; she went back and got that woman--Lottie what's her name--and
took her to live with her."
"Good God! She didn't know, of course?"
"But she did know--that's the knock-down blow. She knew, and she
wanted to save her."
Temple was silent a moment.
"I say, you know, though--that's rather fine," he said presently.
"Oh, yes," said Vernon impatiently, "it's very romantic and all that.
Well, the woman stayed a fortnight and disappeared to-day. Miss
Desmond is breaking her heart about her."
"So she took her up, and--she's rather young for rescue work."
"Rescue work? Bah! She talks of the woman as the only girl friend
she's ever had. And the woman's probably gone off with her watch and
chain and a collection of light valuables. Only I couldn't tell Miss
Desmond that. So I promised to try and find the woman. She's a
thorough bad lot. I've run up against her once or twice with chaps I
know."
"She's not _that_ sort," said Temple. "I know her fairly well."
"What--Sir Galahad? Oh, I won't ask inconvenient questions." Vernon's
sneer was not pretty.
"She used to live with de Villermay," said Temple steadily; "he was
the first--the usual coffee maker business, you know, though God knows
how an English girl got into it. When he went home to be married--It
was rather beastly. The father came up--offered her a present. She
threw it at him. Then Schauermacher wanted her to live with him. No.
She'd go to the devil her own way. And she's gone."
"Can't something be done?" said Vernon.
"I've tried all I know. You can save a woman who doesn't know where
she's going. Not one who knows and means to go. Besides, she's been at
it six months; she's past reclaiming now."
"I wonder," said Vernon--and his sneer had gone and he looked ten
years younger--"I wonder whether anybody's past reclaiming? Do you
think I am? Or you?"
The other stared at him.
"Well," Vernon's face aged again instantly, "the thing is: we've got
to find the woman."
"To get her to go back and live with that innocent girl?"
"Lord--no! To find her. To find out why she bolted, and to make
certain that she won't go back and live with that innocent girl. Do
you know her address?"
But she was not to be found at her address. She had come back, paid
her bill, and taken away her effects.
It was at the Café d'Harcourt, after all, that they found her, one of
a party of four. She nodded to them, and presently left her party and
came to spread her black and white flounces at their table.
"What's the best news with you?" she asked gaily. "It's a hundred
years since I saw you, Bobby, and at least a million since I saw your
friend."
"The last time I saw you," Temple said, "was the night when you asked
me to take care of a girl."
"So it was! And did you?"
"No," said Temple; "she wouldn't let me. She went back to you."
"So you've seen her again? Oh, I see--you've come to ask me what I
meant by daring to contaminate an innocent girl by my society?--Well,
you can go to Hell, and ask there."
She rose, knocking over a chair.
"Don't go," said Vernon. "That's not what we want to ask."
"'_We_' too," she turned fiercely on him: "as if you were a king or a
deputation."
"One and one _are_ two," said Vernon; "and I did very much want to
talk to you."
"And two are company."
She had turned her head away.
"You aren't going to be cruel," Vernon asked.
"Well, send him off then. I won't be bullied by a crowd of you."
Temple took off his hat and went.
"I've got an appointment. I've no time for fool talk," she said.
"Sit down," said Vernon. "First I want to thank you for the care
you've taken of Miss Desmond, and for all your kindness and goodness
to her."
"Oh!" was all Paula could say. She had expected something so
different. "I don't see what business it is of yours, though," she
added next moment.
"Only that she's alone here, and I'm the only person she knows in
Paris. And I know, much better than she does, all that you've done for
her sake."
"I did it for my own sake. It was no end of a lark," said Paula
eagerly, "that little dull pious life. And all the time I used to
laugh inside to think what a sentimental fool she was."
"Yes," said Vernon slowly, "it must have been amusing for you."
"I just did it for the fun of the thing. But I couldn't stand it any
longer, so I just came away. I was bored to death."
"Yes," he said, "you must have been. Just playing at cooking and
housework, reading aloud to her while she drew--yes, she told me that.
And the flowers and all her little trumpery odds and ends about.
Awfully amusing it must have been."
"Don't," said Paula.
"And to have her loving you and trusting you as she did--awfully
comic, wasn't it? Calling you her girl-friend--"
"Shut up, will you?"
"And thinking she had created a new heaven and a new earth for you.
Silly sentimental little school-girl!"
"Will you hold your tongue?"
"So long, Lottie," cried the girl of her party; "we're off to the
Bullier. You've got better fish to fry, I see."
"Yes," said Paula with sudden effrontery; "perhaps we'll look in
later."
The others laughed and went.
"Now," she said, turning furiously on Vernon, "will you go? Or shall
I? I don't want any more of you."
"Just one word more," he said with the odd change of expression that
made him look young. "Tell me why you left her. She's crying her eyes
out for you."
"Why I left her? Because I was sick of--"
"Don't. Let me tell you. You went with her because she was alone and
friendless. You found her rooms, you set her in the way of making
friends. And when you saw that she was in a fair way to be happy and
comfortable, you came away, because--"
"Because?" she leaned forward eagerly.
"Because you were afraid."
"Afraid?"
"Afraid of handicapping her. You knew you would meet people who knew
you. You gave it all up--all the new life, the new chances--for her
sake, and came away. Do I understand? Is it fool-talk?"
Paula leaned her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands.
"You're not like most men," she said; "you make me out better than I
am. That's not the usual mistake. Yes, it _was_ all that, partly. And
I should have liked to stay--for ever and ever--if I could. But
suppose I couldn't? Suppose I'd begun to find myself wishing for--all
sorts of things, longing for them. Suppose I'd stayed till I began to
think of things that I _wouldn't_ think of while _she_ was with me.
_That's_ what I was afraid of."
"And you didn't long for the old life at all?"
She laughed. "Long for that? But I might have. I might have. It was
safer.--Well, go back to her and tell her I've gone to the devil and
it's not her fault. Tell her I wasn't worth saving. But I did try to
save her. If you're half a man you won't undo my one little bit of
work."
"What do you mean?"
"You know well enough what I mean. Let the girl alone."
He leaned forward, and spoke very earnestly. "Look here," he said, "I
won't jaw. But this about you and her--well, it's made a difference to
me that I can't explain. And I wouldn't own that to anyone but _her_
friend. I mean to be a friend to her too, a good friend. No nonsense."
"Swear it by God in Heaven," she said fiercely.
"I do swear it," he said, "by God in Heaven. And I can't tell her
you've gone to the devil. You must write to her. And you can't tell
her that either."
"What's the good of writing?"
"A lie or two isn't much, when you've done all this for her. Come up
to my place. You can write to her there."
This was the letter that Paula wrote in Vernon's studio, among the
half-empty cups and the scattered plates with cake-crumbs on them.
"My Dear Little Betty:
"I must leave without saying good-bye, and I shall never see you
again. My father has taken me back. I wrote to him and he came and
found me. He has forgiven me everything, only I have had to promise
never to speak to anyone I knew in Paris. It is all your doing,
dear. God bless you. You have saved me. I shall pray for you every
day as long as I live.
"Your poor
"Paula."
"Will that do?" she laughed as she held out the letter.
He read it. And he did not laugh.
"Yes--that'll do," he said. "I'll tell her you've gone to England, and
I'll send the letter to London to be posted."
"Then that's all settled!"
"Can I do anything for _you_?" he asked.
"God Himself can't do anything for me," she said, biting the edge of
her veil.
"Where are you going now?"
"Back to the d'Harcourt. It's early yet."
She stood defiantly smiling at him.
"What were you doing there--the night you met her?" he asked abruptly.
"What does one do?"
"What's become of de Villermay?" he asked.
"Gone home--got married."
"And so you thought--"
"Oh, if you want to know what I thought you're welcome! I thought I'd
damn myself as deep as I could--to pile up the reckoning for him; and
I've about done it. Good-bye. I must be getting on."
"I'll come a bit of the way with you," he said.
At the door he turned, took her hand and kissed it gently and
reverently.
"That's very sweet of you." She opened astonished eyes at him. "I
always used to think you an awful brute."
"It was very theatrical of me," he told himself later. "But it summed
up the situation. Sentimental ass you're growing!"
Betty got her letter from England and cried over it and was glad over
it.
"I have done one thing, anyway," she told herself, "one really truly
good thing. I've saved my poor dear Paula. Oh, how right I was! How I
knew her!"
Book 3.--The Other Woman
CHAPTER XV.
ON MOUNT PARNASSUS.
At Long Barton the Reverend Cecil had strayed into Betty's room, now
no longer boudoir and bedchamber, but just a room, swept, dusted,
tidy, with the horrible tidiness of a room that is not used. There
were squares of bright yellow on the dull drab of the wall-paper,
marking the old hanging places of the photographs and pictures that
Betty had taken to Paris. He opened the cupboard door: one or two
faded skirts, a flattened garden hat and a pair of Betty's old shoes.
He shut the door again quickly, as though he had seen Betty's ghost.
The next time he went to Sevenoaks he looked in at the builders and
decorators, gave an order, and chose a wall paper with little pink
roses on it. When Betty came home for Christmas she should not find
her room the faded desert it was now. He ordered pink curtains to
match the rosebuds. And it was when he got home that he found the
letter that told him she was not to come at Christmas.
But he did not countermand his order. If not at Christmas then at
Easter; and whenever it was she should find her room a bower. Since
she had been away he had felt more and more the need to express his
affection. He had expressed it, he thought, to the uttermost, by
letting her go at all. And now he wanted to express it in detail, by
pink curtains, satin-faced wall-paper with pink roses. The paper cost
two shillings a piece, and he gloated over the extravagance and over
his pretty, poetic choice. Usually the wall-papers at the Rectory had
been chosen by Betty, and the price limited to sixpence. He would
refrain from buying that Fuller's Church History, the beautiful brown
folio whose perfect boards and rich yellow paper had lived in his
dreams for the last three weeks, ever since he came upon it in the rag
and bone shop in the little back street in Maidstone. When the rosebud
paper and the pink curtains were in their place, the shabby carpet was
an insult to their bright prettiness. The Reverend Cecil bought an
Oriental carpet--of the bright-patterned jute variety--and was
relieved to find that it only cost a pound.
The leaves were falling in brown dry showers in the Rectory garden,
the chrysanthemums were nearly over, the dahlias blackened and
blighted by the first frosts. A few pale blooms still clung to the
gaunt hollyhock stems; here and there camomile flowers, "medicine
daisies" Betty used to call them when she was little, their whiteness
tarnished, showed among bent dry stalks of flowers dead and forgotten.
Round Betty's window the monthly rose bloomed pale and pink amid
disheartened foliage. The damp began to shew on the North walls of the
rooms. A fire in the study now daily, for the sake of the books: one
in the drawing-room, weekly, for the sake of the piano and the
furniture. And for Betty, in far-away Paris, a fire of crackling twigs
and long logs in the rusty fire-basket, and blue and yellow flames
leaping to lick the royal arms of France on the wrought-iron
fire-back.
The rooms were lonely to Betty now that Paula was gone. She missed her
inexpressibly. But the loneliness was lighted by a glow of pride, of
triumph, of achievement. Her deception of her step-father was
justified. She had been the means of saving Paula. But for her Paula
would not have returned, like the Prodigal son, to the father's house.
Betty pictured her there, subdued, saddened, but inexpressibly happy,
warming her cramped heart in the sun of forgiveness and love.
"Thank God, I have done some good in the world," said Betty.
In the brief interview which Vernon took to tell her that Paula had
gone to England with her father, Betty noticed no change in him. She
had no thought for him then. And in the next weeks, when she had
thoughts for him, she did not see him.
She could not but be glad that he was in Paris. In the midst of her
new experiences he seemed to her like an old friend. Yet his being
there put a different complexion on her act of mutiny. When she
decided to deceive her step-father, and to stay on in Paris alone
Paula had been to be saved, and _he_ had been, to her thought, in
Vienna, not to be met. Now Paula was gone--and he was here. In the
night when Betty lay wakeful and heard the hours chimed by a convent
bell whose voice was toneless and gray as an autumn sky it seemed to
her that all was wrong, that she had committed a fault that was almost
a crime, that there was nothing now to be done but to confess, to go
home and to expiate, as the Prodigal Son doubtless did among the
thorny roses of forgiveness, those days in the far country. But always
with the morning light came the remembrance that it was not her
father's house to which she must go to make submission. It was her
step-father's. And after all, it was her own life--she had to live it.
Once that confession and submission made she saw herself enslaved
beyond hope of freedom. Meanwhile here was the glad, gay life of
independence, new experiences, new sensations. And her step-father was
doubtless glad to be rid of her.
"It isn't as though anyone wanted me at home," she said; "and
everything here is so new and good, and I have quite a few friends
already--and I shall have more. This is what they call seeing life."
Life as she saw it was good to see. The darker, grimmer side of the
student life was wholly hidden from Betty. She saw only a colony of
young artists of all nations--but most of England and America--all
good friends and comrades, working and playing with an equal
enthusiasm. She saw girls treated as equals and friends by the men
students. If money were short it was borrowed from the first friend
one met, and quite usually repaid when the home allowance arrived. A
young man would borrow from a young woman or a young woman from a
young man as freely as school-boys from each other. Most girls had a
special friend among the boys. Betty thought at first that these must
be betrothed lovers. Miss Voscoe, the American, stared when she put
the question about a pair who had just left the restaurant together
with the announcement that they were off to the Musée Cluny for the
afternoon.
"Engaged? Not that I know of. Why should they be?" she said in a tone
that convicted Betty of a social lapse in the putting of the question.
Yet she defended herself.
"Well, you know, in England people don't generally go about together
like that unless they're engaged, or relations."
"Yes," said Miss Voscoe, filling her glass from the little bottle of
weak white wine that costs threepence at Garnier's, "I've heard that
is so in your country. Your girls always marry the wrong man, don't
they, because he's the first and only one they've ever had the
privilege of conversing with?"
"Not quite always, I hope," said Betty good humouredly.
