“Sheila,” said Lavender, vexed and anxious, and yet pleased at the same time by the courage of the girl—“Sheila, it is only a joke. You must not mind; it is only a bit of fun.”
“I do not understand such jests,” she said, calmly.
“Sit down, like a good girl,” said the old lady with an air of absolute indifference. “I did not mean to offend you. Sit down and be quiet. You will destroy your nervous system if you give way to such impulses. I think you are healthy. I like the look of you, but you will never reach a good age, as I hope to do, except by moderating your passions. That is well; now take the ammonia again and give it to me. You don’t wish to die young, I suppose?”
“I am not afraid of dying,” said Sheila.
“Ring the bell, Frank.”
He did so, and a tall, spare, grave-faced woman appeared.
“Paterson, you must put luncheon on at two-ten. I ordered it at one-fifty, did I not?”
“Yes, m’m.”
“See that it is served at two-ten, and take this young lady and get her hair properly done. You understand? My nephew and I will wait luncheon for her.”
“Yes, m’m.”
Sheila rose with a great swelling in her throat. All her courage had ebbed away. She had reflected how pained her husband would be if she did not please this old lady; and she was now prepared to do anything she was told, to receive meekly any remarks that might be made to her, to be quite obedient and gentle and submissive. But what was this tall and terrible woman going to do to her? Did she really mean to cut away those great masses of hair to which Mrs. Lavender had objected! Sheila would have let her hair be cut willingly for her husband’s sake; but as she went to the door some wild and despairing notions came into her head of what her husband might think of her when once she was shorn of this beautiful personal feature. Would he look at her with surprise—perhaps even with disappointment?
“Mind you don’t keep luncheon late,” he said to her as she passed him.
She but indistinctly heard him, so great was the trembling within her. Her father would scarcely know his altered Sheila when she went back to Borva; and what would Mairi say—Mairi who had many a time helped her to arrange those long tresses, and who was as proud of them as if they were her own? She followed Mrs. Lavender’s tall maid up-stairs. She entered a small dressing-room and glanced nervously around. Then she suddenly turned, looked for a moment at the woman, and said, with tears rushing up into her eyes: “Does Mrs. Lavender wish me to cut my hair?”
The woman regarded her with astonishment. “Cut, miss?—ma’am. I beg your pardon. No, ma’am, not at all. I suppose it is only some difference in the arrangement, ma’am. Mrs. Lavender is very particular about the hair, and she has asked me to show several ladies how to dress the hair in the way she likes. But perhaps you would prefer letting it remain as it is, ma’am?”
“Oh, no, not at all,” said Sheila. “I should like to have it just as Mrs. Lavender wishes—in every way just as she wishes. Only it will not be necessary to cut any?”
“Oh, no, miss—ma’am; and it would be a great pity, if I may say so, to cutyourhair.”
Sheila was pleased to hear that. Here was a woman who had a large experience in such matters among those very ladies of her husband’s social circle whom she had been a little afraid to meet. Mrs. Paterson seemed to admire her hair as much as the simple Mairi had done; and Sheila soon began to have less fear of the terrible tiring woman, who forthwith proceeded with her task.
The young wife went down stairs with a tower upon her head. She was very uncomfortable. She had seen, it is true, that this method of dressing the hair really became her—or rather would become her in certain circumstances. It was grand, imposing, statuesque, but then she did not feel statuesque just at this moment. She could have dressed herself to suit this style of hair; she could have worn it with confidence if she had got it up herself; but here she was the victim of an experiment. She felt like a school girl about, for the first time, to appear in public in a long dress, and she was terribly afraid her husband would laugh at her. If he had any such inclination he courteously suppressed it. He said the massive simplicity of this dressing of the hair suited her admirably. Mrs. Lavender said that Paterson was an invaluable woman; and then they went down to the dining-room on the ground floor, where luncheon had been laid.
The man who had opened the door waited on the two strangers; the invaluable Paterson acted as a sort of hench-woman to her mistress, standing by her chair and supplying her wants. She also had the management of a small pair of silver scales, in which pretty nearly everything that Mrs. Lavender took in the way of solid food was carefully and accurately weighed. The conversation was chiefly alimentary, and Sheila listened with a growing wonder to the description of the devices by which the ladies of Mrs. Lavender’s acquaintances were wont to cheat fatigue or win an appetite or preserve their color. When by accident the girl herself was appealed to, she had to confess to an astonishing ignorance of all such resources. She knew nothing of the relative strengths and effects of wines, though she wasfrankly ready to make any experiment her husband recommended. She knew what camphor was, but had never heard of bismuth. On cross-examination she had to admit that eau-de-cologne did not seem to her likely to be a pleasant liquor before going to a ball. Did she not know the effect on brown hair of washing it in soda-water every night? She was equably confessing her ignorance on all such points when she was startled by a sudden question from Mrs. Lavender. Did she know what she was doing?
