SWAN FEATHERS
While Mr. Chadwick Champneys was alive, Nancy had been able to feel
that there was some one to whom she, in a way, belonged. Now that he
was gone, she felt as if she had been detached from all human ties,
for she couldn't consider Peter as belonging. Peter wasn't coming
home, of course. He was content to leave his business interests in
the safe hands of Mr. Jason Vandervelde, and the trust company that
had the Champneys estate in charge. A last addition to Mr.
Champneys's will had made the lawyer the guardian of Mrs. Peter
Champneys until she was twenty-five.
While he was putting certain of his late client's personal affairs
in order, Mr. Vandervelde necessarily came in contact with young
Mrs. Peter. The oftener he met her, the more interested the shrewd
and kindly man became in Anne Champneys. When he first saw her in
the black she had donned for her uncle, the unusual quality of her
personal appearance struck him with some astonishment.
"Why, she's grown handsome!" he thought with surprise. "Or maybe
she's going to be handsome. Or maybe she's not, either. Whatever
she is, she certainly can catch the human eye!"
He remembered her as she had appeared on her wedding-day, and his
respect for Chadwick Champneys's far-sighted perspicacity grew: the
old man certainly had had an unerring sense of values. The girl had
a mind of her own, too. At times her judgment surprised him with its
elemental clarity, its penetrating soundness. The power of thinking
for herself hadn't been educated out of her; she had not been
stodged with other people's--mostly dead people's--thoughts,
therefore she had room for her own. He reflected that a little
wholesome neglect might be added to the modern curriculum with great
advantage to the youthful mind.
Her isolation, the deadly monotony of her daily life, horrified him.
He realized that she should have other companionship than Mrs.
MacGregor's, shrewdly suspecting that as a teacher that lady had
passed the limit of usefulness some time since. Somehow, the
impermeable perfection of Mrs. MacGregor exasperated Mr. Vandervelde
almost to the point of throwing things at her. She made him
understand why there is more joy in heaven over one sinner saved,
than over ninety and nine just persons. He could understand just how
welcome to a bored heaven that sinner must be! And think of that
poor girl living with this human work of supererogation!
"Why, she might just as well be in heaven at once!" he thought, and
shuddered. "I've got to do something about it."
"Marcia," he said to his wife, "I want you to help me out with Mrs.
Peter Champneys. Call on her. Talk to her. Then tell me what to do
for her. She's changed--heaps--in three years. She's--well, I think
she's an unusual person, Marcia."
A few days later Mrs. Jason Vandervelde called on Mrs. Peter
Champneys, and at sight of Nancy in her black frock experienced
something of the emotion that had moved her husband. She felt
inclined to rub her eyes. And then she wished to smile, remembering
how unnecessarily sorry she and Jason had been for young Peter
Champneys.
Marcia Vandervelde was an immensely clever and capable woman;
perhaps that partly explained her husband's great success. She
looked at the girl before her, and realized her possibilities. Mrs.
Peter was for the time being virtually a young widow, she had no
relatives, and she was co-heir to the Champneys millions. Properly
trained, she should have a brilliant social career ahead of her. And
here she was shut up--in a really beautiful house, of course--with
nobody but an insufferable frump of an unimportant Mrs. MacGregor!
The situation stirred Mrs. Vandervelde's imagination and appealed to
her executive ability.
Mrs. Vandervelde liked the way she wore her hair, in thick red
plaits wound around the head and pinned flat. It had a medieval
effect, which suited her coloring. Her black dress was soft and
lusterless. She wore no jewelry, not even a ring. There were shadows
under her grave, gray-green eyes. Altogether, she looked
individual, astonishingly young, and pathetically alone. Mrs.
Vandervelde's interest was aroused. Skilfully she tried to draw the
girl out, and was relieved to discover that she wasn't talkative;
nor was she awkward. She sat with her hands on the arms of her
chair, restfully; and while you spoke, you could see that she
weighed what you were saying, and you.
"I am going to like this girl, I think," Marcia Vandervelde told
herself. And she looked at Nancy with the affectionate eyes of the
creative artist who sees his material to his hand.
"Jason," she said to her husband, some time later, "what would you
think if I should tell you I wished to take Anne Champneys abroad
with me?"
"I'd say it was the finest idea ever--if you meant it."
