Her beautiful face was grave, and her voice a shade anxious. In her eyes was an expression of sincerity that compelled acceptance.
"I know you will make me understand everything, Lisa," he said.
"You must withhold your judgment till I have finished. I am going to be absolutely candid, though I am not sure whether I have ever succeeded in telling the truth about things, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, even to myself. One shrinks from laying bare the causes and motives of one"s thoughts and conduct, even when no other eye is looking. But I should feel myself quite vile now if I concealed the least thing from you."
"One can over-accentuate the baseness of one"s motives as well as cover it up," he suggested.
"It is very kind of you, Paul, to try and spare me. But please save up your mercy; I warn you I shall be sadly in need of it later on. To come to facts now, Paul, I have tried to victimise you from the beginning. I have dissembled and told you lies throughout. I have systematically acted a part. I have never loved you."
He tried to make some articulation, but not a muscle moved. He sat as if turned to stone.
"That first evening we met I knew I had turned your head, and I could see at once you were inexperienced with women as surely as if the fact had been branded upon you. I had heard somebody point you out and say you were worth fifteen thousand pounds a year, and, as afterwards you yourself told me you were rich, any doubt I might have had on the point was removed. My own poverty had just been painfully brought home to me, for I had been forced to leave Paris for want of money at the very moment my ambition began to look reasonable. I was feeling particularly bitter about it as there was no certainty at all of my being able to come back here. Poppa"s savings had all gone in starting me with a good stock of dresses and keeping me here two years. He had hoped to be able to do more for me, but he could only send me my pa.s.sage-money. Fifteen or even ten thousand pounds a year is a great temptation to a poor girl.
Chance had never yet thrown in my way a really rich suitor, and there was I, at the moment of meeting him, almost on the eve of departure, with very little money in my pocket and indebted to the kindness of a lady for her invitation to stay the month in London. She had taken my room for me as she could not accommodate me at her own house. You see how poor I was! I set myself puzzling in the coolest possible way as to how I could get you. Instinct as well as the ease with which I had bewitched you told me there were romantic possibilities in you, of which you had scarcely any suspicion and which might easily be played upon.
And a plan formed at once in my mind in the ultimate success of which I had the fullest confidence. To put the idea into your head that we meet again here in a year"s time was to appeal to your romantic side. That is why I mentioned the Beaux Arts to you--your love for architecture made my game easy. I was now determined that nothing should stand in the way of my returning to Paris, that poppa somehow must raise the necessary money--even if he ran into debt. Happily he was able to send me back and to see his way clear to keep me going as long as I chose to stay."
Miss Brooke paused a moment and poured out Paul"s coffee, which, however, he let stand untouched.
"Everything turned out just as I had calculated," she continued, after taking a sip at her own. "You had carried me in your mind the whole time, and you had been waiting for me and counting on my coming. So far I was delighted. For a time all went smoothly. You were mine completely. But then an unforeseen force began suddenly to act on the position. My old enthusiasm for my work came back, and with it my old mad ambitions. Do you know what first gave me those mad ambitions? You shall hear in a moment. Anyway, my old intolerance against anything like dependence rose up in me. I wanted to make a great name and a great deal of money, all by myself. A picture by a great master--we admired it together at the salon--had just sold for thirty thousand dollars, and that inflamed me. No woman painter has yet existed of absolutely the first rank; one and all have been influenced, more or less, by a man. I wanted to be the first woman whose work should be absolutely great, absolutely original. I wanted the honour for America, for I am proud of being an American woman. But you were on the spot, and I had only to move my little finger to get you. You were an eternal temptation. Don"t you think I knew you were jealous of Charlie? He has been in love with me ever since I first came here; but, poor devil, he only just manages to get along, and is only too glad if he"s not behindhand with his studio rent. The reason I allowed him to hang round so much was partly because he had become a habit of mine, and partly to help me not to be tempted to give you too much of my company.
"I really wanted to fight against the temptation of your money, but more for my own sake than yours. In the first place I did not love you. And in the second, I could read your nature like a book. Your ideas and mine would never go together. I wanted a husband who would be content with such moments of love as I could spare him out of my career; to whom I could go for love when I wanted love; who would be content to live out his own life and leave me to work out mine. I do not want to be kept by my husband--rather than that I should prefer to keep him. All my rooted independence had sprung up as by magic the moment I took up my brush and palette again and looked at the model. Your notions were far too primitive for me. You would have allowed me to go on with my art as a concession--to do credit to your name, perhaps. You would have looked upon my pictures as sacred, to be hung in your house and worshipped by you before your guests; I should have wanted to sell them, to convert them into dollars.
