THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "'Oh, what a pity,' said Betty from the heart, 'that we aren't introduced now!'' Incomplete Amorist By E. NESBIT Author tf "The Red Home," "Tht Wouldbtgoods" ttc.y ttt. Illustrated by CLARENCE F. UNDERWOOD NEW YORK Doubleday, Page & Company 1906 Copyright, 1906, by The Curtis Publishing Company Copyright, 1906, by Doubleday, Page & Company Published, June, 1906 All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including ihv Scandinavian. RICHARD REYNOLDS and JUSTUS MILES FORMAN 2137434 'Faire naitre tin dsir, le nourrir, le dvelopper, le grandir, le satisfaire, c'est un poeme tout entier." Balzac. CONTENTS BOOK I. THE GIRL Chapter I. The Inevitable Chapter II. The Irresistible Chapter III. Voluntary Chapter IV. Involuntary . Chapter V. The Prisoner . Chapter VI. The Criminal Chapter VII. The Escape . BOOK II. THE MAN Chapter VIII. The One and the Other Chapter IX. The Opportunity . Chapter X. Seeing Life Chapter XI. The Thought . . - . Chapter XII. The Rescue . Chapter XIII. Contrasts Chapter XIV. Renunciation BOOK III. THE OTHER WOMAN Chapter XV. On Mount Parnassus Chapter XVI. "Love and Tupper" Chapter XVII. Interventions Chapter XVIII. The Truth . Chapter XIX. The Truth with a Vengeance Chapter XX. Waking-up Time . 3 18 29 40 53 63 75 93 107 121 133 MS 159 172 I8 7 2OI 22O 233 246 257 CONTENTS Continued Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter BOOK XXL XXII. XXIII. XXIV. XXV. XXVI. XXVII. XXVIII. IV. THE OTHER MAN The Flight * The Lunatic . . . Temperatures The Confessional . The Forest . The Miracle . The Pink Silk Story "And so" PAGS 271 28l 29O 301 3 I2 322 335 348 PEOPLE OF THE STORY Eustace Vernon The Incomplete Amorist Betty Desmond The Girl The Rev. Cecil Underwood Her Step-Father Miss Julia Desmond Her Aunt Robert Temple The Other Man Lady St. Craye The Other Woman Miss Voscoe The Art Student Madame Chevillon The Inn-Keeper at Crez Paula Conway A Soul in Hell Mimi Chantal A Model Village Matrons, Concierges, Art Students, Etc. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS " 'Oh, what a pity,' said Betty from the heart, 'that we aren't introduced now!' " . Frontispiece (See Page n) FACING PAGB " 'Ah, don't be cross!' she said." . . .no " Betty stared at him coldly." . . . .130 " Betty looked nervously around the scene was agitatingly unfamiliar." . . . .154 "Unfinished, but a disquieting likeness." . . 208 " ' No, thank you: it's all done now.' " . . 222 " On the further arm of the chair sat, laughing also, a very pretty young woman." . 346 "The next morning brought him a letter." . 350 XI. 1, tEfcr 5irl THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST CHAPTER I. t THE INEVITABLE. "No. The chemises aren't cut out. I haven't had time. There are enough shirts to go on with, aren't there, Mrs. James?" said Betty. "We can make do for this afternoon, Miss, but the men they're getting blowed out with shirts. It's the children's shifts as we can't make shift without much longer." Mrs. James, habitually doleful, punctuated her speech with sniffs. "That's a joke, Mrs. James," said Betty. "How clever you are!" "I try to be what's fitting," said Mrs. James, com- placently. "Talk of fitting," said Betty, "If you like I'll fit on that black bodice for you, Mrs. Symes. If the other ladies don't mind waiting for the reading a little bit." "I'd as lief talk as read, myself," said a red-faced sandy-haired woman; "books ain't what they was in my young days." "If it's the same to you, Miss," said Mrs. Symes in a thick rich voice, "I'll not be tried on afore a room full. If we are poor we can all be clean's what I say, and I keeps my unders as I keeps my outside. But not 3 4 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST before persons as has real imitation lace on their pet- ticoat bodies. I see them when I was a-nursmg her with her fourth. No, Miss, and thanking y u kindly, but begging your pardon all the same." "Don't mention it," said Betty absently. "Oh, Mrs. Smith, you can't have lost your thimble already. Why what's that you've got in your mouth? "So it is!" Mrs. Smith's face beamed at the grati- fying coincidence. "It always was my habit, from a child, to put things there for safety. ^ "These cheap thimbles ain't fit to put in your mouth, no more than coppers," said Mrs. James, her mouth '""(^'nothing hurts you if you like it," s aid Betty recklessly. She had been reading the works of Mr. G. K. Chesterton. A shocked murmur arose. "Oh Miss, what about the publy kows? said Mrs. Symes heavily. The others nodded acquiescence. "Don't you think we might have a window open.'' said Betty The May sunshine beat on the schoolroom windows. ' The room, crowded with the stout members of the "Mother's Meeting and Mutual Clothing Club, was stuffy, unbearable. A murmur arose far more shocked than the first. "I was just a-goin' to say why not close the door, that being what doors is made for, after all, . said Mrs. Symes. "I feel a sort of draught a-creepmg up my legs as it is." The door was shut. "You can't be too careful," said the red-faced wom- an -"we never know what a chill mayn't bring forth. My cousin's sister-in-law, she had twins, and her aunt come in and says she, 'You're a bit stuffy here, THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 5 ain't you ?' and with that she opens the window a crack, not meaning no harm, Miss, as it might be you. And within a year that poor unfortunate woman she popped off, when least expected. Gas ulsters, the doc- tor said. Which it's what you call chills, if you're a doctor and can't speak plain." "My poor grandmother come to her end the same way," said Mrs. Smith, "only with her it was the Bible reader as didn't shut the door through being so set on shewing off her reading. And my granny, a clot of blood went to her brain, and her brain went to her head and she was a corpse inside of fifty minutes." Every woman in the room was waiting, feverishly alert, for the pause that should allow her to begin her own detailed narrative of disease. Mrs. James was easily first in the competition. "Them quick deaths," she said, "is sometimes a blessing in disguise to both parties concerned. My poor husband years upon years he lingered, and he had a bad leg talk of bad legs, I wish you could all have seen it," she added generously. "Was it the kind that keeps all on a-breaking out?" asked Mrs. Symes hastily, "because my youngest brother had a leg that nothing couldn't stop. Break out it would do what they might. I'm sure the band- ages I've took off him in a morning " Betty clapped her hands. It was the signal that the reading was g*oing to begin, and the matrons looked at her resentfully. What call had people to start reading when the talk was flowing so free and pleasant? Betty, rather pale, began : "This is a story about a little boy called Wee Willie Winkie." 6 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "I call that a silly sort of name," whispered Mrs. Smith. "Did he make a good end, Miss?" asked Mrs. James plaintively. "You'll see," said Betty. "I like it best when they dies forgiving of everybody and singing hymns to the last." "And when they says, 'Mother, I shall meet you 'ere- after in the better land' that's what makes you cry so pleasant." "Do you want me to read or not?" asked Betty in desperation. "Yes, Miss, yes," hummed the voices heavy and shrill. "It's her hobby, poor young thing," whispered Mrs. Smith, "we all 'as 'em. My own is a light cake to my tea, and always was. Ush." Betty read. When the mothers had wordily gone, she threw open the windows, propped the door wide with a chair, and went to tea. She had it alone. "Your Pa's out a-parishing," said Letitia, bumping down the tray in front of her. "That's a let-off anyhow," said Betty to herself, and she propped up a Stevenson against the tea-pot. After tea parishioners strolled up by ones and twos and threes to change their books at the Vicarage lend- ing library. The books were covered with black calico, and smelt of rooms whose windows were never opened. When she had washed the smell of the books off, she did her hair very carefully in a new way that seemed becoming, and went down to supper. Her step-father only spoke once during the meal ; he was luxuriating in the thought of the Summa Thee- THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 7 logiae of Aquinas in leather still brown and beautiful, which he had providentially discovered in the was'h- house of an ailing Parishioner. When he did speak he said: "How extremely untidy your hair is, Lizzie. I wish you would take more pains with your appearance." When he had withdrawn to his books she covered three new volumes for the library : the black came off on her hands, but anyway it was clean dirt. She went to bed early. "And that's my life," she said as she blew out the candle. Said Mrs. James to Mrs. Symes over the last and strongest cup of tea : "Miss Betty's ailing a bit, I fancy. Looked a bit peaky, it seemed to me. I shouldn't wonder if she was to go off in a decline like her father did." "It wasn't no decline," said Mrs. Symes, dropping her thick voice, " 'e was cut off in the midst of his wicked courses. A judgment if ever there was one." Betty's blameless father had been killed in the hunt- ing field. "I daresay she takes after him, only being a fem'ale it all turns to her being pernickety in her food and allus wanting the windows open. And mark my words, it may turn into a decline yet, Mrs. Symes, my dear." Mrs. Symes laughed fatly. "That ain't no decline," she said, "you take it from me. What Miss Betty wants is a young man. It is but nature after all, and what we must all come to, gentle or simple. Give her a young man to walk out with and you'll see the dif- ference. Decline indeed! A young man's what she wants. And if I know anything of gells and their ways 8 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST she'll get one, no matter how close the old chap keeps her." Mrs. Symes was not so wrong as the delicate minded may suppose. Betty did indeed desire to fall in love. In all the story books the main interest of the heroine's career began with that event. Not that she voiced the desire to herself. Only once she voiced it in her prayers. "Oh, God," she said, "do please let something hap- pen!" That was all. A girl had her little reticences, even with herself, even with her Creator. Next morning she planned to go sketching ; but no, there were three more detestable books to be put into nasty little black cotton coats, the drawing-room to be dusted all the hateful china the peas to be shelled for dinner. She shelled the peas in the garden. It was a beauti- ful green garden, and lovers could have walked very happily down the lilac-bordered paths. "Oh, how sick I am of it all!" said Betty. She would not say, even to herself, that what she hated was the frame without the picture. As she carried in the peas she passed the open win- dow of the study where, among shelves of dull books and dusty pamphlets, her step-father had as usual for- gotten his sermon in a chain of references to the Fath- ers. Betty saw his thin white hairs, his hard narrow face and tight mouth, the hands yellow and claw-like that gripped the thin vellum folio. "I suppose even he was young once," she said, "but I'm sure he doesn't remember it." He saw her .eo by, young and alert in the sunshine, and the May air stirred the curtains. He looked THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 9 vaguely about him, unlocked a drawer in his writing- table, and took out a leather case. He gazed long at the face within, a young bright face with long ringlets above the formal bodice and sloping shoulders of the sixties. "Well, well," he said, "well, well," locked it away, and went back to De Poenis Parvulorum. "I will go out," said Betty, as she parted with the peas. "I don't care!" It was not worth while to change one's frock. Even when one was properly dressed, at rare local garden- party or flower-show, one never met anyone that mat- tered. She fetched her sketching things. At eighteen one does so pathetically try to feed the burgeoning life with the husks of polite accomplishment. She insisted on withholding from the clutches of the Parish the time to practise Beethoven and Sullivan for an hour daily. Daily, for half an hour, she read an improving book. Just now it was The French Revolution, and Betty thought it would last till she was sixty. She tried to read French and German Telemaque and Maria Stuart. She fully intended to 'become all that a cul- tured young woman should be. But self-improvement is a dull game when there is no one to applaud your score. What the gardener called the gravel path was black earth, moss-grown. Very pretty, but Betty thought it shabby. It was soft and cool, though, to the feet, and the dust of the white road sparkled like diamond dust in the sunlight. She crossed the road and passed through the swing gate into the park, where the grass was up for hay, io THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST with red sorrel and buttercups and tall daisies and feathery flowered grasses, their colours all tangled and blended together like ravelled ends of silk on the wrong side of some great square of tapestry. Here and there in the wide sweep of tall growing things stood a tree a may-tree shining like silver, a laburnum like fine gold. There were horse-chestnuts whose spires of blos- som shewed like fat candles on a Christmas tree for giant children. And the sun was warm and the tree shadows black on the grass. Betty told herself that she hated it all. She took the narrow path the grasses met above her feet crossed the park, and reached the rabbit warren, where the chalk breaks through the thin dry turf, and the wild thyme grows thick. A may bush, overhanging a little precipice of chalk, caught her eye. A wild rose was tangled round it. It was, without doubt, the most difficult composition with- in sight. "I will sketch that," said Eighteen, confidently. For half an hour she busily blotted and washed and niggled. Then she became aware that she no longer had the rabbit warren to herself. "And he's an artist, too!" said Betty. "How aw- fully interesting! I wish I could see his face." But this his slouched Panama forbade. He was in white, the sleeve and breast of his painting jacket smeared with many colours ; he had a camp-stool and an easel and looked, she could not help feeling, much more like a real artist than she did, hunched up as she was on a little mound of turf, in her shabby pink gown and that hateful garden hat with last year's dusty flattened roses in it. THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 11 She went on sketching with feverish unskilled fingers, and a pulse that had actually quickened its beat. She cast little glances at him as often as she dared. He was certainly a real artist. She could tell that by the very way he held his palette. Was he staying with people about there? Should she meet him? Would they ever be introduced to each other? "Oh, what a pity," said Betty from the heart, "that we aren't introduced now!" Her sketch grew worse and worse. "It's no good," she said. "I can't do anything with it." She glanced at him. He had pushed back the hat. She saw quite plainly that he was smiling a very lit- tle, but he was smiling. Also he was looking at her, and across the fifteen yards of gray turf their eyes met. And she knew that he knew that this was not her first glance at him. She paled with fury. "He has been watching me all the time ! He is mak- ing fun of me. He knows I can't sketch. Of course he can see it by the silly way I hold everything." She ran her knife around her sketch, detached it, and tore it across and across. The stranger raised his hat and called eagerly. "I say please don't move for a minute. Do you mind? I've just got your pink gown. It's coming beautifully. Between brother artists Do, please! Do sit still and go on sketching Ah, do !" Betty's attitude petrified instantly. She held a brush in her hand, and she looked down at her block. But she did not go on sketching. She sat rigid and three delicious words rang in her ears : "Between brother artists !" How very nice of him ! He hadn't been mak- 12 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST ing fun, after all. But wasn't it rather impertinent of him to put her in his picture without asking her? Well, it wasn't she but her pink gown he wanted. And "be- tween brother artists!" Betty drew a long breath. "It's no use," he called; "don't bother any more. The pose is gone." She rose to her feet and he came towards her. "Let me see the sketch," he said. "Why did you tear it up?" He fitted the pieces together. "Why, it's quite good. You ought to study in Paris," he added idly. She took the torn papers from his hand with a bow, and turned to go. "Don't go," he said. You're not going? Don't you want to look at my picture?" Now Betty knew as well as you do that you musn't speak to people unless you've been introduced to them. But the phrase "brother artists" had played ninepins with her little conventions. "Thank you. I should like to very much," said Betty. "I don't care," she said to herself, "and be- sides, it's not as if he were a young man, or a tourist, or anything. He must be ever so old thirty; I shouldn't wonder if he was thirty-five." When she saw the picture she merely said, "Oh," and stood at gaze. For it was a picture a picture that, seen in foreign lands, might well make one sick with longing for the dry turf and the pale dog violets that love the chalk, for the hum of the bees and the scent of the thyme. He had chosen the bold sweep of the brown upland against the sky, and low to the left, where the line broke, the dim violet of the Kentish hills. In the green foreground the pink figure, just roughly THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 13 blocked in, was blocked in by a hand that knew its trade, and was artist to the tips of its fingers. "Oh!" said Betty again. "Yes," said he, "I think I've got it this time. I think it'll make a hole in the wall, eh? Yes; it is good!" "Yes," said Betty; "oh, yes." "Do you often go a-sketching ?" he asked. "How modest he is," thought Betty; "he changes the subject so as not to seem to want to be praised." Aloud she answered with shy fluttered earnestness: "Yes no. I don't know. Sometimes." His lips were grave, but there was the light behind his eyes that goes with a smile. "What unnecessary agitation!" he was thinking. "Poor little thing, I suppose she's never seen a man before. Oh, these country girls !" Aloud he was say- ing: "This is such a perfect country. You ought to sketch every day." "I've no one to teach me," said Betty, innocently phrasing a long-felt want. The man raised his eyebrows. "Well, after that, here goes!" he said to himself. I wish you'd let me teach you," he said to her, beginning to put his traps together. "Oh, I didn't mean that," said Betty in real distress. What would he think of her? How greedy and grasp- ing she must seem ! "I didn't mean that at all !" "No; but I do," he said. "But you're a great artist," said Betty, watching him with clasped hands. "I suppose it would be I mean don't you know, we're not rich, and I suppose your les- sons are worth pounds and pounds." "I don't give lessons for money," 'his lips tightened "only for love." 14 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "That means nothing, doesn't it?" she said, and flushed to find herself on the defensive feebly against nothing. "At tennis, yes," he said, and to himself he added : "Vicux jeu, my dear, but you did it very prettily." "But I couldn't let you give me lessons for nothing." "Why not?" he asked. And his calmness made Betty feel ashamed and sordid. "I don't know," she answered tremulously, but I don't think my step-father would want me to." "You think it would annoy him?" "I'm sure it would, if he knew about it." Betty was thinking how little her step-father had ever cared to know of her and her interests. But the man caught the ball as he saw it. "Then why let him know?" was the next move; and it seemed to him that Betty's move of rejoinder came with a readiness born of some practice at the game. "Oh," she said innocently, "I never thought of that! But wouldn't it be wrong?" "She's got the whole thing stereotyped. But it's dainty type anyhow," he thought. Of course it wouldn't be wrong," he said. "It wouldn't hurt him. Don't you know that nothing's wrong unless it hurts somebody?" "Yes," she said eagerly, "that's what I think. But all the same it doesn't seem fair that you should take all that trouble for me and get nothing in return." "Well played! We're getting on!" he thought, and added aloud: "But perhaps I shan't get nothing in return?" Her eyes dropped over the wonderful thought that perhaps she might do something for him. But what? She looked straight at him, and the innocent appeal THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 15 sent a tiny thorn of doubt through his armour of com- placency. Was she after all? No, no novice could play the game so well. And yet "I would do anything I could, you know," she said eagerly, "because it is so awfully kind of you, and I do so want to be able to paint. What can I do?" "What can you do ?" he asked, and brought his face a little nearer to the pretty flushed freckled face under the shabby hat. Her eyes met his. He felt a quick relenting, and drew back. "Well, for one thing you could let me paint your portrait." Betty was silent. "Come, play up, you little duffer," he urged in- wardly. When she spoke her voice trembled. "I don't know how to thank you," she said. "And you will?" "Oh, I will; indeed I will!" "How good and sweet you are," he said. Then there was a silence. Betty tightened the strap of her sketching things and said: "I think I ought to go home now." He had the appropriate counter ready. "Ah, don't go yet!" he said; "let us sit down; see, that bank is quite in the shade now, and tell me " "Tell you what?" she asked, for he had made the artistic pause. "Oh, anything anything about yourself." Betty was as incapable of flight as any bird on a limed twig. She walked beside him to the bank, and sat down at his bidding, and he lay at her feet, looking up into her 16 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST eyes. He asked idle questions : sne answered them With a conscientious tremulous truthfulness that showed to him as the most finished art. And it seemed to him a very fortunate accident that he should have found here, in this unlikely spot, so accomplished a player at his favorite game. Yet it was the variety of his game for which he cared least. He did not greatly relish a skilled adversary. Betty told him ner- vously and in words ill-chosen everything that he asked to know, but all the while the undercurrent of questions rang strong within her "When is he to teach me? Where? How?" so that when at last there was left but the bare fifteen minutes needed to get one home in time for the midday dinner she said abruptly : "And when shall I see you again?" "You take the words out of my mouth," said he. And indeed she had. "She has no finesse yet," he told himself. "She might have left that move to me." "The lessons, you know," said Betty, "and, and the picture, if you really do want to do it." "If I want to do it! You know I want to do it. Yes. It's like the nursery game. How, when and where ? Well, as to the how I can paint and you can learn. The where there's a circle of pines in the wood here. You know it? A sort of giant fairy ring?" She did know it. "Now for the When and that's the most important. I should like to paint you in the early morning when the day is young and innocent and beautiful like like " He was careful to break off in a most natural seeming embarrassment. "That's a bit thick, but she'll swallow it all right. Gone down? Right!" he told himself. THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 17 "I could come out at six if you liked, or or five," said Betty, humbly anxious to do her part. He was almost shocked. "My good child/' he told her silently, "someone really ought to teach you not to do all the running. You don't give a man a chance." "Then will you meet me here to-morrow at six?" he said. "You won't disappoint me, will you?" he added tenderly. "No," said downright Betty, "I'll be sure to come. But not to-morrow," she added with undisguised re- gret; "to-morrow's Sunday." "Monday then," said 'he, "and good-bye." "Good-bye, and oh, I don't know how to thank you!" "I'm very much mistaken if you don't," he said as he stood bareheaded, watching the pink gown out of sight. "Well, adventures to the adventurous! A clergy- man's daughter, too! I might have known it." CHAPTER II. THE IRRESISTIBLE. Betty had to run all the way home, and then she was late for dinner. Her step-father's dry face and dusty clothes, the solid comfort of the mahogany furnished dining room, the warm wet scent of mutton, these seemed needed to wake her from what was, when she had awakened, a dream the open sky, the sweet air of the May fields and Him. Already the stranger was Him to Betty. But, then, she did not know his name. She slipped into her place at the foot of the long white dining table, a table built to serve a dozen guests, and where no guests ever sat, save rarely a curate or two, and more rarely even, an aunt. "You are late again, Lizzie," said her step-father. "Yes, Father," said she, trying to hide her hands and the fact that she had not had time to wash them. A long streak of burnt sienna marked one finger, and her nails had little slices of various colours in them. Her paint-box was always hard to open. Usually Mr. Underwood saw nothing. But when he saw anything he saw everything. His eye was caught by the green smudge on her pink sleeve. "I wish you would contrive to keep yourself clean, or else wear a pinafore," he said. Betty flushed scarlet. 18 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 19 "I'm very sorry," she said, "but it's only water colour. It will wash out." "You are nearly twenty, are you not?" the Vicar inquired with the dry smile that always infuriated his step-daughter. How was she to know that it was the only smile he knew, and that smiles of any sort had long grown difficult to him? "Eighteen," she said. "It is almost time you began to think about being a lady." This was badinage. No failures had taught the Reverend Cecil that his step-daughter had an ideal of him in which badinage had no place. She merely sup- posed that he wished to be disagreeable. She kept a mutinous silence. The old man sighed. It is one's duty to correct the faults of one's child, but it is not pleasant. The Reverend Cecil had not the habit of shirking any duty because he happened to dis- like it. The mutton was taken away. Betty, her whole being transfigured by the emotions of the morning, stirred the stewed rhubarb on her plate. She felt rising in her a sort of wild forlorn cour- age. Why shouldn't she speak out? Her step-father couldn't hate her more than he did, whatever she said. He might even be glad to be rid of her. She spoke sud- denly and rather loudly before she knew that she had meant to speak at all. "Father," she said, "I wish you'd let me go to Paris and study art. Not now," she hurriedly explained with a sudden vision of being taken at her word and packed off to France before six o'clock on Monday morning, "not now, but later. In the autumn perhaps. I would work very hard. I wish you'd let me." 20 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST He put on his spectacles and looked at her with wist- ful kindness. She read in his glance only a frozen con- tempt. "No, my child," he said. Paris is a sink of iniquity. I passed a week there once, many years ago. It was at the time of the Great Exhibition. You are growing discontented, Lizzie. Work is the cure for that. Mrs. Symes tells me that the chemises for the Mother's sew- ing meetings are not cut out yet." "I'll cut them out to-day. They haven't finished the shirts yet, anyway," said Betty; "but I do wish you'd just think about Paris, or even London." "You can have lessons at home if you like. I believe there are excellent drawing-mistresses in Sevenoaks. Mrs. Symes was recommending one of them to me only the other day. With certificates from the High School I seem to remember her saying." "But that's not what I want," said Betty with a cour- age that surprised her as much as it surprised him. "Don't you see, Father ? One gets older every day, and presently I shall be quite old, and I shan't have been anywhere or seen anything." He thought he laughed indulgently at the folly of youth. She thought his laugh the most contemptuous, the crudest sound in the world. "He doesn't deserve that I should tell him about Him," she thought, "and I won't. I don't care!" "No, no," he said, "no, no, no. The home is the place for girls. The safe quiet shelter of the home. Perhaps some day your husband will take you abroad for a fortnight now and then. If you manage to get a husband, that is." He had seen, through his spectacles, her flushed pret- tiness, and old as he was he remembered well enough THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 21 how a face like hers would seem to a young man's eyes. Of course she would get a husband? So he spoke in kindly irony. And she hated him for a wanton insult. "Try to do your duty in that state of life to which you are called," he went on : "occupy yourself with music and books and the details of housekeeping. No, don't have my study turned out," he added in haste, remembering how his advice about household details had been followed when last he gave it. "Don't be a discontented child. Go and cut out the nice little chem- ises." This seemed to him almost a touch of kindly humour, and he went back to Augustine, pleased with himself. Betty set her teeth and went, black rage in her heart, to cut out the hateful little chemises. She dragged the great roll of evil smelling grayish unbleached calico from the schoolroom cupboard and heaved it on to th^ table. It was very heavy. The scissors were blunt and left deep red-blue indentations on finger and thumb. She was rather pleased that the scissors hurt so much. "Father doesn't care a single bit, he hates me," she said, "and I hate him. Oh, I do." She would not think of the morning. Not now, with this fire of impotent resentment burning in her, would she take out those memories and look at them. Those were not thoughts to be dragged through the litter of unbleached cotton cuttings. She worked on doggedly, completed the tale of hot heavy little garments, gath- ered up the pieces into the waste-paper basket and put away the roll. Not till the paint had been washed from her hands, and the crumbled print dress exchanged for a quite respectable muslin did she consciously allow the morn- 22 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST ing's memories to come out and meet her eyes. Then she went down to the arbour where- she had shelled peas only that morning. "It seems years and years ago," she said. And sit- ting there, she slowly and carefully went over every- thing. What he had said, what she 'had said. There were some things she could not quite remember. But she remembered enough. "Brother artists" were the words she said oftenest to herself, but the words that sank themselves were, "young and innocent and beau- tiful like like "But he couldn't 'have meant me, of course/'s'he told herself. And on Monday she would see him again, and he would give her a lesson ! Sunday was incredibly wearisome. Her Sunday- school class had never been so tiresome nor so soaked in hair-oil. In church she was shocked to find herself watching, from her pew in the chancel, the entry of late comers of whom He was not one. No afternoon had ever been half so long. She wrote up her diary. Thursday and Friday were quickly chronicled. At "Saturday" she paused long, pen in hand, and then wrote very quickly: "I went out sketching and met a gentleman, an artist. He was very kind and is going to teach me to paint and he is going to paint my por- trait. I do not like him particularly. He is rather old, and not really good-looking. I shall not tell father, be- cause he is simply hateful to me. I am going to meet this artist at 6 to-morrow. It will be dreadful having to get up so early. I almost wish I hadn't said I would go. It will be such a bother." Then she hid the diary in a drawer, under her con- THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 23 firmation dress and veil, and locked the drawer care- fully. He was not at church in the evening either. He had thought of it, but decided that it was too much trouble to get into decent clothes. "I shall see her soon enough," he thought, "curse my impulsive generosity ! Six o'clock, forsooth, and all to please a clergyman's daughter." She came back from church with tired steps. "I do hope I'm not going to be ill," she said. "I feel so odd, just as if I hadn't had anything to eat for days, and yet I'm not a bit hungry either. I daresay I shan't wake up in time to get there by six." She was awake before five. She woke with a flutter of the heart. What was it?, Had anything happened ? Was anyone ill ? Then she recognized that she was not unhappy. And she felt more than ever as though it were days since she had had anything to eat. "Oh, dear," said Betty, jumping out of