After luncheon at the Crisfords'--the big Sunday banquets of twenty
people and a dozen courses--the men, lingering a little in the
dining-room, dawdling among displaced chairs and dropped napkins while
the ladies rustled away, ended by shuffling in casual pairs up to the
studio, where coffee was served and where, presently, before the
cigarettes were smoked out, Mrs. Crisford always reappeared to usher in
her contingent. The studio was high and handsome, and luncheon at the
Crisfords' was, in the common esteem, more amusing than almost anything
else in London except dinner. It was Bohemia with excellent
service--Bohemia not debtor but creditor. Upstairs the pictures,
finished or nearly finished, and arranged in a shining row, gave an
obviousness of topic, so that conversation could easily touch bottom.
Maurice Glanvil, who had never been in the house before, looked about
and wondered; he was struck with the march of civilization--the rise of
the social tide. There were new notes in English life, which he caught
quickly with his fresh sense; during his long absence--twenty years of
France and Italy--all sorts of things had happened. In his youth, in
England, artists and authors and actors--people of that general
kind--were not nearly so "smart." Maurice Glanvil was forty-nine to-day,
and he thought a great deal of his youth. He regretted it, he missed it,
he tried to beckon it back; but the differences in London made him feel
that it had gone forever. There might perhaps be some sudden
compensation in being fifty, some turn of the dim telescope, some view
from the brow of the hill; it was a round, gross, stupid number, which
probably would make one pompous, make one think one's self venerable.
Meanwhile at any rate it was odious to be forty-nine. Maurice observed
the young now more than he had ever done; observed them, that is, as the
young. He wished he could have had a son, to be twenty with again; his
daughter was only eighteen, but fond as he was of her he couldn't live
instinctively into her girlishness. It was not that there was not plenty
of it, for she was simple, sweet, indefinite, without the gifts that the
boy would have had, the gifts--what had become of them now?--that he
himself used to have.
The youngest person present, before the ladies came in, was the young
man who had sat next to Vera and whom, being on the same side of the
long table, he had not had under his eye. Maurice noticed him now,
noticed that he was very good-looking, fair and fresh and clean,
impeccable in his straight smoothness; also that apparently knowing none
of the other guests and moving by himself about the studio with visible
interest in the charming things, he had the modesty of his age and of
his position. He had however something more besides, which had begun to
prompt this observer to speak to him in order to hear the sound of his
voice--a strange, elusive resemblance, lost in the profile but
flickering straight out of the full face, to someone Maurice had known.
For a minute Glanvil was worried by it--he had a sense that a name would
suddenly come to him if he should see the lips in motion; but as he was
on the point of laying the ghost by an experiment Mrs. Crisford led in
her companions. His daughter was among them, and in company, as he was
constantly anxious about her appearance and her attitude, she had at
moments the faculty of drawing his attention from everything else. The
poor child, the only fruit of his odd, romantic union, the _coup de
foudre_ of his youth, with her strangely beautiful mother, whose own
mother had been a Russian and who had died in giving birth to her--his
short, colourless, insignificant Vera was excessively, incorrigibly
plain. She had been the disappointment of his life, but he greatly
pitied her. Her want of beauty, with her antecedents, had been one of
the strangest tricks of fate; she was acutely conscious of it and, being
good and docile, would have liked to please. She did sometimes, to her
father's delight, in spite of everything; she had been educated abroad,
on foreign lines, near her mother's people. He had brought her to
England to take her out, to do what he could for her; but he was not
unaware that in England her manners, which had been thought very pretty
on the continent, would strike some persons as artificial. They were
exactly what her mother's had been; they made up to a certain extent for
the want of other resemblance. An extreme solicitude at any rate as to
the impression they might make was the source of his habit, in London,
of watching her covertly. He tried to see at a given moment how she
looked, if she were happy; it was always with an intention of
encouragement, and there was a frequent exchange between them of little
invisible affectionate signs. She wore charming clothes, but she was
terribly short; in England the girls were gigantic and it was only the
tallest who were noticed. Their manners, alas, had nothing to do with
it--many of them indeed hadn't any manners. As soon as he had got near
Vera he said to her, scanning her through his single glass from head to
foot:
"Who is the young man who sat next you? the one at the other end of the
room."
"I don't know his name, papa--I didn't catch it."
"Was he civil--did he talk to you?"
"Oh, a great deal, papa--about all sorts of things."
Something in the tone of her voice made him look with greater intensity
and even with greater tenderness than usual into her little dim green
eyes. "Then you're all right--you're getting on?"
She gave her effusive smile--the one that perhaps wouldn't do in
England. "Oh beautifully, papa--everyone's so kind."
She never complained, was a brave little optimist, full of sweet
resources; but he had detected to-day as soon as he looked at her the
particular shade of her content. It made him continue, after an
hesitation: "He didn't say anything about his relations--anything that
could give you a clue?"
Vera thought a moment. "Not that I can remember--unless that Mr.
