BOOK FIRST
I
The people of France have made it
no secret that those of England, as a general thing, are to their
perception an inexpressive and speechless race, perpendicular and
unsociable, unaddicted to enriching any bareness of contact with
verbal or other embroidery. This view might have derived
encouragement, a few years ago, in Paris, from the manner in which
four persons sat together in silence, one fine day about noon, in
the garden, as it is called, of the Palais de l’Industrie
—the central court of the great
glazed bazaar where, among plants and parterres, gravelled walks
and thin fountains, are ranged the figures and groups, the
monuments and busts, which form in the annual exhibition of the
Salon the department of statuary. The spirit of observation is
naturally high at the Salon, quickened by a thousand artful or
artless appeals, but it need have put forth no great intensity to
take in the characters I mention. As a solicitation of the eye on
definite grounds these visitors too constituted a successful
plastic fact; and even the most superficial observer would have
marked them as products of an insular neighbourhood,
representatives of that tweed-and-waterproof class with which, on
the recurrent occasions when the English turn out for a
holiday—Christmas and Easter, Whitsuntide and the autumn
—Paris besprinkles itself at a
night’s notice. They had about them the indefinable professional
look of the British traveller abroad; the air of preparation for
exposure, material and moral, which is so oddly combined with the
serene revelation of
security and of persistence, and
which excites, according to individual susceptibility, the ire or
the admiration of foreign communities. They were the more
unmistakable as they presented mainly the happier aspects of the
energetic race to which they had the honour to belong. The fresh
diffused light of the Salon made them clear and important; they
were finished creations, in their way, and, ranged there motionless
on their green bench, were almost as much on exhibition as if they
had been hung on the line.
Three ladies and a young man,
they were obviously a family
—a mother, two daughters and a
son; a circumstance which had the effect at once of making each
member of the group doubly typical and of helping to account for
their fine taciturnity. They were not, with each other, on terms of
ceremony, and also were probably fatigued with their course among
the pictures, the rooms on the upper floor. Their attitude, on the
part of visitors who had superior features even if they might
appear to some passers-by to have neglected a fine opportunity for
completing these features with an expression, was after all a kind
of tribute to the state of exhaustion, of bewilderment, to which
the genius of France is still capable of reducing the proud.
“En v’là des abrutis!” more than
one of their fellow-gazers might have been heard to exclaim; and
certain it is that there was something depressed and discouraged in
this interesting group, who sat looking vaguely before them, not
noticing the life of the place, somewhat as if each had a private
anxiety. It might have been finely guessed, however, that though on
many questions they were closely united this present anxiety was
not the same for each. If they looked grave, moreover, this was
doubtless partly the result of their all being dressed in such
mourning as told of a recent bereavement. The eldest of the three
ladies had indeed a face of a fine austere mould which would have
been moved to gaiety only by some force more insidious than any she
was likely to recognise in Paris. Cold, still, and considerably
worn, it was neither stupid nor hard—it was firm, narrow and sharp.
This competent matron,
acquainted evidently with grief
but not weakened by it, had a high forehead to which the quality of
the skin gave a singular polish—it glittered even when seen at a
distance; a nose which achieved a high free curve; and a tendency
to throw back her head and carry it well above her, as if to
disengage it from the possible entanglements of the rest of her
person. If you had seen her walk you would have felt her to tread
the earth after a fashion suggesting that in a world where she had
long since discovered that one couldn’t have one’s own way one
could never tell what annoying aggression might take place, so that
it was well, from hour to hour, to save what one could. Lady Agnes
saved her head, her white triangular forehead, over which her
close-crinkled flaxen hair, reproduced in different shades in her
children, made a looped silken canopy like the marquee at a
garden-party. Her daughters were as tall as herself—that was
visible even as they sat there—and one of them, the younger
evidently, altogether pretty; a straight, slender, grey-eyed
English girl of the sort who show “good” figures and fresh
complexions. The sister, who was not pretty, was also straight and
slender and grey-eyed. But the grey in this case was not so pure,
nor were the straightness and the slenderness so maidenly. The
brother of these young ladies had taken off his hat as if he felt
the air of the summer day heavy in the great pavilion. He was a
lean, strong, clear-faced youth, with a formed nose and thick
light-brown hair which lay continuously and profusely back from his
forehead, so that to smooth it from the brow to the neck but a
single movement of the hand was required. I cannot describe him
better than by saying that he was the sort of young Englishman who
looks particularly well in strange lands and whose general aspect—
his inches, his limbs, his friendly eyes, the modulation of his
voice, the cleanness of his flesh-tints and the fashion of his
garments—excites on the part of those who encounter him in far
countries on the ground of a common speech a delightful sympathy of
race. This sympathy may sometimes be qualified by the seen limits
of his apprehension, but it almost revels as such horizons recede.
