"Don"t I just?" returns he, fervently, rising to enforce his words.
"Now, don"t be sillier than you can help," murmurs she, with a lovely smile. "Don"t! I like that gown myself, you know: it makes me look so nice and old, and that."
"If I were a little girl like you," says Mr. Brans...o...b.., "I should rather hanker after looking nice and young."
"But not too much so: it is frivolous when one is once married." This pensively, and with all the air of one who has long studied the subject.
"Is it? Of course you know best, your experience being greater than mine," says Dorian, meekly, "but, just for choice, I prefer youth to anything else."
"Do you? Then I suppose I had better wear white."
"Yes, do. One evening, in Paris, you wore a white gown of some sort, and I dreamt of you every night for a week afterwards."
"Very well. I shall give you a chance of dreaming of me again," says Georgie, with a carefully suppressed sigh, that is surely meant for the beloved olive gown.
The sigh is wasted. When she does don the white gown so despised, she is so perfect a picture that one might well be excused for wasting seven long nights in airy visions filled all with her. Some wild artistic marguerites are in her bosom (she plucked them herself from out the meadow an hour agone); her lips are red, and parted; her hair, that is loosely knotted, and hangs low down, betraying the perfect shape of her small head, is "yellow, like ripe corn." She smiles as she places her hand in Dorian"s and asks him how she looks; while he, being all too glad because of her excessive beauty, is very slow to answer her. In truth, she is "like the snow-drop fair, and like the primrose sweet."
At the castle she creates rather a sensation. Many, as yet, have not seen her; and these stare at her placidly, indifferent to the fact that breeding would have it otherwise.
"What a peculiarly pretty young woman," says the duke, half an hour after her arrival, staring at her through his gla.s.ses. He had been absent when she came, and so is only just now awakened to a sense of her charms.
"Who?--what?" says the d.u.c.h.ess, vaguely, she being the person he has rashly addressed. She is very fat, very unimpressionable, and very fond of argument. "Oh! over there. I quite forget who she is. But I do see that Alfred is making himself, as usual, supremely ridiculous with her. With all his affected devotion to Helen, he runs after every fresh face he sees."
""There"s nothing like a plenty,"" quotes the duke, with a dry chuckle at his own wit; indeed he prides himself upon having been rather a "card" in his day, and anything but a "k"rect" one, either.
"Yes, there is,--there is propriety," responds the d.u.c.h.ess, in an awful tone.
"That wouldn"t be a bit like it," says the duke, still openly amused at his own humor; after which--thinking it, perhaps, safer to withdraw while there is yet time--he saunters off to the left, and, as he has a trick of looking over his shoulder while walking, nearly falls into Dorian"s arms at the next turn.
"Ho, hah!" says his Grace, pulling himself up very shortly, and glancing at his stumbling-block to see if he can identify him.
"Why, it is you, Brans...o...b..," he says, in his usual cheerful, if rather fussy, fashion. "So glad to see you!--so glad." He has made exactly this remark to Dorian every time he has come in contact with him during the past twenty years and more. "By the by, I dare say you can tell me,--who is that pretty child over there, with the white frock and the blue eyes?"
"That pretty child in the frock is my wife," says Brans...o...b.., laughing.
"Indeed! Dear me! dear me! I beg your pardon. My dear boy, I congratulate you. Such a face,--like a Greuze; or a--h"m--yes." Here he grows slightly mixed. "You must introduce me, you know. One likes to do homage to beauty. Why, where could you have met her in this exceedingly deficient county, eh? But you were always a sly dog, eh?"
The old gentleman gives him a playful slap on his shoulder, and then, taking his arm, goes with him across the lawn to where Georgie is standing talking gayly to Lord Alfred.
The introduction is gone through, and Georgie makes her very best bow, and blushes her very choicest blush; but the duke will insist upon shaking hands with her, whereupon, being pleased, she smiles her most enchanting smile.
"So glad to make your acquaintance. Missed you on your arrival," says the duke, genially. "Was toiling through the conservatories, I think, with Lady Loftus. Know her? Stout old lady, with feathers over her nose. She always will go to hot places on hot days."
"I wish she would go to a final hot place, as she affects them so much," says Lord Alfred, gloomily. "I can"t bear her; she is always coming here bothering me about that abominable boy of hers in the Guards, and I never know what to say to her."
"Why don"t you learn it up at night and say it to her in the morning?"
says Mrs. Brans...o...b.., brightly. "_I_ should know what to say to her at once."