bed. "I'm going out, to meet Him, and have a drawing-lesson!" She dressed quickly. It was too soon to start. Not for anything must she be first at the rendezvous, even though it were only for a drawing-lesson. That "only" pulled her up sharply. When she was dressed she dug out the diary and wrote : "This is terrible. Is it possible that I have fallen in love with him? I don't know. 'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?' It is a most frightful tragedy to happen to one, and at my age too. What a long life of loneliness stretches in front of me! For of course he could never care for me. And if this is love well, it will be once and forever with me, I know. 24 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST That's my nature, I'm afraid. But I'm not, I can't be. But I never felt so unlike myself. I feel a sort of calm exultation, as if something very wonderful was very near me. Dear Diary, what a comfort it is to have you to tell everything to!" It seemed to her that she must certainly be late. She had to creep down the front stairs so very slowly and softly in order that she might not awaken her step- father. She had so carefully and silently to unfasten a window and creep out, to close the window again, without noise, lest the maids should hear and come running to see why their young mistress was out of her bed at that hour. She had to go on tiptoe through the shrubbery and out through the church yard. One could climb its wall, and get into the Park that way, so as not to meet labourers on the road who would stare to see her alone so early and perhaps follow her. Once in the park she was safe. Her shoes and her skirts were wet with dew. She made haste. She did not want to keep him waiting. But she was first at the rendezvous, after all. She sat down on the carpet of pine needles. How pretty the early morning was. The sunlight was quite different from the evening sunlight, so much lighter and brighter. And the shadows were different. She tried to settle on a point of view for her sketch, the sketch he was to help her with. Her thoughts went back to what she had written in her diary. If that should be true she must be very, very careful. He must never guess it, never. She would be very cold and distant and polite. Not hail-fellow well-met with a "brother artist," like she had been yes- terday. It was all very difficult indeed. Even if it really did turn out to be true, if the wonderful thing THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 25 had happened to her, if she really was in love she would not try a bit to make him like her. That would be for- ward and "horrid." She would never try to attract any man. Those things must come of themselves or not at all. She arranged her skirt in more effective folds, and wondered how it would look as one came up the wood- land path. She thought it would look rather pic- turesque. It was a nice heliotrope colour. It would look like a giant Parma violet against the dark green background. She hoped her hair was tidy. And that her hat was not very crooked. However little one desires to attract, one may at least wish one's hat to be straight. She looked for the twentieth time at her watch, the serviceable silver watch that had been her mother's. Half-past six, and he had not come. Well, when he did come she would pretend she had only just got there. Or how would it be if she gave up being a Parma violet and went a little way down the path and then turned back when she heard him com- ing? She walked away a dozen yards and stood wait- ing. But he did not come. Was it possible that he was not coming? Was he ill lying uncared for at the Peal of Bells in the village, with no one to smooth his pil- low or put eau-de-cologne on his head? She walked a hundred yards or so towards the vil- lage on the spur of this thought. Or perhaps he had come by another way to the tryst- ing place? That thought drove her back. He was not there. Well, she would not stay any longer. She would just go away, and come back ever so much later, and let him have a taste of waiting. She had had her -6 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST share, she told herself, as she almost ran from the spot. She stopped suddenly. But suppose he did not wait? She went slowly back. She sat down again, schooled herself to patience. What an idiot she had been! Like any school-girl. Of course he had never meant to come. Why should he? That page in her diary called out to her to come home and burn it. Care for him indeed! Not she! Why she hadn't exchanged ten words with the man ! "But I knew it was all nonsense when I wrote it," she said. "I only just put it down to see what it would look like." ***** Mr. Eustace Vernon roused himself, and yawned. "It's got to be done, I suppose. Buck up, you'll feel better after your bath ! Jove ! Seven o'clock. Will she have waited? She's a keen player if she has. It's just worth trying, I suppose." The church clock struck the half-hour as he turned into the wood. Something palely violet came towards him. "So you are here," he said. "Where's the pink frock?" "It's it's going to the wash," said a stiff and stifled voice. "I'm sorry I couldn't get here at six. I hope you didn't wait long?" "Not very long," he said, smiling; "but Great Heavens, what on earth is the matter?" "Nothing," she said "But you've been you are " "I'm not," she said defiantly, "besides, I've got neuralgia. It always makes me look like that." "My Aunt!" he thought. "Then she zvas here at six and she's been crying because I wasn't and oh, THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 27 where are we?" "I'm so sorry you've got neuralgia," he said gently, "but I'm awfully glad you didn't get here at six. Because my watch was wrong and I've only just got here, and I should never have forgiven myself if you'd waited for me a single minute. Is the neuralgia better now?" "Yes," she said, smiling faintly, "much better. It was rather sharp while it lasted, though." "Yes," he said, "I see it was. I am so glad you did come. But I was so certain you wouldn't that I didn't bring any of my traps. So we can't begin the picture to-day. Will you start a sketch, or is your neuralgia too bad?" He knew it would be : and it was. So they merely sat on the pine carpet and talked till it was time for her to go back to the late Rectory breakfast. They told each other their names that day, Betty talked very carefully. It was most important that he should think well of her. Her manner had changed, as she had promised herself it should do if she found she cared for him. Now she was with him she knew, of course, that she did not care at all. What had made her so wretched no, so angry that she had actually cried, was simply the idea that she had been made a fool of. That she had kept the tryst and he hadn't. Now he had come she was quite calm. She did not care in the least. He was saying to himself: "I'm not often wrong, but I was off the line yesterday. All that doesn't count. We take a fresh deal and start fair. She doesn't know the game, mais elle a dcs moyens. She's never played the game before. And she cried because I didn't turn no. And so I'm the first tH'nk nf it, if von nle^se absolutely the first one ! Well : it doesn't detract from 28 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST ' the interest of the game. It's quite a different game and requires more skill. But not more than I have, per- haps."' They parted with another tryst set for the next morning. The brother artist note had been skilfully kept vibrating. Betty was sure that she should never have any feel- ing for him but mere friendliness. She was glad of that. It must be dreadful to be really in love. So unsettling. CHAPTER III. VOLUNTARY. Mr. Eustace Vernon is not by any error to be imag- ined as a villain of the deepest dye, coldly planning to bring misery to a simple village maiden for his own selfish pleasure. Not at all. As he himself would have put it, he meant no harm to the girl. He was a mas- ter of two arts, and to these he had devoted himself wholly. One was the art of painting. But one cannot paint for all the hours there are. In the intervals of painting Vernon always sought to exercise his other art. One is limited, of course, by the possibilities, but he liked to have always at least one love affair on hand. And just now there were none, none at least possess- ing the one charm that irresistibly drew him newness. The one or two affairs that dragged on merely meant letter writing, and he hated writing letters almost as much as he hated reading them. The country had been unfortunately barren of inter- est until his eyes fell on that sketching figure in the pink dress. For he respected one of his arts no less than the other, and would as soon have thought of painting a vulgar picture as of undertaking a vulgar love-affair. He was no pavement artist. Nor did he degrade his art by caricatures drawn in hotel bars. Dairy maids did not delight him, and the mood was rare with him in which one finds anything to say to a 29 30 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST little milliner. He wanted the means, not the end, and was at one with the unknown sage who said: "The love of pleasure spoils the pleasure of love." There is a gift, less rare than is supposed, of wiping the slate clean of memories, and beginning all over again : a certain virginity of soul that makes each new kiss the first kiss, each new love the only love. This gift was Vernon's, and he had cultivated it so earnest- ly, so delicately, that except in certain moods when he lost his temper, and with it his control of his impulses, he was able to bring even to a conservatory flirtation something of the fresh emotion of a schoolboy in love. Betty's awkwardnesses, which he took for advances, had chilled him a little, though less than they would have done had not one of the evil-tempered moods been on him. He had dreaded lest the affair should advance too quickly. His own taste was for the first steps in an affair of the heart, the delicate doubts, the planned mis- understandings. He did not question his own ability to conduct the affair capably from start to finish, but he hated to skip the dainty preliminaries. He had feared that with Betty he should have to skip them, for he knew r that it is only in their first love affairs that wom- en have the patience to watch the flower unfold itself. He himself was of infinite patience in that pastime. He bit his lip and struck with his cane at the buttercup heads. He had made a wretched beginning, with his "good and sweet." his "young n.nd innocent and beau- tiful like li'ke." If the girl had been a shade less inno- cent the whole business would have been muffed muffed hopelessly. To-morrow he would be there early. A ship of promise should be not launched that was weeks THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 31 away. The first timbers should be felled to build a ship to carry him, and her too, of course, a little way towards the enchanted islands. He knew the sea well, and it would be pleasant to steer on it one to whom it was all new all, all. "Dear little girl," he said, "I don't suppose she has ever even thought of love." He was not in love with her, but he meant to be. He carefully thought of her all that day, of her hair, her eyes, her hands; her hands were really beautiful small, dimpled and well-shaped not the hands he loved best, those were long and very slender, but still beautiful. And before he went to bed he wrote a little poem, to encourage himself: Yes. I have loved before ; I know This longing that invades my days, This shape that haunts life's busy ways I know since long and long ago. This starry mystery of delight That floats across my eager eyes, This pain that makes earth Paradise, These magic songs of day and night. I know them for the things they are : A passing pain, a longing fleet, A shape that soon I shall not meet, A fading dream of veil and star. Yet, even as my lips proclaim The wisdom that the years have lent, 32 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST Your absence is joy's banishment And life's one music is your name. I love you to the heart's hid core : Those other loves? How can one learn From marshlights how the great fires burn? Ah, no I never loved before! When he read it through he entitled it, "The Veil of Maya," so that it might pretend to have no personal application. After that more than ever rankled the memory of that first morning. "How could I?" he asked himself. "I must indeed have been in a gross mood. One seems sometimes to act outside oneself altogether. Temporary possession by some brutal ancestor perhaps. Well, it's not too late." Next morning he worked at his picture, in the rabbit-warren, but his head found itself turning to- wards the way by which on that first day she had gone. She must know that on a day like this he would not be wasting the light, that he would be working. She would be wanting to see him again. Would she come out? He wished she would. But he hoped she wouldn't. It would have meant another readjustment of ideas. He need not have been anxious. She did not come. He worked steadily, masterfully. He always worked best at the beginning of a love affair. All of him seemed somehow more alive, more awake, more alert and competent. His mood was growing quickly to what he meant it to be. He was what actors call a quick study. Soon he would be able to play perfectly, THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 33 without so much as a thought to the "book," the part of Paul to this child's Virginia. Had Virginia, he wondered, any relations besides the step-father whom she so light-heartedly consented to hoodwink ? Relations who might interfere and pray and meddle and spoil things? However ashamed we may be of our relations they cannot forever be concealed. It must be owned that Betty was not the lonely orphan she sometimes pre- tended to herself to be. She had aunts an accident that may happen to the best of us. A year or two before Betty was born, a certain youth of good birth left Harrow and went to Ealing where he was received in a family in the capacity of Crammer's pup. The family was the Crammer and his daughter, a hard-headed, tight-mouthed, black-haired young woman who knew exactly what she wanted, and who meant to get it. Poverty had taught her to know what she wanted. Nature, and the folly of youth not her own youth taught her how to get it. There were several pups. She selected the most eligible, secretly married him, and to the day of her death spoke and thought of the marriage as a love-match. He was a dreamy youth, who wrote verses and called the Cram- mer's daughter his Egeria. She was too clever not to be kind to him, and he adored her and believed in her to the end, which came before his twenty-first birth- day. He broke his neck out hunting, and died before Betty was born. His people, exasperated at the news of the marriage, threatened to try to invalidate it on the score of the false swearing that had been needed to get the boy of nineteen married to the woman of twenty-four. Egeria 34 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST was frightened. She compromised for an annuity of two hundred pounds, to be continued to her child. The passion of this woman's life was power. One cannot be very powerful with just two hundred a year, and a doubtful position ns the widow of a boy whose relations are prepared to dispute one's marriage. Mrs. Desmond spent three years in thought, and in caring severely for the wants of her child. Then she bought four handsome dresses, and some impressive bonnets, went to a Hydropathic Establishment, and looked about her. Of the eligible men there Mr. Cecil Under- wood seemed, on enquiry, to be the most eligible. So she married him. He resisted but little, for his parish needed a clergywoman sadly. The two hundred pounds was a welcome addition to an income depleted by the purchase of rare editions, and at the moment crippled bv his recent acquisition of the Omiliae of Vincentius in its original oak boards and leather strings; and, above all, he saw in the three-year-old Betty the child he might have had if things had gone otherwise with him and another when they both were young. Mrs. Desmond had felt certain she could rule a par- ish. Mrs. Cecil Underwood did rule it as she had known she could. She ruled her husband too. And Betty. When she caught cold from working all day among damp evergreens for the Christmas decorations, and, developing pneumonia, died, she died resentfully, thanking God that she had always done her duty, and quite unable to imagine how the world would go on without her. She felt almost sure that in cutting short her career of usefulness her Creator was guilty of an error of judgment which He would sooner or later find reason to regret. Her husband mourned her. He had the habit of her, THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 35 of her strong capable ways, the clockwork precision of her household and parish arrangemencs. But as time went on he saw that perhaps he was more comfort- able without her: as a reformed drunkard sees that it is better not to rely on brandy for one's courage. He saw it, but of course he never owned it to himself. Betty was heart-broken, quite sincerely heart-broken. She forgot all the mother's hard tyrannies, her cramp- ing rules, her narrow bitter creed, and remembered only the calm competence, amounting to genius, with which her mother had ruled the village world, her un- flagging energy and patience, and her rare moments of tenderness. She remembered too all her own lapses from filial duty, and those memories were not comfort- able. Yet Betty too, when the self-tormenting remorseful stage had worn itself out, found life fuller, freer without her mother. Her step-father she hated had always hated. But he could be avoided. She went to a boarding-school at Torquay, and some of her holi- days were spent with her aunts, the sisters of the boy- father who had not lived to see Betty. She adored the aunts. They lived in a world of which her village world did not so much as dream; they spoke of things which folks at home neither knew of nor cared for; and they spoke a language that was not spoken at Long Barton. Of course, everyone who was anyone at Long Barton spoke in careful and cor- rect English, but no one' ever troubled to turn a phrase. And irony would have been considered very bad form indeed. Aunt Nina wore lovely clothes and powdered her still pretty face : Aunt Julia smoked cigarettes and used words that ladies at Long Barton did not use. Betty was proud of them both. 36 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST It was Aunt Nina who taught Betty how to spend her allowance, how to buy pretty things, and, better still, tried to teach her how to wear them. Aunt Julia it was who brought her the Indian necklaces, and prom- ised to take her to Italy some day if she was good. Aunt Nina lived in Grosvenor Square and Aunt Julia's address was most often, vaguely, the Continent of Eu- rope. Sometimes a letter addressed to some odd place in Asia or America would find her. But when Betty had left school her visits to Aunt Nina ceased. Mr. Underwood feared that she was now of an age to be influenced by trifles, and that Lon- don society would make her frivolous. Besides he had missed her horribly, all through her school-days, though he had yielded to the insistence of the aunts. But he had wanted Betty badly. Only of course it never occurred to him to tell her so. So Betty had lived on at the Rectory carrying on, with more or less of success, such of her Mother's Par- ish workings as had managed to outlive their author, and writing to the aunts to tell them how bored she was and how she hated to be called "Lizzie." She could not be expected to know that her step- father had known as "Lizzie" the girl who, if Fate had been kind, would have been his wife or the mother of his child. Betty's letters breathed contempt of Parish matters, weariness of the dulness of the country, and exasperation at the hardness of a lot where "nothing ever happened." Well, something had happened now. The tremendous nature of the secret she was keep- ing against the world almost took Betty's breath away. It was to the adventure, far more than to the man, that her heart's beat quickened. Something had happened. THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 37 Long Barton was no longer the dullest place in the world. It was the centre of the universe. See her diary, an entry following a gap where a page had been torn out : "Mr. V. is very kind. He is teaching me to sketch. He says I shall do very well when I have forgotten what I learned at school. It is so nice of him to be so straightforward. I hate flattery. He has begun my portrait. It is beautiful, but he says it is exactly like me. Of course it is his painting that makes it beauti- ful, and not anything to do with me. That is not flat- tery. I do not think he could say anything unless he really thought it. He is that sort of man, I think. I am so glad he is so good. If he were a different sort of person perhaps it would not be quite nice for me to go and meet him without any one knowing. But there is nothing of that sort. He was quite different the first day. But I think then he was off his guard and could not help himself. I don't know quite what I meant by that. But, anyway, I am sure he is as good as gold, and that is such a comfort. I revere him. I believe he is really noble and unselfish, and so few men are, alas!" , The noble and unselfish Vernon meanwhile was quite happy. His picture was going splendidly, and every morning he woke to the knowledge that his image filled all the thoughts of a good little girl with gray 'dark charming eyes and a face that reminded one of a pretty kitten. Her drawing was not half bad either. He was spared the mortifying labour of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. In one of his arts as in the other he decided that she had talent. And it was pleasant that to him should have fallen the task of teacher in both departments. Those who hunt the fox 38 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST will tell you that Reynard enjoys, equally with the hounds and their masters, the pleasures of the chase. Vernon was quite of this opinion in regard to his fa- vourite sport. He really felt that he gave as much pleasure as he took. And his own forgettings were so easy that the easy forgetting of others seemed a fore- gone conclusion. His forgetting always came first, that was all. But now, the Spring, her charm and his own firm parti pris working together, it seemed to him that he could never forget Betty, could never wish to forget her. Her pretty conscious dignity charmed him. He stood still to look at it. He took no step forward. His role was that of the deeply respectful "brother artist." If his hand touched hers as he corrected her drawing, that was accident. If, as he leaned over her, criticising her work, the wind sent the end of her hair against his ear, that could hardly be avoided in a breezy Eng- lish spring. It was not his fault that the little thrill It gave him was intensified a hundred-fold when, glancing at her, he perceived that her own ears had grown scarlet. Betty went through her days in a dream. There were all the duties she hated the Mothers' meetings, the Parish visits when she tried to adjust the quarrels and calm the jealousies of the stout aggressive Mothers, the carrying round the Parish Magazine. There were no long hours, now. In every spare moment she worked at her drawing to please him. It was the least she could do, after all his kindness. Her step- father surprised her once hard at work with charcoal and board and plumb-line, a house-maid pos- ing for her with a broom. He congratulated himself that his little sermon on the advantages of occupation 39 as a cure for discontent had borne fruit so speedy and so sound. "Dear child, she only wanted a word in season," he thought. And he said: "I am glad to see that you have put away vain dreams, Lizzie. And your labours will not be thrown away, either. If you go on taking pains I daresay you will be able to paint some nice blotting-books and screens for the School Bazaar." "I daresay/' said Betty, adding between her teeth, "If you only knew !" "But we mustn't keep Letitia from her work," he added, vaguely conscientious. Leiitia flounced off, and Betty, his back turned, tore up the drawing. And, as a beautiful background to the gross realism of Mothers' meetings and Parish tiresomenesses, was always the atmosphere of the golden mornings, the dew and the stillness, the gleam of his white coat among the pine-trees. For he was always first at the tryst now. Betty was drunk; and she was too young to distin- guish between vintages. When she had been sober she had feared intoxication. Now she was drunk, she thanked Heaven that she was sober. ***** CHAPTER IV. INVOLUNTARY. Six days of sunlight and clear air, of mornings as enchanting as dreams, of dreams as full of magic as May mornings. Then an interminable Sunday hot and sultry, with rolling purple clouds and an evening of thunder and heavy showers. A magenta sunset, a night working, hidden in its own darkness, its own secret purposes, and a Monday morning gray beyond belief, with a soft steady rain. Betty stood for full five minutes looking out at the straight fine fall, at the white mist spread on the lawn, the blue mist twined round the trees, listening to the plash of the drops that gathered and fell from the big wet ivy leaves, to the guggle of the water-spout, the hiss of smitten gravel. "He'll never go," she thought, and her heart sank. He, shaving, in the chill damp air by his open dimity- 'draped window, was saying : "She'll be there, of course. Women are all perfectly insensible to weather." Two mackintoshed figures met in the circle of pines. "You have come," he said. "I never dreamed you would. How cold your hand is !" He held it for a moment warmly clasped. "I thought it might stop any minute," said Betty; "it seemed a pity to waste a morning." 40 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 41 "Yes," he said musingly, "it would be a pity to waste a morning. I would not waste one of these mornings for a kingdom." Betty fumbled with her sketching things as a sort of guarantee of good faith. "But it's too wet to work," said she. "I suppose I'd better go home again." "That seems a dull idea for me," he said; "it's very selfish, of course, but I'm rather sad this morning. Won't you stay a little and cheer me up?" Betty asked nothing better. But even to her a tete-a- tete in a wood, with rain pattering and splashing on leaves and path and resonant mackintoshes, seemed to demand some excuse. "I should think breakfast and being dry would cheer you up better than anything," said she. "And it's very wet here." "Hang breakfast ! But you're right about the wet- ness. There's a shed in the field yonder. A harrow and a plough live there; they're sure to be at home on a day like this. Let's go and ask for their hospi- tality." "I hope they'll be nice to us," laughed Betty; "it's dreadful to go where you're not wanted." "How do you know?" he asked, laughing too. "Come, give me your hand and let's run for it." They ran, hand in hand, the wet mackintoshes flap- ping and slapping about their knees, and drew up laughing and breathless in the dry quiet of the shed. Vernon thought of Love and Mr. Lewisham, but it was not the moment to say so. "See, they are quite pleased to see us," said he, "they don't say a word against our sheltering here. The plough looks a bit glum, but she'll grow to like us pres- 42 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST ently. As for harrow, look how he's smiling welcome at you with all his teeth." "I'm glad he can't come forward to welcome us," said Betty. "His teeth look very fierce." "He could, of course, only he's enchanted. He used to be able to move about, but now he's condemned to sit still and only smile till till he sees two perfectly happy people. Are you perfectly happy?" he asked anxiously. "I don't know," said Betty truly. "Are you?" "No not quite perfectly." "I'm so glad," said Betty. "I shouldn't like the harrow to begin to move while we're here. I'm sure it would bite us." He sighed and looked grave. "So you don't want me to be perfectly happy?" She looked at him with her head on one side. "Not here," she said. "I can't trust that harrow." His eyelids narrowed over his eyes then relaxed. No, she was merely playing at enchanted harrows. "Are you cold still ?" he asked, and reached for her hand. She gave it frankly. "Not a bit," she said, and took it away again. "The run warmed me. In fact " She unbuttoned the mackintosh and spread it on the bar of the plough and sat down. Her white dress lighted up the shadows of the shed. Outside the rain fell steadily. "May I sit down too? Can Mrs. Plough find room for two children on her lap?" She drew aside the folds of her dress, but even then only a little space was left. The plough had been care- lessly housed and nearly half of it was where the rain drove in on it. So that they were very close together. THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 43 So close that he had to throw his head back to see clearly how the rain had made the short hair curl round her forehead and ears, and how fresh were the tints of face and lips. Also he had to support himself by an arm stretched out behind her. His arm was not round her, but it might just as well have been, as far as the look of the thing went. He thought of the arm of Mr. Lewisham. "Did you ever have your fortune told?" he asked. "No, never. I've always wanted to, but Father hates gipsies. When I was a little girl I used to put on my best clothes, and go out into the lanes and sit about and hope the gipsies would steal me, but they never did." "They're a degenerate race, blind to their own in- terests. But they haven't a monopoly of chances for- tunately." His eyes were on her face. "I never had my fortune told," said Betty. "I'd love it, but I think I should be afraid, all the same. Something might come true." Vernon was more surprised than he had ever been in his life at the sudden involuntary movement in his right arm. It cost him a conscious effort not to let the arm follow its inclination and fall across her slender shoul- ders, while he should say: "Your fortune is that I love you. Is it good or bad fortune?" He braced the muscles of his arm, and kept it where it was. That sudden unreasonable impulse was a mor- tification, an insult to the man whose pride it was to be- lieve that his impulses were always planned. "I can tell fortunes," he said. "When I was a boy I spent a couple of months with some gipsies. They taught me lots of things." 