We shall see quickly enough how accurate a measure it might have
taken of Nicholas Dormer.
There was food for suspicion
perhaps in the wandering blankness that sat at moments in his eyes,
as if he had no attention at all, not the least in the world, at
his command; but it is no more than just to add without delay that
this discouraging symptom was known among those who liked him by
the indulgent name of dreaminess. By his mother and sisters, for
instance, his dreaminess was constantly noted. He is the more
welcome to the benefit of such an interpretation as there is always
held to be something engaging in the combination of the muscular
and the musing, the mildness of strength.
After some time, an interval
during which these good people might have appeared to have come,
individually, to the Palais de l’Industrie much less to see the
works of art than to think over their domestic affairs, the young
man, rousing himself from his reverie, addressed one of the
girls.
“I say, Biddy, why should we sit
moping here all day? Come and take a turn about with me.”
His younger sister, while he got
up, leaned forward a little, looking round her, but she gave for
the moment no further sign of complying with his invitation.
“Where shall we find you, then,
if Peter comes?” asked the other Miss Dormer, making no movement at
all.
“I daresay Peter won’t come.
He’ll leave us here to cool our heels.”
“Oh Nick dear!” Biddy exclaimed
in a small sweet voice of protest. It was plainly her theory that
Peter would come, and even a little her fond fear that she might
miss him should she quit that spot.
“We shall come back in a quarter
of an hour. Really I must look at these things,” Nick declared,
turning his face to a marble group which stood near them on the
right—a man with the skin of a beast round his loins, tussling with
a naked woman in some primitive effort of courtship or
capture.
Lady Agnes followed the direction
of her son’s eyes and then observed: “Everything seems very
dreadful. I should think Biddy had better sit still. Hasn’t she
seen enough horrors up above?”
“I daresay that if Peter comes
Julia’ll be with him,” the elder girl remarked irrelevantly.
“Well then he can take Julia
about. That will be more proper,” said Lady Agnes.
“Mother dear, she doesn’t care a
rap about art. It’s a fearful bore looking at fine things with
Julia,” Nick returned.
“Won’t you go with him,
Grace?”—and Biddy appealed to her sister.
“I think she has awfully good
taste!” Grace exclaimed, not answering this inquiry.
“Don’t say nasty things about
her!” Lady Agnes broke out solemnly to her son after resting her
eyes on him a moment with an air of reluctant reprobation.
“I say nothing but what she’d say
herself,” the young man urged. “About some things she has very good
taste, but about this kind of thing she has no taste at all.”
“That’s better, I think,” said
Lady Agnes, turning her eyes again to the “kind of thing” her son
appeared to designate.
“She’s awfully clever—awfully!”
Grace went on with decision.
“Awfully, awfully!” her brother
repeated, standing in front of her and smiling down at her.
“You are nasty, Nick. You know
you are,” said the young lady, but more in sorrow than in
anger.
Biddy got up at this, as if the
accusatory tone prompted her to place herself generously at his
side. “Mightn’t you go and order lunch—in that place, you know?”
she asked of her mother. “Then we’d come back when it was
ready.”
“My dear child, I can’t order
lunch,” Lady Agnes replied with a cold impatience which seemed to
intimate that she had problems far more important than those of
victualling to contend with.
“Then perhaps Peter will if he
comes. I’m sure he’s up in everything of that sort.”
“Oh hang Peter!” Nick exclaimed.
“Leave him out of account, and do order lunch, mother; but not cold
beef and pickles.”
“I must say—about him—you’re not
nice,” Biddy ventured to remark to her brother, hesitating and even
blushing a little.
