The Incomplete Amorist

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"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 Bete--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 Cafe 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 Cafe 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."

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