It became easy after this for Althea to carry into effect all her
beneficent wishes. The friends who had taken Miss Buchanan to the
Riviera had gone on to London, leaving her alone in Paris for a week's
shopping, and there was no one else to look after her. She brought her
fruit and flowers and sat with her in all her spare moments. The feeling
of anxiety that had oppressed her on the evening of gloom when she had
first seen her was transformed into a soft and delightful perturbation.
As the unknown lady in black Miss Buchanan had indeed charmed as well as
oppressed her, and the charm grew while the oppression, though it still
hovered, was felt more as a sense of alluring mystery. She had never in
her life met any one in the least like Miss Buchanan. She was at once so
open and so impenetrable. She replied to all questions with complete
unreserve, but she had never, with all her candour, the air of making
confidences. It hurt Althea a little, and yet was part of the
allurement, to see that she was, probably, too indifferent to be
reticent. Lying on her pillows, a cigarette--all too frequently, Althea
considered--between her lips, and her hair wound in a heavy wreath upon
her head, she would listen pleasantly, and as pleasantly reply; and
Althea could not tell whether it was because she really found it
pleasant to talk and be talked to, or whether, since she had nothing
better to do, she merely showed good manners. Althea was sensitive to
every shade in manners, and was sure that Miss Buchanan, however great
her tact might be, did not find her a bore; yet she could not be at all
sure that she found her interesting, and this disconcerted her.
Sometimes the suspicion of it made her feel humble, and sometimes it
made her feel a little angry, for she was not accustomed to being found
uninteresting. She herself, however, was interested; and it was when she
most frankly owned to this, laying both anger and humility aside, that
she was happiest in the presence of her new acquaintance. She liked to
talk to her, and she liked to make her talk. From these conversations
she was soon able to build up a picture of Miss Buchanan's life. She
came of an old Scotch family, and she had spent her childhood and
girlhood in an old Scotch house. This house, Althea was sure, she really
did enjoy talking about. She described it to Althea: the way the rooms
lay, and the passages ran, and the queer old stairs climbed up and down.
She described the ghost that she herself had seen once--her
matter-of-fact acceptance of the ghost startled Althea--and the hills
and moors that one looked out on from the windows. Led by Althea's
absorbed inquiries, she drifted on to detailed reminiscence--the dogs
she had cared for, the flowers she had grown, and the dear red lacquer
mirror that she had broken. 'Papa did die that year,' she added, after
mentioning the incident.
'Surely you don't connect the two things,' said Althea, who felt some
remonstrance necessary. Miss Buchanan said no, she supposed not; it was
silly to be superstitious; yet she didn't like breaking mirrors.
Her brother lived in the house now. He had married some one she didn't
much care about, though she did not enlarge on this dislike. 'Nigel had
to marry money,' was all she said. 'He couldn't have kept the place
going if he hadn't. Jessie isn't at all a bad sort, and they get on very
well and have three nice little boys; but I don't much take to her nor
she to me, so that I'm not much there any more.'
'And your mother?' Althea questioned, 'where does she live? Don't you
stay with her ever?' She had gathered that the widowed Mrs. Buchanan was
very pretty and very selfish, but she was hardly prepared for the
frankness with which Miss Buchanan defined her own attitude towards her.
'Oh, I can't stand Mamma,' she said; 'we don't get on at all. I'm not
fond of rowdy people, and Mamma knows such dreadful bounders. So long as
people have plenty of money and make things amusing for her, she'll put
up with anything.'
Althea had all the American reverence for the sanctities and loyalties
of the family, and these ruthless explanations filled her with uneasy
surprise. Miss Buchanan was ruthless about all her relatives; there were
few of them, apparently, that she cared for except the English cousins
with whom she had spent many years of girlhood, and the Aunt Grizel who
made a home for her in London. To her she alluded with affectionate
emphasis: 'Oh, Aunt Grizel is very different from the rest of them.'
