I turned and, hardly conscious of my actions, stumbled from the room. A
bevy of young people at once surrounded me. What I said to them I hardly
know. I only remember that it was several minutes before I found myself
again alone and making for the little room into which Beaton had
vanished a half-hour before. It was the one given up to card-playing.
Did I expect to find him seated at one of the tables? Possibly; at all
events, I approached the doorway, and was about to enter, when a heavy
step shook the threshold before me, and I found myself confronted by the
advancing figure of an elderly lady, whose portrait it is now time for
me to draw. It is no pleasurable task, but one I cannot escape.
Imagine, then, a broad, weighty woman of not much height, with a face
whose features were usually forgotten in the impression made by her
great cheeks and falling jowls. If the small eyes rested on you, you
found them sinister and strange, but if they were turned elsewhere, you
asked in what lay the power of the face, and sought in vain amid its
long wrinkles and indeterminate lines for the secret of that spiritual
and bodily repulsion which the least look into this impassive
countenance was calculated to produce. She was a woman of immense means,
and an oppressive consciousness of this spoke in every movement of her
heavy frame, which always seemed to take up three times as much space as
rightfully belonged to any human creature. Add to this that she was
seldom seen without a display of diamonds which made her broad bust look
like the bejewelled breast of some Eastern idol, and some idea may be
formed of this redoubtable woman whom I have hitherto confined myself to
speaking of as _the gorgon_.
The stare she gave me had something venomous and threatening in it.
Evidently for the moment I was out of her books, and while I did not
understand in what way I had displeased her, for we always had met
amicably before, I seized upon this sign of displeasure on her part as
explanatory, perhaps, of the curtness and show of contradictory feelings
on the part of her dependent niece. Yet why should the old woman frown
on me? I had been told more than once that she regarded me with great
favour. Had I unwittingly done something to displease her, or had the
game of cards she had just left gone against her, ruffling her temper
and making it imperative for her to choose some object on which to vent
her spite? I entered the room to see. Two men and one woman stood in
rather an embarrassed silence about a table on which lay some cards,
which had every appearance of having been thrown down by an impatient
hand. One of the men was Will Beaton, and it was he who now remarked:
"She has just found out that the young people are enjoying themselves. I
wonder upon which of her two unfortunate nieces she will expend her
ill-temper to-night."
"Oh, there's no question about that," remarked the lady who stood near
him. "Ever since she has had a reasonable prospect of working Gilbertine
off her hands, she has devoted herself quite exclusively to her
remaining burden. I hear," she impulsively continued, craning her neck
to be sure that the object of her remarks was quite out of earshot,
"that the south hall was blue to-day with the talk she gave Dorothy
Camerden. No one knows what about, for the girl evidently tries to
please her. But some women have more than their own proper share of
bile; they must expend it on some one." And she in turn threw down her
cards, which up till now she had held in her hand.
I gave Beaton a look and stepped out on the veranda. In a minute he
followed me, and in the corner facing the ocean, where the vines cluster
the thickest, we held our conversation.