II.
Seated opposite her in the railway-carriage, as their train bore them through the pleasant dales and woods of Surrey, Will Stretton fell to studying his cousin’s appearance. “Burrell was right,” he told himself; “she really is tremendously good-looking,” and that, in spite of a perfectly reckless irregularity of feature. Her nose was too small, but it was a delicate, pert, pretty nose, notwithstanding. Her mouth was too large, but it was a beautiful mouth, all the same, softly curved and red as scarlet, with sensitive, humorous little quirks in its corners. Her eyes he could admire without reservation, brown and pellucid, with the wittiest, teasingest, mockingest lights dancing in them, yet at the same time a deeper light that was pensive, tender, womanly. Her hair, too, he decided, was quite lovely, abundant, undulating, black, blue-black even, but fine, but silky, escaping in a flutter of small curls above her brow. “It’s like black foam,” he said. And he would have been ready to go to war for her complexion, though it was so un-English a complexion that one might have mistaken her for a native of the France or Italy she had inhabitated: warm, dusky white, with an elusive shadow of rose glowing through it. Yes, she was tremendously good-looking, he concluded. She looked fresh and strong and real. She looked alert, alive, full of the spring and the joy of life. She looked as if she could feel quick and deep, as if her blood flowed swiftly, and was red. He liked her face, and he liked her figure—it was supple and vigorous. He liked the way she dressed—there was something daring and spirited in the uncompromising, unabashed luxury of it. “Who ever saw such a hat—or such a sunshade?” he reflected.
“There’ll be no coach-and-four to meet us at the station,” she warned him, as they neared their journey’s end, “because I have no horses. But we’ll probably find Madame Dornaye there, piaffer-ing in person. Can you resign yourself to the prospect of driving up to your ancestral mansion in a hired fly?”
“I could even, at a pinch, resign myself to walking,” he declared. “But who is Madame Dornaye?”
“Madame Dornaye is my burnt-offering to that terrible sort of fetich called the County. She’s what might be technically termed my chaperon.”
“Oh, to be sure,” he said; “I had forgotten. Of course, you’d have a chaperon.”
“By no means of course,” she corrected him. “Until the other day I’d never thought of such a thing. But it’s all along o’ the man named Burrell. He insisted that I mustn’t live alone—that I was too young. He has such violent hallucinations about people’s ages. He said the County would be horrified. I must have an old woman, a sound, reliable old woman, to live with me. I begged and implored him to come and try it, but he protested with tears in his eyes that he wasn’t an old woman. So I sent for Madame Dornaye, who is, every inch of her. She’s the widow of a man who used to be a professor at the Sorbonne, or something. I’ve known her for at least a hundred years. She’s connected in some roundabout way with the family of my father’s stepmother. She’s like a little dry brown leaf; and she plays Chopin comme pas un; and she lends me a false air of respectability, I suppose. She calls me Jeanne ma fille, if you can believe it, as if my name weren’t common Johannah. If you chance to please her, she’ll very likely call you Jean mon fils. But see how things turn out. The man named Burrell also insisted that I must put on mourning, as a symbol of my grief for the late Sir William. That I positively refused to think of. So the County’s horrified, all the same—which proves the futility of concessions.”
“Oh?” questioned Will. “What does the County do?”
“It comes and calls on me, and walks round me, and stares, with a funny little deprecating smile, as it I were some outlandish and not very proper animal, cast up by the sea. To begin with, there’s the vicar, with all his wives and daughters. Their emotions are complicated by the fact that I am a Papist. Then there’s old Lord Belgard; and there’s Mrs. Breckenbridge, with her marriageable sons; and there’s the Bishop of Salchester, with his Bishopess, Dean, and Chapter. The dear good people make up parties in the afternoon, to come and have a look at me; and they sip my tea with an air of guilt, as if it smacked of profligacy; and they suppress demure little knowing glances among themselves. And then at last they go away, shaking their heads, and talking me over in awe-struck voices.”
“I can see them, I can hear them,” Will laughed.
“Haven’t you in English a somewhat homely proverbial expression about the fat and the fire?” asked Johannah.
“About the fat getting into the fire? Yes,” said Will.
