The Way of Ambition Part 6

Without giving him time to say anything more she went away, accompanied from the room by Max Elliot, walking carelessly and looking very powerful and almost outrageously self-possessed.

Within the music-room there was a moment's silence. Then Paul Lane said:

"Delightful creature!"

"Yes," said Mrs. Mansfield. "Adelaide is delightful. And why? She always thinks of herself, lives for herself. She wouldn't put herself out for anyone. I've known her for years and would never go to her in a difficulty or trust her with a confidence. And yet I delight in her. I think it's because she's so entirely herself."

"She's a darling!" said Lane. "She's so preposterously human, in her way, and yet she's always distinguished. And she's so clever as well as so ignorant. I love that combination. Even on a yacht she never seems to have a bad day."

Charmian looked at Claude Heath, who was silent. She was wondering whether he meant to call in Grosvenor Square, whether he would ever set sail with Mrs. Shiffney on _The Wanderer_.

CHAPTER III

When Max Elliot came back they gathered round the fire, no longer split up into duets, and the conversation was general. Heath joined in frequently, and with the apparent eagerness which was evidently characteristic of him. He had facility in speaking, great quickness of utterance, and energy of voice. When he listened he suggested to Charmian a mind so alive as to be what she called "on the pounce." He had an odd air of being swayed, carried away, by what those around him were saying, even by what they were thinking, as if something in his nature demanded to acquiesce. Yet she fancied that he was secretly following his own line of thought with a persistence that was almost cold.

Lane led the talk at first, and displayed less of his irony than usual.

He was probably not a happy man, though he never spoke of being unhappy.

His habitual expression was of discontent, and he was too critical of life, endeavor, character, to be easily satisfied. But to-night he seemed in a softer mood than usual. Perhaps he had an object in seeming so. He was a man very curious in the arts. Elliot, who knew him well, was conscious that something in Heath's personality had made a strong impression upon him, and thought he was trying to create a favorable atmosphere in the hope that music might come of it. If this was so, he labored in vain. And soon doubtless he knew it. For he, too, pleaded another engagement, and, like Mrs. Shiffney, got up to go.

Directly the door shut behind him Charmian was conscious of relief and excitement. She even, almost despite herself, began to hope for a Te Deum; and, hoping, she found means to be wise. She effaced herself, so she believed, by withdrawing a little into a corner near the fire, holding up her Conder fan open to shield her face from the glow, and taking no part in the conversation, while listening to it with a pretty appearance of dreaminess. She was conscious of her charming att.i.tude, of the line made by her slender upraised arm, and not unaware of the soft and almost transparent beauty the light of a glowing fire gives to delicate flesh. Nevertheless, she really tried, in a perhaps half-hearted way, to withdraw her personality into the mist. And this she did because she knew well that her mother, not she, was en rapport with Claude Heath.

"I'm out of it," she said to herself, "and mother's in it."

Mrs. Shiffney had been a restraint, Lane had been a restraint. It would be dreadful if she were the third restraining element. She would have liked to be triumphantly active in bringing things about. Since that was evidently quite out of the question she was resolved to go to the other extreme.

"My only chance is to be a mouse!" she thought.

At least she would be a graceful mouse.

She gazed at the delicate figures on her Conder fan. They, those three a little way from her, were talking now, really talking.

Mrs. Mansfield was speaking of the endeavor of certain Londoners to raise the theater out of the rut into which it had fallen, and to make of it something worthy to claim the attention of those who did not use it merely for digestive purposes. She related a story of a disastrous theater-party which she had once joined, and which had been arranged by an aspiring woman with little sense of fitness.

"We dined with her first. She had, somehow, persuaded Burling, the Oxford historian, Mrs. Hartford, the dear poetess who never smiles, and her husband, and c.u.mmerbridge, the statistician, to be of the party.

After dinner where do you think she took us?"

"To the Oxford?" said Elliot, flinging his hands round his knee and beginning to smile.

