Adrian Savage. Lucas Malet

human relations—would choose to capture his exquisite prey amid the blatant materialism, the vulgar noise and chaffer of the modern social highway; rather than pursue it through the shifting lights and shadows of mysterious woodland places, the dread of its final escape always upon him, till his feet were weary with running, and his hands with dividing the thick, leafy branches, his ears, all the while, tormented by the baffling, piercing sweetness of the half-heard Pipes of Pan?

      Not infrequently Adrian would draw himself up short in the midst of such rhapsodizings, humorously conscious that the artistic side of his nature had got the bit, so to speak, very much between its teeth and was running away altogether too violently with its soberer, more practical, stable companion. For, as he frankly admitted, to the ordinary observer it must seem a rather ludicrously far cry from Madame St. Leger's pleasant, well-found flat, in the center of cosmopolitan twentieth-century Paris, to the arcana of pagan myth and legend! Yet, speaking quite soberly and truthfully, it was of such ancient, secret, and symbolic things he instinctively thought when looking into Gabrielle St. Leger's golden-brown eyes and noting the ironic loveliness of her smiling lips. That was just the delight, just the provocation, just what differentiated her from all other women of his acquaintance, from any other woman who, so far, had touched his heart or stirred his senses. Her recondite beauty—to quote the phrase of this analytical lover—challenged his imagination with the excitement of something hidden; though whether hidden by intentional and delicate malice, or merely by lack of opportunity for self-declaration, he was at a loss to determine. Daughter, wife, mother, widow—young though she still was, she had sounded the gamut of woman's most vital experiences. Yet, it seemed to him, although she had fulfilled, and was fulfilling, the obligations incident to each of these several conditions in so gracious and irreproachable a manner, her soul had never been effectively snared in the meshes of any net. Good Catholic, good housewife, sympathetic hostess, intelligent and discriminating critic, still—he might be a fool for his pains, but what artist doesn't know better than to under-rate the fine uses of folly?—he believed her to be, either by fate or by choice, essentially a Belle au Bois Dormant; and further believed himself, thanks to the workings of constitutional masculine vanity, to be the princely adventurer designed by providence for the far from disagreeable duty of waking her up. Only just now providence, to put it roughly, appeared to have quite other fish for him to fry. And it was under compulsion of such prospective fish-frying that he sought her apartment overlooking the Quai Malaquais, this afternoon, reluctantly to bid her farewell.

CHAPTER II

       WHEREIN A VERY MODERN YOUNG MAN TELLS A

       TIME-HONORED TALE WITH BUT SMALL ENCOURAGEMENT

       Table of Contents

      Disappointment awaited him. Madame St. Leger was receiving; but, to his chagrin, another visitor had forestalled his advent—witness a woman's fur-lined wrap lying across the lid of the painted Venetian chest in the corridor. Adrian bestowed a glance of veritable hatred upon the garment. Then, recognizing it, felt a little better. For it belonged to Anastasia Beauchamp, an old friend, not unsympathetic, as he believed, to his suit.

      Sympathy, however, was hardly the note struck on his entrance. Miss Beauchamp and Madame St. Leger stood in the vacant rose-red carpeted space at the far end of the long room, in front of the open fire. Both were silent; yet Adrian was aware somehow they had only that moment ceased speaking, and that their conversation had been momentous in character. The high tension of it held them to the point of their permitting him to walk the whole length of the room before turning to acknowledge his presence. This was damping for Adrian, who, like most agreeable young men, thought himself entitled to and well worth a welcome. But not a bit of it! The elder woman—high-shouldered, short-waisted, an admittedly liberal sixty, her arms disproportionate in their length and thinness to her low stature—continued to hold her hostess's right hand in both hers and look at her intently, as though enforcing some request or admonition.