She looked at her plate; there was on it a piece of cheese to which she had thoughtlessly helped herself. Somebody had called it Roquefort—that was all she knew.
“You have as much there, child, as would kill a ploughman; and I suppose you would not have had the sense to leave it.”
“Is it poison?” said Sheila, regarding her plate with horror.
“All cheese is. Paterson, my scales.”
She had Sheila’s plate brought to her, and the proper modicum of cheese cut, weighed and sent back.
“Remember, whatever house you are in, never to have more Roquefort than that.”
“It would be simpler to do without,” said Sheila.
“It would be simple enough to do without a great many things,” said Mrs. Lavender, severely. “But the wisdom of living is to enjoy as many different things as possible, so long as you do so in moderation and preserve your health. You are young—you don’t think of such things. You think, because you have good teeth and a clear complexion, you can eat anything. But that won’t last. A time will come. Do you not know what the great Emperor Marcus Antoninus says?—‘In a little while thou wilt be nobody and nowhere, like Hadrianus and Augustus.’ ”
“Yes,” said Sheila.
She had not enjoyed her luncheon much; she would rather have had a ham sandwich and a glass of spring water on the side of a Highland hill than this varied and fastidious repast accompanied by a good deal of physiology; but it was too bad that, having successfully got through it, she should be threatened with annihilation immediately afterward. It was no sort of consolation to her to know that she would be in the same plight with two emperors.
“Frank, you can go and smoke a cigar in the conservatory if you please. Your wife will come up-stairs with me and have a talk.”
Sheila would much rather have gone into the conservatory also, but she obediently followed Mrs. Lavender up-stairs and into the drawing-room. It was rather a melancholy chamber, the curtains shutting out most of the daylight, and leaving you in a semi-darkness that made the place look big and vague and spectral. The little, shrivelled woman, with the hard and staring eyes and silver-gray hair, bade Sheila sit down beside her. She herself sat by a small table, on which there were a tiny pair of scales, a bottle of ammonia, a fan, and a book bound in an old-fashioned binding of scarlet morocco and gold. Sheila wished this old woman would not look at her so. She wished there was a window open or a glint of sunlight coming in somewhere. But she was glad that her husband was enjoying himself in the conservatory, and that for two reasons. One of them was, that she did not like the tone of his talk while he and his aunt had been conversing together about the cosmetics and such matters. Not only did he betray a marvelous acquaintance with such things, but he seemed to take an odd sort of pleasure in exhibiting his knowledge. He talked about the tricks of fashionable women in a mocking way that Sheila did not quite like; and of course she naturally threw the blame on Mrs. Lavender. It was only when this old lady exerted a godless influence over him that her good boy talked in such a fashion. There was nothing of that about him in Lewis, nor yet at home in a certain snug little smoking-room which these two had come to consider the most comfortable corner in the house. Sheila began to hate women who used lip-salve, and silently recorded a vow that never, never, never would she wear anybody’s hair but her own.
“Do you suffer from headaches?” said Mrs. Lavender, abruptly.
“Sometimes,” said Sheila.
“How often? What is an average? Two a week?”
“Oh, sometimes I have not a headache for three or four months at a time.”
“No toothache?”
“No.”
“What did your mother die of?”
“It was a fever,” said Sheila, in a low voice, “and she caught it while she was helping a family that was very bad with the fever.”
“Does your father ever suffer from rheumatism?”
“No,” said Sheila. “My papa is the strongest man in the Lewis—I am sure of that.”
“But the strongest of us, you know,” said Mrs. Lavender, looking hardly at the girl—“the strongest of us will die and go into the general order of the universe; and it is a good thing for you that, as you say, you are not afraid. Why should you be afraid? Listen to this passage.” She opened the red book, and guided herself to a certain page by one of a series of colored ribbons: “ ‘He who fears death either fears the loss of sensation or a different kind of sensation. But if thou shalt have no sensation, neither wilt thou feel any harm; and if thou shalt acquire another kind of sensation, thou will be a different kind of living being, and thou wilt not cease to live.’ Do you perceive the wisdom of that?”
“Yes,” said Sheila, and her own voice seemed hollow and strange to her in this big and dimly-lit chamber.
