The crowd has lessened; the rooms are thinning now. A great actor
stands up to give a recitation. He selects one of Browning's poems.
Lady Etwynde, having heard it often before, withdraws into one of the
smaller rooms, a dainty little place, with the exquisite colouring
and artistic finish of a cameo, and with only that sort of moonlight
haze shed about it that she loves so much better than the garish
brilliancy of gas, or candles.
To this retreat saunters also the figure, on whose tall magnificent
proportions even the eyes of the feminine æsthetes have rested with
an admiration contrary to all the tenets of their school.
He seats himself beside Lady Etwynde.
"What a charming retreat," he says softly. "Do you know I wish you
would give me a little information about this 'æstheticism,' of which
you seem a high priestess? I confess I feel quite bewildered."
She smiles. She does not look up.
"Yes, I suppose it is new to you," she answers. "The worst of it is
that, like all new doctrines, it is being ruined by exaggeration.
Genuine æstheticism is, as of course you know, the science of beauty,
and its true perception and pursuit. Our school has its canons, its
doctrines, its schemes and projects, on which oceans of ridicule have
been poured and yet left it unharmed. It has done much good; it has
taught the poetry of colour and arrangement to a class whose dress
and abodes were simply appalling to people of taste. If you have
ever suffered from the gilded abominations of a millionaire's
drawing-room----"
Colonel Carlisle moves a little impatiently.
"But is this craze to regulate our lives, to be the great 'all' of
our existence? Are men and women to go about long-haired,
straight-gowned, tousled; jabbering 'intense' nonsense and gushing
over blue china and sunflowers; and is such an existence considered
elevating, manly, or useful? To me it seems as if I were looking on
at a pantomime."
"You are not educated yet," says Lady Etwynde, with a demure smile.
"Everything new has, of course, its opponents. You have read Plato?"
"When I was at school," answers the Colonel.
"Ah!" sighs Lady Etwynde. "And you have forgotten all he says about
artistic excellence and beauty; the relations of all physical and
moral and intellectual life to what is most perfect and intelligent;
how life should be filled with grace and dignity, the mind cultured
to its utmost capability, the body beautified by vital activity and
ennobled by a healthy and carefully taught appreciation of all that
is conducive to physical and mental perfection."
"Has it taken you thirteen years to learn all this?" asks Colonel
Carlisle softly, as he leans forward and looks into her eyes in the
silver haze of the lamplight.
She starts a little.
"You think I am so--changed?" she says, in her natural voice, and
discarding æsthetic languor.
"I think you are ten thousand times more beautiful, more captivating,
than when I knew you first. But--changed? Well, yes. Is your life
devoted only to the study of the Beautiful now?"
She colours softly.
"I think you do not quite understand," she says. "When a woman's
life is empty, something she must do to fill up the void. And I do
not think this pursuit is so very foolish as you seem to suppose."
"Only that John Bull has not much of the Hellenic type about him,"
says the Colonel, _sotto voce_.
"You see," she goes on, with sweet gravity, "moral beauty and
physical beauty have each their worshippers. We would weld the two
together, and so glorify art, literature, mind, physique--all that is
about and around our daily lives. But, as I said before, like all
new creeds, it is spoiled by the over-zealous, exaggerated by the
foolish, ridiculed by the surface judges. It is not the cultivation
of one thing only, but the cultivation of all that real æsthetics
would teach; leading, subduing, elevating the spiritual and poetic
capacity of our nature, and subordinating the crude and material."
"That sounds more sensible," says Colonel Carlisle. "But when I
heard in your rooms of symphonies of colour, and 'tones' of harmony,
and worship of some special make of china, and 'living up' to
peacocks' fans and feathers, I confess I thought the people were all
lunatics, to say the least of it, and marvelled how you could have
shared in such a lamentable creed and become a priestess of 'High
Art,' as interpreted by terra-cotta gowns, sage-green furniture, and
old china which seems to convert modern drawing-rooms into a memory
of kitchen dressers. Life may be full of emotions and 'thrills,' as
I heard a long-haired youth explaining in a dying voice, but such
life as this seemed to me, I must confess, a series of absurdities
such as no sensible mind could entertain."
"Those are the zealots and the exaggerators," smiles Lady Etwynde
amusedly. "They have spoilt much by carrying into extremes what is
only tolerable in moderation; by dragging in without warning what
really requires delicate and gradual preparation."
