But the portrait was like an ugly Dutch doll Juliana had had in her childhood; Lucy Clare could not have been like that. She looked at it longer than usual this time, for she thought that the narrow eyes were like those of her brother Lucian. But the eyes in the portrait (whether through the fault of the old painter or of faded paint) were dull, a rather muddy brown, whereas Lucian’s were particularly bright.
Then she remembered that when she had looked so long at Lucian’s eyes, while telling her story of the boy she had seen on the bridge, they had no longer looked bright, but had been dull and opaque like pebbles.
Chapter VI
Sophia clare had been paying a visit of some weeks to her cousin, Fanny E)aunt, Juliana’s married sister, at her town house in Hill Street. Now, on her return home, she rode over to pay her respects to Lady Chidleigh and give her news of her daughter, and, incidentally, to gossip with Juliana. She had brought one of the Hilbury girls with her, a plain but graceful little creature of twelve or thirteen, and the three girls withdrew as soon as they conveniently could to Juliana’s closet, Sophia very eager to tell of all her gaieties in the town.
Which she did with much laughter and self-interruptions such as— “Oh, my love, but I must first tell you——” and “Oh, but you haven’t yet heard how I met the dear toad——” and “such an agreeable rattle—why are there no agreeable rattles in the country? Nothing but dull, good, worthy men like Mr. Dain-tree.”
Yet as she proceeded she felt vaguely disappointed and perplexed. She thought Juliana did not attend quite as closely as usual to all she said; she seemed a little fatigued, but when asked she declared herself quite well. Juliana herself could not understand why she was not more excited by her cousin’s account of her doings with dear Fanny. She supposed it was because she had been spending the morning with Lucian in the library, and anything seemed dull after that.
She spent a good many spare hours with him there now, always undisturbed, for no one came to the library except Doctor Eden on Saturday afternoons to hunt in the old volumes of sermons for two that he might preach next day. So that Lucian and Juliana had the great musty room to themselves. Sometimes he read to her, sitting on the top of the ladder, from a book he had pulled out of an upper shelf, while she lounged in delightful abandon in an armchair of carved wood and leather, contentedly aware how shocked her upright mamma would have been; half listening, half dreaming, her eyes following the peacock as he strutted on the lawn outside the long windows. Sometimes he told her strange and rather alarming stories of other times and nations (“any time must be less dull than the present,” Juliana would say), but not of himself nor his own adventures. She had not yet discovered whether he had really worshipped Satan and Venus, and she did not think she would ever dare to ask.
And sometimes he would do what he called his experiments, which Juliana could never remember clearly afterwards. They would begin by his burning something in a little dish that gave out a heavy, sweet scent, making her fall into a drowsy state in which she seemed to be neither asleep nor awake. Then he would give her a china bowl of water to hold, or a sheet of clear glass, or the great library inkpot with the top screwed off, showing the ink in a round black pool, surrounded by four silver sirens whose outstretched hands just touched each other round the bowl. And Juliana would look into the water, glass or ink, at her own shadow or reflection, until she began to dream that she saw other faces in it looking back at her, and that she heard Lucian’s voice speaking to her, though she never remembered if she had known what he had said or if she had answered.
She could remember, however, that when first she began to see a vague shadow in the substance that she held, saw it beginning to take form and colour, a thrill of excitement and triumph that was almost ecstasy ran through her. It was as though she and Lucian had just begun to find something they had long desired and sought—no, it was more than that.
It was as though, if they were Pagans, she had discovered themselves to be equal to the gods. “How very silly!” she would comment at the wildness of her own suggestion, and as she was not used to speculation she would decide that it was all very odd and surprising but that Lucian did not appear to find it so.
One dream, or fancy, she had, that she could remember distinctly afterwards, though she wished that she could not.
She thought that she had seen herself quite clearly, sitting in the library armchair, as though she were someone else who was standing at a little distance. She could see herself leaning forward, holding the silver inkpot in her hands, her head bent, looking down at it, and a long curl at the back of her head dropping forward on to her neck.