Crisford is painting the portrait of his mother. Ah, there it is!" the
girl exclaimed, looking across the room at a large picture on an easel,
which the young man had just approached and from which their host had
removed the drapery that covered it. Maurice Glanvil had observed this
drapery, and as the artist unveiled the canvas with a flourish he saw
that he had been waiting for the ladies to show it, to produce a
surprise, a grand effect. Everyone moved toward it, and Maurice, with
his daughter beside him, recognised that the production, a portrait, was
striking, a great success for Crisford--the figure, down to the knees,
with an extraordinary look of life, of a tall, handsome woman of middle
age, in full dress, in black. Yet he saw it for the moment vaguely,
through a preoccupation, that of a discovery which he had just made and
which had recalled to him an incident of his youth--his juxtaposition,
in London, at a dinner, to a girl, insurmountably charmless to him, who
had fallen in love with him (so that she was nearly to die of it),
within the first five minutes, before he had even spoken; as he had
subsequently learned from a communication made him by his poor mother--a
reminder uttered with a pointless bitterness that he had failed to
understand and accompanied with unsuspected details, much later--too
late, long after his marriage and shortly before her death. He said to
himself that he must look out, and he wondered if poor Vera would also
be insurmountably charmless to the good-looking young man. "But what a
likeness, papa--what a likeness!" he heard her murmur at his elbow with
suppressed excitement.
"How can you tell, my dear, if you haven't seen her?"
"I mean to the gentleman--the son."
Everyone was exclaiming "How wonderfully clever--how beautiful!" and
under cover of the agitation and applause Maurice Glanvil had drawn
nearer the picture. The movement had brought him close to the young man
of whom he had been talking with Vera and who, with his happy eyes on
the painted figure, seemed to smile in acknowledgment of the artist's
talent and of the sitter's charm.
"Do you know who the lady is?" Maurice said to him.
He turned his bright face to his interlocutor. "She's my mother--Mrs.
Tregent. Isn't it wonderful?"
His eyes, his lips, his voice flashed a light into Glanvil's
uncertainty--the tormenting resemblance was simply a prolonged echo of
Fanny Knocker, in whose later name, precisely, he recognised the name
pronounced by the young man. Maurice Glanvil stared in some
bewilderment; this stately, splendid lady, with a face so vivid that it
was handsome, was what that unfortunate girl had become? The eyes, as if
they picked him out, looked at him strangely from the canvas; the face,
with all its difference, asserted itself, and he felt himself turning as
red as if he had been in the presence of the original. Young Tregent,
pleased and proud, had given way to the pressing spectators, placing
himself at Vera's other side; and Maurice heard the girl exclaim to him
in one of her pretty effusions: "How beautiful she must be, and how
amiable!"
"She is indeed--it's not a bit flattered." And while Maurice still
stared, more and more mystified--for "flattered, flattered!" was the
unspoken solution in which he had instantly taken refuge--his neighbour
continued: "I wish you could know her--you must; she's delightful. She
couldn't come here to-day--they asked her: she has people lunching at
home."
"I should be so glad; perhaps we may meet her somewhere," said Vera.
"If I ask her and if you'll let her I'm sure she'll come to see you,"
the young man responded. Maurice had glanced at him while the face of
the portrait watched them with the oddest, the grimmest effect. He was
filled with a confusion of feelings, asking himself half-a-dozen
questions at once. Was young Tregent, with his attentive manner, "making
up" to Vera? was he going out of his way in answering for his mother's
civility? Little did he know what he was taking on himself! Above all
was Fanny Knocker to-day this extraordinary figure--extraordinary in the
light of the early plainness that had made him bolt? He became conscious
of an extreme curiosity, an irresistible desire to see her.
"Oh, papa," said Vera, "Mr. Tregent's so kind; he's so good as to
promise us a visit from his mother."
The young man's friendly eyes were still on the child's face. "I'll tell
her all about you. Oh, if I ask her she'll come!" he repeated.
"Does she do everything you ask her?" the girl inquired.
"She likes to know my friends!"
Maurice hesitated, wondering if he were in the presence of a smooth
young humbug to whom compliments cost nothing, or in that of an
impression really made--made by his little fluttered, unpopular Vera. He
had a horror of exposing his child to risks, but his curiosity was
greater than his caution. "Your mother mustn't come to us--it's our duty
to go to her," he said to Mr. Tregent; "I had the honour of knowing
her--a long time ago. Her mother and mine were intimate friends. Be so
good as to mention my name to her, that of Maurice Glanvil, and to tell
her how glad I have been to make your acquaintance. And now, my dear
child," he added to Vera, "we must take leave."
During the rest of that day it never occurred to him that there might be
an awkwardness in his presenting himself, even after many years, before
a person with whom he had broken as he had broken with Fanny Knocker.
This was partly because he held, justly enough, that he had never
committed himself, and partly because the intensity of his desire to
measure with his own eyes the change represented--misrepresented
perhaps--by the picture was a force greater than any embarrassment. His
mother had told him that the poor girl had cruelly suffered, but there
was no present intensity in that idea. With her expensive portrait, her
grand air, her handsome son, she somehow embodied success, whereas he
himself, standing for mere bereavement and disappointment, was a failure
not to be surpassed. With Vera that evening he was very silent; she saw
him smoke endless cigarettes and wondered what he was thinking of. She
guessed indeed, but she was too subtle a little person to attempt to
fall in with his thoughts or to be willing to betray her own by asking
him random questions about Mrs. Tregent. She had expressed as they came
away from their luncheon-party a natural surprise at the coincidence of
his having known the mother of her amusing neighbour, but the only other
words that dropped from her on the subject were contained in a question
that, before she went to bed, she put to him with abrupt gaiety, while
she carefully placed a marker in a book she had not been reading.
"When is it then that we're to call upon this wonderful old friend?"
He looked at her through the smoke of his cigarette. "I don't know. We
must wait a little, to allow her time to give some sign."
"Oh, I see!" And Vera took leave of him with one of her sincere little
kisses.