Her mind had time to recover its balance.
It was a fortnight and more before she met Byam Warner. Lady Hunsdon,
to her secret wrath and amazement, met defeat with the poet himself.
He replied politely to her ladyship's flattering notes, but only to
remind her that he was very busy, that he had been a recluse for some
years, that he was too much out of health to be fit for the society
of ladies. The estimable Hunsdon, after one fruitless interview,
invariably found the poet from home when he called. "The massa" was
up in the hills. He was on St. Kitts. He was visiting relatives on
Antigua. Had he been in London he could not more successfully have
protected himself. Lord Hunsdon was a man of stubborn purpose, but he
could not search the closed rooms along the gallery.
But the poet's indifference to social patronage at least accomplished
one of the objects upon which Lady Hunsdon had set her heart. The
guests of Bath House, vaguely curious, or properly scandalised, at the
first, soon became quite feverish to meet the distinguished friend of
Lord Hunsdon. So rapidly does a fashion, a fad, leap from bulb to
blossom in idle minds, that before a fortnight was out even the young
men were anxious to extend the hand of good fellowship, while as for
the young ladies, they dreamed of placing his reformation to their own
private account, learned his less subtle poems by heart, and began to
write him anonymous notes.
Meanwhile, Anne, hoping that his purpose would prove of a consistency
with his habits, and determined to dismiss him from her thoughts,
found sufficient pleasure and distraction in her daily life. She made
her short skirts--several hemmed strips gathered into a belt!--and
walked about the island in the early morning. The negroes singing in
the golden cane fields, the women walking along the white road with
their swinging hips, immense baskets poised on their heads, pic'nees
trotting behind, or clinging to their flanks, the lonely odorous,
silent jungles in the high recesses, the cold fringe of forest close
to the lost crater, the house in which Nelson courted and married his
bride and the church in which the marriage certificate is still kept;
she visited them all and alone. In the afternoon she drove with her
aunt, their phaeton one of a gay procession, stopping sometimes at one
of the Great Houses, where she was taken by the young people out to
the mill to see the grinding and partake of "sling;" home in the cool
of the evening to dress for the long dinner and brilliant evening. She
would not dance, but she made several friends among the young men,
notably that accomplished lady-killer and _arbiter elegantiarum_, Mr.
Abergenny, so prosilient in the London of his day; and found herself
in a fair way to be disliked thoroughly by all the other young women
save Lady Mary Denbigh; who, somewhat to her embarrassment, showed a
distinct preference for her society, particularly when Lord Hunsdon
was in attendance. The men she liked better than she had believed
possible, estimating them by their suspiciously small waists, their
pinched feet, and hair so carefully curled and puffed out at the side;
but although Lord Hunsdon's attentions were now unmistakable, she
liked him none the better that she esteemed him the more, and was
glad of the refuge the admiration of the other men afforded her.
And then, without any preliminary sign of capitulation, Byam Warner
wrote to Lady Hunsdon announcing that he now felt sufficiently
recovered to pay his devoirs to one who had been so kind, apologised
for any apparent discourtesy, and asked permission to drink a dish of
tea with her on the following evening.
Lady Hunsdon was quite carried out of herself by this victory, for
there was a Lady Toppington at Bath House, whose husband was in the
present cabinet and a close friend of Peel. She had given the finest
ball of the season to signalise the return of the Tories to power, and
would have taken quick possession of the social reins had Lady Hunsdon
laid them down for a moment. Politics enjoyed a rest on Nevis, but
other interests loomed large in proportion, and the apparent defeat of
the hitherto invulnerable leader of _ton_ excited both joy and hope in
the breast of Lady Toppington and her little court. Now did Lady
Hunsdon sweep rivals aside with her flexible eyebrows, and on the
evening when she was able to announce her triumph, she was besieged
in her stately chair, not unlike a throne.
But she was deaf to hints and bolder hopes. She would not thrust a shy
young man, long a hermit, into a miscellaneous company when he had
come merely to drink tea with herself and son and a few intimate
friends. Later, of course, they should all meet him, but they must
possess their souls in patience. To this dictum they submitted as
gracefully as possible, but they were not so much in awe of Lady
Hunsdon as to forbear to peep from windows and sequestered nooks on
the following evening at nine o'clock, when Byam Warner emerged from
the palm avenue, ran hurriedly up the long flights of steps between
the terraces, and, escorted by Lord Hunsdon, who met him at the door,
up to the suite of his hostess.
