Miss Van Tuyn and the members of the “old guard” went home to bed that night realizing that Lady Sellingworth had had “things” done to herself before she came out to the theatre party.
“She’s beginning again after—how many years is it?” said Lady Wrackley to Mrs. Ackroyde in the motor as they drove away from Shaftesbury.
“Ten,” said Mrs. Ackroyde, who was blessed with a sometimes painfully retentive memory.
“I suppose it’s Zotos,” observed Lady Wrackley.
“Who’s Zotos?” inquired young Leving of the turned-up nose and the larky expression.
“A Greek who’s a genius and who lives in South Moulton Street.”
“What’s he do?”
“Things that men shouldn’t be allowed to know anything about. Talk to Bobbie for a minute, will you?”
She turned again to Mrs. Ackroyde.
“It must be Zotos. But even he will be in a difficulty with her if she wants to have very much done. She made the mistake of her life when she became an old woman. I remember saying at the time that some day she would repent in dust and ashes and want to get back, and that then it would be too late. How foolish she was!”
“She will be much more foolish now if she really begins again,” said Mrs. Ackroyde in her cool, common-sense way.
The young men were talking, and after a moment she continued:
“When a thing’s once been thoroughly seen by everyone and recognized for what it is, it is worse than useless to hide it or try to hide it. Adela should know that. But I must say she looked remarkably well to-night—for her. He’s a good-looking boy.”
“He must be at least twenty-eight years younger than she is.”
“More, probably. But she prefers them like that. Don’t you remember Rochecouart? He was a mere child. When we gave our hop at Prince’s she was mad about him. And afterwards she wanted to marry Rupert Louth. It nearly killed her when she found out he had married that awful girl who called herself an actress. And there was someone else after Rupert.”
“I know. I often wonder who it was. Someonewedon’t know.”
“Someone quite out of our world. Anyhow, he must have broken her heart for the time. And it’s taken ten years to mend. Do you think that she sold her jewels secretly to pay that man’s debts, or gave them to him, and that then he threw her over? I have often wondered.”
“So have we all. But we shall never know. Adela is very clever.”
“And now it’s another boy! And only twenty-eight or so. He can’t be more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Poor old Adela!”
“Perhaps he likes white hair. There are boys who do.”
“But not for long. Beryl was furious.”
“It is hardly a compliment to her. I expect her cult for Adela will diminish rapidly.”
“Oh, she’ll very soon get him away. Even Zotos won’t be able to do very much for Adela now. She burnt all her boats ten years ago. Her case is really hopeless, and she’ll very soon find that out.”
“Do you remember when she tried to live up to Rupert Louth as an Amazon?”
“Yes. She nearly killed herself over it; but I must say she stuck to it splendidly. She has plenty of courage.”
“Is Alick Craven athletic? I scarcely know him.”
“Well, he’s never been a rough rider like Rupert Louth; but I believe he’s a sportsman, does all the usual things.”
“Then I dare say we shall soon see Adela on the links and at Kings’.”
“Probably. I’ll get them both down to Coombe and see if she’ll play tennis on my hard court. I shouldn’t wonder. She has pluck enough for anything.”
“Ask me that Sunday. I wonder how long it will last.”
“Not long. It can’t.”
“And then she’ll go crash again. It must be awful to have a temperament like hers.”
“Her great mistake is that apparently she puts some heart into it every time. I can’t think how she manages it, but she does. Do you remember twelve years ago, when she was crazy about Harry Blake? Well—”
But at this moment the motor drew up at the Carlton, and a huge man in uniform opened the door.
Mrs. Ackroyde was right in her comment on Miss Van Tuyn. In spite of Craven’s acting that night Miss Van Tuyn had thoroughly understood how things really were. She had persuaded Braybrooke to invite Lady Sellingworth to make a fourth in order that she might find out whether any link had been forged between Craven and Lady Sellingworth, whether there was really any secret understanding between them, or whether that tete-a-tete dinner in Soho had been merely a passing pleasure, managed by Lady Sellingworth, meaning little, and likely to lead to nothing. And she had found out that there certainly was a secret understanding between Lady Sellingworth and Craven from which she was excluded. Craven had preferred Adela Sellingworth to herself, and Adela Sellingworth was fully aware of it.
It was characteristic of Miss Van Tuyn that though her vanity was so great and was now severely wounded she did not debate the matter within herself, did not for a moment attempt to deceive herself about it. And yet really she had very little ground to go upon. Craven had been charming to her, had replied to her glances, had almost made love to her at dinner, had sat very close to her during the last act of the play. Yes; but it had all been acting on his part. Quite coolly she told herself that. And Lady Sellingworth had certainly wished him to act, had even prompted him to it.
Miss Van Tuyn felt very angry with Lady Sellingworth. She was less angry with Craven. Indeed, she was not sure that she was angry with him at all. He was several years older than herself, but she began to think of him as really very young, as much younger in mind and temperament than she was. He was only a clever boy, susceptible to flattery, easily influenced by a determined will, and probably absurdly chivalrous. She knew the sort of chivalry which was a symptom really of babyhood in the masculine mind. It was characteristic of sensitive natures, she believed, and it often led to strange aberrations. Craven was only a baby, although a baby of the world, and Adela Sellingworth with her vast experience had, of course, seen that at a glance and was now busily playing upon baby’s young chivalry. Miss Van Tuyn could almost hear the talk about being so lonely in the big house in Berkeley Square, about the freedom of men and the difficulty of having any real freedom when one is a solitary woman with no man to look after you, about the tragedy of being considered old when your heart and your nature are really still young, almost as young as ever they were. Adela Sellingworth would know how to touch every string, would be an adept at calling out the music she wanted. How easily experienced women played upon men! It was really pathetic! And as Craven had thought of protecting Lady Sellingworth against Miss Van Tuyn, so now Miss van Tuyn felt inclined to protect Alick Craven against Lady Sellingworth. She did not want to see a nice and interesting boy make a fool of himself. Yet Craven was on the verge of doing that, if he had not already done it. Lady Wrackley and Mrs. Ackroyde had seen how things were, had taken in the whole situation in a moment. Miss Van Tuyn knew that, and in her knowledge there was bitterness. These two women had seen Lady Sellingworth preferred before her by a mere boy, had seen her beauty and youth go for nothing beside a woman of sixty’s fascination.
