Lady Firmanence’s observations upon the family history of Mr. and Mrs. Lucian Damerel sent Lord Saxonstowe to their house at seven o’clock the following evening with feelings of pleasant curiosity. He had been out of the world—as that phrase is known by people whose chief idea of life is to live in social ant-heaps—long enough to enjoy a renewed acquaintance with it, and since his return to England had found a hitherto untasted pleasure in studying the manners and customs of his fellow-subjects. He remembered little about them as they had presented themselves to him before his departure for the East, for he was then young and unlicked: the five years of comparative solitude which he had spent in the deserts and waste places of the earth, only enlivened by the doubtful company of Kirghese, Tartars, and children of nature, had lifted him upon an eminence from whence he might view civilised humanity with a critical eye. So far everything had amused him—it seemed to him that never had life seemed so small and ignoble, so mean and trifling, as here where the men and women were as puppets pulled by strings which fate had attached to most capricious fingers. Like all the men who come back from the deserts and the mountains, he gazed on the whirling life around him with a feeling that was half pity, half contempt. The antics of the puppets made him wonder, and in the wonder he found amusement.
Mr. and Mrs. Lucian Damerel, as befitted young people untroubled by considerations of economy, resided in one of those smaller streets in Mayfair wherein one may find a house large enough to turn round in without more than an occasional collision with the walls. Such a house is not so comfortable as a suburban residence at one-tenth the rent, but it has the advantage of being{115} in the middle of the known world, and if its frontage to the street is only one of six yards, its exterior may be made pretty and even taking by a judicious use of flowering plants, bright paint, and a quaint knocker. The interior is usually suggestive of playing at doll’s house; but the absence of even one baby makes a great difference, and in Lucian’s establishment there were no children. Small as it was, the house was a veritable nest of comfort—Lucian and Haidee had the instinct of settling themselves amongst soft things, and surrounding their souls with an atmosphere of ?sthetic delight, and one of them at least had the artist’s eye for colour, and the true collector’s contempt for the cheap and obvious. There was scarcely a chair or table in the rooms sacred to the householders and their friends which had not a history and a distinction: every picture was an education in art; the books were masterpieces of the binder’s craft; the old china and old things generally were the despair of many people who could have afforded to buy a warehouse full of the like had they only known where to find it. Lucian knew, and when he came into possession of Lord Simonstower’s legacy he began to surround himself with the fruits of money and knowledge, and as riches came rolling in from royalties, he went on indulging his tastes until the house was full, and would hold no more examples of anything. But by that time it was a nest of luxury wherein even the light, real and artificial, was graduated to a fine shade, where nothing crude in shape or colour interfered with the delicate susceptibilities of a poetic temperament.
When Lord Saxonstowe was shown into the small drawing-room of this small house he marvelled at the cleverness and delicacy of the taste which could make so much use of limited dimensions. It was the daintiest and prettiest room he had ever seen, and though he himself had small inclinations to ease and luxury of any sort, he drank in the pleasantness of his surroundings with a distinct sense of personal gratification. The room was empty of human life when he entered it, but the{116} marks of a personality were all over it, and the personality was neither masculine nor feminine—it was the personality of a neuter thing, and Saxonstowe dimly recognised that it meant Art. He began to understand something of Lucian as he looked about him, and to conceive him as a mind which dominated its enveloping body to a love of beauty that might easily degenerate into a slavedom to luxury. He began to wonder if Lucian’s study or library, or wherever he worked, were similarly devoted to the worship of form and colour.
He was turning over the leaves of an Italian work, a book sumptuous in form and wonderful in its vellum binding and gold scroll-work, when a rustle of skirts aroused him from the first stages of a reverie. He turned, expecting to see his hostess—instead he saw a young lady whom he instinctively recognised as Miss Chilverstone, the girl of the merry eyes and the innumerable freckles of ten years earlier. He looked at her closely as she approached him, and he saw that the merry eyes had lost some of their roguery, but were still frank, clear, and kindly; some of the freckles had gone, but a good many were still there, adding piquancy to a face that had no pretensions to beauty, but many to the charms which spring from the possession of a kindly heart and a purposeful temperament. Good temper and good health appeared to radiate from Miss Chilverstone; the active girl of sixteen had developed into a splendid woman, and Lord Saxonstowe, as she moved towards him, admired her with a sudden recognition of her feminine strength—she was just the woman, he said to himself, who ought to be the mate of a strong man, a man of action and purpose and determination.
She held out her hand to him with a frank smile.
‘Do you remember me?’ she said. ‘It is quite ten years since that fateful afternoon at Simonstower.’
‘Was it fateful?’ he answered. ‘Yes, I remember quite well. In those days you were called Sprats.’