“You make up for it, my dear,”
the young man answered, giving her chin—a very charming, rotund,
little chin—a friendly whisk with his forefinger.
“I can’t imagine what you’ve got
against him,” her ladyship said gravely.
“Dear mother, it’s disappointed
fondness,” Nick argued. “They won’t answer one’s notes; they won’t
let one know where they are nor what to expect. ‘Hell has no fury
like a woman scorned’; nor like a man either.”
“Peter has such a tremendous lot
to do—it’s a very busy time at the embassy; there are sure to be
reasons,” Biddy explained with her pretty eyes.
“Reasons enough, no doubt!” said
Lady Agnes—who accompanied these words with an ambiguous sigh,
however, as if in Paris even the best reasons would naturally be
bad ones.
“Doesn’t Julia write to you,
doesn’t she answer you the very day?” Grace asked, looking at Nick
as if she were the bold one.
He waited, returning her glance
with a certain severity. “What do you know about my correspondence?
No doubt I ask too much,” he went on; “I’m so attached to them.
Dear old Peter, dear old Julia!”
“She’s younger than you, my
dear!” cried the elder girl, still resolute.
“Yes, nineteen days.”
“I’m glad you know her
birthday.”
“She knows yours; she always
gives you something,” Lady Agnes reminded her son.
“Her taste is good then, isn’t
it, Nick?” Grace Dormer continued.
“She makes charming presents;
but, dear mother, it isn’t her
taste. It’s her husband’s.” “How
her husband’s?”
“The beautiful objects of which
she disposes so freely are the things he collected for years
laboriously, devotedly, poor man!”
“She disposes of them to you, but
not to others,” said Lady Agnes. “But that’s all right,” she added,
as if this might have been taken for a complaint of the limitations
of Julia’s bounty. “She has to select among so many, and that’s a
proof of taste,” her ladyship pursued.
“You can’t say she doesn’t choose
lovely ones,” Grace remarked to her brother in a tone of some
triumph.
“My dear, they’re all lovely.
George Dallow’s judgement was so sure, he was incapable of making a
mistake,” Nicholas Dormer returned.
“I don’t see how you can talk of
him, he was dreadful,” said Lady Agnes.
“My dear, if he was good enough
for Julia to marry he’s good enough for us to talk of.”
“She did him a very great
honour.”
“I daresay, but he was not
unworthy of it. No such enlightened collection of beautiful objects
has been made in England in our time.”
“You think too much of beautiful
objects!” Lady Agnes sighed.
“I thought you were just now
lamenting that I think too little.”
“It’s very nice—his having left
Julia so well off,” Biddy interposed soothingly, as if she foresaw
a tangle.
“He treated her en grand
seigneur, absolutely,” Nick went on.
“He used to look greasy, all the
same”—Grace bore on it with a dull weight. “His name ought to have
been Tallow.”
“You’re not saying what Julia
would like, if that’s what you are trying to say,” her brother
observed.
“Don’t be vulgar, Grace,” said
Lady Agnes.
“I know Peter Sherringham’s
birthday!” Biddy broke out innocently, as a pacific diversion. She
had passed her hand into Nick’s arm, to signify her readiness to go
with him, while she scanned the remoter reaches of the garden as if
it had occurred to her that to direct their steps in some such
sense might after all be the shorter way to get at Peter.
“He’s too much older than you, my
dear,” Grace answered without encouragement.
“That’s why I’ve noticed it—he’s
thirty-four. Do you call that too old? I don’t care for slobbering
infants!” Biddy cried.
“Don’t be vulgar,” Lady Agnes
enjoined again.
“Come, Bid, we’ll go and be
vulgar together; for that’s what we are, I’m afraid,” her brother
said to her. “We’ll go and look at all these low works of
art.”
“Do you really think it’s
necessary to the child’s development?” Lady Agnes demanded as the
pair turned away. And then while her son, struck as by a challenge,
paused, lingering a moment with his little sister on his arm: “What
we’ve been through this morning in this place, and what
you’ve paraded before our
eyes—the murders, the tortures, all kinds of disease and
indecency!”
