Part 3 (1/2)
”Of course--I forgot you know nothing of her. She wrote me from Ambleside--I infer she has been 'doing' England; and as her credentials were unimpeachable I asked her down. She has inherited a part of the northern estate and was brought up in the neighboring town of Rosewater--the American names are too silly. She seems quite _comme il faut_ and is remarkably handsome. I detest Americans, as you know, but there certainly is something in blood. I liked her at once. She looks clever, and is quite off the type--none of the usual fluff. If she doesn't bore me I shall keep her here for a while.”
”I wish you would adopt her,” he said, fondly. ”I shouldn't be jealous, for I hate to think of you so much alone.” He rose and kissed her lightly on the forehead, experience teaching him to avoid a stray hair from the carefully built coiffure. ”I'll see if I can waylay Julia on the stairs; she is always late. Keep from eleven to twelve for me to-morrow morning. I want to tell you about the campaign. It was a glorious fight!” His eyes sparkled at the memory of it. ”I felt as if every bit of me had never been alive at once before. My opponent was a splendid chap. It meant something to beat him. The other side was in a rage!--more than once yelled for half an hour after I took the platform.
When I finished they yelled again for half an hour--to a different tune.” His slight, thin, rather graceless figure seemed suddenly to expand, even to grow taller. Some hidden magnetism burst from him like an aura, and his cold pasty face and light gray eyes flamed into positive beauty. ”It was glorious! Glorious! I was intoxicated--I could have reeled, little as they suspected it. I wouldn't part for a second with the certainty that I am the biggest figure in young England to-day.
I hate to sleep and forget it. If I cultivated modesty I should renounce one of the exquisite pleasures of life. Humility is a superst.i.tion. The man who doesn't weed it out is an a.s.s. To be young, well-born, with money enough, a brain instead of a mere intelligence, an essential leader of men--Good G.o.d! Good G.o.d!” Then he subsided and blushed, jerked up his shoulders and laughed. ”Well--I never let myself go to any one but you,” he said. ”And I won't inflict _you_ any longer.”
IV
”I wish the old homes of England had electric lights,” thought Miss Otis, with a sigh.
There were four candles on the dressing-table, two on the mantel-shelf; beyond the radius of their light the room was barely visible. She carried one of the candles over to the cheval-gla.s.s and held it above her head, close to her face, low on either side.
”I feel as if I had been put together by some unpleasant mechanical process. It is well I am not inordinately vain, but when one puts on a new dress for the first time--” She shrugged her shoulders hopelessly, replaced the candle, and walked up and down the room swinging the train--her first--of the charming gown of pale blue satin; patting the hair coiled softly about the entire head in a line eminently becoming to the profile, and prolonged by several little curls escaping to the neck.
She felt happy and excited, her fine almost severe face far more girlishly alive than when she had told her story, provocatively dry, to Flora Thangue. She directed an approving glance at the high heels of her slippers, which, with her lofty carriage, produced the effect of non-existing inches. She was barely five feet five, but she ranked with tall women, her height as unchallenged as the chiselling of her profile.
”What frauds we all are!” she thought, with a humor of which she had not vouchsafed Miss Thangue a hint. ”But what is a cunningly made slipper on a foot not so small, at the end of a body not quite long enough, but an encouraging example of the triumph of art over nature?
Not the superiority, perhaps, but they are the best of working partners.”
She sat down and recalled the conversation with her new friend, giving an amused little shudder. She had heard much of, and in her travels come into contact with, the cold-blooded frankness of the English elect; with whom it was either an instinct or a pose to manifest their careless sense of impregnability. When pressed to give an account of herself the dramatic possibilities of the method suddenly appealed to her, accompanied by a mischievous desire to outdo them at their own game and observe the effect. She had found herself as absorbed as an actress in a new and congenial role.
”After all,” she thought, ”clever women make themselves over in great part, uprooting here, adopting there, and as we have so little chance to _be_ anything, there is a good deal to be got out of it. If one cannot be a genius one can at least be an artist. I have never had much cause to be as direct as stage lightning, but as I enjoyed it I suppose I may infer that even brutal frankness is not foreign to my nature. Perhaps, like father, I am a sn.o.b at heart and liked the sensation of a sort of artistic alliance with the British aristocracy. Well, if I develop sn.o.bbery I can root out that weed--or persuade myself that some other motive is at the base of a disposition to adopt any of the characteristics of this people: a woman can persuade herself of any sophistry she chooses. Not for anything would I be a man. Absolutely to accept the facts of life, even the ugly unvarnished fact itself, and at the same time to invent one's own soul-tunes--that is to be a woman and free!”