Anne was standing in the deep embrasure of the window when he entered
the sitting-room, where she, in common with Lady Constance Mortlake,
Lady Mary Denbigh, Mrs. Nunn, and Miss Bargarny, who was a favourite
of Lady Hunsdon and would take no denial, had been bidden to do honour
to the poet. She heard Lady Hunsdon's dulcet icy tones greet him
and present him to her guests, the ceremonious responses of the
ladies--but not a syllable from Warner--before she steeled herself to
turn and walk forward. But the ordeal she had anticipated was still to
face. Warner did not raise his eyes as her name was pronounced. He
merely bowed mechanically and had the appearance of not having removed
his gaze from the floor since he entered the room. He was deathly
pale, and his lips were closely pressed as if to preserve their
firmness. Anne, emboldened by a shyness greater than her own, and
relieved of the immediate prospect of meeting his eyes, examined him
curiously after he had taken a chair and the others were amiably
covering his silence with their chatter. He had dressed himself in an
old but immaculate white linen suit with a high collar and small
necktie. It was evident that he had always been very thin, for his
clothes, unassisted by stays, fitted without a wrinkle, although his
shoulders were perhaps more bowed than when his tailor had measured
him. His hair was properly cut and parted, but although he was still
young, its black was bright with silver. His head and brow were nobly
formed, his set features fine and sensitive, but his thin face was
lined and gray. It was unmistakably the face of a dissipated man, but
oddly enough the chin was not noticeably weak, and the ideality of the
brow, and the delicacy of the nostril and upper lip were unaltered.
Nevertheless, and in spite of the suggestion of ease which still
lingered about his tall figure, there was something so abject about
his whole appearance, his painful self-consciousness at finding
himself once more among people that had justly cast him out was so
apparent, that Anne longed for an excuse to bid him go forth and hide
himself once more. But to dismiss him was the part of Lady Hunsdon,
who had no intention of doing anything of the sort. It is doubtful if
either she or any of the others saw aught in his bearing but the
natural embarrassment of a shy man at finding himself once more within
the enchanted circle. Lady Hunsdon expatiated upon the beauty of
Nevis, long familiar to her through his works, vowed that she had come
to the island only to see for herself how much he had exaggerated, but
was quite vanquished and speechless. Not to have met her son's most
valued friend would have blurred and flawed the wonderful experience.
Warner bowed gravely once or twice, but did not raise his eyes, to
Anne's continued relief: she dreaded what she must meet in them. If
the rest of his face was a ruin, what sinks of iniquity, what wells of
horror, must be those recording features? There were lines about them
and not from laughter! He looked as if he had never smiled. She pitied
him so deeply that she could have wept, for she had never seen an
unhappier mortal; but she had no desire to approach him further.
Miss Bargarny poured the tea, and when she passed his cup, roguishly
quoted a couplet from one of his poems; lines that had no reference to
tea--God knows, he had never written about tea--but which tripped from
her tongue so gracefully that they had the effect of sounding apropos.
He blushed slightly and bowed again; and shortly after, when all the
cups had been handed about and he had drained his own, seemed to
recover his poise, for he addressed a few remarks to Lady Hunsdon, at
whose right he sat. Anne, who was seated some distance from the table
could not even hear his voice, but Lady Hunsdon received such as he
ventured upon with so much _empressement_, that he manifestly rose in
courage; in a few moments he was extending his attention to Lady Mary
Denbigh, who leaned forward with an exalted expression shaded by
ringlets, raising her imperceptible bosom with an eloquent sigh. By
this time Lord Hunsdon was talking into Anne's ear and she could hear
nothing of the conversation opposite, although now and again she
caught a syllable from a low toneless voice. But his first agony was
passed as well as her own, and she endeavoured to forget him in her
swain's comments upon the political news arrived with the packet that
afternoon. When tea was over and Miss Bargarny, who cultivated
liveliness of manner, had engaged the poet in a discussion upon the
relative merits of Shelley and Nathaniel P. Willis--astonishingly
original on her part, mild to the outposts of indifference on
his--Anne followed Hunsdon to the other side of the room to look over
an album of his mother's, just unpacked. It contained calotypes of the
most distinguished men and women of the day, and Anne, who had barely
seen a daguerreotype before, and never a presentment of the famous
people of her time, became so absorbed that she forgot the poet to
whose spirit hers had been wedded these five years, and whose visible
part had sickened the very depths of her being. Lord Hunsdon had the
pleasure of watching her kindling eyes as he told her personal details
of each of his friends, and when Anne cried out that she was living in
a bit of contemporary history, he too flushed, and felt that his suit
prospered. But Anne was thinking as little of him as of Warner, and so
intent was she upon the ugly striking physiognomy of the author of
"Venetia," with his Byronic curls and flowing collar, that she was
hardly aware that Lord Hunsdon's attentions had been claimed by his
mother; who skilfully transferred him to the side of Lady Mary.
