The Beautiful Miss Brooke Part 2

Paul had seldom felt so many emotions at one time. Added to his surprise at the expected Mrs. Brooke changing at the last moment into a Mrs.

Potter, and to his bewilderment at being received in a bedroom, was a thrill of pleasure at Miss Brooke's reference to him as "my friend." He had, too, a sense of gratified curiosity at learning the next moment that the man's name was Pemberton; it was convenient, moreover, to have a definite symbol by which to refer to him in thought.

"I think the water's boiling, dear," said Mrs. Potter. "Doesn't it mean 'boiling' when steam comes out of the spout like that?"

"Not yet, Katharine. Half a minute more. You are just in nice time, Mr.

Middleton, to get your cup of tea at its best." And Miss Brooke busied herself cutting up a big lemon into thin slices at a little table that was laid with a pretty j.a.panese tea-set.

"Lisa's tea is quite wonderful," chimed in Mrs. Potter. "I always spoil mine--I can never quite tell when the water boils. That's my pet stupidity."

For a moment Paul watched the artistic copper kettle as it sang its pleasant song. Mrs. Potter already struck him as an obviously cheerful personality, and he felt absurdly grateful to her for mentioning Miss Brooke's first name. He had not yet given up Mrs. Brooke, expecting her to enter the room very soon now; and he found it hard not to fix his gaze noticeably on the bed, half-surprised that everybody else ignored it, seeming totally unconscious that any such piece of furniture was there at all.

Mr. Pemberton took little part in the somewhat ba.n.a.l but good-humoured conversation that now sprang up, but drummed idly with his fingers on the settee on which he was lounging. Now and again a monosyllabic drawl fell languidly from him, and Paul read into this demeanour annoyance at his presence.

Mrs. Potter, he soon learnt--for the lady was loquacious--was a widow and a journalist on a three months' stay in Europe, of which she was pa.s.sing a month in London, endeavouring to make as much copy out of it as possible. She related with glee, and without any apparent qualms of conscience, how she had "fixed up" accounts of various great society functions, writing her copy in the first person.

"Lisa is so good and helpful to me. I impose on her dreadfully. I should never have been able to get them fixed up without her. And then her spelling is so perfect--she runs over my copy and puts it right in a jiffy."

"Lemon or cream, Mr. Middleton, please?" asked Miss Brooke. "Two lumps of sugar or one? What, none at all! Oh, yes, everybody thinks these cups sweetly pretty. I'm taking them home with me as a souvenir."

"What shall I do without you in Paris?" broke in Mrs. Potter again. "I shall be lost there. Can't I coax you to come back with me, Lisa dear?"

"Can't disappoint poppa," said Miss Brooke laconically.

"You'll have me to come to," drawled Mr. Pemberton.

"You'll be handy for some things, but your spelling's worse than mine,"

said Mrs. Potter; and somewhat irrelevantly went on to suppose that Paul must know Paris well.

Paul, alas! had only two visits to boast of, one of a week's, the other of two weeks' duration, both in the company of his mother. Whereupon a sound, as of a suppressed sn.i.g.g.e.r, came from the direction of Pemberton.

Something like the truth had begun to dawn on Paul's mind, and he knew better now than to continue to expect Mrs. Brooke to appear. He had sufficiently gathered from the conversation that Miss Brooke was on her way home from Paris to America, and that she was going to travel alone, and had taken London _en route_, probably armed with letters of introduction. Most likely, he argued, she must have considered the one room sufficient for her needs, and had not antic.i.p.ated callers. Or perhaps Americans, for all he knew, did not mind receiving callers in a bedroom. This, he concluded, was probably the case, as no one seemed in the least _gene_, despite that the bed was such a palpable fact, and stood there in ma.s.sive unblus.h.i.+ngness. Otherwise an atmosphere of feminine daintiness seemed to surround Miss Brooke, transforming even this lodging-house bedroom.

However, he did not grasp the facts without an almost overwhelming sense of pain.