There must be something quite extraordinary in Craven. He must be utterly unlike other young men. She began to wonder about him intensely.
On the following morning, as usual, she went to Glebe Place to take what she had called her “lesson” from Dick Garstin. She arrived rather early, a few minutes before eleven, and found Garstin alone, looking tired and irritable.
“You look as if you had been up all night,” she said as he let her in.
“So I have!”
She did not ask him what he had been doing. He would probably refuse to tell her. Instead she remarked:
“Will you be able to paint?”
“Probably not. But perhaps the fellow won’t come.”
“Why not. He always—” She stopped; then said quickly, “So he was up all night too?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know you knew him out of the studio.”
“Of course I know him wherever I meet him. What do you mean?”
“I didn’t know you did meet him.”
Garstin said nothing. She turned and went up the staircase to the big studio. On an easel nearly in the middle of the room, and not very far from the portrait of the judge, there was a sketch of Nicolas Arabian’s head, neck and shoulders. No collar or clothes were shown. Garstin had told Arabian flatly that he wasn’t going to paint a magnificent torso like his concealed by infernal linen and serge, and Arabian had been quite willing that his neck and shoulders should be painted in the nude.
In the strong light of the studio Garstin’s unusual appearance of fatigue was more noticeable, and Miss Van Tuyn could not help saying:
“What on earth have you been doing, Dick? You always seem made of iron. But to-day you look like an ordinary man who has been dissipating.”
“I played poker all night,” said Garstin.
“With Arabian?”
“And two other fellows—picked them up at the Cafe Royal.”
“Well, I hope you won.”
“No, I didn’t. Both Arabian and I lost a lot. We played here.”
“Here!”
“Yes. And I haven’t had a wink since they left. I don’t suppose he’ll turn up. And if he does I shan’t be able to do anything at it.”
He went to stand in front of the sketch, which was in oils, and stared at it with lack-lustre eyes.
“What d’you think of it?” he said at last.
Miss Van Tuyn was rather surprised by the question. Garstin was not in the habit of asking other people’s opinions about his work.
“It’s rather difficult to say,” she said, with some hesitation.
“That means you think it’s rotten.”
“No. But it isn’t finished and—I don’t know.”
“Well, I hate it.”
He turned away, sat down on a divan, and let his big knuckly hands drop down between his knees.
“Fact is, I haven’t got at the fellow’s secret,” he said meditatively. “I got a first impression—”
He paused.
“I know!” said Miss Van Tuyn, deeply interested. “You told me what it was.”
“The successful blackmailer. Yes. But now I don’t know. I can’t make him out. He’s the hardest nut to crack I ever came across.”
He moved his long lips from side to side three or four times, then pursed them up, lifted his small eyes, which had been staring between his feet at a Persian rug on the parquet in front of the divan, looked at Miss Van Tuyn, who was standing before him, and said:
“That’s why I sat up all night playing poker with him.”
“Ah!” she said, beginning to understand
She sat down beside him, turned towards him, and said eagerly:
“You wanted to get really to know him?”
“Yes; but I didn’t. The fellow’s an enigma. He’s bad. And that’s practically all I know about him.”
He glanced with distaste at the sketch he had made.
“And it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough by a damned long way.”
“Is he a good loser?” she asked.
“The best I ever saw. Never turned a hair, and went away looking as fresh as a well-watered gardenia, damn him!”
“Who were the others?”
“Two Americans I’ve seen now and then at the Cafe Royal. I believe they live mostly in Paris.”
“Friends of his?”
“I don’t think so. He said they came and sat down at his table in the cafe and started talking. I suggested the poker. They didn’t. So it wasn’t a plant.”
“Perhaps he isn’t bad,” she said; “and perhaps that’s why you can’t paint him.”
“What d’you mean?”
“I mean because you have made up your mind that he is. I think you have a fixed idea about that.”
“What?”
“You have painted so many brutes, that you seek for the brute in everyone who sits to you. If you were to paint me you’d—”
“Now, now! There you are at it again! I’ll paint you if I ever feel like it—not a minute before.”
“I was only going to say that if you ever painted me you’d try to find something horrible in me that you could drag to the surface.”
“Well, d’you mean that you have thetoupetto tell me there is nothing horrible in you?”
“Now we are getting away from Arabian,” she said, with cool self-possession.
“Owing to your infernal egoism, my girl!”
“Override it, then, with your equally infernal altruism, my boy!”
Garstin smiled, and for a moment looked a little less fatigued, but in a moment his almost morose preoccupation returned. He glanced again towards the sketch.
“I should like to slit it up with a palette knife!” he said. “The devil of it is that I felt I could do a really great thing with that fellow. I struck out a fine phrase that night. D’you remember?”
“Yes. You called him a king in the underworld.”
Abruptly he got up and began to walk about the studio, stopping now here, now there, before his portraits. He paused for quite a long time before the portraits of Cora and the judge. Then he came back to the sketch of Arabian.
“You must help me!” he said at last.
“I!” she exclaimed, with almost sharp surprise. “How can I help you?”
He turned, and she saw the pin-points of light.
“What do you think of the fellow?” he said. “After all, you asked me to paint him. What do you think of him?”
“I think he’s magnificently handsome.”
“Blast his envelope!” Garstin almost roared out. “What do you think of his nature? What do you think of his soul? I’m not a painter of surfaces.”
Miss Van Tuyn sat for a moment looking steadily at him. She was unusually natural and unself-conscious, like one thinking too strongly to bother about herself. At last she said:
“Arabian is a very difficult man to understand, and I don’t understand him.”
“Do you like him?”
“I couldn’t exactly say that.”
“Do you hate him?”
“No.”
Garstin suddenly looked almost maliciously sly.
“I can tell you something that you feel about him.”
“What?”
“You are afraid of him.”
Miss Van Tuyn’s silky fair skin reddened.
