"My dear," continued the duchess, slipping her arm around Helen's waist, "Sir James has honored ME--as became my relations to YOU--with his confidences.As you haven't given me YOURS I suppose you have none, and that I am telling you news when I say that Sir James wishes to marry you."The unmistakable astonishment in the girl's eye satisfied the duchess even before her voice.
"But he scarcely knows me or anything of me!" said the young girl quickly.
"On the contrary, my dear, he knows EVERYTHING about you.I have been particular in telling him all I know--and some things even YOUdon't know and couldn't tell him.For instance, that you are a very nice person.Come, my dear, don't look so stupefied, or Ishall really think there's something in it that I don't know.It's not a laughing nor a crying matter yet--at present it's only luncheon again with a civil man who has three daughters and a place in the county.Don't make the mistake, however, of refusing him before he offers--whatever you do afterwards.""But"--stammered Helen.
"But--you are going to say that you don't love him and have never thought of him as a husband," interrupted the duchess; "I read it in your face,--and it's a very proper thing to say.""It is so unexpected," urged Helen.
"Everything is unexpected from a man in these matters," said the duchess."We women are the only ones that are prepared.""But," persisted Helen, "if I don't want to marry at all?""I should say, then, that it is a sign that you ought; if you were eager, my dear, I should certainly dissuade you." She paused, and then drawing Helen closer to her, said, with a certain masculine tenderness, "As long as I live, dear, you know that you have a home here.But I am an old woman living on the smallest of settlements.
Death is as inevitable to me as marriage should be to you."Nevertheless, they did not renew the conversation, and later received the greetings of their host at Moreland Hall with a simplicity and frankness that were, however, perfectly natural and unaffected in both women.Sir James,--a tall, well-preserved man of middle age, with the unmistakable bearing of long years of recognized and unchallenged position,--however, exhibited on this occasion that slight consciousness of weakness and susceptibility to ridicule which is apt to indicate the invasion of the tender passion in the heart of the average Briton.His duty as host towards the elder woman of superior rank, however, covered his embarrassment, and for a moment left Helen quite undisturbed to gaze again upon the treasures of the long drawing-room of Moreland Hall with which she was already familiar.There were the half-dozen old masters, whose respectability had been as recognized through centuries as their owner's ancestors; there were the ancestors themselves,--wigged, ruffled, and white-handed, by Vandyke, Lely, Romney, and Gainsborough; there were the uniform, expressionless ancestresses in stiff brocade or short-waisted, clinging draperies, but all possessing that brilliant coloring which the gray skies outside lacked, and which seemed to have departed from the dresses of their descendants.The American girl had sometimes speculated upon what might have been the appearance of the lime-tree walk, dotted with these gayly plumaged folk, and wondered if the tyranny of environment had at last subdued their brilliant colors.And a new feeling touched her.Like most of her countrywomen, she was strongly affected by the furniture of life;the thought that all that she saw there MIGHT BE HERS; that she might yet stand in succession to these strange courtiers and stranger shepherdesses, and, like them, look down from the canvas upon the intruding foreigner, thrilled her for a moment with a half-proud, half-passive sense of yielding to what seemed to be her fate.A narrow-eyed, stiff-haired Dutch maid of honor before whom she was standing gazed at her with staring vacancy.Suddenly she started.Before the portrait upon a fanciful easel stood a small elaborately framed sketch in oils.It was evidently some recently imported treasure.She had not seen it before.As she moved quickly forward, she recognized at a glance that it was Ostrander's sketch from the Paris grenier.
The wall, the room, the park beyond, even the gray sky, seemed to fade away before her.She was standing once more at her attic window looking across the roofs and chimney stacks upward to the blue sky of Paris.Through a gap in the roofs she could see the chestnut-trees trilling in the little square; she could hear the swallows twittering in the leaden troughs of the gutter before her;the call of the chocolate vender or the cry of a gamin floated up to her from the street below, or the latest song of the cafe chantant was whistled by the blue-bloused workman on the scaffolding hard by.The breath of Paris, of youth, of blended work and play, of ambition, of joyous *******, again filled her and mingled with the scent of the mignonette that used to stand on the old window-ledge.
"I am glad you like it.I have only just put it up."It was the voice of Sir James--a voice that had regained a little of its naturalness--a calm, even lazy English voice--confident from the experience of years of respectful listeners.Yet it somehow jarred upon her nerves with its complacency and its utter incongruousness to her feelings.Nevertheless, the impulse to know more about the sketch was the stronger.
"Do you mean you have just bought it?" asked Helen."It's not English?""No," said Sir James, gratified with his companion's interest."Ibought it in Paris just after the Commune."
"From the artist?" continued Helen, in a slightly constrained voice.
"No," said Sir James, "although I knew the poor chap well enough.