She recounted this to Lucian with distaste and even fear. “It was like the nightmare,” she said. “I wanted to return—to be inside myself again—and could not.”
“The nightmare—to see yourself!” exclaimed Lucian.” My pretty one, you should be delighted with your good fortune. For once in your life you have been enabled to see what is the most charming sight in it.”
But she could not be teased nor complimented out of her aversion from that particular dream she had had of seeing herself, and ever after she was inclined to shrink a little from the sight of her own reflection and even of her shadow.
Lucian once observed her start back at the edge of the lake, and he, taking her hand in a manner half formal and half caressing, led her to the brink of the water and bade her look at herself among the water-lilies.
“It was an ancient belief,” he said, “that the reflection or the shadow was the soul, and that one should not look at one’s reflection in the water, for by so doing one projected the soul out of the body. That enlightened race, the Greeks, considered it as an omen of death if a man dreamed of seeing himself so reflected. They feared that the water-spirits would drag the person’s reflection or soul under water, leaving him soulless to perish. Is that your fear, Juliana, when you see your pretty soul before you?”
She thought of her fancies by that lake, of water-nymphs drawing her down, down under the water to explore the marvels of an unknown world.
Her narrow shoulders and tiny, tight-bodiced waist emerging from a balloon of petticoats, her small intent face beneath a tower of powdered hair, all lay at her feet, quivering a little as if about to take flight. Beside it, and a little behind it, was another image, a mockingly smiling image, confident and secure, whose hand held hers. She gravely regarded that other laughing, glittering face in the sunlit water.
“I should not fear it, brother,” she said, “if your soul came too,” and then she also laughed at the nonsense they were talking.
She had been with Lucian in the library on the morning of Sophia’s visit, but he had been reading and had not done anything to interest her as yet. At the sound of her cousin’s arrival, she had run out, eager to meet her, yet annoyed and dissatisfied at the interruption. If she had not come so early, Lucian, perhaps, would have found time to continue his tale about the German doctor who called up Helen of Troy from the dead to be his paramour. She had heard of it vaguely as an old child’s story and puppet play like Punchinello, but Lucian made it seem quite different—like a possible, almost a true, story.
She was dreaming of it half the time that Sophia was talking.
“I declare,” cried Sophia, in the middle of a full account of her meeting at a ball with “the most agreeable, witty, severe creature in the world—but ’tis true he’s monstrous severe—Oh, la! the things he said to me about the other women and all the old beaux, but I assure you I put him down a peg—but I vow and declare, Juliana, you have never observed that I am wearing the new riding hat I bought in London. Has it not a strange, mannish air?—come, say!”
Juliana, blushing guiltily, hastened to assure her cousin that she had just been considering how well it became her, and that long green plume went amazingly with her riding dress. Sophia’s pertly pretty face, its pointed, inquiring nose, thin mobile lips and cocked chin, did indeed look charming in her cavalier hat. Juliana was s
mitten with a pang of real self-reproach, for never before had Sophia thus enhanced her charms by any new article of dress without her “dearest coz” at once observing it.
But Sophia, more readily appeased than Juliana’s tender conscience, rattled on. “And how do you like your eldest brother? I heard it said in the town that he is only at home to see what rents he can get out of the estate. They tell the oddest tales of him there. It is certain he is a sad rake, is he not?”
“He has not told me so,” said Juliana.
“Oh, la, what an answer! As if he should tell you so!”
But seeing her cousin did not like the subject, she asked what drawings and flower-paintings she had done since that day when Fanny and they had had such a merry time, using little William as a model.
“He had come up from Nurse’s cottage with a message,” she explained to Miss Hilbury, “and sat quite still for us with an apple in his hand, looking a very Cupid.”
“We told him stories to make him smile,” chimed in Juliana, “and he knew he should have the apple to eat when the drawings were finished.”
