LE BEAU MONDE
Lady Anne Garland was sitting in Mrs. Cresswell's drawing-room. It was
a charming room, with its domed ceiling, its panelled walls, its long
windows, its curtains and brocades of dull orange and glowing brown,
with its porcelains, its bronzes, and its masses of yellow and white
roses in old china bowls and slender glasses.
Anne herself, in a dress of some gleaming material, pale primrose in
colour, was sitting on an Empire sofa. The warm brown of its brocade
made a delightful harmony with the colour of her dress--in fact, she
looked entirely in keeping with her surroundings. A white-haired man,
with blue eyes and wearing faultless evening clothes, was sitting on
the sofa beside her; and Anne was asking herself where in the name
of wonder she had seen him before. Something in his manner seemed
familiar, or was it, perhaps, his eyes, his keen old blue eyes under
their shaggy eyebrows? He had been introduced to her early in the
evening, and somehow there had seemed at once a curious and indefinable
sympathy between them, one which had sprung to life with the first
conventional words they had uttered. Throughout the evening he had
monopolized her--unquestionably monopolized her--yet entirely without
appearing to do so. And over and over again Anne was asking herself
when and where she had seen him before.
She glanced at him now as she slowly waved her fan--a delicate thing of
mother-of-pearl and fine old cobwebby lace softly yellow with age. Anne
possessed the trick of fan-waving in its subtlest form, a trick--or
art--she had inherited from an ancestor of more than a century ago, one
Dolores di Mendova, a very noted beauty of the Spanish court, from whom
Anne had also inherited her hair, her creamy skin, and her panther-like
grace.
General Carden turned and saw that she was watching him. A faint rose
colour tinged the ivory of Anne's face.
"I was wondering," she said, explanatory, "where it was that I had seen
you before."
General Carden smiled, a gay old smile. "I can tell you where I have
seen you, though whether you have deigned to notice me is quite another
matter."
"Yes?" queried Anne the fan fluttering to and fro.
"I have frequently seen you driving in the Park," said General Carden.
"You in your carriage, I in my car."
"Yes?" mused Anne, still doubtful.
"You do not remember?" asked General Carden. He was frankly
disappointed.
"On the contrary, I remember perfectly. I confess I had forgotten the
fact till you mentioned it. Yet somehow it does not quite explain--"
She broke off.
"Explain?" asked General Carden.
Anne laughed. "Explain the quite absurd notion that I have actually
spoken to you before. Something in your manner, your speech, seems
almost familiar. I fancied I must have known you--not intimately, of
course, but slightly."
"I fear," he regretted, "that I have not had that pleasure. I shall
hope now to be able to make up for my previous loss. You live in town?"
"The greater part of the year," said Anne. "I spend three or four
months in the country."
"Which, no doubt, you like," replied General Carden courteously. "Being
young, you are able to enjoy it. I prefer London. I only leave town
during August, when I go abroad. And the whole time I wish I were in
England. An unprofitable method of spending a yearly month of one's
life. Once I--" He broke off. "I am too old for travelling now," he
ended.
"Isn't that rather--nonsense?" said Anne, with a faint hint of a smile,
and glancing at the upright figure beside her.
General Carden straightened his shoulders. She was candid--absolutely
candid--in her remark.
"Very charming of you to suggest it, Lady Anne," he said, and he tried
unavailingly to keep the pleasure out of his voice. "Perhaps after
all----"
"Yes," smiled Anne, "after all, you don't find it quite as disagreeable
as you pretend."
"Ah, well!" he said.
There was a pleasant little silence. Anne watched the groups of people
in the room, sitting or standing in intimate conversation. There
was an atmosphere of airy gaiety about the place, a lightness, an
effervescence. Listlessness or boredom was entirely absent. In one of
the farthest groups was her friend, Muriel Lancing, with whom she was
staying. She was an elfin-like, dainty figure in a green dress, on
which shone a brilliant gleam of diamonds. Muriel herself was sparkling
to-night like a bit of escaped quicksilver.
Rather nearer was another woman, tall and massive. Her figure was
undoubtedly good, but her pose gave one the faintest suspicion that
she was conscious of that fact. She reminded one of a statue which had
become slightly animated by some accident. Apparently, too, she had
never forgotten the fact of having been a statue, and wished other
people not to forget it either. Her face was a faultless oval, and her
hair worn in a Madonna-like style. But beyond the oval and the hair the
Madonna-like impression ceased. Her face was hard, there was none of
the exquisite warmth, the tender humanity seen in the paintings of the
Virgin Mother.
General Carden was also looking at Mrs. Sheldon, whom, it may be
remembered, he had seen on a previous occasion in the Park, a day now
three or four weeks old. Anne noticed the direction of his glance.
"Do you know her?" she asked suddenly, then added as an afterthought,
"She is a friend of mine." Anne did not state that it was a friendship
of only two years' standing, and one which existed infinitely more on
Mrs. Sheldon's side than on her own.
"I once had the honour of knowing her fairly intimately," replied
General Carden. "We still exchange bows and civil speeches, but--well,
I fancy I remind her of an episode she wishes to forget--a perfectly
unimpeachable little episode as far as she was concerned, of course."
