It was affirmed at an early stage of this narrative that he was a young
man of a contemplative and speculative turn, and he had perhaps never
been more true to his character than during an hour or two that
evening as he sat by himself on the terrace of the Conversation-house,
surrounded by the crowd of its frequenters, but lost in his meditations.
The place was full of movement and sound, but he had tilted back his
chair against the great green box of an orange-tree, and in this easy
attitude, vaguely and agreeably conscious of the music, he directed his
gaze to the star-sprinkled vault of the night. There were people coming
and going whom he knew, but he said nothing to any one--he preferred to
be alone; he found his own company quite absorbing. He felt very happy,
very much amused, very curiously preoccupied. The feeling was a singular
one. It partook of the nature of intellectual excitement. He had a
sense of having received carte blanche for the expenditure of his wits.
Bernard liked to feel his intelligence at play; this is, perhaps, the
highest luxury of a clever man. It played at present over the whole
field of Angela Vivian’s oddities of conduct--for, since his visit in
the afternoon, Bernard had felt that the spectacle was considerably
enlarged. He had come to feel, also, that poor Gordon’s predicament was
by no means an unnatural one. Longueville had begun to take his friend’s
dilemma very seriously indeed. The girl was certainly a curious study.
The evening drew to a close and the crowd of Bernard’s fellow-loungers
dispersed. The lighted windows of the Kursaal still glittered in
the bosky darkness, and the lamps along the terrace had not been
extinguished; but the great promenade was almost deserted; here and
there only a lingering couple--the red tip of a cigar and the vague
radiance of a light dress--gave animation to the place. But Bernard
sat there still in his tilted chair, beneath his orange-tree; his
imagination had wandered very far and he was awaiting its return to the
fold. He was on the point of rising, however, when he saw three figures
come down the empty vista of the terrace--figures which even at a
distance had a familiar air. He immediately left his seat and, taking
a dozen steps, recognized Angela Vivian, Blanche Evers and Captain
Lovelock. In a moment he met them in the middle of the terrace.
Blanche immediately announced that they had come for a midnight walk.
“And if you think it ‘s improper,” she exclaimed, “it ‘s not my
invention--it ‘s Miss Vivian’s.”
“I beg pardon--it ‘s mine,” said Captain Lovelock. “I desire the credit
of it. I started the idea; you never would have come without me.”
“I think it would have been more proper to come without you than with
you,” Blanche declared. “You know you ‘re a dreadful character.”
“I ‘m much worse when I ‘m away from you than when I ‘m with you,” said
Lovelock. “You keep me in order.”
The young girl gave a little cry.
“I don’t know what you call order! You can’t be worse than you have been
to-night.”
Angela was not listening to this; she turned away a little, looking
about at the empty garden.
“This is the third time to-day that you have contradicted yourself,” he
said. Though he spoke softly he went nearer to her; but she appeared not
to hear him--she looked away.
“You ought to have been there, Mr. Longueville,” Blanche went on. “We
have had a most lovely night; we sat all the evening on Mrs. Vivian’s
balcony, eating ices. To sit on a balcony, eating ices--that ‘s my idea
of heaven.”
“With an angel by your side,” said Captain Lovelock.
“You are not my idea of an angel,” retorted Blanche.
“I ‘m afraid you ‘ll never learn what the angels are really like,” said
the Captain. “That ‘s why Miss Evers got Mrs. Vivian to take rooms over
the baker’s--so that she could have ices sent up several times a day.
Well, I ‘m bound to say the baker’s ices are not bad.”
“Considering that they have been baked! But they affect the mind,”
Blanche went on. “They would have affected Captain Lovelock’s--only he
has n’t any. They certainly affected Angela’s--putting it into her head,
at eleven o’clock, to come out to walk.”
Angela did nothing whatever to defend herself against this ingenious
sally; she simply stood there in graceful abstraction. Bernard was
vaguely vexed at her neither looking at him nor speaking to him; her
indifference seemed a contravention of that right of criticism which
Gordon had bequeathed to him.
“I supposed people went to bed at eleven o’clock,” he said.
Angela glanced about her, without meeting his eye.
“They seem to have gone.”
Miss Evers strolled on, and her Captain of course kept pace with her; so
that Bernard and Miss Vivian were left standing together. He looked at
her a moment in silence, but her eye still avoided his own.
“You are remarkably inconsistent,” Bernard presently said. “You take a
solemn vow of seclusion this afternoon, and no sooner have you taken it
than you proceed to break it in this outrageous manner.”