"To front row stalls at the Criterion, where they were giving a knockabout farce called _My Little Darling_ in which a clergyman was put into a boiler, a guardsman hidden in a linen cupboard, and a penny novelette d.u.c.h.ess was forced to retreat into a shower-bath in full activity. I confess that I laughed more than I had ever done in my life.

I sat between Burling, who looked like a terrified hen, and Mr.

Hartford, who was seriously attentive from beginning to end, and kept murmuring, 'Really! Really!' And I had the poetess's sibylline profile in full view. I was almost hysterical when it was over. As we were coming out Mr. Hartford said to his wife, 'Henrietta, I'm glad we came.'

She rolled an eye on him and answered, with tears in the voice, 'Why?'

'It's a valuable lesson. We now know what the British public needs.' Her reply was worthy of her."

"What was it?" said Elliot, eagerly.

"'There are many human needs, Gabriel, which it is criminal to gratify.'

Burling went home in a four-wheeler. c.u.mmerbridge had left after the first act--a severe attack of neuralgia in the right eye."

Elliot's full-throated laugh rang through the room. Heath was smiling, but almost sadly, Charmian thought.

"Perhaps it was _My Little Darling_ which brought about the attempt at better things you were speaking of," he said to Mrs. Mansfield.

"Ah, but their prophet is not mine!" she answered.

An almost feverish look of vitality had come into her face, which was faintly pencilled by the fingers of sorrow.

"Sometimes I think I hate the disintegrating drama more than I despise the vulgar idiocies which, after all, never really touch human life,"

she continued. "No doubt it is sheer weakness on my part to be affected by it. But I am. Only last week Charmian and I saw the play that they--the superior ones--are all flocking to. The Premier has seen it five times already. I loathed its cleverness. I loathed the element of surprise in it. I laughed, and loathed my own laughter. The man who wrote it would put cap and bells on St. Francis of a.s.sisi and make a mock of OEdipus."

She paused, then, leaning forward, in a low and thrilling voice she quoted, "'For we are in Thy hand; and man's n.o.blest task is to help others by his best means and powers.'"

Claude Heath gazed at her while she was speaking, and in his eyes Charmian, glancing over her fan, saw what she thought of as two torches gleaming.

"I came out of the theater," continued Mrs. Mansfield, "and I confess it with shame, feeling as if I should never find again the incentive to a n.o.ble action, as if the world were turned to chaff. And yet I had laughed--how I had laughed!"

Suddenly she began to laugh at the mere recollection of something in the play.

"The wretch is terribly clever!" she exclaimed. "But he seems to me destructive."

"Well, but--" began Elliot. "Some such accusation has been brought against many really great men. The Empress Frederick told a friend of mine that no one who had not lived in Germany, and observed German life closely, could understand the evil spread through the country by Wagner's _Tristan_."

"Then the fault, the sin if you like, was in the hearers," said Heath, almost with excitement.

He got up and stood by the fire.

"Wagner was a builder. I believe Germany is the better for a _Tristan_, and I believe we should be the better for an English _Tristan_. But I doubt if we gain essentially by the drama in cap and bells."

Elliot, who was fond of defending his friends, came vigorously to the defense of the playwright, to whom he was devoted and whose first nights he seldom missed. In the discussion which followed Charmian saw more clearly how peculiarly in tune her mother's mind was with Heath's.

"This is the beginning of a great intimacy," she said to herself. "One of mother's great intimacies."

And, for the first time she consciously envied her mother, consciously wished that she had her mother's brains, temperament, and unintentional fascination. The talk went on, and presently she drifted into it, took her small part in it. But she felt herself too brainless, too ignorant to be able to contribute to it anything of value. Her usually happy and innocent self-conceit has deserted her, with all her audacities. She was oddly subdued, was almost sad.

"How old is he really?" she thought more than once as she looked at Claude Heath.

There was no mention of music, and at last Mrs. Mansfield got up to go.

As they said good-night she looked at Heath and remarked:

"We shall meet again?"

He clasped her hand, and answered, slightly reddening: