The whine of innumerable sea gulls awoke the Marchesa Soderrelli. She
arose and opened the white shutters of the window.
A flood of sun entered--the thin, brilliant, inspiring sun of the
sub-Arctic. A sun to illumine, to bring out fantastic colors, to dye
the sea, to paint the mountains, to lay forever on the human heart the
mysterious lure of the North. A sun reaching, it would seem, to its
farthest outpost. A faint sheet of the thinnest golden light, fading out
into distant colors, as though here, finally, one came to the last shore
of the world. Beyond the emerald rim of the distant water was utter
darkness, or one knew not what twilight sea, sinister and mystic,
undulating forever without the breaking of a wave crest, in eternal
silence. Or beyond that blue, smoky haze holding back the sun, were
to be found all those fabled countries for which the human heart has
desired unceasingly, where every man, landing from his black ship, finds
the thing for which he has longed, upward from the cradle; that one
bereaved, the dead glorified, and that one coming hard in avarice, red
and yellow gold.
The bay of Oban on such a morning, under such a sun, surpasses in
striking beauty the bay of Naples. The colors of the sea seem to come
from below upward. The Firth of Lorn is then the vat of some master
alchemist, wherein lies every color and every shade of color, varying
with the light, the angle of incidence, the traveling of clouds; and
yet, always, the waters of that vat are green, viscous, sinister. The
rocks, rising out of this sea, look old, wrinkled, drab. The mountains,
hemming it in, seem in the first lights of the morning covered loosely
with mantles of worn, gray velvet--soft, streaked with great splashes
of pink powder, as though some careless beauty had spilled her cosmetic
over the cover of her table.
To the Marchesa Soderrelli, on this morning, the beauties of this north
outpost of the world were wholly lost. The whining of the gulls, of all
sounds in the heaven above the most unutterably dreary, had brought
her to the window, and there a white yacht, lying in the bay, held
exclusively her attention. It was big, with two oval stacks; the burger
of the Royal Highland Yacht Club floated from its foremast and the
American flag from its jack staff. From its topmast was a variegated
line of fluttering signals. Beyond, crowding the bay, were yachts of
every prominent club in the world, from the airy, thin sailing craft
with its delicate lines to the steamer with its funnels.
The woman, looking from this window, studied the triangular bits of silk
descending from the topmast, like one turning about a puzzle which he
used to understand. For a time the signal eluded her, then suddenly, as
from some hidden angle, she caught the meaning. She laughed, closed
the window, and began hurriedly with those rites by which a woman is
transformed from the toilet of Godiva to one somewhat safer to the eye.
When that work was ended she went down to the clerk's window, gave a
direction about her luggage, and walked out of the hotel along the sea
wall to the beach. There the yacht's boat with two sailors lay beside
a little temporary wooden pier, merely a plank or two on wooden horses.
She returned the salute of the two men with a nod, stepped over the
side, and was taken, under the flocks of gulls maneuvering like an army,
to the yacht. But before they reached it the Mar-chesa Soderrelli put
her hand into the water and dropped the silver case, that had been,
heretofore, so great a consolation. It fled downward gleaming through
the green water. She was a resolute woman, who could throttle a habit
when there was need.
On the yacht deck a maid led the Marchesa down the stairway through a
tiny salon fitted exquisitely, opened a white door, and ushered her into
the adjoining apartment. This apartment consisted of two rooms and
a third for the bath. The first which the Marchesa now entered was a
dressing room, finished in white enamel, polished dull like ivory--old
faintly colored ivory--an effect to be got only by rubbing down
innumerable coats of paint laboriously. The floor was covered with a
silk oriental rug glistening like frost, lying as close to the planks as
a skin. A beautiful dressing table was set into the wall below a pivot
mirror; on this table were toilet articles in gold, carved with dryads,
fauns, cupids, and piping satyrs in relief. A second table stood in the
center of the room, covered with a cloth. Two mirrors, extending from
the ceiling to the floor, were set into the walls, one opposite to the
other. These walls were paneled in delicate rose-colored brocade.
The second room was a bedchamber, covered with a second of those rugs,
upon which innumerable human fingers had labored, under a tropic sun,
until age doubled them into their withered palms. The nap of this
rug was like the deepest yielding velvet, and the colors bright and
alluring. The first rug, with its shimmering surface, was evidently
woven for a temple, a thing to pray on; but this second had
been designed for domestic uses, under a sultan's eye, with nice
discrimination, for a cherished foot.