“I’m not afraid of anyone,” she retorted. “If I have one virtue, I think it’s courage.”
“You’re certainly not a Miss Nancy as a rule. In fact, your cheek is pretty well known in Paris. But you’re afraid of Arabian.”
“Am I really?” said the girl, recovering from her surprise and facing him hardily. “And how have you found that out?”
“You took a fancy to the fellow the first time you saw him.”
“I did not take a fancy. I am not an under-housemaid.”
“There’s not really a particle of difference between an under-housemaid and a super-lady when it comes to a good-looking man.”
“Dick, you’re a great painter, but you’re also a great vulgarian!”
“Well, my father was a national schoolmaster and my mother was a butcher’s daughter. I can’t help my vernacular. You took a fancy to this fellow in the Cafe Royal, and you begged me to paint him so that you might get to know him. I obeyed you—”
“The heavens will certainly fall before you become obedient.”
“—and asked him here. Then I asked you. You came. He came. I started painting. How many sittings have I had?”
“Three.”
“Then you’ve met him here four times?”
“Yes.”
“And why have you always let him go away alone from the studio?”
“Why should I go with him? I much prefer to stay on here and have a talk with you. You are far more interesting than Arabian is. He says very little. Probably he knows very little. I can learn from you.”
“That’s all very well. I will say you’re damned keen on acquiring knowledge. But Arabian interests you in a way I certainly don’t; in a sex way.”
“That’ll do, Dick!”
“And directly a woman gets to that all the lumber of knowledge can go to the devil for her! When Nature drives the coach brain interests occupy the back seat. That is a rule with women to which I’ve never yet found an exception. Every day you’re longing to go away from here with Arabian; every day he does his level best to get you to go. Yet you don’t go. Why’s that? You’re held back by fear. You’re afraid of the fellow, my girl, and it’s not a bit of use your denying it. When I see a thing I see it—it’s there. I don’t deal in hallucinations.”
All this time his small eyes were fixed upon her, and the fierce little lights in them seemed to touch her like the points of two pins.
“You talk about fear! Does it never occur to you that Arabian’s a man you picked up at the Cafe Royal, that we neither of us know anything about him, that he may be—”
“Anyhow, he’s far more presentable than I am.”
“Of course he’s presentable, as you call it. He’s very well dressed and very good-looking, but still—”
At that moment she thought of Craven, and in her mind quickly compared the two men.
“But still you’re afraid of him. Where is your frankness? Why don’t you acknowledge what I already know?”
Miss Van Tuyn looked down and sat for a moment quite still without speaking. Then she began to take off her gloves. Finally, she lifted her hands to her head, took off her hat, and laid it on the divan beside her.
“It isn’t that I am afraid of Arabian,” she then said, at last looking up. “But the fact is I am like you. I don’t understand him. I can’t place him. I don’t even know what his nationality is. He knows nobody I do. I feel certain of that. Yet he must belong somewhere, have some set of friends, some circle of acquaintances, I suppose. He isn’t at all vulgar. One couldn’t call him genteel, which is worse, I think. It’s all very odd. I’m not conventional. In Paris I’m considered even terribly unconventional. I’ve met all sorts of men, but I’ve never met a man like Arabian. But the other day—don’t you remember?—you summed him up. You said he had no education, no knowledge, no love of art or literature, that he was clever, sensual, idle, acquisitive, made of iron, with nerves of steel. Don’t you remember?”
“To be sure I do.”
“Isn’t that enough to go upon?”
“For the painting? No, it isn’t. Besides, you said you weren’t sure I was right in my diagnosis of the chap’s character and physical part.”
“I wasn’t sure, and I’m not sure now.”
“Tell me God’s own truth, Beryl. Come on!”
He came up to her, put one hand on her left shoulder, and looked down into her eyes.
“Aren’t you a bit afraid of the fellow?”
She met his eyes steadily.
“There’s something—” She paused.
“Go ahead, I tell you!”
“I couldn’t describe it. It’s more like an atmosphere than anything else. It seems to hang about him. I’ve never felt anything quite like it when I’ve been with anyone else.”
“An atmosphere! Now we’re getting at it.”
He took his heavy hand away from her shoulder.
“A woman feels that sort of thing more sensitively than a man does. Sex! Go on! What about it?”
“But I scarcely know what I mean—really, Dick. No! But it’s—it’s an unsafe atmosphere.”
“Ah!”
“One doesn’t know where one is in it. At least, I don’t. Once in London I was lost for a little while in Regents Park in a fog. It’s—it’s something like that. I couldn’t see the way, and I heard steps and voices that sounded strange and—I don’t know.”
“Find out!”
“That’s all very well. You are terribly selfish, Dick. You don’t care what happens so long as you can paint as you wish to paint. You’d sacrifice me, anyone—”
The girl seemed strangely uneasy. Her usual coolness had left her. The hot blood had come back to her cheeks and glowed there in uneven patches of red. Garstin gazed at her with profound and cruel interest.
“Sacrifice!” he said. “Who talked of sacrificing you? Who wishes to sacrifice you? I only want—”
“One doesn’t know—with a man like that one doesn’t know where it would lead to.”
“Then you think he’s a thundering blackguard? And yet you defended him just now, said perhaps I couldn’t paint him just because I’d made up my mind he was a brute. You’re a mass of contradictions.”
“I don’t say he’s bad. He may not be bad.”
“Fact is, as I said, you’re in a mortal funk of him.”
“I am not!” she said, with sudden anger. “No one shall say I’m afraid of any man. You can ask anyone who knows me really well, and you will always hear the same story. I’m afraid of no one and nothing, and I’ve proved it again and again.”
“Well then, what’s to prevent you proving it to me, my girl?”
“I will!”
She lifted her chin and looked suddenly impudent.
“What do you wish me to do to prove it?” she asked him defiantly.
“If Arabian does come to-day go away with him when he goes. Get to know him really. You could, I believe. But ever since he’s come here to sit he has shut up the box which contains the truth of what he is, locked it, and lost the key. His face is a mask, and I don’t paint masks.”
“Very well. I will.”
