X
In the large liberty of an English country-house Isabel might have foundthe long morning tedious had she been of a more sociable habit. LadyVictoria, Mrs. Throfton, and Lady Cecilia Spence went to church; allthree, as great ladies, having a dutiful eye to the edification ofhumbler folk. Flora Thangue spent the greater part of the morningwriting letters for her hostess, the men fled to the golf-links, and therest of the women not engaged in vehement political discussion, orBridge, were striding across country. Isabel, tempted by the charminglyfitted writing-table in her room, although an indolent correspondent,wrote a long and amply descriptive letter to her sister, which herbrother-in-law, being more than usually hard up at the moment of itsarrival, transposed into fiction and illustrated delightfully for alocal newspaper. Then she roamed about looking at the pictures, testingher European education by discovering for herself the Lelys and Mores,the Hoppners, Ketels, Holbeins, Knellers, Dahls, and Romneys. She had aquick instinct for the best in all things, but cared less for picturesthan for other treasures of the past: marbles, the architecture in oldstreets, hard brown schlosses on their lonely heights, the Gothic spacesof cathedrals, the high and fervent imaginations, immortal yet nameless,in the carvings on stone; the jewelled facades of Orvieto and Siena,the romantic grandeur of the Alhambra.
She opened a door at the back of the central hall and found herself in apillared corridor with a door at either end. Both rooms were open, andas a blue cloud hung about the entrance to the left, she turned to whatproved to be the library of Capheaton. It was a square light apartment,with the orthodox number of books, but with so many desks andwriting-tables that it looked more like the business corner of themansion. Here, indeed, as Isabel was to learn, Lady Victoria held dailyconference with her housekeeper and stewards, interviewed the women ofthe tenantry, and those active and philanthropic ladies of everydistrict that aspire to carry the burdens of others. Here Gwynne kepthis Blue Books and thought out his speeches, but it was not a favoriteroom with the guests.
Isabel had found many books scattered about the house, solid andflippant, old and new, but nothing by her host. She rightly assumed thathis works would be disposed for posterity in the family library, andfound them on a shelf above one of the large orderly tables. As a matterof fact she had read but two of his books, and she selected another atrandom and carried it to a comfortable chair by the window. The work wasan exposition of conditions in one of the South African colonies,containing much criticism that had been defined by the Conservativepress as youthful impertinence, but surprisingly sound to theunprejudiced. What had impressed Isabel in his other books and claimedher admiration anew was his maturity of thought and style; she saw thatthis volume had been published when he was twenty-four, written,doubtless, when he was a year or two younger. She felt a vague pity fora man that seemed to have had no youth. Since his graduation fromBalliol in a blaze of glory he had worked unceasingly, for he appearedto have found little of ordinary recreation in travel. She wondered ifhe would take his youth in his bald-headed season, like the self-madeAmerican millionaire.
His style, pure, lucid, virile, distinguished, might have been theoutcome of midnight travail, or, like his eloquence on the platform, adirect flight from the quickened brain. It certainly bore no resemblanceto his amputated table talk. But in a moment she dismissed herspeculations, for she had discovered a quality, overlooked before, butarresting in the recent light of his cold arrogance and haughtyself-confidence. Behind his strict regard for facts and the keen insightand large grasp of his subject, which, without his evident care for thegraces, would have distinguished his work from the dry report of equallyconscientious but less gifted men, was the lonely play of a really loftyimagination, and a noble human sympathy. As she read on, this warmfull-blooded quality, tempered always by reason, grew more and morevisible to her alert sense; and when the fires in his mind blazed forthinto a revelation of a passionate love of beauty, both in nature and inhuman character, Isabel realized what such a man's power over hisaudience must be; when this second self, so effectually concealed,suddenly burst into being.
"It is too bad a woman would have to live with the other!" she thought,as she raised her eyes and saw Gwynne emerge from the woods with Mrs.Kaye. "I cannot say that I envy her."
"By Jove, they have an engaged look!"
Isabel turned with a start, but greeted Lord Hexam with a smile. He wasas yet her one satisfactory experience of the young English nobleman,whom, like most American girls, she had unconsciously foreshadowed indoublet and hose. Hexam was quite six feet, with a fine militarycarriage; he had been in the Guards and had not left the army untilafter two years of active service; his blue eyes were both honest andintelligent, and he was generally clean cut and highly bred.
He drew up a chair beside Isabel and reflected that she was evenhandsomer than he had thought, with the sunlight warming the ivorywhiteness of her skin, although it contracted the mobile pupils of hereyes; and that little black moles when rightly placed were moreattractive than he had thought possible. They gave a sort of daringunconscious eighteenth-century coquetry to what was otherwise a somewhatsevere style of beauty. But he was a man for whom a woman's hair had apeculiar fascination, and while they were uttering commonplaces atrandom his eyes wandered to the soft yet massive coils encirclingIsabel's shapely head, and lingered there.
