Читать книгу The Silver Poppy - Stringer Arthur - Страница 9

The lute forgetful of its note;

The wing remembering not to fly

In some sweet flight's mad ecstasy;

The heart that failed to carve the form

Since once the musing soul grew warm

With love for her who sat for him

Of too alluring moonbeam limb.

John Hartley, "The Lost Voice."

"The defeated heart," sighed the woman in black, "has the habit of burying its own dead!"—"The Silver Poppy."

For one virtue alone Cordelia Vaughan was looked on as a rare acquisition by Mrs. Alfred Spaulding. That virtue was her young ward's punctilious attention to all those social duties with regard to which she herself was prone to be deplorably careless. With the accession of Cordelia, therefore, she reveled in a vicarious ceremoniousness that wiped out many discomforting memories, ranging all the way from forgotten dinners to neglected dentist's engagements.

It was but a little after eleven, on the morning following Repellier's birthday gathering, when Cordelia Vaughan alighted from the Spauldings' brougham and once more climbed the long stairs to the old artist's studio. Both she and Mrs. Spaulding had begged to come and help Repellier "clear up." Mrs. Spaulding, however, no longer dazzled by the glow that radiated, to her eyes, from the brow of that great artist, found in the depths of a soft pillow and a darkened room that the spirit was willing but the flesh lamentably weak. She told Cordelia to run along by herself; she had a headache to sleep off.

And as Cordelia mounted lightly to the upper regions of Repellier's workrooms she felt in no way sorry for the promise. Some rudimentary simplicity in her character could always blithely sweep away the cobwebs of either propriety or impropriety—cobwebs so potentially tantalizing to one less ingenuous. Her late hours, too, seemed to have left no depression of spirits, no reaction of ennui, and she floated in before Repellier bright, buoyant, smiling, like a breath of the open morning itself, a confusion of mellow autumnal colors in her wine-colored gown and hat of roses and mottled leaves.

But before she had so much as drawn off her gloves—and they were always the most spotless of white gloves—she glanced about in mock dismay and saw that the last of the righting-up had already been done. There was not even a book for her to replace, or a plaque to tuck away. She pouted at this, prettily and girlishly; she had hurried away from her coffee and rolls just to help him.

Repellier, in his lighter moods, had an affectionate and quite fatherly way about him that was all-conquering. He penitently pinned a long-stemmed American Beauty rose on her wine-tinted gown, and shaking his head dolefully over the color combination, replaced it with a cluster of gardenias. She fluttered femininely to a mirror, to view the result of the added touch, and then bowed her gratitude with arch solemnity. She was not slow to realize the lighter mood in Repellier, and was glad of it. Then, talking the while of the night before, she went over to his book-table, and hovered restlessly over the different volumes scattered about, scarcely knowing just how to wear the conversation through its tides of change into that particular slip where it was to be hawsered. To Repellier she seemed like a humming-bird darting about a little high-walled garden, ready to be off like a flash when the last flower had been rifled.

He watched her, smiling, while she hovered on from topic to topic, looking up at him now and then; now and then nervously turning over the books on the table before her, and wondering within herself just why it was this man had always vaguely intimidated her. She was about to open her lips when he suddenly stopped her.

"Did you know that that's Hartley's book you have there?"

For one quick, searching second she looked up at him, and then casually opened the little volume upon which her hand had fallen by accident. Repellier had once thought her the sort of woman that never blushed.

"'Atalanta and Other Poems, by John Hartley,'" she read aloud idly, with raised eyebrows. "And a dedication as well: 'To C. M.' Did he leave it last night, or is he the kind that always sends them round next day?"

"Hartley's not that sort at all."

The woman slipped into a chair, and with her chin on her hand, meditatively turned over a page or two. Then she closed the book nonchalantly, almost disdainfully. She confessed that she had no particular love for poetry.

"Tell me about him, though," she finally said quite seriously and quite openly. "I'd like to know something about him—all about him."

Repellier, who had been adjusting a great paint-besplattered easel, came over and took up the thin, green volume.

"This is what I want to knock out of him," he said, tapping the little book, "for a while, at least. And I think, Miss Vaughan, you are the happy possessor of a lot I'd like to pound into him."

"And that is——"

"Oh, I mean poise and balance—good, practical judgment."

"Thank you." She caught up her skirts and courtesied.

Repellier raised a deprecating hand, and laughed.

"Well, you know what I mean. And that's why I'm glad you like him."

"I hardly said that."

"I mean all he wants is ballasting with a little of that business spirit which we call American push."

"Thanks," she murmured. "But tell me about him."

"Well, there isn't much to tell—at least not much that I know."

"But you knew him abroad?"

"Yes, I met him two years ago at Lady Meredith's—those were the Woodstock Merediths of Meredith Hall. I was doing a portrait of Connie Meredith—that's the 'C. M.' of the book—and he used to tramp over from Oxford now and then. His father was Sir Harry Hartley, who was killed in the Dunstable Hunt four or five years ago. Hartley himself was wasting his time about Oxford, unsettled, unsatisfied, impecunious, and unrecognized. As I said, I saw a good deal of him at the Merediths'. He was to have married the girl—it was she who gave me that volume—but she was always delicate. In fact, they had to pack her off to the south of England, and then to Italy. She died at Fiesole. On my way back from the Continent I ran across Hartley again, and asked him why he didn't try America."

"And will he ever do anything—anything worth while, I mean?"

She still held the thin, green volume of verse in her hand, almost contemptuously—suddenly depressed in spirits, she could not fathom why.

"He has already done something worth while."

"What is it?"

"Small things, I mean, but of the right sort."

"I never heard of him before," murmured the woman, closing the volume with a gentle little snap of finality.

"But you will," said Repellier as his guest slowly drew on her white gloves and arranged her hair before his mirror as she passed.

"You will," he repeated as he swung his easel around to the light, and opening a door on his left called his model in for what was to be a morning of work for both of them.