Complete Novels of E Nesbit, page 333
“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.
