THE wise one sat at the window and looked out. The view commanded by
Bloomsbury Place was not a specially imposing or attractive one. Four
or five tall, dingy houses with solitary scrubby shrubs in their small
front slips of low-spirited looking gardens, four or five dingy and
tall houses without the scrubby shrubs in their small front slips of
low-spirited looking gardens, rows of Venetian blinds of various shades,
and one or two lamp-posts,--not much to enliven the prospect.
The inhabitants of the houses in Bloomsbury Place were not prone to
sitting at their front windows, accordingly; but this special afternoon,
the weather being foggy, Aimée finding herself alone in the parlor, had
left the fire just to look at this same fog, though it was by no means a
novelty. The house was very quiet. 'Toinette was out, and so was
Mollie, and Tod was asleep, lying upon a collection of cushions on the
hearth-rug, with two fingers in his mouth, his round baby face turned up
luxuriously to catch the warmth.
The wise one was waiting for Mollie, who had gone out a few hours before
to execute divers commissions of a domestic nature.
“She might have been back in half the time,” murmured the family sage,
who sat on the carpet, flattening her small features against the glass.
“She might have done what she has to do in _less_ than half the time,
but I knew how it would be when she went out. She is looking in at the
shop windows and wishing for things. I wish she would n't. People stare
at her so, and I don't wonder. I am sure I cannot help watching her
myself, sometimes. She grows prettier every day of her life, and she is
beginning to know that she does, too.”
Five minutes after this the small face was drawn away from the
window-pane with a sigh of relief.
“There she is now. What a time she has been! Who is with her, I wonder?
I cannot see whether it is Phil or Mr. Gowan, it is getting so dark. It
must be Mr. Gowan. 'Toinette would be with them if it was Phil.”
“Why, Mollie,” she exclaimed, when the door opened, “I saw somebody with
you, and I thought it was Mr. Gowan. Why did n't he come in? Don't waken
Tod.”
Mollie came in rather hurriedly, and going to the fire knelt down before
it, holding out her hands to warm them. Her cheeks were brilliant with
color and her eyes were bright; altogether, she looked a trifle excited.
“It was n't Mr. Gowan,” she answered. “Ugh! how cold it is,--not frosty,
you know, but that raw sort of cold, Aimée. I would rather have the
frost myself, would n't you?”
But Aimée was not thinking of the weather.
“Not Mr. Gowan!” she ejaculated. “Who was it, then?”
Mollie crept nearer to the fire and gave another little shudder.
“It was--somebody else,” she returned, with a triumphant little
half-laugh. “Guess who!”
“Who!” repeated Aimée. “Somebody else! It was not any one I know.”
“It was somebody Phil knows.”
The wise one arose and came to the fire herself.
“It was some one taller than Brown!”
“Brown!” echoed Mollie, with an air of supreme contempt. “He is _twice_
as tall. Brown is only about five feet high, and he wears an overcoat
ten times too big for him, and it flaps--yes, it _flaps_ about
his odious little heels. I should think it wasn't Brown. It was a
gentleman.”
The wise one regarded her pretty, scornful face dubiously.
“Brown is n't so bad as all that implies, Mollie,” she said. “His coat
is the worst part of him. But if it was n't Brown and it was n't Mr.
Gowan, who was it?”
Mollie laughed and shrugged her shoulders again, and then looked up at
her small inquisitor charmingly defiant.
“It was--Mr. Chandos!” she confessed.
Aimée gazed at her for a moment in blank amazement.
“But,” she objected, “you don't know him any more than I do. You
have only seen him once through the window, and you have never been
introduced to him.”
“I have seen him twice,” said Mollie. “Don't you recollect my telling
you that he picked up my glove for me the night I carried Dolly's dress
to Bra-bazon Lodge, and,” faltering a little and dropping her eyes, “he
introduced himself to me. He met me in town. I was passing through the
Arcade, and he stopped to ask about Phil. He apologized, of course, you
know, for doing it, but he said he was very anxious to know when Phil
would be at home, and--and perhaps I would be so kind as to tell him. He
wants to see him about a picture. And--then, you know, somehow or other,
he said something else, and--and I answered him--and he walked to the
gate with me.”
“He took a great liberty,” said Aimée. “And it was very imprudent in you
to let him come. I don't know what you could be thinking of. The idea of
picking up people in the street like that, Mollie; you must be crazy.”
“I could n't help it,” returned Mollie, not appearing at all disturbed.
“He knows Phil and he knows Dolly--a little. And he is very nice. He
wants to know us all. And he says Mr. Gowan is one of his best friends.
