by Grant Allen
Just before lunch-time, two ladies arrived. They sat in the drawing-room with Mrs. Mallory, while I was still unobtrusively occupied in flitting about the room and settling small details. I wore my Italian costume, which was, as it were, my official uniform — barbaric richness of colour; a frock of orange and scarlet striped cotton, with a broad scarlet sash knotted about my waist, and a bright-hued neckerchief. The visitors gossiped with my hostess on the sofa. Their talk turned much on the recent doings of Mrs. Mallory’s cousin John. John, I could see, was an important person. I gathered from what they let drop that “poor John” had been sadly treated by an elect lady unnamed, to whom he had been engaged for close on three years. The elect lady had jilted him, and married a guardsman, which term, I suspected from the side-hints they gave, must mean an officer in a cavalry regiment. “But what could you expect?” Mrs. Mallory murmured, in a deprecatory voice. “John is a capital fellow, we all know, and as good as gold; but he is the prince of prigs. What high-spirited girl could ever put up with him when she came to know him — really to know him?”
“He has money?” one of the ladies asked.
“Not quite what one calls money nowadays, but enough to live on — a comfortable competency, and a good post under government. His future is certain — and splendid.”
“Still, he has been unfortunate in all his love-affairs.”
“Yes. This, you know, is his second disappointment. She kept on putting the marriage off from month to month on one pretext after another, shilly-shallying, toying with him, till at last she wrote that she did not care for him, and did care for the guardsman.”
“It must have been a terrible blow to your cousin’s amour propre!”
“It was — poor John! A cavalry officer above all! And John, who prides himself on his intellectual qualities!”
“But at the present day, dear Mrs. Mallory — there are so many girls, you know — and so few eligible men. A man who can marry is quite the exception. He ought to suit himself. A Girton girl, now — surely he might find some satisfactory Girton girl. Many of them, one would think, must be perfectly prig-proof.”
“Oh no; I fancy not. A Girton girl would be the worst possible choice. When prig meets prig, then comes the tug of war.”
The other lady spoke: her tone was acid. “For my part,” she said, nursing her long tortoise-shell glasses, “I have no patience with the woman. I have advised him to choose some nice bright lassie — catching her young, you know, and plastic — and to educate her up—”
“Rosalba,” Mrs. Mallory interposed, “we’ve forgotten one thing! Run out to the kitchen, quick, there’s a good girl, and bring me a jug of cold water to put with those cactus-dahlias!”
I was sorry to be sent away just then, for I was interested in John; but I ran as I was bid. By the time I came back with the jug of water, they were all three whispering. A minute later, Sir Hugh Tachbrook arrived, and turned the conversation.
Next instant, the drawing-room door opened again, and the housemaid announced “Mr. John Stodmarsh.”
He entered with a slow tread, as of a man who recognises his own weight and worth. His Future weighed upon him. In his hand he held a glossy black silk hat I recognised him at once. Eyes set far apart; thin lips; keen, solid features: he was my old friend of the Madonna del Monte.
“I’m not late, Linda, I hope,” he said, in a precise and cultivated voice, a trifle thin and colourless, advancing to Mrs. Mallory, and kissing her with a perfunctory cousinly kiss. “I was detained at the office — you know what official slavery is like — important dispatches.”
“On the contrary, you are early, John,” Mrs. Mallory answered, in a constrained tone; and I noted that his arrival seemed to cast a reflected air of stiffness over the entire meeting.
He shook hands in a courtly, old-fashioned way with the two other ladies; then his eye lighted on me. I wondered if he would recognise me, but he did not. ‘T was not likely he would. However, he looked hard at me and seemed to be interested. Instinctively I felt that he thought me pretty.
“One of your models?” he asked, raising his eyebrows, but dropping his voice as though the existence of models were scarcely proper.
Mrs. Mallory nodded assent “But more than a model,” she added, with her subtle smile.
“So I should think,” he replied, and regarded me with a fixed stare, not impolitely.
