Three Weeks. Glyn Elinor
irritated by opposition into thinking himself seriously in love with this daughter of the middle classes, so far beneath his noble station.
"Let the boy have his fling," said Sir Charles Verdayne, who was a coarse person. "Damn it all! a man is not obliged to marry every woman he kisses!"
"A gentlemen does not deliberately kiss an unmarried girl unless he intends to make her his wife!" retorted Lady Henrietta. "I fear the worst!"
Sir Charles snorted and chuckled, two unpleasant and annoying habits his lady wife had never been able to break him of. So the affair grew and grew! Until towards the middle of April Paul was advised to travel for his health.
"Your father and I can sanction no engagement, Paul, before you return," said Lady Henrietta. "If, in July, on your twenty-third birthday, you still wish to break your mother's heart—I suppose you must do so. But I ask of you the unfettered reflection of three months first."
This seemed reasonable enough, and Paul consented to start upon a tour round Europe—not having spoken the final fatal and binding words to Isabella Waring. They made their adieux in the pouring rain under a dripping oak in the lane by the Vicarage gate.
Paul was six foot two, and Isabella quite six foot, and broad in proportion. They were dressed almost alike, and at a little distance, but for the lady's scanty petticoat, it would have been difficult to distinguish her sex.
"Good-bye, old chap," she said, "We have been real pals, and I'll not forget you!"
But Paul, who was feeling sentimental, put it differently.
"Good-bye, darling," he whispered with a suspicion of tremble in his charming voice. "I shall never love any woman but you—never, never in my life."
Cuckoo! screamed the bird in the tree.
And now we are getting nearer the episode. Paris bored Paul—he did not know its joys and was in no mood to learn them. He mooned about and went to the races. His French was too indifferent to make theatres a pleasure, and the attractive ladies who smiled at his blue eyes were for him défendues. A man so recently parted from the only woman he could ever love had no right to look at such things, he thought. How young and chivalrous and honest he was—poor Paul!
So he took to visiting Versailles and Fontainebleau and Compiègne with a guide-book, and came to the conclusion it was all "beastly rot."
So he turned his back upon France and fled to Switzerland.
Do you know Switzerland?—you who read. Do you know it at the beginning of May? A feast of blue lakes, and snow-peaks, and the divinest green of young beeches, and the sombre shadow of dark firs, and the exhilaration of the air.
If you do, I need not tell you about it. Only in any case now, you must see it through the eyes of Paul. That is if you intend to read another page of this bad book.
It was pouring with rain when he drove from the station to the hotel. His temper was at its worst. Pilatus hid his head in mist, the Bürgenstock was invisible—it was chilly, too, and the fire smoked in the sitting-room when Paul had it lighted.
His heart yearned for his own snug room at Verdayne Place, and the jolly voice of Isabella Waring counting point, quint and quatorze. What nonsense to send him abroad. As if such treatment could be effectual as a cure for a love like his. He almost laughed at his mother's folly. How he longed to sit down and write to his darling. Write and tell how he hated it all, and was only getting through the time until he saw her six feet of buxom charms again—only Paul did not put it like that—indeed, he never thought about her charms at all—or want of them. He analysed nothing. He was sound asleep, you see, to nuances as yet; he was just a splendid English young animal of the best class.
He had promised not to write to Isabella—or, if he must, at least not to write a love-letter.
"Dear boy," the Lady Henrietta had said when giving him her fond parting kiss, "if you are very unhappy and feel you greatly wish to write to Miss Waring, I suppose you must do so, but let your letter be about the scenery and the impressions of travel, in no way to be interpreted into a declaration of affection or a promise of future union—I have your word, Paul, for that?"
And Paul had given his word.
"All right, mother—I promise—for three months."
And now on this wet evening the "must" had come, so he pulled out some hotel paper and began.
"MY DEAR ISABELLA:
"I say—you know—I hate beginning like this—I have arrived at this beastly place, and I am awfully unhappy. I think it would have been better if I had brought Pike with me, only those rotten laws about getting the little chap back to England would have been hard. How is Moonlighter? And have they really looked after that strain, do you gather? Make Tremlett come down and report progress to you daily—I told him to. My rooms look out on a beastly lake, and there are mountains, I suppose, but I can't see them. There is hardly any one in the hotel, because the Easter visitors have all gone back and the summer ones haven't come, so I doubt even if I can have a game of billiards. I am sick of guide-books, and I should like to take the next train home again. I must dress for dinner now, and I'll finish this to-night."
Paul dressed for dinner; his temper was vile, and his valet trembled. Then he went down into the restaurant scowling, and was ungracious to the polite and conciliating waiters, ordering his food and a bottle of claret as if they had done him an injury. "Anglais," they said to one another behind the serving-screen, pointing their thumbs at him—"he pay but he damn."
Then Paul sent for the New York Herald and propped it up in front of him, prodding at some olives with his fork, one occasionally reaching his mouth, while he read, and awaited his soup.
The table next to him in this quiet corner was laid for one, and had a bunch of roses in the centre, just two or three exquisite blooms that he was familiar with the appearance of in the Paris shops. Nearly all the other tables were empty or emptying; he had dined very late. Who could want roses eating alone? The menu, too, was written out and ready, and an expression of expectancy lightened the face of the head waiter—who himself brought a bottle of most carefully decanted red wine, feeling the temperature through the fine glass with the air of a great connoisseur.
"One of those over-fed foreign brutes of no sex, I suppose," Paul said to himself, and turned to the sporting notes in front of him.
He did not look up again until he heard the rustle of a dress.
The woman had to pass him—even so close that the heavy silk touched his foot. He fancied he smelt tuberoses, but it was not until she sat down, and he again looked at her, that he perceived a knot of them tucked into the front of her bodice.
A woman to order dinner for herself beforehand, and have special wine and special roses—special attention, too! It was simply disgusting!
Paul frowned. He brought his brown eyebrows close together, and glared at the creature with his blue young eyes.
An elderly, dignified servant in black livery stood behind her chair. She herself was all in black, and her hat—an expensive, distinguished-looking hat—cast a shadow over her eyes. He could just see they were cast down on her plate. Her face was white, he saw that plainly enough, startlingly white, like a magnolia bloom, and contained no marked features. No features at all! he said to himself. Yes—he was wrong, she had certainly a mouth worth looking at again. It was so red. Not large and pink and laughingly open like Isabella's, but straight and chiselled, and red, red, red.
Paul was young, but he knew paint when he saw it, and this red was real, and vivid, and disconcerted him.
He began his soup—hers came at the same time; she had only toyed with some caviare by way of hors d'oeuvre, and it angered him to notice the obsequiousness of the waiters, who passed each thing to the dignified servant to be placed before the lady by his hand. Who was she to be served with this respect and rapidity?
Only