The Kingdom Round the Corner Part 16

As he bent forward to receive the cup, their hands touched. The contact was electric. A rush of excited vitality seemed to pour into his body from hers. The touch was only for a second, but it left him startled and stark of pretenses. When he sought her eyes, they were calm as ever.

"You're a most bewildering woman--the most bewildering I ever met," he confessed.

"Except my sister," she corrected.

He glanced up at the portrait and back to her, comparing the features.

"Yes, I see it now. She is your sister. I ought to have guessed. But I haven't met her; so I don't except her."

Maisie busied herself with pa.s.sing the dishes. She had a way of making everything appear conventional by the unruffled quiet with which she accepted it. At the back of her mind she seemed to be smiling at the domestic scene she had achieved with this man, who should have been her enemy.

"No, you haven't met her," she a.s.sented. "But until you've met her, you won't rest; and after you've met her, you won't rest either.--And so you think I'm bewildering! You thought something else, which you didn't have the courage to put into words. Bewildering and dangerous--the most dangerous woman you'd ever met--that was what you meant."

He smiled with a shade of embarra.s.sment. "I might have called you the most disconcerting woman; you're all of that. No man of sense, who valued his peace of mind, would tell any woman she was dangerous."

"I don't see why. Why shouldn't he? Do tell me. I shan't be offended."

She leant forward, absorbing him with her childish eyes, her lips parted with expectancy.

"Because----" Tabs checked himself while he studied the tantalizing innocence of her expression. He felt certain that he was going to say something irresistibly unwise. To gain time he looked away and commenced aimlessly stirring his cup. "Well, if you must have it, because to tell a woman that would be to tempt her to be dangerous."

"But I love to be tempted," she said eagerly; "temptation is the yeast of life." And then in a whisper, speaking less to him than to herself, "A woman knows that she's old when temptation ends."

Like ripples from a stone flung into water the poignancy of what she had implied rather than uttered, spread away with a commotion which grew ever fainter. They sat without change of posture at either end of the couch, she bending towards him, he gazing down into his cup as though by staring into it he could retain his grip on the conventions. There was no sound, save the rustling of live coals in the grate. Outside the window the toy boat floated, a symbol of men's and women's ineffectual childishness, always dreaming of adventures on which they never set sail. Tabs pondered the hidden profundity of her words. At last he believed that through her he understood himself. It wasn't youth that he or anybody coveted; it was the more supreme boon of not growing old. He had just arrived at this new self-knowledge when she spoke.

"To be tempted means that one's wanted--wanted dreadfully, so that it hurts. That's living--to be wanted. Not to be wanted is worse than death. When you're dead, you're forgotten and you forget. To be forgotten and to remember is the end of all things. Not to be wanted when you're alive is to beat your flesh against the walls of a tomb.

Lord Taborley, I know what you came for." He had set down his cup. She covered his bronzed hands with her own pa.s.sionate white ones, overwhelming him with a rush of words. "You came to accuse me, to bribe me, to buy me. You didn't want to hear me; I was already condemned. Do you think I don't know what's said about my marriages? I know too well.

But it isn't vanity that makes me want to be loved. It's so right to be loved. It isn't wickedness. It's the terror of not being loved--the same terror that makes you cling to Terry though she doesn't want you in return---- We all want to believe that we're wanted. It's human. Without that life's a blank. One can't face up---- And I----"

She tore her hands from him and buried her face, sobbing in the cus.h.i.+ons.

V

He had done it. By some unaccountable blunder he had made her cry. What was it he had said? Only a minute ago she had been so radiant and smiling. His first thought was of Porter; she must not know. This crying must be stopped before she heard it. Any moment she might enter. Even now she might be listening at the door, preparing to enter.

Another conjecture rushed into his mind--this sobbing might be part of a prearranged plan. Tears are the jiu-jitsu of woman's art of self-defense. To the world at large the man is always a villain who has caused them. "But I didn't cause them," he protested to himself. And then, "Dash it all! There's nothing gained by sitting here. I've got to do something."

He roused himself and limped round the table to the end of the couch against which her face was hidden. He could see nothing but the pale gold of her hair, the ivory whiteness of her neck and the pitiful heaving of her fascinating shoulders. She looked extraordinarily like a doll--a broken doll which had been allowed to fall through some one's carelessness.

"Confound it! What a brute I am!" he muttered. "What the d.i.c.kens does one do with a woman in hysterics?"

He laid his hand very timidly on her silky hair. He had had no idea that it was so silky. "Cheer up!" he said softly. And then again, "I do wish you'd cheer up."

She took not the slightest notice, save that a small white hand scuttled out like a mouse from beneath the cus.h.i.+ons and commenced a hurried search. He watched it and formed a hasty guess. It couldn't find the thing for which it had been sent, so he dropped his own large handkerchief in its path, saw it take possession of it and dive again beneath the cus.h.i.+ons. It made no difference to the sobbing.

What ought he to do? He couldn't endure the sound--it wrenched him. He bent over her, trying to turn her obstinately hidden face in his direction.