Nick looked at his mother as if
this sudden protest surprised him, but as if also there were
lurking explanations of it which he quickly guessed. Her resentment
had the effect not so much of animating her cold face as of making
it colder, less expressive, though visibly prouder. “Ah dear
mother, don’t do the British matron!” he replied
good-humouredly.
“British matron’s soon said! I
don’t know what they’re coming to.”
“How odd that you should have
been struck only with the disagreeable things when, for myself,
I’ve felt it to be most interesting, the most suggestive morning
I’ve passed for ever so many months!”
“Oh Nick, Nick!” Lady Agnes cried
with a strange depth of feeling.
“I like them better in
London—they’re much less unpleasant,” said Grace Dormer.
“They’re things you can look at,”
her ladyship went on. “We certainly make the better show.”
“The subject doesn’t matter, it’s
the treatment, the treatment!” Biddy protested in a voice like the
tinkle of a silver bell.
“Poor little Bid!”—her brother
broke into a laugh.
“How can I learn to model, mamma
dear, if I don’t look at things and if I don’t study them?” the
girl continued.
This question passed unheeded,
and Nicholas Dormer said to his mother, more seriously, but with a
certain kind explicitness, as if he could make a particular
allowance: “This place is an immense stimulus to me; it refreshes
me, excites me—it’s such an exhibition of artistic life. It’s full
of ideas, full of refinements; it gives one such an impression of
artistic experience. They try everything, they feel everything.
While you were looking at the murders, apparently, I observed
an
immense deal of curious and
interesting work. There are too many of them, poor devils; so many
who must make their way, who must attract attention. Some of them
can only taper fort, stand on their heads, turn somersaults or
commit deeds of violence, to make people notice them. After that,
no doubt, a good many will be quieter. But I don’t know; to-day I’m
in an appreciative mood—I feel indulgent even to them: they give me
an impression of intelligence, of eager observation. All art is
one—remember that, Biddy dear,” the young man continued, smiling
down from his height. “It’s the same great many-headed effort, and
any ground that’s gained by an individual, any spark that’s struck
in any province, is of use and of suggestion to all the others.
We’re all in the same boat.”
“‘We,’ do you say, my dear? Are
you really setting up for an artist?” Lady Agnes asked.
Nick just hesitated. “I was
speaking for Biddy.” “But you are one, Nick—you are!” the girl
cried.
Lady Agnes looked for an instant
as if she were going to say once more “Don’t be vulgar!” But she
suppressed these words, had she intended them, and uttered sounds,
few in number and not completely articulate, to the effect that she
hated talking about art. While her son spoke she had watched him as
if failing to follow; yet something in the tone of her exclamation
hinted that she had understood him but too well.
“We’re all in the same boat,”
Biddy repeated with cheerful zeal.
“Not me, if you please!” Lady
Agnes replied. “It’s horrid messy work, your modelling.”
“Ah but look at the results!”
said the girl eagerly—glancing about at the monuments in the garden
as if in regard even to them she were, through that unity of art
her brother had just proclaimed, in some degree an effective
cause.
“There’s a great deal being done
here—a real vitality,” Nicholas Dormer went on to his mother in the
same reasonable informing way. “Some of these fellows go very
far.”
“They do indeed!” said Lady
Agnes.
“I’m fond of young schools—like
this movement in sculpture,” Nick insisted with his slightly
provoking serenity.
“They’re old enough to know
better!”
“Mayn’t I look, mamma? It is
necessary to my development,” Biddy declared.
“You may do as you like,” said
Lady Agnes with dignity.
“She ought to see good work, you
know,” the young man went on.
“I leave it to your sense of
responsibility.” This statement was somewhat majestic, and for a
moment evidently it tempted Nick, almost provoked him, or at any
rate suggested to him an occasion for some pronouncement he had had
on his mind. Apparently, however, he judged the time on the whole
not quite right, and his sister Grace interposed with the
inquiry
—
“Please, mamma, are we never
going to lunch?”
“Ah mother, mother!” the young
man murmured in a troubled way, looking down at her with a deep
fold in his forehead.
For Lady Agnes also, as she
returned his look, it seemed an occasion; but with this difference
that she had no hesitation in taking advantage of it. She was
encouraged by his slight embarrassment, for ordinarily Nick was not
embarrassed. “You used to have so much sense of responsibility,”
she pursued; “but sometimes I don’t know what has become of
it
—it seems all, all gone!”
