My Little Sister Part 35

The table was glittering and magnificent. We had little helpings of strange, strong-tasting food before the soup. And caviar.

"You like caviar?" the Colonel said.

I said I didn't know, for in my heart I felt it looked repulsive.

"Don't know caviar?"

I said of course I had heard of it. He asked where. And I said, "In Shakespeare." The old Colonel choked, and they all laughed to see how apoplectic he looked--all except Betty and me.

I caught Betty's eye. She had that fiery-rose in her cheeks. I felt excited, too, and "strange." But I hoped they didn't notice. Betty and I had agreed that we must try not to show how unused we were to the ways of a great London house. So I made conversation. I asked about the absent guest.

My good-looking man pretended to be annoyed. He called, in his slightly husky voice, across the table to Aunt Josephine: "Already she wants to talk about The Tartar!" I explained that I meant the foreign lady--the very beautiful lady I had seen upstairs looking out of her door.

Again my man exchanged glances with Aunt Josephine. He was smiling disagreeably. Aunt Josephine did not smile at all. But the old Colonel laughed his croaking laugh, and said the lady upstairs expected people to go to her.

"Does she expect dinner to go to her, too?" Betty asked. And something in their faces made Betty blush, though she didn't know why, as I saw.

I believed they were teasing Betty, just for fun, and to see that beautiful colour in her cheeks flicker and deepen.

So I leaned towards her, and across the flowers and the dazzling lights I told her the foreign lady was not very well. That was why she was not coming down.

The Colonel asked me why I thought the lady wasn't well. So I said: "Because I saw the doctor going up to her."

They were all quite still for a second or two. I looked at Aunt Josephine. Why was it wrong to mention the doctor's visit? Was she afraid of making these friends of the beautiful lady anxious about her?

My man still was smiling, but not pleasantly. I couldn't tell whether the strange noises the Colonel made were choking or laughing. But I felt more and more miserably shy; And I had no clear idea of why I should feel so--unless it was that nothing these people said meant what it seemed to mean.

I could see that Betty was bewildered, too.

We knew we should feel strange; we did not know we should feel like this.

I was thankful when they all turned round and called out. "The Tartar"

had come, after all.

He made no apology for being late, nor for not having dressed. He strolled in as if the place belonged to him--a great broad-shouldered young man in a frock-coat. He had a round, black, cannon-ball of a head, and his eyebrows nearly joined. His moustache was like a little blacking-brush laid back against the lip, with the bristles sticking straight out. But he seemed to be making this effect deliberately, by pushing out his mouth like a pouting child; or, even more, like a person with swollen lips. I felt sure I could not have seen him before; but there was something oddly familiar about him.

He nodded to the others.

When Aunt Josephine said, "My nieces," he said, "Oh," stared a moment, and then, as he lounged into the empty place, said it had been a rotten race. I thought how astonished my mother would have been at such behaviour. Betty must have been thinking of her, too, for she put on our mother's manner. It was a beautiful manner, but it sat oddly on my little sister; it made her seem more self-possessed than she was. She turned and said: "I think you must be Mr. Whitby-Dawson."

The young man stared.

Everybody stared.

He turned sharply from Betty to his hostess. She shook her head. But the yellow part of her big eyes had turned reddish. She looked very strange.

A creepy feeling came over me.

I remembered she had been "most eccentric" twenty years ago. Was eccentricity the sort of thing that grew worse as people grew older?

I looked round at the company and met the eyes of the neighbour on my right. They were unhappy eyes; but they rea.s.sured me.

"What put such an idea into your head?" Aunt Josephine was asking Betty.

"Because," Betty said, and she looked at the young man again, "only because I saw so many of your--of Mr. Whitby-Dawson's photographs----"

"Really?" the young man said, in a bored voice. "That was, no doubt, a great privilege. My name's Williams."

In her embarra.s.sment Betty turned to the man who sat between us. "He has even the little scar," she said, like a person defending herself.

"Mr. Whitby-Dawson got his scar in a duel with a student at Heidelberg.

He studied at the University there part of one year----"

"Studied duelling?" the Colonel chuckled. Our absent-minded man was not absent-minded any more. He was listening, with a look I could not understand, as if he took a malicious pleasure in poor Betty's mistake.

Such a trifling slip to have taken the young man for Guy Whitby-Dawson, and yet it seemed to have put the company out of tune. Or perhaps it was the loss of the race. All except my man seemed to care very much about the lost race. The Tartar, in his annoyed voice, told his hostess and the Colonel how it happened. He leaned his elbow on the table, and almost turned his back on poor Bettina.

I thought I could see that my man seemed not to like The Tartar; and that gave me a kindlier feeling towards him; I wondered what had made him unhappy.

I felt I wanted to justify Bettina to him.

I felt, too, that she would recover herself sooner if we broke the silence at our end. So I said--in a voice too low, I thought, for the others to hear--that I also had noticed the resemblance to Mr.

Whitby-Dawson. Lower still, he asked me how we came "to hear of Mr.--of--the gentleman in question." Then Betty and I between us told about Hermione Helmstone's engagement--only we did not, of course, give her name.

"The faithless Whitby!" our man said, with the tail of his eye on the young gentleman opposite. As for him, he tried to go on talking about "Black Friar," as though he heard nothing of the history being retailed on the other side. But I had a feeling that he was listening all the time.

Bettina's loyalty to Hermione made her object to hearing Guy called faithless. "They would have had only 400 a year between them. And he said--Mr. Whitby-Dawson said--they couldn't possibly live on that. He was miserable, poor man!"

"I should say so! Poor and miserable."

"Oh, you laugh," Bettina protested. "But I saw a heart-broken letter about the poverty that kept them apart and condemned him 'to run in single harness.'"

"'Single harness!'" the husky voice said. And he repeated it: "'Single harness,' eh?"

Bettina was recovering her spirits. She said something about Duncombe.

And I don't know what reminded her of the collie-dog story; but she told it very well, though she did "pile it on." She made me out an immense heroine, and I am afraid I looked sheepish.

The husky voice said "Good!" and "Pretty cool." The story seemed to remind him of something. He looked at his plate, and he looked at Bettina and me.

Betty was amused at having made me feel shy, and she laughed that bubbling laugh of hers.

The Tartar turned his head.

He did not take away his elbow. But he looked over his shoulder down on Bettina's apricot-coloured hair. The fillet showed the shape of her head. It defined the satiny crown, where the hair lay as close as a red-gold skull-cap. The forget-me-nots and the little green leaves held all smooth and tight except the heavy, shining rings. They fell out and lay on her neck.

The Tartar stopped talking about the race.

He still ate his food condescendingly--with one hand. But he drank with great good-will.

He called to the butler, who had been going round with a gold-necked bottle in a napkin. He was to come back, The Tartar said, and fill the ladies' gla.s.ses.

I said no. Bettina said she, too, drank water.