"Now in our country," Miss Voscoe went on, "girls look around so as
they can tell there's more different sorts of boys than there are of
squashes. Then when they get married to a husband it's because they
like him, or because they like his dollars, or for some reason that
isn't just that he's the only one they've ever said five words on end
to."
"There's something in that," Betty owned; "but my aunt says men never
want to be friends with girls--they always want--"
"To flirt? May be they do, though I don't think so. Our men don't, any
way. But if the girl doesn't want to flirt things won't get very
tangled up."
"But suppose a man got really fond of you, then he might think you
liked him too, if you were always about with him--"
"Do him good to have his eyes opened then! Besides, who's always about
with anyone? You have a special friend for a bit, and just walk around
and see the sights,--and then change partners and have a turn with
somebody else. It's just like at a dance. Nobody thinks you're in love
because you dance three or four times running with one boy."
Betty reflected as she ate her _noix de veau_. It was certainly true
that she had seen changes of partners. Milly St. Leger, the belle of
the students' quarter, changed her partners every week.
"You see," the American went on, "We're not the
stay-at-home-and-mind-Auntie kind that come here to study. What we
want is to learn to paint and to have a good time in between. Don't
you make any mistake, Miss Desmond. This time in Paris is _the_ time
of our lives to most of us. It's what we'll have to look back at and
talk about. And suppose every time there was any fun going we had to
send around to the nearest store for a chaperon how much fun would
there be left by the time she toddled in? No--the folks at home who
trust us to work trust us to play. And we have our little heads
screwed on the right way."
Betty remembered that she had been trusted neither for play nor work.
Yet, from the home standpoint she had been trustworthy, more
trustworthy than most. She had not asked Vernon, her only friend, to
come and see her, and when he had said, "When shall I see you again?"
she had answered, "I don't know. Thank you very much. Good-bye."
"I don't know how _you_ were raised," Miss Voscoe went on, "but I
guess it was in the pretty sheltered home life. Now I'd bet you fell
in love with the first man that said three polite words to you!"
"I'm not twenty yet," said Betty, with ears and face of scarlet.
"Oh, you mean I'm to think nobody's had time to say those three polite
words yet? You come right along to my studio, I've got a tea on, and
I'll see if I can't introduce my friends to you by threes, so as you
get nine polite words at once. You can't fall in love with three boys
a minute, can you?"
Betty went home and put on her prettiest frock. After all, one was
risking a good deal for this Paris life, and one might as well get as
much out of it as one could. And one always had a better time of it
when one was decently dressed. Her gown was of dead-leaf velvet, with
green undersleeves and touches of dull red and green embroidery at
elbows and collar.
Miss Voscoe's studio was at the top of a hundred and seventeen
polished wooden steps, and as Betty neared the top flight the sound of
talking and laughter came down to her, mixed with the rattle of china
and the subdued tinkle of a mandolin. She opened the door--the room
seemed full of people, but she only saw two. One was Vernon and the
other was Temple.
Betty furiously resented the blush that hotly covered neck, ears and
face.
"Here you are!" cried Miss Voscoe. She was kind: she gave but one
fleet glance at the blush and, linking her arm in Betty's, led her
round the room. Betty heard her name and other names. People were
being introduced to her. She heard:
"Pleased to know you,--"
"Pleased to make your acquaintance,--"
"Delighted to meet you--"
and realised that her circle of American acquaintances was widening.
When Miss Voscoe paused with her before the group of which Temple and
Vernon formed part Betty felt as though her face had swelled to that
degree that her eyes must, with the next red wave, start out of her
head. The two hands, held out in successive greeting, gave Miss Voscoe
the key to Betty's flushed entrance.
She drew her quickly away, and led her up to a glaring poster where a
young woman in a big red hat sat at a café table, and under cover of
Betty's purely automatic recognition of the composition's talent,
murmured:
"Which of them was it?"
"I beg your pardon?" Betty mechanically offered the deferent defence.
"Which was it that said the three polite words--before you'd ever met
anyone else?"
"Ah!" said Betty, "you're so clever--"
"Too clever to live, yes," said Miss Voscoe; "but before I die--which
was it?"
"I was going to say," said Betty, her face slowly drawing back into
itself its natural colouring, "that you're so clever you don't want to
be told things. If you're sure it's one of them, you ought to know
which."
"Well," remarked Miss Voscoe, "I guess Mr. Temple."
"Didn't I say you were clever?" said Betty.
"Then it's the other one."
Before the studio tea was over, Vernon and Temple both had conveyed to
Betty the information that it was the hope of meeting her that had
drawn them to Miss Voscoe's studio that afternoon.
"Because, after all," said Vernon, "we _do_ know each other better
than either of us knows anyone else in Paris. And, if you'd let me, I
could put you to a thing or two in the matter of your work. After all,
I've been through the mill."
"It's very kind of you," said Betty, "but I'm all alone now Paula's
gone, and--"
"We'll respect the conventions," said Vernon gaily, "but the
conventions of the Quartier Latin aren't the conventions of Clapham."
"No, I know," said she, "but there's a point of honour." She paused.
"There are reasons," she added, "why I ought to be more conventional
than Clapham. I should like to tell you, some time, only--But I
haven't got anyone to tell anything to. I wonder--"
"What? What do you wonder?"
Betty spoke with effort.
"I know it sounds insane, but, you know my stepfather thought you--you
wanted to marry me. You didn't ever, did you?"
Vernon was silent: none of his habitual defences served him in this
hour.
"You see," Betty went on, "all that sort of thing is such nonsense. If
I knew you cared about someone else everything would be so simple."
"Eliminate love," said Vernon, "and the world is a simple example in
vulgar fractions."
"I want it to be simple addition," said Betty. "Lady St. Craye is very
beautiful."
"Yes," said Vernon.
"Is she in love with you?"
"Ask her," said Vernon, feeling like a schoolboy in an examination.
"If she were--and you cared for her--then you and I could be friends:
I should like to be real friends with you."
"Let us be friends," said he when he had paused a moment. He made the
proposal with every possible reservation.
"Really?" she said. "I'm so glad."
If there was a pang, Betty pretended to herself that there was none.
If Vernon's conscience fluttered him he was able to soothe it; it was
an art that he had studied for years.
"Say, you two!"
The voice of Miss Voscoe fell like a pebble into the pool of silence
that was slowly widening between them.
"Say--we're going to start a sketch-club for really reliable girls. We
can have it here, and it'll only be one franc an hour for the model,
and say six sous each for tea. Two afternoons a week. Three, five,
nine of us--you'll join, Miss Desmond?"
"Yes--oh, yes!" said Betty, conscientiously delighted with the idea of
more work.
"That makes--nine six sous and two hours model--how much is that, Mr.
Temple?--I see it written on your speaking brow that you took the
mathematical wranglership at Oxford College."
"Four francs seventy," said Temple through the shout of laughter.
"Have I said something comme il ne faut pas?" said Miss Voscoe.
"You couldn't," said Vernon: "every word leaves your lips without a
stain upon its character."
"Won't you let us join?" asked an Irish student. "You'll be lost
entirely without a Lord of Creation to sharpen your pencils."
"We mean to _work_," said Miss Voscoe; "if you want to work take a box
of matches and a couple of sticks of brimstone and make a little
sketch class of your own."
"I don't see what you want with models," said a very young and shy boy
student. "Couldn't you pose for each other, and--"
A murmur of dissent from the others drove him back into shy silence.
"No amateur models in this Academy," said Miss Voscoe. "Oh, we'll make
the time-honoured institutions sit up with the work we'll do. Let's
all pledge ourselves to send in to the Salon--or anyway to the
Indépendants! What we're suffering from in this quarter's
git-up-and-git. Why should we be contented to be nobody?"
"On the contrary," said Vernon, "Miss Voscoe is everybody--almost!"
"I'm the nobody who can't get a word in edgeways anyhow," she said.
"What I've been trying to say ever since I was born--pretty near--is
that what this class wants is a competent Professor, some bully
top-of-the-tree artist, to come and pull our work all to pieces and
wipe his boots on the bits. Mr. Vernon, don't you know any one who's
pining to give us free crits?"
"Temple is," said Vernon. "There's no mistaking that longing glance of
his."
"As a competent professor I make you my bow of gratitude," said
Temple, "but I should never have the courage to criticise the work of
nine fair ladies."
"You needn't criticise them all at once," said a large girl from
Minneapolis, "nor yet all in the gaudy eye of heaven. We'll screen off
a corner for our Professor--sort of confessional business. You sit
there and we'll go to you one by one with our sins in our hand."
"_That_ would scare him some I surmise," said Miss Voscoe.
"Not at all," said Temple, a little nettled, he hardly knew why.
"I didn't know you were so brave," said the Minneapolis girl.
"Perhaps he didn't want you to know," said Miss Voscoe; "perhaps
that's his life's dark secret."
"People often pretend to a courage that they haven't," said Vernon. "A
consistent pose of cowardice, that would be novel and--I see the idea
developing--more than useful."
"Is that _your_ pose?" asked Temple, still rather tartly, "because if
it is, I beg to offer you, in the name of these ladies, the chair of
Professor-behind-the-screen."
"I'm not afraid of the nine Muses," Vernon laughed back, "as long as
they are nine. It's the light that lies in woman's eyes that I've
always had such a nervous dread of."
"It does make you blink, bless it," said the Irish student, "but not
from nine pairs at once, as you say. It's the light from one pair that
turns your head."
"Mr. Vernon isn't weak in the head," said the shy boy suddenly.
"No," said Vernon, "it's the heart that's weak with me. I have to be
very careful of it."
"Well, but will you?" said a downright girl.
"Will I what? I'm sorry, but I've lost my cue, I think. Where were
we--at losing hearts, wasn't it?"
"No," said the downright girl, "I didn't mean that. I mean will you
come and criticise our drawings?"
"Fiddle," said Miss Voscoe luminously. "Mr. Vernon's too big for
that."
"Oh, well," said Vernon, "if you don't think I should be competent!"
"You don't mean to say you would?"
"Who wouldn't jump at the chance of playing Apollo to the fairest set
of muses in the Quartier?" said Temple; "but after all, I had the
refusal of the situation--I won't renounce--"
"Bobby, you unman me," interrupted Vernon, putting down his cup, "you
shall _not_ renounce the altruistic pleasure which you promise to
yourself in yielding this professorship to me. I accept it."
"I'm hanged if you do!" said Temple. "You proposed me yourself, and
I'm elected--aren't I, Miss Voscoe?"
"That's so," said she; "but Mr. Vernon's president too."
"I've long been struggling with the conviction that Temple and I were
as brothers. Now I yield--Temple, to my arms!"
They embraced, elegantly, enthusiastically, almost as Frenchmen use;
and the room applauded the faithful burlesque.
"What's come to me that I should play the goat like this?" Vernon
asked himself, as he raised his head from Temple's broad shoulder.
Then he met Betty's laughing eyes, and no longer regretted his
assumption of that difficult role.
"It's settled then. Tuesdays and Fridays, four to six," he said. "At
last I am to be--"
"The light of the harem," said Miss Voscoe.
"Can there be two lights?" asked Temple anxiously. "If not, consider
the fraternal embrace withdrawn."
"No, you're _the_ light, of course," said Betty. "Mr. Vernon's the
Ancient Light. He's older than you are, isn't he?"
The roar of appreciation of her little joke surprised Betty, and, a
little, pleased her--till Miss Voscoe whispered under cover of it:
"_Ancient_ light? Then he _was_ the three-polite-word man?"
Betty explained her little jest.
"All the same," said the other, "it wasn't any old blank walls you
were thinking about. I believe he is the one."
"It's a great thing to be able to believe anything," said Betty; and
the talk broke up into duets. She found that Temple was speaking to
her.
"I came here to-day because I wanted to meet you, Miss Desmond," he
was saying. "I hope you don't think it's cheek of me to say it, but
there's something about you that reminds me of the country at home."
"That's a very pretty speech," said Betty. He reminded her of the Café
d'Harcourt, but she did not say so.
"You remind me of a garden," he went on, "but I don't like to see a
garden without a hedge round it."
"You think I ought to have a chaperon," said Betty bravely, "but
chaperons aren't needed in this quarter."
"I wish I were your brother," said Temple.
"I'm so glad you're not," said Betty. She wanted no chaperonage, even
fraternal. But the words made him shrink, and then sent a soft warmth
through him. On the whole he was not sorry that he was not her
brother.
At parting Vernon, at the foot of the staircase, said:
"And when may I see you again?"
"On Tuesday, when the class meets."
"But I didn't mean when shall I see the class. When shall I see Miss
Desmond?"
"Oh, whenever you like," Betty answered gaily; "whenever Lady St.
Craye can spare you."
He let her say it.
CHAPTER XVI.
"LOVE AND TUPPER."
"Whenever Vernon liked" proved to be the very next day. He was waiting
outside the door of the atelier when Betty, in charcoal-smeared
pinafore, left the afternoon class.
"Won't you dine with me somewhere to-night?" said he.
"I am going to Garnier's," she said. Not even for him, friend of hers
and affianced of another as he might be, would she yet break the rule
of a life Paula had instituted.
"Fallen as I am," he answered gaily, "I am not yet so low as to be
incapable of dining at Garnier's."
So when Betty passed through the outer room of the restaurant and
along the narrow little passage where eyes and nose attest strongly
the neighborhood of the kitchen, she was attended by a figure that
aroused the spontaneous envy of all her acquaintances. In the inner
room where they dined it was remarked that such a figure would be more
at home at Durand's or the Café de Paris than at Garnier's. That night
the first breath of criticism assailed Betty. To afficher oneself with
a fellow-student--a "type," Polish or otherwise--that was all very
well, but with an obvious Boulevardier, a creature from the other
side, this dashed itself against the conventions of the Artistic
Quartier. And conventions--even of such quarters--are iron-strong.
"Fiddle-de-dee," said Miss Voscoe to her companions' shocked comments,
"they were raised in the same village, or something. He used to give
her peanuts when he was in short jackets, and she used to halve her
candies with him. Friend of childhood's hour, that's all. And besides
he's one of the presidents of our Sketch Club."