"Maisie!" The word had slipped out. It didn't matter. It mattered so little that he repeated the indiscretion. "Maisie, you mustn't break your heart like that. No one thinks ill of you and you are wanted.

You're wanted most awfully. Heaps of people want you."

The shoulders ceased to heave for a fraction of a second, but her face still refused to turn. "Who-oo--who wants me?" Her voice reached him choked with tears and m.u.f.fled.

Tabs frowned. The question was a poser. Who did want her? He was blessed if he knew. There must be people who wanted her--Adair, for instance.

But the mention of Adair would provide her with a reason for a new outburst. There was only one thing to say under the circ.u.mstances, so he said it. "I do."

She lay so still that she might have been dead. It was frightening, this sudden silence after such a storm of emotion. It was so frightening that he had to say something more to prove to himself that she could hear.

"You're beautiful. You're so gay when you're not crying. I don't think any man could prevent himself from wanting you." And then desperately, in a last effort, "You're most tremendously charming."

Her face never stirred from the cus.h.i.+ons, but he was aware that surrept.i.tiously his borrowed handkerchief was being employed industriously.

He had just time to compose his features before a tear-wet eye blinked up at him. It was an eye eloquent with grat.i.tude and babyishly blue.

"You're a dear," a small voice whispered.

VI

He had been called many things from time to time, but never before "a dear." To be called "a dear" by a beautiful woman was an entirely new sensation for him. It made him distinctly uncomfortable--almost ashamed.

A gift of this sort, even though it hasn't been desired, puts the recipient under an obligation. When once a woman has dubbed a man "a dear," she expects him to live up to the part she has a.s.signed him. Tabs hoped that she hadn't been as sincere as she had sounded.

Taking himself off to the nearest French window, he stood staring out morosely--staring out at the silly little rockery, with the silly little pond at the foot of it, containing the silly little boat that never sailed anywhere. He was cross with himself and even more cross with her.

Why couldn't she have behaved sensibly, instead of bursting like a rain-cloud without warning? She made mysteries out of everything, out of himself, Terry and even her sister's portrait. She never gave him a complete answer to any question. She surrounded herself with the atmosphere of a detective novel. He was half-minded to rush into the hall and make good his escape before she involved him further. Sir Tobias could come and conduct his own unpleasantness. How on earth was he going to tackle her concerning Adair now that she had called him "a dear"?

But beneath his irritation and always struggling to surmount it was a quite different emotion--an emotion of tenderness. He kept seeing her as she had lain there sobbing, so fragile and dispossessed and broken. It was the whiteness of her neck that he remembered, the narrowness of her shoulders and the silkiness of her pale gold hair.

He had been standing at the window for perhaps five minutes when her voice reached him from a great distance. "Thanks muchly for the hanky.

I'm better now."

"I'm glad," he said with his back towards her, once again on his guard.

As he turned slowly, she greeted him with a smile of welcome and nodded towards her sister's portrait. "She wouldn't have cried, you know."

"Wouldn't she?"

He had to say something; that seemed as good as anything. He made no attempt to approach her, but stood at bay against the window just where he had turned. He had arrived at one fixed determination; whatever happened, he would not again be entrapped into sharing the couch with her.

In answer to his unenthusiastic enquiry, Maisie shook her head vigorously like a little girl. "No, Di wouldn't. She never cries. Even when we were children we couldn't make her."

It flashed on Tabs that this conversation about the unknown woman was intended as a kind of peace-offering. Not to be ungracious, he roused himself to a show of interest. "Couldn't make her! Surely you weren't so cruel as to try?"

"Here's your hanky," she said, tossing the moist, scrunched ball across to him. "Cruel! We didn't mean to be cruel. I suppose we were. She used to ask us to try. There was a game we played; we called it Christian Martyrs. She was always the martyr; she liked it. All she ever did when we hurt her was to say, 'Do it harder; I can bear more than that.' She was as proud then as she is to-day of all that she could bear. I think that's what made her husband furious. She seemed always to be saying to him, 'Do it harder,' and he certainly did. But neither he nor any one else has ever succeeded in making her cry."

Tabs glanced at the aloof beauty of the painted face--it was like the face of a Roman Empress, so proudly secure in its serenity. "Make her cry! Why should any one want to make her cry? To do that would be a kind of blasphemy."

"That's why," Maisie clasped her hands eagerly. "You've said it for me exactly. I've never known how to put it. It's the holiness of G.o.d that tempts men to revile Him. He evades them, outlasts them and yet compels their affection. They have no power over Him and can't destroy Him, though they can destroy everything else in the world. What a man loves and has no power over, he longs to destroy; either that, or to drag it down to his own level, so that he can get his arms round it and comfort its weakness and hug it to his breast. It was that way with Di and her husband. He couldn't drag her down. He couldn't find her weakness. She was always up there. So he reviled her."

A silence fell between them. They stared at each other across the room's breadth, finding each in the other something at the same time intimate and incomprehensible; each feeling that they stood on the verge of a discovery. It was Tabs who spoke.

"_Was!_ Then he's dead?"

She barely nodded. "Killed at the Somme, poor fellow. He must have hated her to the end. In everything else he was large and splendid."