December Love Part 106

"Please give her that card. Wait one moment."

He pencilled on the card, "I hope you are better,--A.C.," gave it to the man, and walked away, feeling sure that Lady Sellingworth was in the house but did not choose to see him.

In the evening he received the following note from her:

18A, BERKELEY SQUARE,

Thursday.

DEAR MR. CRAVEN,--How kind of you to call and to write that little message. I am sorry I could not see you. I'm not at all ill, and have been out driving. But, between you and me--for I hate to make a fuss about trifling matters of health--I feel rather played out. Perhaps it's partly old age! You know nothing about that. Any variation in my quiet life seems to act as a disturbing influence. And the restaurant the other night really was terribly hot. I mustn't go there again, though it is great fun. I suppose you didn't see Beryl? She has been to see me, but said nothing about it. Be nice to her. I don't think she has many real friends in London.--Yours very sincerely,

ADELA SELLINGWORTH.

"What is it? What has happened?" Craven thought, as he put down the letter.

He felt that some drama had been played out, or partially played out, within the last days which he did not understand, which he was not allowed to understand. Lady Sellingworth chose to keep him in the dark. Well, she had the right to do that. As he thought over things he realized that the heat in the restaurant could certainly not have been the sole reason of her strange conduct on the night when they had dined together. Something had upset her mentally. A physical reason only could not account for her behaviour. And again he thought of Arabian.

Instinctively he hated the man. Who was he? Where did he come from?

Craven could not place him. Beyond feeling sure that he was a "wrong 'un" Craven had no very definite opinion about him. He was well dressed, good looking--too good looking--and no doubt knew how to behave. He might even possibly be a gentleman of sorts, come to England from some exotic land where the breed of gentleman was quite different from that which prevailed in England. But he was surely a beast. Craven detested his good looks, loathed his large and l.u.s.trous brown eyes. He was the sort of beast who did nothing but make up to women. Something inherently clean in Craven rejected the fellow, wished to drive him into outer darkness.

Could Lady Sellingworth know such a man?

That seemed quite impossible. Nevertheless, certain things persistently suggested to Craven that at least she had some knowledge of Arabian which she was deliberately concealing from him. The most salient of these things was her reiterated attempt to push him into the company of Beryl Van Tuyn. It was impossible not to think that Lady Sellingworth wished him to interfere between Beryl Van Tuyn and Arabian. On the night of the dinner in Soho she had attempted to persuade him to go back to the restaurant and to see Beryl home. And now here in this letter she returned to the matter.

"Be nice to her. I don't think she has many real friends in London."

"Go to see Beryl; don't come to see me."

Between the lines of Lady Sellingworth's letter Craven read those words and wondered at the ways of women. But he did not mean to obey the unwritten command. And he felt angry with Lady Sellingworth for giving it by implication. She might have what she considered a good reason for her extraordinary behaviour. But as she did not allow him to understand it, as she chose to keep him entirely in the dark, he would be pa.s.sive.

It was not his business to run after Beryl Van Tuyn, to interfere almost forcibly between her and another man, even if that man were a scoundrel.

Miss Van Tuyn was a free agent. She had the right to choose her own friends, her own lovers. Once he had decided that he would not give up his intimacy with her in favour of another man without a struggle, the sort of polite, and perhaps subtle, struggle which is suitable to the twentieth century, when man must only be barbarous in battle. But since the encounter in Glebe Place he had changed his mind. Disgust had seized him that day. What could he think but that Beryl Van Tuyn had deliberately induced him to come to Glebe Place, in order that he might see not only her absolute indifference to him but also her intimacy with Arabian? Her reason for such a crude exposure of her lightness of conduct escaped Craven. He could not conceive what she was up to, unless her design was to arouse in him violent jealousy. He did feel jealous, but he was certainly not going to show it. Besides, the delicacy that was natural in him was disquieted by what he thought of as the coa.r.s.eness of her behaviour.

As once more he looked at Lady Sellingworth's letter he was struck by something final in the wording of it. There was nothing explicit in it.

On the contrary, that seemed to be carefully avoided. But the allusions to old age, to disturbing influences, the decision not to go again to the _Bella Napoli_--these seemed to hint an intention to return to a former state of being, to abandon a new path of life. And he remembered a conversation with Francis Braybrooke at the club, the interest it had roused in him. Some slumbering feeling for romance had been stirred in him, he now thought, by that conversation, by the information he had received about the distinguished recluse who had lived a great life and then suddenly plunged into old age and complete retirement.

Now he seemed to hear a door shutting, and he was outside it. She had allowed him to enter her life for a short time, to enter it almost intimately. But she was surely repenting of that intimacy. He did not know why. Did he ever know why a woman did this or that? There was no suggestion in the letter that he should ever call again, no hint of a desire to see him. She was only sorry, politely sorry, that she had not been able to see him that day. But no reason was given for the inability. She had not considered it necessary to give him a reason.

When she had gone abroad without letting him know he had said to himself that his brief friends.h.i.+p with her had come to an end. He felt that more acutely now. For she had come back from abroad. She was close to him in London. She had tried him again. Evidently she must have found him wanting. For once more she was giving him up. Perhaps he was too young.

Perhaps he bored her. He did not know.

"I don't suppose I shall ever know."

To that conclusion he came at last. And the sense of finality grew in him, cold and inexorable. She was a mystery to him. He did not love her. He had never thought of her as she had thought of him. He had never known or suspected what her feelings for him had been. But he felt that something which might have meant a good deal, even perhaps a great deal, to him was being withdrawn from his life. And this withdrawal hurt him and saddened him.

