December Love Part 48

"She's just gone into the ladies' cloak-room," answered Braybrooke.

"But not to powder her face!" said Miss Van Tuyn. "She keeps us waiting, like the great prima donna in a concert, just long enough to give a touch of excitement to her appearance. Dear Lady Sellingworth! She has a wonderful knowledge of just how to do things. That only comes out of a vast experience."

"Or--don't you think that kind of thing may be instinctive?" said Craven.

She sought his eyes with a sort of soft hardihood which was very alluring.

"Women are not half as instinctive as men think them," she said. "I'll tell you a little secret. They calculate more than a senior wrangler does."

"Now you are maligning yourself," he said, smiling.

"No. For I haven't quite got to the age of calculation yet."

"Oh--I see."

"Here she comes!" said Braybrooke.

And he went towards the door, leaving "our young friends" for a moment.

"But what has she done to herself?" said Miss Van Tuyn.

"Done! Lady Sellingworth?"

"Yes. Or is it only her hair?"

Craven wondered, too, as Lady Sellingworth joined them, accompanied by her host. For there was surely some slight, and yet definite, change in her appearance. She looked, he thought, younger, brighter, more vivid than she generally looked. Her white hair certainly was arranged differently from the way he was now accustomed to. It seemed thicker; there seemed to be more of it than usual. It looked more alive, too, and it marked in, he thought, an exquisite way the beautiful shape of her head. A black riband was cleverly entangled in it, and a big diamond shone upon the riband in front above her white forehead, weary with the years, but uncommonly expressive. She wore black as usual, and had another broad black riband round her throat with a fine diamond broach fastened to it. Her gown was slightly open at the front. There were magnificent diamond earrings in her ears. They made Craven think of the jewels stolen long ago at the station in Paris. This evening the whiteness of her hair seemed wonderful, as the whiteness of thickly powdered hair sometimes seems. And her eyes beneath it were amazingly vivid, startlingly alive in their glancing brightness. They looked careless and laughingly self-possessed as she came up to greet the girl and young man, matching delightfully her careless and self-possessed movement.

At that moment Craven realized, as he had certainly never realized before, what a beauty--in his mind he said what a "stunning beauty"--Lady Sellingworth must once have been. Even her face seemed to him in some way altered to-night, though he could not have told how.

Certainly she looked younger than usual. He was positive of that: still positive when he saw her standing by Miss Van Tuyn and taking her hand.

Then she turned to him and gave him a friendly and careless, almost haphazard, greeting, still smiling and looking ready for anything.

And then at once they went into the restaurant up the broad steps.

And Craven noticed that everyone they pa.s.sed by glanced at Lady Sellingworth.

At that moment he felt very proud of her friendship. He even felt a touch of romance in it, of a strange and unusual romance far removed from the sort of thing usually sung of by poets and written of by novelists.

"She is unusual!" he thought. "And so am I; and our friendship is unusual too. There has never before been anything quite like it."

And he glowed with a warming sense of difference from ordinary life.

But Miss Van Tuyn was claiming his urgent attention, and a waiter was giving him Whitstable oysters, and Chablis was being poured into his gla.s.s, and the band was beginning to play a selection from the music of Grieg, full of the poetry and the love of the North, where deep pa.s.sions come out of the snows and last often longer than the loves of the South.

He must give himself up to it all, and to the wonderful white-haired woman, too, with the great diamonds gleaming in her ears.

It really was quite a buoyant dinner, and Braybrooke began to feel more at ease. He had told them all where they were going afterwards, but had said nothing about Walter's description of the play. None of them had seen it, but Craven seemed to know all about it, and said it was an entertaining study of life behind the scenes at the opera, with a great singer as protagonist.

"He was drawn, I believe, from a famous baritone."

During a great part of her life Lady Sellingworth had been an ardent lover of the opera, and she had known many of the leading singers in Paris and London.

"They always seemed to me to be torn by jealousy," she said, "and often to suffer from the mania of persecution! Really, they are like a race apart."

And the conversation turned to jealousy. Braybrooke said he had never suffered from it, did not know what it was. And they smiled at him, and told him that then he could have no temperament. Craven declared that he believed almost the whole human race knew the ugly intimacies of jealousy in some form or other.

"And yourself?" said Miss Van Tuyn.

"I!" he said, and looking up saw Lady Sellingworth's brilliant eyes fixed on him.

"Do you know them?"

"I have felt jealousy certainly, but never yet as I could feel it."

"What! You are conscious of a great capacity for feeling jealous, a capacity which has never yet had its full fling?" said the girl.

"Yes," he said.

And his lips were smiling, but there was a serious look in his eyes.

And they discussed the causes of jealousy.

"We shall see it to-night on the stage in its professional form," said Craven.

"And that is the least forgivable form," said Lady Sellingworth.

"Jealousy which is not bound up with the affections is a cold and hideous thing. But I cannot understand a love which is incapable of jealousy. In fact, I don't think I could believe it to be love at all."

This remark, coming from those lips, surprised Braybrooke. For Lady Sellingworth was not wont to turn any talk in which she took part upon questions concerned with the heart. He had frequently noticed her apparent aversion from all topics connected with deep feeling. To-night, it seemed, this aversion had died out of her.

In answer to the last remark Miss Van Tuyn said:

"Then, dear, you rule out perfect trust in a matter of love, do you? All the sentimentalists say that perfect love breeds perfect trust. If that is so, how can great lovers be jealous? For jealousy, I suppose--I have never felt it myself in that way--is born out of doubt, but can never exist side by side with complete confidence."

"Ah! But Beryl, in how many people in the course of a lifetime can one have _complete confidence_ I have scarcely met one. What do you say?"

She turned her head towards Braybrooke. He looked suddenly rather plaintive, like a man who realizes unexpectedly how lonely he is.

"Oh, I hope I know a few such people," he rejoined rather anxiously.

"I have been very lucky in my friends. And I like to think the best of people."

"That is kind," said Lady Sellingworth. "But I prefer to know the truth of people. And I must say I think most of us are quicksands. The worst of it is that so often when we do for a moment feel we are on firm ground we find it either too hard for our feet or too flat for our liking."

At that moment she thought of Sir Seymour Portman.

"You think it is doubt which breeds fascination?" said Craven.

"Alas for us if it is so," she answered, smiling.

"The human race is a very unsatisfactory race," said Miss Van Tuyn. "I am only twenty-four and have found that out already. It is very clever of the French to cultivate irony as they do. The ironist always wears clothes and an undershirt of mail. But the sentimentalist goes naked in the east wind which blows through society. Not only is he bound to take cold, but he is liable to be pierced by every arrow that flies."

"Yes, it is wise to cultivate irony," said Lady Sellingworth.