MISS ANGELA came out on the steps to wave farewell to her brother’s guest of the night. This was in itself a particular favour; for she made it rather less than a rule to submit her charms to the broad search-light of the early morning. But—to speak figuratively—to withhold a curtesy after yielding a kiss is to value the shadow at more than the substance; for, so it was, she had already vouchsafed her gallant her company while yet the grey of dawn was melting on the blinds.
It came about in this manner—that into Mr. Tuke’s waking dreams stole a strain of music very sweet and melancholy. The rogue slept lightly and unvexedly, as sinners do; and, moved by the mystic cadence, he rose, dressed with great dispatch, and descended the stairs in obedience to the alluring summons.
Now, it was soon evident that this proceeded from a little panelled parlour or boudoir, at the open door of which he paused a-tiptoe, drinking in the vision of a pale morning Cecilia seated at a pianoforte communing with her soul in the softest of harmonies and an angelic gown.
“Thank you!” said he presently, in a pause. “I have risen with the lark.”
St. Cecilia started and turned about with a very pretty confusion.
“Mr. Tuke!” she cried; and presented him with a blush through her ringlets like a moss-rose.
“Ah! madam,” said he, “I dropped upon you like a spider in your bower. Your voice thrilled my web and I must needs fall.”
“But I thought——”
“You thought me gone. Alas! if I have imperilled my welcome by craving your brother’s hospitality till the morning. But, so it seemed to me, your beauty would owe me a recompense for a sleepless night; and I dared to stay to claim it.”
“Oh, sir! You are pleased to make a sport of me. But, indeed, you are very welcome; though, I protest, nothing would have induced me to sing, had I known you in the house.”
“And so would you have denied one soul a full measure of happiness.”
“Poor soul.”
She looked round at him with a little smile, mocking and bewitching at once. She had seated herself at the instrument again and was running her fingers lightly over the keys.
“Are they not beautiful?” she said.
He had stolen up behind her.
“They are,” he murmured. “Like white butterflies fluttering over the chiming flowers of fairyland.”
“Mr. Tuke!” she said—“what are?”
“Your fingers, of course.”
“Oh, fie, sir! I spoke of these melodious pianofortes. Is not mine a darling? ’Tis by Clementi, and a present from my brother.”
“How can I take this praise on trust?”
“You need not, if you have already been eavesdropping—dropping like a spider, I should say.”
“Sing to me.”
“Oh! I could not.”
“Sing to me, please.”
She laughed and protested. It was early—her voice was ropy as a hen’s—she only warbled for her own entertainment, and professed no knowledge of or subtilty in the art—indeed she had never submitted herself to discipline therein. And did not Mr. Tuke think that no acquired skill could compensate for the loss of native simplicity?—even should native simplicity (though she did not add this) ring a little false now and again?
Mr. Tuke thought just as she did. He would rather listen to pretty Maudlin any day, than to the artfullest Pasta that ever shrieked herself into fame.
At last Miss Royston gave way. “Dove sono I bei momenti?” she sang, in a fine, cultivated little voice, that was not unpleasant, as exemplifying the art that can surmount natural disabilities. And, when she had finished, her one listener applauded fatuously.
“I would cry Brava!” said he, “were it not for bringing the atmosphere of the footlights into these enchanted gardens.”
“That is right,” said Miss Royston; “though a little warmth would comfort them just now.”
She was resolute not to sing again, despite his protestations. She had a nice eye for proportion in all matters affecting her own appearance, moral or physical.
She led him across the room to a glazed door in a recess. The icy blast of the night had fallen dead on the grass, where it lay stiff amongst the ruin of the leaves it had scattered. He saw a wide stretch of frosty lawn, on which the fingers of the rising sun were busy assorting a millions of iridescent jewels.
“It is like the angels of the Israelites snowing manna against breakfast-time,” said Mr. Tuke. He was in a mood of most dreamy romanticism. All this cultured and human beauty of orderliness seemed to him very gracious after his experience of desolation.
The lady glanced secretly at her cavalier, with an approving tenderness. He fulfilled her expectations of him—stood appropriately in the foreground of the picture of mysterious melancholy her fancy had painted to receive him.
“I could not breakfast on manna,” she said, with a full little laugh. “What sugar-babies the Israelites must have been! But I have often gone without breakfast at all when sketching, so completely has the pleasure absorbed me.”
“You are an artist, too!”
She owned that she was; and, indeed, she had quite a skill in making pretty little copies of landscapes after Turner, Bright, Stothard, and others, which she signed with her own name. Less often she ventured upon art at first hand. She had penetration enough to mentally appraise that subtle distinction shown by friends in the degrees of admiration accorded respectively her imitative and her original work.
Now, however, in the assurance of appreciative comment, she was moved to reach for the manna she would have herself believe she despised.