"Do you wonder now I was strong enough to hesitate? I was only too glad when Dora said she was going to carry me off to Perros-Guirec. It would take me away from you and--temptation. Then you sent me those flowers. I was touched. Not by the flowers, but by the train of thought they set going. The ghost of my conscience came up, suggesting I should be treating you badly, seeing "you had "em so bad." And then you had, say, ten thousand pounds a year! That, I suppose, had something to do with the rising of the phantom. So I determined to take you to Dora"s--of course, she replied at once she would be pleased to welcome you--and I made up my mind, half to amuse myself, that I would make you propose in the cab on the way to her. I could read you through and through, and knew your every thought. So far I had kept you at a perceptible distance, now it pleased me to draw you close to me, and to see you obey without my uttering a single word of command. I told you about my old engagement just then because it gave me a sensation of daring. I calculated on stirring the romance and chivalry in you still more deeply. The experiment was risky--but it succeeded. You responded like a good ship to its helm. Then for the first time since I had known you, Paul, I suffered remorse--real remorse. Why it came just then I have never been able to make out, but all of a sudden I was dreadfully sorry for you.
"I saw clearly that even if I _had_ loved you, our lives could never harmonise; that after the first honeymoon cooings, the conflict of wills and ideas would inevitably set in, and we should both be utterly and hopelessly miserable. But I did _not_ love you, and I felt myself in a terrible dilemma. You were on the point of speaking, and the only thing I could think of to stop you, and to stop you for always, was to tell you my early flirtations. I was hoping to play on your prejudices and set you against me. I was true to myself then; I was throwing away--how many thousands a year?
"But I caused you suffering to no purpose, and, as I realised nothing would make you desist, the temptation of all those thousands came upon me again. I argued I was the stronger personality of the two, and I should be able to manage you--easily. Curious how I accentuated the "easily," and twisted my arguments to suit it. There was little to do--I just pulled the wire and the puppet worked. You"ll forgive me for calling you a puppet, Paul, but you were one, you know.
"Perhaps now you will begin to understand how I felt the next morning. I really liked you, Paul, and I had done you so great a wrong from the very moment of our first meeting. I had not cried for more than three years, Paul, but I cried then. The situation was desperate, and there was nothing for it but to apply a desperate remedy.
"I have not told you all. I have purposely kept back something to the end. If I had mingled it with the rest it would have been lost, and as it is my only claim on your sympathy, I have kept it for use by itself.
It is unfortunate that even here I have to begin with the confession of another lie, but I have already confessed to so many, I am hoping that one more won"t make me sink any lower in your estimation. Besides, my motive in telling it was good. I refer to my old engagement The fact was true, but the details I gave you were false. I had intended telling you the truth, but somehow it stuck on my lips. I felt I ought never to have used so sacred an experience for such a purpose. I _had_ to invent a lie as I went on. But I cut it as short as I could.
"I did love the man as, it seemed to me, no woman could have loved a man before. He was almost penniless, but I did not mind that. I would have married him, and he would not have interfered with my ambitions. He would have been content to have me live away from him whilst I worked according to my own spirit, and developed the gifts he was the first to discover in me. For he was a painter, too; had starved to get a training in Europe, had starved while getting it. To help us get a start I was content at first to absorb myself in his work. That was a fatal mistake.
I can scarcely trace out how it came about--and to linger on it makes me suffer terribly--but with the lapse of time I ceased to exist for him as a creature of flesh and blood. I suddenly realised that I had become a mere inspiration to him--it was only the artist in me he worshipped. All his heart and soul went into his work--he was no longer a man, but a mere mind wielding a brush. I can see him how absorbed before his canvas, tall and thin with his scholar"s stoop--for Nesbit _was_ a scholar! But it had to end at last. I cried bitterly for many a night after. I had a letter from him one fine day----"
"Announcing his engagement and asking you to congratulate him?" broke from Paul"s lips. His eyes were too dry for tears.
"It is the only letter of his I haven"t burnt. He is famous now, but the first picture he ever sold went to buy my turquoise necklace to match the comb I had from my mother. His example was a n.o.ble one--the first picture I am offered money for shall go to poppa instead. But he would never take the gift back, and now I value it as his. It has always given me great joy to wear it--in fact, that is my one great joy apart from my work."
