Aunt Grizel was not well off, but it was she who made Helen the little allowance that enabled her to go about; and she had insured her life, so that at her death, when her annuity lapsed, Helen should be sure of the same modest sum. "Owing to Aunt Grizel I"ll just not starve," said Helen, with the faint grimace, half bitter, half comic, that sometimes made her strange face still stranger. "One hundred and fifty pounds a year: think of it! Isn"t it d.a.m.nable? Yet it"s better than nothing, as Aunt Grizel and I often say after groaning together."
Althea, safely niched in her annual three thousand, was indeed horrified.
"One hundred and fifty," she repeated helplessly. "Do you mean that you manage to dress on that now?"
"Dress on it, my dear! I pay all my travelling expenses, my cabs, my stamps, my Christmas presents--everything out of it, as well as buy my clothes. And it will have to pay for my rent and food besides, when Aunt Grizel dies--when I"m not being taken in somewhere. Of course, she still counts on my marrying, poor dear."
"Oh, but, of course you _will_ marry," said Althea, with conviction.
Miss Buchanan, who was getting much better, was propped high on her pillows to-day, and was attired in a most becoming flow of lace and silk. Nothing less exposed to the gross chances of the world could be imagined. She did not turn her eyes on her companion as the confident a.s.sertion was made, and she kept silence for a moment. Then she answered placidly:
"Of course, if I"m to live--and not merely exist--I must try to, I suppose."
Althea was taken aback and pained by the wording of this speech. Her national susceptibilities were again wounded by the implication that a rare and beautiful woman--for so she termed Helen Buchanan--might be forced, not only to hope for marriage, but to seek it; the implication that urgency lay rather in the woman"s state than in the man"s. She had all the romantic American confidence in the power of the rare and beautiful woman to marry when and whom she chose.
"I am sure you need never try," she said with warmth. "I"m sure you have dozens of delightful people in love with you."
Miss Buchanan turned her eyes on her and laughed as though she found this idea amusing. "Why, in heaven"s name, should I have dozens of delightful people in love with me?"
"You are so lovely, so charming, so distinguished."
"Am I? Thanks, my dear. I"m afraid you see things _en couleur de rose_."
And, still smiling, her eyes dwelling on Althea with their indifferent kindness, she went on: "Have you delightful dozens in love with you?"
Althea did not desert her guns. She felt that the very honour of their s.e.x--hers and Helen"s--was on trial in her person. She might not be as lovely as her friend--though she might be; that wasn"t a matter for her to inquire into; but as woman--as well-bred, highly educated, refined and gentle woman--she, too, was chooser, and not seeker.
"Only one delightful person is in love with me at this moment, I"m sorry to say," she answered, smiling back; "but I"ve had very nearly my proper share in the past." It had been necessary thus to deck poor Franklin out if her standpoint were to be maintained; and, indeed, could not one deem him delightful, in some senses--in moral senses; he surely was delightfully good. The little effort to see dear Franklin"s goodness as delightful rather discomposed her, and as Miss Buchanan asked no further question as to the one delightful suitor, the little confusion mounted to her eyes and cheeks. She wondered if she had spoken tastelessly, and hastened away from this personal aspect of the question.
"You don"t really mean--I"m sure you don"t mean that you would marry just for money."
Miss Buchanan kept her ambiguous eyes half merrily, half pensively upon her. "Of course, if he were very nice. I wouldn"t marry a man who wasn"t nice for money."
"Surely you couldn"t marry a man unless you were in love with him?"
"Certainly I could. Money lasts, and love so often doesn"t." Helen continued to smile as she spoke.
There was now a tremor of pain in Althea"s protest. "Dear Miss Buchanan, I can"t bear to hear you speak like that. I can"t bear to think of any one so lovely doing anything so sordid, so miserable, as making a _mariage de convenance_." Tears rose to her eyes.
Miss Buchanan was again silent for a moment, and it was now her turn to look slightly confused. "It"s very nice of you to mind," she said; and she added, as if to help Althea not to mind, "But, you see, I am sordid; I am miserable."
"Sordid? Miserable? Do you mean unhappy?" Poor Althea gazed, full of her most genuine distress.
"Oh no; I mean in your sense. I"m a poor creature, quite ordinary and grubby; that"s all," said Miss Buchanan.
They said nothing more of it then, beyond Althea"s murmur of now inarticulate protest; but the episode probably remained in Miss Buchanan"s memory as something rather puzzling as well as rather pitiful, this demonstration of a feeling so entirely unexpected that she had not known what to do with it.
