Winding Paths Part 9

"Then you had better take him under your wing," Hal laughed. "It would be a pity for such a paragon to be lost to society. Personally, stuffed blue-and-gold Apollos don't interest me in the least. Come along to bed. I'm dead tired," and she dragged Lorraine away.

But instead of sleeping, the acress lay silently watching a star that shone in at her window, and thinking a little sadly about the man nature had chosen to endow so bountifully. In a few weeks she would be thirty-two and he was twenty-four.

Supposing it had been twenty-two instead of thirty-two, and out of his splendour he had given his heart to her dark beauty, what a tale it might have been - what a fairy-tale of sweet, impossible things, with a golden-haired prince and a dark-eyed princess.

She awoke from her day-dream with a touch of impatience, apostrophising herself for her folly. After all, what had a beautiful, successful woman at her prime to do with a youth of twenty-four, who played foolish games at a supper-table, and was only just beginning to know his world? Of course he would bore her intolerably at a second interview, and, closing her eyes resolutely, she drove his image from her mind.

CHAPTER VII

The second interview, however, by a mere coincidence, took place at Lorraine's flat. She was walking leisurely down Sloane Street one afternoon, after visiting hermilliners, when she ran into the young giant going in the opposite direction.

"How so?..." she asked gaily, as is face lit up with a pleased smile, and he stopped in front of her. "Whither away at this hour? Are you chasing a brief?"

"Much too brief," he told her. "I had to carry some important papers to a certain well-known Cabinet Minister; and he did not even vouchsafe me a glance of his countenance. I was given an acknowledgment of them by the footman, as if I had been a messenger boy."

"Too bad. I think you deserve that another celebrity should give you a cup of tea, to redeem your opinion of the immortals. My flat is quite near, and I am now returning. Will you come?"

"Oh, won't I?" he said boyishly, and turned back.

It was the fashionable hour in Sloane Street, when many well-dressed, well-known people are often seen walking, and when the road is full of private motors and carriages. Lorraine found herself moving still more slowly. She was accustomed to being gazed at herself, had in fact grown a little blase of it, but the frank admiration bestowed on her giant amused and pleased her.

Covertly she watched, as she chatted up to him, for the tell-tale consciousness and perhaps heightened colour. But when he was looking back into her face he looked straight before him, over the heads of the admiring eyes, and paid no smallest heed to them. Neither was he in the least self-conscious with her. She wondered if he even realised that the tete-a-tete he accepted so simply would have been a joy of heaven to many. Anyhow, far from resenting his seeming want of due appreciation, she found it made him more interesting.

She spoke of Hal, and he immediately exclaimed: "Hal is a ripper, isn't she? I can't help teasing her, you know; it's the best fun in the world."

"Do you usually tease your feminine friends?" she asked. "I've no doubt you have a great many."

"Oh, no, I haven't. Men pals are far jollier."

"Still, I expect your inches bring you many fair admirers."

He shrugged his shoulders slightly, and looked a trifle bored, and she divined that he disliked flattery and probably the subject of his appearance. She adroitly turned the conversation back to Hal, and spoke of her until they reached the block of flats.

"Is this where you live? What a ripping situation!" he exclaimed. "I would sooner be near the river than near Knightsbridge, even if it is not so cla.s.sy."

He followed her into the lift, and then into her charming home, full of enthusiasm, and still without exhibiting a shade of self-consciousness.

Lorraine found her interest growing momentarily, as he took up his stand on her hearth and gazed frankly around, with undisguised pleasure.

"What a jolly nice room. It's one of the prettiest I've seen. You have the same color-scheme as the d.u.c.h.ess of Medstone in het boudoir, but I like your furniture better."

Lorraine glanced up a little surprised.

"Do you know the d.u.c.h.ess of Medstone?"

"Well, yes" - a trifle bashfully. "You see, those sort of people ask me to their houses because of my cricket. Private cricket weeks are rather fashionable, and I get invitations as the late Oxford captain."

"And do you go to people you don't know?"

"Yes, rather, if I can raise the funds. The nuisance is the tipping.

There's always such a rotten lot of servants; and I'm too much afraid of them to give anything but gold."

The tea came in, and she saw him glance round for the chair best suited to his bulk.

"My chairs were not designed for giants," she told him laughingly; "you will have to come and sit on the settee."

He came at once, stretching his long legs out before him, with lazy ease, and then drawing his knees up sharply, as if in sudden remembrance that he was a guest and they were comparative strangers.

Lorraine liked him, both for the moment's forgetfulness and the sudden remembrance, and as she glanced again at his beautiful head and splendid shoulders, she was conscious of a sudden thrill of appreciative admiration.

Hal was right in naming him Apollo. The Sun G.o.d might have been fashioned just so, when first he ravished the eyes of Venus.

"And so the d.u.c.h.ess took you into her boudoir?" she asked, with an unaccountable twinge of jealousy. "I do not know her. I'm afraid my friends are not so aristocratic as yours. But I believe she is considered very handsome."

"Hard," he said, with an old-fashioned air. "Handsome enough, but very hard. I did not like her nearly so much as Lady Moir, her sister."

"Still no doubt she was very nice to you?"

Lorraine rather hated herself for the question. The ways of aristocratic ladies, whose idle hours often supply a field of labour for the Evil One, were perfectly well known to her; and she wondered a little sharply how far he was still unspoilt. The majority of big, strong, full-blooded young men in his place would a.s.suredly have sipped the cup of pleasure pretty deeply by now, even at his years, but with that fine, strong face, and the clear, frank eyes was he of these? She believed not, and was glad.

He did not treat her question as if it implied any special favours, and merely replied jocularly:

"Well, I suppose, since her blood is very blue and mine merely tinged, she was rather gracious, but of course the really 'blue' people generally are."

"Tell me who you happen to be?" Lorraine leant back against her cushions, with her slow, easy grace, asking the question with a lightness that robbed it of all pointedness or sn.o.bbery.

He seemed amused, for he smiled as he answered frankly:

"I happen to be Alymer Hadstock Hermon, one fo _the_ Hermons all right, but not the drawing-room end, so to speak; at the same time tinged with her family shadiness - 'blue' of course I mean - though no doubt it applies in other ways as well. Does that satisfy your curiosity, or do you want to know more?"

She loved looking at him, particularly with that humorous little smile on his lips, so she said:

"Not half. I want to know all the rest."

"Very well. It's quite an open book. I was born twenty-four years ago. I am an only child, and, as usula, the apple of my mother's eye and the terror of my father's pocket. He, my father, is not much else just now except a recluse. He was recently a member of parliament, a Liberal member, and, G.o.d knows, that's little enough. I believe he even climbed in by a Chinese pigtail.

"My grandfather was a Judge in the Divorce Court, which doesn't somehow sound quite respectable, and my great-grandfather was a writer of law books, for which, personally, I think he ought to have been hanged. I can't go any farther back; at any rate I don't want to, because I'm certain it's all so correct and dull there isn't even a family skeleton."

"Is it the women or the men of the family that are beautiful?"

"Oh, both," with humorous eagerness. "Skeletons and ghosts we sought, and clamoured for, but ugliness, never."

"Well, it's a pity you were not a woman. Looks are wasted in a man.

Give a man a ready tongue and a taking manner, and he can usually get what he wants, if he's as ugly as a frog. With you, on the other hand, things will come too easily. You will miss all the fun of the chase.

On my soul I'm sorry for you."