The Courtship of Mr Lyon-2

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    Who prepared her meals? Loneliness of the Beast; all the time she stayed there, she saw no evidence of another human prese the trays of food had arrived on a dumb waiter ihe mahogany cupboard in her parlour. Dinner was eggs Be and grilled veal; she ate it as she browsed in a book she had found in the rosewood revolving bookcase, a colle of courtly and elegant French fairy tales about white cats who were transformed princesses and fairies who were birds. Then she pulled a sprig of muscat grapes from a fat bunch for her dessert and found herself yawning; she discovered she was bored. At that, the spaook hold of her skirt with its velvet mouth and gave a firm but geug. She allowed the dog to trot before her to the study in which her father had beeertained and there, to her well-disguised dismay, she found her host, seated beside the fire with a tray of coffee at his elbow from which she must pour.

    The voice that seemed to issue from a cave full of echoes, his dark, soft rumbling growl; after her day of pastel-coloured idleness, how could she verse with the possessor of a voice that seemed an instrument created to inspire the terror that the chords of great ans bring? Fasated, almost awed, she watched the firelight play on the gold fringes of his mane; he was irradiated, as if with a kind of halo, and she thought of the first great beast of the Apocalypse, the winged lion with his paw upon the Gospel, Saint Mark. Small talk turo dust in her mouth; small talk had never, at the best of times, beeys forte, and she had little practice at it.

    But he, hesitantly, as if he himself were in awe of a young girl who looked as if she had been carved out of a single pearl, asked after her fathers law case; and her dead mother; and how they, who had been so rich, had e to be so poor. He forced himself to master his shyness, which was that of a wild creature, and so, she trived to master her own -- to such effect that soon she was chattering away to him as if she had known him all her life. Whetle cupid in the gilt clo the mantelpiece struck its miniature tambourine, she was astoo discover it did so twelve times.

    "So late! You will want to sleep," he said.

    At that, they both fell silent, as if these strange panions were suddenly overe with embarrassment to fi<s>9９ｌｉｂ?</s>nd themselves together, alone, in that room in the depths of winters night. As she was about to rise, he flung himself at her feet and buried his head in her lap. She stayed stock-still, transfixed; she felt his hot breath on her fingers, the stiff bristles of his muzzle grazing her skin, the rough lapping of his tongue and then, with a flood of passion, uood: all he is doing is kissing my hands.

    He drew back his head and gazed at her with his green, inscrutable eyes, in which she saw her face repeated twice, as small as if it were in bud. Then, without another word, he <var></var>sprang from the room and she saw, with an indescribable shock, he went on all fours.

    day, all day, the hills on which the snow still settled echoed with the Beasts rumbling roar: has master gone a-hunting? Beauty asked the spaniel. But the spaniel growled, almost bad-temperedly, as if to say, that she would not have answered, even if she could have.

    Beauty would pass the day in her suite reading or, perhaps, doing a little embroidery; a box of coloured silks and a frame had been provided for her. Or, well ed up, she wandered in the walled garden, among the leafless roses, with the spa her heels, and did a little raking and rearranging. An idle, restful time; a holiday. The entment of that bright, sad pretty plavel<samp>９9liｂ?</samp>oped her and she found that, against all her expectations, she was happy there. She no longer felt the slightest apprehension at her nightly interviews with the Beast. All the natural laws of the world were held in suspension, here, where an army of invisibles tenderly waited on her, and she would talk with the lion, uhe patient chaperonage of the brown-eyed dog, oure of the moon and its borrowed light, about the stars and the substances of which they were made, about the variable transformations of the weather. Yet still his strangeness made her shiver; and when he helplessly fell before her to kiss her hand, as he did every night when they parted, she would retreat nervously into her skin, fling at his touch.

    The telephoned shrilled; for her. Her father. Suews!

    The Beast sunk his great head on to his paws. You will e bae? It will be lonely here, without you.

    She was moved almost to tears that he should care for her so. It was in her heart to drop a kiss upon his shaggy ma, though she stretched out her hand towards him, she could n herself to touch him of her own free will, he was so different from herself. But, yes, she said; I will e back. Soon, before the winter is over. Theaxi came and took her away.

    You are  the mercy of the elements in London, where the huddled warmth of humanity melts the snow before it has time to settle; and her father was as good as rich again, since his hirsute friends lawyers had the business so well in hand that his credit brought them nothing but the best. A resple hotel; the opera, theatres; a whole new wardrobe for his darling, so she could step out on his arm to parties, to receptions, to restaurants, and life was as she had never known it, for her father had ruined himself before her birth killed her mother.

    Although the Beast was the source of this new-found prosperity and they talked of him often, now that they were so far away from the timeless spell of his house it seemed to possess the radiant and finite quality of dream and the Beast himse></a>lf, so monstrous, so benign, some kind of spirit of good fortune who had smiled on them ahem go. She sent him flowers, white roses iurn for the ones he had given her; and when she left the florist, she experienced a sudden sense of perfect freedom, as if she had just escaped from an unknown danger, had been grazed by the possibility of some ge but, finally, left intact. Yet, with this exhilaration, a desolatiiness. But her father was waiting for her at the hotel; they had planned a delicious expedition to buy her furs and she was as eager for the treat as any girl might be.

    Sihe flowers in the shop were the same all the year round, nothing in the window could tell her that winter had almost gone.