“Good!” said Garstin sonorously, and looking suddenly much less tired and morose.
“But why do you thinkIcould get to know him?”
“Because he’s—but you know why better than I do.”
“I don’t.”
“Arabian’s in love with you, my girl. By Jove! There he is!”
The bell had sounded below.
With a swift movement Garstin got hold of a palette knife, sprang at the sketch of Arabian, and ripped up the canvas from top to bottom. Miss Van Tuyn uttered a cry.
“Dick!”
“That’s all right!”
He threw the knife down.
“We’ll do better than that by a long way.”
He got hold of her hand.
“Stick to your word, my girl, and I’ll paint you yet—and not an Academy portrait. But you’ve got tolive. Just now, with your cheeks all in patches you looked stunning.”
The bell went again.
“Now for him!”
He hurried downstairs.
Lady Sellingworth was afraid. In spite of her many triumphs in the past she had a deep distrust of life. Since the tragedies of her middle age her curious natural diffidence, which the habit of the world had never been able to subdue, had increased. In ten years of retirement, in the hundreds of hours of solitude which those ten years had held for her, it had grown within her. And now it began to torment her.
Life brings gifts to almost everyone, and often the gift-bearer’s approach is absolutely unexpected. So it had been in Lady Sellingworth’s case. She had had no premonition that a change was preparing for her. Nothing had warned her to be on the alert when young feet turned into Berkeley Square on a certain Sunday in autumn and made towards her door. Abruptly, after years of neglect, it seemed as if life suddenly remembered that there was a middle-aged woman, with lungs which still mechanically did their work, and a heart which still obstinately persisted in beating, living in Berkeley Square, and that scarcely a bare bone had been thrown to her for some thousands of days. And then life brought her Craven, with an unusual nature, with a surely romantic mind, with a chivalrous sense that was out of the fashion, with faculties making for friendship; life offered, or seemed to offer her Craven, to whisper in her ear, “You have been starving alone for a long time. To tell the truth, I had forgotten all about you. I did not remember you were there. I don’t quite know why you persist in being there. But, as you do, and as you are wearing thin for want of sustenance, here is something for you!”
And now, because of what life had done, Lady Sellingworth was afraid. When she had parted from her friends after the theatre party, and was once more alone in her big house, she knew thoroughly, absolutely, for the first time what life had done.
All the calm, the long calm of her years of retirement from the world, had gone. She now knew how strangely safe she had felt in her loneliness. She had felt surely something of the safety of a nun of one of the enclosed orders. In her solitude she had learnt to understand how dangerous the great world is, how full of trials for the nerves, the temper, the flesh, the heart. The woman who goes into it needs to be armed. For many weapons thrust at her. She must be perpetually on the alert, ready to hold her own among the attacking eyes and tongues. And she must not be tired, or dull, or sad, must not show, or follow, her varying moods, must not quietly rest in sincerity. When she had lived in the world Lady Sellingworth had scarcely realized all this. But in her long retirement she had come fully to realize it. There had been a strange and embracing sense of safety permeating her solitary life. She had got up in the morning, she had gone to bed at night, feeling safe. For the storms of the passions were stilled, and though desire might stir sometimes, it soon slept again. For she never took her desire into danger. She did not risk the temptations of the world.
But now all the old restlessness, all the old anxiety and furtive uneasiness of the mind, had returned. She was again what she had often been more than ten years ago—a woman tormented. And—for she knew herself now—she knew what was in store for her if she gave herself again to life and her own inclinations.
For it had all come back; the old greedy love of sympathy and admiration, the old worship of strength and youth and hot blood and good looks, the old longing for desire and love, the old almost irritable passion to possess, to dominate, to be first, to submerge another human being in her own personality.
After ten years she was in love again, desperately in love. But she was an elderly woman now, so elderly that many people would no doubt think that it was impossible that she should be in love. How little such people knew about human nature! The evening had been almost as wonderful and as exciting to her as it could have been to a girl. When she had come into the hall of the Carlton and had seen Craven through the glass, had seen his tall figure, smooth, dark hair, and animated face glowing with health after the breezes and sunrays of Beaconsfield, she had known a feeling that a girl might have understood and shared.
And she was sixty!
What was to be done?
Craven was certainly fond of her already. Quietly she had triumphed that night. Three women had seen and had quite understood her little triumph. Probably all of them had wondered about it, had been secretly irritated by it. Certainly Beryl had been very much irritated. But in spite of that triumph, Lady Sellingworth felt almost desperately afraid that night when she was alone. For she knew how great the difference was between her feeling for Craven and his feeling for her. And with greater intimacy that difference, she felt sure, must even increase. For she would want from him what he would never want or even dream of wanting, from her. He would be satisfied in their friendship while she would be almost starving. He would never know that cruel longing to touch which marks the difference between what is love and what is friendship.
If she now let herself go, took no drastic step, just let life carry her on, she could have a strange and unusual, and, in its way, beautiful friendship, a friendship which to a woman with a different nature from hers might seem perfect. She could have that—and what would it be to her?
She longed to lay violent hands on herself; she longed to tear something that was an essential part of her to pieces, to scatter it to a wind, and let the wind whirl it away.
She knelt down that night before getting into bed and prayed. And when she did that she thought of Sellingworth and of his teachings and opinions. How he would have laughed at her if he had ever seen her do that! She had not wanted to do it in the years when she had been with him. But now, if his opinions had been well founded, he was only dust and perhaps a few fragments of bone. He could not laugh at her now. And she felt a really desperate need of prayer.
She did not pray to have something that she wanted. She knew that would be no use. Even if there was a God who attended to individuals, he would certainly not give her what she wanted just then. To do so would be deliberately to interfere with the natural course of things, arbitrarily to change the design. And something in Lady Sellingworth’s brain prevented her from being able even for a moment to think that God would ever do that. She prayed, therefore, that she might cease to want what she wanted; she prayed that she might have strength to do a tremendously courageous thing quickly; she prayed that she might be rewarded for doing it by afterwards having physical and mental peace; she prayed that she might be permanently changed, that she might, after this last trial, be allowed to become passionless, that what remained of the fiercely animal in her might die out, that she might henceforth be as old in nature as she already was in body. “For,” she said to herself, “only in that oldness lies safety for me! Unless I can be all old—mind and nature, as well as body—I shall suffer horribly again.”