I liked him myself.”
“I dare say you did,” despairingly. “You are such a child. You would
like the man in the moon or a Kaffre chief--”
“That is not true,” interposed the delinquent. “I don't know about
the man in the moon. He might be well enough--at any rate, he would
be travelled and a novelty, but Kaffre chiefs are odious. Don't you
remember those we saw last winter?”
“Mollie,” said Aimée, “you are only jesting because you are ashamed of
yourself. You _know_ you were wrong to let that man come home with you.”
Then Mollie hung her head and made a lovely rebellious move.
“I don't care,” she said; “if it was n't exactly correct, it was nice.
But that is always the way,” indignantly, “nice things are always
improper.”
Here was a defection for you. The oracle quite shuddered in her discreet
disapproval.
“If you go on in that way,” she said, “you will be ending by saying that
improper things are always nice.”
“Never mind how I end,” observed the prisoner at the bar. “You have
ended by wakening Tod;” which remark terminated the conversation
somewhat abruptly.
A day or so later came Chandos--upon business, so he said, but he
remained much longer than his errand rendered necessary, and by some
chance or other it came to pass that Phil brought him into the parlor,
and introduced him to their small circle, in his usual amiable, informal
manner. Then he was to be seen fairly, and prepossessing enough he was.
Mollie, sitting in her corner in the blue dress, and looking exquisite
and guileless, was very demurely silent at first; but in due time Aimée
began to see that she was being gradually drawn out, and at last the
drawing out was such a success, subtle as it was, that she became quite
a prominent feature in the party, and made so many brilliant speeches
without blushing, that the family eyes began to be opened to the fact
that she was really a trifle older than she had been a few years ago,
after all. The idea had suggested itself to them faintly on one or two
occasions of late, and they were just beginning to grasp it, though
they were fully as much startled as they would have been if Tod had
unexpectedly roused himself from his infantile slumbers, and mildly but
firmly announced his intention of studying for the ministry or entering
a political contest.
Aimée was dumbfounded. She had not expected this. She was going to have
her hands full, it was plain. She scarcely wondered now at her discovery
of two evenings before. And then she glanced slyly across the room
again, and took it all in once more,--Mollie, bewitching in all the
novelty of her small effort at coquetry; Chandos, leading her on, and
evidently enjoying the task he had set himself intensely.
It was quite a new Mollie who was left to them after their visitor was
gone. There was a touch of triumph and excitement in the pretty flushed
face, and a ghost of defiance in the brown eyes. She was not quite sure
that young Dame Prudence would not improve the occasion with a short
homily.
So she was a trifle restless. First she stood at the window humming an
air, then she came to the table and turned over a few sketches, then she
knelt down on pretence of teasing Tod.
But impulse was too much for her. She forgot Tod in a few minutes
and fell into a sitting position, folding her hands idly on the blue
garment.
“I knew he would come,” she said, abstractedly. Then Dame Prudence
addressed her.
“Did you?” she remarked. “How did you?”
She started and blushed up to her ears.
“How?” she repeated. “Oh, I knew!”
“Perhaps he told you he would,” put in Dame P. “Did he?”
“Aimée,” was the rather irrelevant reply, rather suddenly made, “do you
like him?”
“I never judge people,” primly enunciated, “upon first acquaintance.
First impressions are rarely to be relied upon.”
“That 's a nice speech,” in her elder sister's most shockingly flippant
manner, “and it sounds well, but I have heard it before--thousands of
times. People always say it when they want to be specially disagreeable,
and would like to cool you down. There is the least grain of Lady
Augusta in you, Aimée.”
“And considering that Lady Augusta is the most unpleasant person we
know, _that_ is a nice speech,” returned the oracle.
“Oh, well, I only said 'a grain,' and a grain is not much.”
“It is quite enough.”
“Well,” amiably, “suppose we say half a grain.”
“Suppose we say you are talking nonsense.”
Mollie's air was Dolly's own as she answered her,--people always said
she was like Dolly, despite the fact that Dolly was not a beauty at all.
“There may be something in that,” she said.
“Suppose we admit it and return to the subject. Do you think he is nice,
Aimée?”
“Do you?”
“Yes, I do,” but without getting rose-colored this time.
Aimée looked at her calmly, but with some quiet scrutiny in her glance.
“As nice,” she put it to her,--“as nice as Ralph Gowan?”
She grew rose-colored then in an instant up to her ears again and over
them, and she turned her face aside and plucked at the hearth-rug with
nervous fingers.
“Well?” suggested Aimée.
“He is as handsome and--as tall, and he dresses as well.”