But all Garnier's marked that whereas the habitués contented
themselves with an omelette aux champignons, sauté potatoes and a
Petit Suisse, or the like modest menu, Betty's new friend ordered for
himself, and for her, "a real regular dinner," beginning with hors
d'oeuvre and ending with "mendiants." "Mendiants" are raisins and
nuts, the nearest to dessert that at this season you could get at
Garniers. Also he passed over with smiling disrelish the little
carafons of weak wine for which one pays five sous if the wine be red,
and six if it be white. He went out and interviewed Madame at her
little desk among the flowers and nuts and special sweet dishes, and
it was a bottle of real wine with a real cork to be drawn that adorned
the table between him and Betty. To her the whole thing was of the
nature of a festival. She enjoyed the little sensation created by her
companion; and the knowledge which she thought she had of his
relations to Lady St. Craye absolved her of any fear that in dining
with him tête-à-tête she was doing anything "not quite nice." To her
the thought of his engagement was as good or as bad as a chaperon. For
Betty's innocence was deeply laid, and had survived the shock of all
the waves that had beaten against it since her coming to Paris. It was
more than innocence, it was a very honest, straightforward childish
naiveté.
"It's almost the same as if he was married," she said: "there can't be
any harm in having dinner with a man who's married--or almost
married."
So she enjoyed herself. Vernon exerted himself to amuse her. But he
was surprised to find that he was not so happy as he had expected to
be. It was good that Betty had permitted him to dine with her alone,
but it was flat. After dinner he took her to the Odeon, and she said
good-night to him with a lighter heart than she had known since Paula
left her.
In these rooms now sometimes it was hard to keep one's eyes shut. And
to keep her eyes shut was now Betty's aim in life, even more than the
art for which she pretended to herself that she lived. For now that
Paula had gone the deception of her father would have seemed less
justifiable, had she ever allowed herself to face the thought of it
for more than a moment; but she used to fly the thought and go round
to one of the girls' rooms to talk about Art with a big A, and forget
how little she liked or admired Betty Desmond.
She was now one of a circle of English, American and German students.
The Sketch Club had brought her eight new friends, and they went about
in parties by twos and threes, or even sevens and eights, and Betty
went with them, enjoying the fun of it all, which she liked, and
missing all that she would not have liked if she had seen it. But
Vernon was the only man with whom she dined tête-à-tête or went to the
theatre alone.
To him the winter passed in a maze of doubt and self-contempt. He
could not take what the gods held out: could not draw from his
constant companionship of Betty the pleasure which his artistic
principles, his trained instincts taught him to expect. He had now all
the tête-à-têtes he cared to ask for, and he hated that it should be
so. He almost wanted her to be in a position where such things should
be impossible to her. He wanted her to be guarded, watched, sheltered.
And he had never wanted that for any woman in his life before.
"I shall be wishing her in a convent next," he said, "with high walls
with spikes on the top. Then I should walk round and round the outside
of the walls and wish her out. But I should not be able to get at her.
And nothing else would either."
Lady St. Craye was more charming than ever. Vernon knew it and
sometimes he deliberately tried to let her charm him. But though he
perceived her charm he could not feel it. Always before he had felt
what he chose to feel. Or perhaps--he hated the thought and would not
look at it--perhaps all his love affairs had been just pictures,
perhaps he had never felt anything but an artistic pleasure in their
grouping and lighting. Perhaps now he was really feeling natural human
emotion, didn't they call it? But that was just it. He wasn't. What he
felt was resentment, dissatisfaction, a growing inability to control
events or to prearrange his sensations. He felt that he himself was
controlled. He felt like a wild creature caught in a trap. The trap
was not gilded, and he was very uncomfortable in it. Even the affairs
of others almost ceased to amuse him. He could hardly call up a
cynical smile at Lady St. Craye's evident misapprehension of those
conscientious efforts of his to be charmed by her. He was only moved
to a very faint amusement when one day Bobbie Temple, smoking in the
studio, broke a long silence abruptly to say:
"Look here. Someone was saying the other day that a man can be in love
with two women at a time. Do you think it's true?"
"Two? Yes. Or twenty."
"Then it's not love," said Temple wisely.
"They call it love," said Vernon. "_I_ don't know what they mean by
it. What do _you_ mean?"
"By love?"
"Yes."
"I don't exactly know," said Temple slowly. "I suppose it's wanting to
be with a person, and thinking about nothing else. And thinking
they're the most beautiful and all that. And going over everything
that they've ever said to you, and wanting--"
"Wanting?"
"Well, I suppose if it's really love you want to marry them."
"You can't marry _them_, you know," said Vernon; "at least not
simultaneously. That's just it. Well?"
"Well that's all. If that's not love, what is?"
"I'm hanged if _I_ know," said Vernon.
"I thought you knew all about those sort of things."
"So did I," said Vernon to himself. Aloud he said:
"If you want a philosophic definition: it's passion transfigured by
tenderness--at least I've often said so."
"But can you feel that for two people at once?"
"Or," said Vernon, getting interested in his words, "it's tenderness
intoxicated by passion, and not knowing that it's drunk--"
"But can you feel that for two--"
"Oh, bother," said Vernon, "every sort of fool-fancy calls itself
love. There's the pleasure of pursuit--there's vanity, there's the
satisfaction of your own amour-propre, there's desire, there's
intellectual attraction, there's the love of beauty, there's the
artist's joy in doing what you know you can do well, and getting a
pretty woman for sole audience. You might feel one or two or twenty of
these things for one woman, and one or two or twenty different ones
for another. But if you mean do you love two women in the same way, I
say no. Thank Heaven it's new every time."
"It mayn't be the same way," said Temple, "but it's the same thing to
you--if you feel you can't bear to give either of them up."
"Well, then, you can marry one and keep on with the other. Or be
'friends' with both and marry neither. Or cut the whole show and go to
the Colonies."
"Then you have to choose between being unhappy or being a blackguard."
"My good chap, that's the situation in which our emotions are always
landing us--our confounded emotions and the conventions of Society."
"And how are you to know whether the thing's love--or--all those other
things?"
"You don't know: you can't know till it's too late for your knowing to
matter. Marriage is like spinach. You can't tell that you hate it till
you've tried it. Only--"
"Well?"
"I think I've heard it said," Vernon voiced his own sudden conviction,
very carelessly, "that love wants to give and passion wants to take.
Love wants to possess the beloved object--and to make her happy.
Desire wants possession too--but the happiness is to be for oneself;
and if there's not enough happiness for both so much the worse. If I'm
talking like a Sunday School book you've brought it on yourself."
"I like it," said Temple.
"Well, since the Dissenting surplice has fallen on me, I'll give you a
test. I believe that the more you love a woman the less your thoughts
will dwell on the physical side of the business. You want to take care
of her."
"Yes," said Temple.
"And then often," Vernon went on, surprised to find that he wanted to
help the other in his soul-searchings, "if a chap's not had much to do
with women--the women of our class, I mean--he gets a bit dazed with
them. They're all so nice, confound them. If a man felt he was falling
in love with two women at once, and he had the tiresome temperament
that takes these things seriously, it wouldn't be a bad thing for him
to go away into the country, and moon about for a few weeks, and see
which was the one that bothered his brain most. Then he'd know where
he was, and not be led like a lamb to the slaughter by the wrong one.
They can't both get him, you know, unless his intentions are strictly
dishonourable."
"I wasn't putting the case that either of them wished to get him,"
said Temple carefully.
Vernon nodded.
"Of course not. The thing simplifies itself wonderfully if neither of
them wants to get him. Even if they both do, matters are less
complicated. It's when only one of them wants him that it's the very
devil for a man not to be sure what _he_ wants. That's very clumsily
put--what I mean is--"
"I see what you mean," said Temple impatiently.
"--It's the devil for him because then he lets himself drift and the
one who wants him collars him and then of course she always turns out
to be the one he didn't want. My observations are as full of wants as
an advertisement column. But the thing to do in all relations of life
is to make up your mind what it is that you _do_ want, and then to
jolly well see that you get it. What I want is a pipe."
He filled and lighted one.
"You talk," said Temple slowly, "as though a man could get anyone--I
mean anything, he wanted."
"So he can, my dear chap, if he only wants her badly enough."
"Badly enough?"
"Badly enough to make the supreme sacrifice to get her."
"?" Temple enquired.
"Marriage," Vernon answered; "there's only one excuse for marriage."
"Excuse?"
"Excuse. And that excuse is that one couldn't help it. The only excuse
one will have to offer, some day, to the recording angel, for all
one's other faults and follies. A man who _can_ help getting married,
and doesn't, deserves all he gets."
"I don't agree with you in the least," said Temple,--"about marriage, I
mean. A man _ought_ to want to get married--"
"To anybody? Without its being anybody in particular?"
"Yes," said Temple stoutly. "If he gets to thirty without wanting to
marry any one in particular, he ought to look about till he finds some
one he does want. It's the right and proper thing to marry and have
kiddies."
"Oh, if you're going to be Patriarchal," said Vernon. "What a symbolic
dialogue! We begin with love and we end with marriage! There's the
tragedy of romance, in a nut-shell. Yes, life's a beastly rotten show,
and the light won't last more than another two hours."
[Illustration: "Unfinished, but a disquieting likeness"]
"Your hints are always as delicate as gossamer," said Temple. "Don't
throw anything at me. I'm going."
He went, leaving his secret in Vernon's hands.
"Poor old Temple! That's the worst of walking carefully all your days:
you do come such an awful cropper when you do come one. Two women. The
Jasmine lady must have been practising on his poor little heart.
Heigh-ho, I wish she could do as much for me! And the other one?
_Her_--I suppose."
The use of the pronoun, the disuse of the grammar pulled him up short.
"By Jove," he said, "that's what people say when--But I'm not in
love--with anybody. I want to work."
But he didn't work. He seldom did now. And when he did the work was
not good. His easel held most often the portrait of Betty that had
been begun at Long Barton--unfinished, but a disquieting likeness. He
walked up and down his room not thinking, but dreaming. His dreams
took him to the warren, in the pure morning light; he saw Betty; he
told himself what he had said, what she had said.
"And it was I who advised her to come to Paris. If only I'd known
then--"
He stopped and asked himself what he knew now that he had not known
then, refused himself the answer, and went to call on Lady St. Craye.
Christmas came and went; the black winds of January swept the
Boulevards, and snow lay white on the walls of court and garden.
Betty's life was full now.
The empty cage that had opened its door to love at Long Barton had now
other occupants. Ambition was beginning to grow its wing feathers. She
could draw--at least some day she would be able to draw. Already she
had won a prize with a charcoal study of a bare back. But she did not
dare to name this to her father, and when he wrote to ask what was the
subject of her prize drawing she replied with misleading truth that it
was a study from nature. His imagination pictured a rustic cottage, a
water-wheel, a castle and mountains in the distance and cows and a
peasant in the foreground.
But though her life was now crowded with new interests that
first-comer was not ousted. Only he had changed his plumage and she
called him Friendship. She blushed sometimes and stamped her foot when
she remembered those meetings in the summer mornings, her tremors, her
heart-beats. And oh, the "drivel" she had written in her diary!
"Girls ought never to be allowed to lead that 'sheltered home life,'"
she said to Miss Voscoe, "with nothing real in it. It makes your mind
all swept and garnished and then you hurry to fill it up with
rubbish."
"That's so," said her friend.
"If ever _I_ have a daughter," said Betty, "she shall set to work at
_something_ definite the very instant she leaves school--if it's only
Hebrew or algebra. Not just Parish duties that she didn't begin, and
doesn't want to go on with. But something that's her _own_ work."
"You're beginning to see straight. I surmised you would by and by. But
don't you go to the other end of the see-saw, Miss Daisy-Face!"
"What do you mean?" asked Betty. It was the morning interval when
students eat patisserie out of folded papers. The two were on the
window ledge of the Atelier, looking down on the convent garden where
already the buds were breaking to green leaf.
"Why, there's room for the devil even if your flat ain't swept and
garnished. He folds up mighty small, and gets into less space than a
poppy-seed."
"What do you mean?" asked Betty again.
"I mean that Vernon chap," said Miss Voscoe down-rightly. "I told you
to change partners every now and then. But with you it's that Vernon
this week and last week and the week after next."
"I've known him longer than I have the others, and I like him," said
Betty.
"Oh, he's all right; fine and dandy!" replied Miss Voscoe. "He's a big
man, too, in his own line. Not the kind you expect to see knocking
about at a students' crémerie. Does he give you lessons?"
"He did at home," said Betty.
"Take care he doesn't teach you what's the easiest thing in creation
to learn about a man."
"What's that?" Betty did not like to have to ask the question.
"Why, how not to be able to do without him, of course," said Miss
Voscoe.
"You're quite mistaken," said Betty eagerly: "one of the reasons I
don't mind going about with him so much is that he's engaged to be
married."
"Acquainted with the lady?"
"Yes," said Betty, sheltering behind the convention that an
introduction at a tea-party constitutes acquaintanceship. She was glad
Miss Voscoe had not asked her if she _knew_ Lady St. Craye.
"Oh, well"--Miss Voscoe jumped up and shook the flakes of pastry off
her pinafore--"if she doesn't mind, I guess I've got no call to. But
why don't you give that saint in the go-to-hell collar a turn?"
"Meaning?"
"Mr. Temple. He admires you no end. He'd be always in your pocket if
you'd let him. He's worth fifty of the other man _as_ a man, if he
isn't as an artist. I keep my eyes skinned--and the Sketch Club gives
me a chance to tot them both up. I guess I can size up a man some. The
other man isn't _fast_. That's how it strikes me."
"Fast?" echoed Betty, bewildered.
"Fast dye: fast colour. I suspicion he'd go wrong a bit in the wash.
Temple's fast colour, warranted not to run."
"I know," said Betty, "but I don't care for the colour, and I'm rather
tired of the pattern."
"I wish you'd tell me which of the two was the three-polite-word man."
"I know you do. But surely you see _now_?"
"You're too cute. Just as likely it's the Temple one, and that's why
you're so sick of the pattern by now."
"Didn't I tell you you were clever?" laughed Betty.
