December Love Part 113

"What was it?" he said.

"I hardly feel I can tell you," she said.

"Then don't, if you would rather not. But I should be glad to know."

"Would you? I told Beryl the reason."

She felt forced to say that, forced to speak that bit of truth.

"Then, if so, cannot you tell me?"

"I said--I said I could tell you because I knew you were fond of me."

"Ah--that was it!"

He was silent. At last he said:

"I should like to ask you a question. May I?"

"Yes--please do."

"Are you very fond of Beryl Van Tuyn?"

"Oh, no!"

"Aren't you at all fond of her?"

"I'm afraid not. No. But I like her much better than I did."

"Since you have done something for her?"

"Perhaps it is that."

"It is that."

He came towards the sofa and stood by it looking down at her.

"I told you just now, Adela, that you couldn't surprise me. What you have done in connexion with Beryl Van Tuyn has not surprised me. I always knew you were capable of such a thing; yes, even of a thing as fine as that. Thank G.o.d you have had your opportunity. Of course you took it. But thank G.o.d you have had it."

"I had to take it. I couldn't do anything else."

"Of course _you_ couldn't."

She got up. She did not know why. She just felt that she had to get up.

Seymour put his hands on her shoulders.

"Have you ever wondered why I was able to go on loving you?" he asked her.

"Yes, very often."

"Well, now perhaps you won't wonder any more."

And he lifted his hands from her shoulders. But he stood there for a moment looking at her. And in his eyes she read her reward.

CHAPTER XI

Early on the following morning, soon after ten o'clock Miss Van Tuyn was startled by a knock on her bedroom door. Everything at all unexpected startled her just now. Her nerves, as even old f.a.n.n.y could not help noticing, had gone "all to pieces." She lived in perpetual fear. Nearly all the previous night she had been lying awake turning over and over in her mind the horrible possibilities of the future. It was in vain that she tried to call her normal common sense to the rescue, in vain that she tried to look at facts calmly, to sum them up dispa.s.sionately, and to draw from them reasonable conclusions. She could not be reasonable.

Her brain said to her: "You have no reason for fear. You are perfectly safe. Your folly and wilfulness, your carelessness of opinion, your reckless spirit of defiant independence, your ugly and abominable desires"--her brain did not spare her--"might easily have brought you to irretrievable ruin. They might have destroyed you. But Fate has intervened to protect you. You have been saved from the consequences of your own imprudence--to call it by no other name. Give thanks to the G.o.d of luck, and to the woman who sacrificed her pride for your sake, and live differently in the future." Her brain, in fact, told her she was saved. But something else that she could not cla.s.sify, something still and remote and persistent, told her that she was in great danger. She said to herself, thinking of Arabian: "What can he do? I am my own mistress. If I choose to cut him dead he must accept my decision to have nothing more to do with him and go out of my life. He simply can't do anything else. I have the whole thing in my hands. He hasn't a sc.r.a.p of my writing. He can't blackmail me. He can't compromise me more than I have already compromised myself by going about with him and being seen in his flat. He is helpless, and I have absolutely nothing to be afraid of." She said all this to herself, and yet she was full of fear. That fear had driven her to Lady Sellingworth on the previous evening, and it had grown in the night. The thought of Arabian tormented her. She said to herself that he could do nothing and, even while she said it, the inexorable something within her whispered: "What might not that man do?"

Her imagination put no limit now to his possibilities for evil. All the horrors of the underworld were, for her, congregated together in him.

She trembled at the memory of having been in his arms, shut up alone with him in the flat by the river. She attributed to him nameless powers. Something mysterious in him, something occult, had reduced her apparently to the level of an imaginative child, who peoples the night with spectres and conceives of terrors she cannot describe.

She felt that Arabian was not as other men, that he really was what Garstin had called him, a king in the underworld, and that that was why he had had power over her. She felt that he had within him something which ruled, which would have its way. She felt that he was more persistent than other men, more crafty, more self-possessed, more capable, more subtle. She felt that he had greatness as a ruffian, as another man might have greatness as a saint. And she felt above all that he was an expert with women.

If he had wanted Adela Sellingworth as well as her jewels, how would it have been then? What would have happened ten years ago? He had not wanted Adela Sellingworth. But he wanted her. She was positive of that.

That he had known she was well off and was going to be rich she did not doubt for a moment. She could never forget as long as she lived the fleeting expression which had changed his face when she had told him of the death of her father. At that moment he had certainly felt that a fortune was probably almost within his grasp. Nevertheless she was positive, she was absolutely certain as a girl can be about such a thing, that he wanted and had long wanted her. He had waited because mingled with his man's desire for her there had been the other desire.

He might have rushed at an intrigue. Such a man could have no real delicacies. He was too wise to rush at a marriage. And he must have had marriage in his mind almost ever since he had met her. He must have made inquiries, have found out all about her, and then laid his plans. Her looks had probably brought him for the first time to Garstin's studio.

But it was not only his admiration for her appearance which had brought him there again and again, which had taught him detached self-control, almost distant respect, puzzling reserve, secrecy in intimacy, which had taught him to wait--till he knew.

And when he had not waited, when he had chosen to give way because the right moment had come, when he had made her go with him to his flat, when he had shown her what he wanted! His warmth then had not been a pretending. And yet, just before he had taken her in his arms, he had deliberately managed so that Mrs. Birchington should see her go into his flat. What a horrible mingling of elements there was in this man! Even his natural pa.s.sions were intertwined with his hideous professional instincts The stretched-out hand of the lover was also the stretched-out hand of the thief.

When she heard the knock on her bedroom door she trembled.

"Yes?" she said, after a moment of hesitation.

She was up and was sitting in an arm-chair near the window having breakfast, and looking at her post.

"Yes?"

Another knock.

"Come in!" she cried.

The door was gingerly opened and a page-boy showed himself. Miss Van Tuyn looked at him with dread.

"What is it? Something for me?"

"There's a gentleman wants to see you, ma'am."

"I can't see anyone. I told them so at the bureau. Where is he?"

"Down below, ma'am."

"Send him away. Say I'm still asleep. Say--"

She noticed for the first time that the boy had a card. He had been hiding it pressed to a salver against his trouser-leg. Now he lifted the salver. But Miss Van Tuyn did not take the card. She was certain the man below was Arabian.

"I can't see anyone. It's much too early."