Aunt Grizel was not well off, but it was she who made Helen the little
allowance that enabled her to go about; and she had insured her life, so
that at her death, when her annuity lapsed, Helen should be sure of the
same modest sum. 'Owing to Aunt Grizel I'll just not starve,' said
Helen, with the faint grimace, half bitter, half comic, that sometimes
made her strange face still stranger. 'One hundred and fifty pounds a
year: think of it! Isn't it damnable? Yet it's better than nothing, as
Aunt Grizel and I often say after groaning together.'
Althea, safely niched in her annual three thousand, was indeed
horrified.
'One hundred and fifty,' she repeated helplessly. 'Do you mean that you
manage to dress on that now?'
'Dress on it, my dear! I pay all my travelling expenses, my cabs, my
stamps, my Christmas presents--everything out of it, as well as buy my
clothes. And it will have to pay for my rent and food besides, when Aunt
Grizel dies--when I'm not being taken in somewhere. Of course, she still
counts on my marrying, poor dear.'
'Oh, but, of course you _will_ marry,' said Althea, with conviction.
Miss Buchanan, who was getting much better, was propped high on her
pillows to-day, and was attired in a most becoming flow of lace and
silk. Nothing less exposed to the gross chances of the world could be
imagined. She did not turn her eyes on her companion as the confident
assertion was made, and she kept silence for a moment. Then she
answered placidly:
'Of course, if I'm to live--and not merely exist--I must try to, I
suppose.'
Althea was taken aback and pained by the wording of this speech. Her
national susceptibilities were again wounded by the implication that a
rare and beautiful woman--for so she termed Helen Buchanan--might be
forced, not only to hope for marriage, but to seek it; the implication
that urgency lay rather in the woman's state than in the man's. She had
all the romantic American confidence in the power of the rare and
beautiful woman to marry when and whom she chose.
'I am sure you need never try,' she said with warmth. 'I'm sure you have
dozens of delightful people in love with you.'
Miss Buchanan turned her eyes on her and laughed as though she found
this idea amusing. 'Why, in heaven's name, should I have dozens of
delightful people in love with me?'
'You are so lovely, so charming, so distinguished.'
'Am I? Thanks, my dear. I'm afraid you see things _en couleur de rose_.'
And, still smiling, her eyes dwelling on Althea with their indifferent
kindness, she went on: 'Have you delightful dozens in love with you?'
Althea did not desert her guns. She felt that the very honour of their
sex--hers and Helen's--was on trial in her person. She might not be as
lovely as her friend--though she might be; that wasn't a matter for her
to inquire into; but as woman--as well-bred, highly educated, refined
and gentle woman--she, too, was chooser, and not seeker.
'Only one delightful person is in love with me at this moment, I'm sorry
to say,' she answered, smiling back; 'but I've had very nearly my proper
share in the past.' It had been necessary thus to deck poor Franklin out
if her standpoint were to be maintained; and, indeed, could not one deem
him delightful, in some senses--in moral senses; he surely was
delightfully good. The little effort to see dear Franklin's goodness as
delightful rather discomposed her, and as Miss Buchanan asked no further
question as to the one delightful suitor, the little confusion mounted
to her eyes and cheeks. She wondered if she had spoken tastelessly, and
hastened away from this personal aspect of the question.
'You don't really mean--I'm sure you don't mean that you would marry
just for money.'
Miss Buchanan kept her ambiguous eyes half merrily, half pensively upon
her. 'Of course, if he were very nice. I wouldn't marry a man who wasn't
nice for money.'
'Surely you couldn't marry a man unless you were in love with him?'
'Certainly I could. Money lasts, and love so often doesn't.' Helen
continued to smile as she spoke.
There was now a tremor of pain in Althea's protest. 'Dear Miss Buchanan,
I can't bear to hear you speak like that. I can't bear to think of any
one so lovely doing anything so sordid, so miserable, as making a
_mariage de convenance_.' Tears rose to her eyes.
Miss Buchanan was again silent for a moment, and it was now her turn to
look slightly confused. 'It's very nice of you to mind,' she said; and
she added, as if to help Althea not to mind, 'But, you see, I am sordid;
I am miserable.'
'Sordid? Miserable? Do you mean unhappy?' Poor Althea gazed, full of her
most genuine distress.