"I do mean it. My dear man, with proper handling one might make
something that approaches a classic out of that girl. There's
something elemental in her: she's like a birch tree in spring, and
like the earth it grows in, too, if you see what I mean. I want to
try my hand on her. I hate to see her spoiled."
"It's mighty decent of you, Marcia!" said he, gratefully.
"Oh, you know how bored I get at times, Jason. I need something real
to engage my energies. I fancy Anne Champneys will supply the needed
stimulus. I shall love to watch her reactions: she's not a fool, and
I shall be amused. If she managed to do so well with nobody but poor
old Mr. Champneys and that dreary MacGregor woman, think what
she'll be when _I_ get through with her!"
Vandervelde said respectfully: "You're a brick, Marcia! If she
patterns herself on you--"
"If she patterns herself on anybody but herself, I'll wash my hands
of her! It's because I think she won't that I'm willing to help
her," said his wife, crisply.
Some six weeks later the Champneys house had been closed
indefinitely, the premises put in charge of the efficient Hoichi,
and Mrs. MacGregor bonused and another excellent position secured
for her, and Mrs. Peter Champneys was making her home with her
guardian and his wife.
She might have moved into another world, so different was
everything,--as different, say, as was the acrid countenance of Mrs.
MacGregor from the fresh-skinned, clear-eyed, clever, handsome face
of Marcia Vandervelde. Everything interested Nancy. Her senses were
acutely alert. Just to watch Mrs. Vandervelde, so calm, so poised
and efficient, gave her a sense of physical well-being. She had
never really liked, or deeply admired, or trusted any other woman,
and the real depths of her feeling for this one surprised her. Mrs.
Vandervelde possessed the supreme gift of putting others at their
ease; she had tact, and was at the same time sincere and kind. Nancy
found herself at home in this fine house in which life moved largely
and colorfully.
A maid had been secured for her, whom Mrs. Vandervelde pronounced a
treasure. Then came skilful and polite persons who did things to
her skin and hair, with astounding results. After that came the
selection of her wardrobe, under Mrs. Vandervelde's critical
supervision. Although the frocks were black, with only a white
evening gown or two for relief, Nancy felt as if she were clothed in
a rosy and delightful dream. She had never even imagined such things
as these black frocks were. When she saw herself in them she was
silent, though the super-saleswomen exclaimed, and Mrs. Vandervelde
smiled a gratified smile.
"I am going to keep her strictly in the background for the time
being, Jason," she explained to her husband. "As she's already
married, she can afford to wait a year--or even two. I mean her to
be perfect. I mean her to be absolutely _sure_. She's going to be a
sensation. Jason, have you ever seen anything to equal her
team-work? When I tell her what I want her to do, she looks at me
for a moment--and then does it. One thing I must say for old Mr.
Champneys and that MacGregor woman: they certainly knew how to lay a
firm foundation!"
Nancy was perfectly willing to remain in the background. She was
interested in people only as an on-looker. She responded instantly
to Mrs. Vandervelde's suggestions and instructions, and carried them
out with an intelligent thoroughness that at times made her mentor
gasp. It gave her a definite object to work for, and kept her from
thinking too much about Glenn Mitchell. And she didn't want to
think about Glenn Mitchell. It hurt. She watched with a quiet
wonder--quite as if it had been a stranger to whom all this was
happening--the change being wrought in herself; the immense
difference intelligent care, perfectly selected clothes, and the
background of a beautiful house can make not only in one's
appearance but in one's thoughts. Sometimes she would stare at the
perfectly appointed dinner-table, with its softly shaded lights; she
would look, reflectively, from Marcia Vandervelde's smartly
coiffured head to her husband's fine, aristocratic face; the
reflective glance would trail around the beautiful room, rest
appreciatively upon the impressive butler, come back to the food set
before her, and a fugitive smile would touch her lips and linger in
her eyes. There were times when she felt that she herself was the
only real thing among shadows; as if all these pleasant things must
vanish, and only her lonesome self remain. She watched with a
certain wistfulness the few people she knew. Marcia, now--so
admired, so sure, with so many interests, so many friends, and with
Jason Vandervelde's quiet love always hers--did _she_ ever have that
haunting sense of the impermanence of all possessions; of having, in
the end, nothing but herself?
