Part 5 (1/2)

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 feeling 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 imagined 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 master 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 possessing 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 interest 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 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 earnestly, 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 misunderstandings. 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 that it is only in their first love affairs that women 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 b.u.t.tercup heads. He had made a wretched beginning, with his ”good and sweet.” his ”young and innocent and beautiful like--like.” If the girl had been a shade less innocent the whole business would have been m.u.f.fed--m.u.f.fed hopelessly.

To-morrow he would be there early. A s.h.i.+p of promise should be--not launched--that was weeks away. The first timbers should be felled to build a s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sing 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, 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 ent.i.tled 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 towards 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, without so much as a thought to the ”book,” the part of Paul to this child's Virginia.