Part 20 (2/2)
CHAPTER XIII
”I WILL NOT SING”
”I will not sing--it's no use, I will not.” Al'mah's eyes were vivid with anger, and her lips, so much the resort of humour, were set in determination. Her words came with low vehemence.
Adrian Fellowes' hand nervously appealed to her. His voice was coaxing and gentle.
”Al'mah, must I tell Mrs. Byng that?” he asked. ”There are a hundred people in the ball-room. Some of them have driven thirty miles to hear you. Besides, you are bound in honour to keep your engagement.”
”I am bound to keep nothing that I don't wish to keep--you understand!”
she replied, with a pa.s.sionate gesture. ”I am free to do what I please with my voice and with myself. I will leave here in the morning. I sang before dinner. That pays my board and a little over,” she added, with bitterness. ”I prefer to be a paying guest. Mrs. Byng shall not be my paying hostess.”
Fellowes shrugged his shoulders, but his lips twitched with excitement.
”I don't know what has come over you, Al'mah,” he said helplessly and with an anxiety he could not disguise. ”You can't do that kind of thing. It isn't fair, it isn't straight business; from a social standpoint, it isn't well-bred.”
”Well-bred!” she retorted with a scornful laugh and a look of angry disdain. ”You once said I had the manners of Madame Sans Gene, the washer-woman--a sickly joke, it was. Are you going to be my guide in manners? Does breeding only consist in having clothes made in Savile Row and eating strawberries out of season at a pound a basket?”
”I get my clothes from the Stores now, as you can see,” he said, in a desperate attempt to be humorous, for she was in a dangerous mood. Only once before had he seen her so, and he could feel the air charged with catastrophe. ”And I'm eating humble pie in season now at nothing a dish,” he added. ”I really am; and it gives me shocking indigestion.”
Her face relaxed a little, for she could seldom resist any touch of humour, but the stubborn and wilful light in her eyes remained.
”That sounds like last year's pantomime,” she said, sharply, and, with a jerk of her shoulders, turned away.
”For G.o.d's sake wait a minute, Al'mah!” he urged, desperately. ”What has upset you? What has happened? Before dinner you were yourself; now--” he threw up his hands in despair--”Ah, my dearest, my star--”
She turned upon him savagely, and it seemed as though a storm of pa.s.sion would break upon him; but all at once she changed, came up close to him, and looked him steadily in the eyes.
”I do not think I trust you,” she said, quite quietly.
His eyes could not meet hers fairly. He felt them shrinking from her inquisition. ”You have always trusted me till now. What has happened?”
he asked, apprehensively and with husky voice.
”Nothing has happened,” she replied in a low, steady voice. ”Nothing.
But I seem to realize you to-night. It came to me suddenly, at dinner, as I listened to you, as I saw you talk--I had never before seen you in surroundings like these. But I realized you then: I had a revelation.
You need not ask me what it was. I do not know quite. I cannot tell. It is all vague, but it is startling, and it has gone through my heart like a knife. I tell you this, and I tell you quite calmly, that if you prove to be what, for the first time, I have a vision you are, I shall never look upon your face again if I can help it. If I come to know that you are false in nature and in act, that all you have said to me is not true, that you have degraded me--Oh,” she fiercely added, breaking off and speaking with infinite anger and scorn--”it was only love, honest and true, however mistaken, which could make what has been between us endurable in my eyes! What I have thought was true love, and its true pa.s.sion, helped me to forget the degradation and the secret shame--only the absolute honesty of that love could make me forget. But suppose I find it only imitation; suppose I see that it is only selfishness, only horrible, ugly self-indulgence; suppose you are a man who plays with a human soul! If I find that to be so, I tell you I shall hate you; and I shall hate myself; but I shall hate you more--a thousand times more.”
She paused with agony and appealing, with confusion and vague horror in her face. Her look was direct and absorbing, her eyes like wells of sullen fire.
”Al'mah,” he replied with fluttered eagerness, ”let us talk of this later--not now--later. I will answer anything--everything. I can and I will prove to you that this is only a mad idea of yours, that--”
”No, no, no, not mad,” she interrupted. ”There is no madness in it. I had a premonition before I came. It was like a cloud on my soul. It left me when we met here, when I heard your voice again; and for a moment I was happy. That was why I sang before dinner that song of La.s.sen's, 'Thine Eyes So Blue and Tender.' But it has come back.
Something deep within me says, 'He is not true.' Something whispers, 'He is false by nature; it is not in him to be true to anything or anybody.'”
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