Part 23 (1/2)
Woe to Mr. Silas B. Barker junior if he came in the Duke's way that evening!
”I suppose he is coming to dinner?” said the Duke after a pause, during which his anger had settled into a comfortable ferocity.
”No,” said Lady Victoria; ”he sent some flowers and a note of regret.”
”Well--I am glad of that. Would you like to go for a drive, Vick?”
”Yes, of all things. I have not been here since I was married”--which was about eighteen months, but she had already caught that matronly phrase--”and I want to see what they have been doing to the Park.”
”All right. We'll take Claudius, if he is anywhere about the place.”
”Of course,” said Lady Victoria. And so the brother and sister prepared to soothe their ruffled feelings by making much of the man who was ”a gentleman.” But they were right, for Claudius was all they thought him, and a great deal more too, as they discovered in the sequel.
Having driven in the Park, the Duke insisting that Claudius should sit in the place of honour with Lady Victoria, and having criticised to their satisfaction the few equipages they met--for it was too early for New York--they went back to their hotel, and dispersed to dress for dinner. The Duke, as he had told his sister, had invited his friend to dine. They all sat together waiting his arrival. Punctual to the moment, the door opened, and Mr. Horace Bellingham beamed upon the a.s.sembled party. Ay, but he was a sight to do good to the souls of the hungry and thirsty, and of the poor, and in misery!
He requires description, not that any pen can describe him, but no one ever saw him who did not immediately wish to try. He was short, decidedly; but a broad deep chest and long powerful arms had given him many an advantage over taller adversaries in strange barbarous lands. He was perfectly bald, but that must have been because Nature had not the heart to cover such a wonderful cranium from the admiring gaze of phrenologists. A sweeping moustache and a long imperial of snowy white sat well on the ruddy tan of his complexion, and gave him an air at once martial and diplomatic. He was dressed in the most perfect of London clothes, and there were superb diamonds in his s.h.i.+rt, while a priceless sapphire sparkled, in a plain gold setting, on his broad, brown hand. He is the only man of his time who can wear precious stones without vulgarity. He moves like a king and has the air of the old school in every gesture. His dark eyes are brighter than his diamonds, and his look, for all his white beard and seventy years, is as young and fresh as the rose he wears in his coat.
There are some people who turn gray, but who do not grow h.o.a.ry, whose faces are furrowed but not wrinkled, whose hearts are sore wounded in many places, but are not dead. There is a youth that bids defiance to age, and there is a kindness which laughs at the world's rough usage.
These are they who have returned good for evil, not having learned it as a lesson of righteousness, but because they have no evil in them to return upon others. Whom the G.o.ds love die young, and they die young because they never grow old. The poet, who at the verge of death said this, said it of, and to, this very man.
The Duke went through the introductions, first to the Countess, then to Miss Skeat, then to his sister, and last of all to Claudius, who had been intently watching the newcomer. Mr. Bellingham paused before Claudius, and looked up in a way peculiarly his own, without raising his head. He had of course heard in New York of the strange fortune that had befallen Claudius on the death of the well-known Mr. Lindstrand, and now he stood a minute trying to take the measure of the individual before him, not in the least overcome by the physical proportions of the outer man, but struck by the intellectual face and forehead that surmounted such a tower of strength.
”I was in Heidelberg myself--a student,” said he, his face lighting up with coming reminiscences, ”but that was long before you were born, fifty years ago.”
”I fancy it is little changed,” said Claudius.
”I would like to go back to the Badischer Hof. I remember once--” but he broke off short and turned to the Countess, and sat down beside her. He knew all her people in America and her husband's people abroad. He immediately began telling her a story of her grandmother, with a _verve_ and graphic spirit that enchanted Margaret, for she liked clever old men. Besides he is not old. It is not so long since--well, it is a long story. However, in less than one minute the a.s.sembled guests were listening to the old-time tale of Margaret's ancestress, and the waiter paused breathless on the threshold to hear the end, before he announced dinner.
There are two very different ways of dining--dining with Mr. Bellingham, and dining without him. But for those who have dined with him, all other prandial arrangements are an empty sham. At least so Claudius said to Margaret in an aside, when they got to the fruit. And Margaret, who looked wonderfully beautiful with a single band of gold through her black hair, laughed her a.s.sent, and said it was hopeless for the men of this day to enter the lists against the veterans of the _ancien regime_.
And Claudius was not in the least hurt by the comparison, odious though it would have been to Mr. Barker, had he been there. Claudius had plenty of vanity, but it did not a.s.sume the personal type. Some people call a certain form of vanity pride. It is the same thing on a larger scale.
Vanity is to pride what nervousness is to nerve, what morbid conscience is to manly goodness, what the letter of the law is to the spirit.
Before they rose from the table, Mr. Bellingham proposed that they should adjourn to Newport on the following day. He said it was too early to be in New York and that Newport was still gay; at all events, the weather promised well, and they need not stay more than twenty-four hours unless they pleased. The proposition was carried unanimously, the Duke making a condition that he should be left in peace and not ”entertained in a handsome manner by the _elite_ of our Newport millionaires”--as the local papers generally have it. Lady Victoria would not have objected to the operation of ”being entertained” by Newport, for it amused her to see people, but of course she would enjoy herself very well without it. She always enjoyed herself, even when she went for a walk in the rain on a slippery Yorks.h.i.+re road, all bundled up in waterproofs and hoods and things for her poor people--she enjoyed it all.
