December Love Part 32

But that would be a compromise. She was not fond of compromises. Better one thing or the other. Either she would go with him to the restaurant or she would not see him at all that night.

If Caroline Briggs were only here! And yet if she were it would be difficult to speak about the matter to her. If she were told of it, what would she say? That would depend upon how she was told. If she were told all the truth, not mere incidents, but also the feelings attending them, she would tell her friend to give the whole thing up. Caroline was always drastic. She always went straight to the point.

But Caroline was in Paris.

Lady Sellingworth looked at her watch. Craven lived not far off. He might be at home by now. But perhaps she had better give him, and herself, a little more time. For she was still undecided, did not yet know what she was going to do. Impulse drove her on, but something else, reason perhaps, or fear, or secret, deep down, painfully acquired knowledge, was trying to hold her back. She remembered her last stay in Paris, her hesitation then, her dinner with Caroline Briggs, the definite decision she had come to, her effort to carry it out, the terrible breakdown of her decision at the railway station and its horrible result.

Disaster had come upon her because she had yielded to an impulse ten years ago. Surely that should teach her not to yield to an impulse now. But the one was so different from the other, as different as that horrible man in Paris had been from young Craven. That horrible man in Paris! He had disappeared out of her life. She had never seen him again, had never mentioned him to anybody. He had gone, as mysteriously as he had come, carrying his booty with him, all those lovely things which had been hers, which she had worn on her neck and arms and bosom, in her hair and on her hands. Sometimes she had wondered about him, about the mentality and the life of such a man as he was, a creature of the underworld, preying on women, getting up in the morning, going to bed at night, with thoughts of crime in his mind, using his gift of beauty loathsomely. She had wondered, too, how it was that such loathsomeness as his was able to hide itself, how it was that he could look so manly, so athletic, even so wistful and eager for sympathy.

But Seymour Portman had seen through him at a first glance. Evidently that type of man had a power to trick women's instincts, but was less successful with men. Perhaps Caroline was right, and the whole question was simply one of the l.u.s.t of the eye.

Young Craven was good-looking too. But surely she had not been attracted to him, brought into sympathy with him merely because of that. She hoped not. She tried hard to think not. A woman of her age must surely be beyond the lure of mere looks in a man unconnected with the deeper things which make up personality.

And yet ten years ago she had been lured towards a loathsome and utterly abominable personality by mere looks. Certainly her nature inclined her to be a prey to just that--the l.u.s.t of the eye.

(Caroline Briggs was horribly apposite in some of her remarks.)

She tried to reconst.i.tute her evenings with Craven in her imagination, keeping the conversation exactly as it had been, but giving him a thoroughly plain face, a bad complexion, mouse-coloured feeble hair, undistinguished features, ordinary eyes, and a short broad figure.

Certainly it would have made a difference. But how much difference?

Perhaps a good deal. But he had enjoyed the conversation as much as she had, and there was nothing in her appearance now to arouse the l.u.s.t of the eye. Suddenly it occurred to her that she possessed now at least one advantage. If a young man were attracted by her it must be her personality, herself in fact, which attracted him. It could not be her looks. And surely it is better to attract by your personality than by your looks.

A woman's voice whispered within her just then, "It is better to attract by both. Then you are safe."

She moved uneasily. Then she got up and went to the telephone. The chances were in favour of Craven's being in his flat by now.

As she put her hand on the receiver, but before she took it down, Lady Sellingworth thought of the Paris railway station, of what had happened there, of the stern resolution she had come to that day, of the tears of blood that had sealed it, of the will that had enabled her to stick to it during ten years. And she thought, too, of that phrase of Caroline Briggs's concerning the l.u.s.t of the eye.

"I won't go!" she said to herself.

And she took the receiver down.

Almost immediately she was put through, and heard Craven's voice at the other end, the voice which had recited those lines from Browning's "Waring" by the fire, saying:

"Yes? Who is it?"

"Lady Sellingworth," she replied.

The sound of the voice changed at once, became eager as it said:

"Oh--Lady Sellingworth! I have only just come in. I know what it is."

"But how can you?"

"I do. You want me to dress for dinner. And we are to go in a cab and be very respectable instead of Bohemian. Isn't that it?"

She hesitated. Then she said:

"No; it isn't that."

"Do tell me then!"

"I think--I'm afraid I can't come."

"Oh, no--it can't be that! But I have reserved the table in the corner for us. And we are going to have gnocchi done in a special way with cheese. Gnocchi with cheese! Please--please don't disappoint me."

"But I haven't been very well the last two days, and I'm rather afraid of the cold."

"I am so sorry. But it's absolutely dry under foot. I swear it is!"