Mrs. Lavender turned over a few more pages and proceeded to read again; and as she did so, in a slow, unsympathetic, monotonous voice, a spell came over the girl, the weight at her heart grew more and more intolerable, and the room seemed to grow darker: “ ‘Short, then, is the time which every man lives, and small the nook of the earth where he lives; and short, too, the longest posthumous fame, and even this only continued by a succession of poor human beings, who will very soon die, and who know not even themselves, much less him who died long ago.’ You cannot do better than ask your husband to buy you a copy of this book and give it special study. It will comfort you in affliction, and reconcile you to whatever may happen to you. Listen: ‘Soon will the earth cover us all! then the earth, too, will change, and the things also which result from change will continue to change forever, and these again forever. For if a man reflects on the changes and transformations which follow one another like wave after wave, and with their rapidity, he will despise everything which is perishable.’ Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” said Sheila, and it seemed to her that she was being suffocated. Would not the gray walls burst asunder andshow her one glimpse of the blue sky before she sank into unconsciousness? The monotonous tones of this old woman’s voice sounded like the repetition of a psalm over a coffin. It was as if she was already shut out of life, and could only hear, in a vague way, the dismal words being chanted over her by the people in the other world. She rose, steadied herself for a moment by placing her hand on the back of the chair, and managed to say: “Mrs. Lavender, forgive me for one moment; I wish to speak to my husband.”
She went to the door—Mrs. Lavender being too surprised to follow her—and made her way down stairs. She had seen the conservatory at the end of a certain passage. She reached it, and then she scarcely knew any more, except that her husband caught her in his arms as she cried: “Oh, Frank, Frank, take me away from this house! I am afraid; it terrifies me!”
“Sheila, what on earth is the matter? Here, come out into the fresh air. By Jove, how pale you are! Will you have some water?”
He could not get to understand thoroughly what had occurred. What he clearly did learn from Sheila’s disjointed and timid explanations was that there had been another “scene,” and he knew that of all things in the world his aunt hated “scenes” the worst. As soon as he saw that there was little the matter with Sheila beyond considerable mental perturbation, he could not help addressing some little remonstrance to her, and reminding her how necessary it was that she should not offend the old lady up-stairs.
“You should not be so excitable, Sheila,” he said. “You take such exaggerated notions about things. I am sure my aunt meant nothing unkind. And what did you say when you came away?”
“I said I wanted to see you. Are you angry with me?”
“No, of course not. But then, you see, it is a little vexing just at this moment. Well, let us go up-stairs at once, and try to make up some excuse, like a good girl. Say you felt faint—anything.”
“And you will come with me?”
“Yes. Now do try, Sheila, to make friends with my aunt. She is not such a bad sort of creature as you seem to think. She’s been very kind to me—she’ll be very kind to you when she knows you more.”
Fortunately no excuse was necessary, for Mrs. Lavender, in Sheila’s absence, had arrived at the conclusion that the girl’s temporary faintness was due to that piece of Roquefort.
“You see, you must be careful,” she said, when they entered the room. “You are unaccustomed to a great many things you will like afterward.”
“And the room is a little close,” said Lavender.
“I don’t think so,” said his aunt, sharply; “look at the barometer.”
“I didn’t mean for you and me, Aunt Caroline,” he said, “but for her. Sheila has been accustomed to live almost wholly in the open air.”
“The open air in moderation is an excellent thing. I go out myself every afternoon, wet or dry. And I was going to propose, Frank, that you should leave her here with me for the afternoon, and come back and dine with us at seven. I am going out at four-thirty, and she could go with me.”
“It’s very kind of you, Aunt Caroline, but we have promised to call on some people close by here at four.”
Sheila looked up frightened. The statement was an audacious perversion of the truth. But then Frank Lavender knew very well what his aunt meant by going into the open air every afternoon, wet or dry. At one certain hour her brougham was brought around, she got into it and had both doors and windows hermetically sealed, and then, in a semi-somnolent state, she was driven slowly and monotonously around the Park. How would Sheila fare if she were shut up in this box? He told a lie with great equanimity, and saved her.
Then Sheila was taken away to get on her things, and her husband waited, with some little trepidation, to hear what his aunt would say about her. He had not long to wait.
“She’s got a bad temper, Frank.”
“Oh, I don’t think so, Aunt Caroline,” he said, considerably startled.
“Mark my words, she’s got a bad temper, and she is not nearly so soft as she tries to make out. That girl has a great deal of firmness, Frank.”
“I find her as gentle and submissive as a girl could be—a little too gentle, perhaps, and anxious to study the wishes of other folks.”
“That is all very well with you. You are her master. She is not likely to quarrel with her bread and butter. But you’ll see if she does not hold her own when she gets among your friends.”
“I hope she will hold her own.”
The old lady only shook her head.
“I am sorry you should have taken a prejudice against her, Aunt Caroline,” said the young man, humbly.
“I take a prejudice! Don’t let me hear the word again, Frank. You know I have no prejudices. If I cannot give you a reason for anything, I believe then I cease to believe it.”
“You have not heard her sing,” he said, suddenly remembering that this means of conquering the old lady had been neglected.
“I have no doubt she has many accomplishments,” said Aunt Caroline, coldly. “In time, I suppose, she will get over that extraordinary accent she has.”
“Many people like it.”
