When, a few hours later, Dartmouth entered Mrs. Raleigh's salon, he
saw Miss Penrhyn surrounded by some half-dozen men, and talking
with the abandon of a pleased child, her eyes sparkling, her cheeks
flushed. As he went over to her the flush faded slightly, but she held
out her hand and smiled up into his eyes.
"You have been ill," she murmured, sympathetically. "You look so
still."
"Yes," he said, "I have been ill; otherwise I should have made an
effort to see you before. I suppose I cannot get a word with you
to-night May I call on you to morrow morning?"
"Yes, you may come."
"Thank you. And there will not be a dozen other men there?"
She smiled. "I do not think there will be anyone else. I rarely
receive in the morning."
"But are you sure?"
He had a long sweep of black lash, through which the clear blue of his
eyes had a way of shining with a pleading, softening lustre, immensely
effective. It was an accepted fact that when Mr. Dartmouth turned
on this battery of eyes and lash, resistance was a forgotten art and
protest a waste of time. Miss Penrhyn did not prove an exception to
the rule. She hesitated, then answered, with a little laugh, as if
amused at herself, "Well, yes, I am sure."
"Very well, then, remember, I look upon that as a promise. And I will
try to get a word with you later, but there is no hope now."
He moved off and, leaning against the opposite wall, covertly watched
her, while ostensibly listening with due sympathy to the hopes and
fears of an old friend and embryo author. In a moment he made a
discovery--of his friend's confidence I regret to say he heard not one
word--she did not treat him as she treated other men. Well bred as she
was, there was a perceptible embarrassment in her manner whenever he
addressed her, but with these other men she was talking and smiling
without a trace of effort or restraint. He knew what it meant. He was
thoroughly aware that he was a man of extraordinary magnetism, and he
had seen his power over a great many women. Ordinarily, to a man so
sated with easy success as Harold Dartmouth, the certainty of conquest
would have strangled the fancy, but there was something about this
girl which awakened in him an interest he did not pretend to define,
except that he found her more beautiful, and believed her to be
more original, than other women. He was anxious to have a longer
conversation with her, and ascertain whether or not he was correct in
his latter supposition. He did not want to marry, and she was too
good to flirt with, but platonics were left. And platonics with Miss
Penrhyn suggested variety.
He also made another discovery. Someone played an interminable piece
of classic music. During its recital it was not possible for Miss
Penrhyn to talk with the men about her, and as the animation faded
from her face, he noticed the same preoccupied look overspread it
which had characterized it the night she had entered the ball-room at
the Legation. Something troubled her, but to Dartmouth's quick eye
it was not an active trouble, it was more like a shadow which took
possession of her face in its moments of repose with the quiet
assurance of a dweller of long standing. Possibly she herself was
habitually forgetful of its cause; but the cause had struck deep
into the roots of her nature, and its shadow had become a part of
her beauty. Dartmouth speculated much and widely, but rejected the
hypothesis of a lover. She had never loved for a moment; and in spite
of his platonic predilections, this last of his conclusions held a
very perceptible flavor of satisfaction. When the classic young lady
had gracefully acknowledged the raptures she had evoked, and tripped
back to her seat, Miss Penrhyn was asked to sing, and then Dartmouth
saw his opportunity; he captured her when she had finished, and bore
her off to the conservatory before anyone could interfere.
"You sing charmingly," he said. "Will you sing for me to-morrow?"
"If you can stretch flattery to that extent, with Patti at the Grand
Opera House."
"I have been listening to Patti for fifteen years, and man loves
variety. I wish I could tell where I have seen you before," he
continued, abruptly. "Do you look like your mother? I may have seen
her in my youth."
Her face flushed a sudden, painful red, and then turned very pale. "I
do not remember my mother," she stammered. "She died when I was quite
young."
"Poor thing!" thought Dartmouth. "How girls do grieve for an unknown
mother!" "But you have seen her picture?" he said, aloud.
"Yes, I have seen her pictures. They are dark, like myself. But that
is all."
"You must have had a lonely childhood, brought up all by yourself in
that gloomy old castle I have heard described."
She colored again and crushed a fern-leaf nervously between her
fingers. "Yes, it was lonesome. Yes--those old castles always are."
"By the way--I remember--my mother spent a summer down there once,
some twelve or thirteen years ago, and--it comes back to me now--I
remember having heard her speak of Rhyd-Alwyn as the most picturesque
castle in Wales. She must have known your mother, of course. And you
must have known the children. _Why_ was I not there?"
"I do not remember," she said, rising suddenly to her feet, and
turning so pale that Dartmouth started to his in alarm. "Come; let us
go back to the salon."
"There is some mystery," thought Dartmouth. "Have I stumbled upon a
family skeleton? Poor child!" But aloud he said, "No, do not go yet;
I want to talk to you." And when he had persuaded her to sit down
once more, he exerted himself to amuse her, and before long had the
satisfaction of seeing that she had forgotten her agitation. It did
not take him long to discover that she had read a great deal and that
her favorite reading had been travels, and he entertained her with
graphic recitals of such of his own varied experience as he thought
most likely to interest her. She listened with flattering attention
and a natural and keen sense of humor, and he was stimulated to a good
deal more effort than habit prompted. "You will enjoy travelling," he
said, finally; "and you will not travel like other women. You will see
something besides picture-galleries, and churches, and _Bons marchés_.