Anne glanced at him sideways. There was almost a hard note in his
voice, which had not escaped her. She saw his profile clean-cut against
the dark panelling of the room. And then a sudden little light of
illumination sprang to her eyes. She had all at once discovered of
whom it was he reminded her. There was in his fine old face a very
distinct look of the vagabond Piper. It was one of those indefinable
likenesses which nevertheless exist, at all events in the eyes of those
who chance to see it. It was faint, elusive, and to the majority it
probably would not be the least apparent, but Anne now knew that it was
this which had puzzled her throughout the evening.
And with the discovery came a sudden mental picture of a man standing
in the moonlight with a crimson rose against his lips. It was a picture
that had presented itself many times to her mental vision during the
last few days, and as many times had been dismissed. It was apt to
make her heart beat a trifle faster, to make the warm colour surge
faintly to her face. Being unable--or unwilling--to account for a
certain picturesque, if too impetuous, impulse which had moved her that
moonlight night, she wished to forget it. Yet it had a disturbing way
of representing itself before her mind.
In banishing it now her thoughts turned into another trend, which was
apt to absorb them quite a good deal, the thought of that writer of
letters and books--Robin Adair. Anne was perfectly aware that this
unknown writer occupied a large amount of her mind; it swung and
see-sawed between him and the vagabond Piper in a way that was almost
uncomfortable and altogether unaccountable. She was not accustomed to
have her thoughts encroached on in this way without her will being
consulted, and she could not understand it, or she told herself that
she could not understand it, and that possibly came to the same thing.
At all events, she was undoubtedly in a slight puzzlement of mind.
It is the only word to describe her vaguely perplexed state. As now
Robin Adair had swung uppermost, his book presented itself to her as a
subject of conversation.
She asked General Carden if he had read it. She fancied--it was
probably pure fancy--that he started slightly. He glanced, too, at Mrs.
Cresswell, who was only a few paces away and quite possibly within
earshot.
"Ah, yes," he replied indifferently. "Mrs. Cresswell recommended it to
me--a fairly promising book, I thought." He was adhering faithfully to
the expression.
"Fairly promising!" Anne's voice held a note akin to indignation. "I
thought it delightful; clever, cultured, quite admirably written."
General Carden experienced a sensation which might be described as a
glow of satisfaction. "Isn't that," he said, "rather high praise?"
"Not an atom more than the book deserves!" responded Anne warmly. "And
the reviews on it--I saw two or three--were excellent."
"Indeed!" said General Carden politely. The old hypocrite had no mind
to mention that every review ever penned on it was now lying safely
locked in his desk, that he knew them all nearly verbatim, that he had
gloated over them, exulted over them though with many a little stab of
pain in the region called the heart.
"Of course," pursued Anne thoughtfully, "it isn't merely a surface
book, full of adventure, movement, and incident; and what incident
there is might be termed improbable by those who don't realize that
nothing is improbable, nothing impossible. It's in its style, its
finish, its--its texture that the charm and beauty of it lie."
"It has certainly some well-turned phrases," conceded General Carden
magnanimously. He liked her to talk about the book; he longed for her
to continue, though for the life of him he could not give her a lead.
Yet his grudging admiration--all a pretence though it was, though Anne
could not know that--fired her to further defence of the writing,
stimulated her to fresh praise.
"There are delightful phrases!" she said emphatically. "It is a modern
book, yet with all the delicacy, the refinement, the porcelain-air of
the old school. For all that the scenes are laid mainly in the open,
and are, as I said, quite modern; it breathes an old-world grace, a
kind of powder-and-patches charm, which makes one feel that the writer
must have imbibed the finish, the courtesy of the old school from his
cradle, as if it must have come to him as a birthright, an inheritance."
General Carden drew himself up. His blue eyes were shining. "Your
praise of the book," he said, "is delightful. The author"--his eyes
grew suddenly sad--"would, I am sure, be honoured if he knew your
opinion."
Anne flushed. Did he not know? Had she not told him? Though perhaps
not in those very words.
"It does surprise me," she, allowed, after a second's pause, "that
you are not more enthusiastic about it. I should have fancied
somehow--slightly as I know you--that it would have entirely appealed
to you."
General Carden gave a little cough. "It does appeal to me," he said.
"It appeals to me greatly--so much, in fact, that I assumed a certain
disparagement in order that I might have the pleasure of hearing you
refute me." He had forgotten Mrs. Cresswell, but the words had not
escaped her, absorbed though she appeared to be in conversation, and
there was the tiniest--the very tiniest--expression of triumph in her
eyes.
"Oh!" said Anne, at once puzzled and debating. And then she said, "I am
longing to read his next book."
"He has not published another, then?" queried General Carden
carelessly. Double-faced that he was, he knew perfectly well that no
second book had appeared as yet. Had he not advised Mudie's--naturally
not in Mrs. Cresswell's presence--to supply him with a copy the moment
one appeared?
"No," replied Anne. And she stopped. Had not Robin Adair himself told
her that his Wanderer had escaped him, and Heaven knew whether he would
ever again be caught, chained, fettered, and imprisoned in the pages
and between the covers of a book?
Later in the evening General Carden, taking his departure, said to
Anne, "I should like to have the honour of calling on you, if you will
allow me to do so."
And Anne replied: "I should be quite delighted. I am staying now with
Mrs. Lancing, and go down to the country in a few days, but I shall
return to town to my own house in the autumn."
"In the autumn, then," said General Carden, bowing over her hand.