"Dear," said Laura, entering softly as she might have entered a death chamber. "You will see Aunt Rosa and Aunt Sophy, will you not?"

Angela did not stop in her nervous walk, but when she reached the end of the long room she made a quick, feverish gesture, raising her hands to push back her beautiful loosened hair. "I will do anything you wish, Laura, except see their husbands."

"I've ceased to urge that, Aunt Angela, but your own sisters--"

"Oh, I will see them," returned Angela, as if the words--as if any speech, in fact--were wrung from the cold reserve which had frozen her from head to foot.

Laura went up to her and, with the impa.s.sioned manner which she had inherited from her Southern mother, enclosed her in a warm and earnest embrace. "My dear, my dear," she said, "Uncle Percival tells me that this is one of your bad days. He says, poor man, that he went out and got you flowers."

Angela yielded slowly, still without melting from her icy remoteness.

"They were tuberoses," she responded, in a voice which was in itself effectual comment.

"Tuberoses!" exclaimed Laura aghast, "when you can't even stand the scent of lilies. No wonder, poor dear, that your head aches."

"Mary put them outside on the window sill," said Angela, in a kind of resigned despair, "but their awful perfume seemed to penetrate the gla.s.s, so she took them down into the coal cellar."

"And a very good place for them, too," was Laura's feeling rejoinder; "but you mustn't blame him," she charitably concluded, "for he couldn't have chosen any other flower if he had had the whole Garden of Eden to select from. It isn't really his fault after all--it's a part of fatality like his flute."

"He played for me until my head almost split," remarked Angela wearily, "and then he apologised for stopping because his breath was short."

A startled tremor shook through her as a step was heard on the staircase. "Who is it, Laura?"

Laura went quickly to the door and, after pausing a moment outside, returned with a short, flushed, and richly gowned little woman who was known to the world as Mrs. Robert Bleeker.

More than twenty years ago, as the youngest of the pretty Wilde sisters, she had, in the romantic fervour of her youth and in spite of the opposition of her parents, made a love match with a handsome, impecunious young dabbler in "stocks." "Sophy is a creature of sentiment," her friends had urged in extenuation of a marriage which was not then considered in a brilliant light, but to the surprise of everybody, after the single venture by which she had proved the mettle of her dreams, she had sunk back into a prosperous and comfortable mediocrity. She had made her flight--like the queen bee she had soared once into the farthest, bluest reaches of her heaven, and henceforth she was quite content to relapse into the utter commonplaces of the hive.

Her yellow hair grew spa.r.s.e and flat and streaked with gray, her pink-rose face became over plump and mottled across the nose, and her mind turned soon as flat and unelastic as her body; but she was perfectly satisfied with the portion she had had from life, for, having weighed all things, she had come to regard the conventions as of most enduring worth.

Now she rustled in with an emphatic announcement of stiff brocade, and enveloped the spectral Angela in an embrace of comfortable arms and bosom. Her unwieldy figure reminded Laura of a broad, low wall that has been freshly papered in a large flowered pattern. On her hands and bosom a number of fine emeralds flashed, for events had shown in the end that the impecunious young lover was not fated to dabble in stocks in vain.

"Oh Angela, my poor dear, how are you?" she enquired.

Angela released herself with a shrinking gesture and, turning away, sat down at the foot of the long couch. "I am the same--always the same,"

she answered in her cold, reserved voice.

"You took your fresh air to-day, I hope?"

"I went down in the yard as usual. Laura," she looked desperately around, "is that Rosa who has just come in?" As she paused a knock came at the door, and Laura opened it to admit Mrs. Payne--the eldest, the richest and the most eccentric of the sisters.

From a long and varied a.s.sociation with men and manners Mrs. Payne had gathered a certain halo of experience, as of one who had ripened from mere acquaintance into a degree of positive intimacy with the world. She had seen it up and down from all sides, had turned it critically about for her half-humorous, half-sentimental inspection, and the frank cynicism which now flavoured her candid criticism of life only added the spice of personality to her original distinction of adventure. As the wife of an Amba.s.sador to France in the time of the gay Eugenie, and again as one of the diplomatic circle in Cairo and in Constantinople, she had stored her mind with precious anecdotes much as a squirrel stores a hollow in his tree with nuts. Life had taught her that the one infallible method for impressing your generation is to impress it by a difference, and, beginning as a variation from type, she had ended by commanding attention as a preserved specimen of an extinct species.

Long, wiry, animated, and habitually perturbed, she moved in a continual flutter of speech--a creature to be reckoned with from the little, flat, round curls upon her temples, which looked as if each separate hair was held in place by a particular wire, to the sweep of her black velvet train, which surged at an exaggerated length behind her feet. Her face was like an old and tattered comic mask which, though it has been flung aside as no longer provocative of pleasant mirth, still carries upon its cheeks and eyebrows the smears of the rouge pot and the pencil.

"My dear Angela," she now asked in her excited tones, "have you really been walking about again? I lay awake all night fearing that you had over-taxed your strength yesterday. Mrs. Francis Barnes--you never knew her of course, but she was a distant cousin of Horace's--died quite suddenly, without an instant's warning, after having walked rapidly twice up and down the room. Since then I have always looked upon movement as a very dangerous thing."

"Well, I could hardly die suddenly under any circ.u.mstances," returned Angela, indifferently. "You've been watching by my death-bed for forty years."

