Part 16 (1/2)

Why, I see it all as plain as can be--there at the opera. And you wore blue the day I tried to propose to you and couldn't, and asked you down to Wales instead. Lord, how I funked it!” He laughed, happily almost.

”Yes, you wore blue the first time we met--like this.”

”It was the same skirt, and a different bodice, of course both those first times,” she answered. Then she stepped back and daintily smoothed out the gown she was wearing, smiling at him as she did that day three years ago. She had put on this particular gown, remembering that Ian Stafford had said charming things about that other blue gown just before he bade her good-bye three years ago. That was why she wore blue this night--to recall to Ian what it appeared he had forgotten. And presently she would dine alone with Ian in her husband's house--and with her husband's blessing. Pique and pride were in her heart, and she meant Ian Stafford to remember. No man was adamantine; at least she had never met one--not one, neither bishop nor octogenarian.

”Come, Ruddy, you must dress, or you'll be late,” she continued, lightly, touching his cheek with her fingers; ”and you'll come down and apologize, and put me right with Ian Stafford, won't you?”

”Certainly. I won't be five minutes. I'll--”

There was a tap at the door and a footman, entering, announced that Mr.

Stafford was in the drawing-room.

”Show him into my sitting-room,” she said. ”The drawing-room, indeed,”

she added to her husband--”it is so big, and I am so small. I feel sometimes as though I wanted to live in a tiny, tiny house.”

Her words brought a strange light to his eyes. Suddenly he caught her arm.

”Jasmine,” he said, hurriedly, ”let us have a good talk over things--over everything. I want to see if we can't get more out of life than we do. There's something wrong. What is it? I don't know; but perhaps we could find out if we put our heads together--eh?” There was a strange, troubled longing in his look.

She nodded and smiled. ”Certainly--to-night when you get back,” she said. ”We'll open the machine and find what's wrong with it.” She laughed, and so did he.

As she went down the staircase she mused to herself and there was a shadow in her eyes and over her face.

”Poor Ruddy! Poor Ruddy!” she said.

Once again before she entered the sitting-room, as she turned and looked back, she said:

”Poor boy ... Yet he knew about a thousand years ago!” she added with a nervous little laugh, and with an air of sprightly eagerness she entered to Ian Stafford.

CHAPTER X

AN ARROW FINDS A BREAST

As he entered the new sphere of Jasmine's influence, charm, and existence, Ian Stafford's mind became flooded by new impressions. He was not easily moved by vastness or splendour. His ducal grandfather's houses were palaces, the estates were a fair slice of two counties, and many of his relatives had sumptuous homes stored with priceless legacies of art. He had approached the great house which Byng had built for himself with some trepidation; for though Byng came of people whose names counted for a good deal in the north of England, still, in newly acquired fortunes made suddenly in new lands there was something that coa.r.s.ened taste--an unmodulated, if not a garish, elegance which ”hit you in the eye,” as he had put it to himself. He asked himself why Byng had not been content to buy one of the great mansions which could always be had in London for a price, where time had softened all the outlines, had given that subdued harmony in architecture which only belongs to age. Byng could not buy with any money those wonderful Adam's mantels, over-mantels and ceilings which had a glory quite their own. There must, therefore, be an air of newness in the new mansion, which was too much in keeping with the new money, the gold as yet not worn smooth by handling, the staring, brand-new sovereigns looking like impostors.

As he came upon the great house, however, in the soft light of evening, he was conscious of no violence done to his artistic sense. It was a big building, severely simple in design, yet with the rich grace, s.p.a.cious solidity, and decorative relief of an Italian palace: compact, generous, traditionally genuine and wonderfully proportionate.

”Egad, Byng, you had a good architect--and good sense!” he said to himself. ”It's the real thing; and he did it before Jasmine came on the scene too.”

The outside of the house was Byng's, but the inside would, in the essentials, of course, be hers; and he would see what he would see.

When the door opened, it came to him instantly that the inside and outside were in harmony. How complete was that harmony remained to be seen, but an apparently unstudied and delightful reticence was noticeable at once. The newness had been rubbed off the gold somehow, and the old furniture--Italian, Spanish--which relieved the s.p.a.ciousness of the entrance gave an air of Time and Time's eloquence to this three-year-old product of modern architectural skill.

As he pa.s.sed on, he had more than a glimpse of the ball-room, which maintained the dignity and the refined beauty of the staircase and the hallways; and only in the insistent audacity and intemperate colouring of some Rubens pictures did he find anything of that inherent tendency to exaggeration and Oriental magnificence behind the really delicate artistic faculties possessed by Jasmine.

The drawing-room was charming. It was not quite perfect, however. It was too manifestly and studiously arranged, and it had the finnicking exactness of the favourite gallery of some connoisseur. For its n.o.bility of form, its deft and wise softness of colouring, its half-smothered Italian joyousness of design in ceiling and cornice, the arrangement of choice and exquisite furniture was too careful, too much like the stage. He smiled at the sight of it, for he saw and knew that Jasmine had had his playful criticism of her occasionally flamboyant taste in mind, and that she had over-revised, as it were. She had, like a literary artist, polished and refined and stippled the effect, till something of personal touch had gone, and there remained cla.s.sic elegance without the sting of life and the idiosyncrasy of its creator's imperfections. No, the drawing-room would not quite do, though it was near the perfect thing. His judgment was not yet complete, however. When he was shown into Jasmine's sitting-room his breath came a little quicker, for here would be the real test; and curiosity was stirring greatly in him.

Yes, here was the woman herself, wilful, original, delightful, with a flower-like delicacy joined to a determined and gorgeous audacity.

Luxury was heaped on luxury, in soft lights from Indian lamps and lanterns, in the great divan, the deep lounge, the piled-up cus.h.i.+ons, the piano littered with incongruous if artistic bijouterie; but everywhere, everywhere, books in those appealing bindings and with that paper so dear to every lover of literature. Instinctively he picked them up one by one, and most of them were affectionately marked by marginal notes of criticism, approval, or reference; and all showing the eager, ardent mind of one who loved books. He noticed, however, that most of the books he had seen before, and some of them he had read with her in the days which were gone forever. Indeed, in one of them he found some of his own pencilled marginal notes, beneath which she had written her insistent opinions, sometimes with amazing point. There were few new books, and they were mostly novels; and it was borne in on him that not many of these annotated books belonged to the past three years. The millions had come, the power and the place; but something had gone with their coming.