Flaming Youth

CHAPTER VIII

"Hadn't you heard about Mother, Mr. Scott?" she asked very gently.

Her tone stopped him. His eyes were steady as he raised them to the lovely, pitying face before him. But hollows seemed suddenly to have fallen in beneath them. "Not—?" he whispered.

She inclined her head. "Nearly a year ago."

"Why haven't I heard? Why was I not told?" he demanded.

"Father wrote you, I think. You must sit down." She pushed a chair around for him and, laying light hands upon his shoulders, slipped his coat back. "Take it off," she said.

He obeyed. He was like a man tranced. Seated under the lamplight he stared fixedly into a dark corner of the room, as if to evoke a vision for his appeasement. Sharply intrigued, Constance took the opportunity of observing him at her leisure. He was, she decided, a delightful[Pg 84] personality, all the more engaging for that touch of the exotic, that hint of potential romance which the men of her acquaintance did not have. No woman would have called him handsome. His features were too irregular, and the finely modelled forehead was scarred vertically with a savagely deep V which mercifully lost itself in the clustering hair, a testimony to active war service. There was confident distinction in his bearing, and an atmosphere of quiet and somewhat ironic worldliness in voice and manner. He looked to be a man who had experimented much with life in its larger meanings and found it amusing but perhaps not fulfilling. Reckoning him contemporaneously with the implication of that betraying "Mona!" of his first utterance, Constance thought:

"He must be nearly forty to have been one of Mother's suitors. But he looks hardly over thirty."

She heard him sigh as he drew his spirit back from far distances, and was sensitive to the power of control implied in the composed countenance which he turned to her.

"You should be Constance Fentriss."

"Constance Browning," she corrected. "I'm an old married woman of two years' standing."

"Grand Dieu!" he muttered. "I think of you always as hardly more than a child. As I used to hear about you. One loses touch."

"You had not seen my mother for a long time, had you?"

"Very long. Many years. But one does not forget her kind."

Constance, who had not seated herself during this passage of speech, crossed to the mantel, and lifted from it a heavily framed photograph which she placed in the visitor's hands.

"That was taken a few months before she died."

[Pg 85]
"Unchanged!" he breathed.

Something imperative in Constance's burgeoning interest in the man drove her to ask: "Did you—were you very much in love with her?"

There was daring in her tone; but there was compassion also. Because of his sense of the latter he answered her frankly:

"No. Not, perhaps, as most people understand it. Love asks much. I asked—nothing. It was not," he smiled faintly, "as one falls in love and falls out."

"Ah?" she returned, questioningly, tauntingly. But he held to the graver tone.

"She was all that dreams could be, and as unattainable as dreams. If she was like an angel to me, I suppose I was like a boy to her. She used to tell me about you and your sisters." Again he smiled. "Once she said, 'Wait and come back and marry one of them.'"

"But you did not wait," accused Constance.

"Nor did you," he retorted with that swift, ironic eye-flash which she was to know so well later.

She welcomed the change to a lighter, and more familiar vein.

"How should I know?" she mocked. "You sent no word of your claim. Is Mrs. Scott with you?"

"No," he answered shortly. Then, in suaver tone: "It is more than a year now that I have been out of the world. The East; wild parts of Hindustan and Northern China; and then the South Seas. I have a boy's passion for travel."

"But not for your native land. You are an American, aren't you?"

"I have been. And I want to be again. But I shall need help."

[Pg 86]
"We Fentrisses are terribly American. Don't you want us to reclaim you?"

"Would you? Then I may come back?"

"You must. Father will want to see you."

"And I him. He is well?"

"Very. Where can he find you?"

"At the St. Regis for a few days."

"Do you think a few days enough to re-Americanize you?"

"Say a few years, then." He rose and turned to give a long look at the portrait of Mona Fentriss which he had set on the table. "You have been more than kind to me," he said gravely. "I cannot thank you enough."

"I'm afraid I was clumsy and abrupt." He shook his head. "It must have been a shock to you."

"Yes. But—dreams do not die. And I still keep the dream. And perhaps"—he lifted an appealing gaze to her—"perhaps, as a legacy, some little part of the friendship. I may hold that as a hope?"

"Yes," said Constance.

Her fingers stirred in his as he bent and touched light lips to her hand.

Out into the tumultuous night Cary Scott carried two pictures, mother and daughter, strangely alike, strangely different, which interchanged and blended and separated again, like the evanescence of sunset-hued clouds. But it was the visual memory of the living woman which eventually held his inner eye, the pure, smooth contour of her face, the sumptuous curves of the figure beneath the suave folds of the clinging robe, the chaste line of the lips contradicted by the half-veiled sensuality of the wide, humid, deer-soft eyes. A delicate, but unsatisfied sensuality which might yet, as he read it, break down under provocation into reckless self-indulgence. Sensitive by nature[Pg 87] to beauty in all its implications, inner and outer, he felt the enveloping atmosphere of her youth and sweetness, and sought, to match it, the swift intelligence, the eager responsiveness which had been Mona's. Had the daughter inherited these qualities of the mother? If she had, she would be irresistible.

Mona Fentriss, whatever relations she had maintained, in her wayward, laughing course of life, with other men (wholly unknown and unsuspected by Cary Scott) had been to him all that was demanded by the ideal which he himself had formed of her; had given him a friendship infinitely wise and sweet and clear in spirit. Of Constance he had asked the chance to win a like friendship. Yet in his heart, at once hopeful by instinct, and cynical by experience, he knew from the evidence of those hungering eyes, that if she gave at all it would be more than friendship. And, if she chose to give, would he choose to take? From Mona's daughter, at once so subtly like and unlike Mona? Was he already a little in love with her? The question was still unsolved when he went to sleep.

After he left, Constance returned to her book. Presently it dropped from her hand. Dreams seeped into the craving eyes.

Her husband found her so when he came in at midnight.

"What are you mooning over, Con?" he said testily. He was prone to the impatient mood when he had had too much to drink.

"I?" answered his wife. "Oh! Ghosts."

"Rats!" said Fred Browning. "Come to bed."