"Oh, dear sister," pleaded Mrs. Bleeker, whose heart, was as soft as her bosom.

"It does sound as if you thought we really wanted your things,"

commented Mrs. Payne, opening and shutting her painted fan. "Of course--if you were to die we should be too heart-broken to care what you left--but, since we are on the subject, I've always meant to ask you to leave me the shawl of old rose-point which belonged to mother."

"Rosa, how can you?" remonstrated Mrs. Bleeker, "I am sure I hope Angela will outlive me many years, but if she doesn't I want everything she has to go to Laura."

"Well, I'm sure I don't see how Laura could very well wear a rose-point shawl," persisted Mrs. Payne. "I wouldn't have started the subject for anything on earth, Angela, but, since you've spoken of it, I only mention what is in my mind. And now don't say a word, Sophy, for we'll go back to other matters. In poor Angela's mental state any little excitement may bring on a relapse."

"A relapse of what?" bluntly enquired honest Mrs. Bleeker.

Mrs. Payne turned upon her a glance of indignant calm.

"Why a relapse of--of her trouble," she responded. "You show a strange lack of consideration for her condition, but for my part I am perfectly a.s.sured that it needs only some violent shock, such as may result from a severe fall or the unexpected sight of a man, to produce a serious crisis."

Mrs. Bleeker shook her head with the stubborn common sense which was the reactionary result of her romantic escapade.

"A fall might hurt anybody," she rejoined, "but I'm sure I don't see why the mere sight of a man should. I've looked at one every day for thirty years and fattened on it, too."

"That," replied Mrs. Payne, who still delighted to p.r.i.c.k at the old scandal with a delicate dissecting knife, "is because you have only encountered the s.e.x in domestic shackles. As for me, I haven't the least doubt in the world that the sudden shock of beholding a man after forty years would be her death blow."

"But she has seen Percival," insisted Mrs. Bleeker; and feeling that her ill.u.s.tration did not wholly prove her point added, weakly, "at least he wears breeches."

"I would not see him if I could help myself," broke in Angela, with sudden energy. "I never--never--never wish to see a man again in this world or the next."

Mrs. Payne glanced sternly at Mrs. Bleeker and followed it with an emphatic head shake, which said as plainly as words, "So there's your argument."

"All the same, I don't believe Robert would shock her," remarked Mrs.

Bleeker.

"Never--never--never," repeated Angela in a frozen agony, and, rising, she walked restlessly up and down again until a servant appeared to inform the visiting sisters that dinner and Miss Wilde awaited them below.

CHAPTER III

APOLOGISES FOR AN OLD-FASHIONED ATMOSPHERE

As soon as dinner was over Uncle Percival retired with Mr. Bleeker into the library, from which retreat there issued immediately the shrill piping of the flute. Mr. Bleeker, with an untouched gla.s.s of sherry at his elbow and an unlighted cigar in his hand, sank back into the placid after-dinner reverie which is found in the rare cases when old age has encountered a faultless digestion. The happiest part of his life was spent in the pleasant state between waking and sleeping, while as yet the flavour of his favourite dishes still lingered in his mouth--just as the most blissful moments known to Uncle Percival were those in which he piped his cherished airs upon his antiquated instrument. The eldest member of the Wilde family was very old indeed--had in fact successfully rounded some years ago the critical point of his eightieth birthday, and there was the zest of a second childhood in the animation with which he had revived the single accomplishment of his early youth. That youth was now more vivid to his requickened memory than the present was to his enfeebled faculties. The past had become a veritable obsession in his mind, and when he fingered the old flute strength came back to his half-palsied hands and breath returned to his shrunken little body. His own music was the one sound he heard in all its distinctness, and he hung upon it with an enjoyment which was almost doting in its childish delight.

So the fluting went on merrily, while Mrs. Payne and Mrs. Bleeker, after fidgeting a moment in the drawing-room, decided that they would return for a word or two with Angela. "It is really the only place in the house where one can escape Percival's music," declared Mrs. Payne, who frankly confessed that she had reached the time of life when to bore her was the chief offence society could commit, "so, besides the comfort I afford dear Angela, it is much the pleasantest place for me to pa.s.s the evening. I've always been a merciful woman my child," she pursued shaking her little flat, false gray curls above her painted wrinkles, "for never in my life have I cast a stone at anyone who amused me; but as for Percival and his flute! Well, I won't say a disagreeable word on the subject, but I honestly think that a pa.s.sion at his age is absolutely indecent."

She was so grotesquely gorgeous with her winking diamonds and her old point lace, which yawned over her lean neck, that the distinction she had always aimed at seemed achieved at last by an ironic exaggeration.

"At least it is a perfectly harmless pa.s.sion," suggested her husband, a beautiful old man of seventy gracious years.

"Harmless!" gasped Mrs. Payne. "Why, it has wrecked the nerves of the entire family, has given me Saint Vitus' dance, has kept Laura awake for nights, has reduced Angela to hysterics, and you actually have the face to tell me it is harmless! Judged by its effects, I consider it quite as reprehensible as a taste for cards or a fancy for a chorus girl.

Those are vices at least that belong to our century and to civilisation, but a flute is nothing less than a relic of barbarism."

"Well, it's worse on me than on anyone else," said Laura, with the dominant spirit which caused Mr. Payne to shiver whenever she tilted against his wife. "My room is just above, and I get the benefit of every note."

The tune issuing from the library had changed suddenly into "The Land o'