She looked at him now--a long time--longer than she had ever done
before.
“This is part of the examination, I suppose,” she said.
Bernard hesitated an instant.
“What examination?”
“The one you have undertaken--on Mr. Wright’s behalf.”
“What do you know about that?”
“Ah, you admit it then?” the girl exclaimed, with an eager laugh.
“I don’t in the least admit it,” said Bernard, conscious only for the
moment of the duty of loyalty to his friend and feeling that negation
here was simply a point of honor.
“I trust more to my own conviction than to your denial. You have engaged
to bring your superior wisdom and your immense experience to bear upon
me! That ‘s the understanding.”
“You must think us a pretty pair of wiseacres,” said Bernard.
“There it is--you already begin to answer for what I think. When Mr.
Wright comes back you will be able to tell him that I am ‘outrageous’!”
And she turned away and walked on, slowly following her companions.
“What do you care what I tell him?” Bernard asked. “You don’t care a
straw.”
She said nothing for a moment, then, suddenly, she stopped again,
dropping her eyes.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, very gently; “I care a great deal. It ‘s
as well that you should know that.”
Bernard stood looking at her; her eyes were still lowered.
“Do you know what I shall tell him? I shall tell him that about eleven
o’clock at night you become peculiarly attractive.”
She went on again a few steps; Miss Evers and Captain Lovelock had
turned round and were coming toward her.
“It is very true that I am outrageous,” she said; “it was extremely
silly and in very bad taste to come out at this hour. Mamma was not at
all pleased, and I was very unkind to her. I only wanted to take a turn,
and now we will go back.” On the others coming up she announced this
resolution, and though Captain Lovelock and his companion made a
great outcry, she carried her point. Bernard offered no opposition. He
contented himself with walking back to her mother’s lodging with her
almost in silence. The little winding streets were still and empty;
there was no sound but the chatter and laughter of Blanche and her
attendant swain. Angela said nothing.
This incident presented itself at first to Bernard’s mind as a sort
of declaration of war. The girl had guessed that she was to be made
a subject of speculative scrutiny. The idea was not agreeable to her
independent spirit, and she placed herself boldly on the defensive. She
took her stand upon her right to defeat his purpose by every possible
means--to perplex, elude, deceive him--in plain English, to make a fool
of him. This was the construction which for several days Bernard put
upon her deportment, at the same time that he thought it immensely
clever of her to have guessed what had been going on in his mind. She
made him feel very much ashamed of his critical attitude, and he did
everything he could think of to put her off her guard and persuade her
that for the moment he had ceased to be an observer. His position at
moments seemed to him an odious one, for he was firmly resolved that
between him and the woman to whom his friend had proposed there should
be nothing in the way of a vulgar flirtation. Under the circumstances,
it savoured both of flirtation and of vulgarity that they should even
fall out with each other--a consummation which appeared to be more or
less definitely impending. Bernard remarked to himself that his own only
reasonable line of conduct would be instantly to leave Baden, but I
am almost ashamed to mention the fact which led him to modify this
decision. It was simply that he was induced to make the reflection that
he had really succeeded in putting Miss Vivian off her guard. How he had
done so he would have found it difficult to explain, inasmuch as in one
way or another, for a week, he had spent several hours in talk with her.
The most effective way of putting her off her guard would have been to
leave her alone, to forswear the privilege of conversation with her, to
pass the days in other society. This course would have had the drawback
of not enabling him to measure the operation of so ingenious a policy,
and Bernard liked, of all the things in the world, to know when he was
successful. He believed, at all events, that he was successful now, and
that the virtue of his conversation itself had persuaded this keen
and brilliant girl that he was thinking of anything in the world but
herself. He flattered himself that the civil indifference of his manner,
the abstract character of the topics he selected, the irrelevancy of
his allusions and the laxity of his attention, all contributed to this
result.
Such a result was certainly a remarkable one, for it is almost
superfluous to intimate that Miss Vivian was, in fact, perpetually in
his thoughts. He made it a point of conscience not to think of her, but
he was thinking of her most when his conscience was most lively. Bernard
had a conscience--a conscience which, though a little irregular in
its motions, gave itself in the long run a great deal of exercise; but
nothing could have been more natural than that, curious, imaginative,
audacious as he was, and delighting, as I have said, in the play of his
singularly nimble intelligence, he should have given himself up to a
sort of unconscious experimentation. “I will leave her alone--I will be
hanged if I attempt to draw her out!” he said to himself; and meanwhile
he was roaming afield and plucking personal impressions in great
fragrant handfuls. All this, as I say, was natural, given the man and
the situation; the only oddity is that he should have fancied himself
able to persuade the person most interested that he had renounced his
advantage.