"What are you thinking, when you look at me like that?" Marcia asked
her one evening, smilingly. She was as curious about Nancy as Nancy
was about her.
"I was just--wondering."
"About what?"
"I was wondering if you were ever lonely?" said Nancy, truthfully.
"I mean, as if all this,"--they were in the drawing-room then, and
she made a gesture that included everything in it,--"just _things_,
you know, all the things you have--and--and the people you
know--weren't _real_. They go. And nothing stays but just _you_.
_You_, all by yourself." She leaned forward, her eyes big and
earnest.
Marcia Vandervelde stared at her. After a moment she said,
tentatively: "There are always things; things one has, things one
does. There are always other people."
"Yes, or there wouldn't be you, either. But what I mean is, they go.
And you stay, don't you?" She paused, a pucker between her brows,
"All by yourself," she finished, in a low voice.
"Does that make you afraid?" asked Mrs. Vandervelde.
"Oh, no! Why should it? It just makes me--wonder."
Mrs. Vandervelde said quietly: "I understand." Nancy felt grateful
to her.
A few days later Mrs. Vandervelde said to her casually: "An old
friend of ours dines with us to-night, Anne,--Mr. Berkeley Hayden,
one of the most charming men in the world. I think you will like
him."
Mrs. Vandervelde always said that Berkeley Hayden was the most
critical man of her acquaintance, and that his taste was infallible.
He had an unerring sense of proportion, and that miracle of judgment
which is good taste. He was one of those fortunate people who, as
the saying goes, are born with a gold spoon in the mouth. Unlike
most inheritors of great wealth, he not only spent freely but added
even more freely to the ancestral holdings. He was moneyed enough to
do as he pleased without being considered eccentric; he could even
afford to be esthetic, and to prefer Epicurus to St. Paul. He had a
highly important collection of modern paintings, and an even more
valuable one of Tanagra figurines, old Greek coins, and medieval
church plate. He had, too, the reputation of being the most gun-shy
and bullet-proof of social lions. At thirty he was a handsome,
well-groomed, rather bored personage, with sleekly-brushed blond
hair and a short mustache. He looked important, and one suspected
that he must have been at some pains to keep his waist line so
inconspicuous. For the rest, he was as really cultivated and
pleasing a pagan as one may find, and so wittily ironical he might
have been mistaken for a Frenchman.
Mrs. Vandervelde had planned that he should be the only guest. She
knew this would please him, as well as suit her own purpose, which
was that he should see young Mrs. Peter Champneys. She was curious
to learn what impression Anne would create, and if Berkeley Hayden's
judgment would coincide with her own. She had informed him that
Jason's ward was stopping with them; would, in fact, go abroad with
her shortly. Mr. Hayden was not interested. He thought a ward rather
a bore for the Vanderveldes.
He was standing with his back to the mantel, facing the door, when
Nancy entered the room. In the filmy black Mrs. Vandervelde had
selected for her, tall and slim, she paused for the fraction of a
second and lifted her cool, shining, inscrutable green eyes to his
lazy blue ones. Mrs. Vandervelde had prevailed upon her to retain
her own fashion of wearing her hair in plaits wound around her head,
and the new maid had managed to soften the severity of the style and
so heightened its effectiveness. A small string of black pearls was
around her throat, and pendants of the same beautiful jewels hung
from her ears. Berkeley Hayden started, and his eyes widened. Mrs.
Vandervelde, who had been watching him intently, sighed
imperceptibly.
"I wasn't mistaken, then," she thought, and smiled to herself.
She could have hugged Anne Champneys for her beautifully
unconscious manner. Of course the girl didn't understand she was
being signally honored and favored by Hayden's openly interested
notice, but Marcia reflected amusedly that it wouldn't have made
much difference if Anne had known. He didn't interest her, except
casually and impersonally. She thought him a very good-looking
man, in his way, but rather old: say all of thirty:--and Glenn
Mitchell had been handsome, and romantic, and twenty. Young Mrs.
Champneys, then, didn't respond to Mr. Berkeley Hayden's notice
gratefully, pleasedly, flutteringly, as other young women--and
many older ones--did. This one paid a more flattering attention to
Mr. Jason Vandervelde than to him. But he had seen other women
play that game; he wondered for a moment if this one were
designing. But he was himself too clever not to understand that
this was real indifference. Then he wondered if she might
be--horrible thought!--stupid. He was forced to dismiss that
suspicion, too. She wasn't stupid. The truth didn't occur to
him--that he himself was spoiled. It provoked him, too, that he
couldn't make her talk.