Other guests arrived. I flitted about the room, vaguely aware that Mrs. Mallory desired to keep me in evidence. Now and then she called me on some frivolous pretext. She and John Stodmarsh talked much to one another, and then looked at me. I felt sure they were talking about me. Though he had grown a little older, and was clad now in a tight-fitting frock-coat in place of the grey tourist suit, my old acquaintance was still much the same as ever — close-shaven, clear-cut, sleek, with logical features and a strongly marked chin, but with more of intellect than of emotion in his face — a typical, solid, cultivated Englishman. He held his head erect. His manner bore the stamp of complete confidence in an assured future.
Two or three times before lunch was announced, he lounged over near where I flitted about among the guests and took a hard look at me. He seemed as if he were scheduling me. Each time he went back and spoke once more to Mrs. Mallory, with his thumbs stuck in the armholes of his waistcoat. I caught a phrase now and again—” Might be moulded into any shape one desired”: “Extremely attractive, Linda”: “Great native ability, John”: “Different with those Italians”: “Well, the South, you know, is never naturally vulgar.” But Sir Hugh muttered only two words, “Young guttersnipe!”
By and by they all went in to lunch. I loitered behind in the drawing-room with a strange sense of impending revolution. My ears burned and tingled. I do not know whether it was because in the dining-room they were talking of me.
At any rate, I flung myself back on the sofa, and closed my eyes. I began to reflect that life was wonderful, and that I had seen a great deal of it.
Presently, almost before they were all seated, Mrs. Mallory came out to me, closely followed by John Stodmarsh. “Rosalba,” she said in an abrupt voice, “Mr. Stodmarsh invites you to come in and lunch with us.”
“I — I don’t want to go,” I answered, taken aback. If Mrs. Mallory had never erected the barrier, I would have taken all my meals with her. as a matter of course; as she had not asked me from the first, I did not care to be dragged in now by special favour.
“But you’ve got to come. You know, you promised to obey me in everything reasonable.”
“Is it so nominated in the bond?” I answered, rising.
John Stodmarsh started. “Why, where did you get that from, child?” he asked quickly.
“It is in Shakespeare,” I answered. “Don’t you remember, Shylock says it to Portia when she urges him to mercy?”
His round eyes of wonder amused me.
“Then — you have read Shakespeare?” he murmured.
I smiled. “Why not? Hath not an Italian eyes? Hath not an Italian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you give us the chance, will we not read Shakespeare?”
He glanced across at Mrs. Mallory. “And hath not an Italian originality?” he exclaimed in an undertone.
I curtsied my thanks. “If I have earned your approbation—” I said. “But I am keeping your lunch waiting.”
They had made a place for me between two guests; I took my seat there, with John Stodmarsh beside me. As I sat down, he beamed round with a smile on the other visitors, and murmured, “Experimental, purely.” He thought I would not understand what he meant, but I did. Fortunately, however, I was born without mauvaise honte. I seated myself as composedly as if I had always dined at the high table. I think it is only English people who feel conscious of sitting below the salt. For myself, in spite of my adventures and the strange bedfellows they had forced upon me, I never lost the
ingrained sense of nobility natural to the daughter of a man who had fought for Italy. Sir Hugh glared at me, too appalled for language.
Just at first, the rest of the company abstained from talking much to me, or even from obtrusively watching me; though I was dimly aware that they cast alarmed side-glances in my direction from time to time, no doubt because they suspected me of impossible evolutions with my knife and fork; they were clearly on the lookout for the wildest social solecisms. Their attitude only put me more at my ease. It would never occur to an Italian peasant that his “table manners” (as English servants say) were less than fit for the banquets of princes. I eat my smelt au gratin and my mutton cutlet in unembarrassed silence. My perfect sang-froid relieved the tension. By the time we had arrived at the grouse, Mrs. Mallory and her friends had realised the fact that I was not a savage.
