The Marchesa Soderrelli and Cyrus Childers remained on the yacht. When
the small boat came alongside the Duke asked to be allowed to take the
oars, and so the two had gone alone to see the regattas.
The bay was full of crafts. The crews of rival yachts crowded along the
course. Small boats were packed together in an almost unbroken line; one
coming late could find no place.
Everywhere awnings, flags, gay parasols shut out the view of the
regattas. The Duke pulled out into the bay and north toward Loch Lynne.
He was rather glad of the pressing crowd. This young girl held his
interest; the enigma of her puzzled him; she was like no other woman.
Somehow this dark-eyed, dark-haired girl seemed to present to him the
alluring aspect of something newly come into the world; something which
he himself had found.
There seemed to lie about her, like a vague perfume, something of the
compelling lure of fairy women, called up by the fancy; of women dreamed
of; of women created by the mind to satisfy every hunger of the senses.
The Duke of Dorset could not regard this girl without this vague
illusion entering his body like the first faint subtle odors of a
garden. The illusion seemed constantly to attend her. The presence of
others, commonplace surroundings, did not remove it. Her conversation,
no matter how it ran, did not remove it. He seemed unable by any act of
his will to dispel it.
There seemed, somehow, from the first moment, a certain intimate
relation existing between himself and this girl whom he had found; as
though she had appeared, obedient to some call issuing unconsciously
from the mysterious instincts of his nature. The sense of it had entered
the man at once when he came before her, as the subtle, compelling
influence of some pictures enter and seize our attention when we
approach them. And he had wished to stop and receive it. He had gone
about under the vague spell of it. When he had been shown over the
yacht, he had felt a certain difficulty in giving the attention to
the details of that exquisite craft which a proper courtesy required.
Afterwards on the deck he had hardly followed the conversation. He
had wished to be left alone, to be undisturbed, as one wishes to be
undisturbed before the picture that moves him.
He pulled the little boat out into the sea. He drew beyond the yachts,
beyond the warship, off the great rock that rises out of the green water
north of the bay. He wished to be alone with this girl. He wished to
inquire of her, as one would inquire of a fairy woman found in some
sunlit hollow; to ask her intimate and personal questions. Without being
conscious of it, his conversation entered this avenue of inquiry. He
seized upon the Marchesa Soderrelli as one who might lead the way.
"I wonder," he said, "why it is that the Marchesa Soderrelli bears so
great a distrust of the Oriental?"
"Perhaps from her experiences of life," replied the girl.
"Is she an old friend, then?" said the Duke.
"I have known her only for a month at Biarritz. But long ago, when she
was a little girl, my uncle knew her. She was born in a southern city
of the United States. She was very beautiful, my uncle says. I think he
must have been in love with her then, but he was a man of middle life,
and she was a mere girl. I think he loved her because he always talks of
her when one discusses women with him, and he never married. I only
know the shadow of the story. Her family wished her to make an amazing
marriage. My uncle was then only on his way up, so her family married
her to an Italian Marquis in the diplomatic service. I think he was in
some way near the reigning house, and if certain possible things were
to happen, he would go very high. The things never happened, and I think
the indolent Marquis merely dragged her about the world. But you ought
to know her better than I."
"I have occasionally seen her," replied the Duke. "Her husband was
always somewhere in the diplomatic service, usually in the East. He was
rarely anywhere for long. But I judge the position of his family always
found a place for him."
"Was he a very bad man, this Marquis?"
The Duke did not make a direct reply. He would have wished to evade this
question, but there seemed no way.
"He was a person one usually avoided," he said.
"One begins to understand," continued the girl, "why the Marchesa spoke
just now with so much heat. She has always met with these other races.
She has been behind the scenes with them. In the South, where she was
born, there was always the negro; and moving about the East, there was
always the Oriental, and, besides this, her husband was of another race,
not so widely different from ourselves as these, but still distinct from
us. She had a look in at the door."
"But we cannot take the Marchesa for a prophet."
"Why not? She is a woman."
"And how may a woman be better able to divine events?"
"She feels."
"Do not men also feel?"
"But feeling is the way a woman gets at the truth. Men go by another
road."
"But is not the other road a safer one?"
The girl laughed. "The English think it is. We are not so certain. I see
you trudge along it, and I know that you are safe--ever so safe--but,
are you happy?"
She put out her hands toward the land. "You have made everything in this
great, solid island safe. Even one's marriage is a thing to be managed
by the chief justice. Do you think one ought to go to the altar by this
other road?"
"But why should one follow one's reason in every other thing and abandon
it in this?"
The girl's face became thoughtful.
"I do not know," she said. "I wish I did." She trailed her fingers in
the water. "Perhaps it is a choice between being safe and being happy.
Perhaps, after all, older persons know best. Do you think they do?"
The Duke of Dorset was interested in the woman rather than these
speeches. The conversation was after a certain manner a thing apart. He
did not attach it to this exquisite girl. It seemed rather a portion of
some elaborate rite by which she was made to appear, to be, to remain.