Mrs. Vandervelde smiled to herself again. Berkeley was deliberately
trying to make himself agreeable, something he did not often have to
trouble himself to do. He was at his best only when he was really
interested or amused, and he was at his best to-night. He aroused
her admiration, drew the fire of her own wit and raillery, stung
even quiet Jason into unwonted animation. Anne Champneys looked
from one to the other, concealing the fact that at times their
conversation was over her head. She didn't always understand them.
The sense of their unreality in relation to herself came upon her.
She turned to watch this strange man who was saying things that
puzzled her, and he met her eyes, as Glenn Mitchell had once met
them. She wasn't looking at him as she had looked at Glenn, but
Berkeley Hayden's sophisticated, well-trained, wary heart gave an
unprecedented, unmannerly jump when those green eyes sought to
fathom him.
Marcia spoke of their proposed stay abroad. She had gone to school
in Florence, and she retained a passionate affection for the old
city, and showed her delight at the prospect of revisiting it.
"This will be your first visit to Italy, Mrs. Champneys?" asked
Hayden.
"Yes."
"I envy you. But you mustn't allow yourself to be weaned away from
your own country. You must come back to New York." He smiled into
her eyes--Berkeley Hayden's famous smile.
"Yes, I suppose I must," said Nancy, without enthusiasm.
He felt puzzled. Was she unthinkably simple and natural, or was she
immeasurably deep? Was her apparent utter unconsciousness of the
effect she produced a superfine art? He couldn't decide.
He usually knew exactly why any certain woman pleased him. He had
usually demanded beauty; he had worshiped beauty all his life. But
beauty must go hand in hand with intellectual qualities; he hated a
fool. To-night he found himself puzzled. He couldn't tell exactly
why Anne Champneys pleased him. Studying her critically, he decided
that she was not beautiful. He could not even call her pretty.
Perhaps it was her unusualness. But wherein was she so unusual? He
had met women with red hair and white skin and gray-green eyes
before--women far, far more seductive than Jason's ward. Yet not one
of them all had so potently gripped his imagination.
Mrs. Vandervelde was a brilliant pianist, and after dinner Hayden
begged her to play. Under cover of the music, he watched Mrs.
Champneys. She was sitting almost opposite him, and he could observe
her changing countenance. Nancy was beginning to love and understand
good music. Men create music; women receive and carry it as they
receive and carry life. It is quite as much a part of themselves.
Nancy's eyes shadowed. She leaned back in her chair, and the man
watched the curve of her white cheek and throat, and the thick
braids of her red hair. She had forgotten his presence. He was
saying to himself, with something of wonder, "No, she's not
beautiful: but, my God! how _real_ she is!" when, subtly drawn by
the intensity of his gaze, she turned, looked at him with her
clouded eyes, and smiled vaguely. Still smiling, she turned her head
again and gave herself up to listening, unconscious that destiny had
clapped her upon the shoulder.
The man sat quite still. It had come to him with, the suddenness of
a lightning stroke, and his first feeling was one of stunned
amazement, and an almost incredulous resentment. He had gone to and
fro in the earth and walked up and down in it, comfortably immune,
an amused and ironic looker-on. And now, at thirty, without rhyme or
reason he had fallen in love with a red-haired young woman of whom
he knew absolutely nothing, beyond the bare fact that she was Jason
Vandervelde's ward. A woman who didn't conform to any standard he
had ever set for himself, whose mind was a closed book to him, of
whose very existence he had been ignorant until to-night. Old Dame
Destiny must have sniggered when she thrust Mrs. Peter Champneys,
née Nancy Simms, into the exquisitely ordered life of Mr. Berkeley
Hayden!
He presently discovered from Jason all that the trustee of the
Champneys estate knew of Mrs. Peter, which really wasn't very much,
as the lawyer and his wife had never seen Nancy until the morning of
her marriage. And he didn't have much to say about her as she was
then. Hayden gathered that it was a marriage of convenience, for
family reasons--to keep the money in the family. He asked a few
questions about Peter, whom Vandervelde thought a likely young
fellow enough, but whom Hayden fancied must be a poor sort--probably
a freak with a pseudo-artistic temperament. There couldn't have been
very much love lost between a husband and wife who had consented to
so singular a separation. Hayden had a _very_ poor opinion of Mr.