“Ah mother, mother!” he exclaimed
again—as if there were so many things to say that it was impossible
to choose. But now he stepped closer, bent over her and in spite of
the publicity of their situation gave her a quick expressive kiss.
The foreign observer whom I took for granted in beginning to sketch
this scene would have had to admit that the rigid English family
had after all a capacity for emotion. Grace Dormer indeed looked
round her to see if at this moment they
were noticed. She judged with
satisfaction that they had escaped.
II
Nick Dormer walked away with
Biddy, but he had not gone far before he stopped in front of a
clever bust, where his mother, in the distance, saw him playing in
the air with his hand, carrying out by this gesture, which
presumably was applausive, some critical remark he had made to his
sister. Lady Agnes raised her glass to her eyes by the long handle
to which rather a clanking chain was attached, perceiving that the
bust represented an ugly old man with a bald head; at which her
ladyship indefinitely sighed, though it was not apparent in what
way such an object could be detrimental to her daughter. Nick
passed on and quickly paused again; this time, his mother
discerned, before the marble image of a strange grimacing woman.
Presently she lost sight of him; he wandered behind things, looking
at them all round.
“I ought to get plenty of ideas
for my modelling, oughtn’t I, Nick?” his sister put to him after a
moment.
“Ah my poor child, what shall I
say?”
“Don’t you think I’ve any
capacity for ideas?” the girl continued ruefully.
“Lots of them, no doubt. But the
capacity for applying them, for putting them into practice—how much
of that have you?”
“How can I tell till I
try?”
“What do you mean by trying,
Biddy dear?” “Why you know—you’ve seen me.”
“Do you call that trying?” her
brother amusedly demanded.
“Ah Nick!” she said with
sensibility. But then with more spirit: “And please what do you
call it?”
“Well, this for instance is a
good case.” And her companion pointed to another bust—a head of a
young man in terra-cotta, at which they had just arrived; a modern
young man to whom, with his thick neck, his little cap and his wide
ring of dense curls, the
artist had given the air of some
sturdy Florentine of the time of Lorenzo.
Biddy looked at the image a
moment. “Ah that’s not trying; that’s succeeding.”
“Not altogether; it’s only trying
seriously.” “Well, why shouldn’t I be serious?”
“Mother wouldn’t like it. She has
inherited the fine old superstition that art’s pardonable only so
long as it’s bad—so long as it’s done at odd hours, for a little
distraction, like a game of tennis or of whist. The only thing that
can justify it, the effort to carry it as far as one can (which you
can’t do without time and singleness of purpose), she regards as
just the dangerous, the criminal element. It’s the oddest
hind-part-before view, the drollest immorality.”
“She doesn’t want one to be
professional,” Biddy returned as if she could do justice to every
system.
“Better leave it alone then.
There are always duffers enough.”
“I don’t want to be a duffer,”
Biddy said. “But I thought you encouraged me.”
“So I did, my poor child. It was
only to encourage myself.” “With your own work—your
painting?”
“With my futile, my ill-starred
endeavours. Union is strength— so that we might present a wider
front, a larger surface of resistance.”
Biddy for a while said nothing
and they continued their tour of observation. She noticed how he
passed over some things quickly, his first glance sufficing to show
him if they were worth another, and then recognised in a moment the
figures that made some appeal. His tone puzzled but his certainty
of eye impressed her, and she felt what a difference there was yet
between them— how much longer in every case she would have taken to
discriminate. She was aware of how little she could judge of the
value of a thing till she had looked at it ten minutes; indeed
modest little Biddy was compelled privately to add “And often not
even then.” She was mystified, as I say—Nick was often
mystifying, it was his only
fault—but one thing was definite: her brother had high ability. It
was the consciousness of this that made her bring out at last: “I
don’t so much care whether or no I please mamma, if I please
you.”
“Oh don’t lean on me. I’m a
wretched broken reed—I’m no use
really!” he promptly admonished
her.
“Do you mean you’re a duffer?”
Biddy asked in alarm. “Frightful, frightful!”