A moment later she turned abruptly and met the eyes of Warner. He
was sitting apart, and he was staring at her. It was not meeting his
eyes so suddenly that turned her hands to ice and made them shake as
she returned to the album, but the eyes themselves that looked out
from the ruin of his face. She had expected them to be sneering,
lascivious, bold, anything but what they were: the most spiritual and
at the same time the most tormented eyes that had ever been set in
the face of a mortal. She caught her breath. What could it mean? No
man could live the life he had lived--Lady Mary, who had a fine turn
for gossip, had told her all that Lord Hunsdon had left unsaid--and
keep his soul unspotted. It was marvellous, incredible. She recalled
confusedly something Hunsdon had said about his having a beautiful
character--well, that was originally, not after years of degradation.
Besides, Hunsdon was a fanatical enthusiast.
At this point she became aware that Warner was standing beside her,
but as she glanced up in a surprise that restored her self-possession,
he had averted his eyes, and embarrassment had claimed him again. She
was too much of a woman not to rush to the rescue.
[Illustration: "At this point she became aware that Warner was
standing beside her"]
"I have never seen anything so interesting!" she exclaimed with great
animation, "I am sure you will agree with me, although of course
you have met all these great people. Is not this process a vast
improvement upon the daguerreotype? And I am told they expect to do
better still. Have you read 'Venetia'? Do you remember that Disraeli
makes Lord Cadurcis--Byron--assert that Shakespeare did not write
his own plays? Fancy!"
"I never for a moment supposed that he did," replied Warner, evidently
grasping at a subject upon which he felt at home. "Nor did Byron. Nor,
I fancy, will a good many others, when they begin to think for
themselves--or study the Elizabethan era. I have never read any of
Disraeli's novels. Do you think them worth reading?"
He was looking at her now, still with that expression of a saint at
the stake, but obviously inattentive to her literary opinions. Before
she could answer he said abruptly:
"What a fine walker you are! I have never seen a woman walk as you do.
It is not the custom here, and even in England the ladies seemed far
too elegant to do more than stroll through a park."
"I am not at all elegant," replied Anne, smiling; "as my aunt will
tell you. I had to make myself some short skirts, and I get up at
unearthly hours to have my tramp and return in time to dress for
breakfast. But I have never met you."
"I have passed you several times, but of course you did not notice me.
I have a hut up in one of the jungles and I am always prowling about
at that hour in the morning." He hesitated, drew in his breath
audibly, and as he looked down again, the colour rose under his pallid
loose skin. "I came here to-day to meet you," he added.
For a moment Anne felt that she was going to faint. Good God! Had this
dreary outcast found his way to her castles in Spain? Could he _know_?
She was unable to articulate, and he went on.
"You must pardon me if that was too bold a thing to say--you are the
last person to whom I would give offence! But you have seemed to me
the very spirit of the fresh robust North. I have fancied I could see
the salt wind blowing about you. All the English creoles of this
island are like porcelain. The fine ladies that come to Bath House
take too much care of their complexions, doubtless of their pretty
feet--they all want to be beauties rather than women. That is the
reason you seem something of a goddess by contrast, and vastly
refreshing to a West Indian."
Anne drew a long breath as he blundered through his explanation.
She was relieved, but at the same time femininely conscious of
disappointment. Nor was there sentiment in his low monotonous voice.
He paid but the homage of weary man to vital youth.
"I am unfashionably healthy," she said, hoping that her eyes danced
with laughter at the idea of being likened to a goddess. She continued
with great vivacity, "How relieved I am that you have never noticed
the hang of my morning skirts. Ah, that is because you are a poet. But
I wish I could give you one-tenth of the pleasure, by my suggestion of
the North, that I derive from your wonderful tropics. Don't fancy that
I get up at five merely for the pleasure of exercise. My chief object
is to enjoy your island for a bit while all the rest of the world is
asleep. These last sixteen days have been the happiest of my life."
