The Vanity Girl Part 11

The three girls had only just finished dinner at their lodgings in Eden Square when Sylvia proposed a walk round Oxford. Dorothy agreed to go out if she were allowed time to change her things; but Lily declared that she was tired after the journey, and preferred to look at ill.u.s.trated papers in deshabille. Many undergraduates turned their heads to stare at Dorothy's beauty or Sylvia's eye-gla.s.s when the two girls were walking down the High toward St. Mary's College, through the gates of which Sylvia calmly suggested that they should pa.s.s in order to explore the gardens.

"But suppose they tell us that girls aren't allowed to go in," Dorothy demanded, in a panic.

"We'll go out again."

"But we should look so foolish."

"We always look foolish," said Sylvia. "Anything more foolish than you look at the present moment I can't imagine, except myself."

Before Dorothy could prevent her, Sylvia had asked a tall and haughty undergraduate if there was any reason why they should not take a walk in the college grounds. The young man blushed painfully, and Dorothy, who could see that his embarra.s.sment at being spoken to by an actress was causing intense delight to a group of idlers in the college lodge, was angry with Sylvia for exposing the two of them to a share in the ridicule.

"All right, Dorothy," said Sylvia, cheerfully. "He says we can."

The tall and haughty undergraduate strode away up the High to escape from his friends' chaff, and the two girls wandered about the college until they found themselves in the famous St. Mary's Walks, where upon a seat embowered in foliage they listened to the bells that were ringing down the golden day and ringing in the unhastening Sabbath eve. Close at hand, but hidden from view by leafy banks, the pleasurable traffic of the Cherwell sounded continuously in a low murmur of talk that, blending with the swish of paddles and comfortable sound of jostling punts, seemed the very voice of indolent June. Dorothy supposed that she, like nature, must be looking most beautiful in this bewitching light, and regretted that the only pa.s.sers-by should be ecclesiastical figures bent in grave intercourse, or a few young men arguing in throaty voices about topics she did not recognize.

"I don't think we've chosen a very good place," she complained, with a discontented pout.

"We've chosen the place," said Sylvia, "where nearly four years ago, on a Sunday afternoon in August, I agreed to get married."

"Married?" repeated Dorothy, in amazement. "Are you married?"

"Yes, I believe I'm married for the present; but I sha'n't be soon."

"Oh, Sylvia, do tell me about it! I won't say a word to anybody else."

But Sylvia, having said so much, would say no more; jumping up and insisting that she was thirsty, she reminded Dorothy that they had promised to help Charlie Clinton entertain his brother and some undergraduate friends. Charlie Clinton was an obscure member of the company who had suddenly sprung into considerable prominence by revealing that he had a brother at Oxford and was himself the black sheep of a respectable family. Dorothy, realizing that the blackest sheep is better form than the whitest goat, had accepted the invitation, but she was not much impressed by the collection of undergraduates gathered in his rooms, and was vexed that she had wasted her most becoming hat on young men who wanted to talk about nothing but music.

She was vexed, too, at finding that David Bligh had been invited, and that he was talking affectedly about good music and sounding with his fluty voice rather like an undergraduate himself. Lily came and danced a cla.s.sical dance which seemed to please everybody else, though Dorothy could not see anything in it. Bligh sang German songs, and was so much applauded that he condescendingly proposed that his pupil should sing, who refused so angrily that none of the undergraduates dared approach her. It was indeed a thoroughly boring evening, and she wondered if Oxford was going to produce nothing better than this.

The theater on Monday night, notwithstanding the fine weather, was packed; but the audience was noisy, and the men in the chorus who had not been invited to Charlie Clinton's party severely condemned the bad manners of undergraduates.

"They're a rowdy lot of bounders, that's what they are," Tom Hewitt proclaimed, loosening the collar around his aggressive neck.

Dorothy, who had been looking forward to astonishing some of the girls in the dressing-room with her news about Sylvia, forgot everything in a delightful triumph she was able to enjoy at the expense of Clarice Beauchamp. A note was brought round after the first act addressed:

To the fair artist's model in pink. Front row. O. P. side.

Clarice Beauchamp had the impudence to contest Dorothy's right to open this note, and while some of the artist's models were rapidly transforming themselves into Polynesian beauties and others as rapidly a.s.suming the aristocratic costumes of a millionaire's yachting-party, Clarice and Dorothy, who belonged to the latter division, argued heatedly. At last Fay Onslow, to whom the note could not possibly refer, was allowed to open it and give her verdict:

Fair lady, my name is Lonsdale. On the Grampian hills my father feeds his flock! In other words, will you and the lady with the monocle who yesterday afternoon picked out quite the most unattractive man in St. Mary's as your guide come and picnic with me on the upper river to-morrow? A friend of mine at the House is dying to meet you, but he is much too shy to write himself. If you can come, just send back your address by bearer and I'll send my tame cab to fetch you to-morrow at twelve o'clock.

Yours sincerely,

ARTHUR LONSDALE.

"I knew it was for me," said Dorothy. "Sylvia and I were in St. Mary's College yesterday afternoon."

