The Parts Men Play Part 5

'It is a boon,' said Dunckley, coming to the aid of his floundering loved one.

'Exactly,' said Lady Durwent with a sigh of relief. 'Madame Lucia Carlotti--Mr. Selwyn of New York.'

'_Buona sera, signora_.'

'_Buona sera, signore_.'

He stooped low and pressed a light kiss on the Neapolitan's hand, thus taking the most direct route obtainable by an Anglo-Saxon to the good graces of a woman of Italy.

'How well you speak Italian!' cooed Madame Carlotti; 'so--like one of us.'

The American bowed. It was rarely he achieved a reputation with so little effort.

The remaining introductions were effected; the clock struck eight-thirty; and there followed an awkward silence, born of an absolute unanimity of thought.

'Of course, you two authors,' said Lady Durwent, forcing a smile, 'knew of each other, anyway. It's like asking H. G. Wells if he ever heard of Mark Twain.'

The smile in the American's eyes widened. 'Lady Durwent flatters me,'

he said. 'I am not widely known in my own country, and can hardly expect that you should know of me on this side of the Atlantic.'

'What,' said Mr. Dunckley--'what does New York think of "Precipitate Thoughts"?'

The American considered quickly. He wished that in conversation, as well as in writing, people would use inverted commas.

'Whose precipitate thoughts?' he ventured.

'Mine,' said H. S. D., with ill-concealed importance.

'Oh yes, of course,' said Selwyn, wondering how any one so stationary as the other could project anything precipitate. 'New York was keenly interested.'

'Ah,' said the English author benignly, 'it is satisfactory to hear that. Of course, the great difference between there and here is that in New York one impresses: in London one is impressed.'

An ominous silence followed this epigrammatic wisdom (which Dunckley had just heard from the lips of a poet who had succeeded in writing both an American and an English publishing house into bankruptcy) while the various members of the group pursued their trains of thought along the devious routes of their different mentalities.

'Dear me!' said Lady Durwent anxiously, 'what _can_ have detained'----

'MR. JOHNSTON SMYTH.'

With a jerky action of the knees, the futurist briskly entered the room with all the easy confidence of a famous comedian following on the heels of a chorus announcing his arrival. He looked particularly long and cadaverous in an abrupt, sporting-artistic, blue jacket, with sleeves so short that when he waved his arms (which he did with almost every sentence) he reminded one of a juggler requesting his audience to notice that he has absolutely nothing up his sleeves.

'Lady Durwent,' he exclaimed, striking an att.i.tude and looking over his Cyrano-like nose with his right eye as if he were aligning the sights of a musket, 'don't tell me I'm late. If you do, I shall never speak to the Duke of Earldub again--never!'

As he refused to move an inch until a.s.sured that he was not late, and as Lady Durwent was anxious to proceed with the main business of the evening (to say nothing of maintaining the friendship between Smyth and the Duke of Earldub, whose part in his dilatory arrival was rather vague), she granted the necessary pardon, whereupon he straightened his legs and winked long and solemnly at Norton Pyford.

'Good gracious!' cried Lady Durwent just as she was about to suggest an exodus to the dining-room, 'I had forgotten all about Elise!' She hurriedly rang the bell, which was answered by the butler. 'Send word to Miss Elise that'----

'Milady,' said the servitor, addressing an arc-light just over the door, 'she is descending the stairs this very minute.'

III.

There are moments when women appear at their best--fleeting moments that cannot be sustained. Sometimes it is a tremor of timidity that lends a fawn-like gentleness to their movements, and a frightened wistfulness to the eye, too subtle a thing of beauty to bear a.n.a.lysis in words. A sudden triumph, n.o.ble or ign.o.ble, the conquering of a rival, the sound of a lover's voice, will flush the cheek and liberate the whole radiancy of a woman's being. Such moments come in every woman's life, when the quick impulse of emotion achieves an unconscious beauty that defies the ordinary standards of critical appreciation. It is that little instant that is the torch to light a lover's worship or a poet's verses--to send strange yearnings into a young man's breast and set an old man's memory philandering with the distant past.

It was such a moment for Elise Durwent as she stood in the doorway, the overhanging arc touching her hair and shoulders with the high lights of some master's painting. Conversation ceased, and in every face there was the universal homage paid to beauty, even though it be tendered grudgingly.

She was dressed in a gown of deep blue, that colour which renders its ageless tribute to the fair women of the world, and from her shoulders there hung a black net that subdued the colour of the gown and left the graceful suggestion of a cape.

'I am so sorry, mother,' she said. 'I was reading, and quite forgot the time.'

Austin Selwyn stroked the back of his head, then thrust both hands into his pockets. There was something in the girl's appearance and the contralto timbre of her voice that left him with the odd sensation that she was out of place in the room--that her real sphere was in the expanse of unbridled nature. He could see her wealth of copper-hued hair blown by the western wind; he could picture her joining in Spring's minuet of swaying rose-bushes.

'My daughter Elise--Mr. Austin Selwyn.'

He bowed as the words penetrated his thoughts; then, glancing up, he felt a sudden contraction of disappointment.

The girl's eyes had narrowed, and were no longer sparkling, but steady--almost to the point of dullness; her lower lip was full, and too scarlet for the upper one, which chided its sister for the wanton admission of slumbering pa.s.sion; and her voice was abrupt. He almost cried out '_Legato, legato_,' to coax back the lilt which had caressed his ear a moment before.

He was dimly conscious that dinner was announced, and that amidst a babel of tongues he was being led by, or was leading, Lady Durwent into the dining-room. He heard the resolutionist and Dunckley both talking at once, and felt the melancholy languor of Pyford floating like incense through the air. He had an obscure recollection of sitting down next to his hostess; that the table, like Arthur's, was a round one; that Johnston Smyth was seated beside Miss Durwent and was ogling one of Lady Durwent's maids. Then he remembered that he had heard some voice in his ear for several minutes past, and, growing curious, took a surrept.i.tious glance, to find that it belonged to Madame Carlotti.

'Meester Selwyn,' she said indignantly, 'you have not been listening to me.'

'That is true, signora,' he said; 'but I have been thinking of you.'

'Yes?' she purred, leaning towards him. 'What did you thought?'

He turned squarely to her in an impa.s.sioned counterfeit of frankness.

'Are all Italian women beautiful?' he murmured.

'Hush-sh!' Her hand touched his beneath the table, reprovingly and tenderly.

'Mr. Selwyn,' said Lady Durwent, 'you have not tasted your soup.'

CHAPTER V.

THE OLYMPIANS THUNDER.

I.

Lady Durwent was blessed in the possession of a cook whose artistry was beyond question, if the same could not be said of the guests to whom she so frequently ministered. She was a descendant of the French, that race which makes everything tend towards development of the soul, and consequently looks upon a meal as something of a sacrament. She prepared a dinner with a balance of contrast and climax that a composer might show in writing a tone poem.

On this eventful evening, therefore, the dinner-party, stimulated by her art and by potent wines (gazing with long-necked dignity at the autocratic whisky-decanter), rapidly a.s.sumed a crescendo and an accelerando--the two things for which a hostess listens.

H. Stackton Dunckley had held the resolutionist in a duel of language--a combat with broadswords--and honours were fairly even. The short-sleeved Johnston Smyth had waged futurist warfare against the modernist Pyford, while the Honourable Miss Durwent sat helplessly between them, with as little chance of a.s.serting her rights as the Dormouse at the Mad Hatter's tea-party. The American had held his own in badinage with the daughter of Italy on one side and his hostess on the other, the latter, however, being too skilled in entertaining to do more than murmur a few encouragements to the spontaneity that so palpably existed.