She prayed that she might feel old, so old that she might cease from being attracted by youth, from longing after youth in this dreadful tormenting way.
When she got up from her knees it was one o’clock. She took two tablets of aspirin and got into bed. And directly she was in bed an idea seemed to hit her mind, and she trembled slightly, as if she had really received a blow. She had just been praying for something earnestly, almost violently, and she had prayed with clear understanding, with the understanding that a long and fully lived life brings to every really intelligent human being. Did she really want her prayer to be answered, or had she been trying to humbug herself? She had thought of a test which would surely prove whether she was genuine in her desire to escape from the torment that was lying in wait for her or not. Instead of receiving a visit from her Greek to-morrow, instead of being at home to Craven in the late afternoon, instead of giving herself up to the lure which must, she knew, certainly lead her on to emotional destruction, she might do this: she might telephone to Sir Seymour Portman to come to her and tell him that she would reward his long faithfulness.
It would be a way out. If she could bring herself to do it she would make herself safe. For though Seymour Portman had been so faithful, and she had never rewarded him, he was not a man any woman would dare to play with. Lady Sellingworth knew that she would never break a promise to him, would never play fast and loose with him. He was strong and he was true, and he had very high ideals and an almost stern code of honour. In accepting him as her husband she would shut a door of steel between herself and her past, with its sins and its many follies. She would begin again, as an old woman with a devoted husband who would know—none better—how to make himself respected, how to hold by his rights.
People might smile at such a marriage, but it would be absolutely suitable. Seymour was a few years older than she was. But he was still strong and upright, could still sit a horse as well as any man, still had a steady hand with his gun. He was not a ruin. She would be able to rest on him. A more perfect support for a woman than Seymour, if he loved, was surely not created. He was a gentleman to the core, and totally incapable of insincerity. He was fearless. He belonged to her world. He waspersona grataat Court and in society. And he loved her in that extraordinary and very rare way—as the one woman. All he needed in a woman quite evidently he found in her. How? Why? She did not know, could not understand. But so it was. She would absolutely satisfy his desires.
The aspirin was stilling her nerves. She lay without moving. Had she been a humbug when she prayed? Had she prayed knowing quite well that her prayer was not going to be answered, not intending, or wishing, really, that it should be answered? Had she prayed without any belief in a Being who had the power and probably the will to give her what she asked for? Would she have prayed at all had she been sure that if she offered up a petition to be made old in nature as well as in body it would certainly be granted?
“I don’t know! I don’t know!” she whispered to herself.
The darkness of the big room suddenly seemed very strange. And she thought how odd it was that human beings need in every twenty-four hours a long period of blackness, that they make blackness by turning out light, and stretch themselves out in it as if getting ready for burial.
“Burial! If I’m not a humbug, if really I wish for peace, to-morrow I shall send for Seymour,” she said to herself. “Through him I can get peace of mind. He will protect me against myself, without even knowing that he is doing it. I have only to speak a sentence to him and all possibility of danger, torment and wildness will be over for ever.”
And then she thought of the safety of a prison. But anything was surely better than misery of mind and body, than wanting terribly from someone what he never wants to give you, what he never wants from you.
Torment in freedom, or stagnant peace in captivity behind the prison door—which was the more desirable? Craven’s voice through the telephone—their conversation about Waring—Seymour’s long faithfulness—if he were here now! How would it be? And if Craven—No! No!
Another tablet of aspirin—and sleep!
Lady Sellingworth did not pray the next morning. But she telephoned to Seymour Portman, and said she would be at home about five in the afternoon if he cared for an hour’s talk. She gave no hint that she had any special reason for asking him to come. If he only knew what was in her mind! His firm, quiet, soldier’s voice replied through the telephone that of course he would come. Somehow she guessed that he had had an engagement and was going to give it up for her. What would he not give up for her? And yet he was a man accustomed to command, and to whom authority was natural. But he was also accustomed to obey. He was the perfect courtier, devoted to the monarchy, yet absolutely free from the slave instinct. Good kings trust such men. Many women love them.
“Why not I?” Lady Sellingworth thought that day.
And it seemed to her that perhaps even love might be subject to will power, that a determined effort of will might bring it or banish it. She had never really tested her will in that way in connexion with love. But the time had come for the test to be made.
“Perhaps I can love Seymour!” she said to herself. “Perhaps I could have loved him years ago if I had chosen. Perhaps I have only to use my will to be happy with him. I have never controlled my impulses. That has been my curse and the cause of all my miseries.”
At that moment she entirely forgot the ten years of self-control which were behind her. The sudden return to her former self had apparently blotted them out from her memory.
After telephoning to Seymour Portman she wrote a little note to Craven and sent it round to the Foreign Office. In the note she explained briefly that she was not able to see him that afternoon as had been arranged between them. The wording of the note was cold. She could not help that. She wrote it under the influence of what she thought of just then as a decision. If she did what she believed she intended to do that afternoon she would have to be cold to Craven in the future. With her temperament it would be impossible to continue her friendship with Craven if she were going to marry Sir Seymour. She knew that. But she did not know how frigid, how almost brusque, her note to Craven was.
When he read it he felt as if he had received a cold douche. It startled him and hurt him, hurt his youthful sensitiveness and pride. And he wondered very much why Lady Sellingworth had written it, and what had happened to make her write to him like that. She did not even ask him to call on her at some other time on some other day. And it had been she who had suggested a cosy talk that afternoon. She had been going to show him a book of poems by a young American poet in whose work she was interested. And they would have talked over the little events of the preceding evening, have discussed Moscovitch, the play, the persistence of love, youth, age, everything under the sun.