A printed square of card-board on her writing-table had informed her that the dinner-hour was half-past eight. She looked at her watch. It was five minutes to the time. Once more she peered into the gla.s.s, shook out her skirts, then sought a door in a far and dusky corner. It opened upon a long dimly lit corridor which led into another at right angles, and Isabel presently found herself at the head of a staircase similar to the one on her side of the house. Here, too, the walls were hung with portraits and landscapes, and as far down as the eye could follow; but after glancing over them for a moment with the recurring weariness of one who has seen too many pictures in the hard ways of European travel, her eyes lit and lingered on the figure of a young man who stood on the landing, his back to her, examining, with a certain tensity, a canvas on a level with his eyes.
”Uncle Hiram--John Elton Cecil Gwynne! What a likeness and what a difference!”
The young Englishman's hair, pale in color and very smooth, was worn longer than the fas.h.i.+on, the ends lilting. As he turned slowly at the rustle of descending skirts, this eccentricity and his colorless skin made him look the pale student rather than the gallant soldier, the best fighter on the hustings that England had seen for five-and-twenty years.
As Isabel walked carefully down the slippery stair she veiled her eyes to hide the wonder in them. She had expected personality, magnetism, as a compensation for nature's external economies. His apparent lack of both made him almost repellent, awakened in Isabel a sensation of antagonism; and the cool speculation in his light gray eyes merely accentuated his general dearth of charm. True he had height--although his carriage was unimposing--his head was large and well-proportioned, his nose and chin salient, but the straight heavy mouth was as contemptuous as a Prussian officer's, and in spite of his grooming he looked old-fas.h.i.+oned, absurdly like the Uncle Hiram who had been a country lawyer and farmer, and had always worn broadcloth in the hottest weather--except, to be sure, when he wore a linen ”duster,” or sat on the veranda in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, his feet on the railing.
However, she smiled, and he smiled politely in return, advancing a few steps to meet her. ”I hope you have heard of me,” she said. ”Your mother is so busy--English people are so indifferent to details--I am your cousin, Isabel Otis--”
”Of course my mother has spoken of you. I am very glad to see you in my house,” he added, hospitably. ”Shall I show you the way?”
He made no further remark as they descended the darker section of the stair, and she could think of nothing to say to him. Nor did she particularly care to think of anything, the American in her resenting his lack of effort. But as they reached the door she paused abruptly.
”I forgot! Miss Thangue asked me to knock at her door--”
”You take us too seriously,” he said, with a slight sneer. ”Flora has evidently forgotten you; she came down a quarter of an hour ago.”
Isabel lifted her head still higher, annoyed at the angry blood that leaped to her face. ”I am afraid I am rather literal,” she said, with more hauteur than the occasion demanded. ”But perhaps you will tell me where to go. There seems to be a bewildering number of rooms. After three years of lodgings in Europe, to say nothing of the modest architecture of Rosewater, I feel as if astray in a maze.”
”You got that off as if you were a masquerading princess,” he said, with a flicker of humor in his eyes. ”Americans generally bluff the other way.” He opened the door. ”We meet here in the hall. There is my mother.
You are not obliged to speak to her, you know. We are less formal in life than in novels.” With this parting shot he left her abruptly and joined a small dark woman with a plebeian face, a sensual mouth, and magnificent black eyes.
”The rude beast!--Julia Kaye, of course.” But Isabel forgot them both in the novelty of the scene. The square white hall was lit with wax-candles and shaded lamps, and filled with the murmur of voices--beautiful gowns--the sparkle of jewels. Isabel dismissed the memory of early trials, the long years she had lived in the last three, her philosophic resignation to the disillusions and disappointments with which her liberty had been pitted; it was her first appearance in the world of fas.h.i.+on--which she entered, after all, by a sort of divine right.
Trepidation was undeveloped in her, and when she had stood for a moment, quite aware that her proud and singular beauty had won her instant recognition, she walked over to her hostess.