Robert Elsmere
grace. Her neck and arms bore the challenge of the dress victoriously.
Her red-gold hair gleamed in the light of Lady Charlotte's innumerable
candles. A knot of dusky blue feathers on her shoulder, and a Japanese
fan of the same colour, gave just that touch of purpose and art which
the spectator seems to claim as the tribute answering to his praise in
the dress of a young girl. She moved with perfect self-possession,
distributing a few smiling looks to the people she knew as she advanced
towards Lady Charlotte. Any one with a discerning eye could have seen
that she was in that stage of youth when a beautiful woman is like a
statue to which the master is giving the finishing touches. Life, the
sculptor, had been at work upon her, refining here, softening there,
planing away awkwardness, emphasising grace, disengaging as it were,
week by week, and month by month, all the beauty of which the original
conception was capable. And the process is one attended always by a glow
and sparkle, a kind of effluence of youth and pleasure, which makes
beauty more beautiful and grace more graceful.
The little murmur and rustle of persons turning to look, which had
already begun to mark her entrance into a room, surrounded Rose as she
walked up to Lady Charlotte. Mr. Flaxman, who had been standing absently
silent, woke up directly she appeared, and went to greet her before his
aunt.
'You failed us at rehearsal,' he said with smiling reproach; 'we were
all at sixes and sevens.'
'I had a sick mother, unfortunately, who kept me at home. Lady
Charlotte, Catherine couldn't come. Agnes and I are alone in the world.
Will you chaperon us?'
'I don't know whether I will accept the responsibility to-night--in that
new gown,' replied Lady Charlotte grimly, putting up her eyeglass to
look at it and the wearer. Rose bore the scrutiny with a light smiling
silence, even though she knew Mr. Flaxman was looking too.
'On the contrary,' she said, 'one always feels so particularly good and
prim in a new frock.'
'Really? I should have thought it one of Satan's likeliest moments,'
said Flaxman, laughing--his eyes, however, the while saying quite other
things to her, as they finished their inspection of her dress.
Lady Charlotte threw a sharp glance first at him and then at Rose's
smiling ease, before she hurried off to other guests.
'I have made a muddle as usual,' she said to herself in disgust,
'perhaps even a worse one than I thought!'
Whatever might be Hugh Flaxman's state of mind, however, he never showed
greater self-possession than on this particular evening.
A few minutes after Rose's entry he introduced her for the first time to
his sister Lady Helen. The Varleys had only just come up to town for the
opening of Parliament, and Lady Helen had come to-night to Martin
Street, all ardour to see Hugh's new adoration, and the girl whom all
the world was beginning to talk about--both as a beauty and as an
artist. She rushed at Rose, if any word so violent can be applied to
anything so light and airy as Lady Helen's movements, caught the girl's
hands in both hers, and, gazing up at her with undisguised admiration,
said to her the prettiest, daintiest, most effusive things possible.
Rose--who with all her lithe shapeliness, looked over-tall and even a
trifle stiff beside the tiny bird-like Lady Helen--took the advances of
Hugh Flaxman's sister with a pretty flush of flattered pride. She looked
down at the small radiant creature with soft and friendly eyes, and Hugh
Flaxman stood by, so far well pleased.
Then he went off to fetch Mr. Denman, the hero of the evening, to be
introduced to her. While he was away, Agnes, who was behind her sister,
saw Rose's eyes wandering from Lady Helen to the door, restlessly
searching and then returning.
Presently through the growing crowd round the entrance Agnes spied a
well-known form emerging.
'Mr. Langham! But Rose never told me he was to be here to-night, and how
_dreadful_ he looks!'
Agnes was so startled that her eyes followed Langham closely across the
room. Rose had seen him at once; and they had greeted each other across
the crowd. Agnes was absorbed, trying to analyse what had struck her so.
The face was always melancholy, always pale, but to-night it was
ghastly, and from the whiteness of cheek and brow, the eyes, the
jet-black hair stood out in intense and disagreeable relief. She would
have remarked on it to Rose, but that Rose's attention was claimed by
the young thought-reader, Mr. Denman, whom Mr. Flaxman had brought up.
Mr. Denman was a fair-haired young Hercules, whose tremulous agitated
manner contrasted oddly with his athlete's looks. Among other magnetisms
he was clearly open to the magnetism of women, and he stayed talking to
Rose, staring furtively at her the while from under his heavy
lids,--much longer than the girl thought fair.
'Have you seen any experiments in the working of this new force before?'
he asked her, with a solemnity which sat oddly on his commonplace
bearded face.
'Oh yes!' she said flippantly. 'We have tried it sometimes. It is very
good fun.'
He drew himself up. 'Not _fun_,' he said impressively, 'not fun.
Thought-reading wants seriousness; the most tremendous things depend
upon it. If established it will revolutionise our whole views of life.
Even a Huxley could not deny that!'
She studied him with mocking eyes. 'Do you imagine this party to-night
looks very serious?'
His face fell.
'One can seldom get people to take it scientifically,' he admitted,
sighing. Rose, impatiently, thought him a most preposterous young man.
Why was he not cricketing or shooting or exploring, or using the muscles
Nature had given him so amply, to some decent practical purpose, instead
of making a business out of ruining his own nerves and other people's
night after night in hot drawing-rooms? And when would he go away?