A pause. Then his voice added:

"Since I came in I have refused an invitation to dine out to-night. I absolutely relied on you."

"Yes?"

"Yes. It was from Miss Van Tuyn, to dine with her at the _Bella Napoli_."

"I'll come!" said Lady Sellingworth. "Good-bye."

And she put up the receiver.

CHAPTER V

Miss Van Tuyn had not intended to stay long in London when she came over from Paris. But now she changed her mind. She was pulled at by three interests--Lady Sellingworth, Craven and the living bronze. A cold hand had touched her vanity on the night of the dinner in Soho. She had felt angry with Craven for not coming back to the Cafe Royal, and angrier still with Lady Sellingworth for keeping him with her. Although she did not positively know that Craven had spent the last part of the evening in the drawing-room at Berkeley Square, she felt certain that he had done so. Probably Lady Sellingworth had pressed him to go in. But perhaps he had been glad to go, perhaps he had submitted to an influence which had carried him for the time out of his younger, more beautiful friend's reach.

Miss Van Tuyn resolved definitely that Craven must at once be added to the numerous men who were mad about her. So much was due to her vanity.

Besides, she liked Craven, and might grow to like him very much if she knew him better. She decided to know him better, much better, and wrote her letter to him. Craven had puzzled a little over the final sentence of that letter. There were two reasons for its apparently casual insertion. Miss Van Tuyn wished to whip Craven into alertness by giving his male vanity a flick. Her other reason was more subtle. Some instinct seemed to tell her that in the future she might want to use the stranger as a weapon in connexion with Craven. She did not know how exactly. But in that sentence of her letter she felt that she was somehow preparing the ground for incidents which would be brought about by destiny, or which chance would allow to happen.

That she would some day know "the living bronze" she felt certain. For she meant to know him. Garstin's brutal comment on him had frightened her. She did not believe it to be just. Garstin was always brutal in his comments. And he lived so perpetually among shady, or more than shady, people that it was difficult for him to believe in the decency of anybody who was worth knowing. For him the world seemed to be divided into the hopelessly dull and conventional, who did not count, and the definitely outrageous, who were often interesting and worthy of being studied and sometimes painted. It must be obvious to anyone that the living bronze could not be numbered among the merely dull and conventional. Naturally enough, then, Garstin supposed him to be a successful blackmailer. Miss Van Tuyn was not going to allow herself to be influenced by the putrescence of Garstin's mind. She had her own views on everything and usually held to them. She had quite decided that she would get to know the living bronze through Garstin, who always managed to know anyone he was interested in. Being totally unconventional and not, as he said, caring a d.a.m.n about the proprieties, if he wished to speak to someone he spoke to him, if he wished to paint him he told him to come along to the studio. There was a simplicity about Garstin's methods which was excused in some degree by his fame.

But if he had not been famous he would have acted in just the same way.

No shyness hindered him; no doubts about himself ever a.s.sailed him.

He just did what he wanted to do without _arriere pensee_. There was certainly strength in Garstin, although it was not moral strength.

The morning after the dinner in Soho Miss Van Tuyn telegraphed to f.a.n.n.y Cronin to come over at once, with Bourget's latest works, and engaged an apartment at Claridge's. Although she sometime dined in the shadow of Vesuvius, she preferred to issue forth from some lair which was unmistakably smart and comfortable. Claridge's was both, and everybody came there. Miss Cronin wired obedience and would be on the way immediately. Meanwhile Miss Van Tuyn received Craven's note in answer to hers.

She grasped all its meaning, surface and subterranean, immediately. It meant a very polite, very carefully masked, withdrawal from the sphere of her influence. The pa.s.sage about Soho was perfectly clear to her mind, although to many it might have seemed to convey an agreeably worded acceptance of her suggestion, only laying its translation into action in a rather problematical future, the sort of future which would become present when "neither of us has an engagement."

Craven had evidently been "got at" by Adela Sellingworth.

On the morning after Miss Van Tuyn's telegram to Paris f.a.n.n.y Cronin arrived, with Bourget's latest book in her hand, and later they settled in at Claridge's. Miss Cronin went to bed, and Miss Van Tuyn, who had no engagement for that evening, went presently to the telephone. Although in her note to Craven by implication she had left it to him to suggest a tete-a-tete dinner in Soho, she was now resolved to ask him. She was a girl of the determined modern type, not much troubled by the delicacies or inclined to wait humbly on the pleasure of men. If a man did not show her the way, she was quite ready to show the way to him. Without being precisely of the huntress type, she knew how to take bow and arrow in her hand.

She rang up Craven, and the following dialogue took place at the telephone.

"Yes? Yes?"

"Is Mr. Craven there?"