"I am glad that you are only moderate then," says her companion.
"Some one once said that there was a sphinx in our souls who was
perpetually asking us riddles. I confess I thought there was one in
mine when I met you to-night under such changed auspices."
"And what was the riddle?" asks Lady Etwynde.
He bends a little closer. "The _reason_, of course! You told me a
few moments ago that when a woman's life was empty she must do
something to fill up the void. Was yours so empty?"
It is a bold question; he wonders he has dared ask it. She turns
pale with--anger. Of course it is anger, and her eyes are flashing
under their long lashes, and words won't come because her heart is
hot and indignant. So he interprets her silence and murmurs
apologetically: "Forgive me; I had no right to make such a remark;
only, I have been such a miserable man since you sent me from your
side, that it seemed in some way to console me that you had not been
quite--happy, either."
"I suppose no one is that," she says, with a suspicious tremor in her
voice. "Something, or some one, is sure to spoil our lives for us."
He draws back. The shaft has hit home. He remembers only too well
who has spoilt the life of this woman beside him.
"Society is too artificial to content me," she goes on rapidly. "I
want something more than amusement. I like to think. I like
rational conversation. I like art, little as I can study or
understand its great teachings. I like all that elevates the mind,
and is beautiful to the senses; so I plunged headlong into the new
school, and it has interested and occupied me. Do not suppose I
consider it perfect by any means; but it has done much good--it will
do more. If you were interested in such things you might remember
the glaring colours, the brilliant hues that made one's eyes ache not
so very long ago. Look what lovely shades and tints we have now.
Women required to be educated to some sense of colour and fitness.
However plain or insignificant we may be, we may at least make our
defects less oppressive by taste and culture."
"There I quite agree with you," says Colonel Carlisle, wondering a
little how she manages always to evade personal topics and glide back
to the keynote of their conversation. "But you lack neither taste
nor culture; your words apply to quite a different class of persons.
And if æsthetics teach taste and appreciation of all that is
beautiful and cultured, why, in Heaven's name, do these people make
such guys of themselves?"
"I have told you twice already that every creed has its exaggerators."
"This creed seems to have more than its share then," he says
amusedly. "Your rooms are perfection, I allow--your toilette is like
a Greek poet's dream; but I confess I see no other like it."
"You are very kind to say so," she murmurs, with an inward
congratulation that fate had saved her from the terra-cotta gown
which, in a fit of "exaggeration," she had ordered. "But I wanted to
ask you about yourself. Our conversation seems very one-sided. Have
you returned to England for good?"
"I don't know," he says, somewhat embarrassed. "It will depend on
one or two things. I don't know if I am quite fit for civilized life
again. It seems to want the air, the freedom, the unconventionally,
the long nights spent under no roof but heaven's, the excitement of
sport that may mean death at any moment, the thrill of danger, the
hazard of battle--thirteen years of such a life make one rather
impatient of your effeminate doctrines, don't you think?"
"Yes," she says, with a little soft thrill at her heart at the ring
of the manly voice, at the look in the dark, fearless eyes; "I
suppose it does. But there is no need for you to follow the creed.
I was only explaining."
"And I don't seem to have heard half enough about it," he answers
seriously. "What, are you going?"
"I must," she says, rising from her seat. "The recitation is over.
What a pity you did not listen. Don't you like Browning?"
"I might if I could understand him," says the Colonel, rising also
and looking somewhat disturbed at the interruption to their
conversation. "I always sympathize with that unfortunate man in 'The
Golden Butterfly'; do you remember? The American who sits up all
night to study Browning's works because he expects him to dinner."
Lady Etwynde laughs.
"Yes, poor fellow, and he set himself such an easy task. He meant to
read through the _whole_ collection in the course of one evening.
Though Americans pride themselves on doing 'big things,' I fancy that
was rather beyond him. By the way, do you like Americans? I will
introduce you to a charming girl if you do, and she is not one of the
æsthetic school, so you needn't be alarmed that she will afflict you
with 'art jargon.'"
"I shall be very happy," murmured the Colonel, "only, really----"
"Oh, no excuses," says Lady Etwynde. "There she is, that pretty girl
opposite. You mustn't make love to her, though, for she is engaged.