If, in these graver matters, she distressed Althea, in lesser ones she was continually, if not distressing her, at all events calling upon her, in complete unconsciousness, for readjustments of focus that were sometimes, in their lesser way, painful too. When she a.s.serted that she was not musical, Althea almost suspected her of saying it in order to evade her own descriptions of experiences at Bayreuth. Pleasantly as she might listen, it was sometimes, Althea had discovered, with a restive air masked by a pervasive vagueness; this vagueness usually drifted over her when Althea described experiences of an intellectual or aesthetic nature. It could be no question of evasion, however, when, in answer to a question of Althea"s, she said that she hated Paris. Since girlhood Althea had accepted Paris as the final stage in a civilised being"s education: the Theatre Francais, the lectures at the Sorbonne, the Louvre and the Cluny, and, for a later age, Anatole France--it seemed almost barbarous to say that one hated the splendid city that clothed, as did no other place in the world, one"s body and one"s mind. "How can you hate it?" she inquired. "It means so much that is intellectual, so much that is beautiful."
"I suppose so," said Miss Buchanan. "I do like to look at it sometimes; the s.p.a.ces and colour are so nice."
"The s.p.a.ces, and what"s in them, surely. What is it that you don"t like?
The French haven"t our standards of morality, of course, but don"t you think it"s rather narrow to judge them by our standards?"
Althea was pleased to set forth thus clearly her own liberality of standard. She sometimes suspected Miss Buchanan of thinking her nave.
But Miss Buchanan now looked a little puzzled, as if it were not this at all that she had meant, and said presently that perhaps it was the women"s faces--the well-dressed women. "I don"t mind the poor ones so much; they often look too sharp, but they often look kind and frightfully tired. It is the well-dressed ones I can"t put up with. And the men are even more horrid. I always want to spend a week in walking over the moors when I"ve been here. It leaves a hot taste in my mouth, like some horrid liqueur."
"But the beauty--the intelligence," Althea urged. "Surely you are a little intolerant, to see only people"s faces in Paris. Think of the Salon Carree and the Cluny; they take away the taste of the liqueur.
How can one have enough of them?"
Miss Buchanan again demurred. "Oh, I think I can have enough of them."
"But you care for pictures, for beautiful things," said Althea, half vexed and half disturbed. But Miss Buchanan said that she liked having them about her, not having to go and look at them. "It is so stuffy in museums, too; they always give me a headache. However, I don"t believe I really do care about pictures. You see, altogether I"ve had no education."
Her education, indeed, contrasted with Althea"s well-ordered and elaborate progression, had been lamentable--a mere succession of incompetent governesses. Yet, on pressing her researches, Althea, though finding almost unbelievable voids, felt, more than anything else, tastes sharp and fine that seemed to cut into her own tastes and show her suddenly that she did not really like what she had thought she liked, or that she liked what she had hardly before been aware of. All that Helen could be brought to define was that she liked looking at things in the country: at birds, clouds, and flowers; but though striking Althea as a creature strangely untouched and unmoulded, she struck her yet more strongly as beautifully definite. She marvelled at her indifference to her own shortcomings, and she marvelled at the strength of personality that could so dispense with other people"s furnishings.
Among the things that Helen made her see, freshly and perturbingly, was the sheaf of friends in England of whom she had thought with such security when Miss Robinson had spoken of the London _salon_.
Althea had been trained in a school of severe social caution. Social caution was personified to her in her memory of her mother--a slender, black-garbed lady, with parted grey hair, neatly waved along her brow, and a tortoisesh.e.l.l lorgnette that she used to raise, mildly yet alarmingly, at foreign _tables d"hotes_, for an appraising survey of the company. The memory of this lorgnette operated with Althea as a sort of social standard; it typified delicacy, dignity, deliberation, a scrupulous regard for the claims of heredity, and a scrupulous avoidance of uncertain or all too certain types. Althea felt that she had carried on the tradition worthily. The lorgnette would have pa.s.sed all her more recent friends--those made with only its inspiration as a guide. She was as careful as her mother as to whom she admitted to her acquaintanceship, eschewing in particular those of her compatriots whose accents or demeanour betrayed them to her trained discrimination as outside the radius of acceptance. But Althea"s kindness of heart was even deeper than her caution, and much as she dreaded becoming involved with the wrong sort of people, she dreaded even more hurting anybody"s feelings, with the result that once or twice she had made mistakes, and had had, under the direction of Lady Blair, to withdraw in a manner as painful to her feelings as to her pride. "Oh no, my dear," Lady Blair had said of some English acquaintances whom Althea had met in Rome, and who had asked her to come and see them in England. "Quite impossible; most worthy people, I am sure, and no doubt the daughter took honours at Girton--the middle cla.s.ses are highly educated nowadays; but one doesn"t know that sort of people."