Craven was severely disappointed. He even felt rather angry and hurt. Something in him was up in arms, but something else was distressed and anxious. It was extraordinary how already he had come to depend upon Lady Sellingworth. His mother was dead. He certainly did not think of Lady Sellingworth as what is sometimes called “a second mother.” There was nothing maternal about her, and he was fully aware of that. Besides, she did not fascinate him in the motherly way. No; but owing to the great difference in their ages he felt that he could talk to her as he could talk to nobody else. For he was in no intimate relation with any other woman so much older than himself. And to young women somehow one can never talk so freely, so companionably. Even in these modern days sex gets in the way. Craven told himself that as he folded up Lady Sellingworth’s letter. She was different. He had felt that for him there was quite a beautiful refuge in Berkeley Square. And now! What could have happened? She must surely be vexed about something he had done, or about something which had occurred on the previous evening. And he thought about the evening carefully and minutely. Had she perhaps been upset by Lady Wrackley and Mrs. Ackroyde? Was she self-conscious as he was, and had she observed their concentration upon herself and him? Or, on the other hand, could she had misunderstood his manner with Miss Van Tuyn? He knew how very sensitive women are about each other. And Lady Sellingworth, of course, was old, although he never bothered, and seldom thought, about her age. Elderly women were probably in certain ways even more sensitive than young women. He could well understand that. And he certainly had rather made love to Miss Van Tuyn because of the horribly observing eyes of the “old guard.” And then, too, Miss Van Tuyn had finally almost required it of him. Had she not told him that she had insisted on Lady Sellingworth’s being asked to the theatre to entertain Braybrooke so that Craven and she, the young ones, might have a nice little time? After that what could he do but his duty? But perhaps Lady Sellingworth had not understood. He wondered, and felt now hurt and angry, now almost contrite and inclined to be explanatory.
When he left the Foreign Office that day and was crossing the Mall he was very depressed. A breath of winter was in the air. There was a bank of clouds over Buckingham Palace, with the red sun smouldering just behind their edges. The sky, as it sometimes does, held tenderness, anger and romance, and was full of lures for the imagination and the soul. Craven looked at it as he walked on with a colleague, a man called Marshall, older than himself, who had just come back from Japan, and was momentarily translated. He voyaged among the clouds, and was carried away across that cold primrose and delicate green, and his journey was into the ineffable, and beyond the rim of the horizon towards the satisfaction of the unexpressed, because inexpressible, desires. And Marshall talked about Japanese art and presently about geishas, not stupidly, but with understanding. And Craven thought: “If only I were going to Berkeley Square!” He had come down to earth, but in the condition which yearns for an understanding mind. Lady Sellingworth understood him. But now—he did not know. And he went with Marshall drearily to the St. James’s Club and went on hearing about geishas and Japanese art.
The bell sounded in Berkeley Square, and a footman let in Sir Seymour Portman, who was entirely unconscious that Fate had been working apparently with a view to the satisfaction of his greatest desire. He had long ago given up hope of being Adela Sellingworth’s husband. Twice that hope had died—when she had married Lord Manham, and when she had married Sellingworth. Adela could not care for him in that way. But now for many years she had remained unmarried, had joined him, as it were, in the condition of being lonely. That fact had helped him along the road. He could go to her and feel that he was in a certain degree wanted. That was something, even a good deal, in the old courtier’s life. He valued greatly the welcome of the woman whom he still loved with an undeviating fidelity. He was thankful, selfishly, no doubt—he often said so to himself—for her loneliness, because he believed himself able to cheer it and to alleviate it. And at last he had ceased to dread any change in her way of life. His Adela had evidently at last “settled down.” Her vivacious temperament, her almost greedy love of life, were abated. He had her more or less to himself.
As he mounted the staircase with his slow, firm step, holding his soldierly figure very upright, he was looking forward to one of the usual quiet, friendly conversations with Adela which were his greatest enjoyments, and as he passed through the doorway of the drawing-room his eyes turned at once towards the sofa near the big fireplace, seeking for the tall figure of the woman who so mysteriously had captured his heart in the long ago and who had never been able to let it out of her keeping.
But there was no one by the fire, and the butler said:
“I will tell her ladyship that you are here, sir.”
“Thank you, Murgatroyd,” said Sir Seymour.
And he went to the fireplace, turned round, and began to warm his flat back.
He stood there thus till his back was quite warm. Adela was rather slow in coming. But he did not mind that. It was happiness for him to be in her house, among her things, the sofas and chairs she used, the carpet her feet pressed every day, the books she read, the flowers she had chosen. This house was his idea of a home who had never had a home because of her.
Meanwhile upstairs, in a big bedroom just overhead, Lady Sellingworth was having a battle with herself of which her friend was totally unconscious. She did not come down at once because she wanted definitely and finally to finish that battle before she saw again the man by the fire. But something said to her: “Don’t decide till you have seen him again. Look at him once more and then decide.” She walked softly up and down the room after Murgatroyd had told her who was waiting for her, and she felt gnawed by apprehension. She knew her fate was in the balance. All day she had been trying to decide what she was going to do. All day she had been saying to herself: “Now, this moment, I will decide, and once the decision is made there shall be no going back from it.” It was within her power to come to a decision and to stick to it; or, if it were not within her power, then she was not a sane but an insane woman. She knew herself sane. Yet the decision was not arrived at when Sir Seymour rang the bell. Now he was waiting in the room underneath and the matter must be settled. An effort of will, the descent of a flight of stairs, a sentence spoken, and her life would be made fast to an anchor which would hold. And for her there would be no more drifting upon dangerous seas at the mercy of tempests.
“Look at him once more and then decide.”
The voice persisted within her monotonously. But what an absurd injunction that was. She knew Seymour by heart, knew every feature of him, every expression of his keen, observant, but affectionate eyes, the way he held himself, the shapes of his strong, rather broad hands—the hands of a fine horseman and first-rate whip—every trick of him, every attitude. Why look at him, her old familiar friend, again before deciding what she was now going to do?
“Look at him as the man who is going to be your husband!”
But that was surely a deceiving insidious voice, suggesting to her weakness, uncertainty, hesitation, further mental torment and further debate. And she was afraid of it.