“I dare say you do—at present. But you may tire of it. You married her in a hurry, and you have not got rid of your romance yet. At the same time, I dare say she is a very good sort of girl, and will not disgrace you if you instruct and manage her properly. But remember my words—she has a temper, and you will find it out if you thwart her.”
How sweet and fresh the air was, even in Kensington, when Sheila, having dressed and come down stairs, and after having dutifully kissed Mrs. Lavender and bade her good-bye, went outside with her husband! It was like coming back to the light of day from inside the imaginary coffin in which she had fancied herself placed. A soft West wind was blowing over the Park, and a fairly clear sunlight shining on the May green of the trees. And then she hung on her husband’s arm, and she had him to speak to instead of the terrible old woman who talked about dying.
And yet she hoped she had not offended Mrs. Lavender, for Frank’s sake. What he thought about the matter he prudently resolved to conceal.
“Do you know that you have greatly pleased my aunt?” he said, without the least compunction. He knew that if he breathed the least hint about what had actually been said, any possibly amity between the two women would be rendered impossible forever.
“Have I, really?” said Sheila, very much astonished, but never thinking for a moment of doubting anything said by her husband.
“Oh, she likes you awfully,” he said, with an infinite coolness.
“I am so glad!” said Sheila, with her face brightening. “I was so afraid, dear, I had offended her. She did not look pleased with me.”
By this time they had got into a hansom, and were driving down to the South Kensington Museum. Lavender would have preferred going into the Park, but what if his aunt, in driving by, were to see them? He explained to Sheila the absolute necessity of his having to tell that fib about the four o’clock engagement; and when she heard described the drive in the closed brougham, which she had escaped, perhaps she was not so greatly inclined as she ought to have been to protest against that piece of wickedness.
“Oh, yes, she likes you awfully,” he repeated, “and you must get to like her. Don’t be frightened at her harsh way of saying things; it is only a mannerism. She is really a kind-hearted woman, and would do anything for me. That’s her best feature, looking at her character from my point of view.”
“How often must we go to see her?” asked Sheila.
“Oh, not very often. But she will get up dinner parties, at which you will be introduced to batches of her friends. And then the best thing you can do is to put yourself under her instructions, and take her advice about your dress and such matters, just as you did about your hair. That was very good of you.”
“I am glad you were pleased with me,” said Sheila. “I will do what I can to like her. But she must talk more respectfully of you.”
Lavender laughed that little matter off as a joke, but it was no joke to Sheila. She would try to like that old woman—yes; her duty to her husband demanded that she should. But there are some things that a wife—especially a girl who has been newly made a wife—will never forget; which, on the contrary, she will remember with burning cheeks and anger and indignation.
HADSheila, then, Lavender could not help asking himself, a bad temper, or any other qualities and characteristics which were apparent to other people, but not to him? Was it possible that, after all, Ingram was right, and that he had yet to learn the nature of the girl he had married? It would be unfair to say that he suspected something wrong about his wife—that he fancied she had managed to conceal something—merely because Mrs. Lavender had said that Sheila had a bad temper; but here was another person who maintained that when the days of his romance were over he would see the girl in another light.
Nay, as he continued to ask himself, had not the change already begun? He grew less and less accustomed to see in Sheila a beautiful wild sea-bird that had fluttered down for a time into a strange home in the South. He had not quite forgotten or abandoned those imaginative scenes in which the wonderful sea-princess was to enter crowded drawing-rooms and have all the world standing back to regard her and admire her and sing her praises. But now he was not so sure that that would be the result of Sheila’s entrance into society. As the date of a certain dinner-party drew near, he began to wish she was more like the women he knew. He did not object to her strange, sweet ways of speech, nor to her odd likes and dislikes, nor even to an unhesitating frankness that nearly approached rudeness sometimes in its scorn of all compromise with the truth; but how would others regard these things? He did not wish to gain the reputation of having married an oddity.
“Sheila,” he said, on the morning of the day on which they were going to this dinner-party, “you should not saylike-a-ness. There are only two syllables inlikeness. It really does sound absurd to hear you saylike-a-ness.”
She looked up to him, with a quick trouble in her eyes.When had he spoken to her so petulantly before? And then she cast down her eyes again, and said, submissively, “I will try not to speak like that. When you go out I take a book and read aloud, and try to speak like you; but I cannot learn all at once.”
“Idon’t mind,” he said; “but, you know, other people must think it so odd. I wonder why you should always saygyardenforgardennow, when it is just as easy to saygarden?”
Once upon a time he had said there was no English like the English spoken in Lewis, and had singled out this very word as typical of one peculiarity in the pronunciation. But she did not remind him of that. She only said, in the same simple fashion, “If you will tell me my faults, I will try to correct them.”
