The Incomplete Amorist Part 38

"I wish I were your brother," said Temple.

"I'm so glad you're not," said Betty. She wanted no chaperonage, even fraternal. But the words made him shrink, and then sent a soft warmth through him. On the whole he was not sorry that he was not her brother.

At parting Vernon, at the foot of the staircase, said:

"And when may I see you again?"

"On Tuesday, when the cla.s.s meets."

"But I didn't mean when shall I see the cla.s.s. When shall I see Miss Desmond?"

"Oh, whenever you like," Betty answered gaily; "whenever Lady St.

Craye can spare you."

He let her say it.

CHAPTER XVI.

"LOVE AND TUPPER."

"Whenever Vernon liked" proved to be the very next day. He was waiting outside the door of the atelier when Betty, in charcoal-smeared pinafore, left the afternoon cla.s.s.

"Won't you dine with me somewhere to-night?" said he.

"I am going to Garnier's," she said. Not even for him, friend of hers and affianced of another as he might be, would she yet break the rule of a life Paula had inst.i.tuted.

"Fallen as I am," he answered gaily, "I am not yet so low as to be incapable of dining at Garnier's."

So when Betty pa.s.sed through the outer room of the restaurant and along the narrow little pa.s.sage where eyes and nose attest strongly the neighborhood of the kitchen, she was attended by a figure that aroused the spontaneous envy of all her acquaintances. In the inner room where they dined it was remarked that such a figure would be more at home at Durand's or the Cafe de Paris than at Garnier's. That night the first breath of criticism a.s.sailed Betty. To afficher oneself with a fellow-student--a "type," Polish or otherwise--that was all very well, but with an obvious Boulevardier, a creature from the other side, this dashed itself against the conventions of the Artistic Quartier. And conventions--even of such quarters--are iron-strong.

"Fiddle-de-dee," said Miss Voscoe to her companions' shocked comments, "they were raised in the same village, or something. He used to give her peanuts when he was in short jackets, and she used to halve her candies with him. Friend of childhood's hour, that's all. And besides he's one of the presidents of our Sketch Club."

But all Garnier's marked that whereas the habitues contented themselves with an omelette aux champignons, saute potatoes and a Pet.i.t Suisse, or the like modest menu, Betty's new friend ordered for himself, and for her, "a real regular dinner," beginning with hors d'oeuvre and ending with "mendiants." "Mendiants" are raisins and nuts, the nearest to dessert that at this season you could get at Garniers. Also he pa.s.sed over with smiling disrelish the little carafons of weak wine for which one pays five sous if the wine be red, and six if it be white. He went out and interviewed Madame at her little desk among the flowers and nuts and special sweet dishes, and it was a bottle of real wine with a real cork to be drawn that adorned the table between him and Betty. To her the whole thing was of the nature of a festival. She enjoyed the little sensation created by her companion; and the knowledge which she thought she had of his relations to Lady St. Craye absolved her of any fear that in dining with him tete-a-tete she was doing anything "not quite nice." To her the thought of his engagement was as good or as bad as a chaperon. For Betty's innocence was deeply laid, and had survived the shock of all the waves that had beaten against it since her coming to Paris. It was more than innocence, it was a very honest, straightforward childish naivete.

"It's almost the same as if he was married," she said: "there can't be any harm in having dinner with a man who's married--or almost married."

So she enjoyed herself. Vernon exerted himself to amuse her. But he was surprised to find that he was not so happy as he had expected to be. It was good that Betty had permitted him to dine with her alone, but it was flat. After dinner he took her to the Odeon, and she said good-night to him with a lighter heart than she had known since Paula left her.

In these rooms now sometimes it was hard to keep one's eyes shut. And to keep her eyes shut was now Betty's aim in life, even more than the art for which she pretended to herself that she lived. For now that Paula had gone the deception of her father would have seemed less justifiable, had she ever allowed herself to face the thought of it for more than a moment; but she used to fly the thought and go round to one of the girls' rooms to talk about Art with a big A, and forget how little she liked or admired Betty Desmond.

