Robert Elsmere
* * * * *
And so we return to the Wednesday following this unexpected meeting.
The drawing-room at No. 27 was beginning to fill. Rose stood at the door
receiving the guests as they flowed in, while Agnes in the background
dispensed tea. She was discussing with herself the probability of
Langham's appearance. 'Whom shall I introduce him to first?' she
pondered, while she shook hands. 'The poet? I see mamma is now
struggling with him. The 'cellist with the hair--or the lady in Greek
dress--or the esoteric Buddhist? What a fascinating selection! I had
really no notion we should be quite so curious!'
'Mees Rose, they vait for you,' said a charming golden-bearded young
German, viola in hand, bowing before her. He and his kind were most of
them in love with her already, and all the more so because she knew so
well how to keep them at a distance.
She went off, beckoning to Agnes to take her place, and the quartette
began. The young German aforesaid played the viola, while the 'cello was
divinely played by a Hungarian, of whose outer man it need only be said
that in wild profusion of much-tortured hair, in Hebraism of feature,
and swarthy smoothness of cheek, he belonged to that type which Nature
would seem to have already used to excess in the production of the
continental musician. Rose herself was violinist, and the instruments
dashed into the opening allegro with a precision and an _entrain_ that
took the room by storm.
In the middle of it, Langham pushed his way into the crowd round the
drawing-room door. Through the heads about him, he could see her
standing a little in advance of the others, her head turned to one side,
really in the natural attitude of violin-playing, but, as it seemed to
him, in a kind of ravishment of listening--cheeks flushed, eyes shining,
and the right arm and high-curved wrist managing the bow with a grace
born of knowledge and fine training.
'Very much improved, eh?' said an English professional to a German
neighbour, lifting his eyebrows interrogatively.
The other nodded with the business-like air of one who knows. 'Joachim,
they say, _war darueber entzueckt_, and did his best vid her, and now
D---- has got her'--naming a famous violinist--'she vill make fast
brogress. He vill schtamp upon her treecks!'
'But will she ever be more than a very clever amateur? Too pretty, eh?'
And the questioner nudged his companion, dropping his voice.
Langham would have given worlds to get on into the room, over the
prostrate body of the speaker by preference, but the laws of mass and
weight had him at their mercy, and he was rooted to the spot.
The other shrugged his shoulders. 'Vell, vid a bretty
woman--_ueberhaupt_--it _dosn't_ mean business! It's zoziety--the dukes
and the duchesses--that ruins all the yong talents.'
This whispered conversation went on during the andante. With the scherzo
the two hirsute faces broke into broad smiles. The artist behind each
woke up, and Langham heard no more, except guttural sounds of delight
and quick notes of technical criticism.
How that Scherzo danced and coquetted, and how the Presto flew as though
all the winds were behind it, chasing its mad eddies of notes through
listening space! At the end, amid a wild storm of applause, she laid
down her violin, and, proudly smiling, her breast still heaving with
excitement and exertion, received the praises of those crowding round
her. The group round the door was precipitated forward, and Langham with
it. She saw him in a moment. Her white brow contracted, and she gave him
a quick but hardly smiling glance of recognition through the crowd. He
thought there was no chance of getting at her, and moved aside amid the
general hubbub to look at a picture.
'Mr. Langham, how do you do?'
He turned sharply and found her beside him. She had come to him with
malice in her heart--malice born of smart and long smouldering pain; but
as she caught his look, the look of the nervous short-sighted scholar
and recluse, as her glance swept over the delicate refinement of the
face, a sudden softness quivered in her own. The game was so
defenceless!
'You will find nobody here you know,' she said abruptly, a little under
her breath. 'I am morally certain you never saw a single person in the
room before! Shall I introduce you?'
'Delighted, of course. But don't disturb yourself about me, Miss
Leyburn. I come out of my hole so seldom, everything amuses me--but
especially looking and listening.'
'Which means,' she said, with frank audacity, 'that you dislike new
people!'
His eye kindled at once. 'Say rather that it means a preference for the
people that are not new! There is such a thing as concentrating one's
attention. I came to hear you play, Miss Leyburn!'
'Well?'
She glanced at him from under her long lashes, one hand playing with the
rings on the other. He thought, suddenly, with a sting of regret, of the
confiding child who had flushed under his praise that Sunday evening at
Murewell.
'Superb!' he said, but half-mechanically. 'I had no notion a winter's
work would have done so much for you. Was Berlin as stimulating as you
expected? When I heard you had gone, I said to myself--"Well, at least,
now, there is one completely happy person in Europe!"'
'Did you? How easily we all dogmatise about each other?' she said
scornfully. Her manner was by no means simple. He did not feel himself
at all at ease with her. His very embarrassment, however, drove him into
rashness, as often happens.
'I thought I had enough to go upon!' he said in another tone; and his
black eyes, sparkling as though a film had dropped from them, supplied
the reference his words forbore.
She turned away from him with a perceptible drawing up of the whole
figure.
'Will you come and be introduced?' she asked him coldly. He bowed as
coldly and followed her. Wholesome resentment of her manner was denied
him. He _had_ asked for her friendship, and had then gone away and
forgotten her. Clearly what she meant him to see now was that they were
strangers again. Well, she was amply in her right. He suspected that his
allusion to their first talk over the fire had not been unwelcome to
her, as an opportunity.