44 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST His memory, excellently trained, did not allow itself to dwell for an instant on his reason for following those gipsies, on the dark-eyed black-haired girl with the skin like pale amber, who had taught him, by the flicker of the camp-fire, the lines of head and heart and life, and other things beside. Oh, but many other things 1 That was before he became an artist. He was only an amateur in those days. "Did they teach you how to tell fortunes really and truly?" asked Betty. "We had a fortune-teller's tent at the School Bazaar last year, and the youngest Smith- son girl dressed up in spangles and a red dress and said she was Zara, the Eastern Mystic Hand-Reader, and Foreteller of the Future. But she got it all out of Napoleon's Book of Fate." "I don't get my fortune-telling out of anybody's book of anything," he said. "I get it out of people's hands, and their faces. Some people's faces are their fortunes, you know." "I know they are," she said a little sadly, "but everybody's got a hand and a fortune, whether they've got that sort of fortune-face or not." "But the fortunes of the fortune-faced people are the ones one likes best to tell." "Of course," she admitted wistfully, "but what's going to happen to you is just as interesting to you, even if your face isn't interesting to anybody. Do you always tell fortunes quite truly; I mean do you follow the real rules? or do you make up pretty for- tunes for the people with the pretty fortune-faces." "There's no need to 'make up.' The pretty fortunes are always there for the pretty fortune- faces : unless of course the hand contradicts the face." "But can it?" THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 45 "Can't it? There may be a face that all the beauti- ful things in the world are promised to: just by being so beautiful itself it draws beautiful happenings to it. But if the hand contradicts the face, if the hand is one of those narrow niggardly distrustful hands, one of the hands that will give nothing and take nothing, a hand without courage, without generosity well then one might as well be born without a fortune-face, for any good it will ever do one." "Then you don't care to tell fortunes for people who haven't fortune faces?" "I should like to tell yours, if you would let me. Shall I?" He held out his hand, but her hand was withheld. "I ought to cross your hand with silver, oughtn't I?" she asked. "It's considered correct 'but " "Oh, don't let's neglect any proper precaution," she said. "I haven't got any money. Tell it me to-mor- row, and I will bring a sixpence." "You could cross my hand with your watch," he said, "and I could take the crossing as an I. O. U. of the sixpence." She detached the old watch. He held out his hand and she gravely traced a cross on it. "Now," he said, "all preliminary formalities being complied with, let the prophet do his work. Give me your hand, pretty lady, and the old gipsy will tell you your fortune true." He held the hand in his, bending back the pink fin- ger-tips with his thumb, and looked earnestly at its lines. Then he looked in her face, longer than he had ever permitted himself to look. He looked till her eyes fell. It was a charming picture. He was tall, strong, 46 well-built and quite as good-looking as a clever man has any need to be. And she was as pretty as any oleograph of them all. It seemed a thousand pities that there should be no witness to such a well-posed tableau, no audience to such a charming scene. The pity of it struck Destiny, and Destiny flashed the white of Betty's dress, a shrill point of light, into an eye a hundred yards away. The eye's owner, with true rustic finesse, drew back into the wood's shadow, shaded one eye with a brown rustic hand, looked again, and began a detour which landed the rustic boots, all silently, behind the shed, at a spot where a knot-hole served as frame for the little pic- ture. The rustic eye was fitted to the knot-hole while Vernon holding Betty's hand gazed in Betty's face, and decided that this was no time to analyse his sensa- tions. Neither heard the furtive rustic tread, or noted the gleam of the pale rustic eye. The labourer shook his head as he hurried quickly away. He had daughters of his own, and the Rector had been kind when one of those daughters had sud- denly come home from service, ill, and with no prospect of another place. "A-holdin' of hands and a-castin' of sheep's eyes," said he. "We knows what that's the beginnings of! Well, well, youth's the season for silliness, but there's bounds there's bounds. And all of a mornin' so early too. Lord above knows what it wouldn't be like of a evenin'." He shook his head again, and made haste. Vernon had forced his eyes to leave the face of Betty. "Your fortune," he was saying, "is, curiously enough, just one of those fortunes I was speaking of. 47 You will have great chances of happiness, if you have the courage to take them. You will cross the sea. You've never travelled, have you?" "No, never further than Torquay; I was at school there, you know ; and London, of course. But I should love it. Isn't it horrid to think that one might grow quite old and never have been anywhere or done any- thing?" "That depends on oneself, doesn't it? Adventures are to the adventurous." "Yes, that's all very well girls can't be adventur- ous." "Yes, it's the Prince who sets out to seek his for- tune, isn't it? The Princess has to sit at home and wait for hers to come to her. It generally does if she's a real Princess." "But half the fun must be the seeking for it," said Betty. "You're right," said he, "it is." The labourer had reached the park-gate. His pace had quickened to the quickening remembrance of his own daughter, sitting at home silent and sullen. "Do you really see it in my hand?" asked Betty, "about my crossing the sea, I mean." "It's there; but it depends on yourself, like every- thing else." "I did ask my step-father to let me go," she said, "after that first day, you know, when you said I ought to study in Paris." "And he wouldn't, of course?" "No; he said Paris was a wicked place. It isn't really, is it?" "Every place is wicked," said he, "and every place is good. It's all as one takes things." 48 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST The Rectory gate clicked sharply as it swung to be- hind "the labourer. The Rectory gravel scrunched be- neath the labourer's boots. Yes, the Master was up ; he could be seen. The heavy boots were being rubbed against the birch broom that, rooted at Kentish back doors, stands to receive on its purple twigs the scrapings of Kentish clay from rustic feet. "You have the artistic lines very strongly marked," Vernon was saying. "One, two, three yes, painting music perhaps ?" "I am very fond of music," said Betty, thinking of the hour's daily struggle with the Mikado and the Moonlight Sonata. "But three arts. What could the third one be?" Her thoughts played for an instant with unheard-of triumphs achieved behind footlights rapturous applause, showers of bouquets. "Whatever it is, you've enormous talent for it," he said ; "you'll find out what it is in good time. Perhaps it'll be something much more important than the other two put together, and perhaps you've got even more talent for it than you have for others." "But there isn't any other talent that I can think of." "I can think of a few. There's the stage, but it's not that, I fancy, or not exactly that. There's lit- erature confess now, don't you write poetry some- times when you're all alone at night? Then there's the art of being amusing, and the art of being of being liked." "Shall I be successful in any of the arts?" "In one, certainly." "Ah," said Betty, "if I could only go to Paris !" "It's not always necessary to go to Paris for success in one's art," he said. THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 49 "But I want to go. I'm sure I could do better there." "Aren't you satisfied with your present Master?" "Oh!" It was a cry of genuine distress, of heart- felt disclaim. "You know I didn't mean that! But you won't always be here, and when you've gone why then" Again he had to control the involuntary movement of his left arm. "But I'm not going for months yet. Don't let us cross a bridge till we come to it. Your head-line promises all sorts of wonderful things. And your heart- line " he turned her hand more fully to the light. In the Rector's study the labourer was speaking, standing shufflingly on the margin of the Turkey car- pet. The Rector listened, his hand on an open folio where fat infants peered through the ornamental ini- tials. "And so I come straight up to you, Sir, me being a father and you the same, Sir, for all the difference be- twixt our ways in life. Says I to myself, says I, and bitter hard I feels it too, I says : 'George/ says I, 'you've got a daughter as begun that way, not a doubt of it holdin' of hands and sittin' close alongside, and you know what's come to her !' ' The Rector shivered at the implication. "Then I says, says I : 'Like as not the Rector won't thank you for interferin'. Least said soonest mended/ says I." "I'm very much obliged to you," said the Rector difficultly, and his hand shook on Ambrosius's yellow page. "You see, Sir," the man's tone held all that deferent apology that truth telling demands, "gells is gells, be they never so up in the world, all the world over, bless 5 o THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST their hearts ; and young men is young men, d n them, asking your pardon, Sir, I'm sure, but the word slipped out. And I shouldn't ha' been easy if anything had have gone wrong with Miss, God bless her, all along of the want of a word in season. Asking your pardon, Sir, but even young ladies is flesh and blood, when it comes to the point. Ain't they now ?" he ended appeal- ingly. The Rector spoke with an obvious effort, got his hand off the page and closed the folio. "You've done quite right, George," he said, "and I'm greatly obliged to you. Only I do ask you to keep this to yourself. You wouldn't have liked it if people had heard a thing like that about your Ruby before I mean when she was at home." He replaced the two folios on the shelf. "Not me, Sir," George answered. "I'm mum, I do assure you, Sir. And if I might make so bold, you just pop on your hat and step acrost directly minute. There's that little hole back of the shed what I told you of. You ain't only got to pop your reverend eye to that there, and you'll see for yourself as I ain't give tongue for no, dragged scent." "Thank you, George," said the Rector, "I will. Good morning. God bless you." The formula came glibly, but it was from the lips only that it came. Lizzie his white innocent Lily-girl! In a shed a man, a stranger, holding her hand, his arm around her, his eyes his lips perhaps, daring The Rector was half way down his garden drive. "Your heart-line," Vernon was saying, "it's a little difficult. You will be deeply beloved." To have one's fortune told is disquieting. To keep THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 51 silence during the telling deepens the disquiet curi- ously. It seemed good to Betty to laugh. "Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor," she said, "which am I going to marry, kind gipsy?" "I don't believe the gipsies who say they can see marriage in a hand," he answered gravely, and Betty feared he had thought her flippant, or even vulgar; "what one sees are not the shadows of coming conven- tions. One sees the great emotional events, the things that change and mould and develop character. Yes, you will be greatly beloved, and you will love deeply." "I'm not to be happy in my affairs of the heart then." Still a careful flippancy seemed best to Betty. "Did I say so? Do you really think that there are no happy love affairs but those that end in a wedding breakfast and bridesmaids, with a Bazaar show of hideous silver and still more hideous crockery, and all one's relations assembled to dissect one's most sacred secrets ?" Betty had thought so, but it seemed coarse to own it. "Can't you imagine," he went on dreamily, "a love affair so perfect that it could not but lose its finest fra- grance if the world were called to watch the plucking of love's flower ? Can't you imagine a love so great, so deep, so tender, so absolutely possessing the whole life of the lover that he would almost grudge any manifes- tation of it ? Because such a manifestation must neces- sarily be a repetition of some of the ways in which un- worthy loves have been manifested, by less happy lovers? I can seem to see that one might love the one love of a life-time, and be content to hold the treasure in one's heart, a treasure such as no other man ever 52 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST had, and grudge even a word or a look that might make it less the single perfect rose of the world." "Oh, dear!" said Betty to herself. "But I'm talking like a book," he said, and laughed. "I always get dreamy and absurd when I tell fortunes. Anyway, as I said before, you will be greatly beloved. Indeed, unless your hand is very untruthful, which I'm sure it never could be, you are beloved now, far more than you can possibly guess." Betty caught at her flippancy but it evaded her, and all she found to say was, "Oh," and her eyes fell. There was a silence. Vernon still held her hand, but he was no longer looking at it. A black figure darkened the daylight. The two on the plough started up started apart. Nothing more was wanted to convince the Rector of all that he least wished to believe. "Go home, Lizzie," he said, "go to your room," and to her his face looked the face of a fiend. It is hard to control the muscles under a sudden emotion com- pounded of sorrow, sympathy and an immeasurable pity. "Go to your room and stay there till I send for you." Betty went, like a beaten dog. The Rector turned to the young man. "Now, Sir," he said. CHAPTER V- THE PRISONER. When Vernon looked back on that interview he was honestly pleased with himself. He had been patient, he had been 'kind even. In the end he 'had been posi- tively chivalrous. He had hardly allowed himself to be ruffled for an instant, but had met the bitter flow of Mr. Underwood's biblical language with perfect cour- tesy. He regretted, of course, deeply, this unfortunate misunderstanding. Accident had made him acquainted with Miss Desmond's talent, he had merely offered her a little of that help which between brother artists The well-worn phrase had not for the Rector the charm it had had for Betty. The Rector spoke again, and Mr. Vernon listened, bare-headed, in deepest deference. No, he had not been holding Miss Desmond's hand he had merely been telling her fortune. No one could regret more profoundly than he, and so on. He was much Wounded by Mr. Underwood's unworthy suspicions. The Rector ran through a few texts. His pulpit de- nunciations of iniquity, though always earnest, had lacked this eloquence. Vernon listened quietly. "I can only express my regret that my thoughtless- 53 54 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST ness should have annoyed you, and beg you not to blame Miss Desmond. It was perhaps a little uncon- ventional, but " "Unconventional to try to ruin " Mr. Vernon held up his hand: he was genuinely shocked. "Forgive me," he said, "but I can't hear such words in connection with with a lady for whom I have the deepest respect. You are heated now, Sir, and I can make every allowance for your natural vexation. But I must ask you not to overstep the bounds of decency." The Rector bit his lip, and Vernon went on : "I have listened to your abuse yes, your abuse without defending myself, but I can't allow anyone, even her father, to say a word against her." "I am not her father," said the old man bitterly. And on the instant Vernon understood him as Betty had never done. The young man's tone changed in- stantly. "Look here," he said, and his face grew almost boy- ish, "I am really most awfully sorry. The whole thing what there is of it, and it's very little was entirely my doing. It was inexcusably thoughtless. Miss Des- mond is very young and very innocent. It is I who ought to have known better, and perhaps I did. But the country is very dull, and it was a real pleasure to teach so apt a pupil." .He spoke eagerly, and the ring of truth was in his voice. But the Rector felt that he was listening to the excuses of a serpent. "Then you'd have me believe that you don't even love her?" "No more than she does me," said Vernon very truly. "I've never breathed a word of love to her," he THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 55 went on ; "such an idea never entered our heads. She's a charming girl, and I admire her immensely, but " he sought hastily for a weapon, and defended Betty with the first that came to hand, "I am already engaged to another lady. It is entirely as an artist that I am interested in Miss Betty." "Serpent," said the Rector within himself, "Lying serpent !" Vernon was addressing himself silently in terms not more flattering. "Fool, idiot, brute to let the child in for this ! for it's going to be a hell of a time for her, anyhow. And as for me well, the game is up, abso- lutely up!" "I am really most awfully sorry," he said again. "I find it difficult to believe in the sincerity of your repentance," said the Rector frowning. "My regret you may believe in," said Vernon stiffly. "There is no ground for even the mention of such a word as repentance." "If your repentance is sincere" he underlined the word "you will leave Long Barton to-day." Leave without a word, a sign from Betty a word or a sign to her? It might be best if "I will go, Sir, if you will let me have your assurance that you will say nothing to Miss Desmond, that you won't make her unhappy, that you'll let the whole mat- ter drop." "I will make no bargains with you!" cried the Rec- tor. "Do your worst! Thank God I can defend her from you!" "She needs no defence. It's not I who am lacking in respect and consideration for her," said Vernon a lit- tle hotly, "but, as I say, I'll go if you'll just promise to be gentle with her." 5 6 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "I do not need to be taught my duty by a villain, Sir! " The old clergyman was trembling with rage. "I wish to God I were a younger man, that I might chastise you for the hound you are." His upraised cane shook in his hand. "Words are thrown away on you! I'm sorry I can't use the only arguments that can come home to a puppy !" "If you were a younger man," said Vernon slowly, "your words would not have been thrown away on me. They would have had the answer they deserved. I shall not leave Long Barton, and I shall see Miss Des- mond when and how I choose." "Long Barton shall know you in your true character, Sir, I promise you." "So you would blacken her to blacken me? One sees how it is that she does not love her father." He meant to be cruel, but it was not till he saw the green shadows round the old man's lips that he knew just how cruel he had been. The quivering old mouth opened and closed and opened, the cold eyes gleamed. And the trembling hand in one nervous movement raised the cane and struck the other man sharply across the face. It was a hysterical blow, like a woman's, and with it the tears sprang to the faded eyes. Then it was that Vernon behaved well. When he thought of it afterwards he decided that he had be- haved astonishingly well. With the smart of that cut stinging on his flesh, the mark of it rising red and angry across his cheek, he stepped back a pace, and without a word, without a re- taliatory movement, without even a change of facial expression he executed the most elaborately courteous bow, as of one treading a minuet, recovered the upright and walked away bareheaded. The old clergyman was THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 57 left planted there, the cane still jigging up and down in his shaking hand. "A little theatrical, perhaps," mused Vernon, when the cover of the wood gave him leave to lay his fingers to his throbbing cheek, "but nothing could have an- noyed the old chap more." However effective it may be to turn the other cheek, the turning of it does not cool one's passions, and he walked through the wood angrier than he ever remem- bered being. But the cool rain dripping from the hazel and sweet chestnut leaves fell pleasantly on his uncov- ered head and flushed face. Before he was through the wood he was able to laugh, and the laugh was a real laugh, if rather a rueful one. Vernon could never keep angry very long. "Poor old devil !" he said. "He'll have to put a spe- cial clause in the general confession next Sunday. Poor old devil! And poor little Betty! And poorest me! Because, however, we look at it, and however we may have damn well bluffed over it, the game is up abso- lutely up." When one has a definite end in view marriage, let us say, or an elopement, secret correspondences, the surmounting of garden walls, the bribery of servants, are in the picture. But in a small sweet idyll, with no backbone of intention to it, these things are inartistic. And Vernon was, above and before all, an artist. He must go away and he knew it. And his picture was not finished. Could he possibly leave that incomplete? The thought pricked sharply. He had not made much progress with the picture in these last days. It had been pleasanter to work at the portrait of Betty. If he moved to the next village ? Yes, that must be thought over. 5 8 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST He spent the day thinking of that and of other things. The Reverend Cecil Underwood stood where he was left till the man he had struck had passed out of sight. Then the cane slipped through his hand and fell rat- tling to the ground. He looked down at it curiously. Then he reached out both hands vaguely and touched the shaft of the plough. He felt his way along it, and sat down, where they had sat, staring dully before him at the shadows in the shed, and at the steady fall of the rain outside. Betty's mackintosh was lying on Hie floor. He picked it up presently and smoothed out the creases. Then he watched the rain again. An hour had passed before he got stiffly up and went home, with her cloak on his arm. Yes, Miss Lizzie was in her room had a headache. He sent up her breakfast, arranging the food himself, and calling back the maid because the tray lacked mar- malade. Then he poured out his own tea, and sat stirring it till it was cold. She was in her room, waiting for him to send for her. He must send for her. He must speak to her. But what could he say ? What was there to say that would not be a cruelty? What was there to ask that would not be a challenge to her to lie, as the serpent had lied? "I am glad I struck him," the Reverend Cecil told himself again and again; "that brought it home to him. He was quite cowed. He could do nothing but bow and cringe away. Yes, I am glad." But the girl ? The serpent had asked him to be gen- tle with her had dared to ask him. He could think of no way gentle enough for dealing with this crisis. THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 59 The habit of prayer caught him. He prayed for guid- ance. Then quite suddenly he saw what to do. "That will be best," he said; "she will feel that less." He rang and ordered the fly from the Peal of Bells, went to his room to change his old coat for a better one, since appearances must be kept up, even if the heart be breaking. His thin hair was disordered, and his tie, he noticed, was oddly crumpled, as though strange hands had been busy with his throat. He put on a fresh tie, smoothed his hair, and went down again. As he passed, he lingered a moment outside her door. Betty watching with red eyes and swollen lips saw him enter the fly, saw him give an order, heard the door bang. The old coachman clambered clumsily to his place, and the carriage lumbered down the drive. "Oh, how cruel he is ! He might have spoken to me now! I suppose he's going to keep me waiting for days, as a penance. And I haven't really done any- thing wrong. It's a shame ! I've a good mind to run away!" Running away required consideration. In the mean- time, since he was out of the house, there was no rea- son why she should not go downstairs. She was not a child to be kept to her room in disgrace. She bathed her distorted face, powdered it, and tried to think that the servants, should they see her, would notice nothing. Where had he gone? For no goal within his parish would a hired carriage be needed. He had gone to Sevenoaks or to the station. Perhaps he had gone to Westerham there was a convent there, a Protestant sisterhood. Perhaps he was going to make arrange- ments for shutting her up there ! Never ! Betty would 60 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST. die first. At least she would run away first. But where could one run to? The aunts? Betty loved the aunts, but she distrust- ed their age. They were too old to sympathise really with her. They would most likely understand as little as her step-father had done. An Inward Monitor told Betty that the story of the fortune-telling, of the seven stolen meetings with no love-making in them, would sound very unconvincing to any ears but those of the one person already convinced. But she would not be shut up in a convent no, not by fifty aunts and a hun- dred step-fathers! She would go to Him. He would understand. He was the only person who ever had understood. She would go straight to him and ask him what to do. He would advise her. He was so clever, so good, so noble. Whatever he advised would be right. Trembling and in a cold white rage of determina- tion, Betty fastened on her hat, found her gloves and purse. The mackintosh she remembered had been left in the shed. She pictured her step-father trampling fiercely upon it as he told Mr. Vernon what he thought of him. She took her golf cape. At the last moment she hesitated. Mr. Vernon would not be idle. What would he be doing? Sup- pose he should send a note? Suppose he had watched Mr. Underwood drive away and should come boldly up and ask for her? Was it wise to leave the house? But perhaps he would be hanging about the church yard, or watching from the park for a glimpse of her. She would at least go out and see. "I'll leave a farewell letter," she said, "in case I never come back." She found her little blotting-book envelopes, but no THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 61 paper. Of course! One can't with dignity write cut- ting farewells on envelopes. She tore a page from her diary. "You have driven me to this," she wrote. "I am going away, and in time I shall try to forgive you all the petty meannesses and cruelties of all these years. I know you always hated me, but you might have had some pity. All my life I shall bear the marks on my soul of the bitter tyranny I have endured here. Now I am going away out into the world, and God knows what will become of me." She folded, enveloped, and addressed the note, stuck a long hat-pin fiercely through it, and left it, pat- ent, speared to her pin-cushion, with her step-father's name uppermost. "Good-bye, little room," she said. "I feel I shall never see you again." Slowly and sadly she crossed the room and turned the handle of the door. The door was locked. Once, years ago, a happier man than the Reverend Cecil had been Rector of Long Barton. And in the room that now was Betty's he had had iron bars fixed to the two windows, because that room was the nursery. That evening, after dinner, Mr. Vernon sat at his parlour window looking idly along the wet bowling- green to the belt of lilacs and the pale gleams of watery sunset behind them. He had passed a disquieting day. He hated to leave things unfinished. And now the idyll was ruined and the picture threatened, and Bet- ty's portrait was not finished, and never would be. "Come in," he said; and his landlady heavily fol- lowed up her tap on his door. 62 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "A lady to see you, Sir," said she with a look that seemed to him to be almost a wink. "A lady? To see me? Good Lord!" said Vernon. Among all the thoughts of the day this was the one thought that had not come to him. "Shall I show her in?" the woman asked, and she eyed him curiously. "A lady," he repeated. "Did she give her name?" "Yes, Sir. Miss Desmond, Sir. Shall I shew her in?" "Yes ; shew her in, of course," he answered irritably. And to himself he said : "The Devil!" CHAPTER VI. THE CRIMINAL. If you have found yourself, at the age of eighteen, a prisoner in your own bedroom you will be able to feel with Betty. Not otherwise. Even your highly strung imagination will be impotent to present to you the ecstasy of rage, terror, resentment that fills the soul when locked door and barred windows say, quite quiet- ly, but beyond appeal: "Here you are, and here, my good child, you stay." All the little familiar objects, the intimate associa- . tions of the furniture of a room that has been for years your boudoir as well as your sleeping room, all the decorations that you fondly dreamed gave to your room a cachet the mark of a distinctive personality, these are of no more comfort to you than would be strange bare stone walls and a close unfamiliar iron grating. Betty tried to shake the window bars, but they were immovable. She tried to force the door open, but her silver buttonhook was an insufficient lever, and her tooth-brush handle broke when she pitted it in conflict against the heavy, old-fashioned lock. We have all read how prisoners, outwitting their gaolers, have filed bars with their pocket nail-scissors, and cut the locks out of old oak doors with the small blade of a pen- knife. Betty's door was only of pine, but her knife broke off short ; and the file on her little scissors wore itself smooth against the first unmoved bar. 63 64 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST She paced the room like a caged lioness. We read that did the lioness but know her strength her bars were easily shattered by one blow of her powerful paw. Betty's little pink paws were not powerful like the lioness's, and when she tried to make them help her, she broke her nails and hurt herself. It was this moment that Letitia chose for rapping at the door. "You can't come in. What is it?" Betty was prompt to say. - "Mrs. Edwardes's Albert, Miss, come for the Mater- nity bag." "It's all ready in the school-room cupboard," Betty 'called through the door. "Number three." She resisted an impulse to say that she had broken the key in the lock and to send for the locksmith. No : there should be no scandal at Long Barton, at least not while she had to stay in it. She did not cry. She was sick with fury, and anger made her heart beat as Vernon had never had power to make it. "I will be calm. I won't lose my head," she told her- self again and again. She drank some water. She made herself eat the neglected breakfast. She got out her diary and wrote in it, in a handwriting that was not Betty's, and with a hand that shook like totter-grass. "What will become of me? What has become of him? My step-father must have done something hor- rible to him. Perhaps he has had him put in prison; of course he couldn't do that in these modern times, like in the French revolution, just for talking to some one he hadn't been introduced to, but he may have done it for trespassing, or damage to the crops, or something. I feel quite certain something has hap- THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 65 A ' pened to him. He would never have deserted me like this in my misery if he were free. And I can do noth- ing to help him nothing. How shall I live through the day? How can I bear it? And this awful trouble has come upon him just because he was kind to another artist. The world is very, very, very cruel. I wish I were dead!" She blotted the words and locked away the book. Then she burnt that farewell note and went and sat in the window-seat to watch for her step-fath- er's return. -,.:.: . - :- >*. .'