She turned away from him to get an envelope for a letter she had been writing to her father. He fancied something was wrong, and perhaps some touch of compunction smote him, for he went after her and took her hand, and said, “Look here, Sheila. When I point out any trifles like that, you must not call them faults, and fancy that I have any serious complaint to make. It is for your own good that you should meet the people who will be your friends on equal terms, and give them as little as possible to talk about.”
“I should not mind their talking about me,” said Sheila, with her eyes still cast down, “but it is your wife they must not talk about; and if you will tell me anything I do wrong I will correct it.”
“Oh, you must not think it is anything so serious as that. You will soon pick up from the ladies you will meet some notion of how you differ from them; and if you should startle or puzzle them a little at first by talking about the chances of the fishing or the catching of wild duck, or the way to reclaim bog-land, you will soon get over all that.”
Sheila said nothing, but she made a mental memorandum of three things she was not to speak about. She did not know why these subjects should be forbidden, but she was in a strange land and going to see strange people, whose habits were different from hers. Moreover, when her husband had gone she reflected that these people, having no fishing and peat-mosses, and no wild-duck, could not possibly be interested in such affairs; and thus she fancied sheperceived the reason why she should avoid all mention of these things.
When, in the evening, Sheila came down dressed and ready to go out, Lavender had to admit to himself that he had married an exceedingly beautiful girl, and that there was no country gawkiness about her manner, and no placid insipidity about her proud and handsome face. For one brief moment, he triumphed in his heart, and had some wild glimpse of his old project of startling his small world with this vision from the Northern seas. But when he got into the hired brougham, and thought of the people he was about to meet, and of the manner in which they would carry away such and such impressions of the girl, he lost faith in that admiration. He would much rather have had Sheila unnoticeable and unnoticed—one who would quietly take her place at the dinner-table, and attract no more special attention than the flowers, for example, which every one would glance at with some satisfaction, and then forget in the interest of talking and dining. He was quite conscious of his own weakness in thus fearing social criticism. He knew that Ingram would have taken Sheila anywhere in her blue serge dress, and been quite content and oblivious of observation. But then Ingram was independent of these social circles in which a married man must move, and in which his position is often defined for him by the disposition and manners of his wife. Ingram did not know how women talked. It was for Sheila’s own sake, he persuaded himself, that he was anxious about the impression she should make, and that he had drilled her in all that she should do and say.
“Above all things,” he said, “mind you take no notice of me. Another man will take you in to dinner, of course, and I shall take in somebody else, and we shall not be near each other. But it’s after dinner, I mean: when the men go into the drawing-room don’t you come and speak to me or take any notice of me whatever.”
“Mayn’t I look at you, Frank?”
“If you do, you’ll have half a dozen people all watching you, saying to themselves or to each other, ‘Poor thing! she hasn’t got over her infatuation yet. Isn’t it pretty to see how naturally her eyes turn toward him?’ ”
“But I shouldn’t mind them saying that,” said Sheila, with a smile.
“Oh, you musn’t be pitied in that fashion. Let them keep their compassion to themselves.”
“Do you know, dear,” said Sheila, very quietly, “that I think you exaggerate the interest people will take in me? I don’t think I can be of such importance to them. I don’t think they will be watching me as you fancy.”
“Oh, you don’t know,” he said. “I know they fancy I have done something romantic, heroic and all that kind of thing, and they are curious to see you.”
“They cannot hurt me by looking at me,” said Sheila simply. “And they will soon find out how little there is to discover.”
The house being in Holland Park, they had not far to go; and just as they were driving up to the door a young man, slight, sandy-haired, and stooping, got out of a hansom and crossed the pavement.
“By Jove!” said Lavender, “there is Redburn. I did not know he knew Mrs. Lorraine and her mother. That is Lord Arthur Redburn, Sheila; mind, if you should talk to him, not to call him ‘my lord.’ ”
Sheila laughed and said, “How am I to remember all these things?”
They got into the house, and by-and-by Lavender found himself, with Sheila on his arm, entering a drawing-room to present her to certain of his friends. It was a large room, with a great deal of gilding and color about it, and with a conservatory at the further end; but the blaze of light had not so bewildering an effect on Sheila’s eyes as the appearance of two ladies to whom she was now introduced. She had heard much about them. She was curious to see them. Many a time had she thought over the strange story Lavender had told her of the woman who heard that her husband was dying in a hospital during the war, and started off, herself and her daughter, to find him out; how there was in the same hospital another dying man whom they had known some years before, and who had gone away because the girl would not listen to him; how this man, being very near to death, begged that the girl would do him the last favor he would ask of her, of wearing his name and inheriting his property; and how, some few hours after the strange and sad ceremony had been performed, he breathed his last, happy in holding her hand. The father died next day, and the twowidows were thrown upon the world, almost without friends, but not without means. This man, Lorraine, had been possessed of considerable wealth, and the girl who had suddenly become mistress of it found herself able to employ all possible means in assuaging her mother’s grief. They began to travel. The two women went from capital to capital, until at last they came to London; and here, having gathered around them a considerable number of friends, they proposed to take up their residence permanently. Lavender had often talked to Sheila about Mrs. Lorraine; about her shrewdness, her sharp sayings, and the odd contrast between this clever, keen, frank woman of the world and the woman one would have expected to be the heroine of a pathetic tale.