He locked up her letter in his dispatch box. It would be a souvenir of a friends.h.i.+p which had seemed to promise much and which had ended abruptly in mystery. He did not answer it. Perhaps, probably, he would have done so but for the last two sentences in it.

CHAPTER IX

After Lady Sellingworth had written and sent her note to Craven she felt that she was facing a new phase of life, and she thought of it as the last phase. Her sacrifice of self was surely complete at last. She had exposed her nature naked to Beryl Van Tuyn. She had given up her friends.h.i.+p with Alick Craven. There was nothing more for her to do. The call of youth had wrung from her a response which created loneliness around her. And now she had to find within herself the resolution to face this loneliness bravely.

When she wrote to Craven she had meant him to understand something of what he had understood. Yet she did not desire to hurt him. She would not have hurt him for the world. Secretly her heart yearned over him.

But she could never let him know that. He might be puzzled by her letter. He might even resent it. But he would soon forget any feeling roused by it. And he would no doubt soon forget her, the old woman who had been kind to him for a time, who had even been almost Bohemian with him in a very mild way, and who had then tacitly given him up. Perhaps she would see him again. Probably she would. She had no intentions of permanently closing her door against him. But she would not encourage him to come. She would never dine out with him again. If he came he must come as an ordinary caller at the ordinary caller's hour.

Seymour Portman called on her in the late afternoon of the day when she wrote to Craven. Just before his arrival she was feeling peculiarly blank and almost confusedly dull. She had gone through so much recently, had lived at such high tension, had suffered such intense nervous excitement, in the restaurant of the _Bella Napoli_ and afterwards, that both body and mind refused to function quite normally. Long ago she had stayed at St. Moritz in the depth of the winter, and had got up each morning to greet the fierce blue sky, the blazing sun, the white glare of the enveloping snows with a strange feeling of light, yet depressed, detachment. She began to have a similar feeling now. Far down she was horribly sad. But her surface seemed to say, "Nothing matters, because I am in an abnormal condition, and while I remain in this condition nothing can really matter to me." Surface and depths were in contradiction, yet she was not even fully aware of that. A numbness held her, and yet she was nervous.

She heard the drawing-room door open and Murgatroyd's voice make the familiar announcement; she saw Seymour's upright, soldierly figure come into the room; she smiled a greeting to her old friend; and the sound of Murgatroyd's voice, the sight of Seymour coming towards her, her own response to sound and sight, did not conquer the sensation of numbness.

"Yes, he is here. He does not forget me. He loves me and will always love me. But what does it matter?"

A voice seemed to be saying that within her. Recently she had suffered acutely; she had made a great effort; she had conquered herself and been conquered by another. And it had all been just too much for her. She was, she thought, like one who had fought desperately lying in deadly silence and calm on the deserted battlefield, utterly pa.s.sive because utterly tired out.

But Seymour did not know that. He knew nothing of all that had happened, and Beryl knew everything. And she thought of a picture called "Love locked out." It was hardly fair that Seymour should know so little. And while he was quietly talking to her, telling her little bits of news which he thought would interest her, letting her in by proxy as it were to the life of the great world which she had abandoned but in which he still played a part, she was thinking, "If Seymour knew what I have done! If I told him, what would he think, what would he say?" He would be pleased, no doubt. But would he be surprised? And while she listened and talked she began to wonder, but always without intensity, about that. Seymour would think she had done the inevitable thing, what any thoroughbred was bound to do. And yet--would he be surprised nevertheless that she had been able to do it? She began presently to feel a slight tingle of curiosity about that. Had she, perhaps, to a certain extent justified Seymour's fidelity? He had a splendid character. She certainly had not. She had done countless things that Seymour must have hated, and secretly condemned. And yet he had somehow been able to go on loving her. Was that because he had always instinctively known that somewhere within her there was a traditional virtue which marched with his, that there was a voice which spoke his language?

"I suppose, in spite of all, in a way we are akin," she thought.

And she began to wish vaguely that he knew it, that he knew what had happened between her and Beryl. As she looked at his "cauliflower,"

bent towards her while he talked, at his strong soldier's face, at his faithful eyes, the eyes of the "old dog," she wished that it were possible to let Seymour know a little bit of the best of her. Not that she was proud of what she had done. She was too much akin to Seymour to be proud of such a thing, But Seymour would be pleased with her. And it would be pleasant to give him pleasure. It would be like giving him a small, a very small, reward for his long faithfulness, for his very beautiful and touching loyalty.

"What is it, Adela?" he said.

And a keen, searching look had come into his eyes.

She smiled vaguely, meeting his gaze. She still felt curiously detached, although she was able to think quite connectedly.

"What are you thinking about?"

"Why do you ask?"

"I feel you are not as usual to-day."

"In what way?"

"Something has happened. I don't, of course, wish to know what it is.

But it has changed you, my dear."

"In what way?" she said again.

His reply startled her, set her free from her feeling of numbness, of light detachment, from what she called to herself her "St. Moritz feeling."

"I feel as if you were coming into possession of your true self at last," he said very gravely. "But as if perhaps you scarcely knew it yet."

A slow red crept in her cheeks, which would never know again the touch of the artificial red.

"Dear Seymour! My true self! I wonder what sort of self you think that is?"

"That's easily told. It is the self I have been loving for so many years. And now--"