Marriage a la mode by Mrs. Humphry Ward (best book club books TXT) 📖

her)--"I only knew it for certain this morning--who ... well, who might make trouble. And Daphne's temper is so passionate and uncontrolled that----"

"Dear Lady Barnes, please don't tell me any secrets!" Elsie French implored, and laid a restraining hand on the mother's arm, ready, indeed, to take up her work and fly. But Lady Barnes's chair stood between her and the door, and the occupant of it was substantial.

Laura Barnes hesitated, and in the pause two persons appeared upon the garden path outside, coming towards the open windows of the drawing-room. One was Mrs. Roger Barnes; the other was a man, remarkably tall and slender, with a stoop like that of an overgrown schoolboy, silky dark hair and moustache, and pale gray eyes.

"Dr. Lelius!" said Elsie, in astonishment. "Was Daphne expecting him?"

"Who is Dr. Lelius?" asked Lady Barnes, putting up her eyeglass.

Mrs. French explained that he was a South German art-critic, from Wuerzburg, with a great reputation. She had already met him at Eton and at Oxford.

"Another expert!" said Lady Barnes with a shrug.

The pair passed the window, absorbed apparently in conversation. Mrs. French escaped. Lady Barnes was left to discontent and solitude.

But the solitude was not for long.

When Elsie French descended for tea, an hour later, she was aware, from a considerable distance, of people and tumult in the drawing-room. Daphne's soprano voice--agreeable, but making its mark always, like its owner--could be heard running on. The young mistress of the house seemed to be admonishing, instructing, someone. Could it be her mother-in-law?

When Elsie entered, Daphne was walking up and down in excitement.

"One cannot really live with bad pictures because they happen to be one's ancestors! We won't do them any harm, mamma! of course not. There is a room upstairs where they can be stored--most carefully--and anybody who is interested in them can go and look at them. If they had only been left as they were painted!--not by Lely, of course, but by some drapery man in his studio--_passe encore_! they might have been just bearable. But you see some wretched restorer went and daubed them all over a few years ago."

"We went to the best man we could find! We took the best advice!" cried Lady Barnes, sitting stiff and crimson in a deep arm-chair, opposite the luckless row of portraits that Daphne was denouncing.

"I'm sure you did. But then, you see, nobody knew anything at all about it in those days. The restorers were all murderers. Ask Dr. Lelius."

Daphne pointed to the stranger, who was leaning against an arm-chair beside her in an embarrassed attitude, as though he were endeavouring to make the chair a buffer between himself and Lady Barnes.

Dr. Lelius bowed.

"It is a modern art," he said with diffidence, and an accent creditably slight--"a quite modern art. We hafe a great man at Wuerzburg."

"I don't suppose he professes to know anything about English pictures, does he?" asked Lady Barnes with scorn.

"Ach!--I do not propose that Mrs. Barnes entrust him wid dese pictures, Madame. It is now too late."

And the willowy German looked, with a half-repressed smile, at the row of pictures--all staring at the bystander with the same saucer eyes, the same wooden arms, and the same brilliance of modern paint and varnish, which not even the passage of four years since it was applied had been able greatly to subdue.

Lady Barnes lifted shoulders and eyes--a woman's angry protest against the tyranny of knowledge.

"All the same, they are my forbears, my kith and kin," she said, with emphasis. "But of course Mrs. Barnes is mistress here: I suppose she will do as she pleases."

The German stared politely at the carpet. It was now Daphne's turn to shrug. She threw herself into a chair, with very red cheeks, one foot hanging over the other, and the fingers of her hands, which shone with diamonds, tapping the chair impatiently. Her dress of a delicate pink, touched here and there with black, her wide black hat, and the eyes which glowed from the small pointed face beneath it; the tumbling masses of her dark hair as contrasted with her general lightness and slenderness; the red of the lips, the whiteness of the hands and brow, the dainty irregularity of feature: these things made a Watteau sketch of her, all pure colour and lissomeness, with dots and scratches of intense black. Daphne was much handsomer than she had been as a girl, but also a trifle less refined. All her points were intensified--her eyes had more flame; the damask of her cheek was deeper; her grace was wilder, her voice a little shriller than of old.

While the uncomfortable silence which the two women had made around them still lasted, Roger Barnes appeared on the garden steps.

"Hullo! any tea going?" He came in, without waiting for an answer, looked from his mother to Daphne, from Daphne to his mother, and laughed uncomfortably.

"Still bothering about those beastly pictures?" he said as he helped himself to a cup of tea.

"_Thank_ you, Roger!" said Lady Barnes. "I didn't mean any harm, mother." He crossed over to her and sat down beside her. "I say, Daphne, I've got an idea. Why shouldn't mother have them? She's going to take a house, she says. Let's hand them all over to her!"

Lady Barnes's lips trembled with indignation. "The Trescoes who were born and died in this house, belong here!" The tone of the words showed the stab to feeling and self-love. "It would be a sacrilege to move them."

"Well then, let's move ourselves!" exclaimed Daphne, springing up. "We can let this house again, can't we, Roger?"