But were there two Mrs. Lorraines? That had been Sheila’s first question to herself when, after having been introduced to one lady under that name, she suddenly saw before her another, who was introduced to her as Mrs. Kavanagh. The mother and daughter were singularly alike. They had the same slight and graceful figure, which made them appear, taller than they really were, the same pale, fine, and rather handsome features, the same large, clear gray eyes, and apparently the same abundant mass of soft, fair hair, heavily plaited in the latest fashion. They were both dressed entirely in black, except that the daughter had a band of blue round her slender waist. It was soon apparent, too, that the manner of the two women was singularly different; Mrs. Kavanagh bearing herself with a certain sad reserve that almost approached melancholy at times, while her daughter, with more life and spirit in her face, passed rapidly through all sorts of varying moods until one could scarcely tell whether the affectation lay in a certain cynical audacity in her speech, or whether it lay in her assumption of a certain coyness and archness, or whether there was any affectation at all in the matter. However that might be, there could be no doubt about the sincerity of those gray eyes of hers. There was something almost cruelly frank in the clear look of them; and when her face was not lit by some passing smile, the pale and fine features seemed to borrow something of severity from her unflinching, calm and dispassionate habit of regarding those around her.
Sheila was prepared to like Mrs. Lorraine from the firstmoment she had caught sight of her. The honesty of the gray eyes attracted her. And, indeed, the young widow seemed very much interested in the young wife, and, so far as she could, in that awkward period just before dinner, strove to make friends with her. Sheila was introduced to a number of people, but none of them pleased her as well as Mrs. Lorraine. Then dinner was announced, and Sheila found that she was being escorted across the passage to the room on the other side by the young man whom she had seen get out of the hansom.
This Lord Arthur Redburn was the younger son of a great Tory duke; he represented in the House a small country borough, which his father practically owned; he had a fair amount of ability, an uncommonly high opinion of himself, and a certain affectation of being bored by the frivolous ways and talk of ordinary society. He gave himself credit for being the clever member of the family; and if there was any cleverness going, he had it; but there were some who said that his reputation in the House and elsewhere as a good speaker was mainly based on the fact that he had an abundant assurance, and was not easily put out. Unfortunately, the public could come to no decision on the point, for the reporters were not kind to Lord Arthur, and the substance of his speeches was as unknown to the world as his manner of delivering them.
Now, Mrs. Lorraine had intended to tell this young man something about the girl whom he was to take in to dinner, but she herself had been so occupied with Sheila that the opportunity escaped her. Lord Arthur accordingly knew only that he was beside a very pretty woman, who was a Mrs. Somebody—the exact name he had not caught—and that the few words she had spoken were pronounced in a curious way. Probably, he thought, she was from Dublin.
He also arrived at the conclusion that she was too pretty to know anything about the Deceased Wife’s Sister bill, in which he was, for family reasons, deeply interested, and considered it more likely that she would prefer to talk about theatres and such things.
“Were you at Covent Garden last night?” he said.
“No,” answered Sheila. “But I was there two days ago, and it is very pretty to see the flowers and the fruit; and then they smell so sweetly as you walk through.”
“Oh, yes, it is delightful,” said Lord Arthur. “But I was speaking of the theatre.”
“Is there a theatre in there?”
He stared at her, and inwardly hoped she was not mad.
“Not in among the shops, no. But don’t you know Covent Garden Theatre?”
“I have never been in any theatre, not yet,” said Sheila.
And then it began to dawn upon him that he must be talking to Frank Lavender’s wife. Was there not some rumor about the girl having come from a remote part of the Highlands? He determined on a bold stroke: “You have not been long enough in London to see the theatres, I suppose?”