She brought out the last words somewhat defiantly, but she met his
gaze, still smiling.
"I am not surprised to learn that you are a poet. What else could be
expected--once I learned to pay compliments gracefully, but if I have
forgotten the art, I have not lost my power to admire and appreciate
beauty in any form. It has given me the greatest pleasure I have
known for years to watch you, and I thank you for coming to Nevis."
Anne by this time was accustomed to the high-flown compliments of
polite society, but she could not doubt the sincerity of this man, who
had no place in a world where idle flattery was the small coin of
talk. She blushed slightly and changed the subject, and as he talked,
less and less haltingly, of the traditions of Nevis, she watched his
eyes, fascinated. They were not the eyes of mere youth, any more than
of a man who had seen far too much of life. Neither, upon closer
inspection, were they the eyes of a saint or a martyr, although she
could better understand Hunsdon's estimate by picturing him born three
centuries earlier. But they were the eyes of the undying idealist, of
the inner vision, of a mental and spiritual life apart from the
frailties of the body. They seemed to look at her, intent as was his
gaze, as from a vast distance, from heights which neither she nor all
that respectable world that despised his poor shell could ever attain.
With it all there was no hint of superciliousness: the eyes were too
sad, too terribly wise in their own way for that; and his whole manner
went far beyond modesty; it had all the pitiable self-consciousness
of one that has fallen from the higher social plane. No common man, no
matter what his fame and offences, could lose his self-respect as this
poor gentleman had done. Anne, filled with a pity she had never known
was in her, exerted herself to divert his mind from the gulf which had
so long separated him from his class. She talked as she fancied other
women must have talked to him when he visited London in the first
flush of his youth and fame. She even began with "The Blue Sepulchre,"
which now no longer ranked with the best of his work, so far had he
progressed beyond the unlicensed imagination of youth. She told him
that she looked down from her balcony every morning expecting to see
the domes and towers of ancient cities rise from the sea. And, alas!
in the enthusiasm of her cause, before she could call a halt, she had
told him all that his poetry had meant to her in her lonely life by
the North Sea; in a few moments he was aware that she possessed every
volume he had written, knew every line by heart; and although she
caught herself up in time jealously to conceal the more portentous
meanings it had held for her, he heard enough to make his eyes kindle
at this delicious echo of his youth, coming from an innocent lovely
creature who had evidently heard little of his evil life.
"I knew that you came from the sea!" he exclaimed. "And the purple
rolling moors! How well I remember them, and longed to write of them.
But only these latitudes drive my pen. Indeed, I once tried to write
about the heather--the purple twilight--no figment of the poetical
fancy, that. The atmosphere at that hour literally is purple."
"When it _is_ purple! But you should see the moors in all their moods
as I have done. I rarely missed a day in winter, no matter how wild--I
have tramped half a day many a time. And I can assure you that the sea
itself cannot look more wild, more terrifying--with the wrack driving
overhead, and the rain falling in torrents, and the wind whistling
and roaring, and rushing past you as if called by the sea to some
frightful tryst, some horrible orgy of the elements, and striving to
tear you up and carry you with it. Still--still--perhaps it is as
beautiful--then--in its way, as in its season of colour and peace."
"Ah! I knew you would say that." He added in a moment, "You are the
only person that has quoted my lines to me that has not embarrassed me
painfully. For the moment I felt that you had written them, not I!"
"I often used to feel that I had; all, that is----" The magnet of
danger to the curiosity in her feminine soul was irresistible. "All
but your ode to the mate whom you never could find."
And then she turned cold, for she remembered the story of the woman
who had been his ruin. But he did not pale nor shrink; he merely
smiled and his eyes seemed to withdraw still farther away. "Ah! that
woman of whom all poets dream. Perhaps we really find her as we invoke
her for a bit with the pen." Then he broke off abruptly and looked
hard at her, his eyes no longer absent. "You--you----" he began. "Ten
years ago----" And then his face flushed so darkly that Anne laughed
gaily to cover the cold and horror that gripped her once more.
