The Beautiful Miss Brooke Part 5

"But the breezes, and the woods, and the rye-fields, and the farm-houses with their delicious old oak presses, and the kind-hearted people, and the quaint children who love to watch you sketch and see you squeeze the paint out of the tubes--the memory of all these things draws you back to them. I long for Brittany almost as much as I once longed to leave everything and everybody and be just myself--and by myself. It seems so long ago now."

She had almost unconsciously moved closer to him now.

"Won't you tell me when that was--Lisa?"

It was the first time he had dared to call her by this name. In his longing to utter it in articulate speech it had rushed to the tip of his tongue.

"It was three years ago--before I came here. Every place had a.s.sociations that hurt me. I wanted to get away--to work, work, work. I seemed to hate everybody. So I came here, and for months I thought I was as hard as a stone. Then one day I found myself angry with a girl--a fellow-student--and I was quite surprised to find I could feel at all.

And then I was suddenly glad I was a human being again."

Her voice melted away into the vast murmur of the soft-twinkling city.

Beyond the fact that he was selfishly glad she had had trouble--it afforded him the exquisite pleasure of sympathy--there was no active thought in him now, no estimation of the position. His soul alone dominated; it had been moved to responsiveness and it now wrought out its mood, subtly surrounding her, he felt, with its comfort.

They crossed the mysterious, glistening river, and came upon the myriad flame-points of the Place de la Concorde. They turned into the Champs Elysees betwixt woods enchanted by the sorcerer Night; catching glimpses of palaces of light amid the trees whence melody came floating, mingled with the incense of the summer.

"Won't you tell me, Lisa--that is, if you think you can trust me."

It was sweet to exercise the privilege of calling her "Lisa." He felt it was his for always now.

"I know I can trust you, Paul. Would you really care to hear? Of course you would," she continued quickly, giving him no time to reply. "What a silly question for me to ask! Still there is little to tell! I loved a man. We were to be married. His mind was poisoned against me by an enemy. He was harsh and unjust. A few words sum all up. He is married to another. A commonplace chapter, is it not? But to have lived through it--to have lived through it!"

He grew dazed and white. "To have lived through it!" Those simple words seemed to his comprehending mood athrob with the sobbing of great grief.

"But you do not love him now?" he breathed.

"No, no! All is over now. But I brooded and brooded and thought--the experience made me a woman. Life is a serious thing to me now. I feel better and stronger for what I have suffered. But the memory remains."

"You have nothing to reproach yourself with, Lisa. Surely there are happier memories in store for you. It is for you but to shape the future."

He longed for her impulsive "How?" and had his answer ready. It seemed a strange thing, but this confession of a past love, this telling of a great sorrow in her life, had wrought a spell upon him. His eyes were full of tears. In that moment his love for her seemed to have increased a thousandfold. The surprise with which the revelation had overwhelmed him was lost in the rush of pity. She had suffered, and by his love he would make everything up to her.

But now there came a sudden change, slight in its outward manifestation, but felt by him like a chill blast, for his soul vibrated to hers, registering every subtle shade of her mood. She did not speak immediately, and he knew that moment of silence was fatal.

They had pa.s.sed the round point of the Champs Elysees, and the woods and gardens had ended. Only the giant _hotels_ rose on either hand. There seemed more carriages darting about now, a greater movement of life, a general sense of disenchantment in the air, of an awakening from a dream to the clattering reality of things. Paul realised that the spell was broken.

Miss Brooke had turned her head for a moment to look through the window.

"We shall be there in two or three minutes now," she said, as a sort of natural outcome of her ascertaining their exact whereabouts. "I am afraid I must rather have depressed you. It is scarcely courteous to our hostess for us to arrive in so gloomy a mood."

She gave a little laugh which set his every nerve a-tingle, so certainly did its ring lack the appealing quality that had brought him so close to her. It seemed to thrust him back abruptly and brutally.

"Tell me, Paul, haven't you ever had any love affairs?" she went on to ask, and there was a suspicion of banter in her tone. "I've told you all about my tragedy, now tell me about yours or all yours. I know we've told each other all our lives before, but of course we both bowdlerized.

The most interesting parts have yet to be told."

As she had asked him a direct question he felt constrained to answer it.

He found himself considering whether his relation to Celia need count as a love affair, but he was so convinced he had never been in love with her at all that he decided he could leave her out without doing violence to his conscience. Altogether there had been in his life two very minor and foolish amourettes that might have became entanglements; one with a barmaid when he was in the lawyer's office, some of the clerks having persuaded him the girl "was gone on him," the other with a simple maiden of sixteen, the daughter of a market gardener, which idyll had proceeded at his father's country seat. Paul told the latter--it was a boyish pa.s.sion that had come to nothing and stood for nothing in his life; the former he was ashamed of. "I proposed to her and gave her a mortal fright. She was so scared she ran away. We were both shamefaced when we met again, and my spurt of pluck was at an end. I dared not say another word to her, and somehow we drifted out of being sweethearts. I was barely nineteen at the time."

Miss Brooke laughed again heartily, but Paul only felt the gloomier.

"Tell me some more, please. You put me into quite a cheerful humour.

What was your next love affair?"

