Evenings at Stoke Revel were of a dullness all too deep to be sounded and too closely hedged in by tradition and observance to be evaded or shortened by the boldest visitor. Lavendar and the boy would have prolonged their respite in the smoking room had they dared, but in these later days Lavendar found he wished to be below on guard. The thought of Robinette alone between the two women downstairs made him uneasy. It was as though some bird of bright plumage had strayed into a barnyard to be pecked at by hens. Not but what he realised that this particular bird had a spirit of her own, and plenty of courage, but no man with even a prospective interest in a pretty woman, likes to think of the object of his admiration as thoroughly well able to look after herself. She must needs have a protector, and the heaven-sent one is himself.
He had to take up arms in her defense on this, the first night of his arrival. Mrs. Loring had gone up to her room for some photographs of her house in America, and as she flitted through the door her scarf caught on the knob, and he had been obliged to extricate it. He had known her exactly four hours, and although he was unconscious of it, his heart was being pulled along the passage and up the stairway at the tail-end of that wisp of chiffon, while he listened to her retreating footsteps. Closing the door he came back to Mrs. de Tracy's side.
"Her dress is indecorous for a widow," said that lady severely.
"Oh, I don't see that," replied Lavendar. "She is in reality only a girl, and her widowhood has already lasted two years, you say."
"Once a widow always a widow," returned Mrs. de Tracy sententiously, with a self-respecting glance at her own cap and the half-dozen dull jet ornaments she affected. Lavendar laughed outright, but she rather liked his laughter: it made her think herself witty. Once he had told her she was "delicious," and she had never forgotten it.
"That's going pretty far, my dear lady," he replied. "Not all women are so faithful to a memory as you. I understand Americans don't wear weeds, and to me her blue cape is a delightful note in the landscape. Her dresses are conventional and proper, and I fancy she cannot express herself without a bit of colour."
"The object of clothing, Mark, is to cover and to protect yourself, not to express yourself," said Mrs. de Tracy bitingly.
"The thought of wearing anything bright always makes me shrink," remarked Miss Smeardon, who had never apparently observed the tip of her own nose, "but some persons are less sensitive on these points than others."
Mrs. de Tracy bowed an approving assent to this. "A widow's only concern should be to refrain from attracting notice," she said, as though quoting from a private book of proverbial philosophy soon to be published.
"Then Mrs. Loring might as well have burned herself on her husband's funeral pyre, Hindoo fashion!" argued Lavendar. "A woman's life hasn't ended at two and twenty. It's hardly begun, and I fear the lady in question will arouse attention whatever she wears."
"Would she be called attractive?" asked Mrs. de Tracy with surprise.
"Oh, yes, without a doubt!"
"In gentlemen's eyes, I suppose you mean?" said Miss Smeardon.
"Yes, in gentlemen's eyes," answered Lavendar, firmly. "Those of women are apparently furnished with different lenses. But here comes the fair object of our discussion, so we must decide it later on."
The question of ancestors, a favourite one at Stoke Revel, came up in the course of the next evening's conversation, and Lavendar found Robinette a trifle flushed but smiling under a double fire of questions from Mrs. de Tracy and her companion. Mrs. de Tracy was in her usual chair, knitting; Miss Smeardon sat by the table with a piece of fancy-work; Robinette had pulled a foot-stool to the hearthrug and sat as near the flames as she conveniently could. She shielded her face with the last copy of _Punch_, and let her shoulders bask in the warmth of the fire, which made flickering shadows on her creamy neck. Her white skirts swept softly round her feet, and her favourite turquoise scarf made a note of colour in her lap. She was one of those women who, without positive beauty, always make pictures of themselves.
Lavendar analyzed her looks as he joined the circle, pretending to read. "She isn't posing," he thought, "but she ought to be painted. She ought always to be painted, each time one sees her, for everything about her suggests a portrait. That blue ribbon in her hair is fairly distracting! What the dickens is the reason one wants to look at her all the time! I've seen far handsomer women!"
"Do you use Burke and Debrett in your country, Mrs. Loring?" Miss Smeardon was enquiring politely, as she laid down one red volume after the other, having ascertained the complete family tree of a lady who had called that afternoon.
Robinette smiled. "I'm afraid we've nothing but telephone or business directories, social registers, and 'Who's Who,' in America," she said.
"You are not interested in questions of genealogy, I suppose?" asked Mrs. de Tracy pityingly.
"I can hardly say that. But I think perhaps that we are more occupied with the future than with the past."
"That is natural," assented the lady of the Manor, "since you have so much more of it, haven't you? But the mixture of races in your country," she continued condescendingly, "must have made you indifferent to purity of strain."
"I hope we are not wholly indifferent," said Robinette, as though she were stopping to consider. "I think every serious-minded person must be proud to inherit fine qualities and to pass them on. Surely it isn't enough to give _old_ blood to the next generation--it must be _good_ blood. Yes! the right stock certainly means something to an American."
"But if you've nothing that answers to Burke and Debrett, I don't see how you can find out anybody's pedigree," objected Miss Smeardon. Then with an air of innocent curiosity and a glance supposed to be arch, "Are the Red Indians, the Negroes, and the Chinese in your so-called directories?"
