Part 16 (1/2)
”Perhaps I did understand it, and preferred not to show my comprehension; there is such a thing as modesty!”
”There is--such a thing as false modesty!”
”Exactly,” remarked Lady Betty.
”I will accept your compliment gladly,” said Bellairs, looking at Lady Betty.
”Mine?” asked Clarice Leroux.
”Yes,” Bellairs replied.
The consciousness that he cared very much more for such a pretty meaning in Lady Betty than in Clarice Leroux led him then, for the first time, to that Garden Gate. He looked at Lady Betty again with a new feeling.
She returned his gaze quietly. Then he turned his eyes to those of Clarice. Hers were fixed upon him with a curious violence. He had a momentary sensation, literally for the first time, that these two women after all, had not one soul, one heart, between them. They did not feel quite simultaneously. Lady Betty was always a step behind Clarice. Yes, that was the difference between them. However quickly the echo follows the voice that summons it, yet it must always follow. Would Lady Betty never cease to follow? Bellairs found himself wondering eagerly, for that afternoon a strange certainty came to him. He knew, in a flash, that Clarice, if she did not already love him, was on the verge of loving him. He knew now that he loved Lady Betty. But she didn't love him yet, was not even quite close to loving him. Had she been in Egypt alone, divorced from Clarice, Bellairs believed that he would not have attracted her. He attracted her through Clarice, because he attracted Clarice. Could he make her love him in the same way? It would be a curious, subtle experiment to try to win one woman's heart by winning another's: Bellairs silently decided to make it. All the rest of that afternoon he talked to Clarice, showing to her the new self that Egypt had given him, the poetry which had ousted the prose inherited from a long line of ancestors, the sentiment of which he was no longer ashamed now he felt it to be a weapon with which he might win two hearts, the heart that contained another heart, as one conjurer's box contains a hundred others.
”I knew it when I first saw you,” Clarice said. ”Directly I looked at you that evening on the bank I knew it.”
”How strange,” Bellairs answered.
”And you--did you know it when you heard me playing?”
”That mazurka! Remember I am a man.”
They were sitting in the garden. It was night. Very few people were out, for a great Austrian pianist was playing in the public drawing-room, and the little world of Luxor sat at his feet relentlessly. They two could hear, mingling with a Polonaise of Chopin, the throbbing of tom-toms in the dusty village, the faint and suggestive cry of the pipes, which fill the soul at the same time with desire, and regret for past desire killed by gratification. Bellairs had been making love to Clarice, and she had told him that she loved him. And he had kissed her and his kiss had been returned.
”Will this kiss, too, have its echo?” he thought; and his eyes travelled towards the lighted windows of the drawing-room behind which Lady Betty sat. He turned again to Clarice.
”Do you believe in echoes?” he asked.
”Echoes!”
”That each thing we do in life, each word, each cry, each act, calls into being, perhaps very soon, perhaps very late, a repet.i.tion?”
”From the same person?”
”Or from some other person.”
”What a curious idea. You think we cannot ever do anything without finding an imitator! I don't like to imagine it. I don't fancy that there can ever, in the history of the world, be an exact repet.i.tion of our feeling, our doing, to-night.”
”Yet, there may be. Who knows?”
”I do. Instinct tells me there never can. There has never been, never will be, any woman with a heart just like mine, given to a man just in the same way as mine is given to you. Why should you think such a hateful thing?”
”I don't know. It was only an idea that occurred to me.”
And again he glanced towards the lighted windows.
”The world is very full of echoes,” he went on; ”our troubles are repeated.”
”But not our joys, our deepest joys. No, no, never!”