She had resumed her old militant badinage.

"There is nothing more in my biography that is likely to entertain you,"

he answered evasively.

"Is it so bad as that, Paul? I think you might tell me all the same. I'm not easily shocked."

"You mistake me. I have told you all," he replied, driven to the lie direct.

"Come, come, Mr. Paul. In a woman one might expect such a want of candour. But suppose I tell you _my_ other affairs--will that encourage you to tell me yours? Is it a bargain?"

"Your other affairs?" he repeated.

"Did you imagine I've had only one in my life? That's paying me a very poor compliment. This is our destination."

"Why do you tease me, Lisa?" he asked, as they descended. He was relieved that the drive had come to an end. It had been a trying time for him. He wondered what it was all coming to? Just when the critical moment had come she had practically inhibited him from speaking. She was a strange, baffling girl, and he was helpless in her hands.

"I'm not teasing you, I simply want to finish my confessions. You must dance three dances with me, and talk to me a lot after. Perhaps I shall succeed in softening you and then you'll be more tractable. We dance till midnight. After that we sup and converse till dawn. It seems there are special complications and permissions for dancing and music in the small hours, as one's neighbours above and below are apt to want to sleep just then. Dora s.h.i.+rked the bother, especially as her French is so weak and her husband's worse."

They went up the stairway and were warmly welcomed by Mrs. McCook. It was a pleasant gathering of nice-looking men and pretty girls, but Paul was only half alive to it. To him it was scarcely more than a mere background for the further development of his drama. So far he took these further love-affairs of Miss Brooke as the purest make-believe, but all the same he was curiously uneasy and anxious to hear what she had in mind to tell him.

When he could talk to her again, he could discover no trace in her manner of her having lived through with him a supreme emotional moment.

The softness that had given him a glimpse of infinite love, and which he had perhaps hoped might reveal itself again, was absent; in its place the old niceness and the frank friendliness of comrades.h.i.+p, and with them the old warning to him to stand back. She proceeded to give him the promised account of her various lovers in a light, mocking mood.

"I began very early, much earlier than your simple country maiden. My memories of childhood are rather hazy, but I should say I must have had a lover before I was out of my cradle. But I was thirteen before my heart was really moved. Since then I have been in love with so many men that I really can't remember half of them. However, I'll try and pick out those that affected me most seriously at the time. The first one was really a very nice schoolboy. His idea of love-making was to feed me incessantly with candy, which he did for a whole year till I fell a victim to the charms of another boy. The two fought. Both emerged from the combat with black eyes, which rather spoilt their beauty, and therefore killed my interest in them. It required quite an heroic effort, though, to refuse their offerings."

"And was this method of love-making as satisfying to them as it was to you?" asked Paul, beginning to be confirmed in his supposition that Miss Brooke was joking.

"Oh, we used to have clandestine meetings and we used to kiss, of course. That made me rather tired of them. They wanted to be kissing the whole time."

Paul had a momentary vertigo, though he professed by his manner to be listening in the same spirit as Miss Brooke narrated.

"The first one was always a nice boy even when he grew up and was always ready to fall in love with me again. But one fine day he got engaged, wrote to tell me about it, and asked me to congratulate him. He married.

That finishes with him.

"The next interesting one was a college man. I was about sixteen then and at the height of my musical ambition. He was musical, too, in fact quite an enthusiast. He used to pilot me about to concerts and send me tickets for the opera. Besides I was struggling then with Latin, Greek, and Conic Sections, and he used to help me polish off things--for selfish reasons, of course."

"And used you to kiss this time as well?" he asked, no longer questioning that he was hearing her personal history.

"Only at very sentimental moments," she replied, apparently overlooking the mockery in his voice. "I was older and a greater expert in emotions.

One's first experiments are necessarily crude. But, to proceed, my cavalier lost his head one day and wanted me to marry him at once, which was rather absurd. So I had to give him his _conge_ and accept the attentions of a less violent lover. I had always a reserve to draw upon, but so long as a man behaved nicely and didn't get altogether unreasonable, I let it acc.u.mulate. My musical friend, however, gave me some trouble. We had several stormy interviews, and at last I had positively to refuse to see him. One fine day he, too, got engaged and wrote to me asking me to congratulate him. I know he was divorced some time since, but I've completely lost sight of him."

At this moment Miss Brooke was led away to dance, but was able to join him again before very long.

"The next----" were her first words, in a mock-solemn, long-drawn-out tone, as she took his arm and then she broke into laughter. "The next was a tall Southerner with nice manners, a soft voice, and a pretty way of calling me 'ma'am.' He, too, was musical--naturally, I preferred musical lovers then. The Colonel, as everybody called him, literally wors.h.i.+pped me, but he was as poor as a church mouse, and I used to think myself very n.o.ble to be satisfied to get stuck with him in back seats at concert-halls. He went back South after graduating, swearing he'd never forget me; but, as soon as he'd made his fortune, he was coming back to marry me. I thought that if the illusion would help him to make his fortune, he might as well keep it. In any case I should have given him cause to be grateful to me. He wrote to me half-a-dozen times, then there was a break of some months; and, when I had almost forgotten him, one fine day I got a letter from him."