The Tigress. Warner Anne

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СКАЧАТЬ Disinterested Married Man

       CHAPTER XXV

       The Interested Married Man

       CHAPTER XXVI

       Three Persons Go Three Ways

       CHAPTER XXVII

       Reason Tottering on Its Throne

       CHAPTER XXVIII

       Incarnate or Reincarnate

       CHAPTER XXIX

       The Mantle of Heroism

       CHAPTER XXX

       A Letter and a Legacy

       CHAPTER XXXI

       What They Knew and Thought

       THE END

CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

On a Moonlight Night in Simla

       Table of Contents

      "I do hope you are not going to weep!" said Nina.

      She and he sat on a far-sheltered corner of the terrace in the gray shadow, and she had just told him that "everything was over."

      As "everything" had been going on for the best part of three months, it was, perhaps, only natural that she should experience some concern as to how he meant to take it.

      He was slow to reassure her, and she was impatient. "Because," she explained, "I never know just what to say or do when they weep. I'm never at a loss at other times; but—"

      "Of course I shall not weep," he protested at length, with something of indignation in his tone. "Whatever gave you such an idea?"

      "It isn't unusual," she explained. "Sometimes they storm. I've known them to swear most awfully. But when they are young, as you are, they so often just melt; and it is very trying, you know. Perhaps you'll swear. I'd much rather have it so. There was Emborough, for instance. He—"

      "If you don't mind," he cut in, "I'd prefer not to hear."

      "Ah, I see!" she exclaimed quickly. "You are neither going to weep nor storm. You are going to be just plain disagreeable. And if there is anything I hate it is a man who mopes."

      He was thinking very hard, and for the moment he had failed to follow her. Disaster had dropped upon him like a bolt from the blue at the moment of his greatest confidence.

      It was at Simla where, Kipling says, "all things begin and many come to an evil end;" and something, it seemed, had come to an end—evil or otherwise—as well as the season and the last of the dances at Viceregal Lodge.

      Ten minutes ago he had been so convinced that the end was to be "otherwise" that even now he couldn't believe it was to be evil.

      "Why," he managed to say after a brief pause, "I don't understand you at all. I—"

      "No one ever has understood me," she assured him. "Even when I've gone to the trouble of explaining they manage somehow to get the explanation all upside down. It's very tiresome—very."

      "I really thought you loved me! You—"

      "They all think I love them. That's the odd part of it. I'm sure I never told any one. And yet they are so conceited—Oh, why can't you men appreciate being petted and amused, without imagining that it must be inspired by adoration and coupled with a desire for life-long attachment?"

      "You promised to bolt with me," he asserted boldly.

      Nina's chair jumped back three inches, impelled by the reflexes of a slim but sturdy pair of long legs. Hers, not the chair's.

      "I abominate a liar!" she announced firmly.

      "So do I," he came back. "You did promise me. It was during that last waltz."

      "I am never responsible for what I say when waltzing."

      "You admit it, then?"

      "I admit nothing. I neither confirm nor deny. I don't know."

      "But we came out here to arrange it. Or don't you remember that, either?"

      "I fancied it was because you wished to smoke."

      "God!" he exclaimed suddenly. "How can you be so bitterly cruel!"

      She may have been a reincarnated tigress—in after years there was a man who always declared so—and then again she may not. It is quite possible that circumstance and environment made her what she was.

      Certainly at heart Nina Darling was not a bad woman. There were times when she tried very hard to be a very good woman according to her lights. And yet, somehow, somewhere within her she seemed to possess a faculty for making men wretched.

      The world—or a very large part of it—regarded it as an insatiable craving, an unappeasable appetite—a sort of lust for personal aggrandizement, growing out of personal vanity. But then the world knew nothing of Nina Darling's secret—which made all the difference.

      For right judgment a few facts will not serve. Unless we have them all we are likely to fall into error. To argue from effect back to cause is a very risky undertaking. And that was what most people did in Nina Darling's case.

      Young Gerald Andrews, of the civil service, the most recent victim, whom she had had in leading strings ever since he came to Simla, fancied her from the very first the most beautiful creature he had ever seen.

      Now, stung by the СКАЧАТЬ