The Incomplete Amorist

E >> E. Nesbit >> The Incomplete Amorist

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21

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 a 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 cochere 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 Cafe 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 Cafe
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.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21