ALL OF A FLUTTER
"Bernadette's got a new toy, Esther."
"I know it," said Mrs. Norton Ward, handing her visitor a cup of tea.
"Do you mean that you know the fact or that you're acquainted with the
individual?"
"The latter, Judith. In fact I sent him to her."
"Well, it was she who went to him really, though Godfrey made some
trouble about it. He thought the young man ought to have called first.
However they got round him."
"They? Who?"
"Why, Bernadette and Oliver Wyse, of course. And he came to lunch. But
Godfrey was quite on his high horse at first--stroked his beard, and
dangled his eye-glass, and looked the other way when he was spoken
to--you know the poor old dear when he's like that? Luckily the young
man could tell Leeds from Wedgwood, and that went a long way towards
putting matters right. Godfrey quite warmed to him at last."
"We like him very much, and I hope you did--even if you won't admit it.
He's got a room in Frank's chambers, you know."
"I didn't speak more than six words to him--he was up at the other end
of the table by Bernadette. But I liked the look of him rather. Of
course he was all of a flutter."
"Oh, I daresay," smiled Esther. "But I thought we ought to risk
that--and Sir Christopher felt quite strongly about it."
Judith Arden appeared to reflect for a moment. "Well, I think he ought
to be," she said judicially. "I wouldn't give much for a man who didn't
get into a flutter over Bernadette, at first anyhow. She must seem to
them rather--well, irresistible."
"She's wonderfully"--Esther Norton Ward sought for a word too--"radiant,
I mean, isn't she?"
"And there isn't a bit of affectation about her. She just really does
enjoy it all awfully."
"All what?"
"Why, being irresistible and radiant, of course."
"That's looking at it entirely from her point of view."
"What point of view do you suppose she looks at it from? That is, if she
ever looks at it at all. And why not? They ought to be able to look
after themselves--or keep away."
"I really think you're a very fair-minded girl," laughed Esther. "Very
impartial."
"You have to be--living with them as much as I do."
"Do you like it?"
Judith smiled. "The situation is saved just by my not having to do it.
If I had to do it for my bread-and-butter I should hate it like poison.
But, thank heaven, I've four hundred a year, and if I spend the summer
with them, it's because Godfrey and Margaret want me. The winter I keep
for myself--Switzerland part of the time, then Rome, or Florence. So I'm
quite independent, you see. I'm always a visitor. Besides, of course,
nobody could be more gracious than Bernadette; graciousness is part of
being irresistible."
"I really do think that being pretty improves people," said Esther.
"Well, as far as I can see, without it there wouldn't _be_ any
Bernadette," Judith remarked, and then laughed gently at her own
extravagance. "At any rate, she'd be bound to turn into something
absolutely different. Something like me even, perhaps!" She laughed
again, a low, pleasant, soft laugh, rather in contrast with the slightly
brusque tone and the satiric vein which marked her speech. The laugh
seemed to harmonise with and to belong to her eyes, which were dark,
steady, and reflective; the tone and manner to fall into line with the
pertness of her nose, with its little jut upwards, and with the scornful
turn of her upper lip. Her figure and movements perhaps helped the
latter impression too; she inclined to thinness, and her gestures were
quick and sometimes impatient.
"Come, you're not so bad," said Esther with her pleasant cordial
candour. "Now I'm quite insignificant."
"No, you're not. You've got the grand manner. I heard Godfrey say so."
Esther laughed both at the compliment and at the authority vouched in
support of it.
"Oliver Wyse was at lunch too on the occasion, was he? How is he getting
on?"
"Sir Oliver is still his usual agreeable, composed, competent, and, I'm
inclined to think, very wilful self."
"Patient, though?" The question came with a mischievous glance. Judith's
retort was ironic, both with eyes and tongue.
"I permit myself any amount of comment on character but no conjecture as
to facts. That's the distinction between studying human nature and
gossiping, Esther."
"Don't snub me! And the distinction's rather a fine one."
"No, gossip's all right for you, living outside the house. I live so
much inside it that I think it wouldn't be fair in me. And above all,
owing to the footing on which I'm there--as I've told you--I am
emphatically not a watch-dog."
"Where's the child?"
"She's down at Hilsey--with the old housekeeper Mrs. Gates--by doctor's
orders."
"Again! Have you any comment to make on the doctor's character?"
"I think you're being malicious. It's really better for the child to be
in the country. We're very busy, all of us, and very gay--a bustle all
the time. If she were here, she'd only be with a nurse in the Park or in
the nursery. And we're only just back from three weeks at Hilsey
ourselves."