He continued it as one new at magic continues his formula, in order to
hold in the world the vision he has called up. But the formula was not
of the essence of this vision. It was words following after a certain
fashion. He did not, then, go within for his replies, but without, to
the custom of his country, to the established belief rather than
his own. It was a moving of the man's mind along the lines of least
resistance; as though the magician made up his formula from anything
that he remembered, while the deeps of consciousness in him were
enjoying the appearance that he held by it.
"Older persons," he said, "are possessed of a greater experience of
life. They have gone a journey that youth is setting out on. They ought
to know."
"How to be safe? Yes, I believe that," she replied. "I believe they know
that. But how to be happy? I am not so certain. We have instincts that
we feel are superior to any reason, instincts that seem to warn us--I
mean a woman has. She has a sort of sense of happiness. I cannot make
it plain. It is like the sense of direction that leads an animal home
through an unfamiliar country. Put it down in a place it does not know,
and it will presently set out in the right direction. We are like that.
We feel that right direction. Older persons may insist that we take
another path, but we feel it wrong. We feel that our happiness does not
lie that way. Ought we to go against that instinct?"
The charm of the girl deepened as she spoke. She became more vital, more
serious, more moved. And the attention of the man drew nearer to her
and farther from what he said. He began to repeat arguments that he had
heard when families had gone about the making of a marriage.
It was too important a matter to be governed by a whim, an inclination,
a personal attachment. It was a great complex undertaking. Obligations
lapped over into it from both the past and the future. The rights of
one's people touched it. All the practical affairs of life touched it.
The standards of one's ancestors must not be lowered. The thing was a
human chain; every man must put in his link. The obligation on him was
to make that link as good as his fathers had made it. He must not debase
the metal, he must not alloy it. This was the great moving duty; against
this no personal inclination ought to stand. Moreover, who would leave
the sale of an estate or the investing of revenues to one having no
experience of life; and yet, the making of a marriage was more important
than the sale of any estate, or the placing of any revenues. It was the
administration for life of a great trust in perpetuity.
The man was merely reciting. He was like that one playing at magic,
merely feeding words into his formula one after another, as he could
find them, because thereby the appearance that he was drawing out of the
shadow was becoming more distinct.
The girl, leaning forward, was following every word with the greatest
interest; her eyes wide, her lips parted. She was like some kelpie woman
presented with the gift of life, inquiring of its conditions.
"You make me feel how great you English are," she said, "how big, and
sane, and practical. No wonder you go about setting the world in order;
but where does the poor little individual come in?"
"The house is greater than any member of it," replied the Duke.
"I see that," she said. "I see the big purpose. But must one give up all
one's little chance of happiness? Suppose one's feelings were against
the judgment of one's family?"
"We must believe," he said, "that many persons are wiser than one."
"But does one's instinct, one's personal inclination never count?"
"It often counts," he said. "It often wrecks in a generation all that
one's people have done."
"You make me afraid," said the girl. "Suppose in your big, sane island a
woman felt that she ought not to do as her people told her. Suppose
she felt it to be wrong. I do not mean that she loved some other man,
because if she did, I think she could not be made to obey. But suppose
she loved no one; suppose she only felt that this was not the thing to
do. Ought she to give up that poor little instinct?"
The Duke of Dorset recited the stock answer to that query: Suppose a
prince, called to rule for life a hereditary kingdom, were about
to select a minister, would he go into the street and pick a man by
instinct, or would he hear his parliament?
The girl made a helpless gesture.
"You convince me," she said, "and yet, one would like to believe that
one's instinct can be trusted, that it is somehow above everything else,
eternally right. One would like to believe that some little romance
remained in the world; that some place, somewhere, the one, the real
one, would find us if we only waited--if we only trusted to this
feeling--if we only held fast to it in a sort of blind, persisting
faith. But I suppose older people know."
The sun, slanting eastward, rippled on the sea. The boat lifted and
fell. The Duke pulled back to the yacht. Swarms of boats were detaching
themselves from the packed lines of the regattas. He took a sweep out in
the bay to escape this moving hive. A furrow of shining water followed
the boat. It widened and spread into a gilded track leading out into the
sea.
The girl no longer spoke. The atmosphere, as of something vague, unreal,
deepened around her. Again to the man there returned the impulse to know
things intimate and personal about this woman whom he had found. Was she
alone in the world with this curious old man? Had she no one nearer than
this uncle? He remembered in one of the salons of the yacht, on the old
man's table, a photograph in a big silver frame--the picture of a young
man. He remembered the vivid impression that this picture had given
him, an impression of a certain aggressive alertness that struck him as
almost insolent--as though the person bearing this face were accustomed
to thrust along toward what he wanted. He began to compare the face with
the girl before him. There ought to be some feature, some mark of blood,
some trick of expression common to the two of them, but he could not
find it. His mind was laboring with it when they reached the yacht, and
the old man came down the gangway to receive them.
The young girl stepped out of the boat. Her gay, sunny air returned.
"I have been taking a lesson in obedience, Uncle," she said. "The Duke
of Dorset has made me see how wise older people are, and how we ought
to follow the plan of life they make for us, and how we ought not to set
our whims against their reason."
A smile flitted over the old man's face like sunlight over gun metal.
"I am very much obliged to the Duke of Dorset," he said.