PANSIES FOR THOUGHT.
Lisbeth gave him a sweeping little curtsy, and looked at him sweetly,
with her immense, dense eyes.
“That was very nice, indeed, in you,” she said, with a gravely obliged
air. “Pray, take one of my pansies.” And selecting one from her
bouquet, she held it out to him, and Hector Anstruthers, chancing
to glance toward them at the moment, had the pleasure of seeing the
charming bit of by-play.
It was the misfortune of Miss Crespigny’s admirers that they were
rarely quite sure of her. She had an agreeable way of saying one thing,
and meaning another; of speaking with the greatest gravity, and at the
same time making her hearer feel extremely dubious and uncomfortable.
She was a brilliant young lady, a sarcastic young lady, and this was
her mode of dealing with young men and women who otherwise might have
remained too well satisfied with themselves. Bertie Lyon felt himself
somewhat at a loss before her, always. It was not easy to resist her,
when she chose to be irresistible; but he invariably grew hot and cold
over her “confounded significant speeches.” And this was one of them.
She was making a cut at him for his clumsy compliment, and yet he was
compelled to accept her pansy, and fasten it on his coat, as if he was
grateful.
Mr. Hector Anstruthers had been installed, by universal consent, that
evening, as a sort of young lion, whose gentlemanly roar was worth
hearing. Young ladies had heard of him from their brothers, and one or
two had seen those lovely little pictures of his last season. Matrons
had heard their husbands mention him as a remarkable young fellow, who
had unexpectedly come into a large property, and yet wrote articles for
the papers, and painted, when the mood seized him, for dear life. A
really extraordinary young man, and very popular among highly desirable
people. “Rather reckless,” they would say, “perhaps, and something of a
cynic, as these young swells are often apt to be; but, nevertheless, a
fine fellow--a fine fellow!” And Anstruthers had condescended to make
himself very agreeable to the young ladies to whom he was introduced;
had danced a little, had talked with great politeness to the elder
matrons, and, in short, had rendered himself extremely popular. Indeed,
he was so well employed, that, until the latter part of the evening,
Lisbeth saw very little of him. Then he appeared suddenly to remember
her existence, and dutifully made his way to her side, to ask for a
dance, which invitation being rather indifferently accepted, they
walked through a quadrille together.
“I hope,” he said, with punctilious politeness, “that the Misses
Tregarthyn are well.”
“I am sorry to say,” answered Lisbeth, staring at her _vis-à-vis_,
“that I don’t know.”
“Then I must have mistaken you. I understood you to say that you had
just received a letter from Miss Clarissa.”
“It was not a mistake,” returned Lisbeth. “I had just received one, but
unfortunately they don’t write about themselves. They write about me.”
“Which must necessarily render their letters interesting,” said
Anstruthers.
Lisbeth barely deigned a slight shrug of her shoulders.
“Necessarily,” she replied, “if one is so happily disposed as never to
become tired of one’s self.”
“It would be rank heresy to suppose,” said Anstruthers, “that any of
Miss Crespigny’s friends would allow it possible that any one could
become tired of Miss Crespigny--even Miss Crespigny herself.”
“This is the third figure, I believe,” was Lisbeth’s sole reply, and
the music striking up again, they went on with their dancing.
“He supposes,” said the young lady, scornfully, to herself, “that he
can play the grand seigneur with me as he does with other women. I dare
say he is congratulating himself on the prospect of making me feel
sorry some day--me! Are men always simpletons? It really seems so. And
it is the women whom we may blame for it. Bah! he was a great deal more
worthy of respect when he was nothing but a tiresome, amiable young
bore. I hate these simpletons who think they have seen the world, and
used up their experience.”
She was very hard upon him, as she was rather apt to be hard upon
every one but Lisbeth Crespigny. And it is not improbable that she
was all the more severe, because he reminded her unpleasantly of
things she would have been by no means unwilling to forget. Was she
so heartless as not to have a secret remembrance of the flush of his
first young passion, of his innocent belief in her girlish goodness,
of his generous eagerness to ignore all her selfish caprices, of his
tender readiness to bear all her cruelty--for she had been cruel, and
wantonly cruel, enough, God knows. Was she so utterly heartless as to
have no memory of his suffering and struggles with his boyish pain,
of his passionate, frantic appeal, when she had reached the climax of
her selfishness and indifference to the wrong she might do? Surely,
no woman could be so hard, and I will not say that she was, and that
she was not inwardly stung this night by the thought that, if he had
hardened and grown careless and unbelieving, the chances were that it
was she herself who had helped to bring about the change for the worse.