And then Sheila, taking it for granted that he knew her husband very well, and that he was quite familiar with all the circumstances of the case, began to chat to him freely enough. He found that this Highland girl, of whom he heard vaguely, was not at all shy. He began to feel interested. By and by he actually made efforts to assist her frankness, by becoming equally frank, and by telling her all he knew of the things with which they were mutually acquainted. Of course, by this time they had got up into the Highlands. The young man had himself been in the Highlands—frequently, indeed. He had never crossed to Lewis, but he had seen the island from the Sutherlandshire coast. There were very many deer in Sutherlandshire, were there not? Yes, he had been out a great many times, and had had his share of adventures. Had he not gone out there before daylight, and waited on the top of a hill, hidden by some rocks, to watch the mist clear along the hillsides and in the valley below? Did he not tremble when he fired his first shot, and had not something passed before his eyes, so that he could not see for a moment whether the stag had fallen, or was away like lightning down the bed of the stream? Somehow or other, Lord Arthur found himself relating all his experiences, as if he were a novice begging for the good opinion of a master. She knew all about it, obviously, and he would tell her his small adventures, if only that she might laugh at him. But Sheila did not laugh. She was greatly delighted to have this talk about the hills, and the deer, and the wet mornings. She forgot all about the dinner before her. The servants whipped off successive plates without her seeing anything of them; they received random answers about wine,so that she had three full glasses standing by her untouched! She was no more in Holland Park at that moment than were the wild animals of which she spoke so proudly and lovingly. If the great and frail masses of flowers on the table brought her any perfume at all, it was a scent of peat-smoke. Lord Arthur thought that his companion was a little too frank and confiding, or rather that she would have been had she been talking to any one but himself. He rather liked it. He was pleased to have established friendly relations with a pretty woman in so short a space; but ought not her husband to give her a hint about not admitting all and sundry to the enjoyment of these favors? Perhaps, too, Lord Arthur felt bound to admit to himself there were some men who, more than others, inspired confidence in women. He laid no claims to being a fascinating person, but he had had his share of success, and considered that Sheila showed discrimination, as well as good nature, in talking so to him. There was, after all, no necessity for her husband to warn her. She would know how to guard against admitting all men to a like intimacy. In the meantime, he was very well pleased to be sitting beside this pretty and agreeable companion, who had an abundant fund of good spirits, and who showed no sort of conscious embarrassment in thanking you with a bright look of her eyes, or by a smile when you told her something that pleased or amused her.
But these flattering little speculations were doomed to receive a sudden check. The juvenile M. P. began to remark that a shade occasionally crossed the face of his fair companion, and that she sometimes looked a little anxiously across the table, where Mr. Lavender and Mrs. Lorraine were seated, half hidden from view by a heap of silver and flowers in the middle of the board. But though they could not easily be seen, except at such moments as they turned to address some neighbor, they could be distinctly enough heard when there was any lull in the general conversation. And what Sheila heard did not please her. She began to like that fair, clear-eyed young woman less. Perhaps her husband meant nothing by the fashion in which he talked of marriage and the condition of a married man, but she would rather have not heard him talk so. Moreover, she was aware that in the gentlest possible fashion Mrs. Lorraine was making fun of her companion, and exposing him to small and gracefulshafts of ridicule; while he seemed, on the whole, to enjoy these attacks.
The ingenuous self-love of Lord Arthur Redburn, M. P., was severely wounded by the notion that, after all, he had been made a cat’s paw of by a jealous wife. He had been flattered by this girl’s exceeding friendliness; he had given her credit for genuine impulsiveness, which seemed to him as pleasing as it was uncommon; and he had, with the moderation expected of a man in politics, who hoped some day to assist in the government of the nation, by accepting a junior lordship, admired her. But was it all pretence? Was she paying court to him merely to annoy her husband? Had her enthusiasm about the shooting of red deer been prompted by a wish to attract a certain pair of eyes at the other side of the table? Lord Arthur began to sneer at himself for having been duped. He ought to have known. Women were as much women in a Hebridean Island as in Bayswater. He began to treat Sheila with a little more coolness, while she became more and more pre-occupied with the couple across the table, and sometimes was innocently rude in answering his questions somewhat at random.
When the ladies were going into the drawing-room, Mrs. Lorraine put her hand within Sheila’s arm and led her to the entrance to the conservatory. “I hope we shall be friends,” she said.
“I hope so,” said Sheila, not very warmly.
“Until you get better acquainted with your husband’s friends you will feel rather lonely at being left as at present, I suppose.”
“A little,” said Sheila.
“It is a silly thing altogether. If men smoked after dinner I could understand it. But they merely sit, looking at wine they don’t drink, talking a few commonplaces and yawning.”
“Why do they do it, then?” said Sheila.
“They don’t do it everywhere. But here we keep to the manners and customs of the ancients.”
“What do you know about the manners of the ancients?” said Mrs. Kavanagh, tapping her daughter’s shoulder as she passed with a sheet of music.
“I have studied them frequently, mamma,” said the daughter with composure, “in the monkey-house at the Zoological Gardens.”
The mamma smiled, and passed on to place the music on the piano. Sheila did not understand what her companion had said; and indeed Mrs. Lorraine immediately turned, with the same calm, fair face and fearless eyes, to ask Sheila whether she would not, by and by, sing one of those Northern songs of which Mr. Lavender had told her.
A tall girl with her back hair tied in a knot and her costume copied from a well-known pre-Raphaelite drawing, sat down to the piano and sang a mystic song of the present day, in which the moon, the stars and other natural objects behaved strangely, and were somehow mixed up with the appeal of a maiden who demanded that her dead lover should be reclaimed from the sea.