. ., The time was long. ' At last he came. She saw him open the carriage door and reach out a flat foot, feel- ing for the carriage step. He stepped out, turned and thrust a hand back into the cab. Was he about to hand out a stern-faced Protestant sister, who would take her to Westerham, and she would never be heard of again ? Betty set her teeth and waited anxiously to see if the sister seemed strong. Betty was, and she would fight for her liberty. With teeth and nails if need were. It was no Protestant sister to whom the Reverend Cecil had reached his hand. It was only his umbrella. Betty breathed again. Well, now at least he'll come and speak to me: he must come himself; even he couldn't give the key to the servants and say : "Please go and unlock Miss Liz- zie and bring her down !" Betty would not move. "I shall just stay here and pretend I didn't know the door was locked," said she. But her impatience drove her back to the caged-lion- ess walk' and when at last she heard the key turn in the door she had only just time to spring to the win- dow-seat and compose herself in an attitude of graceful defiance. It was thrown away. 66 The door only opened wide enough to admit a din- ner tray pushed in by a hand she knew. Then the door closed again. The same thing happened with tea and supper. It was not till after supper that Betty, gazing out on the pale watery sunset, found it blurred to her eyes. There was no more hope now. She was a prisoner. If He was not a prisoner he ought to be. It was the only thing that could excuse his silence. He might at least have gone by the gate or waved a handkerchief. Well, all was over between them, and Betty was alone in the world. She had not cried all day, but now she did cry. * * * * * Vernon always prided himself on having a heart for any fate, but this was one of the interviews that one would rather have avoided. All day he had schooled himself to resignation, had almost reconciled himself to the spoiling of what had promised to be a master- piece. Explications with Betty would brush the bloom off everything. Yet he must play the part well. But what part? Oh, hang all meddlers! "Miss Desmond," said the landlady; and he braced his nerves to meet a tearful, an indignant or a desper- ate Betty. But there was no Betty to be met ; no Betty of any kind. Instead, a short squarely-built middle-aged lady walked briskly into the room, and turned to see the door well closed before she advanced towards him. He bowed with indescribable emotions. "Mr. Eustace Vernon ?" said the lady. She wore a sensible short skirt and square-toed brown boots. Her hat was boat-shaped and her abundant hair was THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 67 screwed up so as to be well out of her way. Her face was square and sensible like her shoulders, and her boots. Her eyes dark, clear and near sighted. She wore gold-rimmed spectacles and carried a crutch-han- dled cane. No vision could have been less like Betty. Vernon bowed, and moved a chair towards her. "Thank you," she said, and took it. "Now, Mr. Vernon, sit down too, and let's talk this over like rea- sonable beings. You may smoke if you like. It clears the brain." Vernon sat down and mechanically took out a cigar- ette, but he held it unlighted. "Now," said the square lady, leaning her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands, "I am Betty's aunt." "It is very good of you to come," said Vernon help- lessly. "Not at all," she briskly answered. "Now tell me all about it." "There's nothing to tell," said Vernon. "Perhaps it will clear the ground a little if I say at once that I haven't come to ask your intentions, be- cause of course you haven't any. My reverend broth- er-in-law, on the other hand, insists that you have, and that they are strictly dishonourable." Vernon laughed, and drew a breath of relief. "I fear Mr. Underwood misunderstood, " he said, "and" "He is a born misunderstander," said Miss Julia Desmond. "Now, I'm not. Light your cigarette, man ; you can give me one if you like, to keep you in countenance. A light thanks. Now will you speak, or shall I?" 68 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "You seem to have more to say than I, Miss Des- mond." "Ah, that's because you don't trust me. In other words, you don't know me. That's one of the most annoying things in life : to be really an excellent sort, and to be quite unable to make people see it at the first go-off. Well, here goes. My worthy brother-in- law finds you and my niece holding hands in a shed." "We were not," said Vernon. "I was telling her fortune " "It's my lead now," interrupted the lady. "Your turn next. He being what he is to the pure all things are impure, you know instantly draws the most har- rowing conclusions, hits you with a stick. By the way, you behaved uncommonly well about that." "Thank you," said Vernon, smiling a little. It is pleasant to be appreciated. "Yes, really very decently, indeed. I daresay it wouldn't have hurt a fly, but if you'd been the sort of man he thinks you are However that's neither here nor there. He hits you with a stick, locks the child into her room What did you say?" "Nothing," said Vernon. "All right. I didn't hear it. Locks her in her room, and wires to my sister. Takes a carriage to Sevenoaks to do it too, to avoid scandal. I happen to be at my sister's, on my way from Cairo to Norway, so I under- take to run down. He meets me at the station, and wants me to go straight home and blackguard Betty. But I prefer to deal with principals." "You mean" "I mean that I know as well as you "do that what- ever has happened has been your doing and not that THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 69 dear little idiot's. Now, are you going to tell me about it?" He had rehearsed already a form of words in Which "Brother artists" should have loomed large. But now that he rose, shrugged his shoulders and spoke, it was in words that had not been rehearsed. "Look here, Miss Desmond," said he, "the fact is, you're right. I haven't any intentions certainly not dishonourable ones. But I was frightfully bored in the country, and your 'niece is bored, too more bored than I am. No one ever understands or pities the boredom of the very young," he added pensively. "Well?" "Well, that's all there is to it. I liked meeting her, and she liked meeting me." "And the fortune-telling? Do you mean to tell me you didn't enjoy holding the child's hand and putting her i'.i a silly flutter?" "I deny the flutter," he said, "but Well, yes, of course I enjoyed it. You wouldn't believe me if I said I didn't." "No," said she. "I enjoyed it more than I expected to," he added with a frankness that he had not meant to use, "much more. But I didn't say a word of love only per- haps" "Only perhaps you made the idea of it underlie every word you did speak. Don't I know?" said Miss Des- mond. "Bless the man, I've been young myself !" "Miss Betty is very charming," said he, "and and if I hadn't met her " "If you hadn't met her some other man would. True ; but I fancy her father would rather it had been some other man." 7 o THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "I didn't mean that in the least," said Vernon with some heat. "I meant that if I hadn't met her she would have gone on being bored, and so should I. Don't think me a humbug, Miss Desmond. I am more sorry than I can say that I should have been the means of causing her any unhappiness." " 'Causing her unhappiness,' poor little Betty, poor little trusting innocent silly little girl ! That's about it, isn't it?" It was so like it that he hotly answered : "Not in the least." "Well, well," said Miss Desmond, "there's no great harm done. She'll get over it, and more's been lost on market days. Thanks." She lighted a second cigarette and sat very upright, the cigarette in her mouth and her hands on the handle of her stick. "You can't help it, of course. Men with your col- oured eyes never can. That green hazel girls ought to be taught at school that it's a danger-signal. Only, since your heart's not in the business any more than her's is as you say, you were both bored to death I want to ask you, as a personal favour to me, just to let the whole thing drop. Let the girl alone. Go right away." "It's an unimportant detail, and I'm ashamed to mention it," said Vernon, "but I've got a picture on hand I'm painting a bit of the Warren." "Well, go to Low Barton and put up finish your precious picture. You won't again unless you run after her." "To tell the truth," said Vernon, "I had already de- cided to let the whole thing drop. I'm ashamed of the .THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 71 trouble I've caused her and and I've taken rooms at Low Barton." "Upon my word," said Miss Desmond, "you are the coldest lover I've ever set eyes on." "I'm not a lover," he answered swiftly. "Do you wish I were?" "For Betty's sake, I'm glad you aren't. But I think I should respect you more if you weren't quite so arc- tic." "I'm not an incendiary, at any rate," said he, "and that's something, with my coloured eyes, isn't it?" "Well," she said, "whatever your temperature is, I rather like you. I don't wonder at Betty in the least." Vernon bowed. "All I ask is your promise that you'll not speak to her again." "I can't promise that, you know. I can't be rude to her. But I'll promise not to go out of my way to meet her again." He sighed. "As, yes it is sad all that time wasted and no rabbits caught." Again Miss Desmond had gone un- pleasantly near his thought. Of course he said : "You don't understand me." "Near enough," said Miss Desmond; "and now I'll go." "Let me thank you for coming," said Vernon eager- ly; "it was more than good of you. I must own that my heart sank when I knew it was Miss Betty's aunt who honoured me with a visit. But I am most glad you came. I never would have believed that a lady could be so reasonable and and " "And gentlemanly ?" said the lady. "Yes, it's my brother-in-law who is the old woman, poor dear! You see, Mr. Vernon, I've been running round the world 72 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST for five and twenty years, and I've kept my eyes open. And when I was of an age to be silly, the man I was silly about had your coloured eyes. He married an actress, poor fellow, or rather, she married him, be- fore he could say 'knife.' That's the sort of thing that'll happen to you, unless you're uncommonly care- ful. So that's settled. You give me your word not to try to see Betty?" "I give you my word. You won't believe in my re- gret-" "I believe in that right enough. It must be simply sickening to have the whole show given away like this. Oh, I believe in your regret !" "My regret," said Vernon steadily, "for any pain I may have caused your niece. Do please see how grate- ful I am to you for having seen at once that it was not her fault at all, but wholly mine." "Very nicely said: good boy!" said Betty's aunt. "Well, my excellent brother-in-law is waiting outside in the fly, gnashing his respectable teeth, no doubt, and inferring all sorts of complications from the length of our interview. Good-bye. You're just the sort of young man I like, and I'm sorry we haven't met on a happier footing. I'm sure we should Have got on to- gether. Don't you think so?" "I'm sure we should," said he truly. "Mayn't I 1 99 hope She laughed outright. "You have indeed the passion for acquaintance with- out jntroduction," she said. "No, you may not call on me in town. Besides, I'm never there. Good-bye. And take care of yourself. You're bound to be bitten some clay, you know, and bitten badly." "I wish I thought you forgave me." THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 73 "Forgive you? Of course I forgive you! You can no more help making love, I suppose no, don't inter- rupt: the thing's the same whatever you call it you can no more help making love than a cat can help steal- ing cream. Only one day the cat gets caught, and bad- ly beaten, and one day you'll get caught, and the beat- ing will be a bad one, unless I'm a greater fool than I take myself for. And now I'll go and unlock Betty's prison and console her. Don't worry about her. I'll see that she's not put upon. Good night. No, in the circumstances you'd better not see me to my carriage !" She shook hands cordially, and left Vernon to his thoughts. Miss Desmond had done what she came to do, and he knew it. It was almost a relief to feel that now he could not try to see Betty however much he wished it, however much he might know her to wish it. He shrugged his shoulders and lighted another cigarette. ***** Betty, worn out with crying, had fallen asleep. THe sound of wheels roused her. It seemed to rain cabs at the Rectory to-day. There were voices in the hall, steps on the stairs. Her door was unlocked and there entered no tray of prisoner's fare, no reproachful step-father, no Protest- ant sister, but a brisk and well-loved aunt, who shut the door, and spoke. "All in the dark?" she said. "Where are you, child?" "Here," said Betty. "Let me strike a light. Oh, yes, there you are !" "Oh, aunt, has he sent for you?" said Betty fear- fully. "Oh, don't scold me, auntie! I am so tired. I don't think I can bear any more." 74 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "I'm not going to scold you, you silly little kitten," said the aunt cheerfully. "Come, buck up! It's noth- ing so very awful, after all. You'll be laughing at it all before a fortnight's over." "Then he hasn't told you?" "Oh, yes, he has ; he's told me everything there was to tell, and a lot more, too. Don't worry, child. You just go straight to bed and I'll tuck you up, and we'll talk it all over in the morning." "Aunty," said Betty, obediently beginning to unfas- ten her dress, "did he say anything about Him?"' "Well, yes a little." "He hasn't hasn't done anything to him, has he?" "What could he do ? Giving drawing lessons isn't a hanging matter, Bet." "I haven't heard anything from him all day, and I thought "You won't hear anything more of him, Betty, my dear. I've seen your Mr. Vernon, and a very nice young man he is, too. He's frightfully cut up about having got you into a row, and he sees that the only thing he can do is to go quietly away. I needn't tell you, Betty, though I shall have to explain it very thor- oughly to your father, that Mr. Vernon is no more in love with you than you are with him. In fact he's engaged to another girl. He's just interested in you as a promising pupil." "Yes," said Betty, "of course I know that." CHAPTER VII. THE ESCAPE. "It's all turned out exactly like what I said it was going to, exactly to a T," said Mrs. Symes, wrapping her wet arms in her apron and leaning them on the fence; "if it wasn't that it's Tuesday and me behind- hand as it is, I'd tell you all about it." "Do the things good to lay a bit in the rinse-water," said Mrs. James, also leaning on the fence, "sorter whitens them's what I always say. I don't mind if I lend you a hand with the wringing after. What's turned out like you said it was going to ?" "Miss Betty's decline." Mrs. Symes laughed low and huskily. "What did I tell you, Mrs. James ?" "I don't quite remember not just at the minute," said Mrs. James; "you tells so many things." "And well for some people I do. Else they wouldn't never know nothing. I told you as it wasn't no decline Miss Betty was setting down under. I said it was only what's natural, her being the age she is. I said what she wanted was a young man, and I said she'd get one. And what do you think?" "I don't know, I'm sure." "She did get one," said Mrs. Symes impressively, "that same week, just as if she'd been a-listening to my very words. It was as it might be Friday you and me had that little talk. Well, as it might be the Saturday, she meets the young man, a-painting pictures in the 75 76 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST Warren my Ernest's youngest saw 'em a-talking, and told his mother when he come home to his dinner." "To think of that, and me never hearing a word!" said Mrs. James with frank regret. "I knew it ud be 'Whistle and I'll come to you, my lad,' " Mrs. Symes went on with cumbrous enjoyment, "and so it was. They used to keep their rondyvoos in the wood six o'clock in the morning. Mrs. Wilson's Tom used to see 'em reg'lar every day as he went by to his work." "Lor," said Mrs. James feebly. "Of course Tom he never said nothing, except to a few friends of his over a glass. They enjoyed the joke, I promise you. But old George Marbould he ain't never been quite right in his head, I don't think, since his Ruby went wrong. Pity, I always think. A great clumsy plain-faced girl like her might a kept herself respectable. She hadn't the temptation some of us might have had in our young days." "No indeed," said Mrs. James, smoothing her hair, "and old George what silliness was he up to this time?" "Why he sees the two of 'em together one fine morn- ing and 'stead of doing like he'd be done by he ups to the Vicarage and tells the old man. 'You come alonger me, Sir/ says he, 'and have a look at your daughter a- kissin' and huggin' up in Beale's shed, along of a per- fect stranger.' So the old man he says, 'God bless you,' George is proud of him saying that and off he goes, in a regular fanteague, beats the young master to a jelly, for all he's an old man and feeble, and shuts Miss up in her room. Now that wouldn't a been my way." "No, indeed," said Mrs. James. THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 77 "I should a asked him in," said Mrs. Symes, "if it had been a gell of mine, and give him a good meal with a glass of ale to it, and a tiddy drop of something to top up with, and I'd a let him light his nasty pipe, and then when he was full and contented I'd a up and said, 'Now my man, you've 'ad time to think it over, and no one can't say as I've hurried you nor flur- ried you. But it's time as we began talking. So just you tell me what you're a-goin to do about it. If you 'ave the feelings of a man,' I'd a said 'you'll marry the girl.' ' "Yes, indeed," said Mrs. James with emotion. "Instead of which, bless your 'art, he beats the young man off with a stick, like as if he was a mad dog ; and young Miss is a goin' to be sent to furrin parts to a stride boardin' school, to learn her not to have any truck with young chaps." " 'Ard, I call it," said Mrs. James. "An' well you may crooil 'ard. How's he expect the girl to get a husband if he drives the young fellers away with walking-sticks? Pore gell! I shouldn't wonder but what she lives arad dies a maid, after this set-out." "We shall miss 'er when she goes," said Mrs. James. "I don't say we shan't. But there ain't no one as you can't get on without if you're put to it. And whether or not, she's going to far foreign parts where there ain't no young chaps." "Poor young thing," said Mrs. James, very sympa- thetic. "I think I'll drop in as I'm passing, and see how she takes it." "If you do," said Mrs. Symes, unrolling her arms, white and wrinkled with washing, to set them aggres- 7 8 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST sively on her lips, "it's the last word as passes between us, Mrs. James, so now you know." "Lord, Maria, don't fly out at me that way." Mrs. James shrank back : "How was I to know you'd take it like that?" "Do you suppose," asked Mrs. Symes, "as no one ain't got no legs except you ? I'm a going up, soon as I've got the things on the line and cleaned myself. I only heard it after I'd got every blessed rag in soak, or I'd a gone up afore." "Mightn't I step up with you for company?" Mrs. James asked. "No, you mightn't. But I don't mind dropping in as I come home, to tell you about it. One of them Catho- lic Nunnery schools, I expect, which it's sudden death to a man but to set his foot into." "Poor young thing," said Mrs. James again. * * * * * Betty was going to Paris. There had been "much talk about and about" the project. Now it was to be. There had been interviews. There was the first in which the elder Miss Desmoncl told her brother-in-law in the plain speech she loved exactly what sort of a fool he had made of himself in the matter of Betty and the fortune-telling. When he was convinced of error it was not easily done he would have liked to tell Betty that he was sorry, but he belonged to a generation that does not apologise to the next. The second interview was between the aunt and Betty. That was the one in which so much good ad- vice was given. "You know," the aunt wound up, "all young women 79 want to be in love, and all young men too. I don't mean that there was anything of that sort between you and your artist friend. But there might have been. Now look here, I'm going to speak quite straight to you. Don't you ever let young men get monkeying about with your hands; whether they call it fortune- telling or whether they don't, their reason for doing so is always the same or likely to be. And you want to keep your hand as well as your lips for the man you're going to marry. That's all, but don't you forget it. Now what's this I hear about your wanting to go to Paris?" "I did want to go," said Betty, "but I don't care about anything now. Everything's hateful." "It always is," said the aunt, "but it won't always be." "Don't think I care a straw about not seeing Mr. Vernon again," said Betty hastily. "It's not that." "Of course not," said the aunt sympathetically. "No, but Father was so hateful you've no idea. If I'd if I'd run away and got married secretly he Couldn't have made more fuss." "You're a little harsh just a little. Of course you and I know exactly how it was, but remember how it looked to him. Why, it couldn't have looked worse if you really had been arranging an elopement." "He hadn't got his arm around me," insisted Betty; "it was somewhere right away in the background. He was holding himself up with it." "Don't I tell you I understand all that perfectly? What I want to understand is how you feel about Paris. Are you absolutely off the idea ?" "I couldn't go if I wasn't." "I wonder what you think Paris is like," mused the 80 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST aunt. "I suppose you think it's all one wild razzle- dazzle one delirious round of of museums and pic- ture galleries." "No, I don't," said Betty rather shortly. "If you went you'd have to work." "There's no chance of my going." "Then we'll put the idea away and say no more about it. Get me my Continental Bradshaw out of my dress- ing-bag: I'm no use here. Nobody loves me, and I'll go to Norway by the first omnibus to-morrow morn- ing." "Don't," said Betty ; "how can you say nobody loves you?" "Your step-father doesn't, anyway. That's why I can make him do what I like when I take the trouble. When people love you they'll never do anything for you, not even answer a plain question with a plain yes or no. Go and get the Bradshaw. You'll be sorry when I'm gone." "Aunt Julia, you don't really mean it." "Of course not. I never mean anything except the things I don't say. The Bradshaw!" Betty came and sat on the arm of her aunt's chair. "It's not fair to tease me," she said, "and tantalise me. You know how mizzy I am." "No. I don't know anything. You won't tell me anything. Go and get " "Dear, darling, pretty, kind, clever Aunt," cried Betty, "Fd give my ears to go." "Then borrow h large knife from cook, and sharpen it on the front door-step ! No I don't mean to use it on your step-father. I'll Have your pretty ears mummi- fied and wear them on my watch-chain. No mind my THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 8* spectacles! Let me go. I daresay it won't come to anything." "Do you really mean you'd take me?" "I'd take you fast enough, but I wouldn't keep you. We must find a dragon to guard the Princess. Oh, we'll get a nice tame kind puss-cat of a dragon, but that dragon will not be your Aunt Julia ! Let me go, I say. I thought you didn't care about anything any more?" "I didn't know there could be anything to care for," said Betty honestly, "especially Paris. Well, I won't if you hate it so, but oh, aunt " She still sat on the floor by the chair her aunt had left, and thought and thought. The aunt went straight down to the study. "Now, Cecil," she said, coming briskly in and shut- ting the door, "you've made that poor child hate the thought of you and you've only yourself to thank." "I know you think so," said he, closing the heavy book over which he had been stooping. "I don't mean," she added hastily, for she was not a cruel woman, "that she really hates you, of course. But you've frightened her, and shaken her nerves, locking her up in her room like that. Upon my word, you are old enough to know better !" "I was so alarmed, so shaken myself " he began, but she interrupted him. "I didn't come in and disturb your work just to say all that, of course," she said, "but really, Cecil, I under- stand things better than you think. I know how fond you really are of Betty." The Reverend Cecil doubted this ; but he said noth- ing. "And you know that I'm fond enough of the child 82 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST myself. Now, all this has upset you both tremen- dously. What do you propose to do?" "I I nothing I thought. The less said about these deplorable affairs the better. Lizzie will soon re- cover her natural tone, and forget all about the mat- ter." "Then you mean to let everything go on in the old way?" "Why, of course," said he uneasily. "Well, it's your own affair, naturally," she spoke with a studied air of detachment which worried him exactly as it was meant to do. "What do you mean?" he asked anxiously. He Had never been able wholly to approve Miss Julia Desmond. She smoked cigarettes, and he could not think that this would have been respectable in any other woman. Of course, she was different from any other woman, but still . Then the Reverend Cecil could not deem it womanly to explore, unchaperoned, the less well-known quarters of four continents, to penetrate even to regions where skirts were considered improper and side-saddles were unknown. Even the nearness of Miss Desmond's fiftieth birthday hardly lessened at all the poignancy of his disapproval. Besides, she had not always been fifty, and she had always, in his recollection of her, smoked cigarettes, and travelled alone. Yet he had a certain well-founded respect for her judgment, and for that fine luminous common-sense of hers which had more than once shewn him his own mistakes. On the rare occasions when he and she had differed he had al- ways realized, later, that she had been in the right. And she was "gentlemanly" enough never once to have said: "I told you so!" THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 83 "What do you mean?" he asked again, for she was silent, her hands in the pockets of her long coat, her sensible brown shoes sticking straight out in front of her chair. "If you really want to know, I'll tell you," she said, "but I hate to interfere in other people's business. You see, I know how deeply she has felt this, and of course I know you have too, so I wondered whether you hadn't thought of some little plan for for altering the circumstances a little, so that everything will blow over and settle down, so that when you and she come to- gether again you'll be better friends than ever." "Come together again," he repeated, and the paper- knife was still restless, "do you want me to let her go away? To London?" Visions of Lizzie, in unseemly low-necked dresses surrounded by crowds of young men all possible Ver- nons lent a sudden firmness to his voice, a sudden alertness to his manner." "No, certainly not," she answered the voice and the manner as much as the words. "I shouldn't dream of such a thing. Then it hadn't occurred to you?" "It certainly had not." "You see," she said earnestly, "it's like this at least this is how I see it: She's all shaken and upset, and so are you, and when I've gone and I must go in a very little time you'll both of you simply settle down to thinking over it all, and you'll grow farther and farther apart!" "I don't think so," said he ; "things like this always right themselves if one leaves them alone. Lizzie and I have always got on very well together, in a quiet way. We are neither of us demonstrative." "Now Heaven help the man!" was the woman's 84 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST thought. She remembered Betty's clinging arms, her heartfelt kisses, the fervency of the voice that said, "Dear darling, pretty, kind, clever Aunt ! I'd give my ears to go." Betty not demonstrative! Heaven help the man ! "No," she said, "I know. But when people are young these thinks rankle." "They won't with her," he said. "She has a singu- larly noble nature, under that quiet exterior." Miss Desmond drew a long breath and began afresh. "Then there's another thing. She's fretting over this thinks now that it was something to be ashamed of; she didn't think so at the time, of course." "You mean that it was I who " This was thin ice again. Miss Desmond skated quickly away from it with, "Well, you see, I've been talking to her. She really is fretting. Why she's got ever so much thinner in the last week." "I could get a locum," he said slowly, "and take her to a Hydropathic Establishment for a fortnight." "Oh dear, oh dear!" said Miss Desmond to herself. Aloud she said : "That would be delightful, later. But just now well, of course it's for yc,u to decide, but it seems to me that it would be better for you two to be apart for a while. If you're here alone together well, the very sight of you will remind each other That's not grammar, as you say, but " He had not said anything. He was thinking, finger- ing the brass bosses on the corners of the divine Augus- tine, and tracing the pattern on the stamped pigskin. "Of course if you care to risk it," she went on still with that fine air of detachment. "but I have seen breaches that nothing could heal arise in just that way. OTHE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 83 Two people sitting down together and thinking over everything they had against each other." "But I've nothing against Lizzie." "I daresay not," Miss Desmond lost patience at la "but she has against you, or will have if you let her stay here brooding over it. However if you like k> risk it I'm sorry I spoke." She got up and moved to the door. "No, no," he said hastily, "do not be sorry you spoke. You have given me food for reflection. I will think it all over quietly and and " he did not like to talk about prayers to Miss Desmond somehow, "and calmly, and if I see that you are right I am sure you mean most kindly by me." "Indeed I do," she said heartily, and gave him her hand in the manly way he hated. He took it, held it limply an instant, and repeated : "Most kindly." He thought it over for so long that the aunt almost lost hope. "I have to hold my tongue with both hands to keep it quiet. And if I say another word I shall spoil the song," she told Betty. "I've done my absolute best. If that doesn't fetch him, nothing will !" It had "fetched him." At the end of two intermin- able days he sent to ask Miss Desmond to speak to him in the study. She went. "I have been thinking carefully," he said, "most carefully. And I feel that you are right. Perhaps I owe her some amends. Do you know of any quiet country place?" Miss Desmond thought Betty had perhaps for the moment had almost enough of quiet country places. "She is very anxious to learn drawing," he said, 86 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "and perhaps if I permitted her to do so she might understand it as a sign that I cherish no resentment on account of what has passed. But " "I know the very thing," said the Aunt, and went ori to tell of Madame Gautier, of her cloistral home in Paris where she received a few favoured young girls, of the vigilant maid who conducted them to and from their studies, of the quiet villa on the Marne where in the summer an able master at least 60 or 65 years of age conducted sketching parties, to which the stu- dents were accompanied either by Madame herself, or by the dragon-maid. "I'll stand the child six months with her," she said, "or a year even. So it won't cost you anything. And Madame Gautier is in London now. You could run up and talk to her yourself." "Does she speak English ?" he asked, anxiously, and being reassured questioned further. "And you?" he asked. And when he heard that Norway for a month and then America en route for Japan f ormed Miss Desmond's programme for the next year he was only just able to mask, with a cough, his deep sigh of relief. For, however much he might re- spect her judgment, he was always easier when Lizzie and her Aunt Julia were not together. He went up to town, and found Madame Gautier, the widow of a French pastor, established in a Blooms- bury boarding-house. She was a woman after his own heart severe, simple, earnest. If he had to part with his Lizzie, he told himself in the returning train, it could be to no better keeper than this. He himself announced his decision to Betty. "I have decided," he said, and he spoke very coldly because it was so very difficult to speak at all, "to grant THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 87 you the wish you expressed some time ago. You shall go to Paris and learn drawing." "Do you really mean it?" said Betty, as coldly as he. "I am not in the habit of saying things which I do not mean." "Thank you very much," said Betty. "I will work hard, and try that the money shan't be wasted." "Your aunt has kindly offered to pay your ex- penses." "When do I go?" asked Betty. "As soon as your garments can be prepared. I trust that I shall not have cause to regret the confidence I have decided to place in you." His phrasing was seldom well-inspired. Had he said, "I trust you, my child, and I know I shan't regret it," which was what he meant, she would have come to meet him more than half-way. As it was she said, "Thank you !" again, and left him without more words, He sighed. "I don't believe she is pleased after all ; but she sees I am doing it for her good. Now it comes to the point her heart sinks at the idea of leaving home. But she will understand my motives." The one thought Betty gave him was: "He can't bear the sight of me at all now! He's longing to be rid of me ! Well, thank Heaven I'm go- ing to Paris! I will have a grass-lawn dress over green, with three rows of narrow lace insertion, and a hat with yellow roses and oh, it can't be true. It's too good to be true. Well, it's a good thing to be hated sometimes, by some people, if they only hate you enough !" ***** " 'So you're going to foreign parts, Miss,' says I." 88 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST Mrs. Symes had flung back her bonnet strings and was holding a saucerful of boiling tea skilfully poised on the fingers of one hand. " 'Yes, Mrs. Symes,' says she, 'don't you wish you was going too ?' she says. And she laughed, but I'm not easy blinded, and well I see as she only laughed to 'ide a bleedin' 'art. 'Not me, Miss,' says I; 'nice figure I should look a-goin' to a furrin' boardin' school at my time of life.' " 'It ain't boardin' school/ says she. 'I'm a-going to learn to paint pictures. I'll paint your portrait when I come home,' says she, and laughs again I could see she done it to keep the tears back. " Tm sorry for you, Miss, I'm sure,' I says, not to lose the chance of a word in season, "but I hope it'll prove a blessing to you I do that.' ' " 'Oh, it'll be a blessing right enough,' says she, and keeps on laughing a bit wild like. When the art's full you can't always stop yourself. She'd a done better to 'ave a good cry and tell me 'er troubles. I could a cheered her up a bit p'raps. You know whether I'm considered a comfort at funerals and christenings, Mrs. James." ... - -^": ' ; 'A'^O' "I do," said Mrs. James' sadly; "none don't know it better." :.-; v >-'V-:V ; ;r ,: " "You'd a thought she'd a bin glad of a friend in need. But no. She just goes on a-laughing fit to bring tears to your eyes to hear her, and says she, 'I hope you'll all get on all right without me.' " "I hope you said as how we should miss her some- thing dreadful," said Mrs. James anxiously, "Have another cup." "Thank you, my dear. Do you take me for a born loony? Course I did. Said the parish wouldn't be the THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 89 same without her, and about her pretty reading and all See here what she give me." Mrs. James unrolled a violet petticoat. "Good as new, almost," she said, looking critically at the hem. "Specially her being taller'n me. So what's not can be cut away, and no loss. She kep' on a-laughing an' a-smiling till the old man he come in and he says in his mimicking way, 'Lizzie,' says 'e, 'they're a-waitin' to fit on your new walkin' costoom,' he says. So I come away, she a-smiling to the last something awful to see." "Dear, dear," said Mrs. James. "But you mark my words she don't deceive me. If ever I see a bruised reed and a broken 'art on a young gell's face I see it on hers this day. She may laugh herself black in the face, but she won't laugh me into thinking what I knows to be far otherwise." "Ah," said Mrs. James resignedly, "we all 'as it to bear one time or another. Young gells is very deceit- ful though, in their ways, ain't they ?" JBoob 2. -(Efce CHAPTER VIII. THE ONE AND THE OTHER. "Some idiot," remarked Eustace Vernon, sipping Vermouth at a little table, "insists that, if you sit long enough outside the Cafe de la Paix, you will see every- one you have ever known or ever wanted to know pass by. I have sat here for half-an-hour and voila." "You met me, half an hour ago," said the other man. "Oh, you!" said Vernon affectionately. "And your hat has gone off every half minute ever since," said the other man. "Ah, that's to the people I've known. It's the peo- ple I've wanted to know that are the rarity." "Do you mean people you have wanted to know and not known?" "There aren't many of those," said Vernon ; "no it's Jove, that's a sweet woman!" "I hate the type," said the other man briefly: "all clothes no real human being." The woman was beautifully dressed, in the key whose harmonies are only mastered by Frenchwomen and Americans. She turned her head as her carriage passed, and Vernon's hat went off once more. "I'd forgotten her profile," said Vernon, "and she's learned how to dress since I saw her last. She's quite human, really, and as charming as anyone ought to be." 93 94 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "So I should think," said the other man. "I'm sorry I said that, but I didn't know you knew her. How's trade ?" "Oh, I did a picture well, but a picture ! I did it in England in the Spring..;.