"Pardon me!" he said, boyishly. "But I always thought--don't youknow?--that hair like that was only in novels and poems and that sort ofthing. Is it all your own?" he asked, with sudden suspicion.
"You would think so if you had to carry it for a day. I should have hadit cut off long ago if it had happened to be coarse hair. It is aninherited evil of which I am too vain to rid myself. The early Spanishwomen of my family all had hair that touched the ground when they stoodup. I have an old sketch of a back view of three of them taken side byside; you see nothing but billows of fine silky hair. But I have put itout of sight, as it looks rather like an advertisement for a famous hairrestorer."
"I'd give a lot to see yours down. It's wonderful--wonderful!"
"Well, I have promised a private view to some of the women. If LadyVictoria thinks it quite proper perhaps I'll admit you."
"I'll ask her for a card directly she comes home. Let it be thisafternoon just after tea."
"I wonder if they really are engaged," said Isabel, who had been toldthat Englishmen never paid compliments, and was growing embarrassedunder the round-eyed scrutiny. Gwynne and Mrs. Kaye had paused by asundial.
"Who? Oh yes, I should think so, although there was some talk that poorBratty--but no doubt that was mere rumor, or Mrs. Kaye wouldn't be onwith Jack like that. By Jove, he is engaged. I never saw him lookso--so--well, I hardly know what."
"Do you approve of the match?"
"If my consent is asked I shall give them my blessing. He is the salt ofthe earth, although a bit lumpy now and then; and she is such a jollylittle thing, full of genuine affection--just the wife for Jack."
"You believe in her, then?" Isabel wondered, as many another has done,at the miasma that seems to rise and dim a man's perceptive facultieswhen he is called upon to estimate the worth of a fascinating woman.
"Rather! Don't you?"
"She struck me as being one of the few people without a redeemingvirtue. To be sure that has a distinction of its own."
"Oh!" He wondered if so handsome a girl shared the common rancor of herage and sex against charming young widows.
"And the worst mannered," continued Isabel, who knew exactly what hethought. "And plebeian in her marrow. I wish my cousin had chosen MissThangue or any one else."
"But he couldn't marry Flora," said the literal young nobleman. "Shehasn't a penny, and is the friend of all our mothers. But I'm sorryyou've such a bad opinion of Mrs. Kaye. She's tremendously popular withus. I'm not one of her circle--retinue would be more like it; but I'vealways thought her the brightest little thing going, and I'm sure shewouldn't harm a fly."
"I'm sure she would do no
thing so little worth her while. Well, there isno need for your eyes to be opened; but I wish that my cousin's mightbe. I suppose that you have the same faith in him that so manyothers--himself included--seem to have."
"Rather!--You are a most critical person. Haven't you?"
"I think I have. In fact I am sure of it. That is the reason I have beenwishing he were an American."
He laughed boyishly. "That is a good one! But we need him over here. Youhaven't the slightest idea how much. We get into a blue funk every timeZeal takes a cold on his chest. To quote Mrs. Kaye, 'A Liberal peer isas useful as a fifth wheel to a coach, and as ornamental as whitewash.'Clever, ain't it?"
"I think people are touchingly easy to satisfy! I have been treated toseveral of Mrs. Kaye's epigrams and heard as many more quoted. It seemsto me that nothing could be easier than the manufacture of that popularsuperfluity."
"Perhaps--with time to think them out beforehand. Anyhow, it's ratherjolly to hear things you can remember."
"I should be the last to deny her cleverness," said Isabel, dryly. Butbeing by no means desirous that he should find her too acid, she droppedher eyes for a moment, then raised two dazzling wells of innocence. "Iam tired of the subject of my cousin and Mrs. Kaye," she murmured. "Areyou as ambitious as Jack?"
"No use." He stared helplessly down into the blue flood. "There is noescape from the 'Peers' for me, although my father, I am happy to say,is as healthy as I am. But after the brain cells become brittle--onenever knows. I too am a Liberal, and am getting in all the good work ofwhich I am capable while there is yet time. I don't go as far asJack--don't want to see the 'Peers' chucked. I have a strong reverencefor traditions, and no taste whatever for democracy--that would be toolong a step. And I think a man should be content to be useful, do thebest he can, in his own class; and be loyal to that class whateverhappens. Of course I understand Jack's point of view, because Iunderstand him so well, and know that he would be the most maimed andwretched man on earth in the Upper House; but personally, I think oneshould be prepared to accept inherited responsibilities."
And then, as they were both young, and mutually attracted, they foundmany subjects of common interest to keep them in the library until thegong summoned them to luncheon.