But, all the same, next evening when Vernon called to take her to
dinner, she said:
"Couldn't we go somewhere else? I'm tired of Garnier's."
Vernon was tired of Garnier's, too.
"Do you know Thirion's?" he said. "Thirion's in the Boulevard St.
Germain, Thirion's where Du Maurier used to go, and Thackeray, and all
sorts of celebrated people; and where the host treats you like a
friend, and the waiter like a brother?"
"I should love to be treated like a waiter's brother. Do let's go,"
said Betty.
"He's a dream of a waiter," Vernon went on as they turned down the
lighted slope of the Rue de Rennes, "has a voice like a trumpet, and
takes a pride in calling twenty orders down the speaking-tube in one
breath, ending up with a shout. He never makes a mistake either. Shall
we walk, or take the tram, or a carriage?"
The Fate who was amusing herself by playing with Betty's destiny had
sent Temple to call on Lady St. Craye that afternoon, and Lady St.
Craye had seemed bored, so bored that she had hardly appeared to
listen to Temple's talk, which, duly directed by her quite early into
the channel she desired for it, flowed in a constant stream over the
name, the history, the work, the personality of Vernon. When at last
the stream ebbed Lady St. Craye made a pretty feint of stifling a
yawn.
"Oh, how horrid I am!" she cried with instant penitence, "and how very
rude you will think me! I think I have the blues to-day, or, to be
more French and more poetic, the black butterflies. It _is_ so sweet
of you to have let me talk to you. I know I've been as stupid as an
owl. Won't you stay and dine with me? I'll promise to cheer up if you
will."
Mr. Temple would, more than gladly.
"Or no," Lady St. Craye went on, "that'll be dull for you, and perhaps
even for me if I begin to think I'm boring you. Couldn't we do
something desperate--dine at a Latin Quarter restaurant for instance?
What was that place you were telling me of, where the waiter has a
wonderful voice and makes the orders he shouts down the tube sound
like the recitative of the basso at the Opera."
"Thirion's," said Temple; "but it wasn't I, it was Vernon."
"Thirion's, that's it!" Lady St. Craye broke in before Vernon's name
left his lips. "Would you like to take me there to dine, Mr. Temple?"
It appeared that Mr. Temple would like it of all things.
"Then I'll go and put on my hat," said she and trailed her sea-green
tea-gown across the room. At the door she turned to say: "It will be
fun, won't it?"--and to laugh delightedly, like a child who is
promised a treat.
That was how it happened that Lady St. Craye, brushing her dark furs
against the wall of Thirion's staircase, came, followed by Temple,
into the room where Betty and Vernon, their heads rather close
together, were discussing the menu.
This was what Lady St. Craye had thought of more than a little. Yet it
was not what she had expected. Vernon, perhaps, yes: or the girl. But
not Vernon and the girl together. Not now. At her very first visit. It
was not for a second that she hesitated. Temple had not even had time
to see who it was to whom she spoke before she had walked over to the
two, and greeted them.
"How perfectly delightful!" she said. "Miss Desmond, I've been meaning
to call on you, but it's been so cold, and I've been so cross, I've
called on nobody. Ah, Mr. Vernon, you too?"
She looked at the vacant chair near his, and Vernon had to say:
"You'll join us, of course?"
So the two little parties made one party, and one of the party was
angry and annoyed, and no one of the party was quite pleased, and all
four concealed what they felt, and affected what they did not feel,
with as much of the tact of the truly well-bred as each could call up.
In this polite exercise Lady St. Craye was easily first.
She was charming to Temple, she was very nice to Betty, and she spoke
to Vernon with a delicate, subtle, faint suggestion of proprietorship
in her tone. At least that was how it seemed to Betty. To Temple it
seemed that she was tacitly apologising to an old friend for having
involuntarily broken up a dinner à deux. To Vernon her tone seemed to
spell out an all but overmastering jealousy proudly overmastered. All
that pretty fiction of there being now no possibility of sentiment
between him and her flickered down and died. And with it the interest
that he had felt in her. "_She_ have unexplored reserves? Bah!" he
told himself, "she is just like the rest." He felt that she had not
come from the other side of the river just to dine with Temple. He
knew she had been looking for him. And the temptation assailed him to
reward her tender anxiety by devoting himself wholly to Betty. Then he
remembered what he had let Betty believe, as to the relations in which
he stood to this other woman.
His face lighted up with a smile of answering tenderness. Without
neglecting Betty he seemed to lay the real homage of his heart at the
feet of that heart's lady.
"By Jove," he thought, as the dark, beautiful eyes met his in a look
of more tenderness than he had seen in them this many a day, "if only
she knew how she's playing my game for me!"
Betty, for her part, refused to recognise a little pain that gnawed at
her heart and stole all taste from the best dishes of Thirion's. She
talked as much as possible to Temple, because it was the proper thing
to do, she told herself, and she talked very badly. Lady St. Craye was
transfigured by Vernon's unexpected acceptance of her delicate
advances, intoxicated by the sudden flutter of a dream she had only
known with wings in full flight, into the region where dreams, clasped
to the heart, become realities. She grew momently more beautiful. The
host, going from table to table, talking easily to his guests, could
not keep his fascinated eyes from her face. The proprietor of
Thirion's had good taste, and knew a beautiful woman when he saw her.
Betty's eyes, too, strayed more and more often from her plate, and
from Temple to the efflorescence of this new beauty-light. She felt
mean and poor, ill-dressed, shabby, dowdy, dull, weary and
uninteresting. Her face felt tired. It was an effort to smile.
When the dinner was over she said abruptly:
"If you'll excuse me--I've got a dreadful headache--no, I don't want
anyone to see me home. Just put me in a carriage."
She insisted, and it was done.
When the carriage drew up in front of the closed porte cochère of 57
Boulevard Montparnasse, Betty was surprised and wounded to discover
that she was crying.
"Well, you _knew_ they were engaged!" she said as she let herself into
her room with her latchkey. "You knew they were engaged! What did you
expect?"
Temple could not remember afterwards exactly how he got separated from
the others. It just happened, as such unimportant things will. He
missed them somehow, at a crossing, looked about him in vain, shrugged
his shoulders and went home.
Lady St. Craye hesitated a moment with her latchkey in her hand. Then
she threw open the door of her flat.
"Come in, won't you?" she said, and led the way into her fire-warm,
flower-scented, lamplit room. Vernon also hesitated a moment. Then he
followed. He stood on the hearth-rug with his back to the wood fire.
He did not speak.
Somehow it was difficult for her to take up their talk at the place
and in the strain where it had broken off when Betty proclaimed her
headache.
Yet this was what she must do, it seemed to her, or lose all the
ground she had gained.
"You've been very charming to me this evening," she said at last, and
knew as she said it that it was the wrong thing to say.
"You flatter me," said Vernon.
"I was so surprised to see you there," she went on.
Vernon was surprised that she should say it. He had thought more
highly of her powers.
"The pleasure was mine," he said in his most banal tones, "the
surprise, alas, was all for you--and all you gained."
"Weren't _you_ surprised?"--Lady St. Craye was angry and humiliated.
That she--she--should find herself nervous, at fault, find herself
playing the game as crudely as any shopgirl!
"No," said Vernon.
"But you couldn't have expected me?" She knew quite well what she was
doing, but she was too nervous to stop herself.
"I've always expected you," he said deliberately, "ever since I told
you that I often dined at Thirion's."
"You expected me to--"
"To run after me?" said Vernon with paraded ingenuousness; "yes,
didn't you?"
"_I_ run after _you_? You--" she stopped short, for she saw in his
eyes that, if she let him quarrel with her now, it was forever.
He at the same moment awoke from the trance of anger that had come
upon him when he found himself alone with her; anger at her, and at
himself, fanned to fury by the thought of Betty and of what she, at
this moment, must be thinking. He laughed:
"Ah, don't break my heart!" he said, "I've been so happy all the
evening fancying that you had--you had--"
"Had what?" she asked with dry lips, for the caress in his tone was
such as to deceive the very elect.
"Had felt just the faintest little touch of interest in me. Had cared
to know how I spent my evenings, and with whom!"
"You thought I could stoop to spy on you?" she asked. "Monsieur
flatters himself."
The anger in him was raising its head again.
"Monsieur very seldom does," he said.
She took that as she chose to take it.
"No, you're beautifully humble."
"And you're proudly beautiful."
She flushed and looked down.
"Don't you like to be told that you're beautiful?"
"Not by you. Not like that!"
"And so you didn't come to Thirion's to see me? How one may deceive
oneself! The highest hopes we cherish here! Another beautiful illusion
gone!"
She said to herself: "I can do nothing with him in this mood," and
aloud she could not help saying: "Was it a beautiful one?"
"Very," he answered gaily. "Can you doubt it?"
She found nothing to say. And even as she fought for words she
suddenly found that he had caught her in his arms, and kissed her, and
that the sound of the door that had banged behind him was echoing in
her ears.
She put her hands to her head. She could not see clearly.
CHAPTER XVII.
INTERVENTIONS.
That kiss gave Lady St. Craye furiously to think, as they say in
France.
Had it meant--? What had it meant? Was it the crown of her hopes, her
dreams? Was it possible that now, at last, after all that had gone
before, she might win him--had won him, even?
The sex-instinct said "No."
Then, if "No" were the answer to that question, the kiss had been mere
brutality. It had meant just:
"You chose to follow me--to play the spy. What the deuce do you want?
Is it this? God knows you're welcome," the kiss following.
The kiss stung. It was not the first. But the others--even the last of
them, two years before, had not had that sting.
Lady St. Craye, biting her lips in lonely dissection of herself and of
him, dared take no comfort. Also, she no longer dared to follow him,
to watch him, to spy on him.
In her jasmine-scented leisure Lady St. Craye analysed herself, and
him and Her. Above all Her--who was Betty. To find out how it all
seemed to her--that, presently, seemed to Lady St. Craye the one
possible, the one important thing. So after she had given a few days
to the analysis of that kiss, had failed to reach certainty as to its
elements, had writhed in her failure, and bitterly resented the
mysteries constituent that falsified all her calculations, she dressed
herself beautifully, and went to call on the constituent, Betty.
Betty was at home. She was drawing at a table, cunningly placed at
right angles to the window. She rose with a grace that Lady St. Craye
had not seen in her. She was dressed in a plain gown, that hung from
the shoulders in long, straight, green folds. Her hair was down.--And
Betty had beautiful hair. Lady St. Craye's hair had never been long.
Betty's fell nearly to her knees.
"Oh, was the door open?" she said. "I didn't know, I've--I'm so
sorry--I've been washing my hair."
"It's lovely," said the other woman, with an appreciation quite
genuine. "What a pity you can't always wear it like that!"
"It's long," said Betty disparagingly, "but the colour's horrid. What
Miss Voscoe calls Boy colour."
"Boy colour?"
"Oh, just nothing in particular. Mousy."
"If you had golden hair, or black, Miss Desmond, you'd have a quite
unfair advantage over the rest of us."
"I don't think so," said Betty very simply; "you see, no one ever sees
it down."
"What a charming place you've got here," Lady St. Craye went on.
"Yes," said Betty, "it is nice," and she thought of Paula.
"And do you live here all alone?"
"Yes: I had a friend with me at first, but she's gone back to
England."
"Don't you find it very dull?"
"Oh, no! I know lots of people now."
"And they come to see you here?"
Lady St. Craye had decided that it was not necessary to go delicately.
The girl was evidently stupid, and one need not pick one's words.
"Yes," said Betty.
"Mr. Vernon's a great friend of yours, isn't he?"
"Yes."
"I suppose you see a great deal of him?"
"Yes. Is there anything else you would like to know?"
The scratch was so sudden, so fierce, so feline that for a moment Lady
St. Craye could only look blankly at her hostess. Then she recovered
herself enough to say:
"Oh, I'm so sorry! Was I asking a lot of questions? It's a dreadful
habit of mine, I'm afraid, when I'm interested in people."
Betty scratched again quite calmly and quite mercilessly.
"It's quite natural that Mr. Vernon should interest you. But I don't
think I'm likely to be able to tell you anything about him that you
don't know. May I get you some tea?"
It was impossible for Lady St. Craye to reply: "I meant that I was
interested in _you_--not in Mr. Vernon;" so she said:
"Thank you--that will be delightful."
Betty went along the little passage to her kitchen, and her visitor
was left to revise her impressions.
When Betty came back with the tea-tray, her hair was twisted up. The
kettle could be heard hissing in the tiny kitchen.
"Can't I help you?" Lady St. Craye asked, leaning back indolently in
the most comfortable chair.
"No, thank you: it's all done now."
[Illustration: "'No, thank you it's all done now'"]
Betty poured the tea for the other woman to drink. Her own remained
untasted. She exerted herself to manufacture small-talk, was very
amiable, very attentive. Lady St. Craye almost thought she must have
dreamed those two sharp cat-scratches at the beginning of the
interview. But presently Betty's polite remarks came less readily.
There were longer intervals of silence. And Lady St. Craye for once
was at a loss. Her nerve was gone. She dared not tempt the claws
again. After the longest pause of all Betty said suddenly:
"I think I know why you came to-day."
"I came to see you, because you're a friend of Mr. Vernon's."
"You came to see me because you wanted to find out exactly how much
I'm a friend of Mr. Vernon's. Didn't you?"
Candour is the most disconcerting of the virtues.
"Not in the least," Lady St. Craye found herself saying. "I came to
see you--because--as I said."
"I don't think it is much use your coming to see me," Betty went on,
"though, if you meant it kindly--But you didn't--you didn't! If you
had it wouldn't have made any difference. We should never get on with
each other, never."
"Really, Miss Desmond"--Lady St. Craye clutched her card-case and half
rose--"I begin to think we never should."
Betty's ignorance of the usages of good society stood her friend. She
ignored, not consciously, but by the prompting of nature, the social
law which decrees that one should not speak of things that really
interest one.
"Do sit down," she said. "I'm glad you came--because I know exactly
what you mean, now."
"If the knowledge were only mutual!" sighed Lady St. Craye, and found
courage to raise eyebrows wearily.