Her _fiancé_ is not here to-night. That is her aunt beside her; she
is quite a character in her way."
Colonel Carlisle feels no ambition to be introduced either to the
"beauty" or the character, but he does not like to say so, and he is
soon bowing before the radiant little figure of "Dresden China." She
looks at him with undisguised admiration. The "big man" has
attracted the attention of most feminine eyes to-night--all the more
perhaps because he looks so indifferent, so bored, so unadmiring.
Pretty and bewitching as "Dresden China" is, the Colonel seems to
feel no inclination to pay her compliments. He stands and listens to
her chatter with the sort of amused indulgence he would bestow on any
pretty girl. He thinks what a pity the American twang is so strong,
and how vulgar is the aunt, and marvels what the _fiancé_ is like,
and why he is not now beside his lady-love. And all the time he
cannot keep his restless glance from following the floating movements
of that graceful figure in her creamy draperies of Indian silk. His
heart echoes the poet's words unconsciously:
There is none like her--none!
"What would I not give to know if she remembers still?" he says to
himself. "But I am a fool to imagine it possible. Why should she?
and how could she forgive the old sin now any more than in her young,
passionate, romantic girlhood? And yet--oh, my darling, if life has
taught you wisdom, you must surely know that love has nothing to do
with the soulless follies in which men find beguilement, nor is there
one thing on earth they loathe so utterly as an unworthy passion,
whose pursuit has been base, whose conquest wearied almost as soon as
achieved, whose every memory is a sting that shames them, and from
which their better nature recoils even in thought, once the evil
glamour is over."
But he did not know--how should he?--that it is just of that evil
glamour a woman's heart is jealous.
When Lady Etwynde had loved him, she had been almost a child--young,
fresh, innocent, pure. She had abandoned herself to that love
without thought or analysis. She had worshipped him as the noblest,
truest of God's creatures; she had thought that to him she was all in
all. No cloud had crossed the sky, no sound disturbed the illusion;
in its innocence and depth and peace, her love had been in its way as
perfect as it was beautiful; and then suddenly, without warning or
preparation of any sort, she had learnt that she was deceived.
Had she known more of the world, had she been in any way less
innocent of mind and thought, she would have known better than to
expect so much as she had expected. She would have learnt the lesson
all women have to learn, that their love must accept the evil of a
man's past as well as the good of his future, giving a simple
fidelity that asks no questions, and takes just what--remains.
But she had not known. Her dreams had been rudely broken; her faith
as rudely shaken. Angered, outraged, shamed, she had been stung to
the fierceness of jealous anger, and her love had looked debased in
her sight as in his own, because of the falsehoods told and credited.
How could she judge of the emptiness and weariness of a dead passion
that he had only longed to forget, that he dared not breathe to her
pure young ears? How should she reck of the soulless bondage from
which he thought himself free? She had been so proud, that his
excuses looked paltry to himself--an amorous infidelity that this
great, pure, trusting love had shamed and shown as the debasing,
selfish thing it was.
And she would hear nothing--nothing; and in his heart he could not
blame her.
"If she had loved me less she would have forgiven," he had said to
himself.
"The innocence of youth is cruel, because its ideals are so lofty,
its exactions so great. She thought me a hero, and now I look only a
beast!"
And he had left her. She would never forgive, he felt sure; and all
his pleas and excuses only humiliated him, and never touched her.
Desperate, maddened, hating himself and his old folly, whose burden
he could never in life shake off, so he had passed from her presence
and her knowledge for thirteen long years. And now he stood before
her again and thought of the past.
"Do tell, Colonel," says the shrill voice of the Dresden China figure
beside him. "Did you ever shoot a tiger out there in India, and is
it really so hot, and do the elephants come out at night and knock
all the houses down, and is there nothing but curry and rice to eat,
and are the ladies all yellow, and have you brought any 'punkahs' or
tigers' claws home with you, and did you know Captain Dasher of the
40th? He went out to Burmah last year."
Colonel Carlisle rouses himself, and looks at her bewildered. He
does not know how to begin answering her questions. Fortunately he
is saved the trouble.
"Why, aunt, there's Keith!" she exclaims suddenly. "He's come after
all. Excuse me, Colonel; that's the young man I'm going to marry.
Will you tell him I'm sitting here, and he's to come right along at
once?"
Colonel Carlisle bows, and retreats delighted.