Part 106 (2/2)

After Lady Sellingworth had written and sent her note to Craven she felt that she was facing a new phase of life, and she thought of it as the last phase. Her sacrifice of self was surely complete at last. She had exposed her nature naked to Beryl Van Tuyn. She had given up her friends.h.i.+p with Alick Craven. There was nothing more for her to do. The call of youth had wrung from her a response which created loneliness around her. And now she had to find within herself the resolution to face this loneliness bravely.

When she wrote to Craven she had meant him to understand something of what he had understood. Yet she did not desire to hurt him. She would not have hurt him for the world. Secretly her heart yearned over him.

But she could never let him know that. He might be puzzled by her letter. He might even resent it. But he would soon forget any feeling roused by it. And he would no doubt soon forget her, the old woman who had been kind to him for a time, who had even been almost Bohemian with him in a very mild way, and who had then tacitly given him up. Perhaps she would see him again. Probably she would. She had no intentions of permanently closing her door against him. But she would not encourage him to come. She would never dine out with him again. If he came he must come as an ordinary caller at the ordinary caller's hour.

Seymour Portman called on her in the late afternoon of the day when she wrote to Craven. Just before his arrival she was feeling peculiarly blank and almost confusedly dull. She had gone through so much recently, had lived at such high tension, had suffered such intense nervous excitement, in the restaurant of the _Bella Napoli_ and afterwards, that both body and mind refused to function quite normally. Long ago she had stayed at St. Moritz in the depth of the winter, and had got up each morning to greet the fierce blue sky, the blazing sun, the white glare of the enveloping snows with a strange feeling of light, yet depressed, detachment. She began to have a similar feeling now. Far down she was horribly sad. But her surface seemed to say, ”Nothing matters, because I am in an abnormal condition, and while I remain in this condition nothing can really matter to me.” Surface and depths were in contradiction, yet she was not even fully aware of that. A numbness held her, and yet she was nervous.

She heard the drawing-room door open and Murgatroyd's voice make the familiar announcement; she saw Seymour's upright, soldierly figure come into the room; she smiled a greeting to her old friend; and the sound of Murgatroyd's voice, the sight of Seymour coming towards her, her own response to sound and sight, did not conquer the sensation of numbness.

”Yes, he is here. He does not forget me. He loves me and will always love me. But what does it matter?”

A voice seemed to be saying that within her. Recently she had suffered acutely; she had made a great effort; she had conquered herself and been conquered by another. And it had all been just too much for her. She was, she thought, like one who had fought desperately lying in deadly silence and calm on the deserted battlefield, utterly pa.s.sive because utterly tired out.

But Seymour did not know that. He knew nothing of all that had happened, and Beryl knew everything. And she thought of a picture called ”Love locked out.” It was hardly fair that Seymour should know so little. And while he was quietly talking to her, telling her little bits of news which he thought would interest her, letting her in by proxy as it were to the life of the great world which she had abandoned but in which he still played a part, she was thinking, ”If Seymour knew what I have done! If I told him, what would he think, what would he say?” He would be pleased, no doubt. But would he be surprised? And while she listened and talked she began to wonder, but always without intensity, about that. Seymour would think she had done the inevitable thing, what any thoroughbred was bound to do. And yet--would he be surprised nevertheless that she had been able to do it? She began presently to feel a slight tingle of curiosity about that. Had she, perhaps, to a certain extent justified Seymour's fidelity? He had a splendid character. She certainly had not. She had done countless things that Seymour must have hated, and secretly condemned. And yet he had somehow been able to go on loving her. Was that because he had always instinctively known that somewhere within her there was a traditional virtue which marched with his, that there was a voice which spoke his language?

”I suppose, in spite of all, in a way we are akin,” she thought.

And she began to wish vaguely that he knew it, that he knew what had happened between her and Beryl. As she looked at his ”cauliflower,”

bent towards her while he talked, at his strong soldier's face, at his faithful eyes, the eyes of the ”old dog,” she wished that it were possible to let Seymour know a little bit of the best of her. Not that she was proud of what she had done. She was too much akin to Seymour to be proud of such a thing, But Seymour would be pleased with her. And it would be pleasant to give him pleasure. It would be like giving him a small, a very small, reward for his long faithfulness, for his very beautiful and touching loyalty.

”What is it, Adela?” he said.

And a keen, searching look had come into his eyes.

She smiled vaguely, meeting his gaze. She still felt curiously detached, although she was able to think quite connectedly.

”What are you thinking about?”

”Why do you ask?”

”I feel you are not as usual to-day.”

”In what way?”

”Something has happened. I don't, of course, wish to know what it is.

But it has changed you, my dear.”

”In what way?” she said again.

His reply startled her, set her free from her feeling of numbness, of light detachment, from what she called to herself her ”St. Moritz feeling.”

”I feel as if you were coming into possession of your true self at last,” he said very gravely. ”But as if perhaps you scarcely knew it yet.”

A slow red crept in her cheeks, which would never know again the touch of the artificial red.

”Dear Seymour! My true self! I wonder what sort of self you think that is?”

”That's easily told. It is the self I have been loving for so many years. And now--”

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