"Ten years ago? I was only twelve! And now--I am made to feel every
day that two-and-twenty is quite old. In three more years I shall be
an orthodox old maid. All the women in Bath House intimate that I am
already beyond the marriageable age."
"The men do not, I fancy!" The poet spoke with the energy of a man
himself. "Besides, I looked--happened to look--through the window of
the saloon one night and saw you talking to no less than four
gallants."
Here she turned away in insufferable confusion, and he, too, seemed to
realise that he had betrayed a deeper interest than he had intended.
With a muttered au revoir he left her, and when she finally turned her
head he was gone. Miss Bargarny was exclaiming:
"Well, dear Lady Hunsdon, he was quite delightful, genteel, altogether
the gentleman. Thank heaven I never heard all those naughty stories,
so I can admire without stint. Did you notice, Mary, how pleased he
was when I recited that couplet?"
"I saw that he was very much embarrassed," replied Lady Mary, who for
an elegiac figure had a surprising reserve of human nature. "It was
too soon to be personal with a poor man who has been out of the world
so long. But I think he enjoyed himself after the first embarrassment
wore off. I feel surer still," with an exalted expression turned
suddenly upon Lord Hunsdon, "that we shall rescue him. We must have
him here often, not lose a day of this precious time. Then we can
leave Nevis without anxiety, or perhaps induce him to go with us." She
reflected that were she mistress of Hunsdon Towers she should be quite
willing to give the famous poet a turret and pass as his mundane
redeemer.
Hunsdon moved toward her as if her enthusiasm were a magnet. "It has
all exceeded my fondest hopes," he exclaimed. "He was quite like his
old self before he left----"
"Thanks to Miss Percy," broke in a stridulous voice. "He was devoured
with ennui, to say nothing of shyness, until he summoned up courage to
talk to her, and then he seemed to me quite like any ordinary young
spark. I don't know that he quite forgot to be a poet," she concluded
with some gallantry, for she had taken a great fancy to Anne and was
determined to marry her brilliantly, "but he certainly ceased for a
few moments to look like a God-forsaken one. What were you talking
about, my dear?"
"_Dear_ Lady Constance--Oh, Nevis, and his poetry, for the most part."
"I should think he would be sick of both subjects. Come now, be frank.
Did not you get on the subject of your pretty self? I'll be bound he
has an eye for a fine girl as well as the best of them. You make Mary
and Lillian look like paper dolls."
"I do protest!" cried Miss Bargarny indignantly. "If he does it is
practically because he is a--lives in the country himself. If he lived
in London among people of the first fashion----"
"He'd admire her all the more. Look at the other beaux. Wait until
Miss Percy is in the high tide of a London season. You forget that if
girls are always on the catch, men are always ready for a change."
Miss Bargarny's black eyes were in flames, but she dared not provoke
that dreaded tongue further. She forced herself to smile as she turned
to Anne, standing abashed during this discussion of herself, and
longing to be alone with her chaotic thoughts. "Confess, dear Miss
Percy, that you did not talk about yourself, but about that most
fascinating of all subjects to man, _himself_. I believe you have
the true instinct of the coquette, in spite of your great lack of
experience, and that is a coquette's chiefest sugar-plum."
"I believe I did talk about himself--naturally, as I have always been
a great admirer of his work, and the very inexperience you mention
makes me seize upon such subjects as I know anything about."
Lady Mary went forward and put her arm about her new friend's waist.
"Let us take a turn in the orchard before it is time to retire," she
said. "I long to talk to you about our new acquaintance. Try to devise
a plan to bring him here daily," she said over her shoulder to the
complacent hostess; and to Lord Hunsdon, "Will you come for us in a
quarter of an hour?"
It was only of late that Lady Mary had determined to lay away in
lavender the luxury of sorrow. When a woman is thirty ambition looms
as an excellent substitute for romance, and there had been unexpected
opportunities to charm a wealthy peer during the past five weeks. She
hated poetry and thought this poet a horror, but he was an excellent
weapon in the siege of Hunsdon Towers. She was not jealous of Anne,
for she divined that Hunsdon's suit, if suit it were, was hopeless,
and believed that her new friend's good nature would help her to win
the prize of a dozen seasons. So she refreshed her complexion with
buttermilk and spirits of wine, and made love to Anne; who saw through
her manoeuvres but was quite willing to further them if it would
save herself the ordeal of refusing Lord Hunsdon.