Something was wrong with Tommy Burgrave. Instead of flinging excited hands in the direction of splendid equipage or beautiful woman, he sat glum by Clementina’s side, while the most dazzling procession in Europe passed before his eyes. Of course it was a little cockneyfied to sit on a public bench on the edge of the great Avenue of the Champs Elysées; but Clementina knew that consciousness of cockneydom would not disturb the serenity of Tommy’s soul. Something else was the matter. He was ill at ease. Gloom darkened his brow and care perched on his shoulders. The car of thirty-five million dove-power which had brought the wanderers, the day before, to Paris, had deposited Etta Concannon at the house of some friends for a few hours’ visit, and Tommy and Clementina at Ledoyen’s, where they had lunched. It was over the truite à la gelée that Tommy’s conversation had begun to flag. His melancholy deepened as the meal proceeded. When they strolled, after lunch; across to the Avenue, his face assumed an expression of acute misery. He sat forward, elbows on knees, and traced sad diagrams on the gravel with the point of his cane.
“My good Tommy,” said Clementina, at last—what on earth was the matter with the boy?—“you look as merry as a museum.”
He groaned. “I’m in a devil of a fix, Clementina.”
“Indeed?”
What could he be in a fix about? Anything more aggravatingly, insolently, excruciatingly happy than the pair of young idiots whom she had accompanied in the thirty-five million dove-power car aforesaid, she had never beheld in her life. Sometimes it was as much as she could do to restrain herself from stopping the car and dumping the pair of them down by the wayside and telling them to go and play Daphnis and Chloe by themselves in the sylvan solitudes of France, instead of conducting their antic gambols over her heartstrings. The air re-echoed deafeningly with cooings, and the sky grew sickly with smiles. What could a young man in love want more?
“It’s the biggest, awfullest mess that ever a fellow got into,” said Tommy.
“Well, I suppose it’s your own fault,” she remarked, with just a touch of the vindictive. She had emptied her heart of heaven and thrown it at the boy’s feet, and he had not so much as said “thank you.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Tommy.
“That’s just like a man,” said Clementina. “Every one of you is ready enough to cry peccavi, but it’s invariably somebody else’s maxima culpa.”
“I didn’t cry peccavi at all,” said Tommy. “I suppose I had better do so, though,” he added, after a gloomy pause. “I’ve been a cad. I’ve been abusing your hospitality. Any man of honour would kick me all over the place. But I swear to you it was not my fault. How the deuce could I help it?”
“Help what, my good Tommy?”
Tommy dug his stick fiercely in the gravel. “Help falling in love with Etta. There! now it’s out. Of course you had no idea of it.”
“Of course not,” said Clementina; with a wry twist of her mouth, not knowing whether to shriek with insane laughter or with pain at the final cut of the whip with which she had flagellated the offending Eve. But her grim sense of humour prevailed, though her strength allowed it to manifest itself only in the twinkling of her keen eyes.
“I don’t know what you can think of me,” said Tommy.
She made no reply, reflecting on the success of her comedy. As she had planned, so had it fallen out. She had saved her own self-respect—more, her self-honour—and she had saved him from making muddy disaster of his own life. The simplicity of the boy touched her deeply. The dear, ostrich reasoning of youth! Of course she had no idea of it! She looked at him, sitting there, as a man sometimes looks at a very pure woman—with a pitying reverence in her eyes. But Tommy did not see the look, contemplating as he was the blackness of his turpitude. For each of them it was a wholesome moment.
“You see, not only was I your guest, but I held a kind of position of trust,” continued Tommy. “She was, as it were, in my charge. If I had millions, I oughtn’t to have fallen in love with her. As I’m absolutely penniless, it’s a crime.”
“I don’t think falling in love with a sweet girl is a crime,” said Clementina gently. “There’s one in that automobile”—she nodded in the direction of a rosebud piece of womanhood in a carriage that was held up by a block in the traffic, just in front of them. “If any man fell in love with her right off; as she sat there, not knowing her, it wouldn’t be a crime. It would be a divine adventure.”
“She’s not worth two penn’orth of paint,” said Tommy disparagingly—now Clementina has told me that this was a singularly beautiful girl—such are other women than his Dulcinea in the eyes of the true lover—“she isn’t even doll-pretty. But suppose she were, for the sake of argument—it might be a divine adventure for the fool who fell in love with her and never told her; but for the penniless cad who went up and told her—and got her love in return—it would be a crime.”
Now it must be remembered that Tommy was entirely ignorant of the fact that a fortune of two thousand pounds, the spoils of Old Joe Jenks, was coyly lying at his banker’s, who had made the usual acknowledgment to the payer-in and not to the payee.
“So you’ve told Etta?” said Clementina, feeling curiously remote from him and yet curiously drawn to him.
“This morning,” said Tommy, glowering at the ground. “In the hall of the hotel, waiting for you to come down.”
“Oh!” said Clementina, who had deliberately lingered.
“It wasn’t your fault,” said Tommy with dark magnanimity. “It was the fault of that damned glove. She asked me to button it for her. Why do women wear gloves thirty sizes too small for them? Why can’t they wear sensible easy things like a man? I was fussing over the infernal thing—I had somehow got her arm perpendicular in front of her face and I was bending down and she was looking up—oh, can’t you see?” He broke off impatiently.
“Oh yes, I can see,” replied Clementina. “And I suppose Etta was utterly indignant?”
“That’s the devil of it,” said the conquering but miserable lover. “She wasn’t.”
“She wasn’t?” asked Clementina.
“No,” said Tommy.
“Then I’m shocked at her,” said Clementina. “She was in my charge, enjoying my hospitality. She had no business to fall in love with—with my—” she floundered for a second—“with my invalid guest.”
“Pretty sort of invalid I am,” said Tommy, who; through the masquerade of woe, appealed to passers-by, especially to those of the opposite sex, as the embodiment of fair Anglo-Saxon lustiness. “She isn’t to blame, poor dear. I am, and yet, confound it! I’m not—for how could I help it? But what the deuce there is in me, Clementina dear, for the most exquisite thing God ever made to care for, God only knows.”
Clementina put her hand—the glove on it, so different from Etta’s, was thirty sizes too large; it was of white cotton, and new—she had sent the page-boy of the hotel that morning to buy her a pair—she put her gloved hand on his. At the touch he raised his eyes to hers. He saw in them something—he was too young and ingenuous to know what—but something he had not seen in Clementina’s eyes before.
“You’re right, my dear boy,” she said. “God knows. That being so, it is up to Him, as the Americans say, to make good. And He’ll make good. That is, if you really love that little girl.”
“Love her!” cried Tommy. “Why——”
“Yes, yes,” Clementina interrupted hastily. “I’m convinced of it. You needn’t go into raptures.” She had endured much the last few weeks. She felt now that the penance of listening to amatory dithyrambics was supererogatory. “All I want to know is that you love her like a man.”
“That I do,” said Tommy.
“And she loves you?”
Tommy nodded lugubriously. She loved him for nodding.
“Then why the devil are you trying to make me miserable on this beautiful afternoon?”
He twisted round on the bench and faced her. “Then you’re not angry with me—you don’t think I’ve been a blackguard?”
“I think the two of you are innocent lambs,” said Clementina.
Tommy grinned. He, the seasoned man of the world of twenty-three, to be called an innocent lamb! Much Clementina knew about it.
“All the same,” said he, reverting to his gloom, “you’re different from other people; you have your own way of looking at things. Ordinary folk would say I had behaved abominably. Admiral Concannon would kick me out of the house if I went and asked him for his daughter. It’s Gi............