She searched among the loose drawings and sketches that lay scattered all over the oval table in the middle of the room, to find those of little William, and then held them up, delicate pencil drawings in the rounded manner of the elegant eighteenth-century amateur that Bartolozzi so often etched. Fanny and Sophia had drawn him as the glorified idea of the little peasant, pretty and appealing in his humility and innocence; Juliana, still more romantic, had transformed him to “a very Cupid”— plump, winged and naked, playing with the apple that Venus had won from Paris. Venus was lightly sketched in the background, her draperies very like the loose white dress that Juliana was herself wearing at this moment, with cherry-coloured ribbons round the waist and tying back her light brown curls, not yet powdered and dressed for the day.
There were very few other drawings to show, and Sophia rallied her cousin on her idleness. Miss Hilbury said that she had never seen anything so sweet in her life as Miss Clare’s sketches, they were a vast deal finer than anything in the town, she was sure. Juliana repaid the compliment by saying that Miss Hilbury must sing to them—would she not give them that pretty air, “Chloe’s Lament?”
She rose to open the clavecin, and saw a figure in brown cross the lawn outside the French windows, and a girl’s face looked into the room. The girl stopped, and for an instant she and Juliana looked at each other. Juliana saw her clear, open eyes, wide open in surprise, it seemed, her lips just parted in a kind of pleased wonder. She turned to her companions and said low and hurriedly, “who is it? Shall I ask——”
But Miss Hilbury was turning over the music and had not noticed the passer-by. Sophia was idly flicking at her dress with her riding whip, gazing out of the window, but she did not seem in the least surprised, and now looked up, evidently puzzled by Juliana’s question.
“Who is what, my dear creature?”
Juliana looked back at the garden and saw that the girl in brown had gone. She looked again at Sophia and saw that she had not seen anything. But she must have seen, she was looking straight out of the window.
“What is it?” repeated Sophia, with some impatience.
“Nothing. I think I am very absent this morning.”
“It is the fashion to be absent in the town,” said Sophia. “If you wish to be in the mode you declare your are the most absent creature alive.”
She said it with an air and the girls all laughed. Miss Hilbury sat at the clavecin and sang “Ghloe’s Lament.” Juliana, her hands in her lap, wondered who the passer-by could have been. She had known it was a girl by her face, pretty, though sunburnt, framed in loose brown hair, not curls, but looped in some curious way beneath a sort of cap that came down low on the head. But her dress was so extraordinary that she might well have wondered if it were a girl at all. Now that she was thinking it over, she could not remember ever having seen any dress like it, not even in pictures of outlandish or old-fashioned costume. It was such a loose, straight, boy-like figure—she supposed there had been skirts, but if so they had been most inadequate.
Chapter VII
The visitors stayed to dinner. Miss Hilbury, a little crushed, as were most people, by the presence of Lady Chidleigh, sat next to Vesey and answered by subdued titters whenever he spoke.
He spoke seldom, for he was in no humour to try and entertain a bread-and-butter miss, with a snub nose—thank God, no Clare had a nose like that!—when his cousin Sophia, the finest girl in the family, no, by gad, in the whole county, was sitting next to Lucian at the head of the table, watching him make a fool of himself positively as though she liked and admired it. And what in the world were they talking about? Nothing but absurdities —sheer crinkum crankum—and not at all suitable at that for a young girl like Sophia.
“What! Paris gay, Paris modern, Paris worldly! “Lucian was exclaiming.” But I assure you, dear cousin, they have changed all that. Paris is monstrous serious, credulous, speculative. It is full of magnetic healers and alchemists who talk of the life of the spirit. Oh, yes, the spirit is everything now—and ‘1’esprit’ is nowhere.
“The most popular person in Paris is the Comte de Saint-Germain, whom nobody sees. He claims to have lived five hundred years and to have summoned the loveliest women of antiquity from the dead for his mistresses—Aspasia, Sappho, Faustine, Semiramis. Such, cousin, is the life of the spirit. It cannot be denied that it has compensations—for those who have not had the good fortune to meet the loveliest woman of the present time.”
