Part 52 (2/2)
Armistead, and when their ”trial” engagement reached its tempestuous conclusion, had stepped softly into the breach, rosy with hope and a definite sense that his time had come. Hermia liked him--had liked him for years. She had gotten used to him as one does to a familiar chair or an article of diet. He was a habit with her like her bedroom slippers or her afternoon tea. He was comfortable, always safe and quite sane, which she was not, and she accepted him in the guise of counselor and friend with the same cheerful tolerance that she gave to her Aunt Harriet Westfield or to Mr. Winthrop of the Pilgrim Trust Company.
When Hermia departed suddenly for Europe, her sportive idyl so suddenly shattered, Mr. Morehouse followed her in the next steamer. She had given him no definite encouragement, it was true, and yet he found reasons to hope that the time was at hand when she must make some definite decision. In Europe her brief disappearance from the scene of her usual activities had mystified him and her return to her hotel, shabby and uncommunicative, had aroused a chagrin and an anxiety quite unusual to him; but he had sat and waited her pleasure, survived her turbulent moods and had found his patience at last rewarded by her silent acquiescence in his presence, and by an invitation to accompany her to Switzerland, where she was to join her Aunt Julia and the children.
From the vantage point of his office window down town, where he now sat and viewed the bleak perspective of the city, his memories of the summer with Hermia seemed a strange compound of brief blisses and more enduring pangs. They had been much seen together and the announcement of their engagement which had appeared in the newspapers had not been surprising. Aunt Julia had favored his suit and Mrs. Westfield had given him to understand that it was time Hermia married. But the fact remained that Hermia had not accepted him. His insistence had always provoked and still provoked one of two moods--either resentment or mockery. She either dismissed him in a dudgeon or cajoled him with elusive banter. Why was he so impatient? There was plenty of time?
Was he sure that he wanted to marry her? What did her really know about her heart of hearts? Perhaps, if he knew her better he might not want to marry her. He pleaded in patient calm. The world, it seemed, thought them engaged. Why shouldn't _he_ be permitted to think so.
She only laughed at him and her heart of hearts had come to be the most profound enigma that it had ever been his fortune to study. So the prize, which he had thought most surely his own, still hung reluctantly upon the lip of the horn of plenty. It would not fall, and all the traditions of his experience forbade that he should jostle it. And so he only watched with patient eyes and a physical restraint which could only be described as ”excellent.”
What did she mean by saying that if he knew her better he might not want to marry her? Vague doubts a.s.sailed him. Did he, after all, know her? What was this chapter of her life of which he knew nothing and to which she had so frequently alluded? Was it something which had happened to her in America? Or had it something to do with her disappearance last summer from Paris, after which she had returned sober and intolerant? He gave it up. He was always giving her up and then putting his doubts of her in his pocket with his neat handkerchief, plodding sedulously as before. He must wait. Everything that he had got in life had come from waiting and Hermia, his philosophy told him, must be no exception to the rule.
The winter drew on toward spring. Lent arrived, and society, quite bored and thoroughly exhausted, halted in the mad round of the ”one-step” and turned to calmer delights. Country places in adjacent counties were opened and guests flitted from one house to the other in a continuous round of visits.
Mrs. Berkeley Hammond's invitations, whether to the big house near the Park or to Rood's Knoll, her place in the country, were much in demand.
The Hammonds had unlimited means, the social instinct, worthy family traditions, and a talent for entertainment, a combination of qualities and circ.u.mstances which explained the importance of this family in the social life of the city. The mantle of an older leader who had pa.s.sed had fallen comfortably on Mrs. Hammond's capacious shoulders and she wore it with a familiar grace which gave the impression that it had always been there. Conservative, the more radical called her, and radical, the conservative; but her taste and her _chef_ were both above reproach, and her dinners, whether large or small, had the distinction which only comes of a rare order of tact and discrimination. Nor were her hospitalities confined to the entertainment of the indigenous.
