Part 5 (1/2)

”But the breezes, and the woods, and the rye-fields, and the farm-houses with their delicious old oak presses, and the kind-hearted people, and the quaint children who love to watch you sketch and see you squeeze the paint out of the tubes--the memory of all these things draws you back to them. I long for Brittany almost as much as I once longed to leave everything and everybody and be just myself--and by myself. It seems so long ago now.”

She had almost unconsciously moved closer to him now.

”Won't you tell me when that was--Lisa?”

It was the first time he had dared to call her by this name. In his longing to utter it in articulate speech it had rushed to the tip of his tongue.

”It was three years ago--before I came here. Every place had a.s.sociations that hurt me. I wanted to get away--to work, work, work. I seemed to hate everybody. So I came here, and for months I thought I was as hard as a stone. Then one day I found myself angry with a girl--a fellow-student--and I was quite surprised to find I could feel at all.

And then I was suddenly glad I was a human being again.”

Her voice melted away into the vast murmur of the soft-twinkling city.

Beyond the fact that he was selfishly glad she had had trouble--it afforded him the exquisite pleasure of sympathy--there was no active thought in him now, no estimation of the position. His soul alone dominated; it had been moved to responsiveness and it now wrought out its mood, subtly surrounding her, he felt, with its comfort.

They crossed the mysterious, glistening river, and came upon the myriad flame-points of the Place de la Concorde. They turned into the Champs Elysees betwixt woods enchanted by the sorcerer Night; catching glimpses of palaces of light amid the trees whence melody came floating, mingled with the incense of the summer.

”Won't you tell me, Lisa--that is, if you think you can trust me.”

It was sweet to exercise the privilege of calling her ”Lisa.” He felt it was his for always now.

”I know I can trust you, Paul. Would you really care to hear? Of course you would,” she continued quickly, giving him no time to reply. ”What a silly question for me to ask! Still there is little to tell! I loved a man. We were to be married. His mind was poisoned against me by an enemy. He was harsh and unjust. A few words sum all up. He is married to another. A commonplace chapter, is it not? But to have lived through it--to have lived through it!”

He grew dazed and white. ”To have lived through it!” Those simple words seemed to his comprehending mood athrob with the sobbing of great grief.

”But you do not love him now?” he breathed.

”No, no! All is over now. But I brooded and brooded and thought--the experience made me a woman. Life is a serious thing to me now. I feel better and stronger for what I have suffered. But the memory remains.”

”You have nothing to reproach yourself with, Lisa. Surely there are happier memories in store for you. It is for you but to shape the future.”

He longed for her impulsive ”How?” and had his answer ready. It seemed a strange thing, but this confession of a past love, this telling of a great sorrow in her life, had wrought a spell upon him. His eyes were full of tears. In that moment his love for her seemed to have increased a thousandfold. The surprise with which the revelation had overwhelmed him was lost in the rush of pity. She had suffered, and by his love he would make everything up to her.

But now there came a sudden change, slight in its outward manifestation, but felt by him like a chill blast, for his soul vibrated to hers, registering every subtle shade of her mood. She did not speak immediately, and he knew that moment of silence was fatal.

They had pa.s.sed the round point of the Champs Elysees, and the woods and gardens had ended. Only the giant _hotels_ rose on either hand. There seemed more carriages darting about now, a greater movement of life, a general sense of disenchantment in the air, of an awakening from a dream to the clattering reality of things. Paul realised that the spell was broken.

Miss Brooke had turned her head for a moment to look through the window.

”We shall be there in two or three minutes now,” she said, as a sort of natural outcome of her ascertaining their exact whereabouts. ”I am afraid I must rather have depressed you. It is scarcely courteous to our hostess for us to arrive in so gloomy a mood.”

She gave a little laugh which set his every nerve a-tingle, so certainly did its ring lack the appealing quality that had brought him so close to her. It seemed to thrust him back abruptly and brutally.

”Tell me, Paul, haven't you ever had any love affairs?” she went on to ask, and there was a suspicion of banter in her tone. ”I've told you all about my tragedy, now tell me about yours or all yours. I know we've told each other all our lives before, but of course we both bowdlerized.

The most interesting parts have yet to be told.”

As she had asked him a direct question he felt constrained to answer it.

He found himself considering whether his relation to Celia need count as a love affair, but he was so convinced he had never been in love with her at all that he decided he could leave her out without doing violence to his conscience. Altogether there had been in his life two very minor and foolish amourettes that might have became entanglements; one with a barmaid when he was in the lawyer's office, some of the clerks having persuaded him the girl ”was gone on him,” the other with a simple maiden of sixteen, the daughter of a market gardener, which idyll had proceeded at his father's country seat. Paul told the latter--it was a boyish pa.s.sion that had come to nothing and stood for nothing in his life; the former he was ashamed of. ”I proposed to her and gave her a mortal fright. She was so scared she ran away. We were both shamefaced when we met again, and my spurt of pluck was at an end. I dared not say another word to her, and somehow we drifted out of being sweethearts. I was barely nineteen at the time.”

Miss Brooke laughed again heartily, but Paul only felt the gloomier.

”Tell me some more, please. You put me into quite a cheerful humour.