"You don't like my going about with Mr. Vernon. Well, you've only to
say so. Only when you're married you'll find you've got your work cut
out to keep him from having any friends except you."
Lady St. Craye had the best of reasons for believing this likely to be
the truth. She said:
"When I'm married?"
"Yes," said Betty firmly. "You're jealous; you've no cause to be--and
I tell you that because I think being jealous must hurt. But it would
have been nicer of you, if you'd come straight to me and said: 'Look
here, I don't like you going about with the man I'm engaged to.' I
should have understood then and respected you. But to come like a
child's Guide to Knowledge--"
The other woman was not listening. "Engaged to him!"--The words sang
deliciously, disquietingly in her ears.
"But who said I was engaged to him?"
"He did, of course. He isn't ashamed of it--if you are."
"He told you that!"
"Yes. Now aren't you ashamed of yourself?"
Country-bred Betty, braced by the straightforward directness of Miss
Voscoe, and full of the nervous energy engendered by a half-understood
trouble, had routed, for a moment, the woman of the world. But only
for a moment. Then Lady St. Craye, unable to estimate the gain or loss
of the encounter, pulled herself together to make good her retreat.
"Yes," she said, with her charming smile. "I am ashamed of myself. I
_was_ jealous--I own it. But I shouldn't have shown it as I did if I'd
known the sort of girl you are. Come, forgive me! Can't you
understand--and forgive?"
"It was all my fault." The generosity of Betty hastened to meet what
it took to be the generosity of the other. "Forgive me. I won't see
him again at all--if you don't want me to."
"No, no." Even at that moment, in one illuminating flash, Lady St.
Craye saw the explications that must follow the announcement of that
renunciatory decision. "No, no. If you do that I shall feel sure that
you don't forgive me for being so silly. Just let everything go
on--won't you? And please, please don't tell him anything about--about
to-day."
"How could I?" asked Betty.
"But promise you won't. You know--men are so vain. I should hate him
to know"--she hesitated and then finished the sentence with fine
art--"to know--how much I care."
"Of course you care," said Betty downrightly. "You ought to care. It
would be horrid of you if you didn't."
"But I don't, _now_. Now I _know_ you, Miss Desmond. I understand so
well--and I like to think of his being with you."
Even to Betty's ears this did not ring quite true.
"You like--?" she said.
"I mean I quite understand now. I thought--I don't know what I
thought. You're so pretty, you know. And he has had so very
many--love-affairs."
"He hasn't one with me," said Betty briefly.
"Ah, you're still angry. And no wonder. Do forgive me, Miss Desmond,
and let's be friends."
Betty's look as she gave her hand was doubtful. But the hand was
given.
"And you'll keep my poor little secret?"
"I should have thought you would have been proud for him to know how
much you care."
"Ah, my dear," Lady St. Craye became natural for an instant under the
transfiguring influence of her real thoughts as she spoke them, "my
dear, don't believe it! When a man's sure of you he doesn't care any
more. It's while he's not quite sure that he cares."
"I don't think that's so always," said Betty.
"Ah, believe me, there are 'more ways of killing a cat than choking it
with butter.' Forgive the homely aphorism. When you have a lover of
your own--or perhaps you have now?"
"Perhaps I have." Betty stood on guard with a steady face.
"Well, when you have--or if you have--remember never to let him be
quite sure. It's the only way."
The two parted, with a mutually kindly feeling that surprised one as
much as the other. Lady St. Craye drove home contrasting bitterly the
excellence of her maxims with the ineptitude of her practice. She had
let him know that she cared. And he had left her. That was two years
ago. And, now that she had met him again, when she might have played
the part she had recommended to that chit with the long hair--the part
she knew to be the wise one--she had once more suffered passion to
overcome wisdom, and had shown him that she loved him. And he had
kissed her.
She blushed in the dusk of her carriage for the shame of that kiss.
But he had told that girl that he was engaged to her.
A delicious other flush replaced the blush of shame. Why should he
have done that unless he really meant--? In that case the kiss was
nothing to blush about. And yet it was. She knew it.
She had time to think in the days that followed, days that brought
Temple more than once to her doors, but Vernon never.
Betty left alone let down her damp hair and tried to resume her
drawing. But it would not do. The emotion of the interview was too
recent. Her heart was beating still with anger, and resentment, and
other feelings less easily named.
Vernon was to come to fetch her at seven. She would not face him. Let
him go and dine with the woman he belonged to!
Betty went out at half-past six. She would not go to Garnier's, nor to
Thirion's. That was where he would look for her.
She walked steadily on, down the boulevard. She would dine at some
place she had never been to before. A sickening vision of that first
night in Paris swam before her. She saw again the Café d'Harcourt,
heard the voices of the women who had spoken to Paula, saw the eyes of
the men who had been the companions of those women. In that rout the
face of Temple shone--clear cut, severe. She remembered the instant
resentment that had thrilled her at his protective attitude,
remembered it and wondered at it a little. She would not have felt
that now. She knew her Paris better than she had done then.
And with the thought, the face of Temple came towards her out of the
crowd. He raised his hat in response to her frigid bow, and had almost
passed her, when she spoke on an impulse that surprised herself.
"Oh--Mr. Temple!"
He stopped and turned.
"I was looking for a place to dine. I'm tired of Garnier's and
Thirion's."
He hesitated. And he, too, remembered the night at the Café
d'Harcourt, when she had disdained his advice and gone back to take
the advice of Paula.
He caught himself assuring himself that a man need not be ashamed to
risk being snubbed--making a fool of himself even--if he could do any
good. So he said: "You know I have horrid old-fashioned ideas about
women," and stopped short.
"Don't you know of any good quiet place near here?" said Betty.
"I think women ought to be taken care of. But some of them--Miss
Desmond, I'm so afraid of you--I'm afraid of boring you--"
Remorse stirred her.
"You've always been most awfully kind," she said warmly. "I've often
wanted to tell you that I'm sorry about that first time I saw you--I'm
not sorry for what I _did_," she added in haste; "I can never be
anything but glad for that. But I'm sorry I seemed ungrateful to you."
"Now you give me courage," he said. "I do know a quiet little place
quite near here. And, as you haven't any of your friends with you,
won't you take pity on me and let me dine with you?"
"You're sure you're not giving up some nice engagement--just to--to be
kind to me?" she asked. And the forlornness of her tone made him
almost forget that he had half promised to join a party of Lady St.
Craye's.
"I should like to come with you--I should like it of all things," he
said; and he said it convincingly.
They dined together, and the dinner was unexpectedly pleasant to both
of them. They talked of England, of wood, field and meadow, and Betty
found herself talking to him of the garden at home and of the things
that grew there, as she had talked to Paula, and as she had never
talked to Vernon.
"It's so lovely all the year," she said. "When the last mignonette's
over, there are the chrysanthemums, and then the Christmas roses, and
ever so early in January the winter aconite and the snow-drops, and
the violets under the south wall. And then the little green daffodil
leaves come up and the buds, though it's weeks before they turn into
flowers. And if it's a mild winter the primroses--just little baby
ones--seem to go on all the time."
"Yes," he said, "I know. And the wallflowers, they're green all the
time.--And the monthly roses, they flower at Christmas. And then when
the real roses begin to bud--and when June comes--and you're drunk
with the scent of red roses--the kind you always long for at
Christmas."
"Oh, yes," said Betty--"do you feel like that too? And if you get
them, they're soft limp-stalked things, like caterpillars half
disguised as roses by some incompetent fairy. Not like the stiff solid
heavy velvet roses with thick green leaves and heaps of thorns. Those
are the roses one longs for."
"Yes," he said. "Those are the roses one longs for." And an odd pause
punctuated the sentence.
But the pause did not last. There was so much to talk of--now that
barrier of resentment, wattled with remorse, was broken down. It was
an odd revelation to each--the love of the other for certain authors,
certain pictures, certain symphonies, certain dramas. The discovery of
this sort of community of tastes is like the meeting in far foreign
countries of a man who speaks the tongue of one's mother land. The two
lingered long over their coffee, and the "Grand Marnier" which their
liking for "The Garden of Lies" led to their ordering. Betty had
forgotten Vernon, forgotten Lady St. Craye, in the delightful
interchange of:
"Oh, I do like--"
"And don't you like--?"
"And isn't that splendid?"
These simple sentences, interchanged, took on the value of intimate
confidences.
"I've had such a jolly time," Temple said. "I haven't had such a talk
for ages."
And yet all the talk had been mere confessions of faith--in Ibsen, in
Browning, in Maeterlinck, in English gardens, in Art for Art's sake,
and in Whistler and Beethoven.
"I've liked it too," said Betty.
"And it's awfully jolly," he went on, "to feel that you've forgiven
me"--the speech suddenly became difficult,--"at least I mean to say--"
he ended lamely.
"It's I who ought to be forgiven," said Betty. "I'm very glad I met
you. I've enjoyed our talk ever so much."
Vernon spent an empty evening, and waylaid Betty as she left her class
next day.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I couldn't help it. I suddenly felt I wanted
something different. So I dined at a new place."
"Alone?" said Vernon.
"No," said Betty with her chin in the air.
Vernon digested, as best he might, his first mouthful of
jealousy--real downright sickening jealousy. The sensation astonished
him so much that he lacked the courage to dissect it.
"Will you dine with me to-night?" was all he found to say.
"With pleasure," said Betty. But it was not with pleasure that she
dined. There was something between her and Vernon. Both felt it, and
both attributed it to the same cause.
The three dinners that followed in the next fortnight brought none of
that old lighthearted companionship which had been the gayest of
table-decorations. Something was gone--lost--as though a royal rose
had suddenly faded, a rainbow-coloured bubble had broken.
"I'm glad," said Betty; "if he's engaged, I don't want to feel happy
with him."
She did not feel happy without him. The Inward Monitor grew more and
more insistent. She caught herself wondering how Temple, with the
serious face and the honest eyes, would regard the lies, the
trickeries, the whole tissue of deceit that had won her her chance of
following her own art, of living her own life.
Vernon understood, presently, that not even that evening at Thirion's
could give the key to this uncomforting change. He had not seen Lady
St. Craye since the night of the kiss.
It was after the fourth flat dinner with Betty that he said good-night
to her early and abruptly, and drove to Lady St. Craye's.
She was alone. She rose to greet him, and he saw that her eyes were
dark-rimmed, and her lips rough.
"This is very nice of you," she said. "It's nearly a month since I saw
you."
"Yes," he said. "I know it is. Do you remember the last time? Hasn't
that taught you not to play with me?"
The kiss was explained now. Lady St. Craye shivered.
"I don't know what you mean?" she said, feebly.
"Oh, yes, you do! You're much too clever not to understand. Come to
think of it, you're much too everything--too clever, too beautiful,
too charming, too everything."
"You overwhelm me," she made herself say.
"Not at all. You know your points. What I want to know is just one
thing--and that's the thing you're going to tell me."
She drew her dry lips inward to moisten them.
"What do you want to know? Why do you speak to me like that? What have
I done?"
"That's what you're going to tell me."
"I shall tell you nothing--while you ask in that tone."
"Won't you? How can I persuade you?" his tone caressed and stung.
"What arguments can I use? Must I kiss you again?"
She drew herself up, called wildly on all her powers to resent the
insult. Nothing came at her call.
"What do you want me to tell you?" she asked, and her eyes implored
the mercy she would not consciously have asked.
He saw, and he came a little nearer to her--looking down at her
upturned face with eyes before which her own fell.
"You don't want another kiss?" he said. "Then tell me what you've been
saying to Miss Desmond."
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE TRUTH.
There was a silence.
"Come, my pretty Jasmine lady, speak the truth."
"I will: What a brute you are!"
"So another lady told me a few months ago. Come, tell me."
"Why should I tell you anything?" She tried to touch her tone with
scorn.
"Because I choose. You thought you could play with me and fool me and
trick me out of what I mean to have--"
"What you mean to have?"
"Yes, what I mean to have. I mean to marry Miss Desmond--if she'll
have me."
"_You_--mean to marry? Saul is among the prophets with a vengeance!"
The scorn came naturally to her voice now.
Vernon stood as if turned to stone. Nothing had ever astonished him so
much as those four words, spoken in his own voice, "I mean to marry."
He repeated them. "I mean to marry Miss Desmond, if she'll have me.
And it's your doing."
"Of course," she shrugged her shoulders. "Naturally it would be. Won't
you sit down? You look so uncomfortable. Those French tragedy scenes
with the hero hat in one hand and gloves in the other always seem to
me so comic."
That was her score, the first. He put down the hat and gloves and came
towards her. And as he came he hastily sketched his plan of action.
When he reached her it was ready formed. His anger was always short
lived. It had died down and left him competent as ever to handle the
scene.
He took her hands, pushed her gently into a chair near the table, and
sat down beside her with his elbows on the table and his head in his
hands.
"Forgive me, dear," he said. "I was a brute. Forgive me--and help me.
No one can help me but you."
It was a master-stroke: and he had staked a good deal on it. The stake
was not lost. She found no words.
"My dear, sweet Jasmine lady," he said, "let me talk to you. Let me
tell you everything. I can talk to you as I can talk to no one else,
because I know you're fond of me. You are fond of me--a little, aren't
you--for the sake of old times?"
"Yes," she said, "I am fond of you."
"And you forgive me--you do forgive me for being such a brute? I
hardly knew what I was doing."
"Yes," she said, speaking as one speaks in dreams, "I forgive you."
"Thank you," he said humbly; "you were always generous. And you always
understand."
"Wait--wait. I'll attend to you presently," she was saying to her
heart. "Yes, I know it's all over. I know the game's up. Let me pull
through this without disgracing myself, and I'll let you hurt me as
much as you like afterwards."
"Tell me," she said gently to Vernon, "tell me everything."
He was silent, his face still hidden. He had cut the knot of an
impossible situation and he was pausing to admire the cleverness of
the stroke. In two minutes he had blotted out the last six
months--months in which he and she had been adversaries. He had thrown
himself on her mercy, and he had done wisely. Never, even in the days
when he had carefully taught himself to be in love with her, had he
liked her so well as now, when she got up from her chair to come and
lay her hand softly on his shoulder and to say:
"My poor boy,--but there's nothing for you to be unhappy about. Tell
me all about it--from the very beginning."
