"We were all talking about you down at our end of the table, but I could not see you until just now. I long to go to America, your novels interest me so much. But one is always so busy--one never gets time for the Atlantic. Lady Victoria says you come from that wonderful country, California, but of course you know New York and Newport still better.
All Americans do."
"I have never seen Newport, and pa.s.sed exactly a week in New York before sailing."
Mrs. Kaye"s expressive eyes, which had dwelt on Isabel with flattering attention, fell to the tip of her cigarette. "No? I thought that all smart Americans came from that sacred precinct."
"I am not in the least smart. I don"t really _know_ half a dozen people in America outside of the county in which I have spent the greater part of my life--not even in San Francisco, where I was born." Isabel held her cigarette poised in one slender hand, letting her eyes fall deliberately on the broad back and flat nails of the exquisitely kept section on Mrs. Kaye"s lap. "So far, in my small social ventures I have felt the necessity of little beyond good manners and a small independent income. This is my first excursion into the great world, and of course my cousin is too secure in her position to care whether I am smart or not. Miss Thangue, the only other woman I have talked with, is far too amiable and well-bred. Am I to understand that I shall be tried by New York measurements and found wanting?"
"Oh no!" Mrs. Kaye"s bright color had darkened. "On the contrary, the English are always rather amused at American distinctions. It only happens that all my friends are New-Yorkers."
She was a very clever woman, for sn.o.bbery had blunted and demoralized only one small chamber of her brain, and she had as comprehensive a knowledge of the world as any woman in it. Nevertheless, as her powerful magnetic eyes met the ingenuous...o...b.. opposite, she was unable to determine whether the barbed words, quivering in a sore spot, had been uttered in innocence or intent. "Of course one doesn"t meet so many Americans, after all. Naturally, the New-Yorkers bring the best letters." She paused a moment as if ruminating, then delivered herself of an epigram: "New York is the great American invention for separating the wheat from the tares."
"Indeed!" Isabel was too surprised to strike back.
"It is well known that it is one of the most exclusive social bodies in the world. You have far less difficulty over here."
"That may be merely owing to the fear that affects all new social bodies. I have the honor to know the leader of society in St. Peter--a town of ten thousand inhabitants near my own--and she is frightfully exclusive. She is so afraid of knowing the wrong sort of people that she is barely on nodding terms with the several thousand new-comers that have added to the wealth and importance of the town during the last ten years. Consequently, her circle is as dull as an Anglo-Saxon Sunday. I fancy the same may be said of New York, for its fashionable set is not large and its interests are far from various. From all I have heard, London society alone is perennially interesting, and the reason is, that, absolutely secure, it keeps itself from staleness by constantly refreshing its veins with new blood, exclusive only against offensiveness. Of course you are a daughter of a duke or something," she added, wickedly. "Everybody here seems to be. Don"t you feel that your ancestors have given you the right to know whom you please?--instead of eternally plugging the holes in the dike."
In spite of her sharpened wits, Mrs. Kaye smiled radiantly into Isabel"s guileless eyes. "I am not the daughter of a duke; I wish I were!" she exclaimed, with a fair a.s.sumption of aristocratic frankness. "But your point is quite correct." Again she appeared to ruminate; then added: "The British aristocracy is to society what G.o.d is to the world--all-sufficient, all-merciful, all-powerful."
"And she would sacrifice Him and all his archangels to an epigram,"
thought Isabel, who was somewhat shocked. "How fearfully clever you are!" she murmured. "Do you think in epigrams?"
"Epigrams? Have I made one? I wish I could. They are immensely the fashion."