“Do you like him as well?” said Aimée.
“Ye-es--no. I have not known him long enough to tell you.”
“Well,” returned Aimée, “let me tell you. As I said before, I do not
think it wise to judge people from first impressions, but this I do
know, _I_ don't like him as I like Mr. Gowan, and I never shall. He is
not to be relied upon, that Gerald Chandos; I saw it in his eyes.”
And she set her chin upon her hand, and her small, round, fair face
covered itself all at once with an anxious cloud.
She kept a quiet watch upon Mollie after this, and in the weeks that
followed she was puzzled, and not only puzzled, but baffled outright
many a time. This first visit of Mr. Gerald Chandos was not his last.
His business brought him again and again, and when the time came that he
had no pretence of business, he was on sufficiently familiar terms with
them all to make calls of pleasure. So he did just as Ralph Gowan had
done, slipped into his groove of friend and acquaintance unobtrusively,
and was made welcome as other people were,--just as any sufficiently
harmless individual would have been under the same circumstances.
There was no dragon of high renown to create social disturbances in
Vagabondia.
“As long as a man behaves himself, where's the odds?” said Phil; and no
one ever disagreed with him.
But Mr. Gerald Chandos had not been to the house more than three times
before Aimée found cause to wonder. She discovered that Ralph Gowan was
not so enthusiastically attached to him, after all; and furthermore
she had her reasons for thinking that Gowan was rather disturbed at
his advent, and would have preferred that he had not been adopted so
complacently.
“If Dolly was at home,” she said to herself, “I should be inclined to
fancy he was a trifle jealous; and if he cared just a little more for
Mollie, I might think he was jealous; but Dolly is away, and though he
is fond of Mollie, and thinks her pretty, he does n't care for her in
that way exactly, so there must be some other reason. He is not the sort
of person to have likes or dislikes without reason.”
In her own sage style she approved of Ralph Gowan just as she approved
of Griffith. And then, as I have said, Mollie puzzled her. It was
astonishing how the child altered, and how she began to bloom out, and
adopt independent, womanly airs and graces. She took a new and important
position in the household. From her post of observation the wise one
found herself looking on with a smile sometimes, there was such a
freshness in her style of enacting the _rôle_ of beauty. She struck
Phil's friends dumb now and then with her conscious power, and the
unhappy Brown suffered himself to be led captive without a struggle.
“Her 'prentice han' she tried on Brown,” Dolly had said, months before,
in a wretched attempt at parody; and certainly the tortures of Brown
were prolonged and varied. But it was her manner toward Chandos that
puzzled Aimée. Perhaps she was a trifle proud of his evident
admiration; at all events, she seemed far from averse to it, and the
incomprehensible part of the affair was that sometimes she allowed him
to rival even Ralph Gowan.
“And yet,” commented Aimée, “she likes Ralph Gowan better. She never can
help blushing and looking conscious when he comes or when he talks to
her, and she is as cool as Dolly when she finds herself with Chandos. It
is very odd.”
It was not so easy to manage her as it used to be, Ralph Gowan
discovered. She was growing capricious and fanciful, and ready to take
offence. If they were left alone together, she would change her mood
every two minutes. Sometimes she would submit to his old jesting,
gallant speeches quite humbly and shyly for a while, and then she would
flame out all at once in anger, half a woman's and half a child's. He
was inclined to fancy now and then that she had never forgiven him for
his first interference on the subject of Gerald Chandos, for at the
early part of the acquaintance he did interfere, as he had promised
Dolly he would.
“I am not glad to see that fellow here, Mollie,” he had said, the first
night he met him at the house.
She stood erect before him, with her white throat straight, and a spark
in her eyes.
“What fellow?” she asked.
“Chandos,” he answered, coolly and briefly.
“Oh!” she returned. “How is it that when one man dislikes another he
always speaks of him as 'that fellow'? I know some one who always refers
to you as 'that fellow.'”
“Do you?” dryly, as before. He knew very well whom she meant.
“_I_ am glad to see 'that fellow' here,” she went on. “He is a
gentleman, and he is n't stupid. No one else comes here who is so
amusing. I am tired of Brown & Company.”
“Ah!” he answered, biting his lip. He felt the rebuff, if it was
only Mollie who gave it. “Very well then, if you are tired of Brown &
Company, and would prefer to enter into partnership with Chandos, it is
none of my business, I suppose. I will give you one warning, however,
because I promised your sister to take care of you.” Her skin flamed
scarlet at that. “That fellow is not a gentleman exactly, and he is a
very dangerous acquaintance for any woman to make.”
