LIKE SHIPS UPON THE SEA
Be as one that knoweth, and yet holdeth his tongue.
“And, of course, you know every one in the room?” Dora was saying to her
cousin as the orchestra struck suddenly into “God bless the Prince of
Wales.”
“Good gracious, no!” Miss Mazerod replied; and both young ladies stood up
to curtsey to the Royal party.
It was the great artistic _soirée_ of the year, and crowds of nobodies
jostled each other in their mad desire to deceive whosoever might be
credulous into the belief that they were somebodies.
“Of course,” said Dora, when they were seated again, and the strains of
the Welsh air had been suppressed “by desire,” “they may be very great
swells; I have no doubt they are in their particular way; but they do not
look it.”
Miss Mazerod looked round critically.
“Some of them,” she said, “are frame-makers, a good many of them, with
big bills in high places. Others are actresses--very great actresses off
the stage. Do you see that tall girl there, with a supercilious
expression which she does not know is apt to remind one of a housemaid
scorning a milkman's love on the area steps? She is a great actress, who
will not take small engagements, and is not offered large ones. She is an
actress 'pour se faire photographier.'”
“And this is the cream of London society?” said Dora, looking round her
with considerable amusement.
“Society,” returned her cousin, “is not allowed to stand for cream now.
It is stirred up with a spoon, silver-gilt, and the skim milk gets
hopelessly mixed up with the cream. That young man who is now talking to
the actress person is not what he looks. He is, as a matter of fact, the
scion of a noble house, who models in clay atrociously.”
“And the gorgeous person he is turning his back upon?”
“One of his models.”
“Of clay?”
“Essentially so.”
And Miss Mazerod broke off into a happy laugh. Hers was not the
bitterness of plainness or insignificance, but something infinitely more
suggestive. It was, indeed, not bitterness at all, but light-hearted
contempt, which is, perhaps, the deepest contempt there is.
“Who is the wretched woman with no backbone draped in rusty black?” asked
Dora.
“My dear! That is one of the great lady artists of the age. She lectures
to factory girls or something, and she paints limp females snuffling over
tiger-lilies. Her ideal woman has that sort of droop of the throat--I
imagine she-tries to teach it to the factory. She objects to backbone.”
Miss Mazerod, who possessed a very firm little specimen of the adjunct
mentioned, drew herself up and smiled commiseratingly.
“Then,” said Dora, “I feel quite consoled about my sketches.”
For the first time Miss Mazerod looked serious.
“Dora,” she said, “I often wonder whether it would be profane to mention
in one's prayers a little gratitude for not having an artistic soul.
There are lots of women like that in the world, especially in London.
They pretend that they think themselves superior to men, but they know in
their hearts that they are inferior to women. For they have not something
that women ought to have--No, Dolly, no brown studies here; you must not
dream here!”
Dora, with a light laugh, came back from her mental wanderings to find
herself looking at a face which caught her attention at once. It was the
face of a man--brown, self-contained, with unhappy eyes and a long
drooping nose.
“Who is _that_ man?” she inquired at once. “Now, he is quite different
from the rest. He is about the only person who is not furtively finding
out how much attention he has succeeded in attracting.”
“Yes, that is a man with a purpose.”
“What purpose?” inquired Dora.
“I don't know; I shouldn't think any one knows.”
“_He_ knows,” suggested Dora.
“Yes, _he_ knows.”
Miss Mazerod was looking at the mechanism of her fan with a demure
expression on lips shaped for happiness. A dark young man was elbowing
his way through the mixed crowd towards them.
“What is his name?” asked Dora, who was still looking at the man with a
purpose.
“General Seymour Michael.”
“The Indian man?”
“Yes.”
There was a little pause, during which Miss Mazerod glanced in the
direction of the younger man, who had been detained by a stout lady with
a purple dress and a depressed daughter.
“I should like to know him,” said Dora.
“Nothing easier,” replied her cousin, still absorbed in the fan. “I know
him quite well.”
“He is looking at you now.”
Miss Mazerod looked up and bowed with a little jerk, as if she felt too
young to be stately; one of those bows that say “Come here.”
At this moment the younger man came up and shook hands effusively with
Dora, slowly with Miss Mazerod.
“Jack,” said that young lady, “I have just beamed on General Michael, who
is behind you. I want to introduce him to Dora.”
Jack seemed to think this an excellent idea, and stepped aside with
alacrity.
Seymour Michael came forward with his pleasant smile. He certainly was
one of the most distinguished-looking men in the room, with a brilliant
ribbon across his breast, and that smart, well-brushed general effect
which stamps the successful soldier.
“When did you come back to England?” inquired Edith Mazerod, whose father
had worked with this man in India.
“I--oh! I have been home six months,” he replied, shaking hands with a
subtle _empressemant_ which was more effective than words.
“On leave?”
“No. Laid on the shelf.”
He stood upright, drawing himself up with ironical emphasis, as if to
show as plainly as possible that there were many years of life and work
in him yet.
Edith Mazerod laughed, the careless passing laugh of inattention.
“Dora,” she said, “may I introduce General Michael? My cousin.”
She rose, and Seymour Michael prepared to take the vacant seat. The youth
called Jack was making signs with his eyebrows, and in attempting to
decipher his meaning she forgot to mention Dora's name.
