A pair of blue eyes
it being the possibility of a collapse.
Elfride had never told her father of the four-and-twenty-hours’
escapade with Stephen, nor had it, to her knowledge, come to his ears
by any other route. It was a secret trouble and grief to the girl for a
short time, and Stephen’s departure was another ingredient in her
sorrow. But Elfride possessed special facilities for getting rid of
trouble after a decent interval. Whilst a slow nature was imbibing a
misfortune little by little, she had swallowed the whole agony of it at
a draught and was brightening again. She could slough off a sadness and
replace it by a hope as easily as a lizard renews a diseased limb.
And two such excellent distractions had presented themselves. One was
bringing out the romance and looking for notices in the papers, which,
though they had been significantly short so far, had served to divert
her thoughts. The other was migrating from the vicarage to the more
commodious old house of Mrs. Swancourt’s, overlooking the same valley.
Mr. Swancourt at first disliked the idea of being transplanted to
feminine soil, but the obvious advantages of such an accession of
dignity reconciled him to the change. So there was a radical “move;”
the two ladies staying at Torquay as had been arranged, the vicar going
to and fro.
Mrs. Swancourt considerably enlarged Elfride’s ideas in an aristocratic
direction, and she began to forgive her father for his politic
marriage. Certainly, in a worldly sense, a handsome face at
three-and-forty had never served a man in better stead.
The new house at Kensington was ready, and they were all in town.
The Hyde Park shrubs had been transplanted as usual, the chairs ranked
in line, the grass edgings trimmed, the roads made to look as if they
were suffering from a heavy thunderstorm; carriages had been called for
by the easeful, horses by the brisk, and the Drive and Row were again
the groove of gaiety for an hour. We gaze upon the spectacle, at six
o’clock on this midsummer afternoon, in a melon-frame atmosphere and
beneath a violet sky. The Swancourt equipage formed one in the stream.
Mrs. Swancourt was a talker of talk of the incisive kind, which her low
musical voice—the only beautiful point in the old woman—prevented from
being wearisome.
“Now,” she said to Elfride, who, like AEneas at Carthage, was full of
admiration for the brilliant scene, “you will find that our
companionless state will give us, as it does everybody, an
extraordinary power in reading the features of our fellow-creatures
here. I always am a listener in such places as these—not to the
narratives told by my neighbours’ tongues, but by their faces—the
advantage of which is, that whether I am in Row, Boulevard, Rialto, or
Prado, they all speak the same language. I may have acquired some skill
in this practice through having been an ugly lonely woman for so many
years, with nobody to give me information; a thing you will not
consider strange when the parallel case is borne in mind,—how truly
people who have no clocks will tell the time of day.”
“Ay, that they will,” said Mr. Swancourt corroboratively. “I have known
labouring men at Endelstow and other farms who had framed complete
systems of observation for that purpose. By means of shadows, winds,
clouds, the movements of sheep and oxen, the singing of birds, the
crowing of cocks, and a hundred other sights and sounds which people
with watches in their pockets never know the existence of, they are
able to pronounce within ten minutes of the hour almost at any required
instant. That reminds me of an old story which I’m afraid is too
bad—too bad to repeat.” Here the vicar shook his head and laughed
inwardly.
“Tell it—do!” said the ladies.
“I mustn’t quite tell it.”
“That’s absurd,” said Mrs. Swancourt.
“It was only about a man who, by the same careful system of
observation, was known to deceive persons for more than two years into
the belief that he kept a barometer by stealth, so exactly did he
foretell all changes in the weather by the braying of his ass and the
temper of his wife.”
Elfride laughed.
“Exactly,” said Mrs. Swancourt. “And in just the way that those learnt
the signs of nature, I have learnt the language of her illegitimate
sister—artificiality; and the fibbing of eyes, the contempt of
nose-tips, the indignation of back hair, the laughter of clothes, the
cynicism of footsteps, and the various emotions lying in walking-stick
twirls, hat-liftings, the elevation of parasols, the carriage of
umbrellas, become as A B C to me.
“Just look at that daughter’s sister class of mamma in the carriage
across there,” she continued to Elfride, pointing with merely a turn of
her eye. “The absorbing self-consciousness of her position that is
shown by her countenance is most humiliating to a lover of one’s
country. You would hardly believe, would you, that members of a
Fashionable World, whose professed zero is far above the highest degree
of the humble, could be so ignorant of the elementary instincts of
reticence.”
“How?”
“Why, to bear on their faces, as plainly as on a phylactery, the
inscription, ‘Do, pray, look at the coronet on my panels.’”
“Really, Charlotte,” said the vicar, “you see as much in faces as Mr.
Puff saw in Lord Burleigh’s nod.”
Elfride could not but admire the beauty of her fellow countrywomen,
especially since herself and her own few acquaintances had always been
slightly sunburnt or marked on the back of the hands by a
bramble-scratch at this time of the year.
“And what lovely flowers and leaves they wear in their bonnets!” she
exclaimed.
“Oh yes,” returned Mrs. Swancourt. “Some of them are even more striking
in colour than any real ones. Look at that beautiful rose worn by the
lady inside the rails. Elegant vine-tendrils introduced upon the stem
as an improvement upon prickles, and all growing so naturally just over
her ear—I say growing advisedly, for the pink of the petals and the
pink of her handsome cheeks are equally from Nature’s hand to the eyes
of the most casual observer.”