'Oh no; I mean in your sense. I'm a poor creature, quite ordinary and
grubby; that's all,' said Miss Buchanan.
They said nothing more of it then, beyond Althea's murmur of now
inarticulate protest; but the episode probably remained in Miss
Buchanan's memory as something rather puzzling as well as rather
pitiful, this demonstration of a feeling so entirely unexpected that she
had not known what to do with it.
If, in these graver matters, she distressed Althea, in lesser ones she
was continually, if not distressing her, at all events calling upon her,
in complete unconsciousness, for readjustments of focus that were
sometimes, in their lesser way, painful too. When she asserted that she
was not musical, Althea almost suspected her of saying it in order to
evade her own descriptions of experiences at Bayreuth. Pleasantly as she
might listen, it was sometimes, Althea had discovered, with a restive
air masked by a pervasive vagueness; this vagueness usually drifted over
her when Althea described experiences of an intellectual or aesthetic
nature. It could be no question of evasion, however, when, in answer to
a question of Althea's, she said that she hated Paris. Since girlhood
Althea had accepted Paris as the final stage in a civilised being's
education: the Theatre Francais, the lectures at the Sorbonne, the
Louvre and the Cluny, and, for a later age, Anatole France--it seemed
almost barbarous to say that one hated the splendid city that clothed,
as did no other place in the world, one's body and one's mind. 'How can
you hate it?' she inquired. 'It means so much that is intellectual, so
much that is beautiful.'
'I suppose so,' said Miss Buchanan. 'I do like to look at it sometimes;
the spaces and colour are so nice.'
'The spaces, and what's in them, surely. What is it that you don't like?
The French haven't our standards of morality, of course, but don't you
think it's rather narrow to judge them by our standards?'
Althea was pleased to set forth thus clearly her own liberality of
standard. She sometimes suspected Miss Buchanan of thinking her naive.
But Miss Buchanan now looked a little puzzled, as if it were not this at
all that she had meant, and said presently that perhaps it was the
women's faces--the well-dressed women. 'I don't mind the poor ones so
much; they often look too sharp, but they often look kind and
frightfully tired. It is the well-dressed ones I can't put up with. And
the men are even more horrid. I always want to spend a week in walking
over the moors when I've been here. It leaves a hot taste in my mouth,
like some horrid liqueur.'
'But the beauty--the intelligence,' Althea urged. 'Surely you are a
little intolerant, to see only people's faces in Paris. Think of the
Salon Carree and the Cluny; they take away the taste of the liqueur.
How can one have enough of them?'
Miss Buchanan again demurred. 'Oh, I think I can have enough of them.'
'But you care for pictures, for beautiful things,' said Althea, half
vexed and half disturbed. But Miss Buchanan said that she liked having
them about her, not having to go and look at them. 'It is so stuffy in
museums, too; they always give me a headache. However, I don't believe I
really do care about pictures. You see, altogether I've had no
education.'
Her education, indeed, contrasted with Althea's well-ordered and
elaborate progression, had been lamentable--a mere succession of
incompetent governesses. Yet, on pressing her researches, Althea, though
finding almost unbelievable voids, felt, more than anything else, tastes
sharp and fine that seemed to cut into her own tastes and show her
suddenly that she did not really like what she had thought she liked, or
that she liked what she had hardly before been aware of. All that Helen
could be brought to define was that she liked looking at things in the
country: at birds, clouds, and flowers; but though striking Althea as a
creature strangely untouched and unmoulded, she struck her yet more
strongly as beautifully definite. She marvelled at her indifference to
her own shortcomings, and she marvelled at the strength of personality
that could so dispense with other people's furnishings.
Among the things that Helen made her see, freshly and perturbingly, was
the sheaf of friends in England of whom she had thought with such
security when Miss Robinson had spoken of the London _salon_.
