December Love Part 10

"Well, you know how, when travelling, it is easy to get into intimacies with people whom one doesn't want to be intimate with at home."

"Yes. I know all about that."

"At my age one has learnt to avoid not only such intimacies but many others less disagreeable, but which at moments might give one what I can only call mental gooseflesh. Is that aloofness?"

"I think it would probably be called so by some."

"By whom?"

"Oh, by mental gooseflesh-givers!"

She laughed, laughed quite out with a completeness which had something almost of youth in it.

"I wonder," he added rather ruefully, after the pause which the laugh had filled up, "I wonder whether I am one of them?"

"I don't think you are."

"And Ambrose Jennings?"

"That's a clever man!" was her reply.

And then she changed the conversation to criticism in general, and to the type of clever mind which, unable to create, a.n.a.lyses the creations of others sensitively.

"But I much prefer the creators," she presently said.

"So do I. They are like the fresh air compared with the air in a carefully closed room," said Craven. "Talking of closed rooms, don't you think it is strange the liking many brilliant men and women have, both creators and a.n.a.lysers of creators, for the atmosphere of garish or sordid cafes?"

"You are thinking of the Cafe Royal?"

"Yes. Do you know it?"

"Don't tell Beryl--but I have never been in it. Nevertheless, I know exactly what it is like."

"By hearsay?"

"Oh, no. In years gone by I have been into many of the cafes in Paris."

"And did you like them and the life in them?"

"In those days they often fascinated me, as no doubt the Cafe Royal and its life fascinates Beryl to-day. The hectic appeals to something in youth, when there is often fever in the blood. Strong lights, noise, the human pressure of crowds, the sight of myriads of faces, the sound of many voices--all that represents life to us when we are young. Calm, empty s.p.a.ces, single notes, room all round us for breathing amply and fully, a face here or there--that doesn't seem like life to us then.

Beryl dines with me alone sometimes. But she must finish up in the evening with a crowd if she is near the door of the place where the crowd is. And you must not tell me you never like the Cafe Royal, for if you do I shall not believe you."

"I do like it at times," he acknowledged. "But to-night, sitting here, the mere thought of it is almost hateful to me. It is all vermilion and orange colour, while this . . ."

"Is drab!"

"No, indeed! Dim purple, perhaps, or deepest green."

"You couldn't bear it for long. You would soon begin longing for vermilion again."

"You seem to think me very young. I am twenty-nine."

"Have you ceased to love wildness already?"

"No," he answered truthfully. "But there is something there which makes me feel as if it were almost vulgar."

"No, no. It need not be vulgar. It can be wonderful--beautiful, even.

It can be like the wild light which sometimes breaks out in the midst of the blackness of a storm and which is wilder far than the darkest clouds. Do you ever read William Watson?"

"I have read some of his poems."

"There is one I think very beautiful. I wonder if you know it. 'Pa.s.s, thou wild heart, wild heart of youth that still hast half a will to stay--'"

She stopped and held her fan a little higher.

"I don't know it," he said.

"It always makes me feel that the man or woman who has never had the wild heart has never been truly and intensely human. But one must know when to stop, when to let the wild heart pa.s.s away."

"But if the heart wants to remain?"

"Then you must dominate it. Nothing is more pitiable, nothing is more disgusting, even, than wildness in old age. I have a horror of that.

And I am certain that nothing else can affect youth so painfully. Old wildness--that must give youth nausea of the soul."

She spoke with a thrill of energy which penetrated Craven in a peculiar and fascinating way. He felt almost as if she sent a vital fluid through his veins.

Suddenly he thought of the "old guard," and he knew that not one of the truly marvellous women who belonged to it could hold him or charm him as this white-haired woman, with the frankly old face, could and did.

"After all," he thought, "it isn't the envelope that matters; it is the letter inside."

Deeply he believed that just then. He was, indeed, under a sort of spell for the moment. Could the spell be lasting? He looked at Lady Sellingworth's eyes in the lamplight and firelight, and, despite a certain not forgotten moment connected with the Hyde Park Hotel, he believed that it could. And Lady Sellingworth looked at him and knew that it could not. About such a matter she had no illusions.

And yet for years she had lived a life cloudy with illusions. What had led her out from those clouds? Braybrooke had hinted to Craven that possibly Seymour Portman knew the secret of Lady Sellingworth's abrupt desertion of the "old guard" and plunge into old age. But even he did not know it. For he loved her in a still, determined, undeviating way.

And no woman would care to tell such a secret to a man who loved her and who was almost certain, barring the explosion of a moral bombsh.e.l.l, and perhaps even then, to go on loving her.

No one knew why Lady Sellingworth had abruptly and finally emerged from the world of illusions in which she had lived. But possibly a member of the underworld, a light-fingered gentleman of brazen a.s.surance, had long ago guessed the reason for her sudden departure from the regiment of which she had been a conspicuous member; possibly he had guessed, or surmised, why she had sent in her papers. But even he could scarcely be certain.

The truth of the matter was this.

PART TWO

CHAPTER I

Lady Sellingworth belonged to a great English family, and had been brought up in healthy splendour, saved from the canker of too much luxury by the aristocratic love of sport which is a tradition in such English families as hers. As a girl she had been what a certain sporting earl described as "a leggy beauty." Even then she had shown a decided inclination to run wild and had seldom checked the inclination.