While all others smiled, her face remained cold and averted. Indeed she took such pains to ignore and avoid him, that it was generally recognized that there was a difference between them, and of course there was an endless amount of gossiping surmise. As the hostility seemed wholly on the lady"s side, Van Berg appeared to the better advantage, and Ida was all the more provoked as she recognized the fact.
She now began to wish that she had taken a different course. As Van Berg pursued his present tactics, her feminine intuition was not so dull but that she was led to believe he wished to make her acquaintance. Of course there was, to her mind, but one explanation of this fact--he was becoming fascinated, like so many others.
"If I were only on speaking and flirting terms," she thought (the two relations were about synonymous in her estimation), "I might draw him on to a point which would give me a chance of punishing him far more than is now possible by sullenly keeping aloof. As it is, it looks to these people here as if he had jilted me instead of I him, and that I am sulking over it."
But she had entangled herself in the snarl of her own previous words and manner. She had charged her mother and cousin to permit no overtures of peace; and once or twice, when mine host, in his good-natured, off-hand manner, had sought to introduce them, she had been so blind and deaf to his purpose as to appear positively rude. Her repugnance to the artist had become a generally recognized fact; and she had built up such a barrier that she could not break it down without asking for more help than was agreeable to her pride. But she chafed inwardly at her false position, and at the increasing popularity of the object of her spite.
Even her mother at last formed his acquaintance; and, as the artist listened to the garrulous lady for half an hour with scarcely an interruption, she p.r.o.nounced him one of the most entertaining of men.
As Mrs. Mayhew was chanting his praises that evening, Ida broke out petulantly:
"Was there ever such a gad-fly as this artist! He pesters me from morning till night."
"Pesters you! I never saw a lady so severely let alone as you are by him. Whatever is the cause of your spite it seems to harm only yourself, and I should judge from your remark that it disturbs you much more than you would have it appear--certainly far more than it does him."
There was no soothing balm in these words, as may well be supposed; and yet the impression grew upon Ida that the artist would be friendly if he could; and the belief strengthened with him also that she took far too much pains to manifest what she would have others think to be mere indifference and dislike, and he intercepted besides, with increasing frequency, furtive glances towards himself.
So much ice had acc.u.mulated between them, however that neither knew how it was to be broken.
One day, about the middle of the week, Van Berg found a stranger seated opposite to him at the dinner table. His first impression was, that the lady was not very young and that her features were quite plain; but before the meal was over he concluded that her face was decidedly interesting, and that the suggestion of age had been made by maturity of character and the impress which some real and deep experience gives to the countenance, rather than by the trace of years.
While yet a stranger, the expression of her blue eyes, as she glanced around, was so kindly that she at once won the good-will of all who encountered them. This genial, friendly light in her eyes seemed a marked characteristic. It was so different from the obtrusive, forward manner with which some seek to make acquaintances, that it would not have suggested a departure from modest reserve, even to the most cynical. It rather indicated a heart aglow with gentle feeling and genial good-will, like a maple-wood fire on a hospitality hearth, that warms all who come within the sphere of its influence.
Van Berg was naturally reserved, and slow to make new acquaintances.
But before he had stolen many glances of the face opposite him he began to wish for the privilege of speaking to her--a wish that was increased by the fact that they were alone at the table, the other guests who usually occupied the chairs not having returned from their morning drive. she did not look at him in particular, nor appear to be in the least struck by his "distingue" air, as Ida had been before she was blinded by prejudice; but she looked out upon the world at large with such a friendly aspect that he was sure she had something pleasant to say. He was therefore well pleased when at last the landlord bustled up in his brusque way and said:
"Mr. Van Berg, permit me to make you acquainted with Miss Burton.
She has had the faith to put herself under my charge for a few weeks, and I shall reward her by sharing the responsibility with you, who seem blessed with the benevolent desire of giving us all a good time," and then he bustled off to look after some other matter which required his attention during the critical hour of dinner.
Miss Burton acknowledged the young man"s bow without a trace of affectation or reserve.
"I shall try not to prove a burden to either of you," she said, with a smile.
"I have already discovered that you will not be," said Van Berg, "and was wishing for an introduction."
"I hope your wishes may always find so ready a fulfillment."
"That"s a kindly wish, Miss Burton, but a vain one."
"Were we misanthropical people, Mr. Van Berg, we might sigh, "and such are human wishes generally.""
"One is often tempted to do that anyway, even when not especially p.r.o.ne to look askance at fortune."
"There is an easy way of escaping that temptation."
"How?"
"Do not form many wishes."
"Have you very few wishes?"