As for Claudius, he knew that if he went to Newport he must of necessity stay with the Barkers, but as he had not yet learned to look at Mr.
Barker in the light of a rival, he thought this would be rather convenient than otherwise. The fact that he would be within easy reach of Margaret was uppermost in his mind.
During the last two days his relations with her had been of the happiest. There was an understanding between them, which took the place of a great deal of conversation. Claudius felt that his error in speaking too boldly had been retrieved, if not atoned for, and that henceforward his position was a.s.sured. He was only to be a friend, it was true, but he still felt that from friends.h.i.+p to love was but a step, and that the time would come. He thought of the mighty wooings of the heroes of his Northern home, and he felt in him their strength and their constancy. What were other men that he should think of them? He was her accepted friend of all others. She had said she hoped to find in him what she had never found before; and were not her words ”always, always!” still ringing in his ears? She had found it then in him, this rare quality of friends.h.i.+p; she had found more,--a man who was a friend and yet a lover, but who could curb the strong pa.s.sion to the semblance and docility of the gentler feeling. And when at last she should give the long-desired sign, the single glance that bids love speak, she would find such a lover as was not even dreamt of among the G.o.ds of the Greeks, nor yet among berserk heroes of ice and storm and battle. He felt to-day that he could endure to the end, for the end was worthy all endurance.
And now he sat by her side and looked down into her face when she spoke, and they laughed together. Verily was Claudius the proudest man in all earth's quarters, and his blue eyes flashed a deep fire, and his nostrils expanded with the breath of a victory won. Mr. Bellingham, on the other side of the table, sparkled with a wit and grace that were to modern table-talk what a rare flagon of old madeira, crusted with years, but br.i.m.m.i.n.g with the imperishable strength and perfume of eternal youth, might be to a gaudily-ticketed bottle of California champagne, effervescent, machine-made, cheap, and nasty. And his glance comprehended the pair, and loved them. He thought they were like a picture of the North and of the South; and the thought called up memories in his brave old breast of a struggle that shook the earth to her foundations, and made him think of problems yet unsolved. He sat in his place silent for some minutes, and the broad brown hand stroked the snowy beard in deep thought, so that the conversation flagged, and the Duke began to talk about the voyage. But Mr. Bellingham took his br.i.m.m.i.n.g gla.s.s, filled with the wine that ripened in the sun when he himself was but a little boy, and he held it a moment to the light; the juice was clearer now than it had been that day sixty years, and the hand that held the goblet was as a hand of iron for strength and steadiness, though the dark fingers might have plucked the grapes on the day they were pressed. And with an old-time motion he carried it to his lips, then paused one instant, then drank it slowly, slowly to the last drop. It was a toast, but the speech was unspoken, and none knew to whom or to what he drained the measure. In a little time he began to speak again; the conversation turned upon mutual friends in England, and the dinner was at an end.
But all through the evening Claudius never left Margaret's side. He felt that he was bridging over the difference between life at sea and life on land--that he was a.s.serting his right to maintain in a drawing-room the privileges he had gained on the deck of the _Streak_.
And Margaret, moreover, was especially friendly to-night, for she too felt the difference, and recognised that, after all, life on sh.o.r.e is the freer. There are certain conventionalities of a drawing-room that a man is less likely to break through, more certain to remember, than the unwritten rules of cruising etiquette. Most men who have led a free life are a little less likely to make love under the restraint of a white tie than they are when untrammelled by restraints of dress, which always imply some restraint of freedom.
At least Margaret thought so. And Claudius felt it, even though he would not acknowledge it. They talked about the voyage; about what they had said and done, about the accident, and a hundred other things. There is a moment in acquaintance, in friends.h.i.+p, and in love, when two people become suddenly aware that they have a common past. Days, weeks, or months have been spent in conversation, in reading, perhaps in toil and danger, and they have not thought much about it. But one day they wake up to the fact that these little or great things bind them, as forming the portion of their lives that have touched; and as they talk over the incidents they remember they feel unaccountably drawn to each other by the past. Margaret and Claudius knew this on the first evening they spent together on sh.o.r.e. The confusion of landing, the custom-house, the strange quarters in the great hotel--all composed a drop-curtain shutting off the ocean scene, and ending thus an episode of their life-drama. A new act was beginning for them, and they both knew how much might depend on the way in which it was begun, and neither dared plan how it should end. At all events, they were not to be separated yet, and neither antic.i.p.ated such a thing.
Little by little their voices dropped as they talked, and they recked little of the others, as the dark cheek of the woman flushed with interest, and the blue light shone in the man's eyes. Their companions on the voyage were well used to seeing them thus together, and hardly noticed them, but Mr. Bellingham's bright eyes stole a glance from time to time at the beautiful pair in their corner, and the stories of youth and daring and love, that he seemed so full of this evening, flashed with an unwonted brilliancy. He made up his mind that the two were desperately, hopelessly, in love, and he had taken a fancy to Claudius from the first. There was no reason why they should not be, and he loved to build up romances, always ending happily, in his fertile imagination.