December Love Part 19

She paused, looking almost pleadingly at the uncompromising Miss Briggs.

"I'm convinced of this, that no really normal young man could ever be contented long if he married a middle-aged woman. And what intelligent woman is happy with an abnormal man?"

"Caroline, you are so dreadfully frank!"

"I say just what I think."

"But you think so drastically. And you are so free from sentiment."

"What is called sentiment is very often nothing but what is described in the Bible as the l.u.s.t of the eye."

This shaft, perhaps not intended to be a shaft, went home. Lady Sellingworth reddened and looked down.

"I dare say it is," she murmured. "But--no doubt some of us are more subject to temptation than others."

"I'm sure that is so."

"It's very difficult to give up deliberately nearly all that has made life interesting and attractive to you ever since you can remember.

Caroline, would you advise me to--to abdicate? You know what I mean."

Miss Briggs's rather plain, but very intelligent, face softened.

"Adela, my dear," she said, "I understand a great deal more than you have cared to hint at to me."

"I know you do."

"I think that unless you change your way of life in time you are heading straight for tragedy. We both know a lot of women who try to defy the natural law. Many of them are rather beautiful women. But do you think they are happy women? I don't. I know they aren't. Youth laughs at them. I don't know what you feel about it, but I think I would rather be pelted with stones than be jeered at by youth in my middle age. Respect may sound a very dull word, but I think there's something very warm in it when it surrounds you as you get old. In youth we want love, of course, all of us. But in middle age we want respect too. And nothing else takes its place. There's a dignity of the soul, and women like us--I'm older than you, but still we are neither of us very young any longer--only throw it away at a terrible price. When I want to see tragedy I look at the women who try to hang on to what refuses to stay with them. And I soon have to shut my eyes. It's too painful. It's like looking at bones decked out with jewels."

Lady Sellingworth sat very still. There was a long silence between the two friends. When they spoke again they spoke of other things.

That night Lady Sellingworth told her maid to pack up, as she was returning to London by the morning express on the following day.

At the Gare du Nord there was the usual bustle. But there was not a great crowd of travellers for England, and Lady Sellingworth without difficulty secured a carriage to herself. Her maid stood waiting with the jewel-case while she went to the bookstall to buy something to read on the journey. She felt dull, almost miserable, but absolutely determined. She knew that Caroline was right. She thought she meant to take her advice. At any rate, she would not try to pursue the adventure which had lured her to Paris. How she would be able to live when she got home she did not know. But she would go home. It had been absurd, undignified of her to come to Paris. She would try to forget all about it.

She bought a book and some papers; then she walked to the train.

"Are you going to get in, my lady?" said the maid.

"Yes. You can put in the jewel-case."

The maid did so, and Lady Sellingworth got into the carriage and sat next to the window on the platform side, facing the engine, with the jewel-case beside her on the next seat. The corridor was between her and the platform. On the right, beyond the carriage door, the line was blocked by another train at rest in the station.

She sat still, not reading, but thinking. The maid went away to her second-cla.s.s carriage.

Lady Sellingworth continued to feel very dull. Now that she was abandoning this adventure, or promise of adventure, she knew how much it had meant to her. It had lifted her out of the anger and depression in which she had been plunged by the Rupert Louth episode. It had appealed to her wildness, had given her new hope, something to look forward to, something that was food for her imagination. She had lived in an imagined future that was romantic, delicious and turbulent. Now she knew exactly how much she had counted on this visit to Paris as the door through which she would pa.s.s into a new and extraordinary romance. She had felt certain that something wonderful, something unconventional, bizarre, perhaps almost maddening, was going to happen to her in Paris.

And now--At this moment she became aware of some influence which drew her attention to the platform on her left. She had not seen anyone; she had simply felt someone. She turned her head and looked through the window of the corridor.

The brown man was on the platform alone, standing still and looking intently towards her carriage. Two or three people pa.s.sed him. He did not move. She felt sure that he was waiting for her to get out, that this time he meant to speak to her.