Peter Champneys! But he was fiercely glad it hadn't been a
love-match, glad that that other man's claim upon Anne was at the
best nominal, that theirs was a marriage in name only.
He saw her several times before her departure, and came no nearer to
understanding her. The night before they sailed, he gave a dinner in
his apartment, an old aunt of his, more enchanting at sixty than at
sixteen, being the only other guest. That apartment with its
brocaded walls and its marvelous furniture was a revelation to
Nancy. It was like an opened door to her.
She looked at her host with a new interest. He appeared to greater
advantage seen, as it were, against his proper and natural
background. And that background had the glamour of things strange,
exciting, and alluring, smacking somewhat of, say, an Arabian
Night's entertainment. Over the dining-room mantel hung a curious
and colorful landscape, in which two brown girls, naked to the waist
and from thence to the knees wrapped in straight, bright-colored
stuff, raised their angular arms to pluck queer fruit from exotic
trees.
He knew all that, she thought; he had seen that strange landscape
and those brown women, and tasted the fruit they reached to pluck.
Just as he knew those tiny terra-cotta figurines over there, and
that pottery which must have been made out of ruby-dust. Just as he
knew everything. All this had been in his world, always. A world
full of things beautiful and strange. He had had everything that she
had missed. It seemed to her that he incarnated in his proper and
handsome person all the difference and the change that had come into
her life.
And quite suddenly she saw Nancy Simms dusting the Baxter parlor,
pausing to stand admiringly before a picture on a white-and-gold
easel, that cherished picture of a house with mother-of-pearl
puddles in front of it. A derisive and impish amusement flickered
like summer lightning across her face, and with an inscrutable smile
she mocked the mother-of-pearl puddles and her old admiration of
them. She lifted her eyes to the painting over Berkeley Hayden's
mantel, and the smile deepened.
"Perhaps it is her smile," thought he, watching her. "Yes, I am sure
it must be her smile. I am rather glad Marcia is taking her abroad.
I do not wish to make a fool of myself, and there'd be that danger
if she remained." Yet the idea of her absence gave him an
unaccustomed pang.
He filled her quarters aboard ship with exquisite flowers. She was
not yet used to graceful attentions, they had been for other women,
not for her. She had no idea at all that she was of the slightest
importance, if only because of the Champneys money; her comparative
freedom was still too recent for her to have changed her estimate of
herself. She thought it touchingly kind and thoughtful of this
handsome, important man to have remembered just _her_, particularly
when there wasn't anybody else to do so, and she looked at him with
a pleased and appreciative friendliness for which he felt absurdly
grateful. While Marcia was busied with the other friends who had
come to see her off, he stood beside Mrs. Champneys, who seemed to
know no one but himself, and this established a measure of intimacy
between them.
"It occurs to me," said he, tentatively, "that it has been some time
since I saw Florence. All of two or three years."
They stood together by the railing, and she leaned forward the
better to watch a leggy little girl with a brickdust-red pigtail in
a group on the pier.
"Yes?" said she, absently. The leggy girl had just thrust out her
tongue at an expostulating nurse. She seemed to be a highly
unpleasant child; one of those children of whom aunts speak as "poor
Mary" or whatever their name may be. Anne Champneys, watching her,
put her hand up and touched her own hair, that gleamed under her
close-fitting black hat. Her eyes darkened; she smiled, secretly,
mysteriously, rememberingly.
In that instant Berkeley Hayden made his decision. There was no
longer any doubt in his mind. When she turned away from the railing,
he said pleasantly:
"You and Marcia have put me in the humor to see Florence again. If I
come strolling in upon you some fine day, I hope you'll be glad to
see me, Mrs. Champneys?"
"Oh, yes!" said she, politely. And then Marcia and Vandervelde came
up, and a few minutes later the two men went ashore. Hayden's face
was the last thing Nancy saw as the steamer moved slowly outward.
There were hails, laughter, waving of hand-kerchiefs. He alone
looked at _her_. And so he remained in her memory, standing a little
apart from all others.