Then I began to talk. In five minutes the whole table was listening with amusement. Even John Stodmarsh, who would have made an impressive judge, laughed at my sallies.
He left off laying down the law on our relations with France, and paused to hear me.
Phebe, the parlour-maid, offered me trifle. I helped myself to a little, conscious that she offered it with a very bad grace; it hurt Phebe’s feelings as a self-respecting, high-class English servant to wait at table where an Italian model was seated among the gentry. Mrs. Mallory glanced at me as I began to eat it “That’s sudden death, Rosalba,” she murmured in a tone of warning.
“Then I shall know the worst,” I answered, swallowing a spoonful composedly.
“Come back and tell us,” John Stodmarsh put in. “It is the great fault of travellers who visit that bourne that they never return to let us know what they think of it.”
“Dante did,” I answered. “He gave us a perfect guide-book to the Other World. But then, his account is not exactly encouraging.”
“The Inferno, no; but have you read the Paradiso?”
“Oh, I don’t care for the Paradiso. It is all too vague. I should want a heaven more like this earth — a heaven where things are warmer and more human; a heaven, don’t you know, with grouse and trifle in it.”
“My dear Rosalba,” Mrs. Mallory exclaimed, “how terribly unpoetical! Grouse and trifle! My child, you are too earthy. If you hold such opinions, you should not give vent to them.”
“I always say what I think,” I answered. “That’s my charm, Mrs. Mallory. Besides, of course, there are heavens and heavens. In the heaven in the Arabian Nights, if you are a good Moslem, you have Circassian slaves and houris to wait upon you, and all sorts of good things, just the same as on earth here. I believe there must be different brands of heaven for different types of races and temperaments. I should want my heaven where there were plenty of roses, and peaches on the wall, and lovely grounds with flowery promontories of lilac and laburnum, to walk up and down in, just like Sir Hugh’s, or the gardens about Aladdin’s palace.”
John Stodmarsh turned to our hostess and exclaimed in French, with a very English accent, and some English idiom, “Elle sait beaucoup, cette enfant. Où donc l’a-t-elle ramassé?”
“Sur la grand’ route, monsieur,” I answered, bobbing at him. “On y ramasse bien de choses, quand on est bon chiffonier.”
“Mais; — vous parlez français aussi?” he cried, more and more astonished.
“Mais naturellement,” I answered. “Did I not give dramatic representations in France — à la belle étoile — for more than a twelvemonth?”
He glanced at Mrs. Mallory. She glanced at him. His glance said, “She is extraordinary.” Her glance said, “I told you so.” Then he spoke aloud. “She will do,” he said slowly.
“For what?” I asked.
“For me,” he answered.
It struck me long after as characteristically mannish that he should say so glibly, “She will do for me,” without waiting to ask himself, “Shall I do for her?” — a question which men in their lordly fashion seldom seem to hit upon.
The parlour-maid offered me wine. “No, thanks, Phebe!” I said, laying one finger across my glass.
“You may take a little, Rosalba,” Mrs. Mallory put in. “It is hock — very light.”
“I never take it,” I answered firmly.
“Prejudice?” Sir Hugh asked, relenting.
“Oh no,” I replied; “but I have seen the evil of it.”
They all burst out laughing. I was put on my mettle. “Oh, if you think me prejudiced,” I went on, “I’ll take half a glass to show my open mind. — The nectar, Hebe! I mean, Phebe!”
There was a moment’s pause; then John Stodmarsh spoke again. “Where did you learn all these things?” he asked abruptly.
I poised an olive on the end of my fork and answered, laughing, “At the university of Salamanca.”
“Salamanca? Then you have been in Spain too?”
“Is Salamanca in Spain?” I asked innocently. “Well, I never knew that. I thought, like Bagdad, it was nowhere in particular. How odd it should be ‘in Spain — où j’ai tant de châteaux!”
Their eyes met again. They were trying to examine me.