    Returning late from supper after the theatre, she took off her earrings in front of the mirror; Beauty. She smiled at herself with satisfa. She was learning, at the end of her adolesce, how to be a spoiled child and that pearly skin of hers lumping out, a little, with high living and pliments. A certain inwardness was beginning to transform the lines around her mouth, those signatures of the personality, and her sweetness and her gravity could sometimes turn a mite petulant when things went not quite as she want<big></big>ed them to go. You could not have said that her freshness was fading but she smiled at herself in mirrors a little too often, these days, and the face that smiled back was not quite the one she had seen tained in the Beasts agate eyes. Her face was acquiring, instead of beauty, a lacquer of the invincible prettihat characterises certain pampered, exquisite, expes.

    The soft wind of spring breathed in from the nearby park through the open window; she did not know why it made her want to cry.

    There was a sudden urgent, scrabbling sound, as of claws, at her door.

    Her trance before the mirror broke; all at once, she remembered everything perfectly. Spring was here and she had broken her promise. Now the Beast himself had e in pursuit of her! First, she was frightened of his ahen, mysteriously joyful, she ran to open the door. But it was his liver and white spotted spaniel who hurled herself into the girls arms in a flurry of little barks and gruff murmurings, of whimpering and relief.

    Yet where was the well-brushed, jewelled dog who had sat beside her embroidery frame in the parlour with birds of paradise nodding on the walls? This ones fringed ears were matted with mud, her coat was dusty and snarled, she was thin as a dog that has walked a long way and, if she had not been a dog, she would have been in tears.

    After that first, rapturous greeting, she did not wait for Beauty to order her food and water; she seized the chiffon hem of her evening dress, whimpered and tugged. Threw back her head, howled, then tugged and whimpered again.

    There was a slow, late train that would take her to the station where she had left for London three months ago. Beauty scribbled a note for her father, threw a coat round her shoulders. Quickly, quickly, urged the spaniel soundlessly; ay khe Beast was dying. Ihick dark before dawn, the station master roused a sleepy driver for her. Fast as you .

    It seemed December still possessed his garden. The ground was hard as iron, the skirts of the dark cypress moved on the chill wind with a mournful rustle and there were no green shoots on the roses as if, this year, they would not bloom. And not one light in any of the windows, only, iopmost attic, the fai smear of radian a pahe thin ghost of a light on the verge of extin.

    The spaniel had slept a little, in her arms, for the poor thing was exhausted. But now her grieving agitation fed Beautys urgend, as the girl pushed open the front door, she saw, with a thrust of sce, how the golden door knocker was thickly muffled in black crepe.

    The door did not open silently, as before, but with a doleful groaning of the hinges and, this time, on to perfect darkness. Beauty clicked her gold cigarette lighter; the tapers in the delier had drowned in their own wax and the prisms were wreathed with dreadful arabesques of cobwebs. The flowers in the glass jars were dead, as if nobody had had the heart to replace them after she was gone. Dust, everywhere; and it was cold. There was an air of exhaustion, of despair in the house and, worse, a kind of physical disillusion, as if its glamour had been sustained by a cheap juring trid now the jurer, having failed to pull the crowds, had departed to try his luck elsewhere.

    Beauty found a dle to light her way and followed the faithful spaniel up the staircase, past the study, past her suite, through a house eg with desertion up a little back staircase dedicated to mid spiders, stumbling, ripping the hem of her dress in her haste.

    What a modest bedroom! An attic, with a sloping roof, they might have given the chambermaid if the Beast had employed staff. A night light on the mantelpieo curtains at the windows, no carpet on the floor and a narrow, iroead on which he lay, sadly diminished, his bulk scarcely disturbing the faded patchwork quilt, his mane a greyish rats  and his eyes closed. Oick-backed chair where his clothes had been thrown, the roses she had sent him were thrust into the jug from the washstand but they were all dead.

    The spaniel jumped up on the bed and burrowed her way uhe sty covers, softly keening.

    &quot;Oh, Beast,&quot; said Beauty. &quot;I have e home.&quot;

    His eyelids flickered. How was it she had never noticed before that his agate eyes were equipped with lids, like those of a man? Was it because she had only looked at her own face, reflected there?

    &quot;Im dying, Beauty,&quot; he said in a cracked whisper of his former purr. &quot;Since you left me, I have been sick. I could not go hunting, I found I had not the stomach to kill the gentle beasts, I could . I am sid I must die; but I shall die happy because you have e to say goodbye to me.&quot;

    She flung herself upon him, so that the iroead groaned, and covered his poor paws with her kisses.

    &quot;Dont die, Beast! If youll have me, Ill never leave you.&quot;

    When her lips touched the meat-hook claws, they drew bato their pads and she saw how he had always kept his fists ched, but now, painfully, tentatively, at last began to stretch his fingers. Her tears fell on his face like snow and, uheir soft transformation, the bones showed through the pelt, the flesh through the wide, tawny brow. And then it was no longer a lion in her arms but a man, a man with an u mane of hair and, how strange, a broken nose, such as the noses of retired boxers, that gave him a distant, heroic resemblao the handsomest of all the beasts.

    &quot;Do you know,&quot; said Mr Lyon, &quot;I think I might be able to manage a little breakfast today, Beauty, if you would eat something with me.&quot;

    Mr and Mrs Lyon walk in the garden; the old spaniel drowses on the grass, in a drift of falleals.

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