Part 31 (1/2)
”Ah, n.o.body does your art justice here!”
”Go and sit down at your table, please.”
It was really quite difficult to say to her from that distance the sort of things that I wished to say; but there seemed to be no help for it, and I did my best.
”I shall miss my lunches here very much when I'm gone.”
”Did you say coffee to-day?”
”Chocolate. I shall miss--”
”And the lettuce sandwiches?”
”Yes. You don't realize how much these lunches--”
”Have cost you?” She seemed determined to keep laughing.
”You have said it. They have cost me my--”
”I can give you the receipt, you know.”
”The receipt?”
”For Lady Baltimore, to take with you.”
”You'll have to give me a receipt for a lost heart.”
”Oh, his heart! General, listen to--” From habit she had turned to where her dog used to lie; and sudden pain swept over her face and was mastered. ”Never mind!” she quickly resumed. ”Please don't speak about it. And you have a heart somewhere; for it was very nice in you to come in yesterday morning after--after the bridge.”
”I hope I have a heart,” I began, rising; for, really, I could not go on in this way, sitting down away back at the lunch table.
But the door opened, and Hortense Rieppe came into the Woman's Exchange.
It was at me that she first looked, and she gave me the slightest bow possible, the least sign of conventional recognition that a movement of the head could make and be visible at all; she didn't bend her head down, she tilted it ever so little up. It wasn't new to me, this form of greeting, and I knew that she had acquired it at Newport, and that it denoted, all too accurately, the size of my importance in her eyes; she did it, as she did everything, with perfection. Then she turned to Eliza La Heu, whose face had become miraculously sweet.
”Good morning,” said Hortense.
It sounded from a quiet well of reserve music; just a cupful of melodious tone dipped lightly out of the surface. Her face hadn't become anything; but it was equally miraculous in its total void of all expression relating to this moment, or to any moment; just her beauty, her permanent stationary beauty, was there glowing in it and through it, not skin deep, but going back and back into her lazy eyes, and s.h.i.+ning from within the modulated bloom of her color and the depths of her amber hair. She was choosing, for this occasion, to be as impersonal as some radiant hour in nature, some mellow, motionless day when the leaves have turned, but have not fallen, and it is drowsily warm; but it wasn't so much of nature that she, in her harmonious l.u.s.tre, reminded me, as of some beautiful silken-shaded lamp, from which color rather than light came with subdued ampleness.
I saw her eyes settle upon the flowers that I had brought Eliza La Heu.
”How beautiful those are!” she remarked.
”Is there something that you wish?” inquired Miss La Heu, always miraculously sweet.
”Some of your good things for lunch; a very little, if you will be so kind.”
I had gone back to my table while the ”very little” was being selected, and I felt, in spite of how slightly she counted me, that it would be inadequate in me to remain completely dumb.
”Mr. Mayrant is still at the Custom House?” I observed.