-. Best thing I've done yet. Come and see it." ^ "I should like to! look you' up. '. Where do you hang out?" " '^'. .;'.... .:* "Eighty-six bis Rue" Notre Dame des Champs," said Vernon. "Everyone in fiction lives there. It's the only street on the other side that authors seem ever to have dreamed of. Still, it's convenient, so I herd there with all sorts of blackguards, heroes and villains and what not. Eighty-six bis." "I'll come," said the other man, slowly. "Do you know, Vernon, I'd like awfully to get at your point of view your philosophy of life?" "Haven't you got one, my dear chap! 'sufficient unto' is my motto.". "You paint pictures," the other went on, "so very much too good for the sort of life you lead." Vernon laughed. "My dear Temple," he said, "I live, mostly, the life of a vestal virgin." "You know well enough I'm not quarrelling with the way you spend your evenings," said his dear Temple; "it's your whole outlook that doesn't match your work. Yet there must be some relation between the two, that's what I'd like to get at." There is a bond stronger than friendship, stronger than love a bond that cannot be forged in any other shop than the one the bond between old schoolfellows. Vernon had sometimes wondered why he "stood so 95 much" from Temple. It is a wonder that old school- fellows often feel, mutually. "The subject you've started," said he, "is of course, to me, the most interesting. Please develop your thesis." "Well then, your pictures are good, strong, thorough stuff, with sentiment yes, just enough sentiment to keep them from the brutality of Degas or the sensual- ism of Latouche. Whereas you, yourself, seem to have no sentiment." "I? No sentiment! Oh, Bobby, this is too much! Why, I'm a mass of it ! Ask " "Yes, ask any woman of your acquaintance. That's just it or just part of it. You fool them into think- ing oh, I don't know what; but you don't fool me." "I haven't tried." "Then you're not brutal, except half a dozen times in the year when you And I've noticed that when your temper goes smash your morals go at the same time. Is that cause or effect? What's the real you like, and where do you keep it?" "The real me," said Vernon, "is seen in my pic- tures, and and appreciated by my friends; you for instance, are, I believe, genuinely attached to me." "Oh, rot!" said Bobby. "I don't see," said Vernon, moving his iron chair to make room for two people at the next table, "why you should expect my pictures to rhyme with my life. A man's art doesn't rhyme with his personality. Most often it contradicts flatly. Look at musicians what a divine art, and what pigs of high priests ! And look at actors but no, one can't; the spectacle is too sickening." "I sometimes think," said Temple, emptying his 9 6 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST glass, "that the real you isn't made yet. It's waiting for" "For the refining touch of a woman's hand, eh? You think the real me is Oh, Temple, Temple, I've no heart for these childish imaginings! The real me is the man that paints pictures, damn good pictures, too, though I say it." "And is that what all the women think?" "Ask them, my dear chap; ask them. They won't tell you the truth." "They're not the only ones who won't. I should like to know what you really think of women, Vernon." "I don't think about them at all," lied Vernon equa- bly. "They aren't subjects for thought but for emotion and even of that as little as may be. It's impossible seriously to regard a woman as a human being; she's merely a dear, delightful, dainty " "Plaything?" "Well, yes or rather a very delicately tuned musi- cal instrument. If you know the scales and the com- mon chords, you can improvise nice little airs and charming variations. She's a sort of well, a penny whistle, and the music you get depends not on her at all, but on your own technique." "I've never been in love," said Temple; "not seri- ously, I mean," he hastened to add, for Vernon was smiling, "not a life or death matter, don't you know; but I do hate the way you talk, and one of these days you'll hate it too." Miss Desmond's warning floated up through the dim waters of half a year. "So a lady told me, only last Spring," he said. "Well, I'll take my chance. Going? Well, I'm glad we ran across each other. Don't forget to look me up." THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 97 Temple moved off, and Vernon was left alone. He sat idly smoking cigarette after cigarette, and watched the shifting crowd. It was a bright October day, and the crowd was a gay one. Suddenly his fingers tightened on his cigarette, but he kept the hand that held it before his face, and he bent his head forward. Two ladies were passing, on foot. One was the elder Miss Desmond she who had warned him that one of these days he would be caught and the other, hanging lovingly pn her aunt's arm, was, of course, Betty. But a smart, changed, awakened Betty! She was dressed almost as beautifully as the lady whose profile he had failed to recognise, but much more simply. Her eyes were alight, and she was babbling away to her aunt. She was even gesticulating a little, for all the world like a French girl. He noted the well-gloved hand with which she emphasized some point in her talk. "That's the hand," he said, "that I held when we sat on the plough in the shed and I told her fortune." He had risen, and his feet led him along the road they had taken. Ten yards ahead of him he saw the swing of the aunt's serviceable brown skirt and beside it Betty's green and gray. "I am not breaking my word," he replied to the In- ward Monitor. "Who's going out of his way to speak to the girl?" He watched the brown gown and the green all the way down the Boulevard des Capucines, saw them cross the road and go up the steps of the Madeleine. He paused at the corner. It was hard, certainly, to keep his promise; yet so far it was easy, because he could not well recall himself to the Misses Desmond on the ground of his having six months ago involved the" 98 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST one in a row with her relations, and discussed the situa- tion afterwards with the other. "I do wonder where they're staying, though," he told himself. "If one were properly introduced ?" But he knew that the aunt would consider no intro- duction a proper one that should renew his acquaint- ance with Betty. "Wolf, wolf," he said, "let the fold alone ! There's no door for you, and you've pledged your sacred word as an honourable wolf not to jump any more hurdles." And as he stood musing, the elder Miss Desmond came down the church steps and walked briskly away. Some men would, doubtless, have followed her ex- ample, if not her direction. Vernon was not one of these. He found himself going up the steps of the great church. He had as good a right to go into the Madeleine as the next man. He would probably not see the girl. If he did he would not speak. Almost certainly he would not even see her. But Destiny had remembered Mr. Vernon once more. Betty was standing just inside the door, her face upturned, and all her soul in her eyes. The mut- terings of the organ and the voices of boys filled the great dark building. He went and stood close by her. He would not speak. He would keep his word. But she should have a chance of speaking. His eyes were on her face. The hymn ended. She exhaled a held breath, /started and spoke. "You?" she said, "you?" The two words are spelled alike. Spoken, they are capable of infinite vari- ations. The first "you" sent Vernon's blood leaping. The second froze it to what it had been before he met her. For indeed that little unfinished idyll had been THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 99 almost forgotten by the man who sat drinking Ver- mouth outside the Cafe de la Paix. "How are you?" he whispered. "Won't you shake hands?" She gave him a limp and unresponsive glove. "I had almost forgotten you," she said, "but I am glad to see you because Come to the door. I don't like talking in churches." They stood on the steps behind one of the great pil- lars. "Do you think it is wise to stand here?" he said. "Your aunt might see us." "So you followed us in?" said Betty with perfect self-possession. "That was very kind. I have often wished to see you, to tell you how much obliged I am for all your kindness in the Spring. I was only a child then, and I didn't understand, but now I quite see how good it was of you." "Why do you talk like that?" he said. "You don't think you can't think it was my fault ?" "Your fault! What?" "Why, your father finding us and " "Oh, that!" she said lightly. "Oh, I had forgotten that! Ridiculous, wasn't it? No, I mean your kind- ness in giving so many hours to teaching a perfect duf- fer. Well, now I've seen you and said what I had to say, I think I'll go back." "No, don't go," he said. "I want to know oh, all sorts of things! I can see your aunt from afar, and fly if she approaches." "You don't suppose," said Betty, opening her eyes at him, "that I shan't tell her I've seen you?" He had supposed it, and cursed his clumsiness. "Ah, I see," she went on, "ypu think I should de- ioo THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST ceive my aunt now because I deceived my step-father in the Spring. But I was a child then, and besides, I'm fond of my aunt." "Did you know that she came to see me?" "Of course. You seem to think we live in an atmos- phere of deceit, Mr. Vernon." "What's the matter with you?" he said bluntly, for finer weapons seemed useless. "What have I done to make you hate me?" "I hate you ? Oh, no not in the least," said Betty spitefully. I am very grateful to you for all your kindness." "Where are you staying?" he asked. "Hotel Bete," said Betty, off her guard, "but" The "but" marked his first score. "I wish I could have called to see your aunt," he said carelessly, "but I am off to Vienna to-morrow." Betty believed that she did not change countenance by a hair's breadth. "I hope you'll have a delightful time," she said po- litely. "Thanks. I am sure I shall. The only consolation for leaving Paris is that one is going to Vienna. Are you here for long?" "I don't know." Betty was on her guard again. "Paris is a delightful city, isn't it?" "Most charming." "Have you been here long?" "No, not very long." "Are you still working at your painting? It would be a pity to give that up." "I am not working just now." "I see your aunt," he said hurriedly. "Are you going to send me away like this ? Don't be so unjust, THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 101 so ungenerous. It's not like you my pupil of last Spring was not unjust." "Your pupil of last Spring was a child and a duffer, Mr. Vernon, as I said before. But she is grateful to you for one thing no, two." "What's the other?" he asked swiftly. "Your drawing-lessons," she demurely answered. "Then what's the one?" "Good-bye," she said, and went down the steps to meet her aunt. He effaced himself behind a pillar. In spite of her new coldness, he could not believe that she would tell her aunt of the meeting. And he was right, though Betty's reasons were not his reasons. "What's the good?" she asked herself as she and her aunt walked across to their hotel. "He's going away to-morrow, and I shall never see him again. Well, I behaved beautifully, that's one thing. He must simply loathe me. So that's all right ! If he were stay- ing on in Paris, of course I would tell her." She believed this fully. He waited five minutes behind that pillar, and then had himself driven to the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, choosing as driver a man with a white hat, in strict accordance with the advice in Baedeker, though he had never read any of the works of that author. This new Betty, with the smart gown and the dis- tant manner, awoke at the same time that she con- tradicted his memories of the Betty of Long Barton. And he should not see her again. Of course he was not going to Vienna, but neither was he going to hang round the Hotel Bete, or to bribe Franz or filise to smuggle notes to Miss Betty. "It's never any use trying to join things on again," 102 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST he told himself. "As well try to mend a spider's web when you have put your boot through it. 'No diver brings up love again Dropped once * * In such cold seas!' But what has happened ? Why does she hate me so ? You acted very nicely, dear, but that wasn't indiffer- ence. It was hatred, if ever I've seen it. I wonder what it means? Another lover? No then she'd be sorry for me. It's something that belongs to me not another man's shadow. But what I shall never know. And she's prettier than ever, too. Oh, hang it!" His key turned in the lock, and on the door-mat shewed the white square of an envelope a note from the other woman, the one whose profile he had not re- membered. She was in Paris for a time. She had seen him at the Paix, had wondered whether he had his old rooms, had driven straight up on the chance of being able to leave this wasn't that devotion? and would he care to call for her at eight and they could dine somewhere and talk over old times? One familiar initial, that of her first name, curled in the corner and the card smelt of jasmine not of jasmine-scent in bot- tles, but of the real flower. He had never known how she managed it. Vernon was not fond of talking over old times, but Betty would be dining at the Hotel Bete some dull hole, no doubt; he had never heard of it. Well, he could not dine at the Bete, and after all one must dine somewhere. And the other woman had never bored him. That is a terrible weapon in the hands of a rival. And Betty had been most unjust. And what was Betty THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 103 to him, anyway? His thoughts turned to the Ameri- can girl who had sketched with him in Brittany that Summer. Ah, if she had not been whisked back to New York by her people, it would not now be a question of Betty or of the Jasmine lady. He took out Miss Van Tromp's portrait and sat looking at it : it was ad- mirable, the fearless poise of the head, the laughing eyes, the full pouting lips. Then Betty's face and the face of the Jasmine lady came between him and Miss Van Tromp. "Bah," he said, "smell, kiss, wear at last throw away. Never keep a rose till it's faded." A little tide of Breton memories swept through him. "Bah," he said again, "she was perfectly charming, but what is the use of charm, half the world away?" He pulled his trunk from the front of the fire-place, pushed up the iron damper, and made a little fire. He burned all Miss Van Tromp's letters, and her photo- graph but, from habit, or from gratitude, he kissed it before he burned it. "Now," said he as the last sparks died redly on the black embers, "the decks are cleared for action. Shall I sentimentalise about Betty cold, cruel, changed Betty or shall I call for the Jasmine lady ?" He did both, and the Jasmine lady might have found him dull. As it happened, she only found him distrait, and that interested her. "When we parted," she said, "it was I who was in tears. Now it's you. What is it?" "If I am in tears," he roused himself to say, "it is only because everything passes, 'tout lasse, tout passe, tout casse.' ' "What's broken now?" she asked; "another heart? Oh, yes! you broke mine all to little, little bits. But 104 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST I've mended it. I wanted frightfully to see you to thank you ! "This is a grateful day for women," thought Ver- non, looking the interrogatory. "Why, for showing me how hearts are broken," she explained; "it's quite easy when you know how, and it's a perfectly delightful game. I play it myself now, and I can't imagine how I ever got on before I learned the rules." "You forget," he said, smiling. "It was you who broke my heart. And it's not mended yet." "That's very sweet of you. But really, you know, I'm very glad it was you who broke my heart, and not anyone else. Because, now it's mended, that gives us something to talk about. We have a past. That's really what I wanted to tell you. And that's such a bond, isn't it? When it really is past dead, you know, no nonsense about cataleptic trances, but stone dead." "Yes," he said, "it is a link. But it isn't the past for me, you know. It can never " She held up a pretty jewelled hand. "Now, don't," she said. "That's just what you don't understand. All that's out of the picture. I know you too well. Just realize that I'm the only nice woman you know who doesn't either expect you to make love to her in the future or hate you for having done it in the past, and you'll want to see me every day. Think of the novelty of it." "I do and I do," said he, "and I won't protest any more while you're in this mood. Bear with me if I seem idiotic to-night I've been burning old letters, and that always makes me like a funeral." "Old letters mine?" "I burned yours long ago." THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 105 "And it isn't two years since we parted ! How many have there been since?" "Is this the Inquisition or is it Durand's?" "It's somewhere where we both are," she said, with- out a trace of sentiment ; "that's good enough for me. Do you know I've been married since I saw you last? And left a widow in a short three months it all hap- pened. And well I'm not very clever, as you know, but can you imagine what it is like to be married to a man who doesn't understand a single word you say, unless it's about the weather or things to eat? No, don't look shocked. He was a good fellow, and very happy till the motor accident took him and left me this." She shewed a scar on her smooth arm. "What a woman it is for surprises ! So he was very happy? But of course he was." "Yes, of course, as you say. I was a model wife. I wore black for a whole year too !" "Why did you marry him?" "Well, at the time I thought you might hear of it and be disappointed, or hurt, or something." "So I am," said Vernon with truth. "You needn't be," said she. "You'll find me much nicer now I don't want to disappoint you or hurt you, but only to have a good time, and there's no nonsense about love to get in the way, and spoil everything." "So you're But this isn't proper! Here am I din- ing with a lady and I don't even know her name !" "I know I wouldn't put it to the note. Didn't that single initial arouse your suspicions ? Her name ? Her title if you please! I married Harry St. Craye. You remember how we used to laugh at him together." io6 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "That little I beg your pardon, Lady St. Craye/' "Yes," she said, "De mortuis nil nisi bonum : of the dead nothing but the bones. If he had lived he would certainly have beaten me. Here's to our new friend- ship!" "Our new friendship !" he repeated, raising his glass and looking in her eyes. Lady St. Craye looked very beautiful, and Betty was not there. In fact, just now there was no Betty. He went back to his room humming a song of Yvette Guilbert's. There might have been no flower- ing May, no buttercup meadows in all the world, for any thought of memory that he had of them. And Betty was a thousand miles away. That was at night. In the morning Betty was at the Hotel Bete, and the Hotel Bete was no longer a petty little hotel which he did not know and never should know. For the early post brought him a letter which said: "I am in Paris for a few days and should like to see you if you can make it convenient to call at my hotel on Thursday." This was Tuesday. The letter was signed with the name of the uncle from whom Vernon had expectations, and at the head of the letter was the address : "Hotel Bete, Cite de Retraite, Rue Boissy d' Anglais." "Now bear witness !" cried Vernon, appealing to the Universe, "bear witness that this is not my fault!" CHAPTER IX. THE OPPORTUNITY. Vernon in those two days decided that he did not wish to see Betty again. She was angry with him, and, though he never for an instant distrusted his power to dissipate the cloud, he felt that the lifting of it would leave him and her in that strong light wherein the frail flower of sentiment must wither and perish. Explica- tions were fatal to the delicate mystery, the ethereal half-lights, that Vernon loved. Above all things he detested the trap dit. Already a mood of much daylight was making him blink and shrink. He saw himself as he was or nearly and the spectacle did not please him. The thought of Lady St. Craye was the only one that seemed to make for any sort of complacency. The thought of Temple rankled oddly. "He likes me, and he dislikes himself for liking me. Why does he like me? Why does anyone like me? I'm hanged if I know !" This was the other side of his mood of most days, when the wonder seemed that everyone should not like him. Why shouldn't they? Ordinarily he was hanged if he knew that. He had expected a note from Lady St. Craye to fol- low up his dinner with her. He knew how a woman rarely resists the temptation to write to the man in 107 io8 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST whom she is interested, even while his last words are still ringing in her ears. But no note came, and he concluded that Lady St. Craye was not interested. This reassured while it piqued. The Hotel Bete is very near the Madeleine, and very near the heart of Paris of gay Paris, that is, yet it might have been a hundred miles from anywhere. You go along the Rue Boissy, and stopping at a gateway you turn into a dreary paved court, which is the Cite de la Retraite. Here the doors of the Hotel Bete open before you like the portals of a mausoleum. There is no greeting from the Patronne; your arrival gives rise to no pleasant welcoming bustle. The concierge re- ceives you, and you see at once that her cheerful smile is assumed. No one could really be cheerful at the Hotel Bete. Vernon felt as though he was entering a family vault of the highest respectability when he passed through its silent hall and enquired for Mr. James Vernon. Monsieur Vernon was out. No, he had charged no one with a billet for monsieur. Monsieur Vernon would doubtless return for the dejeuner; it was certain that he would return for the diner. Would Monsieur wait? Monsieur waited, in a little stiff salon with glass doors, prim furniture, and an elaborately ornamental French clock. It was silent, of course. One wonders sometimes whether ornamental French Ormolu clocks have any works, or are solid throughout. For no one has ever seen one of them going. There were day-old English papers on the table, and the New York Herald. Through the glass doors he could see everyone Who came in or went out. And he saw no one. There was a stillness as of the tomb. THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 109 Even the waiter, now laying covers for the dejeuner, wore list slippers and his movements were silent as a heron's ghost-gray flight. He came to the glass door presently. "Did Monsieur breakfast?" Vernon was not minded to waste two days in the pursuit of uncles. Here he was, and here he stayed, till Uncle James should appear. Yes, decidedly, Monsieur breakfasted. He wondered where the clients of the hotel had hidden themselves. Were they all dead, or merely sight-seeing? As his watch shewed him the approach of half-past twelve he found himself listening for the tramp of approaching feet, the rustle of returning skirts. And still all was silent as the grave. The sudden summoning sound of a bell roused him from a dreamy wonder as to whether Betty and her aunt had already left. If not, should he meet them at dejeuner? The idea of the possible meeting amused more than it interested him. He crossed the hall and entered the long bare salle a manger. By Heaven he was the only guest ! A cover was laid for him only no, at a distance of half the table for another. Then Betty and her aunt had gone. Well, so much the better. He unfolded his table-napkin. In another moment, doubtless, Uncle James would appear to fill the vacant place. But in another moment the vacant place was filled and by Betty Betty alone, unchaperoned, and brist- ling with hostility. She bowed very coldly, but she was crimson to the ears. He rose and carne to her holding out his hand. i io THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST With the waiter looking on, Betty had to give hers, but she gave it in a way that said very plainly : "I am very surprised and not at all pleased to see you here." "This is a most unexpected pleasure," he said very distinctly, and added the truth about his uncle. "Has Monsieur Vernon yet returned ?" he asked the waiter who hovered anxiously near. "No, Monsieur was not yet of return." "So you see," his look answered the speech of her hand, "it is not my doing in the least." "I hope your aunt is well," he went on, the waiter handing baked eggs the while. "Quite well, thank you," said Betty. "And how is your wife? I ought to have asked yesterday, but I forgot." "My wife?" "Oh, perhaps you aren't married yet. Of course my father told me of your engagement." She crumbled bread and smiled pleasantly. "So that's it," thought Vernon. "Fool that I was to forget it!" "I am not married," he said coldly, "nor have I ever been engaged to be married." And he ate eggs stolidly wondering what her next move would be. It was one that surprised him. For she leaned towards him and said in a perfectly new voice : "Couldn't you get Franz to move you a little more this way? One can't shout across these acres of table- cloth, and I've heaps of things to tell you." He moved nearer, and once again he wronged Betty by a mental shrinking. Was she really going to own that she had resented the news of his engagement ? She I -t^m>j Ah, don't be cross! ' she said THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST in was really hopeless. He began to bristle defensively. "Anything you care to tell me will of course be of the greatest possible interest," he was beginning, but Betty interrupted him. "Ah, don't be cross!" she said. "I know I was per- fectly horrid yesterday, but I own I was rather hurt." "Hold back," he adjured her, inwardly, "for Heav- en's sake, hold back!" "You see," she went on, "you and I were such good friends you'd been so kind and you told me you talked to me about things you didn't talk of to other people, and when I thought you'd told my step-father a secret of yours that you'd never told me, of course I felt hurt anyone would have." "I see," said he, beginning to. "Of course I never dreamed that he'd lied, and even now I don't see " Then suddenly she did see and crimsoned again. "He didn't lie," said Vernon carefully, "it was I. But I would never have told him anything that I wouldn't have told you nor half that I did tell you." The waiter handed pale meat. "Yes, the scenery in Brittany is most charming; I did some good work there. The people are so primi- tive and delightful too." The waiter withdrew, and Betty said: "How do you mean he didn't lie?" "The fact is," said Vernon, "he he did not under- stand our friendship in the least. I imagine friendship was not invented when he was young. It's a tiresome subject, Miss Desmond; let's drop it shall we?" "If you like," said she, chilly as December. "Oh, well then, just let me say it was done for your sake, Miss Desmond. He had no idea that two people ii2 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST should have any interests in common except except matters of the heart, and the shortest way to convince him was to tell him that my heart was elsewhere. I don't like lies, but there are some people who insist on lies nothing else will convince them of the truth. Here comes some abhorrent preparation of rice. How goes it with art?" "I have been working very hard," she said, "but every day I seem to know less and less." "Oh, that's all right! It's only that every day one knows more and more of how little one does know. You'll have to pass many milestones before you pass out of that state. Do they always feed you like this here?" "Some days it's custard," said Betty, "but we've only been here a week." "We're friends again now, aren't we?" he ques- tioned suddenly. "Yes oh, yes!" "Then I may ask questions. I want to hear what you've been doing since we parted, and where you've been, and how you come to Paris and where your aunt is, and what she'll say to me when she comes in." "She likes you," said Betty, "and she won't come in, but Madame Gautier will. Aunt Julia went off this morning she couldn't delay any longer because of catching the P. & O. at Brindisi ; and I'm to wait here till Madame Gautier comes at three. Auntie came all the way back from America to see whether I was happy here. She is a dear!" "And who is Madame Gautier? Is she also a dear? But let's have our coffee in the salon and tell me everything from the beginning." "Yes," said Betty, "oh, yes!" THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 113 But the salon window was darkened by a passing shape. "My uncle, bless him!" said Vernon. "I must go. See, here's my card ! Won't you write and tell me all about everything? You will, won't you?" "Yes, but you musn't write to me. Madame Gautier opens all our letters, and friendships weren't invented when she was young either. Good-bye." Vernon had to go towards the strong English voice that was filling the hall with its inquiries for "Ung Mossoo ung mossoo Anglay qui avoir certainmong etty icy ce mattan." Five minutes later Betty saw two figures go along the pavement on the other side of the decorous em- broidered muslin blinds which, in the unlikely event of any happening in the Cite de la Retraite, ensure its not being distinctly seen by those who sojourn at the Hotel Bete. Betty instantly experienced that feminine longing which makes women write to lovers or friends from whom they have but now parted, and she was weaker than Lady St. Craye. There was nothing to do. Her trunks were packed. She had before her two hours, or nearly, of waiting for Madame Gautier. So she wrote, and this is the letter, erasures and all. Vernon, when he got it, was most interested in the erasures here given in italics. Dear Mr. Vernon : I am very glad we are good friends again, and I should like to tell you everything that has happened. (After you, after he when my step-father}. After the last time I saw you (7 was very unhappy be- cause I wanted to go to Paris} I was very anxious to go to Paris because of what you had said. My aunt ii 4 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST came down and was very kind. (She told me) She persuaded my step-father to let me go. I think (we) he was glad to get rid of me, for (somehow) he never did care about me, any more than I did about him. There are a great many (other) things that he does not understand. Of course I was wild with joy and thought of nothing but (what you} work, and my aunt brought me over. But I did not see anything of Paris then. We went straight on to Joinville where Madame Gautier has a villa, and (we) my aunt left me there, and went to Norway. It was all very strange at first, but I liked it. Madame Gautier is very strict ; it was like being at school. Sometimes I almost (for- got) fancied that I was at school again. There were three other girls besides me, and we had great fun. The Professor was very nice and encouraging. He is very old. So is everybody who comes to the house (but) it (was) is jolly, because when there are four of you everything is so interesting. We used to have picnics in the woods, and take it in turn to ride in the donkey-cart. And there were musical evenings with the Pastor and the Avocat and their wives. It was very amusing sometimes. Madame Gautier had let her Paris flat, so we stayed at Joinville till a week ago, and then my Aunt walked in one day and took me to Paris for a week. I did enjoy that. And now aunt has gone, and Madame Gautier is taking the inventory and getting the keys, and presently she will come for me, I shall go with her to the Rue Vaugirard, Number 62. It will be very nice seeing the other girls again and