Miss Churchill came to the rescue.
"The Duc de Mersch means our friend, your aunt," she explained. I had an
unpleasant sensation. Through fronds of asparagus fern I caught the eyes
of Gurnard fixed upon me as though something had drawn his attention. I
returned his glance, tried to make his face out. It had nothing
distinctive in its half-hidden pallid oval; nothing that one could seize
upon. But it gave the impression of never having seen the light of day,
of never having had the sun upon it. But the conviction that I had
aroused his attention disturbed me. What could the man know about me? I
seemed to feel his glance bore through the irises of my eyes into the
back of my skull. The feeling was almost physical; it was as if some
incredibly concentrant reflector had been turned upon me. Then the
eyelids dropped over the metallic rings beneath them. Miss Churchill
continued to explain.
"She has started a sort of _Salon des Causes Perdues_ in the Faubourg
Saint Germain." She was recording the vagaries of my aunt. The Duc
laughed.
"Ah, yes," he said, "what a menagerie--Carlists, and Orleanists, and
Papal Blacks. I wonder she has not held a bazaar in favour of your White
Rose League."
"Ah, yes," I echoed, "I have heard that she was mad about the divine
right of kings."
Miss Churchill rose, as ladies rise at the end of a dinner. I followed
her out of the room, in obedience to some minute signal.
We were on the best of terms--we two. She mothered me, as she mothered
everybody not beneath contempt or above a certain age. I liked her
immensely--the masterful, absorbed, brown lady. As she walked up the
stairs, she said, in half apology for withdrawing me.
"They've got things to talk about."
"Why, yes," I answered; "I suppose the railway matter has to be
settled." She looked at me fixedly.
"You--you mustn't talk," she warned.
"Oh," I answered, "I'm not indiscreet--not essentially."
The other three were somewhat tardy in making their drawing-room
appearance. I had a sense of them, leaning their heads together over the
edges of the table. In the interim a rather fierce political dowager
convoyed two well-controlled, blond daughters into the room. There was a
continual coming and going of such people in the house; they did with
Miss Churchill social business of some kind, arranged electoral
rarée-shows, and what not; troubled me very little. On this occasion
the blond daughters were types of the sixties' survivals--the type that
unemotionally inspected albums. I was convoying them through a volume of
views of Switzerland, the dowager was saying to Miss Churchill:
"You think, then, it will be enough if we have...." When the door opened
behind my back. I looked round negligently and hastily returned to the
consideration of a shining photograph of the Dent du Midi. A very
gracious figure of a girl was embracing the grim Miss Churchill, as a
gracious girl should virginally salute a grim veteran.
"Ah, my dear Miss Churchill!" a fluting voice filled the large room, "we
were very nearly going back to Paris without once coming to see you. We
are only over for two days--for the Tenants' Ball, and so my aunt ...
but surely that is Arthur...."
I turned eagerly. It was the Dimensionist girl. She continued talking to
Miss Churchill. "We meet so seldom, and we are never upon terms," she
said lightly. "I assure you we are like cat and dog." She came toward me
and the blond maidens disappeared, everybody, everything disappeared. I
had not seen her for nearly a year. I had vaguely gathered from Miss
Churchill that she was regarded as a sister of mine, that she had, with
wealth inherited from a semi-fabulous Australian uncle, revived the
glories of my aunt's house. I had never denied it, because I did not
want to interfere with my aunt's attempts to regain some of the family's
prosperity. It even had my sympathy to a small extent, for, after all,
the family was my family too.
As a memory my pseudo-sister had been something bright and clear-cut and
rather small; seen now, she was something that one could not look at for
glow. She moved toward me, smiling and radiant, as a ship moves beneath
towers of shining canvas. I was simply overwhelmed. I don't know what
she said, what I said, what she did or I. I have an idea that we
conversed for some minutes. I remember that she said, at some point,
"Go away now; I want to talk to Mr. Gurnard."
As a matter of fact, Gurnard was making toward her--a deliberate, slow
progress. She greeted him with nonchalance, as, beneath eyes, a woman
greets a man she knows intimately. I found myself hating him, thinking
that he was not the sort of man she ought to know.
"It's settled?" she asked him, as he came within range. He looked at me
inquiringly--insolently. She said, "My brother," and he answered:
"Oh, yes," as I moved away. I hated the man and I could not keep my eyes
off him and her. I went and stood against the mantel-piece. The Duc de
Mersch bore down upon them, and I welcomed his interruption until I saw
that he, too, was intimate with her, intimate with a pomposity of
flourishes as irritating as Gurnard's nonchalance.
I stood there and glowered at them. I noted her excessive beauty; her
almost perilous self-possession while she stood talking to those two
men. Of me there was nothing left but the eyes. I had no mind, no
thoughts. I saw the three figures go through the attitudes of
conversation--she very animated, de Mersch grotesquely _empressé_,
Gurnard undisguisedly saturnine. He repelled me exactly as grossly
vulgar men had the power of doing, but he, himself, was not that--there
was something ... something. I could not quite make out his face, I
never could. I never did, any more than I could ever quite visualise
hers. I wondered vaguely how Churchill could work in harness with such a
man, how he could bring himself to be closeted, as he had just been,
with him and with a fool like de Mersch--I should have been afraid.
As for de Mersch, standing between those two, he seemed like a country
lout between confederate sharpers. It struck me that she let me see,
made me see, that she and Gurnard had an understanding, made manifest to
me by glances that passed when the Duc had his unobservant eyes turned
elsewhere.
I saw Churchill, in turn, move desultorily toward them, drawn in, like a
straw toward a little whirlpool. I turned my back in a fury of jealousy.