“So that you intend to give up
your work—to let it alone, as you advise me?”
“It has never been my work, all
that business, Biddy. If it had it would be different. I should
stick to it.”
“And you won’t stick to it?” the
girl said, standing before him open-eyed.
Her brother looked into her eyes
a moment, and she had a compunction; she feared she was indiscreet
and was worrying him. “Your questions are much simpler than the
elements out of which my answer should come.”
“A great talent—what’s simpler
than that?”
“One excellent thing, dear Biddy:
no talent at all!” “Well, yours is so real you can’t help
it.”
“We shall see, we shall see,”
said Nick Dormer. “Let us go look at that big group.”
“We shall see if your talent’s
real?” Biddy went on as she accompanied him.
“No; we shall see if, as you say,
I can’t help it. What nonsense Paris makes one talk!” the young man
added as they stopped in front of the composition. This was true
perhaps, but not in a sense he could find himself tempted to
deplore. The present was far from his first visit to the French
capital: he had often quitted England and usually made a point of
“putting in,” as he called it, a few days there on the outward
journey to the Continent or on the return; but at present the
feelings, for the most part agreeable, attendant upon a change of
air and of scene had been more
punctual and more acute than for
a long time before, and stronger the sense of novelty, refreshment,
amusement, of the hundred appeals from that quarter of thought to
which on the whole his attention was apt most frequently, though
not most confessedly, to stray. He was fonder of Paris than most of
his countrymen, though not so fond perhaps as some other captivated
aliens: the place had always had the virtue of quickening in him
sensibly the life of reflexion and observation. It was a good while
since his impressions had been so favourable to the city by the
Seine; a good while at all events since they had ministered so to
excitement, to exhilaration, to ambition, even to a restlessness
that was not prevented from being agreeable by the excess of
agitation in it. Nick could have given the reason of this unwonted
glow, but his preference was very much to keep it to himself.
Certainly to persons not deeply knowing, or at any rate not deeply
curious, in relation to the young man’s history the explanation
might have seemed to beg the question, consisting as it did of the
simple formula that he had at last come to a crisis. Why a
crisis—what was it and why had he not come to it before? The reader
shall learn these things in time if he cares enough for them.
Our young man had not in any
recent year failed to see the Salon, which the general voice this
season pronounced not particularly good. None the less it was the
present exhibition that, for some cause connected with his
“crisis,” made him think fast, produced that effect he had spoken
of to his mother as a sense of artistic life. The precinct of the
marbles and bronzes spoke to him especially to-day; the glazed
garden, not florally rich, with its new productions alternating
with perfunctory plants and its queer, damp smell, partly the odour
of plastic clay, of the studios of sculptors, put forth the voice
of old associations, of other visits, of companionships now
ended—an insinuating eloquence which was at the same time somehow
identical with the general sharp contagion of Paris. There was
youth in the air, and a multitudinous newness, for ever reviving,
and the diffusion of a hundred talents, ingenuities, experiments.
The summer clouds made shadows on the roof of the great building;
the white images, hard in their crudity, spotted the place with
provocations; the rattle of plates at the restaurant sounded
sociable in the distance, and our
young man congratulated himself more than ever that he had not
missed his chance. He felt how it would help him to settle
something. At the moment he made this reflexion his eye fell upon a
person who appeared— just in the first glimpse—to carry out the
idea of help. He uttered a lively ejaculation, which, however, in
its want of finish, Biddy failed to understand; so pertinent, so
relevant and congruous, was the other party to this
encounter.
