THE DREAM GIRL
“She is utterly without generosity; she is cold and hard and bitter,
and she has made a mountain out of a molehill, built up a great
grievance on what was, after all, only a foolish and ill-considered
statement. She is pleased to feel herself deeply insulted, and she
hates me for what I did in perfect innocence. I have done all that I
can do. I have offered to make amends in the only way I can think of,
and she refuses to accept either that or my apologies. Very well,
then... But what a lovely face it is, and for just that moment, when
the hardness and bitterness were gone...” He paused; his own face
softened. One could not be angry for long with a vision like that,
which was passing before his mind, conjured up by memory.
Just for that instant, when the flush had come into her cheeks, she had
looked all those things that she was not—sweet, womanly, tender, and
gentle, a woman with an immense capacity for love.
“Bah!” said Hugh. “I’m an idiot. I shall go to a theatre to-night,
forget all about her, and go home to-morrow—home.” He sighed a little
drearily. For months past he had pictured pretty Marjorie Linden as
queen of that home, and now he knew that it would never be. His house
would remain lonely and empty, as must his life be.
He sighed sentimentally, and took out Marjorie’s little pink note from
his pocket-book. He noticed for the first time that it was somewhat
over-scented. He realised that he did not like the smell of scent,
especially on notepaper, and pink was not his favourite colour. In
fact, he disliked pink. Marjorie was happy, Lady Linden was beaming on
Tom Arundel, the cloud had lifted from Marjorie’s life. Hugh tore up
the pink, smelly little missive, and dropped the fragments into the
grate of the hotel bedroom.
“That’s that!” he said. “And it’s ended and done with!”
He was amazed to find himself not broken-hearted and utterly cast down.
He lighted his pipe and puffed hard, to destroy the lingering smell of
the pink notepaper. Then he laughed gently.
“By every right I should now be on my way to the bar to drown dull care
in drink. She’s a dear little soul, the sweetest and dearest and best
in the world. I hope Tom Arundel will appreciate her and make the
little thing happy. I would have done my best, but somehow I feel that
Tom is the better man, so far as Marjorie is concerned.”
Grey eyes, not disdainful and cold and scornful, but soft, and filled
with kindliness and gentleness, banished all memory of Marjorie’s
pretty pathetic blue eyes. Why, Hugh thought, had that girl looked at
him like that for just one moment? Why had she appeared for that
instant so different? It was as if a cold and bitter mask had fallen
from her face, and he had had a peep at the true—the real woman, the
woman all love and tenderness and gentleness, behind it.
“Anyhow, it doesn’t matter,” said Hugh. “I’ve done what I believed to
be the right thing. She turned me down; the affair is now closed, and
we’ll think of something else.”
But it was not easy. At his dinner, which he took in solitary state, he
had a companion, a girl with grey eyes and flushed cheeks who sat
opposite to him at the table. She said nothing, but she looked at him,
and the beauty of her intoxicated him, and the smile of her found an
answer on his own lips. She ate nothing, nor did the waiter see her; so
far as the waiter was concerned, there was an empty chair, but Hugh
Alston saw her.
“Why,” he asked, “why can you look like that, and yet be so different?
That look in your eyes makes you the most beautiful and wonderful thing
in this world, and yet...”
He laughed softly to himself. He was uttering his thoughts aloud, and
the unromantic waiter stared at him.
“Beg your pardon, sir?” he asked.
“That’s all right!” Hugh said. “What won the three-thirty?”
“I don’t think there was any racing to-day, sir,” the man said.
He went away, not completely satisfied as to this visitor’s sanity, and
Hugh drifted back into dreams and memories.
“You are very wonderful,” he said to himself, “yet you made me very
angry; you hurt me and made me furious. I called you ungenerous, and I
meant it, and so you were. Yet when you look at me with your eyes like
that and the colour in your cheeks, I can’t find one word to say
against you.”
He went to the theatre that night. It was a successful play. All London
was talking of it, but Hugh Alston never remembered what it was about.
He was thinking of a girl with cold disdainful looks that changed
suddenly to softness and tenderness. She sat beside him as she had sat
opposite to him at dinner. On the stage the actors talked meaningless
stuff; nothing was real, save this girl beside him.
“What’s the matter with you, my good fellow, is,” Hugh said to himself,
as he walked back to the hotel that night, “you’re a fickle man; you
don’t know your own mind. A week ago you were dreaming of Marjorie; you
considered blue eyes the most beautiful thing in the world. You would
not have listened to the claims of eyes of any other colour, and
now—Bless her dear little heart, she’ll be happy as the day is long
with Tom Arundel, with his nice fair hair parted down the middle, and
her pretty scented notepaper. Of course she’ll be happy. She would have
been miserable at Hurst Dormer, and so should I have been; seeing her
miserable, I should have been miserable myself. But I shall go back to
Hurst Dormer to-morrow and start on that renovation work. It will give
me something to occupy my time and attention.”
That night, much to his surprise, Hugh found he could not sleep.
“It’s the strange bed,” he said. “It’s the noise of the London
streets.” Sleeplessness had never troubled him before, but to-night he
rolled and tossed from side to side, and then at last he sat bolt
upright in the bed.
“Good Lord!” he said. “Good Lord, it can’t be!” He stared into the
thick darkness and saw an oval face, crowned by waving brown hair, that
glinted gold in the highlights. He saw a sweet, womanly, tender,
smiling mouth and a pair of grey eyes that seemed to burn into his own.
“It can’t be!” he said again. And yet it was!