“But praise them a little, they do deserve it!” said generous Elfride.
“Well, I do. See how the Duchess of——waves to and fro in her seat,
utilizing the sway of her landau by looking around only when her head
is swung forward, with a passive pride which forbids a resistance to
the force of circumstance. Look at the pretty pout on the mouths of
that family there, retaining no traces of being arranged beforehand, so
well is it done. Look at the demure close of the little fists holding
the parasols; the tiny alert thumb, sticking up erect against the ivory
stem as knowing as can be, the satin of the parasol invariably matching
the complexion of the face beneath it, yet seemingly by an accident,
which makes the thing so attractive. There’s the red book lying on the
opposite seat, bespeaking the vast numbers of their acquaintance. And I
particularly admire the aspect of that abundantly daughtered woman on
the other side—I mean her look of unconsciousness that the girls are
stared at by the walkers, and above all the look of the girls
themselves—losing their gaze in the depths of handsome men’s eyes
without appearing to notice whether they are observing masculine eyes
or the leaves of the trees. There’s praise for you. But I am only
jesting, child—you know that.”
“Piph-ph-ph—how warm it is, to be sure!” said Mr. Swancourt, as if his
mind were a long distance from all he saw. “I declare that my watch is
so hot that I can scarcely bear to touch it to see what the time is,
and all the world smells like the inside of a hat.”
“How the men stare at you, Elfride!” said the elder lady. “You will
kill me quite, I am afraid.”
“Kill you?”
“As a diamond kills an opal in the same setting.”
“I have noticed several ladies and gentlemen looking at me,” said
Elfride artlessly, showing her pleasure at being observed.
“My dear, you mustn’t say ‘gentlemen’ nowadays,” her stepmother
answered in the tones of arch concern that so well became her ugliness.
“We have handed over ‘gentlemen’ to the lower middle class, where the
word is still to be heard at tradesmen’s balls and provincial
tea-parties, I believe. It is done with here.”
“What must I say, then?”
“‘Ladies and MEN’ always.”
At this moment appeared in the stream of vehicles moving in the
contrary direction a chariot presenting in its general surface the rich
indigo hue of a midnight sky, the wheels and margins being picked out
in delicate lines of ultramarine; the servants’ liveries were dark-blue
coats and silver lace, and breeches of neutral Indian red. The whole
concern formed an organic whole, and moved along behind a pair of dark
chestnut geldings, who advanced in an indifferently zealous trot, very
daintily performed, and occasionally shrugged divers points of their
veiny surface as if they were rather above the business.
In this sat a gentleman with no decided characteristics more than that
he somewhat resembled a good-natured commercial traveller of the
superior class. Beside him was a lady with skim-milky eyes and
complexion, belonging to the ‘interesting’ class of women, where that
class merges in the sickly, her greatest pleasure being apparently to
enjoy nothing. Opposite this pair sat two little girls in white hats
and blue feathers.
The lady saw Elfride, smiled and bowed, and touched her husband’s
elbow, who turned and received Elfride’s movement of recognition with a
gallant elevation of his hat. Then the two children held up their arms
to Elfride, and laughed gleefully.
“Who is that?”
“Why, Lord Luxellian, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Swancourt, who with the
vicar had been seated with her back towards them.
“Yes,” replied Elfride. “He is the one man of those I have seen here
whom I consider handsomer than papa.”
“Thank you, dear,” said Mr. Swancourt.
“Yes; but your father is so much older. When Lord Luxellian gets a
little further on in life, he won’t be half so good-looking as our
man.”
“Thank you, dear, likewise,” said Mr. Swancourt.
“See,” exclaimed Elfride, still looking towards them, “how those little
dears want me! Actually one of them is crying for me to come.”
“We were talking of bracelets just now. Look at Lady Luxellian’s,” said
Mrs. Swancourt, as that baroness lifted up her arm to support one of
the children. “It is slipping up her arm—too large by half. I hate to
see daylight between a bracelet and a wrist; I wonder women haven’t
better taste.”
“It is not on that account, indeed,” Elfride expostulated. “It is that
her arm has got thin, poor thing. You cannot think how much she has
altered in this last twelvemonth.”
The carriages were now nearer together, and there was an exchange of
more familiar greetings between the two families. Then the Luxellians
crossed over and drew up under the plane-trees, just in the rear of the
Swancourts. Lord Luxellian alighted, and came forward with a musical
laugh.
It was his attraction as a man. People liked him for those tones, and
forgot that he had no talents. Acquaintances remembered Mr. Swancourt
by his manner; they remembered Stephen Smith by his face, Lord
Luxellian by his laugh.
Mr. Swancourt made some friendly remarks—among others things upon the
heat.
“Yes,” said Lord Luxellian, “we were driving by a furrier’s window this
afternoon, and the sight filled us all with such a sense of suffocation
that we were glad to get away. Ha-ha!” He turned to Elfride. “Miss
Swancourt, I have hardly seen or spoken to you since your literary feat
was made public. I had no idea a chiel was taking notes down at quiet
Endelstow, or I should certainly have put myself and friends upon our
best behaviour. Swancourt, why didn’t you give me a hint!”
Elfride fluttered, blushed, laughed, said it was nothing to speak of,
&c. &c.