“Do you ever go down to your husband’s studio?” said Mrs. Lorraine.
She glanced toward the lady at the piano.
“Oh, you may talk,” said Mrs. Lorraine, with the least expression of contempt in her gray eyes. “She is singing to gratify herself, not us.”
“Yes, I sometimes go down,” said Sheila in as low a voice as she could manage without falling into a whisper, “and it is such a dismal place. It is very hard on him to have to work in a big bare room like that, with the windows half blinded. But sometimes I think Frank would rather have me out of the way.”
“And what would he do if both of us were to pay him a visit?” said Mrs. Lorraine. “I should so like to see the studio! Won’t you call for me some day and take me with you?”
Take her with her, indeed! Sheila began to wonder that she did not propose to go alone. Fortunately, there was no need to answer the question, for at this moment the song came to an end, and there was a general movement and murmur of gratitude.
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Lorraine to the lady who had sung the song, and was now returning to the photographs she had left, “thank you very much. I knew some one would instantly ask you to sing that song; it is the most charming of all your songs, I think, and how well it suits your voice, too!”
Then she turned to Sheila again: “How did you like Lord Arthur Redburn?”
“I think he is a very good young man.”
“Young men are never good, but they may be very amiable,” said Mrs. Lorraine, not perceiving that Sheila had blundered on a wrong adjective, and that she had really meant that she thought him honest and pleasant.
“You did not speak at all, I think, to your neighbor on the right; that was wise of you. He is a most insufferable person, but mamma bears with him for the sake of his daughter, who sang just now. He is too rich. And he smiles blandly, and takes a sort of after-dinner view of things, as if he coincided with the arrangements of Providence. Don’t you take coffee? Tea, then. I have met your aunt—I mean Mr. Lavender’s aunt; such a dear old lady she is.”
“I don’t like her,” said Sheila.
“Oh, don’t you really?”
“Not at present, but I shall try to like her.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Lorraine, calmly, “you know she has her peculiarities. I wish she wouldn’t talk so much about Marcus Antoninus and doses of medicine. I fancy I smell calomel when she comes near. I suppose if she were in a pantomime, they’d dress her up as a phial, tie a string around her neck and label her ‘Poison.’ Dear me, how languid one gets in this climate! Let us sit down. I wish I was as strong as mamma.”
They sat down together, and Mrs. Lorraine evidently expected to be petted and made much of by her new companion. She gave herself pretty little airs and graces, and said no more cutting things about anybody. And Sheila somehow found herself being drawn to the girl, so that she could scarcely help taking her hand, and saying how sorry she was to see her so pale and fine and delicate. The hand, too, was so small that the tiny white fingers seemed scarcely bigger than the claws of a bird. Was not that slender waist, to which some little attention was called by a belt of bold blue, just a little too slender for health, although the bust and shoulders were exquisitely and finely proportioned?
“We were at the Academy all the morning, and mamma is not a bit tired. Why has not Mr. Lavender anything at the Academy? Oh, I forgot,” she added, with a smile. “Of course, he has been very much engaged. But now I suppose he will settle down to work.”
Sheila wished that this fragile-looking girl would not socontinually refer to her husband, but how was any one to find fault with her when she put a little air of plaintiveness into the ordinarily cold gray eyes, and looked at her small hand as much as to say, “The fingers there are very small, and even whiter than the glove that covers them. They are the fingers of a child, who ought to be petted.”
Then the men came in from the dining-room. Lavender looked around to see where Sheila was—perhaps with a trifle of disappointment that she was not the most prominent figure there. Had he expected to find all the women surrounding her and admiring her, and all the men going up to pay court to her? Sheila was seated near a small table, and Mrs. Lorraine was showing her something. She was just like anybody else. If she was a wonderful sea-princess who had come into a new world, no one seemed to observe her. The only thing that distinguished her from the women around her was her freshness of color, and the unusual combination of black eyelashes and dark blue eyes. Lavender had arranged that Sheila’s first appearance in public should be at a very quiet little dinner party, but even here she failed to create any profound impression. She was, as he had to confess to himself again, just like anybody else.
He went over to where Mrs. Lorraine was, and sat down beside her. Sheila, remembering his injunctions, felt bound to leave him there; and as she rose to speak to Mrs. Kavanagh, who was standing by, that lady came and begged her to sing a Highland song. By this time Lavender had succeeded in interesting his companion about something or other, and neither of them had noticed that Sheila had gone to the piano, attended by the young politician who had taken her in to dinner. Nor did they interrupt their talk merely because some one had played a few bars of prelude. But what was this that suddenly startled Lavender to the heart, causing him to look up with surprise? He had not heard the air since he was in Borva, and when Sheila sang