The Return of the Prodigal Part 30

"She's gone," said f.a.n.n.y. "She's left a little note for you. She said you'd forgive her, you'd understand."

"Do _you_?" said Straker.

"She said she was going to be straight and see this thing through."

"What thing?"

"Furny's thing. What else do you suppose she's thinking of? She said she'd only got to lift her little finger and he'd come back to her; she said there ought to be fair play. Do you see? She's gone away--to save him."

"Good Lord!" said Straker.

But he saw.

XI

It was nearly twelve months before he heard again from Miss Tarrant.

Then one day she wrote and asked him to come and have tea with her at her flat in Lexham Gardens.

He went. His entrance coincided with the departure of Laurence Furnival and a lady whom Philippa introduced to him as Mrs.

Laurence, whom, she said, he would remember under another name.

Furnival's wife was younger than ever and more like Nora Viveash and more different. When the door closed on them Philippa turned to him with her radiance (the least bit overdone).

"_I_ made that marriage," she said, and staggered him.

"Surely," he said, "it was made in heaven."

"If this room is heaven. It was made here, six months ago."

She faced him with all his memories. With all his memories and her own she faced him radiantly.

"You know now," she said, "_why I did it_. It was worth while, wasn't it?"

His voice struggled with his memories and stuck. It stuck in his throat.

Before he left he begged her congratulations on a little affair of his own; a rather unhappy affair which had ended happily the week before last. He did not tell her that, if it hadn't been for the things dear f.a.n.n.y Brocklebank had done for him, the way she had mixed herself up with his unhappy little affair, it might have ended happily a year ago.

"But," said Philippa, "how beautiful!"

He never saw Miss Tarrant again. Their correspondence ceased after his marriage, and he gathered that she had no longer any use for him.

APPEARANCES

I

All afternoon since three o'clock he had sat cooling his heels in a corner of the hotel veranda. And all afternoon he had been a spectacle of interest to the beautiful cosmopolitan creature who watched him from her seat under the palm tree in the corresponding corner.

She had two men with her, and when she was not occupied with one or both of them she turned her splendid eyes, gaily or solemnly, on Oscar Thesiger. And every time she turned them Thesiger in his corner darkened and flushed and bit his moustache and twirled it, while his eyes answered hers as he believed they meant him to answer. Oscar Thesiger was not a cosmopolitan himself for nothing.

And all the time while he looked at her he was thinking, thinking very miserably, of little Vera Walters.

She had refused him yesterday evening without giving any reason.

Her cruelty (if it wasn't cruelty he'd like to know what it was) remained unexplained, incomprehensible to Oscar Thesiger.

For, if she didn't mean to marry him, why on earth had they asked him to go abroad with them? Why had they dragged him about with them for five weeks, up and down the Riviera? Why was he there now, cooling his heels in the veranda of the Hotel Mediterranee, Cannes?

That was where the cruelty, the infernal cruelty came in.

And her reasons--if she had only given him her reasons. It was all he asked for. But of course she hadn't any.

What possible reason could she have? It wasn't as if he'd been a bad lot like her French brother-in-law, Paul de Vignolles (good Lord, the things he knew about de Vignolles!). He was, as men go, a decent sort. He had always known where to draw the line (de Vignolles didn't). And he wasn't ugly, like de Vignolles. On the contrary, he was, as men go, distinctly good looking; he knew he was; the glances of the beautiful and hypothetical stranger a.s.sured him of it, and he had looked in the gla.s.s not half an hour ago to rea.s.sure himself.

Solid he was, and well built, and he had decorative points that pleased: a fresh color, eyes that flashed blue round a throbbing black, a crisp tawny curl in his short moustache and shorter hair.

He was well off; there wasn't a thing she wanted that he couldn't give her. And he was the admired and appreciated friend of her admired and appreciated sister, Agatha de Vignolles.

And for poor little Vera, as far as he could see, the alternatives to marrying him were dismal. It was either marrying a Frenchman, since Agatha had married one, or living forever with that admired and appreciated woman, looking after the little girls, Ninon and Odette. She had been looking after them ever since he had first met her and fallen, with some violence, in love with her.