This room contained a bedstead of inlaid brass and hangings of exquisite
silk. The ripple and splash of the bath told how the occupant of this
dainty apartment was engaged--in green sea water like that Aphrodite
of imperishable legend. Water, warmed by the trackless currents of the
gulf, cooled by wandering ice floes; of mightier alchemy to preserve
the gloss of firm white shoulders, and the alluring hues of bright, red
blood glowing under a satin skin, than the milk of she asses, or the
scented tubbings of Egypt.
The Marchesa Soderrelli entering was greeted by a merry voice issuing
from the bath of splashing waters.
"Good morning," said the voice, "could you read my signal?"
"With some difficulty," replied the Marchesa; "one does not often see an
invitation to breakfast dangling from a topmast."
The voice laughed among the rippling waters.
"Old Martin was utterly scandalized when I ordered him to run it up,
but Uncle had gone ashore somewhere, and I remained First Lord of the
Admiralty, so he could not mutiny. It was obey or go to the yardarm. For
rigorous unyielding etiquette, give me an English butler or an American
yacht captain."
"It was rather unconventional," replied the Marchesa.
"Quite so," the voice assented, "but at the same time it was a most
practical way of getting you here promptly to breakfast with me. This
place is crowded with hotels. I did not know in which of them you were
housed, and it would have taken Martin half a day to present himself
formally to all the hall porters in Oban."
Then the voice added, "I am breaking every convention this morning. I
invite you to breakfast by signal, and I receive you in my bath."
"This latter is upon old and established authority, I think," replied
the Marchesa. "It was a custom of the ancient ladies of Versailles, only
you do not follow it quite to the letter. The bath door is closed."
"I am coming out," declared the voice.
"If you do," replied the Marchesa, "I shall not close my eyes, even if
they shrivel like those of that inquisitive burgher of poetic memory."
The voice laughed and the door opened.
It is quite as well perhaps that photography was unknown to the
ancients; that the fame of reputed beauties rests solely upon certain
descriptive generalities; words of indefinite and illusive meaning;
various large and comprehensive phrases, into which one's imagination
can fill such detail as it likes. If they stood before us uncovered to
the eye, youth, always beautiful, would in every decade shame them with
comparison. The historical detective, following his clew here and there
among forgotten manuscripts, has stripped them already of innumerable
illusions. We are told that Helen was forty when she eloped to Ilium,
and, one fears, rather fat into the bargain; that Cleopatra at her
heyday was a middle-aged mother; that Catherine of Russia was pitted
with the smallpox; and, upon the authority of a certain celebrated
Englishman, that every oriental beauty cooing in Bagdad was a load for a
camel.
It is then the idea of perennial youth, associated by legend with these
names, that so mightily affects us. As these beauties are called, it is
always the slim figure of Daphne, of Ariadne, of Nicolette, as under the
piping of Prospero, that rises to the eye--fresh color, slender limbs,
breasts like apples--daughters of immortal morning, coming forth at dawn
untouched as from the silver chamber of a chrysalis. It is youth that
the gods love!
And it was youth, fresh, incomparable youth, that came now through the
bath door. A girl packed yet into the bud; slender, a little tall,
a little of authority, perhaps in the carriage of the head, a bit of
hauteur maybe in the lifting of the chin--but gloriously young. Her
hair, long, heavy, in two wrist-thick plaits, fell on either side of her
face to her knees over a rose-colored bath robe of quilted satin. This
hair was black; blue against the exquisite whiteness of the skin; purple
against the dark-rose-colored quiltings. Her eyes, too, were black; but
they were wide apart, open, and thereby escaped any suggestion of that
shimmering, beady blackness of Castilian women. Their very size made
this feature perhaps too prominent in the girl's face. It is a thing
often to be noticed, as though the eye came first to its maturity, and
disturbed a little the harmony of features not yet wholly filled in.
But it is a beauty to be had only from the cradle, and for that reason
priceless.
"Oh, Caroline," cried the Marchesa, rising, "you are so splendidly, so
gloriously young!" The girl laughed. "It is a misfortune, Marchesa, from
which I am certain to recover."
