The Incomplete Amorist | Page 5

said to her, beginning to put his traps together.
"Oh, I didn't mean that," said Betty in real distress. What would he think of her? How greedy and grasping she must seem! "I didn't mean that at all!"
"No; but I do," he said.
"But you're a great artist," said Betty, watching him with clasped hands. "I suppose it would be--I mean--don't you know, we're not rich, and I suppose your lessons are worth pounds and pounds."
"I don't give lessons for money," his lips tightened--"only for love."
"That means nothing, doesn't it?" she said, and flushed to find herself on the defensive feebly against--nothing.
"At tennis, yes," he said, and to himself he added: "Vieux jeu, my dear, but you did it very prettily."
"But I couldn't let you give me lessons for nothing."
"Why not?" he asked. And his calmness made Betty feel ashamed and sordid.
"I don't know," she answered tremulously, but I don't think my step-father would want me to."
"You think it would annoy him?"
"I'm sure it would, if he knew about it."
Betty was thinking how little her step-father had ever cared to know of her and her interests. But the man caught the ball as he saw it.
"Then why let him know?" was the next move; and it seemed to him that Betty's move of rejoinder came with a readiness born of some practice at the game.
"Oh," she said innocently, "I never thought of that! But wouldn't it be wrong?"
"She's got the whole thing stereotyped. But it's dainty type anyhow," he thought. "Of course it wouldn't be wrong," he said. "It wouldn't hurt him. Don't you know that nothing's wrong unless it hurts somebody?"
"Yes," she said eagerly, "that's what I think. But all the same it doesn't seem fair that you should take all that trouble for me and get nothing in return."
"Well played! We're getting on!" he thought, and added aloud: "But perhaps I shan't get nothing in return?"
Her eyes dropped over the wonderful thought that perhaps she might do something for him. But what? She looked straight at him, and the innocent appeal sent a tiny thorn of doubt through his armour of complacency. Was she--after all? No, no novice could play the game so well. And yet--
"I would do anything I could, you know," she said eagerly, "because it is so awfully kind of you, and I do so want to be able to paint. What can I do?"
"What can you do?" he asked, and brought his face a little nearer to the pretty flushed freckled face under the shabby hat. Her eyes met his. He felt a quick relenting, and drew back.
"Well, for one thing you could let me paint your portrait."
Betty was silent.
"Come, play up, you little duffer," he urged inwardly.
When she spoke her voice trembled.
"I don't know how to thank you," she said.
"And you will?"
"Oh, I will; indeed I will!"
"How good and sweet you are," he said. Then there was a silence.
Betty tightened the strap of her sketching things and said:
"I think I ought to go home now."
He had the appropriate counter ready.
"Ah, don't go yet!" he said; "let us sit down; see, that bank is quite in the shade now, and tell me--"
"Tell you what?" she asked, for he had made the artistic pause.
"Oh, anything--anything about yourself."
Betty was as incapable of flight as any bird on a limed twig.
She walked beside him to the bank, and sat down at his bidding, and he lay at her feet, looking up into her eyes. He asked idle questions: she answered them with a conscientious tremulous truthfulness that showed to him as the most finished art. And it seemed to him a very fortunate accident that he should have found here, in this unlikely spot, so accomplished a player at his favorite game. Yet it was the variety of his game for which he cared least. He did not greatly relish a skilled adversary. Betty told him nervously and in words ill-chosen everything that he asked to know, but all the while the undercurrent of questions rang strong within her--"When is he to teach me? Where? How?"--so that when at last there was left but the bare fifteen minutes needed to get one home in time for the midday dinner she said abruptly:
"And when shall I see you again?"
"You take the words out of my mouth," said he. And indeed she had. "She has no finesse yet," he told himself. "She might have left that move to me."
"The lessons, you know," said Betty, "and, and the picture, if you really do want to do it."
"If I want to do it!--You know I want to do it. Yes. It's like the nursery game. How, when and where? Well, as to the how--I can paint and you can learn. The where--there's a circle of pines in the wood here. You know it?