'Come, Mr. Denman,' said Flaxman, laying hands upon him; 'the audience
is about collected, I think. Ah, there you are!' and he gave Langham a
cool greeting. 'Have you seen anything yet of these fashionable dealings
with the devil?'
'Nothing. Are you a believer?'
Flaxman shrugged his shoulders. 'I never refuse an experiment of any
kind,' he added with an odd change of voice. 'Come, Denman.'
And the two went off. Langham came to a stand beside Rose, while old
Lord Rupert, as jovial as ever, and bubbling over with gossip about the
Queen's Speech, appropriated Lady Helen, who was the darling of all
elderly men.
They did not speak. Rose sent him a ray from eyes full of a new divine
shyness. He smiled gently in answer to it, and full of her own young
emotion, and of the effort to conceal it from all the world, she noticed
none of that change which had struck Agnes.
And all the while, if she could have penetrated the man's silence! An
hour before this moment Langham had vowed that nothing should take him
to Lady Charlotte's that night. And yet here he was, riveted to her
side, alive like any normal human being to every detail of her
loveliness, shaken to his inmost being by the intoxicating message of
her look, of the transformation which had passed in an instant over the
teasing difficult creature of the last few months.
At Murewell his chagrin had been _not_ to feel, _not_ to struggle, to
have been cheated out of experience. Well, here _is_ the experience in
good earnest! And Langham is wrestling with it for dear life. And how
little the exquisite child beside him knows of it, or of the man on whom
she is spending her first wilful passion! She stands strangely exulting
in her own strange victory over a life, a heart, which had defied and
eluded her. The world throbs and thrills about her, the crowd beside her
is all unreal, the air is full of whisper, of romance.
The thought-reading followed its usual course. A murder and its
detection were given in dumb show. Then it was the turn of
card-guessing, bank-note-finding, and the various other forms of
telepathic hide and seek. Mr. Flaxman superintended them all, his
restless eye wandering every other minute to the farther drawing-room in
which the lights had been lowered, catching there always the same patch
of black and white,--Rose's dress and the dark form beside her.
'Are you convinced? Do you believe?' said Rose, merrily looking up at
her companion.
'In telepathy? Well--so far--I have not got beyond the delicacy and
perfection of Mr. Denman's--muscular sensation. So much I am sure of!'
'Oh, but your scepticism is ridiculous!' she said gaily. 'We _know_ that
some people have an extraordinary power over others.'
'Yes, that certainly we know!' he answered, his voice dropping, an odd
strained note in it. 'I grant you that.'
She trembled deliciously. Her eyelids fell. They stood together,
conscious only of each other.
'Now,' said Mr. Denman, advancing to the doorway between the two
drawing-rooms, 'I have done all I can--I am exhausted. But let me beg of
you all to go on with some experiments amongst yourselves. Every fresh
discovery of this power in a new individual is a gain to science. I
believe about one in ten has some share of it. Mr. Flaxman and I will
arrange everything, if any one will volunteer?'
The audience broke up into groups, laughing, chatting, suggesting this
and that. Presently Lady Charlotte's loud dictatorial voice made itself
heard, as she stood eyeglass in hand looking round the circle of her
guests.
'Somebody must venture--we are losing time.'
Then the eyeglass stopped at Rose, who was now sitting tall and radiant
on the sofa, her blue fan across her white knees. 'Miss Leyburn--you are
always public-spirited--will you be victimised for the good of science?'
The girl got up with a smile.
'And Mr. Langham--will you see what you can do with Miss Leyburn?
Hugh--we all choose her task, don't we--then Mr. Langham wills?'
Flaxman came up to explain. Langham had turned to Rose--a wild fury with
Lady Charlotte and the whole affair sweeping through him. But there was
no time to demur; that judicial eye was on them; the large figure and
towering cap bent towards him. Refusal was impossible.
'Command me!' he said with a sudden straightening of the form and a
flush on the pale cheek. 'I am afraid Miss Leyburn will find me a very
bad partner.'
'Well, now then!' said Flaxman; 'Miss Leyburn, will you please go down
into the library while we settle what you are to do!'
She went, and he held the door open for her. But she passed out
unconscious of him--rosy, confused, her eyes bent on the ground.
'Now, then, what shall Miss Leyburn do?' asked Lady Charlotte in the
same loud emphatic tone.
'If I might suggest something quite different from anything that has
been yet tried,' said Mr. Flaxman, 'suppose we require Miss Leyburn to
kiss the hand of the little marble statue of Hope in the far
drawing-room. What do you say, Langham?'
'What you please!' said Langham, moving up to him. A glance passed
between the two men. In Langham's there was a hardly sane antagonism and
resentment, in Flaxman's an excited intelligence.
'Now then, said Flaxman coolly, 'fix your mind steadily on what Miss
Leyburn is to do--you must take her hand--but except in thought, you
must carefully follow and not lead her. Shall I call her?'
Langham abruptly assented. He had a passionate sense of being
watched--tricked. Why were he and she to be made a spectacle for this
man and his friends! A mad irrational indignation surged through him.
Then she was led in blindfolded, one hand stretched out feeling the air
in front of her. The circle of people drew back. Mr. Flaxman and Mr.
Denman prepared, note-book in hand, to watch the experiment. Langham
moved desperately forward.
But the instant her soft trembling hand touched his, as though by