“Well, then, to employ that somewhat homely proverbial expression,” she went on, “the fat got into the fire at the Bishop’s palace. Mrs. Rawley was kind enough to write and ask us to dinner, and she added that she had heard I sang, and wouldn’t I bring some music? But nobody had ever told me that it’s bad form in England to sing well. So, after dinner, when Mrs. Rawley said, ’Now, Miss Silver, do sing us something,’ I made the incredible blunder of singing as well as I could. I sang the Erlkônig, and Madame Dornaye played the accompaniment, and we both did our very bestest, in our barefaced, Continental way. We were a little surprised, and vastly enlightened, to perceive that we’d shocked everybody. And by-and-by the Bishop’s daughters consented to sing in their turn, and then we saw the correct British style of doing it. If you don’t want to be considered rowdyish and noisy in a British drawing-room, you must sing under your breath, faintly, faintingly, as if you were afraid somebody might hear you.”
“My poor dear young lady,” her cousin commiserated her, “fancy your only just discovering that. It’s one of the foundation-stones of our social constitution. If you sing with any art or with any feeling, you expose yourself to being mistaken for a paid professional.”
“Another thing that’s horrified the County,” pursued Johannah, “is the circumstance that I keep no horses. I don’t like horses—except in pictures. In pictures, I admit at once, they make a very pleasant decorative motive. But in life—they’re too strong and too unintelligent; and they’re perpetually bolting. By-the-bye, please choose a good feeble jaded one, when you engage our fly. I’m devoted to donkeys, though. They’re every bit as decorative as the horse, and they’re really wise—they only baulk. I had a perfect love of a little donkey in Italy; his name was Angelo. If I decide to stay in England, I shall have a spanking team of four donkeys, with scarlet trappings and silver bells. But the County say ’Oh, you must have horses,’ and casts its eyes appealingly to heaven when I say I won’t.”
“The County lacks a sense of situations,” he reflected. “It’s really a deliciously fresh one—a big country house, and not a horse in the stables.”
“Apropos of the house, that brings me to another point,” said she. “The County feels very strongly that I ought to put the house in repair—that dear old wonderful, rambling, crumbling house. They take it as the final crushing evidence of my depravity, that I prefer to leave it in its present condition of picturesque decay. I’m sure you agree with me, that it would be high treason to allow a carpenter or mason to lay a hand on it. By-the-bye, I hope you have no conscientious scruples against speaking French; for Madame Dornaye only knows two words of English, and those she mispronounces. There she is—yes, that little black and grey thing, in the frock. She’s come to meet me, because we had a bet. You owe me five shillings,” she called out to Madame Dornaye, as Will helped her from the carriage. “You see, I’ve brought him.”
Madame Dornaye, who had a pair of humorous old French eyes, responded, blinking them, “Oh, before I pay you, I shall have to be convinced that it is really he.”
“I’m afraid it’s really he,” laughed Will; “but rather than let so immaterial a detail cost you five shillings, I’m prepared to maintain with my dying breath that there’s no such person.”
“Don’t mind him,” interposed Johannah. “He’s trying to flatter you up, because he wants you to call him Jean mon fils, as if his name weren’t common William.” Then, to him, “Go,” she said, with an imperious gesture, “go and find a vehicle with a good tired horse.”
And when the vehicle with the good tired horse had brought them to their destination, and they stood before the hall-door of Silver Towers, Johannah looked up at the escutcheon carved in the pale-grey stone above it, and said pensively, “On a field argent, a heart gules, crowned with an imperial crown or; and the motto, ’Qu’il régne!’ If, when you got my first letter, Cousin Will, if you’d remembered the arms of our family, and the motto—if you had ’let it reign’—I should have been spared the trouble and expense of a journey to town to-day.”
“But I should have missed a precious experience,” said he. “You forget what I couldn’t help being supremely conscious of—that I bear those arms with a difference. I hope, though, that you won’t begrudge the journey to town. I think there are certain aspects of your character that I might never have discovered if I’d met you in any other way.”
That evening Johannah wrote a letter:
“Dear Mr. Burrell,—Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut. The first part of my rash little prophecy has already come true. Will Stretton is staying in this house, a contented guest. At the present moment he’s hovering about the piano, where Madame Dornaye is playing Chopin; and he’s just remarked that he never hears Chopin without thinking of those lines of Browning’s:
’I discern
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.’
I quite agree with you, he is a charming creature. So now I repeat the second part of my rash little prophecy: Before the summer’s over he will have accepted at least a good half of his paternal fortune. Ce que femme veut, le diable ne saurait pas l’empêcher. He will, he shall, even if I have to marry him to make him.—Yours ever, Johannah Silver.”