telling them all about (everything) my week in Paris. I am so sorry that I shall not have the pleasure of seeing you again, but I am glad we met because I THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 115 do not like to think my friends do not trust me. Yours sincerely, BETTY DESMOND. That was the letter which Betty posted. But the first letter she wrote was quite different. It began : "You don't know, you never will know what it is to me to know that you did not deceive me. My dear friend, my only friend! And how I treated you yes- terday! And how nobly you forgave me. I shall see you again. I must see you again. No one else has ever understood me." And so on to the "True and con- stant friend Betty." She burned this letter. "The other must go," she said, "that's the worst of life. If I sent the one that's really written as I feel he'd think I was in love with him or some nonsense. But a child who was just in two syllables might have written the other. So that's all right." She looked at her watch. The same silver watch with which she had once crossed the hand of one who told her fortune. "How silly all that was !" she said. "I have learned wisdom now. Nearly half-past three. I never knew Madame late before." And now Betty began to watch the windows for the arrival of her chaperone; and four o'clock came, and five, but no Madame Gautier. She went out at last and asked to see the Patronne, and to her she explained in a French whose fluency out-ran its correctness, that a lady was to have called for her at three. It was now a quarter past five. What did Madame think she should do? Madame was lethargic and uninterested. She had n6 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST no idea. She could not advise. Probably Mademoi- selle would do well to wait always. The concierge was less aloof. But without doubt Madame, Mademoiselle's friend had forgotten the hour. She would arrive later, cer- tainly. If not, Mademoiselle could stay the night at the hotel, where a young lady would be perfectly well, and go to Madame her friend in the morning. But Betty was not minded to stay the night alone at the Hotel Bete. For one thing she had very little money, save that in the fat envelope addressed to Madame Gautier which her aunt had given her. It contained, she knew, the money to pay for her board and lessons during the next six months, for the elder Miss Desmond was off to India, Japan and Thibet, and her horror of banks and cheques made her very down- right in the matter of money. That in the envelope was all Betty had, and that was Maclame Gautier's. But the other part of the advice to go to Madame Gautier's in the morning? If in the morning, why not now? She decided to go now. No one opposed the idea much. Only Franz seemed a little disturbed and the concierge tepidly urged patience. But Betty was fretted by waiting. Also she knew that Vernon and his uncle might return at any mo- ment. And it would perhaps be awkward for him to find her there she would not for the world cause him a moment's annoyance. Besides he might think she had waited on the chance of seeing him again. That was not to be borne. "I will return and take my trunks," she said; and a carriage was called. There was something very exhilarating in driving through the streets of Paris, alone, in a nice little car- riage with fat pneumatic tires. The street lamps were alight, and the shops not yet closed. Almost every house seemed to be a shop. "I wonder where all the people live/' said Betty. The Place de la Concorde delighted her with its many lamps and its splendid space. "How glorious it would be to live alone in Paris," she thought, "be driven about in cabs just when one liked and where one liked ! Oh, I am tired of being a school-girl ! I suppose they won't let me be grown up till I'm so old I shall wish I was a school-girl again." She loved the river with its reflected lights, but it made her shudder, too. "Of course I shall never be allowed to see the Morgue," she said; "they won't let me see anything real. Even this little teeny tiny bit of a drive, I dare- say it's not comme il faut ! I do hope Madame won't be furious. She couldn't expect me to wait forever. Perhaps, too, she's ill, and no one to look after her. Oh, I'm sure I'm right to go." The doubt, however, grew as the carriage jolted through narrower streets, and when it drew up at an open carriage-door, Betty jumped out, paid the coach- man, and went in quite prepared to be scolded. She went through the doorway and stood looking for the list of names such as are set at the foot of the stairs leading to flats in London. There was no such list. From a lighted doorway on the right came a babel of shrill, high-pitched voices, Betty looked in at the door and the voices ceased. "Pardon, Madame," said Betty. "I seek Madame Gautier." n8 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST Everyone in the crowded stuffy lamplit little room drew a deep breath. "Mademoiselle is without doubt one of Madame's young ladies?" Perhaps it was the sudden hushing of the raised voices, perhaps it was something in the flushed faces that all turned towards her. To her dying day Betty will never know why she did not say "Yes." What she did say was : "I am a friend of Madame's. Is she at home?" "No, Mademoiselle, she is not at home; she will never be at home more, the poor lady. She is dead, Mademoiselle an accident, one of those cursed auto- mobiles ran over her at her very door, Mademoiselle, before our eyes." Betty felt sick. "Thank you," she said, "it is very sudden." "Will Mademoiselle leave her name?" the concierge asked curiously. "The brother of Madame, he is in the commerce at Nantes. A telegramme has been sent he arrives to-morrow morning. He will give Made- moiselle details." Again Betty said what she had not intended to say. She said : "Miss Brown." Perhaps the brother in the com- merce vaguely suggested the addition, "of Manches- ter." Then she turned away, and got out of the light into the friendly dusk of the street. "Tiens, but it is droll," said the concierge's friend, "a young girl, and all alone like that." "Oh, it is nothing," said the concierge; "the Eng- lish are mad all ! Their young girls run the streets at all hours, and the Devil guards them." THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 119 Betty stood in the street. She could not go back to that circle of harpy faces, all eagerly tearing to pieces the details of poor old Madame Gautier's death. She must be alone think. She would have to write home. Her father would come to fetch her. Her aunt was beyond the reach of appeal. Her artist-life would be over. Everything would be over. She would be dragged back to the Parishing and the Mothers' meet- ings and the black-cotton-covered books and the Sun- day School. And she would never have lived in Paris at all ! She walked down the street. "I can't think I must think! I'll have this night to myself to think in, anyway. I'll go to some cheap hotel. I have enough for that." She hailed a passing carriage, drove to the Hotel Bete, took her luggage to the Gare du Nord, and left it there. Then as she stood on the station step, she felt some- thing in her hand. It was the fat letter addressed to Madame Gautier. And she knew it was fat with bank notes. She unfastened her dress and thrust the letter into her bosom, buttoning the dress carefully over it. "But I won't go to my hotel yet," she said. "I won't even look for one. I'll see Paris a bit first." She hailed a coachman. "Go," she said, "to some restaurant in the Latin Quarter where the art students eat." "And I'm alone in Paris, and perfectly free," said Betty, leaning back on the cushions. "No, I won't tell my coachman to drive along the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, wherever that is. Oh, it is glorious to be perfectly free. Oh, poor Madame Gautier! Oh dear, 120 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST oh dear!" She held her breath and wondered why she could feel sorry. "You are a wretch," she said, "poor Madame was kind to you in her hard narrow way, and now is she lying cold and dead, all broken up by that cruel motor car." The horror of the picture helped by Betty's excite- ment brought the tears and she encouraged them. "It is something to find one is not entirely heartless," she said at last, drying her eyes, as the carriage drew up at a place where there were people and voices and many lights. CHAPTER X. SEEING LIFE. The thoughts of the two who loved her were with Betty that night. The aunt, shaken, jolted, enduring much in the Paris, Lyons and Mediterranean express thought fondly of her. "She's a nice little thing. I must take her about a bit," she mused, and even encouraged her fancy to play with the idea of a London season a thing it had not done for years. The Reverend Cecil, curtains drawn and lamp alight, paused to think of her even in the midst of his first thorough examination of his newest treasure in Seventeenth Century Tracts, "The Man Mouse baited and trapped for nibbling the margins of Eugenius Phil- alethes, being an assault on Henry Moore." It was bound up with, "The Second Wash, or the Moore scoured again," and a dozen others. A dumpy octavo, in brown leather, he had found it propping a beer bar- rel in the next village. "Dear Lizzie! I wonder if she will ever care for really important things. There must be treasures upon 122 THE INCOMPLETE AIvIORIST treasures in those boxes on the French quays that one reads about. But she never would learn to know one type from another." He studied the fire thoughtfully. "I wonder if she does understand how much she is to me," he thought. "Those are the things that are better unsaid. At least I always think so when she's here. But all these months I wonder whether girls like you to say things, or to leave them to be under- stood. It is more delicate not to say them, perhaps." Then his thoughts went back to the other Lizzie, about whom he had never felt these doubts. He had loved her, and had told her so. And she had told him her half of the story in very simple words and most simply, and without at all "leaving things to be under- stood" they had planned the future that never was to be. He remembered the day when sitting over the drawing-room fire, and holding her dear hand he had said: "This is how we shall sit when we are old and gray, dearest." It had seemed so impossibly far-off then. And she had said : "I hope we shall die the same day, Cec." But this had not happened. And he had said : "And we shall have such a beautiful life doing good, and working for God, and bringing up our chil- dren in the right way. Oh, Lizzie, it's very wonderful to think of that happiness, isn't it?" And she had laid her head on his shoulder and whis- pered : "I hope we shall have a little girl, dear." And he had said: "I shall call her Elizabeth, after my dear wife." THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 123 " She must have eyes like yours though." "She will be exactly like both of us," he had said, and they sat hand in hand, and talked innocently, like two children, of the little child that was never to be. He had wanted them to put on her tombstone, Lizzie daughter of and affianced wife of Cecil Under- wood, but her mother had said that there there was no marrying or giving in marriage. In his heart the Rev- erend Cecil had sometimes dared to hope that that text had been misunderstood. To him his Lizzie had al- ways been "as the angels of God in Heaven." Then came the long broken years, and then the little girl Elizabeth, his step-child. The pent-up love of all his life spent itself on her: a love so fond, so tender, so sacred that it seemed only self-respecting to hide it a little from the world by a mask of coldness. And Betty had never seen anything but the mask. "I think, when I see her, I will tell her all about my Lizzie," he said. "I wonder if she knows what the house is like without her. But of course she doesn't, or she would have asked to come home, long ago. I wonder whether she misses me very much. Madame Gautier is kind, she says ; but no stranger can make a home, as love can make it." Meanwhile Betty dining alone at a restaurant in the Boulevard St. Michel, within a mile of the Serpent, ordered what she called a nice dinner it was mostly vegetables and sweet things and ate it with appetite, looking about her. The long mirrors, the waiters were like the ones in London restaurants, but the people who ate there they were different. Everything was much shabbier, yet much gayer. Shopkeeping-looking men were dining with their wives ; some of them had a child, 124 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST napkin under chin, solemnly struggling with a big soup spoon or upturning on its little nose a tumbler of weak red wine and water. There were students she knew them by their slouched hats and beards a day old dining by twos and threes and fours. No one took any more notice of Betty than was shewn by a careless glance or two. She was very quietly dressed. Her hat even was rather an unbecoming brown thing. When she had eaten, she ordered coffee, and began to try to think, but thinking was difficult with the loud voices and the laughter, and the clink of glasses and the wait- ers' hurrying transits. And at the back of her mind was a thought waiting for her to think it. And she was afraid. So presently she paid her bill, and went out, and found a tram, and rode on the top of it through the lighted streets, on the level of the first floor windows and the brown leaves of the trees in the Boulevards, and went away and away through the heart of Paris ; and still all her mind could do nothing but thrust off, with both hands, the thought that was pushing forward towards her thinking. When the tram stopped at its journey's end she did not alight, but paid for, and made, the return journey, and found her feet again in the Boulevard St. Michel. Of course, she had read her Trilby, and other works dealing with the Latin Quarter. She knew that in that quarter everyone is not respectable, but everyone is kind. It seemed good to her to go to a cafe, to sit at a marble topped table, and drink not the strange liqueurs which men drink in books, but homely hot milk, such as some of the other girls there had before them. It would be perfectly simple, as well as interest- ing, to watch the faces of the students, boys and girls, THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 125 and when she found a nice girl-face, to speak to it, asking for the address of a respectable hotel. So she walked up the wide, tree-planted street feel- ing very Parisian indeed, as she called it the "Boule Miche" to herself. And she stopped at the first Cafe she came to, which happened to be the Cafe d'Har- court. She did not see its name, and if she had it would naturally not have conveyed any idea to her. The hour was not yet ten, and the Cafe d'Harcourt was very quiet. There were not a dozen people at the little tables. Most of them were women. It would be easy to ask her little questions, with so few people to stare and wonder if she addressed a stranger. She sat down, and ordered her hot milk and, with a flutter, awaited it. This was life. And to-morrow she must telegraph to her step-father, and everything would end in the old round of parish duties; all her hopes and dreams would be submerged in the heavy morass of meeting mothers. The thought leapt up. Betty hid her eyes and would not look at it. Instead, she looked at the other people seated at the tables the women. They were laughing and talking among themselves. One or two looked at Betty and smiled with frank friendliness. Betty smiled back, but with embarrassment. She had heard that French ladies of rank and fashion would as soon go out without their stockings as without their paint, but she had not sup- posed that the practice extended to art students. And all these ladies were boldly painted no mere soupc,on of carmine and pearl powder, but good solid master- pieces in body colour, black, white and red. She smiled in answer to their obvious friendliness, but she did not ask them for addresses. A Handsome 126 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST black-browed scowling woman sitting alone frowned at her. She felt quite hurt. Why should anyone want to be unkind? Men selling flowers, toy rabbits, rattling cardboard balls, offered their wares up and down the row of tables. Betty bought a bunch of fading late roses and thought, with a sudden sentimentality that shocked her, of the monthly rose below the window at home. It always bloomed well up to Christmas. Well, in two days she would see that rose-bush. The trams rattled down the Boulevard, carriages rolled by. Every now and then one of these would stop, and a couple would alight. And people came on foot. The cafe was filling up. But still none of the women seemed to Betty exactly the right sort of person to know exactly the right sort of hotel. Of course she knew from books that Hotels keep open all night, but she did not happen to have read any book which told of the reluctance of respectable hotels to receive young women without luggage, late in the evening. So it seemed to her that there was plenty of time. A blonde girl with jet black brows and eyes like big black beads was leaning her elbows on her table and talking to her companions, two tourist-looking Ger- mans in loud checks. They kept glancing at Betty, and it made her nervous to know that they were talk- ing about her. At last her eyes met the eyes of the girl, who smiled at her and made a little gesture of invita- tion to her, to come and sit at their table. Betty out of sheer embarrassment might have gone, but just at that moment the handsome scowling woman rose, rus- tled quickly to Betty, knocking over a chair in her pas- sage, held out a hand, and said in excellent English : THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 127 "How do you do?" Betty gave her hand, but "I don't remember you," said she. "May I join you?" said the woman sitting down. She wore black and white and red, and she was fright- fully smart, Betty thought. She glanced at the others the tourists and the blonde; they were no longer looking at her. "Look here," said the woman, speaking low, "I don't know you from Adam, of course, but I know you're a decent girl. For God's sake go home to your friends! I don't know what they're about to let you out alone like this." "I'm alone in Paris just now," said Betty. "Good God in Heaven, you little fool ! Get back to your lodging. You've no business here." "I've as much business as anyone else," said Betty. "I'm an artist, too, and I want to see life." "You've not seen much yet," said the woman with a laugh that Betty hated to hear. "Have you been brought up in a convent ? You an artist ! Look at all of us! Do you need to be told what our trade is?" "Don't," said Betty; "oh, don't." "Go home," said the woman, "and say your prayers I suppose you do say your prayers ? and thank God that it isn't your trade too." "I don't know what you mean," said Betty. "Well then, go home and read your Bible. That'll tell you the sort of woman it is that stands about the corners of streets, or sits at the Cafe d'Harcourt. What are your people about?" "My father's in England," said Betty; "he's a clergy- man." "I generally say mine was," said the other, "but I 128 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST won't to you, because you'd believe me. My father was church organist, though. And the Vicarage peo- ple were rather fond of me. I used to do a lot of Par- ish work." She laughed again. Betty laid a hand on the other woman's. "Couldn't you go home to your father or something?" she asked feebly. "He's cursed me forever Put it all down in black and white a regular commination service. It's you that have got to go home, and do it now, too." She shook off Betty's hand and waved her own to a man who was passing. "Here,. Mr. Temple" The man halted, hesitated and came up to them. "Look here," said the black-browed woman, "look what a pretty flower I've found, and here of all places !" She indicated Betty by a look. The man looked too, and took the third chair at their table. Betty wished that the ground might open and cover her, but the Boule Miche asphalt is solid. The new-comer was tall and broad-shouldered, with a handsome, serious, boyish face, and fair hair. "She won't listen to me " "Oh, I did !" Betty put in reproachfully. "You talk to her like a father. Tell her where naughty little girls go who stay out late at the Cafe d'Harcourt fire and brimstone, you know. She'll un- derstand, she's a clergyman's daughter." "I really do think you'd better go home," said the new comer to Betty with gentle politeness. "I would, directly," said Betty, almost in tears, "but the fact is I haven't settled on a hotel, and I came to this cafe. I thought I could ask one of these art THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 129 students to tell me a good hotel, but so that's how it is." "I should think not," Temple answered the hiatus. Then he looked at the black-browed, scowling woman, and his look was very kind. "Nini and her German swine were beginning to be amiable," said the woman in an aside which Betty did not hear. "For Christ's sake take the child away, and put her safely for the night somewhere, if you have to ring up a Mother Superior or a Governesses' Aid So- ciety." "Right. I will." He turned to Betty. "Will you allow me," he said, "to find a carriage for you, and see you to a hotel?" "Thank you," said Betty. He went out to the curbstone and scanned the road for a passing carriage. "Look here," said the black-browed woman, turn- ing suddenly on Betty ; "I daresay you'll think it's not my place to speak oh, if you don't think so you will some day, when you're grown up, but look here. I'm not chaffing. It's deadly earnest. You be good. See? There's nothing else that's any good really." "Yes," said Betty, "I know. If you're not good you won't be happy." "There you go," the other answered almost fiercely ; "it's always the way. Everyone says it copybooks and Bible and everything and no one believes it till they've tried the other way, and then it's no use believ- ing anything." "Oh, yes, it is," said Betty comfortingly, "and you're so kind. I don't know how to thank you. Being kind is being good too, isn't it?" "Well, you aren't always a 'devil^ even if you are in i 3 o THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST hell. I wish I could make you understand all the things I didn't understand when I was like you. But nobody can. That's part of the hell. And you don't even understand half I'm saying." "I.think I do," said Betty. "Keep straight," the other said earnestly; "never mind how dull it is. I used to think it must be dull in Heaven. God knows it's dull in the other place ! Look, he's got a carriage. You can trust him just for once, but as a rule I'd say 'Don't you trust any of them they're all of a piece.' Good-bye; you're a nice little thing." "Good-bye," said Betty; "oh, good-bye! You are kind, and good! People can't all be good the same way," she added, vaguely and seeking to comfort. "Women can," said the other, "don't you 'make any mistake. Good-bye." She watched the carriage drive away, and turned to meet the spiteful chaff of Nini and her German friends. "Now," said Mr. Temple, as soon as the wheels be- gan to revolve, "perhaps you will tell me how you come to be out in Paris alone at this hour." Betty stared at him coldly. "I shall be greatly obliged if you can recommend me a good hotel," she said. "I don't even know your name," said he. "No," she answered briefly. "I cannot advise you unless you will trust me a lit- tle," he said gently. "You are very kind, but I have not yet asked for anyone's advice." "I am sorry if I have offended you," he said, "but I only wish to be of service to you." " She stared at him coldly " THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 131 "Thank you very much," said Betty : "the only ser- vice I want is the name of a good hotel." "You are unwise to refuse my help," he said. "The place where I found you shews that you are not to be trusted about alone." "Look here," said Betty, speaking very fast, "I dare say you mean well, but it isn't your business. The lady I was speaking to " "That just shews," he said. "She was very kind, and I like her. But I don't in- tend to be interfered with by any strangers, however well they mean." He laughed for the first time, and she liked him bet- ter when she had heard the note of his laughter. "Please forgive me," he said. "You are quite right. Miss Conway is very kind. And I really do want to help you, and I don't want to be impertinent. May I speak plainly?" "Of course." "Well the Cafe d'Harcourt is not a place for a re- spectable girl to go to." "I gathered that," she answered quietly. "I won't go there again." "Have you quarreled with your friends?" he per- sisted; "have you run away?" "No," said Betty, and on a sudden inspiration, add- ed : "I'm very, very tired. You can ask me any ques- tions you like in the morning. Now : will you please tell the man where to go?" The dismissal was unanswerable. He took out his card-case and scribbled on a card. "Where is your luggage?" he asked. "Not here," she said briefly. "I thought not," he smiled again. "I am discern- 132 ing, am I not? Well, perhaps you didn't know that respectable hotels prefer travellers who have luggage. But they know me at this place. I have said you are my cousin," he added apologetically. He stopped the carriage. "Hotel de 1'Unicorne," he told the driver and stood bareheaded till she was out of sight. The Thought came out and said : "There will be an end of Me if you see that well-meaning person again." Betty would not face the Thought, but she was roused to protect it. She stood up and touched the coachman on the arm. "Go back to the Cafe d'Harcourt," she said. "I have forgotten something. That was why, when Temple called, very early, at the Hotel de 1'Unicorne he heard that his cousin had not arrived there the night before Had not, indeed, arrived at all. He shrugged his shoulders. "It's a pity," he said. "Certainly she had run away from home. I suppose I frightened her. I was always a clumsy brute with women." CHAPTER XL THE THOUGHT. The dark-haired woman was still ably answering the chaff of Nini and the Germans. And her face was not the face she had shewn to Betty. Betty came quietly behind her and touched her shoulder. She leapt in her chair and turned white under the rouge. "What the devil! You shouldn't do that!" she said roughly; "You frightened me out of my wits." "I'm so sorry," said Betty, who was pale too. "Come away, won't you ? I want to talk to you." "Your little friend is charming," said one of the mien in thick German-French. "May I order for her a bock or a cerises ?" "Do come," she urged. "Let's walk," she said. "What's the matter? Where's young Temple? Don't tell me he's like all the others." "He meant to be kind," said Betty, "but he asked a lot of questions, and I don't want to know him. I like you better. Isn't there anywhere we can be quiet, and talk? I'm all alone here in Paris, and I do want help. And I'd rather you'd help me than anyone else. Can't I come home with you?" "No you can't." "Well then, will you come with me? not to the hotel he told me of, but to some other you must know of one." 133 I 34 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "What will you do if I don't?" "I don't know," said Betty very forlornly, "but you will, won't you. You don't know how tired I am. Come with me, and then in the morning we can talk. Do do." The other woman took some thirty or forty steps in silence. Then she asked abruptly : "Have you plenty of money?" "Yes, lots." "And you're an artist?" "Yes at least I'm a student." Again the woman reflected. At last she shrugged her shoulders and laughed. "Set a thief to catch a thief," she said. "I shall make a dragon of a chaperon, I warn you. Yes, I'll come, just for this one night, but you'll have to pay the hotel bill." "Of course," said Betty. "This is an adventure! Where's your luggage?" "It's at the station, but I want you to promise not to tell that Temple man a word about me. I don't want to see him again. Promise." "Queer child. But I'll promise. Now look here : if I go into a thing at all I go into it heart and soul ; so let's do the thing properly. W r e must have some lug- gage. I've got an old portmanteau knocking about. Will you wait for me somewhere while I get it?" "I'd rather not," said Betty, remembering the Ger- mans and Nini. "Well then, there'd be no harm for a few minutes. You can come with me. This is really rather a lark!" Five minutes' walking brought the two to a dark house. The woman rang a bell ; a latch clicked and a big door swung open. She grasped Betty's hand. THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 135 "Don't say a word," she said, and pulled her through. It was very dark. The other woman called out a name as they passed the door of the concierge, a name that was not Con- way, and her hand pulled Betty up flight after flight of steep stairs. On the fifth floor she opened a door with a key, and left Betty standing at the threshold till she had lighted a lamp. Then "Come in," she said, and shut the door and bolted it. The room was small and smelt of white rose scent; the looking-glass had a lace drapery fastened up with crushed red roses ; and there were voluminous lace and stuff curtains to bed and window. "Sit down," said the hostess. She took off her hat and pulled the scarlet flowers from it. She washed her face till it shewed no rouge and no powder, and the brown of lashes and brows was free from the black water-paint. She raked under the bed with a faded sunshade till she found an old brown portmanteau. Her smart black and white dress was changed for a black one, of a mode passee these three years. A gray chequered golf cape and the dulled hat completed the transformation. "How nice you look," said Betty. The other bundled some linen and brushes into the portmanteau. "The poor old Gladstone's very thin still," she said, and folded skirts ; "we must plump it out somehow." When the portmanteau was filled and strapped, they carried it down between them, in the dark, and got it out on to the pavement. "I am Miss Conway now," said the woman, "and we 136 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST will drive to the Hotel de Lille. I went there one Easter with my father." With the change in her dress a change had come over Miss Conway's voice. At the Hotel de Lille it was she who ordered the two rooms, communicating, for herself and her cousin, explained where the rest of the luggage was, and gave orders for the morning chocolate. "This is very jolly," said Betty, when they were alone. "It's like an elopement." "Exactly," said Miss Conway. "Good night." "It's rather like a dream, though. I shan't wake up and find you gone, shall I?" Betty asked anxiously. "No, no. We've all your affairs to settle in the morning." "And yours?" "Mine were settled long ago. Oh, I forgot I'm Miss Conway, at the Hotel de Lille. Yes, we'll settle my affairs in the morning, too. Good night, little girl." "Good night, Miss Conway." "They call me Lotty." "My name's Betty and look here, I can't wait till the morning." Betty clasped her hands, and seemed to be holding her courage between them. "I've come to Paris to study art, and I want you to come and live with me. I know you'd like it, and I've got heaps of money will you?" She spoke quickly and softly, and her face was flushed and her eyes bright. There was a pause. "You silly little duffer you silly dear little duffer." The other woman had turned away and was ringer- THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 137 ing the chains of an ormolu candlestick on the mantel- piece. Betty put an arm over her shoulders, "Look here," she said, "I'm not such a duffer as you think. I know people do dreadful things but they needn't go on doing them, need they?" "Yes, they need," said the other; "that's just it." Her fingers were still twisting the bronze chains. "And the women you talked about in the Bible they weren't kind and good, like you; they were just only horrid and not anything else. You told me to be good. Won't you let me help you? Oh, it does seem such cheek of me, but I never knew anyone before who I don't know how to say it. But I am so sorry, and I want you to be good, just as much as you want me to. Dear, dear Lottyl" "My name's Paula." "Paula dear, I wish I wasn't so stupid, but I know it's not your fault, and I know you aren't like that woman with the Germans." "I should hope not indeed," Paula was roused to flash back; "dirty little French gutter-cat." "I've never been a bit of good to anyone," said Betty, adding her other arm and making a necklace of the two round Paula's neck, "except to Parishioners perhaps. Do let me be a bit of good to you. Don't you think I could?" "You dear little fool!" said Paula gruffly. "Yes, but say yes you must ! I know you want to. I've got lots of money. Kiss me, Paula." "I won't! Don't kiss me! I won't have it! Go away," said the woman, clinging to Betty and return- ing her kisses. "Don't cry," said Betty gently. "We shall be ever 138 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST so happy. You'll see. Good night, Paula. Do you know I've