She stood still near the window. She must go down. Seymour had already been waiting some time, ten minutes or more. He must be wondering why she did not come. He was not the sort of man one cares to keep waiting—although he had waited many years scarcely daring to hope for something he longed for. She thought of his marvellous happiness, his wonderful surprise, if she did what she meant—or did she mean it—to do. Surely it would be a splendid thing to bring such a flash of radiance into a life of twilight. Does happiness come from making others happy? If so, then—She must go down.
“I will do it!” she said to herself. “Merely his happiness will be enough reward.”
And she went towards the door. But as she did so her apprehension grew till her body tingled with it. A strange sensation of being physically unwell came upon her. She shrank, as if physically, from the clutching hands of the irrevocable. If in a hurry, driven by her demon, she were to say the words she had in her mind there would be no going back. She would never dare to unsay them. She knew that. But that was just the great advantage she surely was seeking—an irrevocable safety from herself, a safety she would never be able to get away from, break out of.
In a prison there is safety from all the dangers and horrors of the world outside the prison. But what a desperate love of the state she now called freedom burned within her! Freedom for what, though? She knew and felt as if her soul were slowly reddening. It was monstrous that thought of hers. Yet she could not help having it. It was surely not her fault if she had it. Was she a sort of monster unlike all other women of her age? Or did many of them, too, have such thoughts?
She must go down. And she went to the door and opened it. And directly she saw the landing outside and the descending staircase she knew that she had not yet decided, that she could not decide till she had looked at Seymour once more, looked at him with the almost terrible eyes of the deeply experienced woman who can no longer decide a thing swiftly in ignorance.
“I shall do it,” she said to herself. “But I must be reasonable, and there is no reason why I should force myself to make up my mind finally up here. I have sent for Seymour and I know why. When I see him, when I am with him, I shall do what I intended to do when I asked him to come.”
She shut her bedroom door and began to go downstairs, and as she went she imagined Seymour settled in that house with her. (For, of course, he would come to live in Berkeley Square, would leave the set of rooms he occupied now in St. James’s Palace.) She had often longed to have a male companion living with her in that house, to smell cigar smoke, to hear a male voice, a strong footstep in the hall and on the stairs, to see things that implied a man’s presence lying about, caps, pipes, walking sticks, golf clubs, riding crops. The whole atmosphere of the house would be changed if a man came to live with her there, if Seymour came.
But—her liberty?
She had gained the last stair and was on the great landing before the drawing-room door. Down below she heard a faint and discreet murmur of voices from Murgatroyd and the footman in the hall. And as she paused for a moment she wondered how much those two men knew of her and of her real character, whether they had any definite knowledge of her humanity, whether they had perhaps realized in their way what sort of woman she was, sometimes stripped away theGrande Dame, the mistress, and looked with appraising eyes at the stark woman.
She would never know.
She opened the door and instantly assumed her usual carelessly friendly look.
Sir Seymour had left the fire, and was sitting in an armchair with a book in his hand reading when she came in; and as she had opened the door softly, and as it was a long way from the fireplace he did not hear her or instantly realize that she was there. She had an instant in which to contemplate him as he sat there, like a man quietly at home. Only one lamp was lit. It stood on a table behind him and threw light on his rather big head thickly covered with curly and snow-white hair, the hair which he sometimes smilingly called his “cauliflower.” The light fell, too, aslant on his strong-featured manly face, the slightly hooked nose, large-lipped, firm mouth, shaded by a moustache in which some dark hairs were mingled with the white ones, and chin with a deep dent in the middle of it. His complexion was of that weather-beaten red hue which is often seen in oldish men who have been much out in all weathers. There were many deep lines in the face, two specially deep ones slanting downwards from the nose on either side of the mouth. Above the nose there was a sort of bump, from which the low forehead slightly retreated to the curves of strong white hair. The ears were large but well shaped. In order to read he had put on pince-nez with tortoise-shell rimmed glasses, from which hung a rather broad black riband. His thin figure looked stiff even in an arm-chair. His big brown-red hands held the book up. His legs were crossed, and his feet were strongly defined by the snowy white spats which partially concealed the varnished black boots. He looked a distinguished old man as he sat there—but he looked old.
“Is it possible that I look at all that sort of age?” was Lady Sellingworth’s thought as, for a brief instant, she contemplated him, with an intensity, a sort of almost fierce sharpness which she was scarcely aware of.
He looked up, made a twitching movement; his pince-nez fell to his black coat, and he got up alertly.
“Adela!”
She shut the door and went towards him, and as she did so she thought:
“If I had seen Alick Craven sitting there reading!”
“I was having a look at this.”
He held up the book. It was Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal.”
“Not the book for you!” she said. “Though your French is so good.”
“No.”
He laid it down, and she noticed the tangle of veins on his hand.
“The dandy in literature doesn’t appeal to me. I must say many of these poets strike me as decadent fellows, not helped to anything like real manliness by their gifts.”
She sat down on the sofa, just where she had sat to have those long talks with Craven about Waring and Italy, the sea people, the colours of the sails on those ships which look magical in sunsets, which move on as if bearing argosies from gorgeous hidden lands of the East.
“But never mind Baudelaire,” he continued, and his eyes, heavily lidded and shrouded by those big bushy eyebrows which seem to sprout almost with ardent violence as the body grows old, looked at her with melting kindness. “What have you been doing, my dear? The old dog wants to know. There is something on your mind, isn’t there?”
Lady Sellingworth had once said to Sir Seymour that he reminded her of a big dog, and he had laughed and said that he was a big dog belonging to her. Since that day, when he wrote to her, he had often signed himself “the old dog.” And often she had thought of him almost as one thinks of a devoted dog, absolutely trustworthy, ready for instant attack on your enemies, faithful with unquestioning faithfulness through anything.
As he spoke he gently took her hand, and she thought, “If Alick Craven were taking my hand!”
The touch of his skin was warm and very dry. It gave her a woman’s thoughts, not to be told of.
“What is it?” he asked.
Very gently she released her hand, and as she did so she looked on it almost sternly.
“Why?” she said. “Do I look unhappy—or what? Sit down, Seymour dear.”
She seemed to add the last word with a sort of pressure, with almost self-conscious intention.