She was now one of a circle of English, American and German students.

The Sketch Club had brought her eight new friends, and they went about in parties by twos and threes, or even sevens and eights, and Betty went with them, enjoying the fun of it all, which she liked, and missing all that she would not have liked if she had seen it. But Vernon was the only man with whom she dined tete-a-tete or went to the theatre alone.

To him the winter pa.s.sed in a maze of doubt and self-contempt. He could not take what the G.o.ds held out: could not draw from his constant companionship of Betty the pleasure which his artistic principles, his trained instincts taught him to expect. He had now all the tete-a-tetes he cared to ask for, and he hated that it should be so. He almost wanted her to be in a position where such things should be impossible to her. He wanted her to be guarded, watched, sheltered.

And he had never wanted that for any woman in his life before.

"I shall be wishing her in a convent next," he said, "with high walls with spikes on the top. Then I should walk round and round the outside of the walls and wish her out. But I should not be able to get at her.

And nothing else would either."

Lady St. Craye was more charming than ever. Vernon knew it and sometimes he deliberately tried to let her charm him. But though he perceived her charm he could not feel it. Always before he had felt what he chose to feel. Or perhaps--he hated the thought and would not look at it--perhaps all his love affairs had been just pictures, perhaps he had never felt anything but an artistic pleasure in their grouping and lighting. Perhaps now he was really feeling natural human emotion, didn't they call it? But that was just it. He wasn't. What he felt was resentment, dissatisfaction, a growing inability to control events or to prearrange his sensations. He felt that he himself was controlled. He felt like a wild creature caught in a trap. The trap was not gilded, and he was very uncomfortable in it. Even the affairs of others almost ceased to amuse him. He could hardly call up a cynical smile at Lady St. Craye's evident misapprehension of those conscientious efforts of his to be charmed by her. He was only moved to a very faint amus.e.m.e.nt when one day Bobbie Temple, smoking in the studio, broke a long silence abruptly to say:

"Look here. Someone was saying the other day that a man can be in love with two women at a time. Do you think it's true?"

"Two? Yes. Or twenty."

"Then it's not love," said Temple wisely.

"They call it love," said Vernon. "_I_ don't know what they mean by it. What do _you_ mean?"

"By love?"

"Yes."

"I don't exactly know," said Temple slowly. "I suppose it's wanting to be with a person, and thinking about nothing else. And thinking they're the most beautiful and all that. And going over everything that they've ever said to you, and wanting--"

"Wanting?"

"Well, I suppose if it's really love you want to marry them."

"You can't marry _them_, you know," said Vernon; "at least not simultaneously. That's just it. Well?"

"Well that's all. If that's not love, what is?"

"I'm hanged if _I_ know," said Vernon.

"I thought you knew all about those sort of things."

"So did I," said Vernon to himself. Aloud he said:

"If you want a philosophic definition: it's pa.s.sion transfigured by tenderness--at least I've often said so."

"But can you feel that for two people at once?"

"Or," said Vernon, getting interested in his words, "it's tenderness intoxicated by pa.s.sion, and not knowing that it's drunk--"

"But can you feel that for two--"

"Oh, bother," said Vernon, "every sort of fool-fancy calls itself love. There's the pleasure of pursuit--there's vanity, there's the satisfaction of your own amour-propre, there's desire, there's intellectual attraction, there's the love of beauty, there's the artist's joy in doing what you know you can do well, and getting a pretty woman for sole audience. You might feel one or two or twenty of these things for one woman, and one or two or twenty different ones for another. But if you mean do you love two women in the same way, I say no. Thank Heaven it's new every time."

"It mayn't be the same way," said Temple, "but it's the same thing to you--if you feel you can't bear to give either of them up."

"Well, then, you can marry one and keep on with the other. Or be 'friends' with both and marry neither. Or cut the whole show and go to the Colonies."

"Then you have to choose between being unhappy or being a blackguard."