The two young men, Lyon and his friend, spending that night together,
had a little conversation on the subject of their entertainment, and it
came to pass in this wise.
Accompanying Anstruthers to his chambers, Lyon, though by no means a
sentimental individual, carried Miss Crespigny’s gold and purple pansy
in his button-hole, and finding it there when he changed his dress coat
for one of his friend’s dressing gowns, he took it out, and put it in a
small slender vase upon the table.
Anstruthers had flung himself into an easy-chair, with his chibouque,
and through the wreaths of smoke, ascending from the fragrant weed, he
saw what the young man was doing.
“Where did you get that?” he demanded, abruptly.
“It is one of those things Miss Crespigny wore,” was the modestly
triumphant reply. “You saw them on her dress, and in her hair, and on
her fan. This is a real one, though, out of her bouquet. I believe they
call them heart’s-ease.”
“Heart’s-ease be ----,” began Anstruthers, roughly, but he checked
himself in time. “She is the sort of a woman to wear heart’s-ease!”
he added, with a sardonic laugh. “She ought to wear heart’s-ease, and
violets, and lilies, and snowdrops, and wild roses in the bud,” with
a more bitter laugh for each flower he named. “Such fresh, innocent
things suit women of her stamp.”
“I say,” said Lyon, staring at his sneering face, amazedly, “what is
the matter? You talk as if you had a spite against her. What’s up?”
Anstruther’s sneer only seemed to deepen in its intensity.
“A spite!” he echoed. “What is the matter? Oh, nothing--nothing of any
consequence. Only I wish she had given her heart’s-ease to me, or I
wish you would give it to me, that I might show you what I advise you
to do with the pretty things such creatures give you. Toss it into the
fire, old fellow, and let it scorch, and blacken, and writhe, as if it
was a living thing in torment. Or fling it on the ground, and set your
heel upon it, and grind it out of sight.”
“I don’t see what good that would do,” said Lyon, coming to the
mantelpiece, and taking down his meerschaum. “You are a queer fellow,
Anstruthers. I did not think you knew the girl.”
“I know her?” with a fresh sneer. “I know her well enough.”
“By Jove!” exclaimed Lyon, suddenly, as if a thought had struck him.
“Then she did mean something.”
“She generally means something,” returned the other. “Such women
invariably do--they mean mischief.”
“She generally does when she laughs in that way,” Lyon proceeded,
incautiously. “She is generally laughing at a man, instead of with him,
as she pretends to be. And when she laughed, this evening, and looked
in that odd style at you, I thought there was something wrong.”
Anstruthers turned white, the dead white of suppressed passion.
“Laugh!” he said. “She laughed?”
“You see,” explained Lyon, “she had been asking about you; and when
I finished telling her what I knew, she looked at you under her
eyelashes, as you stood talking to Mrs. Despard, and then she laughed;
and when I asked her if she was laughing at you, she said, ‘Ah, no! Not
at you, but at another gentleman of the same name, whom she had known a
long time ago.’”
It was not the best thing for himself, that Hector Anstruthers could
have heard. He had outlived his boyish passion, but he had not lived
down the sting of it. Having had his first young faith broken, he had
given faith up, as a poor mockery. He had grown cynical and sneering.
Bah! Why should he cling to his old ideals of truth and purity? What
need that he should strive to be worthy of visions such as they had
proved themselves? What was truth after all? What was purity, in the
end? What had either done for him, when he had striven after and
believed in them?
The accidental death of his cousin had made him a rich man, and he had
given himself up to his own caprices. He had seen the world, and lived
a lifetime during the last few years. What had there been to hold him
back? Not love. He had done with that, he told himself. Not hope of any
quiet bliss to come. If he ever married, he should marry some woman who
knew what she was taking when she accepted what he had to offer.