In a moment all her good resolutions, all the worldly wise advice of Miss Briggs, all her dullness and despair were forgotten. The wildness that would not die surged up in her. Her vanity glowed. She had been wrong, utterly wrong. Miss Briggs had been wrong. Despite the difference between their ages, this man, young, strong, amazingly handsome, must have fallen in love with her at first sight. He must have--somehow--been watching her in Paris. He must have ascertained that she was leaving Paris that morning, have followed her to the station determined at all costs to have a word with her.

Should she let him have that word?

Just for an instant she hesitated. Then, almost pa.s.sionately, she gave way to a turbulent impulse. She felt reckless. At that moment she was almost ready to let the train go without her. But there were still a few, a very few, minutes before the time for its departure. She got up, left the carriage, and stood in the corridor looking out of the window.

Immediately the man slightly raised his hat, sent her a long and imploring look, and then moved slowly away down the platform in the direction of the entrance to it. She gazed after him. He paused, again raised his hat, and made a very slight, scarcely noticeable gesture with his hand. Then he remained where he was.

Saying to herself that she would certainly not obey his obvious wish and follow him, but would simply get out of the train and take a few breaths of air on the platform--as any woman might to while away the time--Lady Sellingworth made her way to the end of the corridor and descended to the platform. The brown man was still there, a little way off. Several people were hurrying to take their places in the train. Porters were carrying hand luggage, or wheeling trucks of heavy luggage to the railway vans. No one seemed to have any time to take notice of her or of the man. She did not look at him, but began slowly to stroll up and down, keeping near to her carriage. She had given him his chance. Now it was for him to take firm hold on it. She fully expected that he would come up and speak to her. She thrilled with excitement at the prospect.

What would he say? How would he act? Would he explain why he had done nothing in Paris? Would he beg her to stay on in Paris? Would he ask to be allowed to visit her in London? Would he--But he did not come up to her.

After taking several short turns, keeping her eyes resolutely away from the place where he was standing, Lady Sellingworth could not resist the impulse to look towards him to see what he was doing. She lifted her eyes.

He was gone.

"_En voiture!_" cried a hoa.r.s.e voice.

She stood still.

"_En voiture! En voiture!_"

Mechanically she moved. She went to her carriage, put her hand on the rail, mounted the steps, pa.s.sing into the corridor, and reached her compartment just as the train began to move.

What had happened to him? What was the meaning of it all? Was he travelling to England too? Had he got into the train?

She sat down wondering, almost confused.

Mechanically she let her right hand drop on to the seat beside her. She was so accustomed when travelling to have her jewel-case beside her that her hand must have missed it though her thoughts were far from it. For immediately after dropping her hand she looked down.

The jewel-case was gone.

Instantly her feeling of confusion was swept away; instantly she understood.

She had been caught in a trap by a clever member of the swell mob operating with a confederate. While she had been on the platform, to which she had been deliberately enticed, the confederate had entered the compartment from the line, through the doorway on the right-hand side of her carriage, and had carried off the jewel-case.

The revelation of the truth almost stunned something in her. Yet she was able to think quite clearly. She did nothing. She just sat still and understood, and went on understanding, while the train quickened its pace on its way towards the sea.

By the time it slowed down, and the dull houses of Calais appeared, she had made up her mind about the future. Her vanity had received at last a mortal blow. The climax had come. It was not what she had expected, but her imp--less satirical now than desperately tragic and powerfully persuasive, told her that it was what she deserved. And she bowed her head to his verdict, not with tears, but with a cold and stormy sense of finality.

When the train stopped at the harbour station her maid appeared in the corridor.

"Shall I take the jewel-case, my lady?"

Lady Sellingworth stood up. She had not decided what to say to her maid.

She was taken by surprise. As she stood, her tall figure concealed the seat on which the jewel-case had been lying. For an instant she looked at the maid in silence. Perhaps the expression of her face as strange, for after a pause the maid said anxiously:

"Whatever is it, my lady?"