As for Delia, like every sensible English girl, she enjoyed herself in the time of youth, drinking in delightedly the interest attaching to Gaston’s betrothed. His letters had been regular, kind yet not emotionally affectionate, interesting, uncommon. He had a knack of saying as much in one page as most people did in five. Her imagination was not great, but he stimulated it. If he wrote a pungent line on Daudet or Whistler, on Montaigne or Fielding, she was stimulated to know them. One day he sent her Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which he had picked up in New York on his way to England. This startled her. She had never heard of Whitman. To her he seemed coarse, incomprehensible, ungentlemanly. She could not understand how Gaston could say beautiful things about Montaigne and about Whitman too. She had no conception how he had in him the strain of that first Sir Gaston Belward, and was also the son of a half-heathen.
He interested her all the more. Her letters were hardly so fascinating to him. She was beautifully correct, but she could not make a sentence breathe. He was grateful, but nothing stirred in him. He could live without her—that he knew regretfully. But he did his part with sincere intention.
That was up to the day when he saw Andree as Mademoiselle Victorine. Then came a swift change. Day after day he visited her, always in the presence of Annette. Soon they dined often together, still in Annette’s presence, and the severity of that rule was never relaxed.
Count Ploare came no more; he had received his dismissal. Occasionally Gaston visited the menagerie, but generally after the performance, when Victorine had a half-hour’s or an hour’s romp with her animals. This was a pleasant time to Gaston. The wild life in him responded.
These were hours when the girl was quite naive and natural, when she spent herself in ripe enjoyment—almost child-like, healthy. At other times there was an indefinable something which Gaston had not noticed in England. But then he had only seen her once. She, too, saw something in him unnoticed before. It was on his tongue a hundred times to tell her that that something was Delia Gasgoyne. He did not. Perhaps because it seemed so grotesque, perhaps because it was easier to drift. Besides, as he said to himself, he would soon go to join the yacht at Gibraltar, and all this would be over-over. All this? All what? A gipsy, a dompteuse—what was she to him? She interested him, he liked her, and she liked him, but there had been nothing more between them. Near as he was to her now, he very often saw her in his mind’s eye as she passed over Ridley Common, looking towards him, her eyes shaded by her hand.
She, too, had continually said to herself that this man could be nothing to her—nothing, never! Yet, why not? Count Ploare had offered her his hand. But she knew what had been in Count Ploare’s mind. Gaston Belward was different—he had befriended her father. She had not singular scruples regarding men, for she despised most of them. She was not a Mademoiselle Cerise, nor a Madame Juliette, though they were higher on the plane of art than she; or so the world put it. She had not known a man who had not, one time or another, shown himself common or insulting. But since the first moment she had seen Gaston, he had treated her as a lady.
A lady? She had seen enough to smile at that. She knew that she hadn’t it in her veins, that she was very much an actress, except in this man’s company, when she was mostly natural—as natural as one can be who has a painful secret. They had talked together—for how many hours? She knew exactly. And he had never descended to that which—she felt instinctively—he would not have shown to the ladies of his English world. She knew what ladies were. In her first few weeks in Paris, her fame mounting, she had lunched with some distinguished people, who entertained her as they would have done one of her lions, if that were possible. She understood. She had a proud, passionate nature; she rebelled at this. Invitations were declined at first on pink note-paper with gaudy flowers in a corner, afterwards on cream-laid vellum, when she saw what the great folk did.
And so the days went on, he telling her of his life from his boyhood up—all but the one thing! But that one thing she came to know, partly by instinct, partly by something he accidentally dropped, partly from something Jacques once said to him. Well, what did it matter to her? He would go back; she would remain. It didn’t matter.—Yet, why should she lie to herself? It did matter. And why should she care about that girl in England? She was not supposed to know. The other had everything in her favour; what had Andree the gipsy girl, or Mademoiselle Victorine, the dompteuse?
One Sunday evening, after dining together, she asked him to take her to see Saracen. It was a long-standing promise. She had never seen him riding; for their hours did not coincide until the late afternoon or evening. Taking Annette, they went to his new apartments. He had furnished a large studio as a sitting-room, not luxuriantly but pleasantly. It opened into a pretty little garden, with a few plants and trees. They sat there while Jacques went for the horse. Next door a number of students were singing a song of the boulevards. It was followed by one in a woman’s voice, sweet and clear and passionate, pitifully reckless. It was, as if in pure contradiction, the opposite of the other—simple, pathetic. At first there were laughing interruptions from the students; but the girl kept on, and soon silence prevailed, save for the voice:
“And when the wine is dry upon the lip,
And when the flower is broken by the hand,
And when I see the white sails of thy ship
Fly on, and leave me there upon the sand:
Think you that I shall weep? Nay, I shall smile:
The wine is drunk, the flower it is gone,
One weeps not when the days no more beguile,
How shall the tear-drops gather in a stone?”