“You will be sorry for this,” said Seymour Michael, sitting down. “You
will not thank your cousin.”
“Why?” inquired Dora, prepared to like him, possibly because he had a
brown face and wore his hair cut short.
“Because,” he replied, “I am hopelessly new to this work.”
“So am I,” replied Dora; “I don't even know what pictures to look at and
what to ignore. So I dare not look at the walls at all.”
“That is precisely my position, only I am worse. You know how to behave
in polite circles; I don't. You have a slightly tired look, as if this
sort of thing wearied you by reason of its monotony.”
“Have I? I am sorry for that.”
“No, there is no reason to be sorry. They all have it.”
“But,” protested Dora, “I am not one of them. I am only aping the
Romans.”
“You do it well; I shall study your method. You do it better than Edith
Mazerod.”
“Edith is young--hopelessly, enviably young. Do you know them well?”
“Yes, I knew them in India.”
“Of course; I forgot.”
He turned and looked at her sharply. Sometimes his own reputation, far
from being a happiness, gave him cause for misgiving. A man with an
unclean record cannot well be sure that all the details he would wish
suppressed have been suppressed. There was a little pause, during which
they both watched the self-satisfied throng moving in and out, here and
there, full of a restless desire to be observed.
It was Seymour Michael who spoke first. True to his mixed blood, he
sought to make himself safe.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but Edith Mazerod did not mention your name; may I
ask it?”
“Dora Glynde!”
She saw him start. She saw a sudden wavering gleam in his eyes which in
another man she would have set down to fear.
“Miss Dora Glynde,” he repeated; and the expression of his face was so
serene again that the look which had passed away from it began already to
present itself to her memory as a conception of her own brain.
“When I was younger and shyer,” he said, with a singular haste, “I was
afraid to ask a lady her name when I did not catch it, and--and I
frequently regretted not having had the courage to do so.”
She recollected it all afterwards--every word, every pause. But then, as
so frequently happens, knowledge aided her memory, and added significance
to every detail.
“Are you staying with the Mazerods?” he asked.
“Yes, I am being shown life. I am doing a season. To-night is part of my
education. To-morrow, I believe, we go to Hurlingham; the next day to a
charity bazaar, and so on. I believe I am getting on very well. Aunt Mary
is pleased with me. But I still stare about me, and show visible
disappointment when I am presented to a literary celebrity or some other
person of newspaper renown.”
“Celebrities in the flesh _are_ disappointing.”
“Not only that, but I find that many of them are just a little common.
Not quite what we in the country call gentlemen.”
“Ah! Miss Glynde, you forget that Art rises superior to class
distinctions.”
“Yes, but artists don't; and artists' wives don't rise at all. I think
you are to be congratulated. In your profession there are fewer persons
'superior to class distinction.'”
This was a subject which Seymour Michael dreaded. He was ignorant of how
much Dora might know. He had suspected from the first that Jem Agar's
desire that she should know the truth had been a mere matter of
sentiment; but the fact of meeting her at this public festivity, gay and
in colours, shook this theory from its foundation. He disliked Edith
Mazerod, because he suspected that his own early career had probably been
discussed in her hearing, and her easy lightness of heart was to him as
incomprehensible as it was suspicious. Dora he rather feared without
knowing why.
“I suppose you know India well?” she said, looking straight in front of
her.
“Too well,” was the reply, with a sharp sidelong glance.
He was right. At that moment Dora might have been one of these
_habituées_ of rout and ballroom. She was very pale and looked tired out.
“I went out there thirty years ago,” he continued, “into the Mutiny. From
that time to this India has been killing my friends.”
There was a little pause. She knew that in the natural course of events
it was almost certain that this man knew Jem personally. It would have
been easy to mention his name; but the wound was too fresh, her heart was
too sore to bear the sting of hearing him discussed.
For a second Seymour Michael hovered on the brink. His lips almost framed
the name. Good almost triumphed over evil.
And the girl sitting there--broken-hearted, quiet and strong, as only
women can be--never knew how near she was. Sometimes it seems as if the
cruelty of fate were unnecessary, as if the word too little or the word
too much, which has the power to alter a whole life, were withheld or
spoken merely to further a Providential experiment.
“Yes,” said Michael, “I hate India.”
And the spell was broken, the moment lost for ever. Seymour Michael had
kept silence, and elsewhere, perhaps, at that very moment his doom was
spoken. Who can tell? We are offered chances--we are, if you will, the
puppets of an experiment--and surely there must be a moment which
decides.
Dora was conscious of having miscalculated her own strength. She had led
him on to the dangerous ground, but it was with relief that she saw him
step back. She did not dare to lead him to it again.
It was not long before he left her, on the timely arrival of another
friend.
The introduction brought about by Miss Mazerod did not seem to have been
an entire success, for they parted gravely and without a word expressing
the hope of meeting again. And yet Dora liked him, for he was strong and
purposeful, such as she would have had all men. She wanted to know more
of him. She wanted to be admitted further into the knowledge which she
knew to be his.
Seymour Michael was conscious of a feeling of discomfort, no less
disquieting by reason of its vagueness. He had a nervous sensation of
being surrounded by something--something in the nature of a chain,
piecing itself together, link by link--something that was slowly closing
in upon him.