I believe that you would realize what it is to be an atom of to-day in
the presence of twenty centuries."
She smiled up at him with quick sympathy. "Yes," she said, "I believe
one must more frequently be awed than pleased, or even enraptured. And
I can imagine how even the most self-content of men, if he absorb the
meaning of Europe, must feel his insignificance. If he has wit enough
to reflect that all these represented ages, with their extraordinary
results, abstract and concrete, have come and gone with no aid of his;
that no prophet ever whispered his name among the thousands of great
in every conceivable destiny; that he is, mentally and physically,
simply a result of evolution and civilization, not, in any way worth
mentioning, a cause, he will be apt to reflect as well upon how many
men, all told, have ever heard of his existence or who besides his
grandchildren will remember him a generation hence. He will probably
wish that arithmetic had never been invented. Or if he be one of the
great of earth, he is only one after all, and, if he be in danger of
bursting from inflation, he can be grateful for a timely reminder that
there are several millions on the globe who have never heard of him,
and a few millions more who do not and never will take the faintest
interest in him or his career. But it needs the presence of twenty
centuries to bring the fact of man's individual insignificance home to
most of us."
"She is clever," thought Dartmouth, as he dismissed his brougham
a little later and walked home alone. "Very un-modern and most
reprehensibly unconventional, in so much as she thinks, and develops
her mental muscles; but very charming, notwithstanding. There is an
incongruity about her, however, which is almost absurd. She has been
brought up in such seclusion--and under the sole tuition of a man not
only a pedant, but who has never stepped through the gates of the last
generation--that she reminds one of those fair English dames who used
to prowl about their parks with the Phaedo under their arm and long
for a block on which to float down to prosperity; Plato had quite
enough to do to sail for himself. And upon this epitomized abstraction
of the sixteenth century, this mingling of old-time stateliness, of
womanly charm, of tougher mental fibre, are superimposed the shallow
and purely objective attributes of the nineteenth-century belle and
woman of fashion. It is almost a shock to hear her use our modern
vernacular, and when she relapses into the somewhat stilted language
in which she is still accustomed to think, it is a positive relief.
She is conscious that she is apt to be a little high-flown, and when
she forgets herself and is natural, she quickly pulls herself in with
a round turn, which is an apology in itself. Upon such occasions a
man wants to get his fingers about the throat of the world. She has
acquired all the little arts and mannerisms of the London drawing-room
girl, and although they do not sit ungracefully upon her, because
she is innately graceful, and too clever to assume a virtue which
she cannot assimilate, still it is like a foreigner who speaks your
language to perfection in all but accent, and whom you long to hear in
his own tongue. Put her back in her Welsh castle, and the scales
would fall from her as from a mermaid who loves. If she returns to
her father at the end of the season, I think I will call upon her six
months later. She should go now, though; scales are apt to corrode.
But what is the mystery about the mother? Did she elope with the
coachman? But, no; that is strictly a modern freak of fashion. Perhaps
she died in a mad-house. Not improbable, if she had anything of the
nature of this girl in her, and Sir Iltyd sowed the way with thorns
too sharp. Poor girl! she is too young for mysteries, whatever it is.
I shall like to know her better, but she is so intense that she makes
me feel frivolous. I am never intense except when I have the blues,
and intensity, with my peculiar mental anatomy, is a thing to be
avoided. In what is invariably the last chapter of those attacks of
morbid dissatisfaction I shall some day feel an intense desire to blow
out my brains, and shall probably succumb. I wonder if she will induce
another rhyming attack to-night. Was that night a dream or a reality?
Could I have had a short but sharp attack of brain fever? Perhaps
the less I think about it the better; but it is decidedly hard to be
gifted with the instincts of a poet and denied the verbal formulation.
And it was the most painfully realistic, aggressively material
thing, that conflict in my brain, that mortal ever experienced. That,
however, may have been a mere figment of my excited imagination.
But what excited my imagination? That is the question. If I remember
aright, I was mentally discoursing with some enthusiasm upon Miss
Penrhyn's charms, but in strict impartiality it cannot be said that
I was excited. The excitement was like that produced by an onslaught
from behind. It is the more surprising, as I think it may be conceded
that I have myself pretty well in hand by this time, and that my
nerves, unruly as nature saw fit to make them, are now my very abject
slaves. Occasionally one of our fiction carpenters flies off at a
tangent and treats us to a series of intellectual gymnastics, the
significance of which--so we are called upon to digest--is that the
soul of one dead, finding its present clime too warm--or too cold--or
having left something undone on earth, takes temporary and summary
possession of an unfortunate still in the flesh, and through this
unhappy medium endeavors to work his will. Perhaps that is what is the
matter with me. Pollok, perchance, who died in his flower, thinking
that he had not given the world a big enough pill to swallow, wants to
concoct another dose in my presumably vacant brain. I appreciate
the compliment, but I disdain to be Pollok's mouthpiece: I will be
original or nothing. Besides, it is deuced uncomfortable. And I should
like to know if there is anything in life more bitter than the sense,
even momentary, of loss of self-mastery. Well, as I remarked a few
moments since, the less I think about it the better, considering my
unfortunate peculiarities. I will go and see Miss Penrhyn to-morrow;
that will be sufficiently distracting for the present."