The girl’s attention followed her
brother’s, resting with it on a young man who faced them without
seeing them, engaged as he was in imparting to two companions his
ideas about one of the works exposed to view. What Biddy remarked
was that this young man was fair and fat and of the middle stature;
he had a round face and a short beard and on his crown a mere
reminiscence of hair, as the fact that he carried his hat in his
hand permitted to be observed. Bridget Dormer, who was quick,
placed him immediately as a gentleman, but as a gentleman unlike
any other gentleman she had ever seen. She would have taken him for
very foreign but that the words proceeding from his mouth reached
her ear and imposed themselves as a rare variety of English. It was
not that a foreigner might not have spoken smoothly enough, nor yet
that the speech of this young man was not smooth. It had in truth a
conspicuous and aggressive perfection, and Biddy was sure no mere
learner would have ventured to play such tricks with the tongue. He
seemed to draw rich effects and wandering airs from it—to modulate
and manipulate it as he would have done a musical instrument. Her
view of the gentleman’s companions was less operative, save for her
soon making the reflexion that they were people whom in any
country, from China to Peru, you would immediately have taken for
natives. One of them was an old lady with a shawl; that was the
most salient way in which she presented herself. The shawl was an
ancient much-used fabric of embroidered cashmere, such as many
ladies wore forty years ago in their walks abroad and such as no
lady wears to-day. It had fallen half off the back of the wearer,
but at the moment Biddy permitted herself to consider her she gave
it a violent jerk and brought it up to her shoulders again, where
she continued to arrange and settle it, with a good deal of
jauntiness and elegance,
while she listened to the talk of
the gentleman. Biddy guessed that this little transaction took
place very frequently, and was not unaware of its giving the old
lady a droll, factitious, faded appearance, as if she were
singularly out of step with the age. The other person was very much
younger—she might have been a daughter—and had a pale face, a low
forehead, and thick dark hair. What she chiefly had, however, Biddy
rapidly discovered, was a pair of largely-gazing eyes. Our young
friend was helped to the discovery by the accident of their resting
at this moment for a time—it struck Biddy as very long—on her own.
Both these ladies were clad in light, thin, scant gowns, giving an
impression of flowered figures and odd transparencies, and in low
shoes which showed a great deal of stocking and were ornamented
with large rosettes. Biddy’s slightly agitated perception travelled
directly to their shoes: they suggested to her vaguely that the
wearers were dancers—connected possibly with the old-fashioned
exhibition of the shawl-dance. By the time she had taken in so much
as this the mellifluous young man had perceived and addressed
himself to her brother. He came on with an offered hand. Nick
greeted him and said it was a happy chance—he was uncommonly glad
to see him.
“I never come across you—I don’t
know why,” Nick added while the two, smiling, looked each other up
and down like men reunited after a long interval.
“Oh it seems to me there’s reason
enough: our paths in life are so different.” Nick’s friend had a
great deal of manner, as was evinced by his fashion of saluting
Biddy without knowing her.
“Different, yes, but not so
different as that. Don’t we both live in London, after all, and in
the nineteenth century?”
“Ah my dear Dormer, excuse me: I
don’t live in the nineteenth century. Jamais de la vie!” the
gentleman declared.
“Nor in London either?”
“Yes—when I’m not at Samarcand!
But surely we’ve diverged since the old days. I adore what you
burn, you burn what I adore.” While the stranger spoke he looked
cheerfully, hospitably, at Biddy; not because it was she, she
easily guessed, but because it was in his nature to desire a second
auditor—a
kind of sympathetic gallery. Her
life was somehow filled with shy people, and she immediately knew
she had never encountered any one who seemed so to know his part
and recognise his cues.
“How do you know what I adore?”
Nicholas Dormer asked. “I know well enough what you used to.”
“That’s more than I do myself.
There were so many things.”
“Yes, there are many things—many,
many: that’s what makes life so amusing.”
“Do you find it amusing?”
“My dear fellow, c’est à se
tordre. Don’t you think so? Ah it was high time I should meet you—I
see. I’ve an idea you need me.”
“Upon my word I think I do!” Nick
said in a tone which struck his sister and made her wonder still
more why, if the gentleman was so important as that, he didn’t
introduce him.
“There are many gods and this is
one of their temples,” the mysterious personage went on. “It’s a
house of strange idols— isn’t it?—and of some strange and unnatural
sacrifices.”