Clarice Beauchamp, much mortified, had to surrender her claim to the note.

"But what a strange coincidence that he should be called Lonsdale!"

Onzie exclaimed. "Most extraordinary, I call it. Who knows? He might be a relation."

"He might be," said Dorothy, calmly.

Lily looked up from her place as if she were going to speak, but, though she said nothing, Dorothy was glad that the terms of the note gave her no excuse for asking her to-morrow, even if Sylvia did maliciously propose that Lily should go instead of herself.

"Oh, but they particularly want you," Dorothy protested.

"Anyway, I can't go," Lily said; "I've promised to go round some of the colleges with Tom."

Dorothy winced at the threatened sacrilege.

Next morning a cab jingled up to the girls' lodgings, and they were driven to the nearest point of embarkation for a picnic on the upper river. Their host, a short young man with very fair hair and a round pink face, introduced himself and led the way to the Rollers, over which punts and canoes were dragged from the lower level of the Cherwell to the wider sweeps of the Isis. A tall young man who was standing by a couple of canoes moored to the bank came forward to greet them. His most immediately conspicuous feature was a pair of white flannel trousers down the seams of which ran stripes of vivid blue ribbon; but when he was introduced to Dorothy as Lord Clarehaven she forgot about his trousers in the more vivid blue of his name. All sorts of ideas rushed through her mind--a sudden dread that he might think Sylvia more attractive than herself, a sudden contempt for the party of the evening before, a sudden rapture in which blue sky, blue blood, and the blue stripes of the trousers merged exquisitely, and a sudden apprehension created by her pleated reflection in the water that she was not looking her best. After Lord Clarehaven she should not have been surprised if the first young man had also had a t.i.tle; but he was apparently only Mr.

Lonsdale, and, though ent.i.tled to respect as a friend of Lord Clarehaven, would probably interest Sylvia more than herself.

Dorothy's dread that she and Lord Clarehaven might not find themselves in the same canoe was soon dispelled, because Lord Clarehaven was evidently as eager for her company as she was for his, and they were soon leaving the others behind. There is no form of conveyance which makes for so much intimacy of regard as a canoe, and Dorothy, when she had once been able to rea.s.sure herself by means of a pocket-mirror that she had not been ruffled by the cab-drive or by the nervous business of getting gracefully into a wabbling canoe, settled herself down to be admired at a distance of about four feet. Moreover, she indulged for the first time in her life in the pleasure of admiring somebody else, a state of mind which doubled her charm by taking away much of her self-consciousness. If Lord Clarehaven was below the standard of aristocracy set by our full-blooded lady novelists, he was equally far removed from the chinless convention of ba.n.a.l caricature. He had the long legs, the narrow hips and head, and the big teeth of the Norman; but his fair hair was already thinning upon a high, retreating forehead, his nose was small, and if the protuberant eyes that one sees in Pekinese spaniels and other well-bred mammals were a faint intimation of approaching degeneracy in the stock, Dorothy was not sufficiently versed in physiognomy to recognize such symptoms; already fascinated by his t.i.tle and his trousers, she was quite ready to be fascinated by his eyes.

"I was lunching in St. Mary's yesterday with Arthur Lonsdale," he was explaining, "and I noticed you from the lodge. I should have come up and spoken to you myself, but I was rather frightened by your friend's eye-gla.s.s. In fact, I'm still not at all at ease with her. She looks deuced clever, I mean, don't you think?"

"She is awfully clever."

"Poor girl, but I suppose it's not such a bore for a girl as it would be for a man. I'm an awful a.s.s myself, you know. I mean, I'm absolutely incapable of doing anything."

"How did you know we belonged to the company?" asked Dorothy, implying that with all his modesty he must possess acute powers of judgment hidden away somewhere.

"Well, to tell you the truth, we didn't know. Somebody said your friend was a medical student, only I wasn't going to have that, and some man said he'd noticed you at the station, so Lonnie and I went to the theater on the off-chance and tried to spot you."

"Which you did?"

"Oh, rather. Only, then we couldn't spot your name. I was all for Clarice Beauchamp."

"She's an awfully horrid girl," said Dorothy, quickly.

"Is she? I'm sorry to hear that. And Lonnie betted you were Fay Onslow.

So we were quits. Funny thing you should have the same name as Lonnie.

No relation, I suppose?"

He was evidently so sure of this that Dorothy was rather piqued and asked, loftily, which Lonsdale he was.

"Cleveden's son."

"Oh, then I am a relation," said Dorothy. "Though of course a very, very distant one."

"By Jove! that's great!" said Clarehaven.

He seemed enthusiastic, but Dorothy could not make out whether he believed her or not, and she rather wished she had kept the relationship for the dressing-room. She hoped that Sylvia would not give Lonsdale an impression that she claimed to be his first cousin; this abrupt plunge into the whirlpool of society might make her act extravagantly. What a pity that she had not known who he was before they met, and "Oh!" she cried, aloud.

"What's the matter?" Clarehaven asked.

"Nothing. At least I think I touched a fish," said Dorothy.