He dropped his voice at this conclusion, and Sophia, shy at first and then flattered by his treatment of her as a companion habituée of the great world she had so lately visited, was excited by this compliment into blushes and laughter.
“Such impostors ought to be whipped and branded,” observed Grandmamma Chidleigh, as unexpectedly as if the bust of William III had suddenly addressed them from the corner where he gazed in cold severity upon the company, “unless, indeed, the man is really the Comte de Saint-Germain and of noble birth.”
“Unfortunately, madam, it appears to be the only reality about him. These things, undoubtedly, should be better arranged.”
“Pray, my lord, continue,” said Sophia. “Have you met these alchemists? Is there not a report that Signor Cagliostro invokes shades from the dead to sup with his guests? I have heard of him in London, but all his alchemy could not prevent him from getting into debt there and ruining poor Lord Bare-acres.”
“But London,” said Lucian, “is a sad, irreligious place, where there is no longer any true respect for the Infernal Majesty. And that is an important power to conciliate in invoking shades of the dead, since the only shades one would ever desire in company must necessarily come from below. You should visit Paris, cousin—with your understanding of history you would find it entertaining, as many a French Court lady has done, to dine with the shade of Lucretius or Petronius at Count Cagliostro’s house in the Rue St. Claude. Only the week before I left, the shade of Voltaire attended a midnight supper party in, I fear, an almost indecent haste to return to the earth he has so lately rendered null and void by his absence. He declared that he had conversed with half a dozen Popes since his death, and found them good to listen to. After that, one can believe anything that happens at the house of Count Cagliostro.”
Sophia laughed extremely, and Miss Hilbury, whose eyes and mouth had opened very wide, supposed she had better laugh, too. Aunt Emily gave a nervous titter and declared it was all vastly droll.
“How exceedingly absurd, Lucian,” said Lady Chidleigh. “Have you nothing better to tell us of your travels than of a flock of quacks and charlatans?”
But Sophia no longer minded her severe Aunt Chidleigh. How easy and affable her cousin was! No doubt he was wearied to death at home and thankful to have someone fresh to talk to. It was evident that his attention was entirely engrossed by her.
Juliana, far down the table, wondered why Lucian was talking o
f such nonsense. It was strange that he should speak, though in that careless, scoffing way, of shades rising from the past. It was almost as though he had known what she had seen that morning, and had thought—what had he thought? At that instant, Lucian, still chattering with his fair companion, looked down the table and met her eyes.
It was no more than an interchange of the briefest glance, but Juliana knew that he had asked her what she had to tell him and that she in her turn had asked him to explain it. He had told her to remember that when he had looked at her it was to her he was talking, and she had learnt her lesson well.
She was distraite and ill at ease after that, unable to think of anything but her wish that their guests would go so that she should be able to talk with Lucian. She had never wanted Sophia to go before and it made her feel uncomfortably guilty, especially when they were strolling together in the garden after dinner. But, oh dear, how Sophia rattled! It was so difficult to attend, to show interest in the right places. How was it she had never before perceived that “her dearest Sophy,” her own particular friend, chattered about so many things that did not interest her? She supposed she had never thought before what had interested her and what had not—never before Lucian’s coming, Lucian, whose life, unknown as it was to her, made her own pastimes and occupations appear so empty of all but tedium.
At last the two girls rode off, their groom in attendance behind them, and she was alone with Lucian on the terrace, telling him of the figure she had seen on the lawn.
As she had half expected, he showed no surprise.
She described the strange dress as far as she could, she even made a rough drawing of it in her journal as she sat on the little wall that ran along the terrace. But he could think of no country nor even any period in which anyone was dressed like that.
“You are certain it was a girl?” he asked.
Still She Wished for Company Page 7