"We can, I suppose," said Roger, munching his bread and butter; "but we're not going to."

He raised his head and looked quietly at her.

"I think we'd better!" The tone was imperious. Daphne, with her thin arms and hands locked behind her, paused beside her husband.

Dr. Lelius, stealthily raising his eyes, observed the two. A strange little scene--not English at all. The English, he understood, were a phlegmatic people. What had this little Southerner to do among them? And what sort of fellow was the husband?

It was evident that some mute coloquy passed between the husband and wife--disapproval on his part, attempt to assert authority, defiance, on hers. Then the fair-skinned English face, confronting Daphne, wavered and weakened, and Roger smiled into the eyes transfixing him.

"Ah!" thought Lelius, "she has him, de poor fool!"

Roger, coming over to his mother, began a murmured conversation. Daphne, still breathing quick, consented to talk to Dr. Lelius and Mrs. French. Lelius, who travelled widely, had brought her news of some pictures in a chateau of the Bourbonnais--pictures that her whole mind was set on acquiring. Elsie French noticed the _expertise_ of her talk; the intellectual development it implied; the passion of will which accompanied it. "To the dollar, all things are possible"--one might have phrased it so.

The soft September air came in through the open windows, from a garden flooded with western sun. Suddenly through the subdued talk which filled the drawing-room--each group in it avoiding the other--the sound of a motor arriving made itself heard.

"Heavens! who on earth knows we're here?" said Barnes, looking up.

For they had only been camping a week in the house, far too busy to think of neighbours. They sat expectant and annoyed, reproaching each other with not having told the butler to say "Not at home." Lady Barnes's attitude had in it something else--a little anxiety; but it escaped notice. Steps came through the hall, and the butler, throwing open the door, announced--

"Mrs. Fairmile."

Roger Barnes sprang to his feet. His mother, with a little gasp, caught him by the arm instinctively. There was a general rise and a movement of confusion, till the new-comer, advancing, offered her hand to Daphne.

"I am afraid, Mrs. Barnes, I am disturbing you all. The butler told me you had only been here a few days. But Lady Barnes and your husband are such old friends of mine that, as soon as I heard--through our old postmistress, I think--that you had arrived, I thought I might venture."

The charming voice dropped, and the speaker waited, smiling, her eyes fixed on Daphne. Daphne had taken her hand in some bewilderment, and was now looking at her husband for assistance. It was clear to Elsie French, in the background, that Daphne neither knew the lady nor the lady's name, and that the visit had taken her entirely by surprise.

Barnes recovered himself quickly. "I had no idea you were in these parts," he said, as he brought a chair forward for the visitor, and stood beside her a moment.

Lady Barnes, observing him, as she stiffly greeted the new-comer--his cool manner, his deepened colour--felt the usual throb of maternal pride in him, intensified by alarm and excitement.

"Oh, I am staying a day or two with Duchess Mary," said the new-comer. "She is a little older--and no less gouty, poor dear, than she used to be. Mrs. Barnes, I have heard a great deal of you--though you mayn't know anything about me. Ah! Dr. Lelius?"

The German, bowing awkwardly, yet radiant, came forward to take the hand extended to him.

"They did nothing but talk about you at the Louvre, when I was there last week," she said, with a little confidential nod. "You have made them horribly uncomfortable about some of their things. Isn't it a pity to know too much?"

She turned toward Daphne. "I'm afraid that's your case too." She smiled, and the smile lit up a face full of delicate lines and wrinkles, which no effort had been made to disguise; a tired face, where the eyes spoke from caverns of shade, yet with the most appealing and persuasive beauty.

"Do you mean about pictures?" said Daphne, a little coldly. "I don't know as much as Dr. Lelius."

Humour leaped into the eyes fixed upon her; but Mrs. Fairmile only said: "That's not given to the rest of us mortals. But after all, _having's_ better than knowing. Don't--_don't_ you possess the Vitali Signorelli?"

Her voice was most musical and flattering. Daphne smiled in spite of herself. "Yes, we do. It's in London now--waiting till we can find a place for it."

"You must let me make a pilgrimage--when it comes. But you know you'd find a number of things at Upcott--where I'm staying now--that would interest you. I forget whether you've met the Duchess?"

"This is our first week here," said Roger, interposing. "The house has been let till now. We came down to see what could be made of it."

His tone was only just civil. His mother, looking on, said to herself that he was angry--and with good reason.

But Mrs. Fairmile still smiled.

"Ah! the Lelys!" she cried, raising her hand slightly toward the row of portraits on the wall. "The dear impossible things! Are you still discussing them--as we used to do?"

Daphne started. "You know this house, then?"

The smile broadened into a laugh of amusement, as Mrs. Fairmile turned to Roger's mother.

"Don't I, dear Lady Barnes--don't I know this house?"

Lady Barnes seemed to straighten in her chair. "Well, you were here often enough to know it," she said abruptly. "Daphne, Mrs. Fairmile is a distant cousin of ours."

"Distant, but quite enough to swear by!" said the visitor, gaily. "Yes, Mrs. Barnes, I knew this house very well in old days.