The Tigress Part 25

She clasped her hands behind her head and gazed intently into the very soul of the embers. "I mean that I soon choke and stifle in the close air of man. I am happier alone."

Freshly startled, he stared afresh. "It's always bad, then?" he asked sympathetically. "You don't get over it?"

"It's always bad." She paused a second or more, and then turned toward him, her eyes narrowed in that characteristic style which Kneedrock had described so harshly.

"But it is glorious, all the same," she cried with an odd little soft rapture. "You haven't come to that yet. You've not gone on to where one fights for the mere joy of loving love, in life, as one fights for breath in a suffocating pit. Why shouldn't I love to love? I love to do it. I love it all. I'd double the stakes at every loss, if I could. Do you follow me?"

"N-no," stammered Sir Caryll, a trifle stunned by the sudden shock of a boomerang idea. "N-no--I--er--I--"

"But you will to-morrow," she declared, nodding at him. "You will to-morrow. I'll go first and you'll follow."

"Oh, if you mean that--"

"I never give up," she a.s.serted. "I never will--"

"Does it look hopeless?" he broke in, laughing.

"I will tell you that to-morrow."

"When to-morrow?"

"We'll get off an hour before luncheon. I'll be down here waiting for you at a quarter to twelve precisely."

"You'll find _me_ waiting," said Carleigh, smiling.

CHAPTER XII

The Joy of Interest

The next morning the sun soared radiant. Carleigh, handed his stick by his valet, was conscious, too, of a personal soaring radiance: a condition so unusual and unexpected that it metaphorically struck him in the face.

"Oh, no," he reminded his lovelornity with emphasis, "it cannot possibly be!" Yet he knew joy to be all over him.

Not even the fourteen rare old engravings of early Christian martyrs and their martyrdom, with which the corridor was cheerfully embellished, could dampen his bubbling gaiety.

One cannot, indeed, take much interest in hangings and burnings and other tortures when one is going to have an hour alone in the open with a pretty woman who says things that--as the duke put it--you wouldn't think she would.

In the hall below he found the great black staghound--sole symbol of her mourning--waiting in majestic solitude beside a chair that bore a slender switch of a cane and a rough gray Burberry.

Mrs. Darling, herself, was not there; but the hound, the cane, and the coat--the morning being cold--showed that she had not forgotten her appointment.

Carleigh strolled over to the fire and lighted a cigarette. He felt so delightedly content. Presently his hostess swept quickly in from another room and nodded at him with the good cheer that no one had of late dared exhibit before him.

"You're going out with Nina," she said, evidently well-posted. "We're all driving to lunch with the men in the open. Can't you and she find your way there, too?"

"We'll try, but don't wait for us," he answered, really blithely.

Then it abruptly rushed over him how much he had been eased of his pain in these few hours, and he went up and kissed Lady Bellingdown's cheek impulsively, with: "Oh, Aunt Kitty! When will you have a spare minute for me, alone? I've such a lot to tell you."

In his way he was as uncontrolled as Nina, and quite as given to bursting forth in unwary speech.

"Tell it all to her, dear boy," she advised, looking up into his flushed brightness. "She's such a sweet, sympathetic woman. And she'll help you.

She helps every man. She has wonderful ways with her."

"You recommend her as a confidante?"

"Yes, indeed."

"But why, aunt? Why?"

"Oh, she has a way with her that brings men out of themselves. I don't know just what it is, because I'm a woman, and she never has it with women. But I know that she has it. She was always like that. And then she grew more so after her marriage. There was a while when no one knew just what the end would be, but she pulled through quite straight."

"There was a story?"

"When a woman is magnetic, my dear Caryll, there is always a story."

"Who will tell it me?"

"She will, if you ask her, I fancy."

He smiled again. "I am so interested. If you knew the relief--the rest--the absolute joy of feeling an interest in something again!"

"I know, dear boy. It's been bad. But Nina will help you. She helps every one. Ah, here she is now!"

And she was; tall and withy as a willow-wand; more wondrous, it seemed to Caryll, by daylight than nightlight, because more clearly seen.

"Good-morning! Good-morning!" she cried, a hand to each. "What a glorious day! The bang-bang of the guns woke lazy me; but I thanked Heaven that I was a woman and went to sleep again directly."

Lady Bellingdown laughed, and kissing her hand to both, vanished quickly through a curtained archway opposite.

Then Mrs. Darling all at once altered. First she glanced at Carleigh, and then at the floor. "Have you been waiting long?" she queried.

"Hours," he declared, gloating over her confusion. He picked up the coat and offered her the cane. With a quick, fleeting smile, she took both; and then they were off; the funereal Tara at their heels.

Across the Italian garden they went, and then across the Dutch garden, and the French garden to the genuine English park. When their feet clapped gaily on the smooth, sodden mosaic of leaves, he turned to her, exclaiming:

"Life has become suddenly full again for me. I am really happy. And yet this time yesterday I was a misanthrope--a blighted creature. Think of that! It is your witchcraft."

But she shook her head.

"No," she contradicted firmly. "Not my doing at all. Manlike you wish to attribute all good and evil to some cause. But as a matter of fact you were already cured. I am but the 'top-stones of the corner.'"

"No, no, not at all," he denied gravely. "I was blighted, I--"

"Then you are blighted still," she declared. "What has happened is that you are just enough intoxicated to forget for a little. I've benumbed you. That's all."