His romance had been rudely shattered at one blast, and he felt his breath draw heavily when he first comprehended Miss Brooke was on the point of leaving London. A sense of helplessness came upon him as he realised he could do nothing but just get through with his call. There seemed not the slightest chance now of his telling her about the career he purposed for himself. He had dreamed, too, of her showing him her verses, perhaps some of her sketches. But the presence of the others stood in the way. He would have liked to hate them both, but being forced to like Mrs. Potter, he had to bestow a double amount of dislike on Mr. Pemberton, which he was very glad to do. And then he wanted to know the exact relation between Mr. Pemberton and Miss Brooke. From a hint the "fellow" had dropped, it was clear he lived in Paris--where Miss Brooke had been living. Was he a relative? Who was he? Why was he in London? How came he to be at Mrs. Saxon's dance? For a moment Paul thought of asking Mrs. Saxon about him, and also about Miss Brooke, but he put the idea from him as underhand and unworthy.

Meanwhile the conversation went on, pleasant and ba.n.a.l. Mrs. Potter deluged Paul with questions about the London season and English painters and the Academy. She narrated the comicalities of her shopping expeditions, various little misadventures that had arisen from the different usage of everyday words by the two nations. By imperceptible stages along a tortuous and varied route they drifted on to the subject of love, and Mrs. Potter, still keeping the talk almost all to herself, related several touching romances of her friends' lives. Once or twice Paul's gloom was lightened by the smile of Miss Brooke that met his look each time he turned his face towards her. A lien, invisible to the others, seemed to be established between them.

At length Mrs. Potter, drawing Mr. Pemberton's attention to the hour, rose to go, and the two left together. Despite some mad idea of declaring himself to Miss Brooke there and then, which had occurred to him, Paul had also risen, but to his astonishment Miss Brooke drew her chair closer to the fire, and motioned him to take a seat in the opposite chimney corner. He obeyed as if hypnotised. "What would my mother think of this?" he asked himself, and awaited developments. As for Miss Brooke, at no moment did she seem aware of the slightest unconventionality in the situation.

"Katharine is so sweet," she began thoughtfully. "You can't imagine how pleased I was when she wrote she was coming. Charlie is piloting her about a little. He is so good-natured."

"Charlie is, I presume, Mr. Pemberton."

"Why, of course. And he'll be of so much use to her in Paris. He has a studio there. But I hope she won't fall in love with him," she added laughingly. "Katharine is so romantic; she is always in love with some man or other."

Though he knew as a general biological fact that women fall in love with men, Paul, despite all the love-stories he had read, had never yet been able to grasp it and admit it to himself as a fact of actual life.

Somehow, he had always felt that the onus of falling in love and of courts.h.i.+p rested on men, and that it was very good and condescending of women to allow themselves to be loved at all. But Miss Brooke's way of talking seemed to take it for granted that it was a perfectly natural and proper thing for a woman to be in love, that romance was a thing a woman might own to without any shame; making him realise more distinctly than ever before that women were not so entirely pa.s.sive and pa.s.sionless. But all this he rather felt than thought, and it did not interfere with the sentence that was on the tip of his tongue; the outcome of his sense of disappointment and desolation at her threatened departure out of his life, which was only mitigated by the reflection that Pemberton was being left behind.

"And now you are going home!"

The words were obviously equivalent to a sigh of regret.

"But not for good, I hope," said Miss Brooke; and Paul's universe changed at once into a wonderful enchanted garden. "Of course, it will be very nice to be at home with poppa and mamma again, but I should not be leaving Paris from choice. I was making such progress at school that my professor was quite angry I couldn't stay. But perhaps I shall be back in a year's time. I certainly shall if everything goes well."

"I do hope it's nothing serious that calls you away, and that keeps you from your studies so long a time," exclaimed Paul fervently.

"From my point of view it's certainly serious," smiled Miss Brooke, good-humouredly. "As I've already tried to make you believe, I am a very greedy person, with a fondness for dollars, and the whole trouble is that they keep out of reach. Poor hardworked poppa can't send me any more money just now, but he'll be getting a bigger salary next year, and I shall be able to go back and paint a masterpiece for the Salon. In the meanwhile I shall have to amuse myself as best I can sketching about the place, and watching poppa getting through big batches of couples. He's a minister--you know the cloth's hereditary in our family--and marries off people wholesale."