never had a friend a girl-friend, I mean ?" "For God's sake hold your tongue, and go to bed! Good night." Betty, alone, faced at last, and for the first time, The Thought. But it had changed its dress when Miss Conway changed hers. It was no longer a Thought: it was a Resolution. Twin-born with her plan for saving her new friend was the plan for a life that should not be life at Long Barton. All the evening she had refused to face The Thought. But it had been shaping itself to something more defi- nite than thought. As a Resolution, a Plan, it now unrolled itself before her. She sat in the stiff arm-chair looking straight in front of her, and she saw what she meant to do. The Thought had been wise not to insist too much on recognition. Earlier in the evening it would have seemed merely a selfish temptation. Now it was an opportunity for a good and noble act. And Betty had always wanted so much to be noble and good. Here she was in Paris, alone. Her aunt, train-borne, was every moment further and further away. As for her step-father: "I hate him," said Betty, "and he hates me. He only let me come to get rid of me. And what good could I do at Long Barton compared with what I can do here? Any one can do Parish work. I've got the money Aunt left for Madame Gautier. Perhaps it's stealing. But is it? The money was meant to pay to keep me in Paris to study Art. And it's not as if I were staying altogether for selfish reasons there's Paula. I'm sure she has really a noble nature. And THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 139 it's not as if I were staying because He is in Paris. Of course, that would be really wrong. But he said he was going to Vienna. I suppose his uncle delayed him, but he'll certainly go. I'm sure it's right. I've learned a lot since I left home. I'm not a child now. I'm a woman, and I must do what I think is right. You know I must, mustn't I ?" She appealed to the Inward Monitor, but it refused to be propitiated. "It only seems not quite right because it's so unus- ual," she went on ; "that's because I've never been any- where or done anything. After all, it's my own life, and I have a right to live it as I like. My step-father has never written to Madame Gautier all these months. He won't now. It's only to tell him she has changed her address he only writes to me on Sunday nights. There's just time. And I'll keep the money, and when 'Aunt comes back I'll tell her everything. She'll under- stand." "Do you think so?" said the Inward Monitor. "Any way," said Betty, putting her foot down on the Inward Monitor, "I'm going to do it. If it's only for Paula's sake. We'll take rooms, and I'll go to a Studio, and work hard ; and I won't make friends with gentlemen I don't know, or anything silly, so there," she added defiantly. "Auntie left the money for me to study in Paris. If I tell my step-father that Madame Gautier is dead, he'll just fetch me home, and what'll become of Paula then?" Thus and thus, ringing the changes on resolve and explanation, her thoughts ran. A clock chimed mid- night. "Is it possible," she asked herself, "that it's not twelve hours since I was at the Hotel Bete talking to 140 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST Him? Well, I shall never see him again, I suppose. How odd that I don't feel as if I cared whether I did or not. I suppose what I felt about him wasn't real. It all seems so silly now. Paula is real, and all that I mean to do for her is real. He isn't." She prayed that night as usual, but her mind was made up, and she prayed outside a closed door. Next morning, when her chocolate came up, she carried it into the next room, and, sitting on the edge of her new friend's bed, breakfasted there. Paula seemed dazed when she first woke, but soon she was smiling and listening to Betty's plans. "How young you look," said Betty, "almost as young as me." "I'm twenty-five." "You don't look it with your hair in those pretty plaits, and your nightie. You do have lovely night- gowns." "I'll get up now," said Paula. "Look out I nearly upset the tray." Betty had carefully put away certain facts and la- belled them : "Not to be told to anyone, even Paula." No one was to know anything about Vernon. "There is nothing to know really," she told herself. No one was to know that she was alone in Paris without the knowl- edge of her relations. Lots of girls came to Paris alone to study art. She was just one of these. She found the lying wonderfully easy. It did not bring with it, either, any of the shame that lying should bring, but rather a sense of triumphant achieve- ment, as from a difficult part played excellently. She paid the hotel bill, and then the search for rooms began. "We must be very economical, you know," she said, THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 141 "but you won't mind that, will you? I think it will be rather fun." "It would be awful fun," said the other. "You'll go and work at the studio, and when you come home after your work I shall have cooked the dejeuner, and we shall have it together on a little table with a nice white cloth and a bunch of flowers on it." "Yes; and in the evening we'll go out, to concerts and things, and ride on the tops of trams. And on Sundays what does one do on Sundays?" "I suppose one goes to church," said Paula. "Oh, I think not when we're working so hard all the week. We'll go into the country." "We can take the river steamer and go to St. Cloud, or go out on the tram to Clamart the woods there are just exactly like the woods at home. What part of England do you live in?" "Kent," said Betty. "My home's in Devonshire," said Paula. It was a hard day : so many stairs to climb, so many apartments to see ! And all of them either quite beyond Betty's means, or else little stuffy places, filled to chok- ing point with the kind of furniture no one could bear to live with, and with no light, and no outlook except a blank wall a yard or two from the window. They kept to the Montparnasse quarter, for there, Paula said, were the best ateliers for Betty. They found a little restaurant, where only art students ate, and where one could breakfast royally for about a shilling. Betty looked with interest at the faces of the students, and wondered whether she should ever know any of them. Some of them looked interesting. A few were English, and fully half American. Then the weary hunt for rooms began again. 142 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST It was five o'clock before a concierge, unexpected amiable in face of their refusal of her rooms, asked whether they had tried Madame Bianchi's Madame Bianchi where the atelier was, and the students' meet- ings on Sunday evenings, Number 57 Boulevard Montparnasse. They tried it. One passes through an archway into a yard where the machinery, of a great laundry pulses half the week, .up some wide wooden stairs shallow, easy stairs and on the first floor are the two rooms. Betty drew a long breath when she saw them. They were lofty, they were airy, they were light. There was not much furniture, but what there was was good old carved armoires, solid divans and joy of joys in each room a carved oak, Seventeenth Century mantel- piece eight feet high and four feet deep. "I must have these rooms !" Betty whispered. "Oh, I could make them so pretty!" The rent of the rooms was almost twice as much as the sum they fixed on, and Paula murmured cau- tion. "Its no use," said Betty. "We'll live on bread and water if you like, but we'll live on it here" And she took the rooms. "I'm sure we've done right," she said as they drove off to fetch her boxes : "the rooms will be like a home, you see if they aren't. And there's a piano too. And Madame Bianchi, isn't she a darling ; Isn't she pretty and sweet and nice?" "Yes," said Paula thoughtfully; "it certainly is something that you've got rooms in the house of a woman like that." "And that ducky little kitchen! Oh, we shall have such fun, cooking our own meals ! You shall get the THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 143 dejeuner but I'll cook the dinner while you lie on the sofa and read novels 'like a real lady.' ' "Don't use that expression I hate it," said Paula sharply. "But the rooms are lovely, aren't they?" "Yes, it's a good place for you to be in I'm sure of that," said the other, musing again. When the boxes were unpacked, and Betty had pinned up a few prints and photographs and sketches and arranged some bright coloured Liberty scarves to cover the walls' more obvious defects left by the re- moval of the last tenant's decorations when flowers were on table and piano, the curtains drawn and the lamps lighted, the room did, indeed, look, "like a home." "We'll have dinner out to-night," said Paula, " and to-morrow we'll go marketing, and find you a studio to work at." "Why not here?" "That's an idea. Have you a lace collar you can lend me? This is not fit to be seen." Betty pinned the collar on her friend. "I believe you get prettier every minute," she said. "I must just write home and give them my address." She fetched her embroidered blotting-book. "It reminds one of bazaars," said Miss Conway. 57 Boulevard Montparnasse. My dear Father: This is our new address. Madame Gautier's ten- ant wanted to keep on her flat in the Rue de Vaugirard, so she has taken this one which is larger and very convenient, as it is close to many of the best studios. I think I shall like it very much. -It-is not decided yet where I am to study, but there is an Atelier in the House for ladies only, and I think it will be there, so 144 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST that I shall not have to go out to my lessons. I will write again as soon as we are more settled. We only moved in late this afternoon, so there is a lot to do. I hope you are quite well, and that everything is going on well in the Parish. I will certainly send some sketches for the Christmas sale. Madame Gautier does not wish me to go home for Christmas; she thinks it would interrupt my work too much. There is a new girl, a Miss Conway. I like her very much. With love, Yours affectionately, E. DESMOND. She was glad when that letter was written. It is harder to lie in writing than in speech, and the use of the dead woman's name made her shiver. "But I won't do things by halves," she said. "What's this?" Paula asked sharply. She had stopped in front of one of Betty's water colours. "That? Oh, I did it ages ago before I learned any- thing. Don't look at it." "But what is it?" "Oh, only our house at home." "I wonder," said Paula, "why all English Vicarages are exactly alike." "It's a Rectory," said Betty absently. "That ought to make a difference, but it doesn't, I haven't seen an English garden for four years." "Four years is a long time," said Betty. "You don't know how long," said the other. "And the garden's been going on just the same all the time. It seems odd, doesn't it ? Those hollyhocks the ones at the Vicarage at home are just like them. Come, let's go to dinner!" CHAPTER XII. THE RESCUE. When Vernon had read Betty's letter and holding it up to the light he was able to read the scratched-out words almost as easily as the others he decided that he might as well know where she worked, and one day, after he had called on Lady St. Craye, he found him- self walking along the Rue de Vaugirard. Lady St. Craye was charming. And she had been quite right when she had said that he would find a special charm in the companionship of one in whose heart his past love-making seemed to have planted no thorns. Yet her charm, by its very nature its finished elegance, its conscious authority made him think with the more interest of the unformed, immature grace of the other woman Betty, in whose heart he had not had the chance to plant either thorns or roses. How could he find out? Concierges are venal, but Vernon disliked base instruments. He would act boldly. It was always the best way. He would ask to see this Madame Gautier if Betty were present he must take his chance. It would be interesting to see whether she would commit herself to his plot by not recognizing him. If she did that Yet he hoped she wouldn't. If she did recognize him he would say that it was through Miss Desmond's relatives that he had heard of Madame Gautier. Betty could not contradict '45 II4 6 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST him. He would invent a niece whose parents wished to place her with Madame. Then he could ask as many questions as he liked, about hours and studios, and all the details of the life Betty led. It was a simple straight-forward design, and one that carried success in its pocket. No one could sus- pect anything. Yet at the very first step suspicion, or what looked like it, stared at him from the eyes of the concierge when he asked for Madame Gautier. "Monsieur is not of the friends of Madame?" she asked curiously. He knew better than to resent the curiosity. He explained that he desired to see Madame on business. "You will see her never," the woman said dramati- cally; "she sees no one any more." "Is it that she is ill?" "It is that she is dead, and the dead do not re- ceive, Monsieur." She laughed, and told the tale of death circumstantially, with grim relish of detail. "And the young ladies they have returned to their parents ?" "Ah, it is in the young ladies that Monsieur inter- ests himself? But yes. Madame's brother, who is in the Commerce of Nantes, he restored instantly the young ladies to their friends. One was already with her aunt." Vernon had money ready in his hand. "What was her name, Madame the young lady with the aunt?" "But I know not, Monsieur. She was a new young lady, who had been with Madame at her Villa I have not seen her. At the time of the regrettable accident THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST she was with her aunt, and doubtless remains there. Thank you, Monsieur. That is all I know." "Thank you, Madame. I am desolated to have dis- turbed you. Good day." And Vernon was in the street again. So Betty had never come to the Rue Vaugirard ! The aunt must somehow have heard the news perhaps she had called on the way to the train she had returned to the Bete and Betty now was Heaven alone knew where. Perhaps at Long Barton. Perhaps in Paris, with some other dragon. Vernon for a day or two made a point of being near when the studios Julien's, Carlorossi's, Delacluse's, disgorged their students. He did not see Betty, be- cause she was not studying at any of these places, but tt the Atelier Bianchi, of which he never thought. So he shrugged his shoulders, and dined again with Lady St. Craye, and began to have leisure to analyse the emotions with which she inspired him. He had not believed that he could be so attracted by a woman with whom he had played the entire comedy, from first glance to last tear from meeting hands to severed hearts. Yet attracted he was, and strongly. He ex- perienced a sort of resentment, a feeling that she had kept something from him, that she had reserves of which he knew nothing, that he, who in his blind com- placency had imagined himself to have sucked the orange and thrown away the skin, had really, in point of fact, had a strange lovely fruit snatched from him before his blunt teeth had done more than nibble at its seemingly commonplace rind. In the old days she had reared barriers of reserve, walls of reticence over which he could see so easily ; now she posed as having no reserves, and he seemed to him- 148 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST self to be following her through a darkling wood, where the branches flew back and hit him in the face so that he could not see the path. "You know," she said, "what makes it so delightful to talk to you is that I can say exactly what I like. You won't expect me to be clever, or shy, or any of those tiresome things. We can be perfectly frank with each other. And that's such a relief, isn't it?" "I wonder whether it would be supposing it could be?" said he. They were driving in the Bois, among the autumn tinted trees where the pale mist wreaths wandered like ghosts in the late afternoon. "Of course it could be; it is," she said, opening her eyes at him under the brim of her marvel of a hat : "at least it is for simple folk like me. Why don't you wear a window in your breast as I do?" She laid her perfectly gloved hand on her sables. "Is there really a window? Can one see into your heart?" "One can not the rest. Just the one from whom one feareth nothing, expecteth nothing, hopeth nothing. That's out of the Bible, isn't it?" "It's near enough," said he. "Of course, to you it's a new sensation to have the window in your breast. Whereas I, from innocent childhood to earnest man- hood, have ever been open as the day." "Yes," she said, "you were always transparent enough. But one is so blind when one is in love." Her calm references to the past always piqued him. "I don't think Love is so blind as he's painted," he said : "always as soon as I begin to be in love with peo- ple I begin to see their faults." "You may be transparent, but you haven't a good THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 149 mirror," she laughed; "you don't see yourself as you are. It isn't when you begin to love people that you see their faults, is it? It's really when they begin to love you." "But I never begin to love people till they begin tq love me. I'm too modest." "And I never love people after they've done loving me. I'm too " "Too what?" "Too something forgetful, is it? I mean it takes two to make a quarrel, and it certainly takes two tq make a love affair." "And what about all the broken hearts?" "What broken hearts?" "The ones you find in the poets and the story books." "That's just where you do find them. Nowhere else. Now, honestly, has your heart ever been broken?" "Not yet : so be careful how you play with it. You don't often find such a perfect specimen absolutely not a crack or a chip." "The pitcher shouldn't crow too loud can pitchers crow? They have ears, of course, but only the little pitchers. The ones that go to the well should go in modest silence." "Dear Lady," he said almost impatiently, "what is there about me that drives my friends to stick up danger boards all along my path? 'This way to De- struction!' You all label them. I am always being solemnly warned that I shall get my heart broken one of these days, if I don't look out." "I wish you wouldn't call me dear Lady," she said ; "it's not the mode any more now." 1 50 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "What may I call you?" he had to ask, turning to look in her eyes. "You needn't call me anything. I hate being called names. That's a pretty girl not the dark one, the one with the fur hat." He turned to look. Two girls were walking briskly under the falling leaves. And the one with the fur hat was Betty. But it was at the other that he gazed even as he returned Betty's prim little bow. He even turned a little as the carriage passed, to look more intently at the tall figure in shabby black whose arm Betty held. "Well?" said Lady St. Craye, breaking the silence that followed. "Well?" said he, rousing himself, but too late. "You were saying I might call you " "It's not what I was saying it's what you were looking. Who is the girl, and why don't you approve of her companion ?" "Who says I don't wear a window in my breast?" he laughed. "The girl's a little country girl I knew in England I didn't know she was in Paris. And I thought I knew the woman, too, but that's impossible: it's only a likeness." "One nice thing about me is that I never ask imperti- nent questions or hardly ever. That one slipped out and I withdraw it. I don't want to know anything about anything and I'm sorry I spoke. I see, of course, that she is a little country girl you knew in England, and that you are not at all interested in her. How fast the leaves fall now, don't they?" "No question of your's could be im - could be any- thing but flattering. But since you are interested " "Not at all," she said politely. THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 151 "Oh, but do be interested," he urged, intent on checking her inconvenient interest, "because, really, it is rather interesting when you come to think of it. I was painting my big picture I wish you'd come and see it, by the way. Will you some day, and have tea in my studio?" "I should love it. When shall I come?" "Whenever you will." He wished she would ask another question about Betty, but she wouldn't. He had to go on, a little awkwardly. "Well, I only knew them for a week her and her aunt and her father and she's a nice, quiet little thing. The father's a parson all of them are all that there is of most respectable." She listened but she did not speak. "And I was rather surprised to see her here. And for the moment I thought the woman with her was well, the last kind of woman who could have been with her, don't you know." "I see," said Lady St. Craye. "Well, it's fortunate that the dark woman isn't that kind of woman. No doubt you'll be seeing your little friend. You might ask her to tea when I come to see your picture." "I wish I could." Vernon's manner was never so frank as when he was most on his guard. "She'd love to know you. I wish I could ask them to tea, but I don't know them well enough. And their address I don't know at all. It's a pity ; she's a nice little thing." It was beautifully done. Lady St. Craye inwardly applauded Vernon's acting, and none the less that her own part had grown strangely difficult. She was sud- denly conscious of a longing to be alone to let her 1 52 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST face go. She gave herself a moment's pause, caught at her fine courage and said : "Yes, it is a pity. However, I daresay it's safer for her that you can't ask her to tea. She is a nice little thing, and she might fall in love with you, and then, your modesty appeased, you might follow suit ! Isn't it annoying when one can't pick up the thread of a con- versation? All the time you've been talking I've been wondering what we were talking about before I pointed out the fur hat to you. And I nearly remember, and I can't quite. That is always so worrying, isn't it?" Her acting was as good as his. And his perception at the moment less clear than hers. He gave a breath of relief. It would never have done to have Lady St. Craye spying on him and Betty ; and now he knew that she was in Paris he knew too that it would be "him and Betty." "We were talking," he said carefully, "about calling names." "Oh, thank you! When one can't remember those silly little things it's like wanting to sneeze and not being able to, isn't it? But we must turn back, or I shall be late for dinner, and I daren't think of the names my hostess will call me then. She has a vocabu- lary, you know." She named a name and Vernon thought it was he who kept the talk busy among ac- quaintances till the moment for parting. Lady St. Craye knew that it was she. The moment Betty had bowed to Mr. Vernon she turned her head in answer to the pressure on her arm. "Who's that?" her friend asked. Betty named him, and in a voice genuinely uncon- cerned. "How long have you known him ?" THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 153 "I knew him for a week last Spring : he gave me a few lessons. He is a great favourite of my aunt's, but we don't know him much. And I thought he was in Vienna." "Does he know where you are?" "No." "Then mind he doesn't." "Why?" "Because when girls are living alone they can't be too careful. Remember you're the person that's respon- sible for Betty Desmond now. You haven't your aunt and your father to take care of you." "I've got you," said Betty affectionately. "Yes, you've got me," said her friend. Life in the new rooms was going very easily and pleasantly. Betty had covered some cushions with the soft green silk of an old evening dress Aunt Julia had given her; she had bought chrysanthemums in pots; and now all her little belongings, the same that had "given the cachet" to her boudoir bedroom at home lay about, and here, in this foreign setting, did really stamp the room with a pretty, delicate, conventional individuality. The embroidered blotting-book, the sil- ver pen-tray, the wicker work-basket lined with blue satin, the long worked pin-cushion stuck with Betty's sparkling hat-pins, all these, commonplace at Long Barton were here not commonplace. There was noth- ing of Paula's lying about. She had brought nothing with her, and had fetched nothing from her room save clothes dresses and hats of the plainest. The experiments in cooking were amusing; so were the marketings in odd little shops that sold what one wanted, and a great many things that one had never heard of. The round of concerts and theatres and 154 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST tram-rides had not begun yet. In the evenings Betty drew, while Paula read aloud from the library of stray Tauchnitz books Betty had gleaned from foreign book-stalls. It was a very busy, pleasant home-life. And the studio life did not lack interest. Betty suffered a martyrdom of nervousness when first a little late she entered the Atelier. It is a large light room; a semi-circular alcove at one end, hung with pleasant-coloured drapery, holds a grand piano. All along one side are big windows that give on an old garden once a convent garden where nuns used to walk, telling their beads. The walls are covered with sketches, posters, studies. Betty looked nervously round the scene was agitatingly unfamiliar. The strange faces, the girls in many-hued painting pina- fores, the little forest of easels, and on the square wooden platform the model smooth, brown, with limbs set, moveless as a figure of wax. Betty got to work, as soon as she knew how one be- gan to get to work. It was her first attempt at a draw- ing from the life, saving certain not unsuccessful cari- catures of her fellow pupils, her professor and her chap- eron. So far she had only been set to do landscape, and laborious drawings of casts from the antique. The work was much harder than she had expected. And the heat was overpowering. She wondered how these other girls could stand it. Their amused, half-patro- nising, half-disdainful glances made her furious. She rubbed out most of the lines she had put in and gasped for breath. The room, the students, the naked brown girl on the model's throne, all swam before her eyes. She got to the door somehow, opened and shut it, and found her- " Betty looked nervously around the scene was agitatingly unfamiliar THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 155 self sitting on the top stair with closed eyelids and heart beating heavily. Some one held water to her lips. She was being fanned with a handkerchief. "I'm all right," she said. "Yes, it's hotter than usual to-day," said the hand- kerchief-holder, fanning vigorously. "Why do they have it so hot?" asked poor Betty. "Because of the model, of course. Poor thing! she hasn't got a nice blue gown and a pinky-greeny pina- fore to keep her warm. We have to try to match the garden of Eden climate when we're drawing from a girl who's only allowed to use Eve's fashion plates." Betty laughed and opened her eyes. "How jolly of you to come out after me," she said. "Oh, I was just the same at first. All right now? I ought to get back. You just sit here till you feel fit again. So long !" So Betty sat there on the bare wide brown stair, staring at the window, till things had steadied them- selves, and then she went back to her work. Her easel was there, and her half-rubbed out draw- ing No, that was not her drawing. It was a head, vaguely but very competently sketched, a likeness no, a caricature of Betty herself. She looked round one quick but quite sufficient look. The girl next her, and the one to that girl's right, were exchanging glances, and the exchange ceased just too late. Betty saw. From then till the rest Betty did not look at the model. She looked, but furtively, at those two girls. When, at the rest-time, the model stretched and yawned and got off her throne and into a striped petti- 156 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST coat, most of the students took their "easy" on tlic stairs: among these the two. Betty, who never lacked courage, took charcoal in hand and advanced quite boldly to the easel next to her own. How she envied the quality of the drawing she saw there. But envy does not teach mercy. The little sketch that Betty left on the corner of the drawing was quite as faithful, and far more cruel, than the one on her own paper. Then she went on to the next easel. The few students who were chatting to the model looked curiously at her and giggled among themselves. When the rest was over and the model had reas- sumed, quite easily and certainly, that pose of the uplifted arms which looked so difficult, the students trooped back and the two girls Betty's enemies, as she bitterly felt returned to their easels. They looked at their drawings, they looked at each other, and they looked at Betty. And when they looked at her they smiled. "Well done!" the girl next her said softly. "For a tenderfoot you hit back fairly straight. I guess you'll do!" "You're very kind," said Betty haughtily. "Don't you get your quills up," said the girl. "I hit first, but you hit hardest. I don't know you, but I want to." She smiled so queer yet friendly a smile that Betty's haughtiness had to dissolve in an answering smile. "My name's Betty Desmond," she said. "I wonder why you wanted to hit a man when he was down." "My!" said the girl, "how was I to surmise about you being down? You looked dandy enough fit to lick all creation." THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 157 "I've never been in a studio before," said Betty, fix- ing fresh paper. "My!" said the girl again. "Turn the faucet off now. The model don't like us to whisper. Can't stand the draught." So Betty was silent, working busily. But next day she was greeted with friendly nods and she had some one to speak to in the rest-intervals. On the third day she was asked to a studio party by the girl who had fanned her on the stairs. "And bring your friend with you," she said. But Betty's friend had a headache that day. Betty went alone and came home full of the party. "She's got such a jolly studio," she said; "ever so high up, and busts and casts and things. Everyone was so nice to me you can't think: it was just like what one hears of Girton Cocoa parties. We had tea such weak tea, Paula, it could hardly crawl out of the tea- pot! We had it out of green basins. And the loveliest cakes ! There were only two chairs, so some of us sat on the sommier and the rest on the floor." "Were there any young men?" asked Paula. "Two or three very, very young ones they came late. But they might as well have been girls; there wasn't any flirting or nonsense of that sort, Paula. Don't you think we might give a party not now, but presently, when we know some more people? Do you think they'd like it? Or would they think it a bore?" "They'd love it, I should think." Paula looked round the room which already she loved. "And what did you all talk about?" "Work," said Betty, "work and work and work and work and work : everyone talked about their work, and everyone else listened and watched for the chance to 158 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST begin to talk about theirs. This is real life, my dear. I am so glad I'm beginning to know people. Miss Vos- coe is very queer, but she's a dear. She's the one who caricatured me the first day. Oh, we shall do now, shan't we?" "Yes," said the other, "you'll do now." "I said 'we,' " Betty corrected softly. "I meant we, of course," said Miss Conway, CHAPTER XIII. CONTRASTS. Vernon's idea of a studio was a place to work in, a place where there should be room for all the tools of one's trade, and besides, a great space to walk up and down in those moods that seize on all artists when their work will not come as they want it. But when he gave tea-parties he had store of draper- ies to pull out from his carved cupboard, deeply col- oured things embroidered in rich silk and heavy gold Chinese, Burmese, Japanese, Russian. He came in to-day with an armful of fair chrysan- themums, deftly set them in tall brazen jars, pulled out his draperies and arranged them swiftly. There was a screen to be hung with a Chinese mandarin's dress, where, on black, gold dragons writhed squarely among blue roses; the couch was covered by a red burnous with a gold border. There were Persian praying mats to lay on the bare floor, kakemonos to be fastened with drawing pins on the bare walls. A tea cloth worked by Russian peasants lay under the tea-cups two only of yellow Chinese egg-shell ware. His tea-pot and cream- jug were Queen Anne silver, heirlooms at which he mocked. But he saw to it that they were kept bright. He lighted the spirit-lamp. "She was always confoundedly punctual," he said. But to-day Lady St. Craye was not punctual. She 159 160 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST arrived half an hour late, and the delay had given her host time to think about her. He heard her voice in the courtyard at last but the only window that looked that way was set high in the wall of the little corridor, and he could not see who it was to whom she was talking. And he wondered, be- cause the inflection of her voice was English not the