“Have you found it?” she said eagerly, without a trace of consciousness in her charming face. “Thank you so much!... Yes, I have it!... That’s all right!”
He had inevitably touched the little unslippered foot in its silk stocking, but she did not seem to be aware of the fact as he was. Mrs. White had risen, and Mrs. Lewin rose too, with one brilliant smile of thanks at him—nothing more. The Administrator was nearest to the door; he got out of his seat and held it for the ladies, looking down on them from his unusual height as they passed,—Mrs. Arthur White in dull white silk, a comfortable, portly presence—Mrs. Clayton, still trying to attract attention with a jingle of bangles, but his eyes were blank;—Diana Churton, hard and metallic and burnt to the collar-line, beneath which her bare neck was startlingly fair;—then a tall woman with a well-groomed head, and a black velvet rose nestling against the rich whiteness of her skin. He scanned her as keenly as though he saw her for the first time, and he felt sure she did not notice it as she went calmly by, so softly unconscious of him that she was as easily graceful as though no strong masculine eyes were searching her from the crown of her head to the little foot that had a new meaning to him.
Mr. Gregory held the door until the last silk skirts had swept into the further room. Then he went back to his seat and sat down, and the talk buzzed round him of sugar works and hemp-crops, and mixtures of races in Key Island, while a few men talked promotion and the chances of the army. Between his feet, as he sat there discussing his favourite topics, he could still feel the strange yielding softness of a little satin slipper....
As Mrs. Lewin entered the drawing-room the coffee came in from the servants’ quarters. She sat down in the nearest chair, which happened to be beside a little table where a fancy mirror lay with some other trifles. The other women had crossed over to the coffee-tray; Chum took up the glass deliberately, and looked at herself; first on this side and then on that. The inspection was entirely satisfactory.
She laid down the mirror, and smiled as if distinctly amused. For it had occurred to her that they had all been fools and had wasted much valuable time, and when women are fools the men will not help them out of their folly.
“He is only a man!” she said a little contemptuously, going back to her first comment.
By the time the men came into the drawing-room, most of the women had drifted out on to the stoep, but the two Bridge tables were placed and waiting, and the Bridge players sat down to the serious business of their evening, while Hamilton Gurney of the Wessex wheeled the piano out into the cool darkness and fortified by cého began to sing. He had that gift of the gods a real tenor voice, and when he sang he was suddenly transformed from an ordinary young man in a Line Regiment to a satellite of the Angel Israfil, with power over his fellow-creatures to wring their hearts and bring tears into their eyes. It is a little pitiful of human nature that intense pleasure always shows itself most simply in weeping; for when the senior sub. of the Wessex had dropped his last soft note into a listening silence most of his hearers had uncomfortable lumps in their throats, and believed that it was a foretaste of Heaven.
Mrs. Lewin had seated herself in a basket chair as far from other listeners as she could, for she was selfish over music, and felt inclined to turn and rend any one who interrupted her enjoyment of it. It represented the only violent emotion that she had really experienced, and she objected to facing the public with quivering nerves. To-night she was to be more than usually harrowed because Mr. Gurney, in a fit of sentimentalism engendered by her own black rose, had chosen a song with her name interwoven—a song that Blumenthal loved best of all he wrote, and which seems as if the accompaniment were born of the air. It is called “Leoline,” but Chum missed the reference to herself as completely as she lost sight of the pink-and-white young man at the piano who was casting glances at her shadowy corner. Hamilton Gurney did not realise that he was merely the vehicle of his own gift, and therefore he made the mistake of accepting the attention he knew he received not only as for his voice, but for his very unimportant self.
“One night we sat below the porch
And out in that warm air,