And then he had gradually drifted into his artistic and literary
pursuits, and his success had roused his vanity. He would be something
more than the rest; and, incited by this noble motive, and his real
love for the work, he had made himself something more. He had had no
higher incentive than this vanity, and a fancy for popularity. It was
not unpleasant to be pointed out as a genius--a man who, having no need
to labor, had the whim to labor as hard when the mood seized, as the
poorest Bohemian among them, and who would be paid for his work, too.
“They will give me praise for nothing,” he would say, sardonically.
“They won’t give me money for nothing. As long as they will pay me, my
work means something. When it ceases to be worth a price, it is not
worth my time.”
The experience of this evening had been a bad thing altogether for
Anstruthers. It had roused in him much of sleeping evil. His meeting
with Lisbeth Crespigny had been, as he told her, wholly unexpected. And
because it had been unexpected, its effect had double force. He did not
want to see her. If he had been aware of her presence in the house he
was going to visit, he would have avoided it as he would have avoided
the plague. The truth was, that in these days she had, in his mind,
become the embodiment of all that was unnatural, and hard, and false.
And meeting her suddenly, face to face, every bitter memory of her
had come back to him with a fierce shock. When he had turned, as Mrs.
Despard spoke, and had seen her standing in the doorway, framed in, as
it were, with vines and flowers, and tropical plants, he had almost
felt that he could turn on his heel and walk out of the room without a
word of explanation. She would know well enough what it meant. Being
the man he was, his eye had taken in at a glance every artistic effect
about her; and she was artistic enough; for when Lisbeth Crespigny
was not artistic she was nothing. He saw that the promise of her own
undeveloped girlhood had fulfilled itself after its own rare, peculiar
fashion, doubly and trebly. He saw in her what other men seldom
saw at first sight, but always learned afterward, and his sense of
repulsion and anger against her was all the more intense. Having been
such a girl, what might she not be as such a woman? Having borne such
blossoms, what could the fruit be but hard and bitter at the core? Only
his ever-ruling vanity saved him from greeting her with some insane,
caustic speech. Vanity will serve both men and women a good turn, by
chance, sometimes, and his saved him from making a blatant idiot of
himself--barely saved him. And having got through this, it was not
soothing to hear that she had stood, in her sly way, and looked at him
under her eyelashes, and laughed. He knew how she would laugh. He had
heard her laugh at people in that quiet fashion, when she was fifteen,
and the sound had always hurt him, through its suggestion of some
ungirlish satire he could not grasp, and which was not worthy of so
perfect a being as he deemed her.
So, he could not help breaking out again in new fury, when Bertie Lyon
explained himself. It did not matter so much, breaking out before Lyon.
Men could keep each other’s secrets. He flung his pipe aside with a
rough word, and began to pace the room.
“There is more of devil than woman in her,” he said. “There always was.
I’d give a few years of my life,” clenching his hand, “to be sure that
she would find her match some day.”
“I should think you would be match enough for her,” remarked Lyon,
astutely. “But what has she done to make _you_ so savage? When were
_you_ in love with a woman?”
“Never!” bitterly. “I was in love with her, and she never belonged to
the race, not even at fifteen years old. I was in love with her, and
she has been the ruin of me.”
“I should scarcely have thought it,” answered Lyon. “You are a pretty
respectable wreck, for your age.”
The young man was not prone to heroics himself, and not seeing his
friend indulge in them often, he did not regard them with enthusiasm.
This complacency checked Anstruthers. What a frantic fool he was, to
let such a trifle upset his boasted cynicism? He flung out another
short laugh of defiant self-ridicule. He came back to his chair as
abruptly as he had left it.
“Bah!” he said. “So I am. You are a wise boy, Lyon, and I am glad you
stopped me. I thought I had lived down all this sort of nonsense,
but--but I have seen that girl wear pansies before. Heart’s-ease, by
Jove! And it gave me a twinge to think of it. Keep that one in the
glass over there; keep it as long as you choose, my boy. It will last
as long as your fancy for her does, I wager. Women of the Crespigny
stamp don’t wear well. Here, hand me that bottle--Or stay! I’ll ring
for my man, and we will have some brandy and soda, to cool our heated
fancies. We are too young to stay up so late; too young and innocent!
We ought to have gone to bed long ago, like good boys.”