Till that moment Miss Brooke had been the railway king's daughter. For Paul to find now that she was a comparatively poor girl, whose anxiety to earn money by making her mark in art was no mere jesting pretence, involved a complete readjustment of his mental focus. But its instantaneity made the operation a violent one, especially as he strove hard not to exhibit any external signs of discomposure. At the same time a good deal that had bewildered him was explained, though there were points yet on which he needed enlightenment. And with all his astonishment went an unbounded admiration for the cheerful way in which she accepted her position, the lover's keen lookout for every sc.r.a.p of virtue in the beloved seizing on this greedily for commendation. What a splendid, plucky girl she was! The glamour of his romance was heightened. Mere millionaires and all that appertained to them seemed suddenly prosaic.

Into what a bizarre misconception had he fallen! She herself was not to blame. If his mind had not been clogged up by what Thorn had told him beforehand he would not so persistently have misunderstood her references to money; but how should he have thought of challenging what he knew only now to have been a mere speculative rumour? There had been nothing in her appearance and personality to belie that rumour, and, as obviously she was not called upon to contradict statements about herself she had never heard, such manifestations of the truth as had since become visible to him had only served to mystify him.

The way, too, she had taken certain things for granted as perfectly natural and proper, somewhat astonished him, to wit, her inviting him to call here, her reception of him in a bedroom, and his presence alone with her now. These facts contravened the ideas in which he had been brought up, and he could only suppose that American ideas probably differed from English. This surmise seemed, on the whole, corroborated by the glimpse he had had that day into the spirit of the American independent woman--a type entirely new to him--as exemplified both by Mrs. Potter and Miss Brooke.

He asked how soon she was leaving, and learnt she was sailing on the Sat.u.r.day, so that barely two days of London remained to her. He did not like the idea at all, as he had formed the hope he might somehow see her again before her departure.

"My berth is taken," explained Miss Brooke, perhaps amused by his evident discontent. "Some boxes have gone on. Besides, I could not stay here any longer. Dollars are getting scarce. I'm going to have some more tea--won't you join me?"

"Willingly." He wanted to stay longer, and tea, by filling the time plausibly, would help to lessen his constraint at the original position in which he found himself.

"I am so pleased you were able to call!" went on Miss Brooke, as she poured out the beverage. "You haven't forgotten your promise to tell me all about your work--and your Utopia as well," she added, smiling, and handing him his cup.

Her sweetness as she spoke enchanted him. When he himself had been hesitating on the brink of the chasm, with what ease had she taken him across it at one leap! Soon he found himself telling her how he had come to abandon his father's ideas and plan out his life his own way, with as much emotion as if he were relating his inmost secrets to an affianced wife. And certainly no affianced wife could have listened with a graver attention, or more sympathetic demeanour.

"Has it ever occurred to you to study architecture at Paris?" she asked.

"The Beaux Art School is, I think, one of the finest in the world, and you could scarcely get a more artistic atmosphere."

The effect of her remark was as that of an electric spark that fuses many elements into one new whole. He was conscious of a struggling chaotic ma.s.s of thought, followed by a clear perception of the conditions of his existence in all its bearings. And in a flash he had made up his mind to plunge into the delicious indefiniteness of what offered itself. A soft purple haze floated before him as in a dream, and an odour of incense and a harmony of sweet sounds seemed to steal upon him. And the haze, parting a moment, allowed him a glimpse of a magic city in its depths. And in that city, he knew, were "Lisa" and himself.

That was to be the future! The awakening of the man in him was complete.

By an abrupt mastercoup he would wrench himself away from the influences that had well-nigh reduced him to a puppet. His reply to Miss Brooke now would be the beginning of the necessary forward impulse.

"The idea has not come to me, though, of course, I should have had to consider the question of a formal course before very long. But I like the suggestion very much."

"Lots of the boys take the course there," added Miss Brooke. "There are, of course, many more American than English boys, but you'll find them all a sociable set."

He asked for details about the student life, and Miss Brooke tried to give him some notion of it. In this way quite half an hour slipped by, during which Paul became worked up to a high pitch of enthusiasm and took care to leave no doubt in Miss Brooke's mind that his decision was finally taken.

"Charlie, too, might be useful to you," said Miss Brooke, as Paul rose to take his leave. "I'm sure he'd be delighted to be of service to you.

And how nice, too, if we were to meet there again! Perhaps we shall."

Her face gleamed as with the pleasure of antic.i.p.ation.

"I shall always bear the hope with me," said Paul gravely; and, wis.h.i.+ng her a pleasant crossing, he bade her "good-bye."

"Let us say '_Au revoir_' rather," and once again she pressed his hand, which was more than he had dared hope for.