"You still love him! You have loved him all through!" cried Paul.
Her face softened. "You see I have quite an extraordinary vein of sentiment in me. I am not sure whether I am not ashamed of it."
"Tell me, Lisa--if I may still call you Lisa--all those flirtations you told me about were true?"
"What a quaint question! You haven"t drunk your coffee." He gulped down the cold contents of the tiny cup at one draught, for his mouth was parched.
"They all happened just as I told you, and I haven"t told you a quarter."
"And do you mind my asking you another quaint question? Have you and Charlie ever kissed?"
"I have always liked to have nice men kiss me. It is a mania with me, and I shall go on doing so till the end of the chapter."
"All the same, Lisa, I love you still. Is there no hope for me? I have no prejudices. I want you, Lisa, just as you are. Your life shall be perfectly free--your career your own."
"You are good, Paul, and I have played with you precisely as a cat plays with a mouse. You will have observed I have a good deal of the cat in me. Believe me, I am in earnest when I say I am quite unworthy of your love----"
"No, Lisa," he began.
"Listen, Paul. I want you to understand how much I love my lost darling.
If he were to leave his wife and child, now and come to me and say he loved me, I would go with him to the end of the earth. No, no, Paul. My hope is only in my work. I know I shall realise my ambition. Some day you will marry a better woman than I am. And if," she continued, with a smile, "you care to write and let me know, be sure I shall congratulate you right heartily. Now tell me I have your sympathy, and then let us say good-bye."
"I love you, Lisa. Is that not sufficient proof of my sympathy? I shall leave Paris to-night."
"Come, Paul, kiss me! For the first time and last!"
He brushed her lips so lightly that he scarce had the consciousness of doing so; then he staggered from the room.
CHAPTER IX.
HE wandered he knew not whither, penetrating into strange, silent regions his foot had never trod. At the end of an hour he found he had taken a long circuit round, and that he had arrived again at the _hotel_ where Lisa lived. He crossed the narrow street, and, standing in the shadow, looked up at the window he knew so well. It stood wide open, and he could see the white ceiling of the lighted room, with the huge j.a.panese umbrella making a glare of colour against it. In the balcony sat two figures full in the light that flooded out. One was Miss Brooke, the other a stalwart young man in a Norfolk suit he could not recollect having seen before. A vague sound of their cheerful talking came down to him.
He turned away with a sigh, and strode rapidly to his lodging. He lighted his lamp, and, sinking into a chair, sat looking at his trunks.
The labels with their bold ornamental lettering--"Middleton, Paris a Perros-Guirec"--stared him mockingly in the face. He averted his eyes, instinctively seeking in his pocket for his mother"s letter, which he had till now forgotten, and was surprised to find it rolled into a ball.
Smoothing it out, he read it through again.
"Write to me, dear Paul, direct there, or, better still, come down and surprise us. Celia, I am sure, will be _delighted_ to see you. I never understood what happened between you two exactly. You said "good-bye" so stiffly that I made sure you had quarrelled, though Celia a.s.sures me that it was not so. She is a dear, good girl, and I love her as if she were my own daughter."
And with these words he seemed to read the inevitableness of his fate.
His rebellion against it was over. He had broken loose from the maternal leading-strings, but had made a miserable failure without them. Now he would help to fix them on him again.
The millionaire"s daughter, the keynote of whose character had struck him as a charming, simple frankness, and in pursuit of whom he had set out, had proved to be a more complex specimen of womanhood than he could have imagined to exist, the very essence of that femininity of which he had always had an instinctive distrust. Celia was not brilliant, but she was safe--he knew her well enough to be sure of that.
He seized a small brush and inked over the flamboyant "Perros-Guirec,"
writing over the black strip the word "Dieppe" in the plainest of lettering. Then, finishing what little packing there remained to be done, he went out to consult a time-table at a neighbouring cafe, where he wrote and posted a note to his professor, and another to the _ma.s.sier_ of his cla.s.s. He next hailed a cab at the rank, and the concierge carried down his trunks. "_a la gare St. Lazare!_"
The _cocher_ cracked his whip, and Paul, lost in thought, was only vaguely conscious of the streets and boulevards that had become so dear to him.
THE END.