Part 5 (1/2)
The drawing-room had two doors in the same wall: people coming from the dining-room would enter by one of these, while those who came from the street entered by the other, after pa.s.sing through the small reception-room where they left their things, and the larger reception-room intervening between this and the drawing-room. Charlie Hunt, talking with Mrs. Satterlee, let a casual eye roll away from her middle-aged agreeableness to see who was entering by that different door from the one which had given him pa.s.sage. Curiosity, pure and simple.
Ah, so. Madame Balm de Breze, spare, sharp, high-nosed, beaked and clawed like a bird--a picked bird. Very elegant. It was clear to Charlie Hunt why with a dinner to give one should care to secure her and her husband. They looked so fiendishly aristocratic.
The Felixsons. Naturally. Felixson had to be asked when the guest of honor was a scholar. Mrs. Felixson's warm brilliancy to-night bore testimony to a good dinner. Abundance of meats and wines always turned her a burning pink. It looked to Charlie like a new frock she was wearing; he did not remember seeing her in it before.
Gideon Hart, the old sculptor. It was his picturesque white hair and beard that people liked to see at their tables, for the old fellow, thought Hunt, was phenomenally a bore. In this case patriotism explained his presence. America quaintly loved his name.
And Cecilia Brown. But was it really Cecilia?... What had she been doing to herself?... Oh. Her hair. Her hair was cropped and curled all over her head like wicked Caracalla's. That was the fas.h.i.+on in England, he had heard, where she had been spending the summer.
But who was this, at the end of the procession, after Mrs. Foss and Brenda and the consul?
Hunt had a genuine surprise. Gerald Fane.
Now, wherefore Gerald Fane rather than Charlie Hunt?
Mrs. Foss, coming into the drawing-room, felt a glow of pleasure at the scene meeting her eyes. The occasion, the success of it, had lifted life for her above its usual plane. She could feel how blessed she was in ways she did not sufficiently consider on common days when common cares blinded her. It was a beautiful home, this of hers; here was a beautiful room, with its mirrors and flowers and candle-light and happy guests.
She smiled at everybody and everything with a brooding sweetness.
Her sense of herself was satisfactory too at the moment. She felt her dress--an old one, rejuvenated--to be becoming. She was young to have grown children. Her blond hair did not show the silver threads among it.
She was as handsome in her older way as she had been when young, and she was sure she was nicer. She had family and friends, all full of regard for her. Her smile reflected the state of her mind and did one good to see.
Her eyes resting upon Brenda--whom the reverend Arthur had tried to capture the moment she appeared, and been baffled--Mrs. Foss in the optimism of her mood said to herself that all would very likely go well in that quarter; they ought not to worry as they did.
The pianist had struck up a polka. One still danced the polka in those days, and the schottische and the dear old lancers, though the waltz was already the favorite.
The floor was at first spa.r.s.ely, then ever more thickly, sown with hopping and revolving couples. Hunt, one arm curled around a young waist in pink muslin, had enough of his mind to spare from the amount of talk one has breath for while dancing to continue in a line of thought started by an annoying little smart where a shred of skin had been rubbed off his vanity when he saw Gerald come from the dining-room. He mentally looked at himself and looked at Gerald, and after comparing the pictures felt his astonishment increase. He could admit, as an excuse for inviting Gerald instead of himself, that Gerald was an artist, and this dinner had presumably been planned with the idea of having it literary-artistic. But then--an artist! Gerald was so little of one. One never heard of his selling a painting. In the darkest corners of his friends' rooms you sometimes discovered one of his queer things--a gift, hung there as a compliment. One might, furthermore, grant that it did not matter that a man should be agreeable in appearance. But Gerald was not even agreeable in disposition; he did not try to make himself agreeable. What did the Fosses see in him?
The music had worked through a mighty flourish to a banging final chord.
Hunt escorted his lady to a chair, took the fan from her hand to fan her with,--himself a little, too,--and while talking let his dark eye stray from her and go roving, as was the habit of his eye.
It plunged through an open door into the quietly lighted library, where the consul and his distinguished guest and a few more of the older or staider people had withdrawn from the tumult and were having smokes and conversation. They were considering a marble fragment, pa.s.sing it from hand to hand.
Hunt knew that fragment, and at sight of it looked cynical. The consul, who had discovered it immured in an ancient garden-wall, believed it to have been carved by Orcagna.
Old Hart had it in his hand. What he said could hardly be heard at that distance; he pa.s.sed it to Gerald with a look that seemed to ask for corroboration. Gerald held it long and gazed seriously, with that conceit in his own judgment which made him sometimes dispute the attributions in no less a gallery than the Uffizi--say that a Verocchio was not a Verocchio, a Giorgione not a Giorgione.
Charlie strained to catch some syllable of what he said. Vainly. The pianist was preluding. Bertie Bentivoglio came to ask the girl in pink to dance with him. From the chair she left empty Charlie moved nearer to the library door, of half a mind to join the group in there. But Gerald, upon whom Leslie had impressed it that he must do his duty and let there be no wall-flowers, when the prelude had developed into a waltz returned the marble into Hart's hand and came to the door. Whereupon Charlie changed his mind and after saying ”h.e.l.lo, Gerald!” turned again, and the young men stood looking over the scene side by side, two figures contrasting in reality nearly as much as they did in Charlie's mental image of them for purposes of comparison.
Any Rosina who sold b.u.t.tonhole bouquets at the theater door could have seen that Charlie was handsome, with his pale brown smoothness and regularity of feature; the pretty mustache accentuating and not concealing the neat and agreeable mold of his lip; the fine whiteness of his teeth, his civilized and silken look altogether. The defects of his face, if one could call them that, did not appear at first glance or even at second. His forehead had begun to gain on his hair,--it ran up at the sides in two points,--and his slightly prominent eyes were brown in the same sense as a horn b.u.t.ton or a bit of chestnut-sh.e.l.l is brown,--while some eyes that we remember were brown like woodland pools with autumn leaves at the bottom! He did not look English, yet did not look quite Italian either. He was in fact both, and the thing evenly balanced. The banker Hunt's brother had married an Italian; Charlie had been born in Italy and hardly ever stirred out of it; on the other hand he had found his society largely among the English and Americans in Florence.
As he stood there, conforming gracefully to a recognized canon of manly beauty, his neighbor Gerald, who would not have been noticed one way or the other for his looks, yet from being beside him took on an indescribable effect of eccentricity. The bone showed plainly around his eye-sockets and at the bridge of his nose. One eyebrow became different from the other the moment he regarded a thing a.n.a.lytically; and when he smiled those who noticed such things could detect that nature had marked him for recognition: there showed beneath his mustache three of the broad front middle teeth whereof two are the common portion. For the remainder, a slight beard veiled the character of his chin and jaw and a little disguised the thinness of his throat. Above a large forehead his dark hair rose on end in a bristling bank, like that of most Italian men at the time. He looked solitary, unsociable, critical, but not altogether ungentle. His forehead was full of the suggestion of thoughts, his gray-blue eyes were full of the reflection of feelings, that you could be comfortably sure he would not trouble you with.
”Well, Gerald, what are you doing with yourself these days?” asked Charlie as they stood looking on, delaying to seek partners for the dance. ”Immortal masterpieces?”
This innocuous playfulness somehow jarred. Gerald looked down at Charlie from the side of his eye,--he was by a couple of inches or so the taller,--then asked in his turn, a little crustily:
”Do you really want to know?”
”Why, no, my dear fellow, I don't, if that's your reply. It was not curiosity. I was only showing an amiable interest.” His tone conveyed that he had intended no offense and refused to take any; the disagreeableness should be all on the same side.