exquisite imitation of the French inflexion which he had so often admired in her. He opened the door and went to the stair head. The voices were coming up the steps. "A caller," said Vernon, and added a word or two. However little you may be in love with a woman, two is better company than three. The voices came up. He saw the golden brown shimmer of Lady St. Craye's hat, and knew that it matched her hair and that there would be violets some- where under the brim of it violets that would make her eyes look violet too. She was coming up a man just behind her. She came round the last turn, and the man was Temple. "What an Alpine ascent!" she exclaimed, reaching up her hand so that Vernon drew her up the last three steps. "We have been hunting you together, on both the other staircases. Now that the chase is ended, won't you present your friend? And I'll bow to him as soon as I'm on firm ground !" Vernon made the presentation and held the door open for Lady St. Craye to pass. As she did so Tem- ple behind her raised eyebrows which said : "Am I inconvenient? Shall I borrow a book or something and go?" Vernon shook his head. It was annoying, but inevit- THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 161 able. He could only hope that Lady St. Craye also was disappointed. "How punctual you are," he said. "Sit here, won't you? I hadn't finished laying the table." He delib- erately brought out four more cups. "What unnatural penetration you have, Temple ! How did you find out that this is the day when I sit 'at home' and wait for people to come and buy my pictures ?" "And no one's come?" Lady St. Craye had sunk into the chair and was pulling off her gloves. "That's very disappointing. I thought I should meet dozens of clever and interesting people, and I only meet two." Her brilliant smile made the words seem neither banal nor impertinent. Vernon was pleased to note that he was not the only one who was disappointed. "You are too kind," he said gravely. Temple was looking around the room. "Jolly place you've got here," he said, "but it's hard to find. I should have gone off in despair if I hadn't met Lady St. Craye." "We kept each other's courage up, didn't we, Mr. Temple? It was like arctic explorers. I was begin- ning to think we should have to make a camp and cook my muff for tea." She held out the sable and Vernon laid it on the couch when he had held it to his face for a moment. "I love the touch of fur," he said ; "and your fur is scented with the scent of summer gardens, 'open jas- mine muffled lattices/ " he quoted softly. Temple had wandered to the window. "What ripping roofs !" he said. "Can one get out on them?" 162 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "Now what," demanded Vernon, "is the hidden mainspring that impels every man who comes into these rooms to ask, instantly, whether one can get out on to the roof? It's only Englishmen, by the way; Ameri- cans never ask it, nor Frenchmen." "It's the exploring spirit, I suppose," said Temple idly; "the spirit that has made England the Empire which et cetera." "On which the sun never sets. Yes but I think the sunset would be one of the attractions of your roof, Mr. Vernon." "Sunset is never attractive to me," said he, "nor Au- tumn. Give me sunrise, and Spring." "Ah, yes," said Lady St. Craye, "you only like be- ginnings. Even Summer " "Even Summer, as you say," he answered equably. "The sketch is always so much better than the picture." "I believe that is your philosophy of life," said Temple. "This man," Vernon explained, "spends his days in doing ripping etchings and black and white stuff and looking for my philosophy of life." "One would like to see that in black and white. Will you etch it for me, Mr. Temple, when you find it ?" "I don't think the medium would be adequate," Tem- ple said. "I haven't found it yet, but I should fancy it would be rather highly coloured." "Iridescent, perhaps. Did you ever speculate as to the colour of people's souls? I'm quite sure every soul has a colour." "What is yours?" asked Vernon of course. "I'm too humble to tell you. But some souls are thick body-colour, don't you know and some are clear like jewels." THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 163 "And mine's an opal, is it?" "With more green in it, perhaps; you know the lovely colour on the dykes in the marshes?" "Stagnant water ? Thank you!" "I don't know what it is. It has some hateful chemi- cal name, I daresay. They have vases the colour I mean, mounted in silver, at the Army and Navy Stores." "And your soul it is a pearl, isn't it?" "Never! Nothing opaque. If you will force my modesty to the confession I believe in my heart that it is a sapphire. True blue, don't you know!" "And Temple's but you've not known him long enough to judge." "So it's no use my saying that I am sure his soul is a dewdrop." "To be dried up by the sun of life?" Temple ques- tioned. "No to be hardened into a diamond by the fire of life. No, don't explain that dewdrops don't harden into diamonds. I know I'm not scientific, but I hon- estly did mean to be complimentary. Isn't your kettle boiling over, Mr. Vernon ?" Lady St. Craye's eyes, while they delicately condoled vith Vernon on the spoiling of his tete-a-tete with her, were also made to indicate a certain interest in the spoiler. Temple was more than six feet high, well built. He had regular features and clear gray eyes, with well-cut cases and very long dark lashes. His mouth was firm and its lines were good. But for his close-cropped hair and for a bearing at once frank, assured, and modest, he would have been much hand- somer than a man has any need to be. But his expres- 164 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST sion saved him. No one had ever called him a barber's block or a hairdresser's apprentice. To Temple Lady St. Craye appeared the most charming woman he had ever seen. It was an effect which she had the habit of producing. He had said of her in his haste that she was all clothes and no wom- an, now he saw that on the contrary the clothes were quite intimately part of the woman, and took such value as they had, from her. She carried her head with the dainty alertness of a beautiful bird. She had a gift denied to most English- women the genius for wearing clothes. No one had ever seen her dress dusty or crushed, her hat crooked. No uncomfortable accidents ever happened to her. Blacks never settled on her face, the buttons never came off her gloves, she never lost her umbrella, and in the windiest weather no loose untidy wisps escaped from her thick heavy shining hair to wander unbecomingly round the ears that were pearly and pink like the little shells of Vanessae. Some of the women who hated her used to say that she dyed her hair. It was certainly very much lighter than her brows and lashes. To-day she was wearing a corduroy dress of a gold some shades grayer than the gold of her hair. Sable trimmed it, and violet silk lined the loose sleeves and the coat, now unfastened and thrown back. There were, as Vernon had known there would be, violets under the brim of the hat that matched her hair. The chair in which she sat wore a Chinese blue drap- ery. The yellow tea-cups gave the highest note in the picture. "If I were Whistler, I should ask you to let me paint your portrait like that yes, with my despicable yellow tea-cup in your honourable hand." THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 165 "If you were Mr. Whistler or anything in the least like Mr. Whistler I shouldn't be drinking tea out of your honourable tea-cup," she said. "Do you really think, Mr. Temple, that one ought not to say one doesn't like people just because they're dead?" He had been thinking something a little like it. "Well," he said rather awkwardly, "you see dead people can't hit back." "No more can live ones when you don't hit them, but only stick pins in their effigies. I'd rather speak ill of the dead than the living." "Yet it doesn't seem fair, somehow," Temple in- sisted. "But why? No one can go and tell the poor things what people are saying of them. You don't go and unfold a shroud just to whisper in a corpse's ear: 'It was horrid of her to say it, but I thought you ought to know, dear.' And if you did, they wouldn't lie awake at night worrying over it as the poor live people do. No more tea, thank you." "Do you really think anyone worries about what anyone says?" "Don't you, Mr, Temple?" He reflected. "He never has anything to worry about," Vernon put in ; "no one ever says anything unkind about him. The cruelest thing anyone ever said of him was that he would make as excellent a husband as Albert the Good." "The white flower of a blameless life? My felicita- tions," Lady St. Craye smiled them. Temple flushed. "Now isn't it odd," Vernon asked, "that however much one plumes oneself on one's blamelessness, one 166 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST hates to hear it attributed to one by others? One is good by stealth and blushes to find it fame. I my- self" "Yes !" said Lady St. Craye with an accent of final- ity. "What a man really likes is to be saint with the repu- tation of being a bit of a devil." "And a woman likes, you think, to be a bit of a devil, with the reputation of a saint?" "Or a bit of a saint with a reputation that rhymes to the reality. It's the reputation that's important, isn't it?" "Isn't the inward truth the really important thing?" said Temple rather heavily. Lady St. Craye looked at him in such a way as to make him understand that she understood. Vernon looked at them both, and turning to the window looked out on his admired roofs. "Yes," she said very softly, "but one doesn't talk about that, any more than one does of one's prayers or one's love affairs." The plural vexed Temple, and he told himself how unreasonable the vexation was. Lady St. Craye turned her charming head to look at him, to look at Vernon. One had been in love with her. The other might be. There is in the .world no better company than this. Temple, always deeply uninterested in women's clothes, was noting the long, firm folds of her skirt. Vernon had turned from the window to approve the loving closeness of those violets against her hair. Lady St. Craye in her graceful attitude of conscious uncon- sciousness was the focus of their eyes. "Here comes a millionaire, to buy your pictures," THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 167 she said suddenly, "no a millionairess, by the sound of her high-heeled shoes. How beautiful are the feet" The men had heard nothing, but following hard on her words came the sound of footsteps along the little corridor, an agitated knock on the door. Vernon opened the door to Betty. "Oh come in," he said cordially, and his pause of absolute astonishment was brief as an eye-flash. "This is delightful" And as she passed into the room he caught her eyes and, looking a warning, said : "I am so glad to see you. I began to be afraid you wouldn't be able to come." "I saw you in the Bois the other day," said Lady St. Craye, "and I have been wanting to know you ever since." "You are very kind," said Betty. Her hat was on one side, her hair was very untidy, and it was not a becoming untidiness either. She had no gloves, and a bit of the velvet binding of her skirt was loose. Her eyes were red and swollen with crying. There was a black smudge on her cheek. "Take this chair," said Vernon, and moved a com- fortable one with its back to the light. "Temple let me present you to Miss Desmond." Temple bowed, with no flicker of recognition visible in his face. But Betty, flushing scarlet, said : "Mr. Temple and I have met before." There was the tiniest pause. Then Temple said : "I am so glad to meet you again. I thought you had per- haps left Paris." "Let me give you some tea," said Vernon. Tea was made for her, and conversation. She 168 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST drank the tea, but she seemed not to know what to do with the conversation. It fluttered, aimlessly, like a bird with a broken wing. Lady St. Craye did her best, but talk is not easy when each one of a party has its own secret pre-occupying interest, and an overlapping interest in the preoccupa- tion of the others. The air was too electric. Lady St. Craye had it on her lips that she must go when Betty rose suddenly. "Good-bye," she said generally, looking round with miserable eyes that tried to look merely polite. "Must you go?" asked Vernon, furious with the complicated emotions that, warring in him, left him just as helpless as anyone else. "I do hope we shall meet again," said Lady St. Craye. "Mayn't I see you home?" asked Temple unexpect- edly, even to himself. Betty's "No, thank you," was most definite. She went. Vernon had to let her go. He had guests. He could not leave them. He had lost wholly his ordi- nary control of circumstances. All through the petri- fying awkwardness of the late talk he had been seek- ing an excuse to go with Betty to find out what was the matter. He closed the door and came back. There was no help for it. But there was help. Lady St. Craye gave it. She rose as Vernon came back. "Quick!" she said, "Shall we go? Hadn't you bet- ter bring her back here? Go after her at once." "You're an angel," said Vernon. "No, don't go. Temple, look after Lady St. Craye. If you'll not think me rude? Miss Desmond is in trouble, I'm afraid." THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 169 "Of course she is poor little thing. Oh, Mr. Ver- non, do run! She looks quite despairing. There's your hat. Go go !" The door banged behind her. The other two, left alone, looked at each other. "I wonder " said she. "Yes," said he, "it's certainly mysterious." "We ought to have gone at once," said she. "I should have done, of course, only Mr. Vernon so elab- orately explained that he expected her. One had to play up. And so she's a friend of yours?" "She's not a friend of mine," said Temple rather ruefully, "and I didn't know Vernon was a friend of hers. You saw that she wouldn't have my company at any price." $ : j . "Mr. Vernon's a friend of her people, I believe. We saw her the other day in the Bois, and he told me he knew them in England. Did you know them there too? Poor child, what a woe-begone little face it was !" "No, not in England. I met her in Paris about a fortnight ago, but she didn't like me, from the first, and our acquaintance broke off short." , There was a silence. Lady St. Craye perceived a ring-fence of reticence round the subject that interested her, and knew that she had no art strong enough to break it down. She spoke again suddenly : "Do you know you're not a bit the kind of man I ex- pected you to be, Mr. Temple? I've heard so much of you from Mr. Vernon. We're such old friends, you know." "Apparently he can't paint so well with words as he does with oils. May I ask exactly how flattering the portrait was?" 170 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "It wasn't flattering at all. In fact it wasn't a por- trait." "A caricature?" "But you don't mind what people say of you, do you?" "You are trying to frighten me." "No, really," she said with pretty earnestness; "it's only that he has always talked about you as his best friend, and I imagined you would be like him." Temple's uneasy wonderings about Betty's trouble, her acquaintance with Vernon, the meaning of her visit to him, were pushed to the back of his mind. "I wish I were like him," said he, "at any rate, in his paintings." "At any rate yes. But one can't have everything, you know. You have qualities which he hasn't quali- ties that you wouldn't exchange for any qualities of his." "That wasn't what I meant ; I the fact is, I like old Vernon, but I can't understand him." "That philosophy of life eludes you still? Now, I understand him, but I don't always like him not all of him." "I wonder whether anyone understands him ?" "He's not such a sphinx as he looks!" Her tone betrayed a slight pique "Now, your character would be much harder to read. That's one of the differ- ences." "We are all transparent enough to those w r ho look through the right glasses," said Temple. "And part of my character is my inability to find any glass through which I could see him clearly." This comparison of his character and Vernon's, with THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 171 its sudden assumption of intimacy, charmed yet em- barrassed him. She saw both emotions and pitied him a little. But it was necessary to interest this young man enough to keep him there till Vernon should return. Then Ver- non would see her home, and she might find out some- thing, however little, about Betty. But if this young man went she too must go. She could not outstay him in the rooms of his friend. So she talked on, and Tem- ple was just as much at her mercy as Betty had been at the mercy of the brother artist in the rabbit warren at Long Barton. But at seven o'clock Vernon had not returned, and it was, after all, Temple who saw her home. Temple, free from the immediate enchantment of her presence, felt the revival of a resentful curiosity. Why had Betty refused his help? Why had she sought Vernon's ? Why did women treat him as though he were a curate and Vernon as though he were a god ? W T ell Lady St. Craye at least had not treated him as curates are treated. ft- CHAPTER XIV, RENUNCIATION. Vernon tore down the stairs three and four at a time, and caught Betty as she was stepping into a hired carriage. "What is it ?" he asked. "What's the matter?" "Oh, go back to your friends!" said Betty angrily. "My friends are all right. They'll amuse each Other. Tell me." "Then you must come with me," said she. "If I try to tell you here I shall begin to cry again. Don't speak to me. I can't bear it." He got into the carriage. It was not until Betty had let herself into her room and he had followed her in not till they stood face to face in the middle of the car- pet that he spoke again. "Now," he said, "what is it? Where's your aunt, and" " Sit down, won't you?" she said, pulling off her hat and throwing it on the couch; "it'll take rather a long time to tell, but I must tell you all about it, or else you can't help me. And if you don't help me I don't know what I shall do." Despair was in her voice. He sat down. Betty, in the chair opposite his, sat with hands nervously locked together. "Look here," she said abruptly, "you're sure to 172 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 173 think that everything I've done is wrong, but it's no use your saying so." "I won't say so." "Well, then that day, you know, after I saw you at the Bete Madame Gautier didn't come to fetch me, and I waited, and waited, and at last I went to her flat, and she was dead, and I ought to have telegraphed to my step-father to fetch me, but I thought I would like to have one night in Paris first you know I hadn't seen Paris at all, really." "Yes," he said, trying not to let any anxiety into his voice. "Yes go on." "And I went to the Cafe d'Harcourt What did you say?" "Nothing." "I thought it was where the art students went. And I met a girl there, and she was kind to me." "What sort of a girl ? Not an art student?" "No," said Betty hardly, "she wasn't an art stu- dent. She told me what she was." "Yes?" "And I I don't think I should have done it just for me alone, but I did want to stay in Paris and work and I wanted to help her to be good she is good really, in spite of everything. Oh, I know you're hor- ribly shocked, but I can't help it ! And now she's gone, and I can't find her." "I'm not shocked," he said deliberately, "but I'm extremely stupid. How gone?" "She was living with me here. Oh, she found the rooms and showed me where to go for meals and gave me good advice oh, she did everything for me ! And now she's gone. And I don't know what to do. Paris is such a horrible place. Perhaps she's been kidnapped 174 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST or something. And I don't know even how to tell the police. And all this time I'm talking to you is wasted time." "It isn't wasted. But I must understand. You met this girl and she " "She asked your friend Mr. Temple he was pass- ing and she called out to him to tell me of a decent hotel, but he asked so many questions. He gave me an address and I didn't go. I went back to her, and we went to a hotel and I persuaded her to come and live with me." "But your aunt?" Betty explained about her aunt. "And your father?" She explained about her father. "And now she has gone, and you want to find her ?" "Want to find her?" Betty started up and began to walk up and down the room. "I don't care about any- thing else in the world ! She's a dear ; you don't know what a dear she is and I know she was happy here and now she's gone! I never had a girl friend before what?" Vernon had winced, just as Paula had winced, and at the same words. "You've looked for her at the Cafe d'Harcourt?" "No; I promised her that I'd never go there again." "She seems to have given you some good advice." "She advised me not to have anything to do with you," said Betty, suddenly spiteful. "That was good advice when she gave it," said Vernon, quietly; "but now it's different." He was silent a moment, realising with a wonder beyond words how different it was. Every word, every glance between him and Betty had, hitherto, been THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 175 part of a play. She had been a charming figure in a charming comedy. He had known, as it were by rote, that she had feelings a heart, affections but they had seemed pale, dream-like, just a delightful back- ground to his own sensations, strong and conscious and delicate. Now for the first time he perceived her as real, a human being in the stress of a real human emo- tion. And he was conscious of a feeling of protective tenderness, a real, open-air primitive sentiment, with no smell of the footlights about it. He was alone with Betty. He was the only person in Paris to whom she could turn for help. What an opportunity for a fine scene in his best manner! And he found that he did not want a scene : he wanted to help her. "Why don't you say something?" she said impa- tiently. "What am I to do?" "You can't do anything. I'll do everything. You say she knows Temple. Well, I'll find him, and we'll go to her lodgings and find out if she's there. You don't know the address ?" "No," said Betty. "I went there, but it was at night and I don't even know the street." "Now look here." He took both her hands and held them firmly. "You aren't to worry. I'll do every- thing. Perhaps she has been taken ill. In that case, when we find her, she'll need you to look after her. You must rest. I'm certain to find her. You must eat something. I'll send you in some dinner. And then lie down." "I couldn't sleep," said Betty, looking at him with the eyes of a child that has cried its heart out. "Of course you couldn't. Lie down, and make your- self read. I'll get back as soon as I can. Good-bye." There was something further that wanted to get itself 176 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST said, but the words that came nearest to expressing it were "God bless you," and he did not say them. On the top of his staircase he found Temple loung- ing. "Hullo still here? I'm afraid I've been a devil of a time gone, but Miss Desmond's " "I don't want to shove my oar in," said Temple, "but I came back when I'd seen Lady St. Craye home. I hope there's nothing wrong with Miss Desmond." "Come in," said Vernon. "I'll tell you the whole thing." They went into the room desolate with the disorder of half empty cups and scattered plates with crumbs of cake on them. "Miss Desmond told me about her meeting you. Well, she gave you the slip ; she went back and got that woman Lottie what's her name and took her to live with her." "Good God! She didn't know, of course?" "But she did know that's the knock-down blow. She knew, and she wanted to save her." Temple was silent a moment. "I say, you know, though that's rather fine," he said presently. "Oh, yes," said Vernon impatiently, "it's very ro- mantic and all that. Well, the woman stayed a fort- night and disappeared to-day. Miss Desmond is break- ing her heart about her." "So she took her up, and she's rather young for rescue work." "Rescue work? Bah! She talks of the woman as the only girl friend she's ever had. And the woman's probably gone off with her watch and chain and a col- lection of light valuables. Only I couldn't tell Miss THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 177 Desmond that. So I promised to try and find the woman. She's a thorough bad lot. I've run up against her once or twice with chaps I know." "She's not that sort," said Temple. "I know her fairly well." "What Sir Galahad? Oh, I won't ask inconven- ient questions." Vernon's sneer was not pretty. "She used to live with de Villermay," said Temple steadily ; "he was the first the usual coffee maker bus- iness, you know, though God knows how an English girl got into it. When he went home to be married It was rather beastly. The father came up offered her a present. She threw it at him. Then Schauer- macher wanted her to live with him. No. She'd go to the devil her own way. And she's gone." "Can't something be done?" said Vernon. ' "I've tried all I know. You can save a woman who doesn't know where she's going. Not one who knows and means to go. Besides, she's been at it six months ; she's past reclaiming now." "I wonder," said Vernon and his sneer had gone and he looked ten years younger "I wonder whether anybody's past reclaiming? Do you think I am? Or you?" The other stared at him. "Well," Vernon's face aged again instantly, "the thing is : we've got to find the woman." "To get her to go back and live with that innocent girl?" "Lord no! To find her. To find out why she bolted, and to make certain that she won't go back and live with that innocent girl.' Do you know her address?" But she was not to be found at her address. Stie had 178 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST come back, paid her bill, and taken away her effects. It was at the Cafe d'Harcourt, after all, that they found her, one of a party of four. She nodded to them, and presently left her party and came to spread her black and white flounces at their table. "What's the best news with you?" she asked gaily. "It's a hundred years since I saw you, Bobby, and at least a million since I saw your friend." "The last time I saw you," Temple said, "was the night when you asked me to take care of a girl." "So it was! And did you?" "No," said Temple; "she wouldn't let me. She went back to you." "So you've seen her again? Oh, I see you've come to ask me what I meant by daring to contaminate an innocent girl by my society? Well, you can go to Hell, and ask there." She rose, knocking over a chair. "Don't go," said Vernon. "That's not what we want to ask." " 'We' too," she turned fiercely on him: "as if you were a king or a deputation." "One and one are two," said Vernon; "and I did very much want to talk to you." "And two are company." She had turned her head away. "You aren't going to be cruel," Vernon asked. "Well, send him off then. I won't be bullied by a crowd of you." Temple took off his hat and went. "I've got an appointment. I've no time for fool talk," she said. "Sit down," said Vernon. "First I want to thank THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 179 you for the care you've taken of Miss Desmond, and for all your kindness and goodness to her." "Oh !" was all Paula could say. She had expected something so different. "I don't see what business it is of yours, though," she added next moment. "Only that she's alone here, and I'm the only person she knows in Paris. And I know, much better than she does, all that you've done for her sake." "I did it for my own sake. It was no end of a lark," said Paula eagerly, "that little dull pious life. And all the time I used to laugh inside to think what a senti- mental fool she was." "Yes," said Vernon slowly, "it must have been amus- ing for you." "I just did it for the fun of the thing. But I couldn't stand it any longer, so I just came away. I was bored to death." "Yes," he said, "you must have been. Just playing at cooking and housework, reading aloud to her while she drew yes, she told me that. And the flowers and all her little trumpery odds and ends about. Awfully amusing it must have been." "Don't," said Paula. "And to have her loving you and trusting you as she did awfully comic, wasn't it? Calling you her girl- friend" , "Shut up, will you?" .' "And thinking she had created a new heaven and a new earth for you. Silly sentimental little school-girl !" "Will you hold your tongue ?" ; "So long, Lottie," cried the girl of her party; "we're off to the Bullier. You've got better fish to fry, I see." "Yes," said Paula with sudden effrontery; "perhaps we'll look in later." i8o THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST ,' The others laughed and went. "Now," she said, turning furiously on Vernon, "will you go? Or shall I? I don't want any more of you." "Just one word more," he said with the odd change of expression that made him look young. "Tell me why you left her. She's crying her eyes out for you." "Why I left her? Because I was sick of " "Don't. Let me tell you. You went with her be- cause she was alone and friendless. You found her rooms, you set her in the way of making friends. And when you saw that she was in a fair way to be happy and comfortable, you came away, because " "Because?" she leaned forward eagerly. "Because you were afraid." "Afraid?" "Afraid of handicapping her. You knew you would meet people who knew you. You gave it all up all the new life, the new chances for her sake, and came away. Do I understand? Is it fool-talk?" Paula leaned her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands. "You're not like most men," she said ; "you make me out better than I am. That's not the usual mistake. Yes, it was all that, partly. And I should have liked to stay for ever and ever if I could. But suppose I couldn't? Suppose I'd begun to find myself wishing for all sorts of things, longing for them. Suppose I'd stayed till I began to think of things that I wouldn't think of while she was with me. That's what I was afraid of." "And you didn't long for the old life at all?" She laughed. "Long for that ? But I might have. I might have. It was safer. Well, go back to her and tell her I've gone to the devil and it's not her fault. THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 181 Tell Her I wasn't worth saving. But I did try to save her. If you're half a man you won't undo my one lit- tle bit of work." "What do you mean?" "You know well enough what I mean. Let the girl alone." He leaned forward, and spoke very earnestly. "Look here," he said, "I won't jaw. But this about you and her well, it's made a difference to me that I can't explain. And I wouldn't own that to anyone but her friend. I mean to be a friend to her too, a good friend. No nonsense." "Swear it by God in Heaven," she said fiercely. "I do swear it," he said, "by God in Heaven. And I can't tell her you've gone to the devil. You must write to her. And you can't tell her that either." "What's the good of writing?" "A lie or two isn't much, when you've done all this for her. Come up to my place. You can write to her there." This was the letter that Paula wrote in Vernon's studio, among the half-empty cups and the scattered plates with cake-crumbs on them. "My Dear Little Betty : "I must leave without saying good-bye, and I shall never see you again. My father has taken me back. I wrote to him and he came and found me. He has for- given me everything, only I have had to promise never to speak to anyone I knew in Paris. It is all your doing, dear. God bless you. You have saved me. I shall pray for you every day as long as I live. "Your poor "PAULA." 182 THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST "Will that do?" she laughed as she held out the letter. He read it. And he did not laugh. "Yes that'll do," he said. "I'll tell her you've gone to England, and I'll send the letter to London to be posted." "Then that's all settled!" "Can I do anything for you?" he asked. "God Himself can't do anything for me," she said, biting the edge of her veil. "Where are you going now ?" "Back to the d'Harcourt. It's early yet." She stood defiantly smiling at him. "What were you doing there the night you met her ?" he asked abruptly. "What does one do?" "What's become of de Villermay?" he asked. "Gone home got married." "And so you thought " "Oh, if you want to know what I thought you're welcome! I thought I'd damn myself as deep as I could to pile up the reckoning for him ; and I've about done it. Good-bye. I must be getting on." "I'll come a bit of the way with you," he said. ' At the door he turned, took her hand and kissed it gently and reverently. "That's very sweet of you." She opened astonished eyes at him. "I always used to think you an awful brute." "It was very theatrical of me," he told himself later. "But it summed up the situation. Sentimental ass you're growing!" Betty got her letter from England and cried over it and was glad over it. THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST 183 "I have done one thing, anyway," she told herself, "one really truly good thing. I've saved my poor dear Paula. Oh, how right I was ! How I knew her 1" . *5oofe 3, Wyt