"Oh," continued the woman, drinking in the girl from her dainty feet,
incased in quaint Japanese sandals, to the delicate contour of her
bosom, showing above the open collar of the robe. "If only one could be
always young, then one could, indeed, be always beautiful; but each year
is sold to us, as it goes out it takes with it some bit of our priceless
treasure, like evil fairies, stealing sovereigns from a chest, piece by
piece, until the treasure is wholly gone."
She paused, as though caught on the instant by some returning memory
of a day long vanished, when she saw, reflected from a glass, on such a
morning, a counterpart of this splendid picture, only that girl's hair
was gold, and her eyes gray, but she was slim, too, and brilliantly
colored and alluring.
Then she continued: "The bit taken seems a very little, a strand of
hair, a touch of color, the almost imperceptible lessening of a perfect
contour, but in the end we are hags."
"Then," replied the girl, smiling, "I beg that I may become, in the end,
such a hag as the Marchesa Soderrelli."
"Child," said the woman, still speaking as though moved by the
inspiration of that picture, "beg only for youth, in your prayers, as
the Apostle would say it, unceasingly. If you should be given a wish by
the fairies, or three wishes, let them all be youth. Women arriving
at middle life adhere to the Christian religion upon the promise of a
resurrection of the body. Were that promise wanting, we should be, to
the last one, pagans."
"But, Marchesa," replied the girl, "old, wise men tell us that the mind
is always young."
There was something adverse to this wisdom in the girl's soft voice; a
voice low, lingering, peculiar to the deliberate peoples of the South.
The Marchesa made a depreciating gesture. "My dear," she said, "what
man ever loved a woman for her mind! What Prince Charming ever rode down
from his enchanted palace to wed a learned prig, doing calculus behind
her spectacles! The sight would set the sides of every god in his sphere
shaking. It is always the lily lass, the dainty maiden of red blood and
dreams, the slim youngling of gloss and porcelain that the Prince takes
up, after adventures, into his saddle. Every man born into this world
is at heart a Greek. Learning, cleverness, and wisdom he may greatly, he
may extravagantly, admire, but it is beauty only that he loves. He may
deny this with a certain heat, with well-turned and tripping phrases,
with specious arguments to the ear sound, but, believe me for a wise old
woman, it is a seizure of unconscionable lying."
A soft hand put for a moment into that of the Marchesa, a wet cheek
touched a moment to her face, brought her lecture abruptly to a close.
"I refuse," replied the girl, laughing, "to do lessons before breakfast
even under so charming a teacher as the Marchesa Soderrelli."
Then she went into the bedchamber of the apartment, and sent a maid to
order breakfast laid on the Buhl table in the dressing room. The maid
returned, removed the cover, placed a felt pad over the exquisite face
of the table, and on that a linen cloth with a clock center, and borders
of Venetian point lace. Upon this the breakfast, brought in by a second
maid, was set under silver covers. While these preparations went swiftly
forward, the young woman, concerned with the details of her toilet,
maintained a running conversation with the Marchesa Soderrelli.
"Did you find that fairy person, the Duke of Dorset?"
"Yes," replied the Marchesa, "at Doune in Perthshire."
"Charming! Will he come to Oban?"
"He will come," answered the Marchesa.
"How lovely!" And then a volley of queries upon that alluring picture
which the press of Europe had drawn in fancy of this mysterious
Duke--queries which the inquisitive young woman herself interrupted by
coming, at that moment, through the door. She now wore slippers and
a dressing gown of silk, in hunters' pink, embroidered with Japanese
designs, but her hair in its two splendid plaits still hung on either
side of her face, over the red folds of the gown, as they had done over
the quiltings of the bath robe. She sat down opposite the Marchesa at
the table, in the subdued light of this sumptuous apartment.
The picture thus richly colored, set under a yacht's deck in the bay
of Oban, belonged rather behind a casement window, opening above a
blue sea, in some Arabian story. The beauty of the girl, the barbaric
richness of the dressing gown, her dark, level eyebrows, the hair in its
two plaits, were the distinctive properties of those first women of
the earth glorified by fable. But the girl responding visibly to these
ancient extravagances, was, in mental structure, aptly fitted to her
time. The wisdom of the débutante lay in her mouth.
"And now, Marchesa," she said, balancing her fork on the tips of her
fingers, "tell me all about him."