The Immortal Moment Part 29

"And it wasn't enough?"

"No, I don't think it was, quite. There was something wanting. But I don't think Robert ever knew it."

"He knows it now," said Kitty. Her voice lifted with the pride of pa.s.sion.

CHAPTER XV

Marston cancelled that appointment at Whitehall. Somebody else's business would have to wait another day, that was all. He was wont to settle affairs as they arose, methodically, punctually, in the order of their importance. At the moment his own affair and Kitty's was of supreme importance. Until it was settled he could not attend to anybody else.

He was determined not to let her go. He meant to have her. He did not yet know precisely how he was to achieve this end, but as a first step to it he engaged a room indefinitely at the Metropole. There was nothing like being on the spot. He would consider himself defeated when Lucy had actually married her. Meanwhile, he was uplifted by his supreme distrust of the event.

His rival had made a very favourable impression on him, with the curious effect of heightening Kitty's value in his eyes. Other causes contributed, her pa.s.sion for Lucy, and the subtle purification it had wrought in her (a charm to which Marston was by no means unsusceptible), the very fact that his own dominion was uncertain and his possession incomplete.

Up till now he had been unaware of the grip she had on him. He had never allowed for the possibility of permanence in his relations with her s.e.x.

The idea of marriage was peculiarly unsupportable to him. Even in his youth he had had no love affairs, avowed and sanctioned. Though Marston professed the utmost devotion to women like Miss Lucy, the women whom his mother and his sisters knew, he had noticed a little sadly that he soon wearied of their society, that he had no power of sustained communion with the good. The unfallen were for him the unapproachable.

Therefore he had gravitated by taste and temperament to the women of the underworld. There his incurable fastidiousness drove him to the pursuit of a possible perfection, distinction within the limits, the inherent frailties of the type.

In Kitty Tailleur he had found even more than he was looking for. Kitty had certain graces, reminiscent of the upper world; a heritage from presumably irreproachable parents, that marked her from the women of her cla.s.s. She had, moreover, a way of her own, different from the charm of the unfallen, different, too, from the coa.r.s.e lures of the underworld.

Kitty was never rank, never insipid. She had a few light brains in her body, and knew how to use them, woman-like, for the heightening of her charm.

There were other good points about Kitty. Marston disliked parting with his money, and he had found Kitty, so far, inexpensive, as women went.

For these reasons, so many and so plausible that they disguised the true kind and degree of his subjection, he had before now returned to Kitty more than once after he thought that he had tired of her.

Only three weeks ago, on her return from Matlock, he judged that he had come to the end of his pa.s.sion for her; and here he was again at the very beginning of it. Instead of perishing it had thrived on absence. He found himself on the verge of a new and unforeseen adventure, with impulse sharpened by antagonism and frustration. Yet his only chance, he knew, was not to be impulsive, but cool rather, calculating and cautious. The fight he was in for would have to be fought with brains; his against hers.

He sent a note to her early in the morning asking her to see him at nine. At nine she saw him.

"I thought," she said, "you were going up to town early."

"I'm not going up to town at all, as it happens, to-day."

"Isn't it rather a pity to neglect your business?"

"My business, dear Kitty, is not any business of yours."

"I'm only trying to make you see that it isn't worth your while stopping out of town because of me."

He was a little disconcerted at her divination of his motives, her awareness of her own power.

"Well, you see, though the affairs of Whitehall are not your affairs, your affairs, unfortunately, are mine; and, since I have to attend to them, I prefer to do it at once and get it over. I had some talk with Lucy last night."

She turned on him. "Ah, you _have_ given me away."

"Did you ever know me give any one away?"

She did not answer all at once.

He was shocked at her suspicion; at the things she believed it possible for a man to do. In the upper world, in a set that discussed its women freely, he had never used his knowledge of a woman to harm her. He had carried the same scruple into that other world where Kitty lived, where he himself was most at home, where an amused, contemptuous tolerance played the part of chivalry. The women there trusted him; they found him courteous in his very contempt. He had connived at their small deceits, the preposterous hypocrisies wherewith they protected themselves. He accepted urbanely their pitiful imitations of the lost innocence. Kitty, moving reckless and high in her sad circle, had been scornful of her sisters' methods. Her soul was as much above them as her body, in its unique, incongruous beauty, was above their rouge and coloured raiment.

It was this superiority of hers that had brought her to her present pa.s.s; caused her to be mistaken for an honest woman. In her contempt for the underworld's deceptions she had achieved the supreme deceit.

Her deceit--that was his point.

"Then," she said presently, "what _did_ you say to him?"

"I said nothing, my dear child, in your disparagement. On the contrary, I congratulated him on his engagement. As I'm supposed to be acting as your agent, or solicitor, or whatever it is I am acting as, I imagine I did right. Is that so?"

"Yes; if that's all you said."

"It is not quite all. I sustained my character by giving him a hint, the merest hint, that in the event of your marriage your worldly position would be slightly altered. We must prepare him, you know, for the sudden collapse of your income."

He rose and went to the mantelpiece, and lingered there over the lighting of a cigarette.

"You hadn't thought of that?" he said as he seated himself again.

"No; I hadn't thought of it."

"Well, he didn't appear to have thought of it either."

"What did he say, when you told him that?"

"He said it didn't matter in the very least."

"I knew he would."

"He said, in fact, that nothing mattered."

"What did you say then?"

"Nothing. What could I say?"

She looked at him, trying to see deep into his design, trusting him no further than she saw.

"Look here, Kitty, I think you're making a mistake, even from your own point of view. You ought to tell him."

"I--can't."

"You must. He's such an awfully decent chap, you can't let him in for marrying you without telling him." That was his point and he meant to stick to it. "It's what you might call playing it low down on a guileless and confiding man. Isn't it?"

"Yes, but I can't tell him."

"It's the straight thing, Kitty."

"I know. But it means giving him up."