To Biddy as much as to her
brother this remark might have been offered; but the girl’s eyes
turned back to the ladies who for the moment had lost their
companion. She felt irresponsive and feared she should pass with
this easy cosmopolite for a stiff, scared, English girl, which was
not the type she aimed at; but wasn’t even ocular commerce overbold
so long as she hadn’t a sign from Nick? The elder of the strange
women had turned her back and was looking at some bronze figure,
losing her shawl again as she did so; but the other stood where
their escort had quitted her, giving all her attention to his
sudden sociability with others. Her arms hung at her sides, her
head was bent, her face lowered, so that she had an odd appearance
of raising her eyes from under her brows; and in this attitude she
was striking, though her air was so unconciliatory as almost to
seem dangerous. Did it express resentment at having been abandoned
for another girl? Biddy, who began to be frightened—there was a
moment when the neglected creature resembled a tigress about
to
spring—was tempted to cry out
that she had no wish whatever to appropriate the gentleman. Then
she made the discovery that the young lady too had a manner, almost
as much as her clever guide, and the rapid induction that it
perhaps meant no more than his. She only looked at Biddy from
beneath her eyebrows, which were wonderfully arched, but there was
ever so much of a manner in the way she did it. Biddy had a
momentary sense of being a figure in a ballet, a dramatic ballet—a
subordinate motionless figure, to be dashed at to music or
strangely capered up to. It would be a very dramatic ballet indeed
if this young person were the heroine. She had magnificent hair,
the girl reflected; and at the same moment heard Nick say to his
interlocutor: “You’re not in London—one can’t meet you
there?”
“I rove, drift, float,” was the
answer; “my feelings direct me— if such a life as mine may be said
to have a direction. Where there’s anything to feel I try to be
there!” the young man continued with his confiding laugh.
“I should like to get hold of
you,” Nick returned.
“Well, in that case there would
be no doubt the intellectual adventure. Those are the currents—any
sort of personal relation
—that govern my career.”
“I don’t want to lose you this
time,” Nick continued in a tone that excited Biddy’s surprise. A
moment before, when his friend had said that he tried to be where
there was anything to feel, she had wondered how he could endure
him.
“Don’t lose me, don’t lose me!”
cried the stranger after a fashion which affected the girl as the
highest expression of irresponsibility she had ever seen. “After
all why should you? Let us remain together unless I interfere”—and
he looked, smiling and interrogative, at Biddy, who still remained
blank, only noting again that Nick forbore to make them acquainted.
This was an anomaly, since he prized the gentleman so. Still, there
could be no anomaly of Nick’s that wouldn’t impose itself on his
younger sister.
“Certainly, I keep you,” he said,
“unless on my side I deprive those ladies—!”
“Charming women, but it’s not an
indissoluble union. We meet, we communicate, we part! They’re
going—I’m seeing them to the door. I shall come back.” With this
Nick’s friend rejoined his companions, who moved away with him, the
strange fine eyes of the girl lingering on Biddy’s brother as well
as on Biddy herself as they receded.
“Who is he—who are they?” Biddy
instantly asked.
“He’s a gentleman,” Nick made
answer—insufficiently, she thought, and even with a shade of
hesitation. He spoke as if she might have supposed he was not one,
and if he was really one why didn’t he introduce him? But Biddy
wouldn’t for the world have put this question, and he now moved to
the nearest bench and dropped upon it as to await the other’s
return. No sooner, however, had his sister seated herself than he
said: “See here, my dear, do you think you had better stay?”
“Do you want me to go back to
mother?” the girl asked with a lengthening visage.
“Well, what do you think?” He
asked it indeed gaily enough. “Is your conversation to be
about—about private affairs?”
“No, I can’t say that. But I
doubt if mother would think it the sort of thing that’s ‘necessary
to your development.’”
This assertion appeared to
inspire her with the eagerness with which she again broke out: “But
who are they—who are they?”
“I know nothing of the ladies. I
never saw them before. The man’s a fellow I knew very well at
Oxford. He was thought immense fun there. We’ve diverged, as he
says, and I had almost lost sight of him, but not so much as he
thinks, because I’ve read him—read him with interest. He has
written a very clever book.”
“What kind of a book?” “A sort of
novel.” “What sort of novel?”
“Well, I don’t know—with a lot of
good writing.” Biddy listened to this so receptively that she
thought it perverse her
brother should add: “I daresay
Peter will have come if you return to mother.”
“I don’t care if he has. Peter’s
nothing to me. But I’ll go if you wish it.”
Nick smiled upon her again and
then said: “It doesn’t signify. We’ll all go.”
“All?” she echoed.
“He won’t hurt us. On the
contrary he’ll do us good.”