It was a bit late now to go back on all that. It had been an understood thing. Vera herself had understood it, and she--well, she had lent herself to it very sweetly, shyly, and beautifully, as Vera would. If she hadn't he wouldn't have had a word to say against her decision.

It wasn't as if she had been a cold and selfish woman like her sister. She wasn't cold; and, as for selfish, he had seen her with Agatha and the little girls. It was through the little girls that he had made love to her, that being the surest and shortest way. He had worked it through Ninon and Odette; he had carried them on his back by turns that very afternoon, in the heat of the sun, all the way, that terrible winding way, up the Californie Hill to the Observatory at the top, where they had sat drinking coffee and eating brioches, he and Vera and Ninon and Odette. What on earth did she suppose he did it for?

But she hadn't supposed anything; she had simply understood, and had been adorable to him all afternoon. Not that she had said much (Vera didn't say things); but her eyes, her eyes had given her away; they had been as soft for him as they had been for Ninon and Odette.

Why, oh why, hadn't he done it, then?

He couldn't, because of those two infernal, bilingual little monkeys. They were clinging to her skirts all the way down the hill.

They were all going to Nice the next day; and that evening the de Vignolles had gone down to the Casino and Vera hadn't gone. It would have been all right if the children had not been allowed to sit up to see the conjuror conjuring in the lounge. But they had sat up; and that had brought it to ten o'clock before he had Vera for a minute to himself.

He may have chosen his moment badly (it wasn't easy to choose it well, living, as the de Vignolles did, in public), and perhaps, if they hadn't had that little difference of opinion, he and she---- It was in the evening that they had had it, between the conjuring tricks and the children's chatter, in the public, the intolerably public lounge, and it was only a difference of opinion, opinion concerning the beauty of the beautiful and hypothetical lady who was looking at him then, who had never ceased to look at him and Vera and the children when any of them were about.

Thesiger couldn't get Vera to say that the lady was beautiful, and the little that she did say implied that you couldn't be beautiful if you looked like that. She was not beautiful (Thesiger had admitted it) in Vera's way, and on the whole he was glad to think that Vera didn't look like that; but there was, he had contended, a beauty absolute and above opinion, and the lady had it. That was all. Perhaps, now he came to think of it, he ought not to have drawn Vera's attention to her; for he knew what Vera had thought of her by the things she hadn't said, and, what was worse, he knew what Paul de Vignolles thought by the things he _had_ said, things implying that, if the lady were honest, appearances were against her. Of her and of her honesty Thesiger didn't feel very sure himself. He found himself continually looking at her to make sure. He had been looking at her then, across the little table in the lounge where she and her two men sat drinking coffee and liqueurs. She kept thrusting her face between the two as she talked; she had a rose in her bronze hair, which made him dubious; and when their eyes met, as they were always meeting (how could he help it?), his doubt leaped in him and fastened on her face. Her face had held him for a moment so with all his doubt, and he had stared at her and flamed in a curious excitement born of Vera's presence and of hers, while he smiled to himself furtively under the moustache he bit.

And then he had seen Vera looking at him.

For a moment she had looked at him, with wide, grave eyes that stayed wide until she turned her head away suddenly.

And the lady, who was the cause of it all, had got up and removed herself, softly and, for her, inconspicuously, taking her two men with her out into the garden and the night.

Of course he had understood Vera. He had seen that it was jealousy, feminine jealousy. And that was why, in the drawing-room afterward, he had hurried up with his proposal, to make it all straight.

And she had refused him without giving any reasons. She had gone off to Nice by the one-forty-four train with the de Vignolles, Paul and Agatha and Ninon and Odette; she had left him in the great, gay, exotic hotel above the palm trees, above the rose and ivory town, above the sea; left him alone with the loveliness that made him mad and miserable; left him cooling his heels on the veranda, under the gaze, the distinctly interested gaze, of the beautiful and hypothetical stranger.

II