He drew the tails of his braided morning coat forward with both hands and sat down, and she thought, “How differently a young man sits down!”
“Unhappy!” he said, in his quiet and strong, rather deep voice.
He looked at her with the scrutinizing eyes of affection, whose gaze sometimes is so difficult to bear. And she felt that something within her was writhing under his eyes.
“I don’t think you often look happy, Adela. No; it isn’t that. But you look to-day as if you had been going through something which had tried your nerves—some crisis.”
He paused. She remained silent and looked at his hands and then at his eyelids and eyebrows. And there was a terrible coldness in her scrutiny, which she did not show to him, but of which she was painfully aware. His nails were not flat, but were noticeably curved. For a moment the thought in her mind was simply, “Could I live with those nails?” She hated herself for that thought; she despised herself for it; she considered herself almost inhuman and certainly despicable, and she recalled swiftly what Seymour was, the essential beauty and fineness of his character, his truth, his touching faithfulness. And almost simultaneously she thought, “Why do old men get those terribly bushy eyebrows, like thickets?”
“Perhaps I think too much,” she said. “Living alone, one thinks—and thinks. You have so much to do and I so little.”
“Sometimes I think of retiring,” he said.
“From the court?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, but they would never let you!”
“My place could be filled easily enough.”
“Oh, no, it couldn’t.”
And she added, leaning forward now, and looking at him differently:
“Don’t you ever realize how rare you are, Seymour? There is scarcely anyone left like you, and yet you are not old-fashioned. Do you know that I have never yet met a man who really was a man—”
“Now, now, Adela!”
“No, I will say it! I have never met a real man who, knowing you, didn’t think you were rare. They wouldn’t let you go. Besides, what would you retire to?”
Again she looked at him with a scrutiny which she felt to be morally cruel. She could not refrain from it just then. It seemed to come inevitably from her own misery and almost desperation. At one moment she felt a rush of tenderness for him, at another an almost stony hardness.
“Ah—that’s just it! I dare say it will be better to die in harness.”
“Die!” she said, as if startled.
At that moment the thought assailed her, “If Seymour were suddenly to die!” There would be a terrible gap in her life. Her loneliness then would be horrible indeed unless—she pulled herself up with a sort of fierce mental violence. “I won’t! I won’t!” she cried out to herself.
“You are very strong and healthy, Seymour,” she said, “I think you will live to be very old.”
“Probably. Palaces usually contain a few dodderers. But is anything the matter, Adela? The old dog is very persistent, you know.”
“I’ve been feeling a little depressed.”
“You stay alone too much, I believe.”
“It isn’t that. I was out at the theatre with a party only last night. We went toThe Great Lover. But he wasn’t like you. You are a really great lover.”
And again she leaned forward towards him, trying to feel physically what surely she was feeling in another way.
“The greatest in London, I am sure.”
“I don’t know,” he said, very simply. “But certainly I have the gift of faithfulness, if it is a gift.”
“We had great discussions on love and jealousy last night.”
“Did you? Whom were you with?”
“I went with Beryl Van Tuyn and Francis Braybrooke.”
“An oddly uneven pair!”
“Alick Craven was with us, too.”
“The boy I met here one Sunday.”
Lady Sellingworth felt an almost fierce flash of irritation as she heard him say “boy.”
“He’s hardly a boy,” she said. “He must be at least thirty, and I think he seems even older than he is.”
“Does he? He struck me as very young. When he went away with that pretty girl it was like young April going out of the room with all the daffodils. They matched.”
The intense irritation grew in Lady Sellingworth. She felt as if she were being pricked by a multitude of pins.
“Beryl is years and years younger than he is!” she said. “I don’t think you are very clever about ages, Seymour. There must be nearly ten years difference between them.”
Scarcely had she said this than her mind added, “And about thirty years’ difference between him and me!” And then something in her—she thought of it as the soul—crumpled up, almost as if trying to die and know nothing more.
“What is it, Adela?” again he said, gently. “Can’t I help you?”
“No, no, you can’t!” she answered, almost with desperation, no longer able to control herself thoroughly.
Suddenly she felt as if she were losing her head, as if she might break down before him, let him into her miserable secret.
“The fact is,” she continued, fixing her eyes upon him, as a criminal might fix his eyes on his judge while denying everything. “The fact is that none of us really can help anyone else. We may think we can sometimes, but we can’t. We all work out our own destinies in absolute loneliness. You and I are very old friends, and yet we are far away from each other, always have been and always shall be. No, you haven’t the power to help me, Seymour.”
“But what is the matter, my dear?”
“Life—life!” she said, and there was a fierce exasperation in her voice. “I cannot understand the unfairnesses of life, the cruel injustices.”
“Are you specially suffering from them to-day?” he asked, and for a moment his eyes were less soft, more penetrating, as they looked at her.
“Yes!” she said.
A terrible feeling of “I don’t care!” was taking possession of her, was beginning to drive her. And she thought of the women of the streets who, in anger or misery, vomit forth their feelings with reckless disregard of opinion in a torrent of piercing language.
“I’m really just like one of them!” was her thought. “Trimmed up as a lady!”
“Some people have such happy lives, years and years of happiness, and others are tortured and tormented, and all their efforts to be happy, or even to be at peace, without any real happiness, are in vain. It is of no use rebelling, of course, and rebellion only reacts on the rebel and makes everything worse, but still—”
Her face suddenly twisted. In all her life she thought she had never felt so utterly hopeless before.
Sir Seymour stretched out a hand to put it on hers, but she drew away.
“No, no—don’t! I’m not—you can’t do anything, Seymour. It’s no use!”
She got up from the sofa, and walked away down the long drawing-room, trying to struggle with herself, to get back self-control. It was like madness this abrupt access of passion and violent despair, and she did not know how to deal with it, did not feel capable of dealing with it. She looked out of the window into Berkeley Square, after pulling back curtain and blind. Always Berkeley Square! Berkeley Square till absolute old age, and then death came! And she seemed to see her own funeral leaving the door. Good-bye to Berkeley Square! She let the blind drop, the curtain fall into its place.