Part 104 (1/2)
And at that moment Lady Sellingworth knew she was speaking the truth.
She remembered her own madnesses, sunk away in the past, but still present to her, gripped between the tentacles of memory. Beryl, too, was then capable of the great follies which often exist side by side with great vanity. The wild heart confronted Lady Sellingworth in another.
And she felt suddenly a deep sense of pity, a sense that seemed flooded with tears, the pity that age sometimes feels for youth coming on into life, on into the devious ways, with their ambushes, their traps, their pitfalls full of darkness and fear. She was even conscious of a tenderness of age which till now had been a rare visitor in her difficult nature. Seymour Portman seemed near her, almost with her in the room. She could almost hear his voice speaking of spring with all its daffodils.
n.o.blesse oblige. In her torn heart could she find a n.o.bleness sufficient for this occasion? Seymour's eyes, the terrible eyes of affection, which require so much and which sometimes, because of that, seem to be endowed with creative power, forcing into life that which they long to see, were surely upon her, watching for her n.o.bility, asking for it, demanding it of her.
She took Beryl Van Tuyn by the wrist and led her away from the shut door back to the fire.
”Sit down, Beryl,” she said.
The girl looked at her wondering, feeling a great change in her and not understanding it.
”Why?” she said.
”I have something I must say to you.”
Beryl dropped her m.u.f.f and sat down. Lady Sellingworth stood near her.
”Beryl,” she said, ”you think I have been and am your enemy. I must show you I am not. And there's only one way. You say I can't bear to see you happy. I don't think that's true. I hope it isn't. I don't think I wish unhappiness to others, but, even at my age, I still wish to have a little happiness myself. There's never a time in one's life, I suppose, when one doesn't long to be happy. But I don't want to interfere with your happiness, I only want to interfere between you and a very great danger, something which would certainly bring disaster into your life.”
She stopped speaking. She was looking grave, indeed almost tragically sad, but calm and resolute. The spots of red had faded out of her cheeks. There was no fever in her manner. Miss Van Tuyn's wonder grew as she looked at her former friend, who now dominated her, and began to extort from her a strange and unwilling admiration, which recalled to her the admiration of that past time when she had first met Alick Craven in this drawing-room.
After a long pause Lady Sellingworth continued, with a sort of strong simplicity in which there was moral power:
”Don't be angry with me, Beryl, when I tell you that you have one of my dominant characteristics.”
”What is it?” Miss Van Tuyn asked, in a low voice.
”Vanity. You and I--we were both born with great vanity in us. Mine has troubled me, tortured me, been a curse to me, all my life. It led me at last into a very horrible situation, in which the--that man who calls himself Nicolas Arabian was mixed up.”
”But you said you didn't know him, that you had never known him!”
”That's quite true. I have never spoken to him in my life. But it was he who led me to change my life. You must have heard of it. You must have heard how, ten years ago, I suddenly gave up everything and began to lead a life of retirement.”
”Yes.”
”But for that man I should probably never have done that. But for him I might have been going about London now with dyed hair, pretending to be ten or fifteen years younger than I really am.”
”But--if you never knew him? I can't understand!”
”Did you ever hear that about ten years ago I lost a great quant.i.ty of jewels, that they were stolen out of a train at the Gare du Nord in Paris?”
A look of fear, almost of horror, came into Beryl Van Tuyn's eyes. She got up from the sofa on which she was sitting.
”Adela!”
Already she knew what was coming, what Lady Sellingworth was going to tell her. She even knew the very words Lady Sellingworth was about to say, and when she heard them it was as if she herself had spoken them.
”That man stole them.”
”Adela!”