With a slight and piquant motion of her head she replied, "I was only giving a bit of trite advice. It"s asking a great deal to require that one should both preach and practice."
"I think you are possessed by one wish which swallows up most others," said Van Berg, a little abruptly.
A visible pallor overspread her face, and she drew back perceptibly as one might shrink from a blow.
"You know how strong first impressions are," resumed Van Berg hastily, "and the thought has pa.s.sed through my mind that you might be so preoccupied in wishing good things for others as to quite forget yourself."
"If one could be completely occupied in that way," she said, with a faint smile which suggested rather than revealed a vista of her past experience, "one might have little occasion to wish for anything for self. But, Mr. Van Berg, only we poor unreasoning women put much faith in first impressions; and you know how often they mislead even us, who are supposed to have safe instincts."
"Do they often mislead you?"
"Indeed, sir," she replied, with a merry twinkle in her eye, "I think you must have learned the questions in the catechism, if not the answers."
Van Berg bit his lip. Here was a suggestion of a thorn in the sweetbrier he believed he had discovered.
"Now see how far I am astray," she resumed with a frankness which had in it no trace of familiarity. "It is my impression you are a lawyer."
At this Van Berg laughed outright and said: "You are indeed mistaken. I have no connection with the influential cla.s.s whose business it is to make and evade the laws. I am only one among the humble ma.s.ses who aim to obey them. But perhaps you think your intuition goes deeper than surface facts and that I OUGHT to have been a cross-questioner."
"I am quite sure my intuition is correct in thinking that you would not be very cross about it."
"Perhaps not, if disarmed by so smiling a face as yours."
The others, who had been delayed by a longer ride than usual, now entered and took the vacant chairs around the table. Van Berg felt sufficiently acquainted with them to introduce Miss Burton, for he was curious to observe whether she would make the same impression on them as he had been conscious of himself.
They bowed with the quiet, well-bred manner of society people, but were at first inclined to pay little heed to the plainly dressed and rather plain appearing young stranger. As one and another, however, glanced towards her, something about her seemed to linger in their memories and cause them to look again. The lady next to her offered a commonplace remark, chiefly out of politeness, and received so pleasant a reply in return that she turned her thoughts as well as her eyes to see who it really was that had made it. Then another spoke, and the response led her to speak again and again; and soon the entire party were describing their drive and living over its pleasantest features; and before the meal ended they were all gathered, metaphorically, around the mystical, maple-wood fire that burned on the hearth of a nature that seemed so hospitable and kindly as to have no other mission than to cheer and entertain.
"Who is that little brown thrush of a woman that you were so taken with at dinner?" asked Stanton, as they were enjoying a quiet smoke in their favorite corner of the piazza.
"Good for you, Stanton. I never knew you to be so appreciative before. Your term quite accurately describes her. She is both shy and reserved, but not diffident or awkward in the least. Indeed her manner might strike some as being peculiarly frank. But there is something back of it all; for young as she undoubtedly is, her face suggests to me some deep and unusual experience."
"Jupiter Ammon! What an abyss of mystery, surmise, and metaphysics you fell into while I was eating my dinner! I used the phrase "brown thrush," only in reference to her dress and general homeliness."
"Oh, I beg your pardon! I take all back about your nice appreciation of character. I now grasp the whole truth--your attention wandered sufficiently from your dinner to observe that she wore a brown dress, and the one fact about the thrush that has impressed you is that it is brown. "Here be truths" which leave nothing more to be said."
"You imaginative fellows are often ridiculously astray on the other tack, and see a thousand-fold more than exists. But it"s a pity you could not read all there was in this young woman"s face, for it was certainly PLAIN enough. At this rate you will be asking our burly landlord to unbosom himself, insisting that he has a "silent sorrow" tucked away somewhere under his ample waistcoat."
"His troubles, like yours, are banished by the dinner hour. I recognize your feeble witticism about her plain face, and forgive you because I thought it plain also at first, but when she came to speak and smile it ceased to be plain. I do not say she has had trouble, but she has had some experience in her past history which neither you nor I could understand."
"Quite likely; the measles, for instance, which I never had to my knowledge. Possibly she has had a lover who was not long in finding a prettier face, and so left her, but not so disconsolate that she could not smile bewilderingly upon you."
"Come now, Stanton, I"ll forewarn and forearm you. I confidently predict that the voice of this brown thrush will lure you out of a life which, to put it mildly, is a trifle matter-of-fact and material. You have glanced at her, but you have not seen her yet.
Mark my words; your appet.i.te will flag before many weeks pa.s.s."
"I wish I could pin you down to a large wager on this absurdity."
"I agree to paint you a picture if my prediction fails."