"I should think you might have set it--"
She did not finish her sentence, for the ear to which it was addressed suddenly closed. Lady Cecilia Spence had sauntered up, and Mrs. Kaye hastily made room for her on the sofa, turning a shoulder upon Isabel. A faint change, as by the agitation of depths on the far surface of waters, rippled her features, and Isabel, summoning the impersonal att.i.tude, watched her curiously. It was her first experience of the sn.o.b in a grandiose setting, but it was the type that had aroused her most impa.s.sioned inward protest all her life: the smallest circles have their sn.o.bs, and, like all the unchosen of mammon, she had had her corroding experiences. But her high spirit resented the power of the baser influences, and, with her intellect, commanded her to accept the world with philosophy and the unsheathed weapon of self-respect. In the present stage of the world"s development it was to be expected that the pettier characteristics of human nature would predominate; and perhaps the intellectually exclusive would not have it otherwise.
Mrs. Kaye, polite tolerance giving place to the accent of intimacy, began: "Oh, Lady Cecilia, have you heard--" and plunged into a piece of gossip, no doubt of absorbing interest to those that knew the contributory circ.u.mstances and the surnames of the actors, but to the uninitiated as puzzling as success. Lady Cecilia"s eyes twinkled appreciatively, and her wells of laughter bubbled close to the surface.
Isabel, completely ignored, waited until the story was finished, and then made a deliberate move.
"How interesting!" she exclaimed. "Won"t you tell me the names of the people?"
Mrs. Kaye, without turning her head, murmured something indistinctly, and lit another cigarette. "Won"t you have a light, Lady Cecilia?" she asked.
"Please give me one," said Isabel, sweetly. She reached out and took the cigarette from Mrs. Kaye"s faintly resisting hand. "Thank you. I am lazy about looking for matches. Do you smoke a lot?"
But Mrs. Kaye, irritated, or having reached the conclusion that the newcomer was not in the very least worth while, said with soft fervor to her who was: "How delightful that dear Jack was returned! Of course you are as interested in his career as the rest of us."
"I should be a good deal more so if his mother had turned him across her knee a little oftener--or if I could shake him myself occasionally."
Isabel, satisfied, more amazed than ever at the infantile ingenuousness of the sn.o.b, rose, and was about to turn away when she met Lady Cecilia"s eyes. They were full of amus.e.m.e.nt, and there was no mistaking its purport. In a flash Isabel had responded with a challenge of appeal, which that accomplished dame was quick to understand.
"Please don"t go," she said. "I came over here to talk to you. We are all so interested in the idea that Vicky is half an American--we had quite forgotten it. Did you ever see any one look less as if she had American cousins than Vicky? She might easily have a whole tribe of Spanish ones."
"Well, she has, in a way." And in response to many questions Isabel found herself relating the story of Rezanov and Concha Arguello, while Mrs. Kaye, whatever may have been her sensations, rose with an absent smile and composedly transferred herself to an equally distinguished neighborhood.
"I wonder if she has ever tried to condense rudeness into an epigram,"
said Isabel viciously, pausing in her narrative.
Lady Cecilia shook expressively. "At least she has not made an art of it," she said. "They never do."
VI
The next morning, Isabel, after little sleep, rose early and went out for a walk. She had sat up until eleven, listening to the puzzling jets of conversation, or watching the Bridge-players, and when she had finally reached her room, tired and excited, Flora Thangue had come in for a last cigarette and half an hour of chat. Her first evening in the new world had had its clouded moments, for it was impossible not to feel the alien, and the kindness of English people, no matter how deep, is casual in expression. But on the whole she had felt more girlishly happy and ebullient than since her sister had gone her own way and left a heavy burden for young shoulders behind her. In the freedom of a girl in Europe, no matter how prized, there is much of loneliness in idleness, a constant att.i.tude of defence, moments of bitter wonder and disgust, and, to the a.n.a.lytical mind, an encroaching dread of a more normal future with a chronic canker of discontent.
Isabel had by no means pa.s.sed her European years in the procession that winds from the Tiber to the Seine, prostrating itself at each successive station of architecture or canvas; nor even devoted the major portion of her time to the investigation of the native, deeply as the varying types had interested her. Her intellectual ambition, as is often the case with the American provincial girl, had been even stronger than her desire for liberty and pleasure, and she had spent several months with the archaeological society of Rome, read deeply in Italian history and art, attended lectures at the Sorbonne, and spent nearly a year in Berlin, Dresden, Munich, and Vienna, studying that modern stronghold of dramatic literature, the German Theatre.