“That is one of my poor originals,” she said, inviting him by a gesture to an escritoire on which lay an open sketch-book.
He took it up, as a priest lifts the Gospels; though not—in further illustration—to kiss it. Here his reverence halted on the brink of perplexity.
“Do you know what it is?” she murmured slyly, but a little anxiously “You ought to.”
“Of course,” he said—almost in a perspiration already. “It is—it is a gate, is it not?”
She was disappointed at the outset.
“How did you know?” she said, with a note of irrepressible irony in her voice. “It is clever of you to have lighted on the truth at once; and I tried so hard to conceal it. Yes, it is a gate—the gate of your own wilderness.”
He looked at her helplessly.
“Is not this sort of thing—this—this wash-painting, in its infancy, as—as it were?”
“Oh, yes! Mine, you would say, tries to run before it can walk.”
“No, no, no,” he murmured.
It was a shock to her to discover his inability to read the soul behind the—possible immature—performance.
“Turn over,” she said. “Perhaps you will like the others better.”
He obeyed, with a vague air of wonderment. The remainder pages were filled with copies, very elegant and painstaking.
“Ah!” he said, with a real relief and an air of embarrassed conciliation. “These are beautiful. You paint in two styles, it seems. How clever you are. I like this the better. I know nothing about such things, of course, and can only judge when I understand a picture and when I don’t. And they are all your own work? You are a genius, upon my soul.”
She did not gainsay him. Perhaps she would not in any case. But now she was indifferent to his praise or silence. Her hero, she thought—a little crossly, it must be confessed—was not all transcendental. What man was? The most amorous appealing eyes, in their moments of apparent inspiration, were usually, if the truth should be confessed, an index of thoughts dreamily loitering through visions of flint-locks, steeple-chases, and even vulgar tankards of small-beer. Now-a-days, whatever savour of romance clung about the creatures, was from their persistent contact, through every phase of evolution, with the finer feminine clay. Yet, could a soul completely gross and commonplace find its expression in a personality so melancholy and so noble? She glanced at her companion with a reviving tenderness. Of earth he might be; but she thrilled to remember the strength of his arms as he bore her from the sinking well-mouth. After all, Apollo was a sportsman before he was a poet; or it never would have occurred to him to skin critics who derided his lays.
“There,” she said. “You have seen them all. I keep you here, and you are famishing for food of a very different order.”
She led the way to the breakfast-room. He followed with a lamb-like submissiveness. There was a vague feeling at his heart of distress or something of the nature of it. He opined that he had been churlish; though quite in what respect he could not understand. But he was conscious of having unwittingly given offence where none should have been taken; and so, being human, he felt an atom aggrieved.
Captain Luvaine, it appeared, still kept his bed.
Sir David, however, flung abroad an atmosphere of boisterous good-humour. He rallied his guest and his sister upon their rising-sun worship.
“Gad!” he cried. “I heard you tunin’ up, my dear, before I could see to t’other end of my bed. Don’t do it, Angel; or you’ll be gettin’ chilblains on your little ten toes. ’Twas all for you, Tuke. I’ll tell you, sir, she ain’t in the habit of frosting her little nose o’ common days.”
“Why,” said the other—“you’re wrong. Miss Royston had no knowledge I slept here.”
“Eh!” said the baronet, his eyes a double note of exclamation; and “Davy, be quiet!” implored his sister.
The manling fell into a fit of laughter.
“Don’t you believe it!” he crowed hoarsely. “She understood you was goin’ to stop, an——”
Miss Royston was crushing the little villain in her arms.
“Don’t listen to him, Mr. Tuke!” she cried. “He’s a bad, bad boy!”
She made a very pretty picture, as she turned with radiant face and tumbling hair to their guest. Her girlish grace commanded the situation.
“I didn’t know—I didn’t, I didn’t!” she cried; and “Fibs, Tuke!” was the response in a smothered voice.
Now the visitor was a salted gallant; but he found something very sweet in this delicate-skinned, coquettish maid of many arts and graces. She was like an exotic whiff from the glass-house of his former life—good God! how vague and far away that seemed now. This gave him a full feeling about the heart; a feeling as though he, a years-long exile, had chanced across a compatriot in the land of his desolation; and the consequences was that he, who would not while he might, was now wavering to a parlous state in the afternoon of his fortunes.
The vision of her standing on the steps to bid him God-speed abode with him during the length of his homeward journey, and would often rise up before him at intervals during the day.
Sir David had stretched up to him, as he sat mounted for his departure, hat in hand.
“Tuke,” the little man whispered, “that is a cursed queer business you told us about, and it jumps oddly with Luvaine’s. You will hold me at your service if you need assistance. I am a Justice of the Peace, sir.”
He smacked his chest; dropped back on his heels, and cried “A votre service!” with extreme elegance.