Part 4 (1/2)

”That's an interesting face!” she said presently, pointing to a conspicuous portrait of a young man on the mantelpiece.

”That's Mr. Londonderry,” said Mr. Moggridge.

”O! _that's_ Mr. Londonderry, is it?” she said. ”H'm,... I hadn't expected him to be so young.”

”Yes! He's a wonderful young man for his position,” said Mr. Moggridge, started on what was now his favourite topic. ”He'll be a great man some day, will Mr. Londonderry.”

Isabel looked up at Mr. Moggridge with added interest. Such a genuine interest in great men as his voice betokened was a surprise in him.

Then Mr. Moggridge proceeded to narrate the history of New Zion, told of its former desolation, his lucky advertis.e.m.e.nt, and its present prosperity.

”Yes, it was a dead-and-alive place was New Zion when we moved in here, wasn't it, missus?” turning to his wife; ”but now, since Mr. Londonderry came, there is always something moving. Yes, there's always something going on at New Zion,” he repeated, rubbing his hands gleefully. Mr.

Moggridge did so love anything that was alive.

Mr. Moggridge also told the story of ”The Dawn,” and generally, as he would have said, posted her up in the position of things at New Zion. At the end she found herself generally looking forward to meeting this young minister and his friends, who were evidently a little nest of surprise-people in what had indeed seemed a most unpromising corner of the world,--perhaps the most unpromising corner that her nomadic wandering minstrel existence had brought her to.

Isabel Strange, according to old-fas.h.i.+oned reckoning, was not a very young woman. That is, she was already twenty-eight, though, having to fight a silly world with its own silly weapons, she called herself twenty-five, which it was still quite safe for her to do; and though the nerve-intensity of her face was the worst thing in the world for wrinkles, they would when they came be very interesting wrinkles, and her eyes and mouth would keep the world from looking at the rest of her features for a long time to come. A face so full of the mystery of light could only be eclipsed by one darkness, and even in that those magnetic eyes would s.h.i.+ne through the cold closed lids.

Surprises were welcome to her, for she got few. Her life was rather a dreary one, as the life of an elocution teacher may well be. At one time she had dreamed of the stage, but her voice was not quite big enough for that, some managers had said, and indeed her mettle was perhaps a little too fine for the stage. The positive and enduring joys of her life were that she lived in London--for which she had the kind of pa.s.sion that some people have for the Earth-Mother--and loved beauty as some women love religion. She had been loved many times, but never quite as she needed, as she demanded, to be loved. Vivid, pa.s.sionate, and exquisite, she was what we call ”modern” to the tips of her beautiful fingers; that is, she united the newest opinions on all things with many ancient charms. At the same time she was a good woman, though very wonderful and highly dangerous.

Presently Mr. Moggridge, who from where he sat commanded a view of the street, exclaimed, ”Why, here is Mr. Londonderry himself!” rising as he spoke and pa.s.sing into the hall, where he was met by a curiously rich and mellow voice, which Isabel Strange thus heard for the first time; and then the glorified original of the photograph entered the room.

As her eyes and hands met his, her soul gave a little half-humorous ”Oh!” of surprise; for photography, which seems to have been invented to flatter the mediocre and belittle the exceptional, had indeed given Londonderry an ”interesting face,” as we have heard, but missed all the rest--”all the rest” of a large, mobile, talking face, not exactly handsome perhaps, but decidedly good-looking and full of various commands and appeals, thought on the brow and laughter in the eyes, humour and eloquence all along the large and somewhat loose mouth, with plenty of go in the powerful but not anxiously determined chin. These were the moral qualities of the face, which Isabel Strange did not miss; but it was the fascination of its general vitality that struck her most, as an important introduction was made, to the usual fantastic accompaniment of small talk.

Let us not prolong the small-talk of the situation further, but introduce Miss Strange as speedily as possible to Jenny also and to the little study in 3 Zion Place.

Here her eager examination of the shelves was one succession of cries of sympathetic delight. ”Why, you have got all the books I ever want to read again!” she exclaimed. ”What wonderful people you are! How have you done it--in Zion Place?”

”I suppose the books must have been blown here,” answered Theophil, gaily, ”on the same fair wind that blew Miss Isabel Strange.”

”Yes,” said little Jenny, affectionately pressing her shoulder as the three leaned forward looking at the shelves, ”for if we seem wonderful people to you, what must you seem to us--here, as you may well say, in Zion Place?”

”What _does_ she remind you of?” said Jenny presently, with candid admiration. ”I know! Why, of course, she just _is_ the very woman.

Wait--I'll go and fetch it;” and Theophil and Isabel were thus left for a moment or two alone,--a fact of no importance beyond this, that it was the first moment in their lives that they had ever been together alone.

Jenny returned presently with a small copy of Botticelli's ”Primavera,”

which hung in her bedroom; and it was undoubtedly true that the figure of Flora might well have pa.s.sed for a portrait of Isabel. The nose was a little longer, that was all; but the rest of the face--particularly the eyes and mouth--was all but exact, and the general correspondence between the two faces in subtlety, strangeness, and, so to say, determined refinement, was complete.

”It is strange that I should have loved that face so,” said Jenny.

”It is very sweet of you,--Jenny, I had almost said,--but you are too kind to me, and a little selfish too--you give me no time to admire you.

I wonder if Mr. Londonderry is modern enough to allow ladies to smoke in his study.”

And thus it comes out that Jenny often smoked there!

The smoking-sister is now almost as common as a taste for Botticelli, and perhaps equally insincere; but in 1886 there still remained that sense of contrast in both which we have declared the essence of romance.

At present those curious people who resent the popular acceptance of an ideal of beauty which they have done their best to popularise are beginning to affect that a taste for Botticelli is a mark of the _bourgeoisie_. So does the whirligig of time bring in the paradoxer.

A new kind of woman, while she is always the despairing hope of men, is seldom acceptable to women; yet when the evening came and Isabel stood up to recite in New Zion schoolroom, women as well as men were instantaneously attracted. She stood very simply, with one hand lightly touching the table at which Londonderry sat as chairman, and the other at her side; and before she began her first recitation she glanced quietly over the audience, as though her eyes were thus preparing the proper magnetic atmosphere for her voice.