Lady Blair was the widow of a judge, and, in her large velvet drawing-room, a thick fog outside and a number of elderly legal ladies drinking tea about her, Althea had always felt herself to be in the very heart of British social safety. Lady Blair was an old friend of her mother"s, and, with Miss Buckston, was her nearest English friend. She also felt safe on the lawn under the mulberry-tree at Grimshaw Rectory, and when ensconced for her long visit in Colonel and Mrs. Colling"s little house in Devonshire, where hydrangeas grew against a blue background of sea, and a small white yacht rocked in the bay at the foot of the garden.
It was therefore with some perplexity that, here too, she brought from her interviews with Helen an impression of new standards. They were not drastic and relegating, like those of Lady Blair"s; they did not make her feel unsafe as Lady Blair"s had done; they merely made her feel that her world was very narrow and she herself rather ingenuous.
Helen herself seemed unaware of standards, and had certainly never experienced any of Althea"s anxieties. She had always been safe, partly, Althea had perceived, because she had been born safe, but, in the main, because she was quite indifferent to safety. And with this indifference and this security went the further fact that she had, probably, never been ingenuous. With all her admiration, her affection for her new friend, this sense of the change that she was working in her life sometimes made Althea a little afraid of her, and sometimes a little indignant. She, herself, was perfectly safe in America, and when she felt indignant she asked herself what Helen Buchanan would have done had she been turned into a strange continent with hardly any other guides than the memory of a lorgnette and a Baedeker.
It was when she was bound to answer this question, and to recognise that in such circ.u.mstances Miss Buchanan would have gone her way, entirely unperturbed, and entirely sure of her own preferences, that Althea felt afraid of her. In all circ.u.mstances, she more and more clearly saw it, Miss Buchanan would impose her own standards, and be oppressed or enlightened by none. Althea had always thought of herself as very calm and strong; it was as calm and strong that Franklin Winslow Kane so worshipped her; but when she talked to Miss Buchanan she had sharp shoots of suspicion that she was, in reality, weak and wavering.
Althea"s accounts of her friends in England seemed to interest Miss Buchanan even less than her accounts of Bayreuth. She had met Miss Buckston, but had only a vague and, evidently, not a pleasant impression of her. Lady Blair she had never heard of, nor the inmates of Grimshaw Rectory. The Collings were also blanks, except that Mrs. Colling had an uncle, an old Lord Taunton; and when Althea put forward this identifying fact, Helen said that she knew him and liked him very much.
"I suppose you know a great many people," said Althea.
Yes, Miss Buchanan replied, she supposed she did. "Too many, sometimes.
One gets sick of them, don"t you think? But perhaps your people are more interesting than mine; you travel so much, and seem to know such heaps of them all over the world."
But Althea, from these interviews, took a growing impression that though Miss Buchanan might be sick of her own people, she would be far more sick of hers.
CHAPTER V.
Miss Buchanan was well on the way to complete recovery, was able to have tea every afternoon with Althea, and to be taken for long drives in the Bois, when Aunt Julia and the girls arrived at the Hotel Talleyrand.
Mrs. Pepperell was a sister of Althea"s mother, and lived soberly and solidly in New York, disapproving as much of millionaires and their manners as of expatriated Americans. She was large and dressed with immaculate precision and simplicity, and had it not been for a homespun quality of mingled benevolence and shrewdness, she might have pa.s.sed as stately. But Mrs. Pepperell had no wish to appear stately, and was rather intolerant of the pretension in others. Her sharp tongue had indulged itself in a good many sallies on this score at her sister Bessie"s expense; Bessie being the lady of the lorgnette, Althea"s deceased mother.
Althea, remembering that dear mother so well, all dignified elegance as she had been--too dignified, too elegant, perhaps, to be either so shrewd or so benevolent as her sister--always thought of Aunt Julia as rather commonplace in comparison. Yet, as she followed in her wake on the evening of her arrival, she felt that Aunt Julia was obviously and eminently "nice." The one old-fashioned diamond ornament at her throat, the ruffles at her wrist, the gloss of her silver-brown hair, reminded her of her own mother"s preferences.