      Miss Beauchamp, it may be noted in passing, affected a certain juvenility of apparel. To-day she wore a short purple serge walking-suit. A velvet toque of the same color, trimmed with sable and blush-roses, perched itself on her elaborately dressed hair, which, in obedience to the then prevailing fashion, showed not gray but a full coppery red. Her eyebrows and eyelids were darkly penciled, and powder essayed to mask wrinkles and sallowness of complexion. Yet the very frankness of these artifices tended to rob them of offense; or, in any serious degree—the first surprise of them over—to mar the genial promise of her quick blue-gray eyes and her thin, witty, strongly marked, rather masculine countenance. Adrian usually accepted her superficial bedizenments without criticism, as just part of her excellent, if somewhat bizarre, personality. But to-day—his temper being slightly ruffled—under the cold, diffused light of the range of tall windows, they started, to his seeing, into quite unpardonable prominence—a prominence punctuated by the grace and the proudly youthful aspect of the woman beside her.

      Madame St. Leger was clothed in unrelieved black, from the frill, high about her long throat, to the hem of her trailing cling skirts. Over her head she had thrown a black gauze scarf, soberly framing her heart-shaped face in fine semi-transparent folds, and obscuring the burnished lights in her brown hair, which stood away in soft, dense ridges on either side the parting and was gathered into a loose knot at the back of her head. Her white skin was very clear, a faint scarlet tinge showing through it in the round of either cheek. But just now she was pale. And this, along with the framing black gauze scarf, developed the subtle likeness which—as Adrian held—she bore, in the proportions of her face and molding of it, to Leonardo's world-famous "Mona Lisa" in Salon Carré of the Louvre. The strange recondite quality of her beauty, and the challenge it offered, were peculiarly in evidence; thereby making, as he reflected, cruel, though unconscious, havoc of the juvenile pretensions of poor Anastasia. And this was painful to him. So that in wishing—as he incontestably did—the said Anastasia absent, his wish may have been dictated almost as much by chivalry as by selfishness.

      All of which conflicting perceptions and emotions tended to rob him of his habitual and happy self-assurance. His voice took on quite plaintive tones, and his gay brown eyes a quite pathetic and orphaned expression, as he exclaimed:

      "Ah! I see that I disturb you. I am in the way. My visit is inconvenient to you!"

      The faint tinge of scarlet leaped into Madame St. Leger's cheeks, and an engaging dimple indicated itself at the left corner of her closed and smiling mouth. Meanwhile Anastasia Beauchamp broke forth impetuously:

      "No, no! On the contrary, it is I who am in the way, though our dear, exquisite friend is too amiable to tell me so. I have victimized her far too long already. I have bored her distractingly."

      "Indeed, it is impossible you should ever bore me," the younger woman put in quietly.

      "Then I have done worse. I have just a little bit angered you," Miss Beauchamp declared. "Oh! I know I have been richly irritating, preaching antiquated doctrines of moderation in thought and conduct. But 'les vérités bêtes' remain 'les vérités vraies,' now as ever. With that I go. Ma toute chère et belle, I leave you. And," she added, turning to Adrian, "I leave you, you lucky young man, in possession. Retrieve my failures! Be as amusing as I have been intolerable.—But see, one moment, since the opportunity offers. Tell me, you are going to accept those articles on the Stage in the Eighteenth Century, by my poor little protégé, Lewis Byewater, for publication in the Review?"

      "Am I not always ready to attempt the impossible for your sake, dear Mademoiselle?" Adrian inquired gallantly.

      "Hum—hum—is it as bad as that, then? Are his articles so impossible? Byewater has soaked himself in his subject. He has been tremendously conscientious. He has taken immense trouble over them."

      "He has taken immensely too much; that is just the worry. His conscience protrudes at every sentence. It prods, it positively impales you!" The speaker raised his neat black eyebrows and broad shoulders in delicate apology. "Alas! he is pompous, pedantic, I grieve to report; he is heavy, very heavy, your little Byewater. The eighteenth-century