"As many of them as are in business, or have won their way to any position among men no doubt are there, I suppose," answered Robinette straightforwardly. "I think we just guess at people's ancestry by the way they look, act, and speak," she continued musingly. "You can 'guess' quite well if you are clever at it. No Indians or Chinese ever dine with me, Miss Smeardon, though I'd rather like a peaceful Indian at dinner for a change; but I expect he'd find me very dull and uneventful!"
"Dull!--that's a word I very often hear on American lips," broke in Lavendar as he looked over the top of Henry Newbolt's poems. "I believe being dull is thought a criminal offence in your country. Now, isn't there some danger involved in this fear of dullness?"
"I shouldn't wonder," Robinette answered thoughtfully, looking into the fire. "Yes; I dare say there is, but I'm afraid there are social and mental dangers involved in _not_ being afraid of it, too!" Her mischievous eyes swept the room, with Mrs. de Tracy's solemn figure and Miss Smeardon's for its bright ornaments. "The moment a person or a nation allows itself to be too dull, it ceases to be quite alive, doesn't it? But as to us Americans, Mr. Lavendar, bear with us for a few years, we are so ridiculously young! It is our growing time, and what you want in a young plant is growth, isn't it?"
"Y-yes," Lavendar replied: then with a twinkle in his blue eyes he added: "Only somehow we don't like to hear a plant grow! It should manage to perform the operation quite silently, showing not processes but results. That's a counsel of perfection, perhaps, but don't slay me for plain-speaking, Mrs. Loring!"
Robinette laughed. "I'll never slay you for saying anything so wise and true as that!" she said, and Lavendar, flushing under her praise, was charmed with her good humour.
"America's a very large country, is it not?" enquired Miss Smeardon with her usual brilliancy. "What is its area?"
"Bigger than England, but not as big as the British Empire!" suggested Carnaby, feeling the conversation was drifting into his ken.
"It's just the size of the moon, I've heard!" said Robinette teasingly. "Does that throw any light on the question?"
"Moonlight!" laughed Carnaby, much pleased with his own wit. "Ha! ha! That's the first joke I've made this holidays. _Moonlight!_ Jolly good!"
"If you'd take a joke a little more in your stride, my son," said Lavendar, "we should be more impressed by your mental sparkles."
"Straighten the sofa-cushions, Carnaby," said his grandmother, "and don't lounge. I missed the point of your so-called joke entirely. As to the size of a country or anything else, I have never understood that it affected its quality. In fruit or vegetables, for instance, it generally means coarseness and indifferent flavour." Miss Smeardon beamed at this palpable hit, but Mrs. Loring deprived the situation of its point by backing up Mrs. de Tracy heartily. She had no opinion of mere size, either, she declared.
"You don't stand up for your country half enough," objected Carnaby to his cousin. ("Why don't you give the old cat beans?" was his supplement, _sotto voce_.)
"Just attack some of my pet theories and convictions, Middy dear, if you wish to see me in a rage," said Robinette lightly, "but my motto will never be 'My country right or wrong.'"
"Nor mine," agreed Lavendar. "I'm heartily with you there."
"It's a great venture we're trying in America. I wish every one would try to look at it in that light," said Robinette with a slight flush of earnestness.
"What do you mean by a venture?" asked Mrs. de Tracy.
"The experiment we're making in democracy," answered Robinette. "It's fallen to us to try it, for of course it simply had to be tried. It is thrillingly interesting, whatever it may turn out, and I wish I might live to see the end of it. We are creating a race, Aunt de Tracy; think of that!"
"It's as difficult for nations as for individuals to hit the happy medium," said Lavendar, stirring the fire. "Enterprise carried too far becomes vulgar hustling, while stability and conservatism often pass the coveted point of repose and degenerate into torpor."
"This part of England seems to me singularly free from faults," interposed Mrs. de Tracy in didactic tones. "We have a wonderful climate; more sunshine than in any part of the island, I believe. Our local society is singularly free from scandal. The clergy, if not quite as eloquent or profound as in London (and in my opinion it is the better for being neither) is strictly conscientious. We have no burglars or locusts or gnats or even midges, as I'm told they unfortunately have in Scotland, and our dinner-parties, though quiet and dignified, are never dull.... What is the matter, Robinetta?"
"A sudden catch in my throat," said Robinette, struggling with some sort of vocal difficulty and avoiding Lavendar's eye. "Thank you," as he offered her a glass of water from the punctual and strictly temperate evening tray. "Don't look at me," she added under her voice.
"Not for a million of money!" he whispered. Then he said aloud: "If I ever stand for Parliament, Mrs. Loring, I should like you to help me with my constituency!"
The unruffled temper and sweet reasonableness of Robinette's answers to questions by no means always devoid of malice, had struck the young man very much, as he listened.
"She is good!" he thought to himself. "Good and sweet and generous. Her loveliness is not only in her face; it is in her heart." And some favorite lines began to run in his head that night, with new conviction:--
He that loves a rosy cheek,
Or a coral lip admires,
Or from star-like eyes doth seek
Fuel to maintain his fires,--
As old Time makes these decay,
So his flames will waste away.
But a smooth and steadfast mind,
Gentle thoughts and calm desires,
Hearts with equal love combined--
but here Lavendar broke off with a laugh.
"It's not come to that yet!" he thought. "I wonder if it ever will?"
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