There was a luxurious temptation in the idea. It was not the first
time, naturally, that Vernon had "told all about it" with a
sympathetic woman-hand on his shoulder. He knew the strategic value of
confidences. But always he had made the confidences fit the
occasion--serve the end he had in view. Now, such end as had been in
view was gained. He knew that it was only a matter of time now, before
she should tell him of her own accord, what he could never by any
brutality have forced her to tell. And the temptation to speak, for
once, the truth about himself was overmastering. It is a luxury one
can so very rarely afford. Most of us go the whole long life-way
without tasting it. There was nothing to lose by speaking the truth.
Moreover, he must say something, and why not the truth? So he said:
"It all comes of that confounded habit of mine of wanting to be in
love."
"Yes," she said, "you were always so anxious to be--weren't you? And
you never were--till now."
The echo of his hidden thought made it easier for him to go on.
"It was at Long Barton," he said,--"it's a little dead and alive place
in Kent. I was painting that picture that you like--the one that's in
the Salon, and I was bored to death, and she walked straight into the
composition in a pink gown that made her look like a La France rose
that has been rained on--you know the sort of pink-turning-to-mauve."
"And it was love at first sight?" said she, and took away her hand.
"Not it," said Vernon, catching the hand and holding it; "it was just
the usual thing. I wanted it to be like all the others."
"Like mine," she said, looking down on him.
"Nothing could be like _that_," he had the grace to say, looking up at
her: "that was only like the others in one thing--that it couldn't
last.--What am I thinking of to let you stand there?"
He got up and led her to the divan. They sat down side by side. She
wanted to laugh, to sing, to scream. Here was he sitting by her like a
lover--holding her hand, the first time these two years, three years
nearly--his voice tender as ever. And he was telling her about Her.
"No," he went on, burrowing his shoulder comfortably in the cushions,
"it was just the ordinary outline sketch. But it was coming very
nicely. She was beginning to be interested, and I had taught myself
almost all that was needed--I didn't want to marry her; I didn't want
anything except those delicate delightful emotions that come before
one is quite, quite sure that she--But you know."
"Yes," she said. "I know."
"Then her father interfered, and vulgarized the whole thing. He's a
parson--a weak little rat, but I was sorry for him. Then an aunt came
on the scene--a most gentlemanly lady,"--he laughed a little at the
recollection,--"and I promised not to go out of my way to see Her
again. It was quite easy. The bloom was already brushed from the
adventure. I finished the picture, and went to Brittany and forgot the
whole silly business."
"There was some one in Brittany, of course?"
"Of course," said he; "there always is. I had a delightful summer.
Then in October, sitting at the Café de la Paix, I saw her pass. It
was the same day I saw you."
"Before or after you saw me?"
"After."
"Then if I'd stopped--if I'd made you come for a drive then and there,
you'd never have seen her?"
"That's so," said Vernon; "and by Heaven I almost wish you had!"
The wish was a serpent in her heart. She said: "Go on."
And he went on, and, warming to his subject, grew eloquent on the
events of the winter, his emotions, his surmises as to Betty's
emotions, his slow awakening to the knowledge that now, for the first
time--and so on and so forth.
"You don't know how I tried to fall in love with you again," he said,
and kissed her hand. "You're prettier than she is, and cleverer and a
thousand times more adorable. But it's no good; it's a sort of
madness."
"You never were in love with me."
"No: I don't think I was: but I was happier with you than I shall ever
be with her for all that. Talk of the joy of love! Love hurts--hurts
damnably. I beg your pardon."
"Yes. I believe it's painful. Go on."
He went on. He was enjoying himself, now, thoroughly.
"And so," the long tale ended, "when I found she had scruples about
going about with me alone--because her father had suggested that I was
in love with her--I--I let her think that I was engaged to you."
"That is too much!" she cried and would have risen: but he kept her
hand fast.
"Ah, don't be angry," he pleaded. "You see, I knew you didn't care
about me a little bit: and I never thought you and she would come
across each other."
"So you knew all the time that I didn't care?" her self-respect
clutched at the spar he threw out.
"Of course. I'm not such a fool as to think--Ah, forgive me for
letting her think that. It bought me all I cared to ask for of her
time. She's so young, so innocent--she thought it was quite all right
as long as I belonged to someone else, and couldn't make love to her."
"And haven't you?"
"Never--never once--since the days at Long Barton when it had to be
'made;' and even then I only made the very beginnings of it. Now--"
"I suppose you've been very, very happy?"
"Don't I tell you? I've never been so wretched in my life! I despise
myself. I've always made everything go as I wanted it to go. Now I'm
like a leaf in the wind--_Pauvre feuille desechée_, don't you know.
And I hate it. And I hate her being here without anyone to look after
her. A hundred times I've had it on the tip of my pen to send that
doddering old Underwood an anonymous letter, telling him all about
it."
"Underwood?"
"Her step-father.--Oh, I forgot--I didn't tell you." He proceeded to
tell her Betty's secret, the death of Madame Gautier and Betty's bid
for freedom.
"I see," she said slowly. "Well, there's no great harm done. But I
wish you'd trusted me before. You wanted to know, at the beginning of
this remarkable interview," she laughed rather forlornly, "what I had
told Miss Desmond. Well, I went to see her, and when she told me that
you'd told her you were engaged to me, I--I just acted the jealous a
little bit. I thought I was helping you--playing up to you. I suppose
I overdid it. I'm sorry."
"The question is," said he anxiously, "whether she'll forgive me for
that lie. She's most awfully straight, you know."
"She seems to have lied herself," Lady St. Craye could not help
saying.
"Ah, yes--but only to her father."
"That hardly counts, you think?"
"It's not the same thing as lying to the person you love. I wish--I
wonder whether you'd mind if I never told her it was a lie? Couldn't I
tell her that we were engaged but you've broken it off? That you found
you liked Temple better, or something?"
She gasped before the sudden vision of the naked gigantic egotism of a
man in love.
"You can tell her what you like," she said wearily: "a lie or two more
or less--what does it matter?"
"I don't want to lie to her," said Vernon. "I hate to. But she'd never
understand the truth."
"You think _I_ understand? It _is_ the truth you've been telling me?"
He laughed. "I don't think I ever told so much truth in all my life."
"And you've thoroughly enjoyed it! You alway did enjoy new
sensations!"
"Ah, don't sneer at me. You don't understand--not quite. Everything's
changed. I really do feel as though I'd been born again. The point of
view has shifted--and so suddenly, so completely. It's a new Heaven
and a new earth. But the new earth's not comfortable, and I don't
suppose I shall ever get the new Heaven. But you'll help me--you'll
advise me? Do you think I ought to tell her at once? You see, she's so
different from other girls--she's--"
"She isn't," Lady St. Craye interrupted, "except that she's the one
you love; she's not a bit different from other girls. No girl's
different from other girls."
"Ah, you don't know her," he said. "You see, she's so young and brave
and true and--what is it--Why--"
Lady St. Craye had rested her head against his coat-sleeve and he knew
that she was crying.
"What is it? My dear, don't--you musn't cry."
"I'm not.--At least I'm very tired."
"Brute that I am!" he said with late compunction. "And I've been
worrying you with all my silly affairs. Cheer up,--and smile at me
before I go! Of course you're tired!"
His hand on her soft hair held her head against his arm.
"No," she said suddenly, "it isn't that I'm tired, really. You've told
the truth,--why shouldn't I?" Vernon instantly and deeply regretted
the lapse.
"You're really going to marry the girl? You mean it?"
"Yes."
"Then I'll help you. I'll do everything I can for you."
"You're a dear," he said kindly. "You always were."
"I'll be your true friend--oh, yes, I will! Because I love you,
Eustace. I've always loved you--I always shall. It can't spoil
anything now to tell you, because everything _is_ spoilt. She'll never
love you like I do. Nobody ever will."
"You're tired. I've bothered you. You're saying this just
to--because--"
"I'm saying it because it's true. Why should you be the only one to
speak the truth? Oh, Eustace--when you pretended to think I didn't
care, two years ago, I was too proud to speak the truth then. I'm not
proud now any more. Go away. I wish I'd never seen you; I wish I'd
never been born."
"Yes, dear, yes. I'll go" he said, and rose. She buried her face in
the cushion where his shoulder had been.
He was looking round for his hat and gloves--more uncomfortable than
he ever remembered to have been.
As he reached the door she sprang up, and he heard the silken swish of
her gray gown coming towards him.
"Say good-night," she pleaded. "Oh, Eustace, kiss me again--kindly,
not like last time."
He met her half-way, took her in his arms and kissed her forehead very
gently, very tenderly.
"My dearest Jasmine lady," he said, "it sounds an impertinence and I
daresay you won't believe it, but I was never so sorry in my life as I
am now. I'm a beast, and I don't deserve to live. Think what a beast I
am--and try to hate me."
She, clung to him and laid her wet cheek against his. Then her lips
implored his lips. There was a long silence. It was she--she was
always glad of that--who at last found her courage, and drew back.
"Good-bye," she said. "I shall be quite sane to-morrow. And then I'll
help you."
When he got out into the street he looked at his watch. It was not yet
ten o'clock. He hailed a carriage.
"Fifty-seven Boulevard Montparnasse," he said.
He could still feel Lady St. Craye's wet cheek against his own. The
despairing passion of her last kisses had thrilled him through and
through.
He wanted to efface the mark of those kisses. He would not be haunted
all night by any lips but Betty's.
He had never called at her rooms in the evening. He had been careful
for her in that. Even now as he rang the bell he was careful, and when
the latch clicked and the door was opened a cautious inch he was
ready, as he entered, to call out, in passing the concierge's door not
Miss Desmond's name, but the name of the Canadian artist who occupied
the studio on the top floor.
He went softly up the stairs and stood listening outside Betty's door.
Then he knocked gently. No one answered. Nothing stirred inside.
"She may be out," he told himself. "I'll wait a bit."
At the same time he tapped again; and this time beyond the door
something did stir.
Then came Betty's voice:
"_Qui est la_?"
"It's me--Vernon. May I come in?"
A moment's pause. Then:
"No. You can't possibly. Is anything the matter?"
"No--oh, no, but I wanted so much to see you. May I come to-morrow
early?"
"You're sure there's nothing wrong? At home or anything? You haven't
come to break anything to me?"
"No--no; it's only something I wanted to tell you."
He began to feel a fool, with his guarded whispers through a locked
door.
"Then come at twelve," said Betty in the tones of finality.
"Good-night."
He heard an inner door close, and went slowly away. He walked a long
way that night. It was not till he was back in his rooms and had
lighted his candle and wound up his watch that Lady St. Craye's kisses
began to haunt him in good earnest, as he had known they would.
* * * * *
Lady St. Craye, left alone, dried her eyes and set to work, with heart
still beating wildly to look about her at the ruins of her world.
The room was quiet with the horrible quiet of a death chamber. And yet
his voice still echoed in it. Only a moment ago she had been in his
arms, as she had never hoped to be again--more--as she had never been
before.
"He would have loved me now," she told herself, "if it hadn't been for
that girl. He didn't love me before. He was only playing at love. He
didn't know what love was. But he knows now. And it's all too late!"
But was it?
A word to Betty--and--
"But you promised to help him."
"That was before he kissed me."
"But a promise is a promise."
"Yes,--and your life's your life. You'll never have another."
She stood still, her hands hanging by her sides--clenched hands that
the rings bit into.
"He will go to her early to-morrow. And she'll accept him, of course.
She's never seen anyone else, the little fool."
She knew that she herself would have taken him, would have chosen him
as the chief among ten thousand.
"She could have Temple. She'd be much happier with Temple. She and
Eustace would make each other wretched. She'd never understand him,
and he'd be tired of her in a week."
She had turned up the electric lights now, at her toilet table, and
was pulling the pins out of her ruffled hair.
"And he'd never care about her children. And they'd be ugly little
horrors."
She was twisting her hair up quickly and firmly.
"I _have_ a right to live my own life," she said, just as Betty had
said six months before. "Why am I to sacrifice everything to
her--especially when I don't suppose she cares--and now that I know I
could get him if she were out of the way?"
She looked at herself in the silver-framed mirror and laughed.
"And you always thought yourself a proud woman!"
Suddenly she dropped the brush; it rattled and spun on the polished
floor.
She stamped her foot.
"That settles it!" she said. For in that instant she perceived quite
clearly and without mistake that Vernon's attitude had been a
parti-pris: that he had thrown, himself on her pity of set purpose,
with an end to gain.
"Laughing at me all the time too, of course! And I thought I
understood him. Well, I don't misunderstand him for long, anyway," she
said, and picked up the hair brush.
"You silly fool," she said to the woman in the glass.
And now she was fully dressed--in long light coat and a hat with, as
usual, violets in it. She paused a moment before her writing-table,
turned up its light, turned it down again.
"No," she said, "one doesn't write anonymous letters. Besides it would
be too late. He'll see her to-morrow early--early."
The door of the flat banged behind her as it had banged behind Vernon
half an hour before. Like him, she called a carriage, and on her lips
too, as the chill April air caressed them, was the sense of kisses.
And she, too, gave to the coachman the address:
Fifty-seven Boulevard Montparnasse.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE TRUTH WITH A VENGEANCE.
In those three weeks whose meetings with Vernon had been so lacking in
charm there had been other meetings for Betty, and in these charm had
not been to seek. But it was the charm of restful, pleasant
companionship illuminated by a growing certainty that Mr. Temple
admired her very much, that he liked her very much, that he did not
think her untidy and countrified and ill-dressed, and all the things
she had felt herself to be that night when Lady St. Craye and her furs
had rustled up the staircase at Thirion's. And she had dined with Mr.
Temple and lunched with Mr. Temple, and there had been an afternoon at
St. Cloud, and a day at Versailles. Miss Voscoe and some of the other
students had been in the party, but not of it as far as Betty was
concerned. She had talked to Temple all the time.
