This was bad in many ways, for the woman was eight years his senior and a most heartless coquette, and Paul’s infatuation kept him from his own thoughts, which were just beginning to be of value to him.
The Dreamer in the mountains grieved wistfully as the old times enacted themselves before him. ‘Love,’ says blackguard Iago, ‘is a lust of the blood and a permission of the will.’ Well, one-and-twenty made his dreams even out of such poor material. The westward train boomed past, invisible from first to last in the smoke-cloud.
CHAPTER XI
Miss Belmont, nine-and-twenty, fresh and fair, ignorant-clever (after the known feminine fashion), rusée to the finger-tips, with a dragon reputation for virtue and a resolute will to keep it, was dangerous to the peace of mind of masculine twenty-one. She made Paul her bondslave. She intoxicated him with a touch, and sobered him with a face of sudden marble. She played the matron and the sister with him, and drove him mad between whiles.
Here is one scene out of hundreds, all acted to the Solitary’s mind as if the past were back again.
Summer was dying. The woods were yet lusty but growing sombre. Level beams of parting sunlight flashing through the trees like white-hot wire. A Sunday picnic for the company, magnificently provided by Darco, had brought Paul and Miss Belmont together. The lady had led the way into this solitude with so much tact and skill that Paul took pride in his own generalship. They sat on a rustic bench together, and immediately before them was an opening in the trees. At a very little distance the ground fell suddenly away, and in the valley wound a shining river with fold on fold of wooded lands beyond.
Paul was quivering to be nearer to her, but he had no courage to move. He looked at her, and her eyes seemed to be dreaming on the distant hills. He stole a timid hand towards her very slowly. She turned towards him with a soft smile, took the hand in her own, and held it, nestling her shoulders into the rustic woodwork and sending her dreamy gaze back to the hills again. Once or twice, as if unconsciously, she lifted the hand slightly and laid it down again caressingly.
Paul looked at her adoringly. It was like being in heaven, with a touch of vertigo.
‘Claudia,’ said Paul, in a whisper.