Visitors to New York, foreign celebrities, literary, artistic or political, found within her doors a welcome and a company exactly suited to their social requirements. She liked young people, too, and contrived to let them know it, to the end that her dances, while formal, were gay rather than ”stodgy,” juvenescent rather than patriarchal.
The house at Rood's Knoll was a huge affair, of brick and timbered plaster, set in the midst of its thousand acres of woodland in the heart of the hills. Lent found it full of people and its gayety was reflected in other houses of the neighborhood whose owners, like the Hammonds, kept open house. There was much to do. March went out like a lion and the snow which kept the more timid indoors at the cards made wonderful coasting and sledding, of which latter these wearied children of fortune were not slow to take advantage. The ponds were frozen, too, and skating was added to the sum of their rural delights.
Hermia Challoner, who was visiting Caroline Anstell, joined feverishly in these pursuits, glad of the opportunity they afforded her of relief from her personal problems. There were some of her intimates here in the neighborhood, but she found greater security in the society of an older set of whom she had seen little in town and in the pleasure of picking up the loose ends of these acquaintances.h.i.+ps she managed to forget, at least temporarily, her sword of Damocles. Olga Tcherny was one of Mrs. Berkeley Hammond's house guests, but she had not been in evidence on either of the occasions when Hermia had called. There was some excitement over an evening which Mrs. Hammond was planning to take place in the country during the latter days of Lent. The invitations were noncommittal and merely mentioned the date and hour, but it was understood that ”everyone” was to be there, and that an entertainment a little out of the ordinary was to be provided.
It was, therefore, with a pleasurable antic.i.p.ation that Hermia got down from the Anstell's machine on the appointed evening, and followed her party into the great house. The rooms were comfortably filled, but not crowded, and it seemed that the women had done their best to add their share to the merely decorative requirements of the occasion. The ball-room lights s.h.i.+mmered softly on the rich tissues of their costumes, and caught in the facets of the jewels on their bared shoulders. Society was at its best, upon its good behavior, patiently eking out the few short days that remained to it of the penitential season. Hermia managed to elude the watchful Trevelyan and entered the ball-room with Beatrice Coddington and Caroline Anstell. Just inside she found herself face to face with the Countess Tcherny. She would have pa.s.sed on, but Olga was not to be denied.
”So glad to see you, Hermia, dear,” she purred, her eyes lighting.
”It's really dreadfully unlucky how seldom we've met this winter.
You're a little thinner, aren't you? But it becomes you awfully.”
”Thanks,” said Hermia. ”I'm quite well.”
”I hope you'll like the play, you know I--” and she whispered. ”n.o.body knows--_I_ wrote it.”
”Oh, really,” Hermia smiled coolly. ”I hope it's quite moral.”
”Oh, you must judge for yourself,” said Olga, and disappeared.
The men, having searched the premises vainly for the bridge tables, resigned themselves to the inevitable and drifted by twos and threes into the ball-room, where they melted into the gay company which was not seated, or stood along the back and side walls, making a somber background for the splendid plumage of their dinner-partners.
”_Tableaux-vivants_, for a dollar!” said Archie Westcott in bored desperation.
”Oh, rot!” blurted out Crosby Downs in contempt. ”What's the use?
They'll be havin' Mrs. Jarley's waxworks next--”
”Or the 'Dream of Fair Women'--”
”Or charades. Not a card in sight--or a cigar! Rotten taste--_I'd_ call it.”
The music of the orchestra silenced these protests and a ripple of expectation pa.s.sed over the audience as the curtain rose, disclosing a sylvan glade and a startled nymph in meager draperies hiding from a faun. The music trembled for a moment and then, as the nymph was discovered, broke into wild concords through which the violins sang tunefully as the chase began. It was not for some moments that the audience awoke to the fact that these must be the Austrian dancers whose visit to New York had been so widely heralded. Captured at last, the nymph was submissive, and the dance which followed revealed artistry of an order with which most of the spectators were unfamiliar.
Even Crosby Downs ceased to grumble and wedged himself down the side wall where he could have a better view. The dance ended amid applause and the audience now really aroused from its lethargy eagerly awaited the next rise of the curtain.
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