It had been the living dream of long winter evenings, when she had not dared to join in the festivities of the other young folk lest her father should stray beyond her control; he would, when the demon was quiescent, sit at home if she read to him, and she had learned to read and dream at the same time. It was only at the beginning of her third year of liberty, when, in spite of shifting scenes, the entire absence of daily cares and of heavy responsibilities involving another had given her longer hours for thought and introspection, that the poisonous doubt of the use of it all had begun to work in a mind that had lost something of the ardor of novelty. The eternal interrogations had obtruded themselves in her unfortunate girlhood, and she had questioned the voiceless infinite, but angrily, with youth"s blind rebellion against the injustice of life. The anger and rebellion had been comatose in these years of freedom, but the maturer brain was the more uneasy, at times appalled. For what was she developing, perfecting herself? She had no talent, with its constant promises, its occasional triumphs, its stimulating rivalries, to give zest to life; and there were times when she envied the student girls in Munich with their absurd "reform dress,"
their cigarettes and beer in cheap restaurants and theatres, their more than doubtful standards. Although she had her own private faith and never hesitated to pray for anything she wanted, she was not of those that can make a career of religion; her mind and temperament were both too complex, and she was unable to interest herself in creeds and theologies--and congregations.
Now and again she had considered seriously the study of medicine, architecture, law, of perfecting herself for criticism of some sort, for she had spoken with a measure of truth when she had a.s.sured Flora that she had no wish to marry. In her depths she was--had been--romantic and given to dreaming, but the manifold weaknesses of her father--who had been one of the most brilliant and accomplished of men, a graduate of Harvard, and the possessor of many books--and the selfish and tyrannous exactions which had tempered his enthusiasm for all things feminine, the caustic tongue and overbearing masculinity of her uncle, who had been as weak in his way as her father, for he had lost the greater part of his patrimony on the stock-market, and the charming inconsequence of her brother-in-law, who loved his family extravagantly and treated them like poor relations, had not prepared her to idealize the young men she had met in Rosewater and Europe. She had been sought and attracted more than once during her years of liberty, but her prejudices and the deep cold surface of temperament peculiar to American girls of the best cla.s.s, lent a fatal clarity of vision; and although she had studied men as deeply as she dared, the result had but intensified the sombre threat of the future. It was quite true that she had half-consciously believed that hope would live again and justify itself in Elton Gwynne, and the disappointment, at the first glimpse of his portrait, was so crushing that she had buried her s.e.x under an avalanche of scorn.
But scorn is far more volcanic than glacial and a poor barrier between s.e.x and judgment. It needed more than that, and more than disillusions of the second cla.s.s, no matter how inordinate, to give a girl the cool reality of poise that had stimulated the curiosity of Miss Thangue; and this Isabel had encountered, during the most critical period of her inner life, in the beautiful city by the Isar. The experience had been so brief and tremendous, the incidents so crowding and tense, the climax so hideous, that she had been stunned for a time, then emerged into her present state of tranquil and not unpleasant philosophy--when the present moment, if it contained distraction, was something to be grateful for; otherwise, to be borne with until the sure compensation arrived. The future had neither terror for her nor any surpa.s.sing concern, although all her old impersonal interest in life had revived, and she was still too young not to be very much like other girls when circ.u.mstances were propitious. And at last she had conceived--or evolved--a definite purpose.
This morning she was living as eagerly as ever during her first deep months in Europe. The excitement of the evening still possessed her; she had held her own, received homage, lived a little chapter in an English novel; above all, she was young, she was free, she was no longer unhappy; and she loved the early morning and swift walking.