“He is a friend of yours,” she interrupted.
“That is a natural mistake on your part,” he replied,--“natural, but
still a mistake. He is _not_ a friend of mine. As I before observed, he
is not exactly a gentleman--not to put too fine a point upon it--from a
moral point of view. We won't discuss the matter further.”
They had parted bad friends that night. Mollie was restive under his
cool decisiveness for various reasons; he was irritated because he felt
he had failed, and had lost ground instead of gaining it. So sometimes
since, he had fancied that she had not wholly forgiven him, and yet
there were times when she was so softly submissive that he felt himself
in some slight danger of being as much touched and as fairly bewitched
as he was when Dolly turned her attention to him. Still she was
frequently far from amiable, and upon more than one occasion he found
her not precisely as polite as she might have been.
“You are not as amiable, Mollie,” he said to her once, “as you used
to be. We were very good friends in the old days. I suppose you are
outgrowing me. I should be afraid to offer you a bunch of camellias now
as a token of my affection.”
He smiled down at her indolently as he said it, and before he had
finished he began to feel uncomfortable. Her eyelids drooped and her
head drooped, and she looked sweetly troubled.
“I know I am not as good as I used to be,” she admitted. “I know it
without being told. Sometimes,” very suddenly, “I think I must be
growing awfully wicked.”
“Well,” he commented, “at least one must admit that is a promising state
of mind, and augurs well for future repentance.”
She shook her head.
“No, it doesn't,” she answered him, “and that is the bad side of it. I
am getting worse every day of my life.”
“Is it safe,” he suggested, cynically,--“is it safe for an innocent
individual to cultivate your acquaintance? Would it not be a good plan
to isolate yourself from society until you feel that the guileless ones
may approach you without fear of contamination? You alarm me.”
She lifted up her head, her eyes flashing.
“_You_ are safe,” she said; “so it is rather premature to cry 'wolf' so
soon.”
“It is very plain that you are outgrowing me,” he returned. “Dolly
herself could not have made a more scathing remark.”
But, fond as he was of tormenting her, he did not want to try her
too far, and so he endeavored to make friends. But his efforts at
reconciliation were not a success. She was not to be coaxed into her
sweet mood again; indeed she almost led him to fear that he had wounded
her irreparably by his jests. And yet, when he at last consulted his
watch, and went to the side-table for his hat and gloves, he turned
round to find her large eyes following him in a wistful sort of way.
“Are you going?” she asked him at length, a half-reluctant appeal in her
voice.
“I am due at Brabazon Lodge now,” he answered.
She said no more after that, but relapsed into silence, and let him go
without making an effort to detain him, receiving his adieus in her most
indifferent style.
But she was cross and low-spirited when he was gone, and Aimée, coming
into the room with her work, found her somewhat hard to deal with, and
indeed was moved to tell her so.
“You are a most inexplicable girl, Mollie,” she said. “What crotchet is
troubling you now?”
“No crotchet at all,” she answered, and then all at once she got up and
stood before the mantel-glass, looking at herself fixedly. “Aimée,” she
said, “if you were a man, would you admire me?”
Aimée gave her a glance, and then answered her with sharp frankness.
“Yes, I should,” she said.
She remained standing for a few minutes, taking a survey of herself,
front view, side view, and even craning her pretty throat to get a
glimpse of her back; and then a pettish sigh burst from her, and she sat
down again at her sister's feet, clasping her hands about her knees in a
most unorthodox position.
“I should like to have a great deal of money,” she said after a while,
and she frowned as she said it.
“That is a startling observation,” commented Aimée, “and shows great
singularity of taste.”
Mollie frowned again, and shrugged one shoulder, but otherwise gave the
remark small notice.
“I should like,” she proceeded, “to have a carriage, and to live in a
grand house, and go to places. I should like to marry somebody rich.”
And having blurted out this last confession, she looked half ashamed of
herself.
“Mollie,” said Aimée, solemnly dropping her hands and her work upon her
lap, “I am beginning to feel as Dolly does; I am beginning to be afraid
you are going to get yourself into serious trouble.”
Then this overgrown baby of theirs, who had so suddenly astonished
them all by dropping her babyhood and asserting herself a woman, said
something so startling that the wise one fairly lost her breath.
“If I cannot get what I want,” she said, deliberately, “I will take what
I can get.”
“You are going out of your mind,” ejaculated Aimée.
“It does n't matter if I am,” cried the romantic little goose,
positively crushing the oracle by breaking down all at once, and
flinging herself upon the hearthrug in a burst of tears,--“it does n't
matter if I am. Who cares for _me_?”