‘I am still Sprats,’ she answered, with a laugh. ‘I{117} shall always be Sprats. I am Sprats to Lucian and Haidee, and even to my children.’
‘To your children?’ he said wonderingly.
‘I have twenty-five,’ she replied, smiling at his questioning look. ‘But of course you do not know. I have a private orphanage, all of my own, in Bayswater—it is my hobby. If you are interested in babies and children, do come to see me there, and I will introduce you to all my charges.’
‘I will certainly do that,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it hard work?’
‘Isn’t everything hard work that is worth doing?’ she answered. ‘Yes, I suppose it is hard work, but I like it. I have a natural genius for mothering helpless things—that is why I occasionally condescend to put on fine clothes and dine with children like Lucian and Haidee when they entertain great travellers who are also peers of the realm.’
‘Do they require mothering?’ he asked.
‘Very much so sometimes—they are very particular babies. I come to them every now and then to scold them, smack them, straighten them up, and see that they are in no danger of falling into the fire or upsetting anything. Afterwards I dine with them in order to cheer them up after the rough time they have had.’
Saxonstowe smiled. He had been watching her closely all the time.
‘I see,’ he said, ‘that you are still Sprats. Has the time been very rough to-day?’
‘Somewhat rough on poor Haidee, perhaps,’ answered Sprats. ‘Lucian has wisely kept out of the way until he can find safety in numbers. But please sit down and tell me about your travels until our hostess appears—it seems quite funny to see you all in one piece after such adventures. Didn’t they torture you in some Thibetan town?’ she inquired, with a sudden change from gaiety to womanly concern.
‘They certainly were rather inhospitable,’ he answered. ‘I shouldn’t call it torture, I think—it was{118} merely a sort of gentle hint as to what they would do if I intruded upon them again.’
‘But I want to know what they did,’ she insisted. ‘You look so nice and comfortable sitting there, with no other sign of discomfort about you than the usual I-want-my-dinner look, that one would never dream you had gone through hardships.’
Saxonstowe was not much given to conversation—his nomadic life had communicated the gift of silence to him, but he recognised the sympathetic note in Miss Chilverstone’s voice, and he began to tell her about his travels in a somewhat boyish fashion that amused her. As he talked she examined him closely and decided that he was almost as young as on the afternoon when he occasioned such mad jealousy in Lucian’s breast. His method of expressing himself was simple and direct and schoolboyish in language, but the exuberance of spirits which she remembered had disappeared and given place to a staid, old-fashioned manner.
‘I wonder what did it?’ she said, unconsciously uttering her thought.
‘Did what?’ he asked.
‘I was thinking aloud,’ she answered. ‘I wondered what had made you so very staid in a curiously young way—you were a rough-and-tumble sort of boy that afternoon at Simonstower.’
Saxonstowe blushed. He had recollections of his youthfulness.
‘I believe I was an irrepressible sort of youngster,’ he said. ‘I think that gets knocked out of you though, when you spend a lot of time alone—you get no end of time for thinking, you know, out in the deserts.’
‘I should think so,’ she said. ‘And I suppose that even this solitude becomes companionable in a way that only those who have experienced it can understand?’
He looked at her with some surprise and with a new interest and strange sense of kinship.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘That’s it—that is it exactly. How did you know?’{119}
‘It isn’t necessary to go into the deserts and steppes to feel a bit lonely now and then, is it?’ she said, with a laugh. ‘I suppose most of us get some sort of notion of solitude at some time or other.’
At that juncture Haidee entered, and Saxonstowe turned to her with a good deal of curiosity. He was somewhat surprised to find that ten years of added age had made little difference in her. She was now a woman, it was true, and her girlish prettiness had changed into a somewhat luxurious style of beauty—there was no denying the loveliness of face and figure, of charm and colour, he said to himself, but he was quick to observe that Haidee’s beauty depended entirely upon surface qualities. She fell, without effort or consciousness, into poses which other women vainly tried to emulate; it was impossible to her to walk across a room, sit upon an unaccommodating chair, or loll upon a much becushioned sofa in anything but a graceful way; it was equally impossible, so long as nothing occurred to ruffle her, to keep from her lips a perpetual smile, or inviting glances from her dark eyes. She reminded Saxonstowe of a fluffy, silky-coated kitten which he had seen playing on Lady Firmanence’s hearthrug, and he was not surprised to find, when she began to talk to him, that her voice had something of the feline purr in it. Within five minutes of her entrance he had determined that Mrs. Damerel was a pretty doll. She showed to the greatest advantage amidst the luxury of her surroundings, but her mouth dropped no pearls, and her pretty face showed no sign of intellect, or of wit, or of any strong mental quality. It was evident that conversation was not Mrs. Damerel’s strong point—she indicated in an instinctive fashion that men were expected to amuse and admire her without drawing upon her intellectual r............