"I'm glad to see you've taken my advice," said Miss Voscoe, "only you
do go at things so--like a bull at a gate. A month ago it was all that
ruffian Vernon. Now it's all Mr. Go-to-Hell. Why not have a change?
Try a Pole or a German."
But Betty declined to try a Pole or a German.
What she wanted to do was to persuade herself that she liked Temple as
much as she liked Vernon, and, further, that she did not care a straw
for either.
Of course it is very wrong indeed to talk pleasantly with a young man
when you think you know that he might, just possibly, be falling in
love with you. But then it is very interesting, too. To be loved, even
by the wrong person, seems in youth's selfish eyes to light up the
world as the candle lights the Japanese lantern. And besides, after
all, one can't be sure. And it is not maidenly to say "No," even by
the vaguest movements of retreat, to a question that has not been
asked and perhaps never will be.
And when she was talking to Temple she was not thinking so much of
Vernon, and of her unselfish friendship for him, and the depth of her
hope that he really _would_ be happy with that woman.
So that it was with quite a sick feeling that her days had been robbed
of something that made them easier to live, if not quite worth living,
that she read and reread the letter that she found waiting for her
after that last unsuccessful dinner with the man whom Temple helped
her to forget.
You will see by the letter what progress friendship can make in a
month between a young man and woman, even when each is half in love
with some one else.
"Sweet friend," said the letter: "This is to say good-bye for a
little while. But you will think of me when I am away, won't you?
I am going into the country to make some sketches and to think. I
don't believe it is possible for English people to think in Paris.
And I have things to think over that won't let themselves be thought
over quietly here. And I want to see the Spring. I won't ask you to
write to me, because I want to be quite alone, and not to have even
a word from my sweet and dear friend. I hope your work will go well.
"Yours,
"Robert Temple."
Betty, in bed, was re-reading this when Vernon's knock came at her
door. She spoke to him through the door with the letter in her hand.
And her real thought when she asked him if he had come to break bad
news was that something had happened to Temple.
She went back to bed, but not to sleep. Try as she would, she could
not keep away the wonder--what could Vernon have had to say that
wanted so badly to get itself said? She hid her eyes and would not
look in the face of her hope. There had been a tone in his voice as he
whispered on the other side of that stupid door, a tone she had not
heard since Long Barton.
Oh, why had she gone to bed early that night of all nights? She would
never go to bed early again as long as she lived!
What?--No, impossible! Yes. Another knock at her door. She sprang out
of bed, and stood listening. There was no doubt about it. Vernon had
come back. After all what he had to say would not keep till morning. A
wild idea of dressing and letting him in was sternly dismissed. For
one thing, at topmost speed, it took twenty minutes to dress. He would
not wait twenty minutes. Another knock.
She threw on her dressing gown and ran along her little passage--and
stooped to the key-hole just as another tap, discreet but insistent,
rang on the door panel.
"Go away," she said low and earnestly. "I can't talk to you to-night
_whatever it is_. It must wait till the morning."
"It's I," said the very last voice in all Paris that she expected to
hear, "it's Lady St. Craye.--Won't you let me in?"
"Are you alone?" said Betty.
"Of course I'm alone. It's most important. Do open the door."
The door was slowly opened. The visitor rustled through, and Betty
shut the door. Then she followed Lady St. Craye into the sitting-room,
lighted the lamp, drew the curtain across the clear April night, and
stood looking enquiry--and not looking it kindly. Her lips were set in
a hard line and she was frowning.
She waited for the other to speak, but after all it was she who broke
the silence.
"Well," she said, "what do you want now?"
"I hardly know how to begin," said Lady St. Craye with great truth.
"I should think not!" said Betty. "I don't want to be disagreeable,
but I can't think of anything that gives you the right to come and
knock me up like this in the middle of the night."
"It's only just past eleven," said Lady St. Craye. And there was
another silence. She did not know what to say. A dozen openings
suggested themselves, and were instantly rejected. Then, quite
suddenly, she knew exactly what to say, what to do. That move of
Vernon's--it was a good one, a move too often neglected in this
cynical world, but always successful on the stage.
"May I sit down?" she asked forlornly.
Betty, rather roughly, pushed forward a chair.
Lady St. Craye sank into it, looked full at Betty for a long minute;
and by the lamp's yellow light Betty saw the tears rise, brim over and
fall from the other woman's lashes. Then Lady St. Craye pulled out her
handkerchief and began to cry in good earnest.
It was quite easy.
At first Betty looked on in cold contempt. Lady St. Craye had counted
on that: she let herself go, wholly. If it ended in hysterics so much
the more impressive. She thought of Vernon, of all the hopes of these
months, of the downfall of them--everything that should make it
impossible for her to stop crying.
"Don't distress yourself," said Betty, very chill and distant.
"Can you--can you lend me a handkerchief?" said the other
unexpectedly, screwing up her own drenched cambric in her hand.
Betty fetched a handkerchief.
"I haven't any scent," she said. "I'm sorry."
That nearly dried the tears--but not quite: Lady St. Craye was a
persevering woman.
Betty watching her, slowly melted, just as the other knew she would.
She put her hand at last on the shoulder of the light coat.
"Come," she said, "don't cry so. I'm sure there's nothing to be so
upset about--"
Then came to her sharp as any knife, the thought of what there might
be.
"There's nothing wrong with anyone? There hasn't been an accident or
anything?"
The other, still speechless, conveyed "No."
"Don't," said Betty again. And slowly and very artistically the flood
was abated. Lady St. Craye was almost calm, though still her breath
caught now and then in little broken sighs.
"I _am_ so sorry," she said, "so ashamed.--Breaking down like this.
You don't know what it is to be as unhappy as I am."
Betty thought she did. We all think we do, in the presence of any
grief not our own.
"Can I do anything?" She spoke much more kindly than she had expected
to speak.
"Will you let me tell you everything? The whole truth?"
"Of course if you want to, but--"
"Then do sit down--and oh, don't be angry with me, I am so wretched.
Just now you thought something had happened to Mr. Vernon. Will you
just tell me one thing?--Do you love him?"
"You've no right to ask me that."
"I know I haven't. Well, I'll trust you--though you don't trust me.
I'll tell you everything. Two years ago Mr. Vernon and I were
engaged."
This was not true; but it took less time to tell than the truth would
have taken, and sounded better.
"We were engaged, and I was very fond of him. But he--you know what he
is about Women?"
"No," said Betty steadily. "I don't want to hear anything about him."
"But you must.--He is--I don't know how to put it. There's always some
woman besides the One with him. I understand that now; I didn't then.
I don't think he can help it. It's his temperament."
"I see," said Betty evenly. Her hands and feet were very cold. She was
astonished to find how little moved she was in this interview whose
end she foresaw so very plainly.
"Yes, and there was a girl at that time--he was always about with her.
And I made him scenes--always a most stupid thing to do with a man,
you know; and at last I said he must give her up, or give me up. And
he gave me up. And I was too proud to let him think I cared--and just
to show him how little I cared I married Sir Harry St. Craye. I might
just as well have let it alone. He never even heard I had been married
till last October! And then it was I who told him. My husband was a
brute, and I'm thankful to say he didn't live long. You're very much
shocked, I'm afraid?"
"Not at all," said Betty, who was, rather.
"Well, then I met Him again, and we got engaged again, as he told you.
And again there was a girl--oh, and another woman besides. But this
time I tried to bear it--you know I did try not to be jealous of you."
"You had no cause," said Betty.
"Well, I thought I had. That hurts just as much. And what's the end of
it all--all my patience and trying not to see things, and letting him
have his own way? He came to me to-night and begged me to release him
from his engagement, because--oh, he was beautifully candid--because
he meant to marry you."
Betty's heart gave a jump.
"He seems to have been very sure of me," she said loftily.
"No, no; he's not a hairdresser's apprentice--to tell one woman that
he's sure of another. He said: 'I mean to marry Miss Desmond if she'll
have me.'"
"How kind of him!"
"I wish you'd heard the way he spoke of you."
"I don't want to hear."
"_I_ had to. And I've released him. And now I've come to you. I was
proud two years ago. I'm not proud now. I don't care what I do. I'll
kneel down at your feet and pray to you as if you were God not to take
him away from me. And if you love him it'll all be no good. I know
that."
"But--supposing I weren't here--do you think you could get him back?"
"I know I could. Unless of course you were to tell him I'd been here
to-night. I should have no chance after that--naturally. I wish I knew
what to say to you. You're very young; you'll find someone else, a
better man. He's not a good man. There's a girl at Montmartre at this
very moment--a girl he's set up in a restaurant. He goes to see her.
You'd never stand that sort of thing. I know the sort of girl you are.
And you're quite right. But I've got beyond that. I don't care what he
is, I don't care what he does. I understand him. I can make allowances
for him. I'm his real mate. I could make him happy. You never
would--you're too good. Ever since I first met him I've thought of
nothing else, cared for nothing else. If he whistled to me I'd give up
everything else, everything, and follow him barefoot round the world."
"I heard someone say that in a play once," said Betty musing.
"So did I," said Lady St. Craye very sharply--"but it's true for all
that. Well--you can do as you like."
"Of course I can," said Betty.
"I've done all I can now. I've said everything there is to say. And if
you love him as I love him every word I've said won't make a scrap of
difference. I know that well enough. What I want to know is--_do_ you
love him?"
The scene had been set deliberately. But the passion that spoke in it
was not assumed. Betty felt young, school-girlish, awkward in the
presence of this love--so different from her own timid dreams. The
emotion of the other woman had softened her.
"I don't know," she said.
"If you don't know, you don't love him.--At least don't see him till
you're sure. You'll do that? As long as he's not married to anyone,
there's just a chance that he may love me again. Won't you have pity?
Won't you go away like that sensible young man Temple? Mr. Vernon told
me he was going into the country to decide which of the two women he
likes best is the one he really likes best! Won't you do that?"
"Yes," said Betty slowly, "I'll do that. _Look_ here, I am most
awfully sorry, but I don't know--I can't think to-night. I'll go right
away--I won't see him to-morrow. Oh, no. I can't come between you and
the man you're engaged to," her thoughts were clearing themselves as
she spoke. "Of course I knew you were engaged to him. But I never
thought. At least--Yes. I'll go away the first thing to-morrow."
"You are very, very good," said Lady St. Craye, and she meant it.
"But I don't know where to go. Tell me where to go."
"Can't you go home?"
"No: I won't. That's too much."
"Go somewhere and sketch."
"Yes,--but _where_?" said poor Betty impatiently.
"Go to Grez," said the other, not without second thoughts. "It's a
lovely place--close to Fontainebleau--Hotel Chevillon. I'll write it
down for you.--Old Madame Chevillon's a darling. She'll look after
you. It _is_ good of you to forgive me for everything. I'm afraid I
was a cat to you."
"No," said Betty, "it was right and brave of you to tell me the whole
truth. Oh, truth's the only thing that's any good!"
Lady St. Craye also thought it a useful thing--in moderation. She
rose.
"I'll never forget what you're doing for me," she said. "You're a girl
in thousand. Look here, my dear: I'm not blind. Don't think I don't
value what you're doing. You cared for him in England a little,--and
you care a little now. And everything I've said tonight has hurt you
hatefully. And you didn't know you cared. You thought it was
friendship, didn't you--till you thought I'd come to tell you that
something had happened to him. And then you _knew_. I'm going to
accept your sacrifice. I've got to. I can't live if I don't. But I
don't want you to think I don't know what a sacrifice it is. I know
better than you do--at this moment. No--don't say anything. I don't
want to force your confidence. But I do understand."
"I wish everything was different," said Betty.
"Yes. You're thinking, aren't you, that if it hadn't been for Mr.
Vernon you'd rather have liked me? And I know now that if it hadn't
been for him I should have been very fond of you. And even as it is--"
She put her arms round Betty and spoke close to her ear.
"You're doing more for me than anyone has ever done for me in my
life," she said--"more than I'd do for you or any woman. And I love
you for it. Dear brave little girl. I hope it isn't going to hurt very
badly. I love you for it--and I'll never forget it to the day I die.
Kiss me and try to forgive me."
The two clung together for an instant.
"Good-bye," said Lady St. Craye in quite a different voice. "I'm sorry
I made a scene. But, really, sometimes I believe one isn't quite sane.
Let me write the Grez address. I wish I could think of any set of
circumstances in which you'd be pleased to see me again."
"I'll pack to-night," said Betty. "I hope _you'll_ be happy anyway. Do
you know I think I have been hating you rather badly without quite
knowing it."
"Of course you have," said the other heartily, "but you don't now. Of
course you won't leave your address here? If you do that you might as
well not go away at all!"
"I'm not quite a fool," said Betty.
"No," said the other with a sigh, "it's I that am the fool.
You're--No, I won't say what you are. But--Well. Good night, dear. Try
not to hate me again when you come to think it all over quietly."
CHAPTER XX.
WAKING-UP TIME.
Dear Mr. Vernon. This is to thank you very much for all your help
and criticism of my work, and to say good-bye. I am called away
quite suddenly, so I can't thank you in person, but I shall never
forget your kindness. Please remember me to Lady St. Craye. I
suppose you will be married quite soon now. And I am sure you will
both be very happy.
Yours very sincerely,
Elizabeth Desmond.
This was the letter that Vernon read standing in the shadow of the
arch by the concierge's window. The concierge had hailed him as he
hurried through to climb the wide shallow stairs and to keep his
appointment with Betty when she should leave the atelier.
"But yes, Mademoiselle had departed this morning at nine o'clock. To
which station? To the Gare St. Lazare. Yes--Mademoiselle had charged
her to remit the billet to Monsieur. No, Mademoiselle had not left any
address. But perhaps chez Madame Bianchi?"
But chez Madame Bianchi there was no further news. The so amiable
Mademoiselle Desmond had paid her account, had embraced Madame,
and--Voila! she was gone. One divined that she had been called
suddenly to return to the family roof. A sudden illness of Monsieur
her father without doubt.
Could some faint jasmine memory have lingered on the staircase? Or was
it some subtler echo of Lady St. Craye's personality that clung there?