"Oh! I dare say," says Lord Alfred. "Only that doesn"t help me, you know, because _I_ don"t."
"Didn"t know who you were, at first, Mrs. Brans...o...b..," breaks in the duke. "Thought you were a little girl--eh?--eh?"--chuckling again.
"Asked your husband who you were, and so on. I hope you are enjoying yourself. Seen everything, eh? The houses are pretty good this year."
"Lord Alfred has just shown them to me. They are quite too exquisite,"
says Georgie.
"And the lake, and my new swans?"
"No; not the swans."
"Dear me! why didn"t he show you those? Finest birds I ever saw. My dear Mrs. Brans...o...b.., you really must see them, you know."
"I should like to, if you will show them to me," says the little hypocrite, with the very faintest, but the most successful, emphasis on the p.r.o.noun, which is wine to the heart of the old beau; and, offering her his arm, he takes her across the lawn and through the shrubberies to the sheet of water beyond, that gleams sweet and cool through the foliage. As they go, the county turns to regard them; and men wonder who the pretty woman is the old fellow has picked up; and women wonder what on earth the duke can see in that silly little Mrs.
Brans...o...b...
Sir James, who has been watching the duke"s evident admiration for his pretty guest, is openly amused.
"Your training!" he says to Clarissa, over whose chair he is leaning.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself and your pupil. Such a disgraceful little coquette I never saw. I really pity that poor d.u.c.h.ess: see there, how miserably unhappy she is looking, and how----er----pink."
"Don"t be unkind: your hesitation was positively cruel. The word "red"
is unmistakably the word for the poor d.u.c.h.ess to-day."
"Well, yes, and yesterday, and the day before, and probably to-morrow," says Sir James, mildly. "But I really wonder at the duke,--at his time of life, too! If I were Brans...o...b.. I should feel it my duty to interfere."
He is talking gayly, unceasingly, but always with his grave eyes fixed upon Clarissa, as she leans back languidly on the uncomfortable garden-chair, smiling indeed every now and then, but fitfully, and without the gladness that generally lights up her charming face.
Horace had promised to be here to-day,--had faithfully promised to come with her and her father to this garden-party; and where is he now? A little chill of disappointment has fallen upon her, and made dull her day. No smallest doubt of his truth finds harbor in her gentle bosom, yet grief sits heavy on her, "as the mildews hang upon the bells of flowers to blight their bloom!"
Sir James, half divining the cause of her discontent, seeks carefully, tenderly, to draw her from her sad thoughts in every way that occurs to him; and his efforts, though not altogether crowned with success, are at least so far happy in that he induces her to forget her grievance for the time being, and keeps her from dwelling too closely upon the vexed question of her recreant lover.
To be with Sir James is, too, in itself a relief to her. With him she need not converse unless it so pleases her; her silence will neither surprise nor trouble him; but with all the others it would be so different: they would claim her attention whether she willed it or not, and to make ordinary spirited conversation just at this moment would be impossible to her. The smile dies off her face. A sigh replaces it.
"How well you are looking to-day!" says Scrope, lightly, thinking this will please her. She is extremely pale, but a little hectic spot, born of weariness and fruitless hoping against hope, betrays itself on either cheek. His tone, if not the words, does please her, it is so full of loving kindness.
"Am I?" she says. "I don"t feel like looking well; and I am tired, too. They say,--
"A merry heart goes all the day, Your sad tires in a mile-a;"
I doubt mine is a sad one, I feel so worn out. Though,"--hastily, and with a vivid flush that changes all her pallor into warmth,--"if I were put to it, I couldn"t tell you why."
"No? Do you know I have often felt like that," says Scrope, carelessly. "It is both strange and natural. One has fits of depression that come and go at will, and that one cannot account for; at least, I have, frequently. But you, Clarissa, you should not know what depression means."
"I know it to day." For the moment her courage fails her. She feels weak; a craving for sympathy overcomes her; and, turning, she lifts her large sorrowful eyes to his.
She would, perhaps, have spoken; but now a sense of shame and a sharp pang that means pride come to her, and, by a supreme effort, she conquers emotion, and lets her heavily-lashed lids fall over her suffused eyes, as though to conceal the tell-tale drops within from his searching gaze.
"So, you see,"--she says, with a rather artificial laugh,--"your flattery falls through: with all this weight of imaginary woe upon my shoulders, I can hardly be looking my best."