Althea had been trained in a school of severe social caution. Social
caution was personified to her in her memory of her mother--a slender,
black-garbed lady, with parted grey hair, neatly waved along her brow,
and a tortoiseshell lorgnette that she used to raise, mildly yet
alarmingly, at foreign _tables d'hotes_, for an appraising survey of the
company. The memory of this lorgnette operated with Althea as a sort of
social standard; it typified delicacy, dignity, deliberation, a
scrupulous regard for the claims of heredity, and a scrupulous avoidance
of uncertain or all too certain types. Althea felt that she had carried
on the tradition worthily. The lorgnette would have passed all her more
recent friends--those made with only its inspiration as a guide. She was
as careful as her mother as to whom she admitted to her
acquaintanceship, eschewing in particular those of her compatriots whose
accents or demeanour betrayed them to her trained discrimination as
outside the radius of acceptance. But Althea's kindness of heart was
even deeper than her caution, and much as she dreaded becoming involved
with the wrong sort of people, she dreaded even more hurting anybody's
feelings, with the result that once or twice she had made mistakes, and
had had, under the direction of Lady Blair, to withdraw in a manner as
painful to her feelings as to her pride. 'Oh no, my dear,' Lady Blair
had said of some English acquaintances whom Althea had met in Rome, and
who had asked her to come and see them in England. 'Quite impossible;
most worthy people, I am sure, and no doubt the daughter took honours
at Girton--the middle classes are highly educated nowadays; but one
doesn't know that sort of people.'
Lady Blair was the widow of a judge, and, in her large velvet
drawing-room, a thick fog outside and a number of elderly legal ladies
drinking tea about her, Althea had always felt herself to be in the very
heart of British social safety. Lady Blair was an old friend of her
mother's, and, with Miss Buckston, was her nearest English friend. She
also felt safe on the lawn under the mulberry-tree at Grimshaw Rectory,
and when ensconced for her long visit in Colonel and Mrs. Colling's
little house in Devonshire, where hydrangeas grew against a blue
background of sea, and a small white yacht rocked in the bay at the foot
of the garden.
It was therefore with some perplexity that, here too, she brought from
her interviews with Helen an impression of new standards. They were not
drastic and relegating, like those of Lady Blair's; they did not make
her feel unsafe as Lady Blair's had done; they merely made her feel that
her world was very narrow and she herself rather ingenuous.
Helen herself seemed unaware of standards, and had certainly never
experienced any of Althea's anxieties. She had always been safe, partly,
Althea had perceived, because she had been born safe, but, in the main,
because she was quite indifferent to safety. And with this indifference
and this security went the further fact that she had, probably, never
been ingenuous. With all her admiration, her affection for her new
friend, this sense of the change that she was working in her life
sometimes made Althea a little afraid of her, and sometimes a little
indignant. She, herself, was perfectly safe in America, and when she
felt indignant she asked herself what Helen Buchanan would have done had
she been turned into a strange continent with hardly any other guides
than the memory of a lorgnette and a Baedeker.
It was when she was bound to answer this question, and to recognise that
in such circumstances Miss Buchanan would have gone her way, entirely
unperturbed, and entirely sure of her own preferences, that Althea felt
afraid of her. In all circumstances, she more and more clearly saw it,
Miss Buchanan would impose her own standards, and be oppressed or
enlightened by none. Althea had always thought of herself as very calm
and strong; it was as calm and strong that Franklin Winslow Kane so
worshipped her; but when she talked to Miss Buchanan she had sharp
shoots of suspicion that she was, in reality, weak and wavering.
Althea's accounts of her friends in England seemed to interest Miss
Buchanan even less than her accounts of Bayreuth. She had met Miss
Buckston, but had only a vague and, evidently, not a pleasant impression
of her. Lady Blair she had never heard of, nor the inmates of Grimshaw
Rectory. The Collings were also blanks, except that Mrs. Colling had an
uncle, an old Lord Taunton; and when Althea put forward this identifying
fact, Helen said that she knew him and liked him very much.
'I suppose you know a great many people,' said Althea.
Yes, Miss Buchanan replied, she supposed she did. 'Too many, sometimes.
One gets sick of them, don't you think? But perhaps your people are
more interesting than mine; you travel so much, and seem to know such
heaps of them all over the world.'
But Althea, from these interviews, took a growing impression that though
Miss Buchanan might be sick of her own people, she would be far more
sick of hers.