“This is very extraordinary, Linda,” he went on, half aside. “English girls who have been to good schools know absolutely nothing. Why, there is my niece Phyllis — from Miss Buss’s, at Hampstead — I spoke to her the other day of the Gerusalemme and the Orlando Furioso, and I assure you, she had never even heard of Tasso or Ariosto.”
“Mauvaise éducation!” I murmured, half below my breath. “La ville — les pensionnats! But, in the open air, on the highroads — with nature all round one—” and I ate my olive.
John Stodmarsh surveyed me once more with a curious amused smile playing round the corners of his doctrinaire mouth. “There may be some truth in that,” he drawled out slowly; “at any rate, you appear to justify your doctrine in your own person. But don’t you think it would do a scholar educated in that open-air university of which you speak a certain amount of good to take a course of lessons in some more regular school — to get the ordinary scholastic training superadded to her peculiar line of knowledge?”
“Oh, it might finish her education,’ no doubt,” I answered, offhand. “Though, for my own part, I would rather learn in the fields and on the hills than stew in a schoolroom.”
“Each has its use,” John Stodmarsh mused oracularly.
“No doubt,” I replied, and helped myself to an apricot.
CHAPTER XII
SIGNED, SEALED, AND DELIVERED
AFTER lunch we adjourned to the room in Bond Street where the exhibition was to be held. I flitted about the place as usual, dancing here, dancing there, and putting last touches to the show; while Mrs. Mallory and her friends inspected the pictures. Some of them held their heads judicially on one side, a little way off; others peered close into the canvas with critical eye-glasses. From time to time I caught fragments of their modulated murmur. I have terrible ears, and terribly quick perceptions. All through life I have overheard much that was not meant for me. Through the Babel of sounds now, stray sentences detached themselves. Half of them, of course, were about the pictures — the usual would-be connoisseurish and laudatory talk of those who have learnt the art of simulating conversation. But the other half were not. They concerned a person, described as “She”; I thought that I could conjecture about whom they were speaking.
“The Godiva is charming.”
“High lights on the shoulders overdone, perhaps.”
“But don’t you think the horse’s off leg—”
“Has the manners of a lady.”
“Just a touch more blue, I fancy.”
“Not green enough, is it?”
“Could hardly believe it; why, Mrs. Mallory says she was wandering about the roads—”
“That exquisite bit of landscape.”
“The figures are all right, but the trees—”— “My dear, how unspeakable!”
“A trifle too pink!”
“Between ourselves, I call it out of
drawing.”
“Bowled John Stodmarsh over; I never saw a man so completely floored—”— “But then, nobody can render trees like you, Mrs. Mallory.”
“My dear Linda, it’s quite the finest bit of figure-painting you’ve done since—”
“So quaint! so gipsy-like!”
“Pique, I should say!”
“No, not pique. It often happens so. You see, a man has been living in a strained emotional state, indulging his love-instinct; and all at once his hopes and expectations are frustrated. What more natural than for him to transfer to a new object the flow of feelings which have hitherto—”
“Such splendour of colour! Such wealth of imagination!”
“As clever as she can hold.”
“Too grey; quite too grey — especially in the foreground!”— “But then, consider the ante cedents. For my part, I should be afraid—”
“A certain originality of speech and manner.”
“Oh, naturally well bred; with training, you know, and education—”— “Plastic, so plastic!”— “And he means to educate her.”
I half guessed what it all meant; but I flitted about between the easels pretending to look unconscious.
In the afternoon, when all the rest had gone, John Stodmarsh remained. “It is kind of you, Linda,” he said, with his back to the fire and his hands behind him, “to undertake the arrangement of this little business for me. Let me see” — he pulled out his watch: an ancestral gold watch, with big seals attached—” just four! At half-past I have an important appointment with Sir Everard at the office, and one must not keep a Secretary of State waiting. A hansom will whisk me there in five minutes. That leaves twenty-five — which ought to be ample. I like to strike while the iron is hot. As psychologist I have observed that the apt emotional moment recurs infrequently.”