It was Sunday; the shooting would not begin until the morrow; everybody except herself, apparently, still slept; the breakfast-hour was half-past nine. She walked down a long lane behind the lawns and entered the first of the coverts. There was a drowsy whir of wings--once--that was all. There was a glint of dancing water in the heavier shades, a rosy light beyond the farthest of the trees in the little wood where the delicate pendent leaves hung asleep in the sweet peace. There was not an expiring echo of her own wild forests here; nor any likeness to the splendid royal preserves of Germany and Austria, with their ancient trees, their miles of garnished floor, the sudden glimpse of chamois or stag standing on a rocky ledge against the sky as if drilled for his part. These woods had a quality all their own: of Nature in her last little strongholds, but smiling, serenely triumphant, of tempered heat without chill, above all, of perfect peace.
Nothing in England had impressed Isabel like this atmosphere of peace that broods over its fields and lanes, its woods and fells, in the evening and early morning hours; the atmosphere that makes it seem to be set to the tune of Wordsworth"s verses, and to keep it everlastingly old-fashioned and out of all relation to its towns. As she left the wood she saw a big hay-stack, as firm and shapely of outline as a house, not a loose wisp anywhere. A girl, bareheaded, was driving a cow across a field. A narrow river moved as slowly as if the world had never awakened. The road turned to her right and led to an old stone village with a winding broken street and several oak-trees, a pump, and a long green bench. It might have been the Deserted Village, for the English rise far later than the Southern races that have fallen so far behind them in importance and wealth. Beyond the village, on a rise of ground, was the church, its square gray tower crumbling down upon its ancient graves. In the distance were farms, coverts, another village, a gray spire against the blossoming red of the sky; and over all--peace--peace.
Had anything ever really disturbed it? Would there ever be any change?
England had been devastated to the roots, would be again, no doubt, but unless it became one vast London, it would brood on into eternity with the slight defiant smile of a beautiful woman in an enchanted sleep.
"Are you, too, an early bird?"
Isabel flew out of her reverie. Lady Victoria was approaching from a forking road. She wore a short skirt, leggings, and heavy boots; and she was bright, fresh, almost rosy from swift walking. "I have gone five miles already," she said, smiling. "But I believe you were sauntering."
"Only just now--to absorb it all. I, too, can do my five miles an hour, although Californians are the laziest people in the world about walking."
"Then if you are up to a sharp trot we"ll go to that farthest village.
My land steward has been telling me a painful tale about one of my young women, and I intend to ask her some embarra.s.sing questions while she is still too stupid with sleep to lie."
"Your young women? Is all this your estate?"
"It belongs to Strathland, but I have lived here since I married, and now the place is virtually Jack"s. These people have been my particular charge for thirty years and will continue to be until my son marries.
There are only about a hundred families on the estate altogether, but they keep one busy."
"I can"t imagine you in the working role of the Lady Bountiful. Last night, at least, if I had written to my friend, Anabel Colton, I should have devoted pages to your more famous attributes, but I should never have thought of this."
"Indeed? If one could languish through life in the sh.e.l.l of a mere beauty that life would be a good deal simpler proposition than it is.
Unfortunately there are complications, and, agreeable or not, one accepts them as one does enemies, husbands, stupid servants, and all other mortal thorns. But I am not uninterested in my people here, not by any means, and they bore me less than going to court and visiting my father-in-law. I watch them from birth, see that they are properly clothed and fed, that they go to school as soon as they are old enough, later that they find a situation here or elsewhere--those that have no work to do at home. My son gives the young men and women a complete wardrobe when they start out to win their way in life, and the details fall on me. It means correspondence, mothers" meetings, and all that sort of thing. Even during the London season I come down once a month.
Of course it is a bore, but on the whole tradition is rather kind than otherwise in making life more or less of a routine."
"Wouldn"t you miss it if your son married?" Isabel wondered if this woman had really given her the impression of tragic secrets, unlimited capacities for both license and arrogance. In this early morning freshness there was hardly a suggestion of the woman of the world, barely of the great lady; and in the rich tones of her voice there was a genuine note of interest in her poor.