December Love Part 78

"I beg your pardon!" said Braybrooke.

"It was the very day the death of her father was in the evening papers.

I came back from the club with the paper in my hand, and met Beryl Van Tuyn getting out of the lift in Rose Tree Gardens with the man who lives opposite to me. She absolutely looked embarra.s.sed."

"Impossible!" said Lady Wrackley. "She couldn't!"

"I a.s.sure you she did! But she introduced me to him."

"She cannot have heard of her father's death," said Braybrooke.

"But she had! For I expressed my sympathy and she thanked me."

Braybrooke looked very ill at ease and glanced plaintively towards the place where Craven was sitting with the pretty American.

"No doubt she had been to visit old friends," he said, "American friends."

"But this man, Nicolas Arabian, lives alone in his flat. And I'm sure he's not an American. Lady Archie has seen him several times with Beryl."

"What's he like?" asked Lady Wrackley.

"Marvellously handsome! A _charmeur_ if ever there was one. Beryl certainly had good taste, but--"

At this moment there was a general movement. The butler had murmured to Mrs. Ackroyde that lunch was ready.

Lady Sellingworth was among the first few women who left the drawing-room, and was sitting at a round table in the big, stone-coloured dining-room when Baron de Melville, an habitue at Coombe, bent over her.

"I'm lucky enough to be beside you!" he said. "This is a rare occasion.

One never meets you now."

He sat down on her right. The place on her left was vacant. People were still coming in, talking, laughing, finding their seats. The d.u.c.h.ess of Wellingborough, who was exactly opposite to Lady Sellingworth, leaned forward to speak to her.

"Adela . . . Adela!"

"Yes? How are you, Cora?"

"Very well, as I always am. Isn't Lavallois a marvel?"

"He is certainly very clever."

"You are proud of it, my dear. Have you heard what the Bolshevist envoy said to the Prime Minister when--"

But at this moment someone spoke to the d.u.c.h.ess, who was already beginning to laugh at the story she was intending to tell and Lady Sellingworth was aware of a movement on her left. She felt as if she blushed, though no colour came into her face.

"How are you, Lady Sellingworth?"

She had not turned her head, but now she did, and met Craven's hard, uncompromising blue eyes and deliberately smiling lips.

"Oh, it's you! How nice!"

She gave him her hand. He just touched it coldly. What a boy he still was in his polite hostility! She thought of Camber Sands and the darkness falling over the waste, and, in spite of her self-control and her pity for him, there was an unconquerable feeling of injury in her heart. What reason, what right, had he to greet her so frigidly? How had she injured him?

A roar of conversation had begun in the room. Everyone seemed in high spirits. Mrs. Ackroyde, who was at the same table as Lady Sellingworth, with Lord Alfred Craydon on her right and Sir Robert Syng on her left, looked steadily round over the mult.i.tude of her guests with a comprehensive glance, the a.n.a.lyzing and summing-up glance of one to whom everything social was as an open book containing no secrets which her eyes did not read. Those eyes travelled calmly, and presently came to Craven and Adela Sellingworth. She smiled faintly and spoke to Robert Syng.

"This is her second debut," she said. "I'm bringing her out again. They are all amazed."

"What about?" said Sir Robert, in his grim and very masculine voice.

"Bobbie, you know as well as I do. I had a bet with Anne that she would accept. I'm five pounds to the good. Adela is a creature of impulses, and that sort of creature does young things to the day of its death."

"Is it doing a young thing to accept a luncheon invitation from you?"

"Yes--for _her_ reason."

"Well, that's beyond me."

"How indifferent you are!"

He looked at her in silence.

Lady Sellingworth talked to the baron till half-way through lunch.

He was a financier of rather obscure origin, long naturalized as an Englishman, and ardently patriotic. The n.o.ble words "we British people"

were often upon his strangely foreign-looking lips. Many years ago the "old guard" had taken him to their generous bosoms. For he was enormously rich, and really not a bad sort. And he had been clever enough to remain unmarried, so hope attended him with undeviating steps.

Miss Van Tuyn was presently the theme of his discourse. Evidently he did not know anything about her and Alick Craven. For he discussed her and her change of fortune without embarra.s.sment or any _arriere pensee_, and he, too, spoke of the visit to Rose Tree Gardens. Evidently all the Coombe set was full of this mysterious visit, paid to an Adonis whom n.o.body knew, in the shadow of a father's death.

The baron greatly admired Miss Van Tuyn, not only for her beauty but for her daring. And he was not at all shocked at what she had done.

"She never lived with her father. Why should she pretend to be upset at his death? The only difference it makes to her is an extremely agreeable one. If she celebrates it by a mild revel over the tea cups with an exceptionally good-looking man, who is to blame her? The fact is, we Britishers are all moral humbugs. It seems to be in the blood," etc.

He ran on with wholly un-English vivacity about Beryl and her wonderful man. Everybody wished to know who he was and all about him, but he seemed to be a profound mystery. Even Minnie Birchington, who lived opposite to him, knew little more than the rest of them. Since she had been introduced to him she had never set eyes on him, although she knew from her maid that he was still in the flat opposite, which he had rented furnished for three months with an option for a longer period. He had a Spanish manservant in the flat with him, but whether he, too, was Spanish Mrs. Birchington did not know. Where had Beryl Van Tuyn picked him up, and how had she come to know him so well? All the women were asking these questions. And the men were intrigued because of the report, carried by Lady Archie, and enthusiastically confirmed by Mrs.

Birchington, of the fellow's extraordinary good looks.

Lady Sellingworth listened to all this with an air of polite, but rather detached, interest, wondering all the time whether Craven could overhear what was being said. Craven was sometimes talking to his neighbour, Mrs. Farringdon, but occasionally their conversation dropped, and Lady Sellingworth was aware of his sitting in silence. She wished, and yet almost feared, to talk to him, but she knew that she was interested in no one else in the room. Now that she was again with Craven she realized painfully how much she had missed him. Among all these people, many of them talented, clever, even fascinating, she was only concerned about him. To her he seemed almost like a vital human being in the midst of a crowd of dummies endowed by some magic with the power of speech. She only felt him at this moment, though she was conscious of the baron, Mrs. Ackroyde, Bobbie Syng, the d.u.c.h.ess, and others who were near her.

This silent boy--he was still a boy in comparison with her--crumbling his bread, wiped them all out. Yet he was no cleverer than they were, no more vital than they. And half of her almost hated him still.

"Oh, why do I worry about him?" she thought, while she leaned towards the baron and looked energetically into his s.h.i.+fting dark eyes. "What is there in him that holds me and tortures me? He's only an ordinary man--horribly ordinary, I know that."

And she thought of Camber Sands and the twilight, and saw Craven seeking for Beryl's hand--footman and housemaid. What had she, Adela Sellingworth, with her knowledge and her past, her great burden of pa.s.sionate experiences--what had she to do with such an ordinary young man?

"Nicolas might possibly be Greek or Russian. But what are we to make of Arabian?"

It was still the voice of the Baron--full, energetic, intensely un-English.

"Have you heard the name before, Lady Sellingworth?"

"Yes," she said.

"Really! What country does it belong to? Surely not to our England?"