Abruptly, as he passed Betty's door, the suspicion stung him. Had the
Jasmine lady had any hand in this sudden departure?
"Pooh--nonsense!" he said. But all the same he paused at the
concierge's window.
"I am desolated to have deranged Madame,"--gold coin changed
hands.--"A lady came to see Mademoiselle this morning, is it not?"
"No, no lady had visited Mademoiselle to-day: no one at all in
effect."
"Nor last night--very late?"
"No, monsieur," the woman answered meaningly; "no visitor came in last
night except Monsieur himself and he came, not to see Mademoiselle,
that understands itself, but to see Monsieur Beauchèsne an troisième.
No--I am quite sure--I never deceive myself. And Mademoiselle has had
no letters since three days. Thanks a thousand times, Monsieur. Good
morning."
She locked up the gold piece in the little drawer where already lay
the hundred franc note that Lady St. Craye had given her at six
o'clock that morning.
"And there'll be another fifty from her next month," she chuckled.
"The good God be blessed for intrigues! Without intrigues what would
become of us poor concierges?"
For Vernon Paris was empty--the spring sunshine positively
distasteful. He did what he could; he enquired at the Gare St. Lazare,
describing Betty with careful detail that brought smiles to the lips
of the employés. He would not call on Miss Voscoe. He made himself
wait till the Sketch Club afternoon--made himself wait, indeed, till
all the sketches were criticised--till the last cup of tea was
swallowed, or left to cool--the last cake munched--the last student's
footfall had died away on the stairs, and he and Miss Voscoe were
alone among the scattered tea-cups, blackened bread-crumbs and torn
paper.
Then he put his question. Miss Voscoe knew nothing. Guessed Miss
Desmond knew her own business best.
"But she's so young," said Vernon; "anything might have happened to
her."
"I reckon she's safe enough--where she is," said Miss Voscoe with
intention.
"But haven't you any idea why she's gone?" he asked, not at all
expecting any answer but "Not the least."
But Miss Voscoe said:
"I have a quite first-class idea and so have you."
He could but beg her pardon interrogatively.
"Oh, you know well enough," said she. "She'd got to go. And it was up
to her to do it right now, I guess."
Vernon had to ask why.
"Well, you being engaged to another girl, don't you surmise it might
kind of come home to her there were healthier spots for you than the
end of her apron strings? Maybe she thought the other lady's apron
strings 'ud be suffering for a little show?"
"I'm not engaged," said Vernon shortly.
"Then it's time you were," the answer came with equal shortness.
"You'll pardon me making this a heart-to-heart talk--and anyway it's
no funeral of mine. But she's the loveliest girl and I right down like
her. So you take it from me. That F.F.V. Lady with the violets--Oh,
don't pretend you don't know who I mean--the one you're always about
with when you aren't with Betty. _She's_ your ticket. Betty's not.
Your friend's her style. You pass, this hand, and give the girl a
chance."
"I really don't understand--"
"I bet you do," she interrupted with conviction. "I've sized you up
right enough, Mr. Vernon. You're no fool. If you've discontinued your
engagement Betty doesn't know it. Nor she shan't from me. And one of
these next days it'll be borne in on your friend that she's _the_ girl
of his life--and when he meets her again he'll get her to see it his
way. Don't you spoil the day's fishing."
Vernon laughed.
"You have all the imagination of the greatest nation in the world,
Miss Voscoe," he said. "Thank you. These straight talks to young men
are the salt of life. Good-bye."
"You haven't all the obfuscation of the stupidest nation in the
world," she retorted. "If you had had you'd have had a chance to find
out what straight talking means--which it's my belief you never have
yet. Good-bye. You take my tip. Either you go back to where you were
before you sighted Betty, or if the other one's sick of you too, just
shuffle the cards, take a fresh deal and start fair. You go home and
spend a quiet evening and think it all over."
Vernon went off laughing, and wondering why he didn't hate Miss
Voscoe. He did not laugh long. He sat in his studio, musing till
it was too late to go out to dine. Then he found some biscuits
and sherry--remnants of preparations for the call of a picture
dealer--ate and drank, and spent the evening in the way recommended
by Miss Voscoe. He lay face downward on the divan, in the dark, and
he did "think it all over."
But first there was the long time when he lay quite still--did not
think at all, only remembered her hands and her eyes and her hair, and
the pretty way her brows lifted when she was surprised or
perplexed--and the four sudden sweet dimples that came near the
corners of her mouth when she was amused, and the way her mouth
drooped when she was tired.
"I want you. I want you. I want you," said the man who had been the
Amorist. "I want you, dear!"
When he did begin to think, he moved uneasily in the dark as thought
after thought crept out and stung him and slunk away. The verses he
had written at Long Barton--ironic verses, written with the tongue in
the cheek--came back with the force of iron truth:
"I love you to my heart's hid core:
Those other loves? How can one learn
From marshlights how the great fires burn?
Ah, no--I never loved before!"
He had smiled at Temple's confidences--when Betty was at hand--to be
watched and guarded. Now Betty was away--anywhere. And Temple was
deciding whether it was she whom he loved. Suppose he did decide that
it was she, and, as Miss Voscoe had said, made her see it? "Damn,"
said Vernon, "Oh, damn!"
He was beginning to be a connoisseur in the fine flavours of the
different brands of jealousy. Anyway there was food for thought.
There was food for little else, in the days that followed. Mr.
Vernon's heart, hungry for the first time, had to starve. He went
often to Lady St. Craye's. She was so gentle, sweet, yet not too
sympathetic--bright, amusing even, but not too vivacious. He approved
deeply the delicacy with which she ignored that last wild interview.
She was sister, she was friend--and she had the rare merit of seeming
to forget that she had been confidante.
It was he who re-opened the subject, after ten days. She had told
herself that it was only a question of time. And it was.
"Do you know she's disappeared?" he said abruptly.
"_Disappeared_?" No one was ever more astonished than Lady St. Craye.
Quite natural, the astonishment. Not overdone by so much as a hair's
breadth.
So he told her all about it, and she twisted her long topaz chain and
listened with exactly the right shade of interest. He told her what
Miss Voscoe had said--at least most of it.
"And I worry about Temple," he said; "like any school boy, I worry. If
he _does_ decide that he loves her better than you--You said you'd
help me. Can't you make sure that he won't love her better?"
"I could, I suppose," she admitted. To herself she said: "Temple's at
Grez. _She's_ at Grez. They've been there ten days."
"If only you would," he said. "It's too much to ask, I know. But I
can't ask anything that isn't too much! And you're so much more noble
and generous than other people--"
"No butter, thanks," she said.
"It's the best butter," he earnestly urged. "I mean that I mean it.
Won't you?"
"When I see him again--but it's not very fair to him, is it?"
"He's an awfully good chap, you know," said Vernon innocently. And
once more Lady St. Craye bowed before the sublime apparition of the
Egoism of Man.
"Good enough for me, you think? Well, perhaps you're right. He's a
dear boy. One would feel very safe if one loved a man like that."
"Yes--wouldn't one?" said Vernon.
She wondered whether Betty was feeling safe. No: ten days are a long
time, especially in the country--but it would take longer than that to
cure even a little imbecile like Betty of the Vernon habit. It was
worse than opium. Who ought to know if not she who sat, calm and
sympathetic, promising to entangle Temple so as to leave Betty free to
become a hopeless prey to the fell disease?
Quite suddenly and to her own intense surprise, she laughed out loud.
"What is it?" his alert vanity bristled in the query.
"It's nothing--only everything! Life's so futile! We pat and pinch our
little bit of clay, and look at it and love it and think it's going to
be a masterpiece.--and then God glances at it--and He doesn't like
the modelling, and He sticks his thumb down, and the whole thing's
broken up, and there's nothing left to do but throw away the bits."
"Oh, no," said Vernon; "everything's bound to come right in the end.
It all works out straight somehow."
She laughed again.
"Optimism--from you?"
"It's not optimism," he asserted eagerly, "it's only--well, if
everything doesn't come right somehow, somewhere, some day, what did
He bother to make the world for?"
"That's exactly what I said, my dear," said she. She permitted herself
the little endearment now and then with an ironical inflection, as one
fearful of being robbed might show a diamond pretending that it was
paste.
"You think He made it for a joke?"
"If He did it's a joke in the worst possible taste," said she, "but I
see your point of view. There can't be so very much wrong with a world
that has Her in it,--and you--and possibilities."
"Do you know," he said slowly, "I'm not at all sure that--Do you
remember the chap in Jane Eyre?--he knew quite well that that Rosamund
girl wouldn't make him the wife he wanted. Yet he wanted nothing else.
I don't want anything but her; and it doesn't make a scrap of
difference that I know exactly what sort of fool I am."
"A knowledge of anatomy doesn't keep a broken bone from hurting," said
she, "and all even you know about love won't keep off the heartache. I
could have told you that long ago."
"I know I'm a fool," he said, "but I can't help it. Sometimes I think
I wouldn't help it if I could."
"I know," she said, and something in her voice touched the trained
sensibilities of the Amorist. He stooped to kiss the hand that teased
the topazes.
"Dear Jasmine Lady," he said, "my optimism doesn't keep its colour
long, does it? Give me some tea, won't you? There's nothing so
wearing as emotion."
She gave him tea.
"It's a sort of judgment on you, though," was what she gave him with
his first cup: "you've dealt out this very thing to so many
women,--and now it's come home to roost."
"I didn't know what a fearful wildfowl it was," he answered smiling.
"I swear I didn't. I begin to think I never knew anything at all
before."
"And yet they say Love's blind."
"And so he is! That's just it. My exotic flower of optimism withers at
your feet. It's all exactly the muddle you say it is. Pray Heaven for
a clear way out! Meantime thank whatever gods may be--I've got _you_."
"Monsieur's confidante is always at his distinguished service," she
said. And thus sealed the fountain of confidences for that day.
But it broke forth again and again in the days that came after. For
now he saw her almost every day. And for her, to be with him, to know
that she had of him more of everything, save the heart, than any other
woman, spelled something wonderfully like happiness. More like it than
she had the art to spell in any other letters.
Vernon still went twice a week to the sketch-club. To have stayed away
would have been to confess, to the whole alert and interested class,
that he had only gone there for the sake of Betty.
Those afternoons were seasons of salutary torture.
He tried very hard to work, but, though he still remembered how a
paint brush should be handled, there seemed no good reason for using
one. He had always found his planned and cultivated emotions strongly
useful in forwarding his work. This undesired unrest mocked at work,
and at all the things that had made up the solid fabric of one's days.
The ways of love--he had called it love; it was a name like
another--had merely been a sort of dram-drinking. Such love was the
intoxicant necessary to transfigure life to the point where all
things, even work, look beautiful. Now he tasted the real draught. It
flooded his veins like fire and stung like poison. And it made work,
and all things else, look mean and poor and unimportant.
"I want you--I want you--I want you," said Vernon to the vision with
the pretty kitten face, and the large gray eyes. "I want you more than
everything in the world," he said, "everything in the world put
together. Oh, come back to me--dear, dear, dear."
He was haunted without cease by the little poem he had written when he
was training himself to be in love with Betty:
"I love you to my heart's hid core:
Those other loves? How should one learn
From marshlights how the great fires burn?
Ah, no--I never loved before!"
"Prophetic, I suppose," he said, "though God knows I never meant it.
Any fool of a prophet must hit the bull's eye at least once in a life.
But there was a curious unanimity of prophecy about this. The aunt
warned me; that Conway woman warned me; the Jasmine Lady warned me.
And now it's happened," he told himself. "And I who thought I knew all
about everything!"
Miss Conway's name, moving through his thoughts, left the trail of a
new hope.
Next day he breakfasted at Montmartre.
The neatest little Crémerie; white paint, green walls stenciled with
fat white geraniums. On each small table a vase of green Bruges ware
or Breton pottery holding not a crushed crowded bouquet, but one
single flower--a pink tulip, a pink carnation, a pink rose. On the
desk from behind which the Proprietress ruled her staff, enormous pink
peonies in a tall pot of Grez de Flandre.
Behind the desk Paula Conway, incredibly neat and business-like, her
black hair severely braided, her plain black gown fitting a figure
grown lean as any grey-hound's, her lace collar a marvel of fine
laundry work.
Dapper-waisted waitresses in black, with white aprons, served the
customers. Vernon was served by Madame herself. The clientele formed
its own opinion of the cause of this, her only such condescension.
"Well, and how's trade?" he asked over his asparagus.
"Trade's beautiful," Paula answered, with the frank smile that Betty
had seen, only once or twice, and had loved very much: "if trade will
only go on behaving like this for another six weeks my cruel creditor
will be paid every penny of the money that launched me."
Her eyes dwelt on him with candid affection.
"Your cruel creditor's not in any hurry," he said. "By the way, I
suppose you've not heard anything of Miss Desmond?"
"How could I? You know you made me write that she wasn't to write."
"I didn't _make_ you write anything."
"You approved. But anyway she hasn't my address. Why?"
"She's gone away: and she also has left no address."
"You don't think?--Oh, no--nothing _could_ have happened to her!"
"No, no," he hastened to say. "I expect her father sent for her, or
fetched her."
"The best thing too," said Paula. "I always wondered he let her come."
"Yes,"--Vernon remembered how little Paula knew.
"Oh, yes, she's probably gone home."
"Look here," said Miss Conway very earnestly; "there wasn't any love
business between you and her, was there?"
"No," he answered strongly.
"I was always afraid of that. Do you know--if you don't mind, when
I've really paid my cruel creditor everything, I should like to write
and tell her what he's done for me. I should like her to know that she
really _did_ save me--and how. Because if it hadn't been for her you'd
never have thought of helping me. Do you think I might?"
"It could do no harm," said Vernon after a silent moment. "You'd
really like her to know you're all right. You _are_ all right?"
"I'm right; as I never thought I could be ever again."
"Well, you needn't exaggerate the little services of your cruel
creditor. Come to think of it, you needn't name him. Just say it was a
man you knew."
But when Paula came to write the letter that was not just what she
said.
Book 4.--The Other Man