He remembered her telling him that she cared very much what he should
say of her on Gordon Wright’s return, and he felt that this declaration
had a particular significance. After this, of her own movement, she
never spoke of Gordon, and Bernard made up his mind that she had
promised her mother to accept him if he should repeat his proposal, and
that as her heart was not in the matter she preferred to drop a veil
over the prospect. “She is going to marry him for his money,” he said,
“because her mother has brought out the advantages of the thing. Mrs.
Vivian’s persuasive powers have carried the day, and the girl has made
herself believe that it does n’t matter that she does n’t love him.
Perhaps it does n’t--to her; it ‘s hard, in such a case, to put one’s
self in the woman’s point of view. But I should think it would matter,
some day or other, to poor Gordon. She herself can’t help suspecting it
may make a difference in his happiness, and she therefore does n’t wish
to seem any worse to him than is necessary. She wants me to speak well
of her; if she intends to deceive him she expects me to back her up.
The wish is doubtless natural, but for a proud girl it is rather an odd
favor to ask. Oh yes, she ‘s a proud girl, even though she has been
able to arrange it with her conscience to make a mercenary marriage. To
expect me to help her is perhaps to treat me as a friend; but she ought
to remember--or at least I ought to remember--that Gordon is an older
friend than she. Inviting me to help her as against my oldest friend--is
n’t there a grain of impudence in that?”
It will be gathered that Bernard’s meditations were not on the whole
favorable to this young lady, and it must be affirmed that he was
forcibly struck with an element of cynicism in her conduct. On the
evening of her so-called midnight visit to the Kursaal she had suddenly
sounded a note of sweet submissiveness which re-appeared again at
frequent intervals. She was gentle, accessible, tenderly gracious,
expressive, demonstrative, almost flattering. From his own personal
point of view Bernard had no complaint to make of this maidenly
urbanity, but he kept reminding himself that he was not in question and
that everything must be looked at in the light of Gordon’s requirements.
There was all this time an absurd logical twist in his view of things.
In the first place he was not to judge at all; and in the second he was
to judge strictly on Gordon’s behalf. This latter clause always served
as a justification when the former had failed to serve as a deterrent.
When Bernard reproached himself for thinking too much of the girl, he
drew comfort from the reflection that he was not thinking well. To let
it gradually filter into one’s mind, through a superficial complexity
of more reverent preconceptions, that she was an extremely clever
coquette--this, surely, was not to think well! Bernard had luminous
glimpses of another situation, in which Angela Vivian’s coquetry should
meet with a different appreciation; but just now it was not an item to
be entered on the credit side of Wright’s account. Bernard wiped his
pen, mentally speaking, as he made this reflection, and felt like a
grizzled old book-keeper, of incorruptible probity. He saw her, as
I have said, very often; she continued to break her vow of shutting
herself up, and at the end of a fortnight she had reduced it to
imperceptible particles. On four different occasions, presenting himself
at Mrs. Vivian’s lodgings, Bernard found Angela there alone. She made
him welcome, receiving him as an American girl, in such circumstances,
is free to receive the most gallant of visitors. She smiled and talked
and gave herself up to charming gayety, so that there was nothing
for Bernard to say but that now at least she was off her guard with
a vengeance. Happily he was on his own! He flattered himself that he
remained so on occasions that were even more insidiously relaxing--when,
in the evening, she strolled away with him to parts of the grounds of
the Conversation-house, where the music sank to sweeter softness and
the murmur of the tree-tops of the Black Forest, stirred by the warm
night-air, became almost audible; or when, in the long afternoons, they
wandered in the woods apart from the others--from Mrs. Vivian and the
amiable object of her more avowed solicitude, the object of the sportive
adoration of the irrepressible, the ever-present Lovelock. They were
constantly having parties in the woods at this time--driving over
the hills to points of interest which Bernard had looked out in
the guide-book. Bernard, in such matters, was extremely alert and
considerate; he developed an unexpected talent for arranging excursions,
and he had taken regularly into his service the red-waistcoated
proprietor of a big Teutonic landau, which had a courier’s seat behind
and was always at the service of the ladies. The functionary in the
red waistcoat was a capital charioteer; he was constantly proposing
new drives, and he introduced our little party to treasures of romantic
scenery.