And he had actually debated whether he should come, lest in spite of
himself she might beguile him once more into those old lapses of will
and common sense! Coxcomb!
He made a few spasmodic efforts at conversation with the lady to whom
she had introduced him, then awkwardly disengaged himself and went to
stand in a corner and study his neighbours.
Close to him, he found, was the poet of the party, got up in the most
correct professional costume--long hair, velvet coat, eyeglass and all.
His extravagance, however, was of the most conventional type. Only his
vanity had a touch of the sublime. Langham, who possessed a sort of
fine-ear gift for catching conversation, heard him saying to an
open-eyed _ingenue_ beside him,--
'Oh, my literary baggage is small as yet. I have only done, perhaps,
three things that will live.'
'Oh, Mr. Wood!' said the maiden, mildly protesting against so much
modesty.
He smiled, thrusting his hand into the breast of the velvet coat. 'But
then,' he said, in a tone of the purest candour, 'at my age I don't
think Shelley had done more!'
Langham, who, like all shy men, was liable to occasional explosions, was
seized with a convulsive fit of coughing, and had to retire from the
neighbourhood of the bard, who looked round him, disturbed and slightly
frowning.
At last he discovered a point of view in the back room whence he could
watch the humours of the crowd without coming too closely in contact
with them. What a miscellaneous collection it was! He began to be
irritably jealous for Rose's place in the world. She ought to be more
adequately surrounded than this. What was Mrs. Leyburn--what were the
Elsmeres about? He rebelled against the thought of her living
perpetually among her inferiors, the centre of a vulgar publicity, queen
of the second-rate.
It provoked him that she should be amusing herself so well. Her
laughter, every now and then, came ringing into the back room. And
presently there was a general hubbub. Langham craned his neck forward,
and saw a struggle going on over a roll of music, between Rose and the
long-haired, long-nosed violoncellist. Evidently she did not want to
play some particular piece, and wished to put it out of sight. Whereupon
the Hungarian, who had been clamouring for it, rushed to its rescue, and
there was a mock fight over it. At last, amid the applause of the room,
Rose was beaten, and her conqueror, flourishing the music on high,
executed a kind of _pas seul_ of triumph.
'_Victoria!_' he cried. 'Now denn for de conditions of peace. Mees Rose,
vill you kindly tune up? You are as moch beaten as the French at Sedan.'
'Not a stone of my fortresses, not an inch of my territory!' said Rose,
with fine emphasis, crossing her white wrists before her.
The Hungarian looked at her, the wild poetic strain in him which was the
strain of race asserting itself.
'But if de victor bows,' he said, dropping on one knee before her. 'If
force lay down his spoils at de feet of beauty?'
The circle round them applauded hotly, the touch of theatricality
finding immediate response. Langham was remorselessly conscious of the
man's absurd _chevelure_ and ill-fitting clothes. But Rose herself had
evidently nothing but relish for the scene. Proudly smiling, she held
out her hand for her property, and as soon as she had it safe, she
whisked it into the open drawer of a cabinet standing near, and drawing
out the key, held it up a moment in her taper fingers, and then,
depositing it in a little velvet bag hanging at her girdle, she closed
the snap upon it with a little vindictive wave of triumph. Every
movement was graceful, rapid, effective.
Half a dozen German throats broke into guttural protest. Amid the storm
of laughter and remonstrance, the door suddenly opened. The fluttered
parlour-maid mumbled a long name, and, with a port of soldierly
uprightness, there advanced behind her a large fair-haired woman,
followed by a gentleman, and in the distance by another figure.
Rose drew back a moment astounded, one hand on the piano, her dress
sweeping round her. An awkward silence fell on the chattering circle of
musicians.
'Good heavens!' said Langham to himself, 'Lady Charlotte Wynnstay!'
'How do you do, Miss Leyburn?' said one of the most piercing of voices.
'Are you surprised to see me? You didn't ask me--perhaps you don't want
me. But I have come, you see, partly because my nephew was coming,' and
she pointed to the gentleman behind her, 'partly because I meant to
punish you for not having come to see me last Thursday. Why didn't you?'
'Because we thought you were still away,' said Rose, who had by this
time recovered her self-possession. 'But if you meant to punish me, Lady
Charlotte, you have done it badly. I am delighted to see you. May I
introduce my sister? Agnes, will you find Lady Charlotte Wynnstay a
chair by mamma?'
'Oh, you wish, I see, to dispose of me at once,' said the other
imperturbably. 'What is happening? Is it music?'
'Aunt Charlotte, that is most disingenuous on your part. I gave you
ample warning.'
Rose turned a smiling face towards the speaker. It was Mr. Flaxman, Lady
Charlotte's companion.
'You need not have drawn the picture too black, Mr. Flaxman. There is an
escape. If Lady Charlotte will only let my sister take her into the next
room, she will find herself well out of the clutches of the music. Oh,
Robert! Here you are at last! Lady Charlotte, you remember my
brother-in-law? Robert, will you get Lady Charlotte some tea?'