[Illustration]
I
EUSTACE DAMIER bent his long, melancholy profile over
the photograph-album. It was an old-fashioned album; its faded morocco
cover, its gilt clasp loosened with age, went with the quiet
old-fashioned little room, that had no intentions, made no efforts, and
yet was full of meaning, with the charm of an epoch near enough to be
easily understood, yet with a grace and a pathos in its modern antiquity
deeper than that possessed by a more romantic remoteness. It was the
sort of little drawing-room where one's mother might have accepted one's
father: one could not quite see one's present in it, but one saw a near
and a dear past. The gray wall-paper with its flecked gold flower, the
curved lines of the sedately ornamental chairs and sofas, the crisp yet
faded chintzes, the wedded vases on the marble mantelpiece, the books,
well worn, on stands, the group of family silhouettes on the wall, the
cheerful floral carpet--all made a picture curiously unlike the early
nineties, and fully characteristic of the sixties. There were many
flowers about the room, arranged with a cheerful regularity; the very
roses looked old-fashioned in their closely grouped bunches; and in a
corner stood a tall étagère bearing potted plants in rows that narrowed
to an apex. Between curtains, carefully drawn, of white lace and green
rep, one saw a strip of garden brilliantly illuminated with sunlight.
It was in just such a room and in such surroundings that Damier had
imagined seeing again his old friend, and his mother's friend, Mrs.
Mostyn. He always associated her with a sprightly conservatism. With a
genial, yet detached, appreciation of modern taste, she would be
placidly faithful to the taste of her girlhood. The house, he
remembered, had been her mother's, and its contents had probably
remained as they were when her mother's death put her in possession of
it. He remembered Mrs. Mostyn's caps, her cameos, her rings, her
bracelet with the plaited hair in it, her jests, too, and her
gaieties--all with a perfume of potpourri, with a niceness and
exactitude of simile that had not attempted to keep pace with the
complexities, the allusiveness and elusiveness, of modern humor.
Mrs. Mostyn had lived for many years in this small country house; she
had entered it as a childless widow after a life of some color and
movement, her husband having been a promising diplomat, whose death in
early middle age had cut short a career that had not yet found an
opportunity of rising from promise to any large achievement. After his
death Mrs. Mostyn devoted herself to books, to her garden, her poor
people, and her friends. Her house was not adapted to a large
hospitality, but one of these friends was usually with her. Damier,
however, was only paying a call. He had never visited Mrs. Mostyn; she
had visited his mother in London, and since his mother had died he had
been little in England. Now he was staying with the Halbournes, eight
miles away.
The atmosphere of the room, as he waited, the stillness of the warm,
fragrant garden outside, combined to make a half-tender, half-melancholy
mood, in which an impression, quickly felt, is long remembered. Such an
impression awaited him in the old photograph-album. It had been natural
to see there his mother's gentle, thoughtful face--first of a
round-cheeked girl, looking like a Thackeray heroine, and, later, the
face he knew so well, fatigued, sad, yet smiling under gray hair;
natural to see his father, with dreaming eyes and the fine head of the
thinker; to see aunts and uncles, his dead sister, and himself: but it
was with the half-painful, half-joyous shock of something wholly
unfamiliar, wholly arresting, strongly significant, that he came upon
the photograph of an unknown lady. It was a faded carte-de-visite, and
the small lettering on the cardboard edge spoke of Paris and of some
bygone photographer. The lady was portrayed in a conventional pose and
without modern accessories, leaning one arm in its sleeve of flowing
silk on the back of a high chair, a hand hanging, half hidden, against
the folds of her silken skirt. She was dressed after the fashion of the
late sixties, in that of the Second Empire; yet, though her dress spoke
of France, as the photograph had done, and spoke charmingly, her face
was not that of a French-woman. One's first impression--not too
superficial, either--was of a finished little _mondaine;_ but finished,
poised, serene as she was, she could not be more than twenty--indeed, as
Damier reflected, youth at that time was not a lengthy epoch, as in
ours. She was slender, the leaning bust and arm rounded, the hand long.
Her face was heart-shaped; the dark hair, parted over the forehead and
drawn up fully from the brows, emphasized the width across the eyes, the
narrowness of the face below; the lips were firm and delicate. Of her
eyes one saw chiefly the gaze and the darkness under a sweep of straight
eyebrow. And Damier had passed at once through these surface impressions
to an essential one: her head was the most enchanting he had ever seen,
and her eyes, as they looked at him, had a message for him. Man of the
modern world as he was, he stood looking back at this dim, enchanting
face; stood trying to interpret its message over the chasm made by more
than two decades; stood wondering what she meant to him. He was wrapped
in this sensation--of a spell woven about him, of an outstretching from
the past, of something mysterious and urgent--when Mrs. Mostyn came in.