"Yes, I think I was being malicious," Esther admitted. "I suppose we're
all jealous of Bernadette in our hearts, and talk like cats about her!
Well, you don't!"
"It would be ungrateful of me. She affords me a very great deal of
pleasure. Besides, she's my aunt."
"Well--by marriage."
"Oh yes, entirely by marriage," Miss Arden agreed with one of her
fleeting smiles. She implied that no other form of auntship would be, as
the advertisements say, "entertained" by Bernadette. "And even as to
that I have, by request, dropped the titles, both for her and Godfrey,"
she added.
Though Judith Arden was only just out of her teens, she was older in
mind and ways; she ranked herself, and was accepted, as contemporary
with women in the middle and later twenties, like Bernadette and Esther
Norton Ward. She had had to face the world practically by herself. An
epidemic of fever in an Italian town had carried off father and mother
when she was fifteen. She had got them buried, herself quarantined and
back to England, unaided, as she best could. That was a developing
experience. At home she came under the guardianship of her uncle,
Godfrey Lisle, which was much the same thing as coming under her own.
Godfrey was not practical; the care of a growing girl was hopelessly
beyond him. Judith put herself to school at Paris; that finished with,
she tried Cambridge for a term, and found it too like going back to
school. She kept house for a while with an old school-comrade, an
art-student, in Paris. The friend married, and she was by herself again.
A visit to Hilsey led to the sort of semi-attachment to the Godfrey
Lisle household which she described to Esther; from the position of a
"poor relation" she was saved by her four hundred pounds a year--her
mother's portion; the late Mr. Arden, author of books on art, and travel
in the interests of art, had left nothing but some personal debts
behind. To the maturity of her world-experience there was one exception;
she had never been in love; the transitory flirtations of ball-rooms and
studios had left her amused but heart-whole.
Her guardian had come by degrees to let himself be looked after by her a
good deal. The inheritor of an old family estate worth some ten thousand
pounds a year, Godfrey Lisle had been bred for a country squire, a local
man of affairs, or (given aptitude for the wider sphere) a politician;
such were the traditions of the Lisles of Hilsey. In him they found no
continuance. He was a shy quiet man, tall but rather awkward in person,
and near-sighted; his face was handsome and refined and, when he was not
embarrassed (he often was), his manner was pleasant, if too soft. But he
did not like society, and was shy with strangers; he would fumble with
the black ribbon from which his glasses hung, and look the other way, as
Judith had described. He was fond of beautiful things--pictures, china,
furniture--but had not the energy to make himself a real amateur of any
of them. His nature was affectionate--calmly affectionate, and the
affections were constant. Once, and once only, he had blazed into a
flame of feeling--when he courted Bernadette and in the early days of
his marriage with her. The beautiful penniless girl--she would have
stirred even a fish to romance; and it would not have been fair to call
Godfrey fish-like. But ardours were not really in his line; too soon the
rapturous lover subsided into the affectionate husband. Bernadette had
shown no signs of noticing the change; perhaps she did not wish to check
it. It may be that it coincided with a modification of her own feelings.
At any rate, thus acquiesced in, it had gone further. Little of
affection survived now, though they treated one another with the
considerate politeness of an extinct passion. He gave her everything
that she desired--even to the straining of his income; he was the only
person for whom she ever "put herself out." Here were reciprocal, if
tacit, apologies for a state of affairs which neither of them really
regretted.
She had loved him, though, once. She did not claim it as a merit; there
it was, a curious fact in her past life at which, in her rare moments of
introspection, she would smile. She had loved not only all that he
brought--ease, wealth, escape from sordidness; she had also loved him
for bringing them. Even now sometimes she would love the memory of him
as he had seemed in those days; then the considerate politeness would be
coloured by a pretty tenderness, a sort of compassionate affection as
for a man who had fallen from high estate, inevitably fallen but
blamelessly. However these recrudescences on the whole embarrassed
Godfrey Lisle, and Bernadette, laughing at herself, withdrew to a safe
distance and to her real interests. Godfrey was not one of the interests
of her life; he was only one of its conditions.
Into this household--though not, of course, below the surface of
it--Arthur Lisle now made joyful and tremulous entry. His eyes were in
no state to see clearly or to see far; they were glued to the central
light, and for him the light burned bright to dazzling. Behold the
vision that he saw--the vision of a Reigning Beauty!
It is a large party. There is no getting near her--at least no staying
near. The crush forces a man away, however politely. But perhaps a
far-off corner may afford a view, for a dexterous servant keeps clear a
space just in front of her, and the onlooker is tall. They all come and
speak to her, by ones and twos--ex-beauties, would-be beauties, rival
beauties; for the last she has a specially cordial greeting--sometimes,
if she knows them well, a word of praise for their gowns, always a quick
approving glance at them. The great ladies come; for them a touch of
deference, a pretty humility, a "Who am I that you should come to my
house?" air, which gracefully masks her triumphant sense of personal
power. The men come--all the young men who would adore if they might,
and are very grateful for their invitations; they pass quickly, each
with his reward of an indolent smile of welcome. The choice young men
come; them she greets with a touch of distance lest they should grow
proud in their hearts. No favour in them to come--far from it! Then an
old man, a friend. Mark now the change; she is daughter-like in her
affection and simplicity. Then perhaps a little stir runs through the
company, a whisper, a craning of necks. A great man is coming--for
beauty can draw greatness. There comes a massive white head--a ribbon
and star perhaps, or the plain black that gives, not wears, such
ornaments. He stays with her longer: there is no jostling now; the
dexterous servant delays the oncoming stream of guests. Royal
compliments are exchanged. It is a meeting between Potentates.
In some such dazzling colours may the ardent imagination of youth paint
the quite ordinary spectacle of a pretty woman's evening party, while an
old lady on one side of him complains that "everybody" is there, and an
old man on the other says that it is a beastly crush, or damns the
draught from a window behind him--lucky, perhaps, if he does not damn
the Potentates too, the one for keeping him from his bed, the other for
marching through rapine to dismemberment, or some such act of policy
plainly reprehensible.
Strange to think--it is Youth that holds the brush again--strange and
intoxicating--that this is the woman with whom he drives in the Park, of
whose family luncheon he partakes, with whom he had tea yesterday, who
makes a friend of him. She talked to him an hour yesterday, told him all
about that hard childhood and girlhood of hers, how she had scanty food
and coarse, had to make her own frocks and wash her own handkerchiefs;
she said that she feared the hard training had made her hard, yet hoped
with a sigh that it was not so, and seemed to leave the question to his
sovereign arbitrament. She had made the little narrow home she came from
real to him with cunning touches; she had made her leap of escape from
it so natural, so touching. Of what the leap had brought her she had
made light, had spoken with a gentle depreciation of the place her
beauty had won--"Such looks as I have helped, I suppose, besides
Godfrey's position"--and let him see how much more to her taste was a
quiet talk with a friend than all the functions of society. How much
better than the receiving of Beauties and Potentates was a quiet hour in
the twilight of her little den with Cousin Arthur!
Could it be the same woman? Yes, it was. There was the wonder and the
intoxication of it. He was quite unknown to all that throng. But to
himself he stood among them, eminent and superior. See, hadn't she
thrown him a glance--right across the room? Well, at any rate he could
almost swear she had!
Arthur Lisle--in the flesh at his cousin's evening party, in the spirit
anywhere you like--felt a hand laid on his arm. He turned to find Sir
Christopher Lance beside him.
"Ah, Mr. Lisle, aren't you glad you took my advice? I told you you were
missing something by not coming here. Don't you remember?"
"Yes, sir, but you see, I didn't know--I didn't quite understand what
you meant."
"You might have thought it worth while to find out," said the old man,
smiling. "As it was, I'm told you had to be fetched."
Arthur laughed shamefacedly but happily. That was already a standing
joke between him and Bernadette; hence the associations of it were
altogether pleasant.
Sir Christopher's way was not to spoil joy in the name of wisdom nor to
preach a safety that was to be won through cowardice. He saw the young
man's excitement and exaltation, and commended it.
"Take as much of this sort of thing as you can get," he counselled,
nodding his head towards the crowd and, incidentally, towards
Bernadette. "Take a good dose of the world. It'll do you good. Society's
an empty thing to people with empty heads, but not to the rest of us.
And the more you go about, and so on--well, the fewer terrors will my
Brother Pretyman possess for you."
Arthur Lisle caught at the notion eagerly. "Just what I've had in my own
mind, sir," he said gravely.
"I thought from the look of you that you had some such wise idea in your
head," said Sir Christopher with equal seriousness.
Arthur blushed, looked at him rather apprehensively, and then laughed.
The Judge remained grave, but his blue eyes twinkled distantly. _O mihi
praeteritos_--that old tag was running in his head.
"It's getting late; only bores stay late at large parties. Come and say
good-night to our hostess."
"Do you think we might?" asked Arthur.
Certainly he was all of a flutter, as Judith Arden said.