She inclined her head again, as though to indicate that her thirst for knowledge was satisfied. At this point the Speaker, who had been standing behind Jeremy, silent but tapping his foot on the ground, broke in abruptly.
“Where is Eva?” he said.
The lady looked at him with a corpulent parody of reserve. “She has just come in from riding. Shall I send for her?” The Speaker nodded, and then seemed to wave away a question in her eyes. She turned to Jeremy and murmured, “The bell is over there.”
Jeremy stared at her a moment, puzzled; then, following the direction of her finger, saw hanging on the wall an old-fashioned bell-pull. Recovering himself a little he went to it, tugged at it gingerly, and so summoned the girl who sat in the ante-room. When she came in he saw again on her face the same look of frank but unimpressed curiosity. But she received her orders still with downcast and submissive eyes and departed in silence.
Then a door at the other end of the room opened abruptly and gustily inwards. Jeremy looked towards it with interest, saw nothing but a hand still holding it, and, dimly, a figure in the opening turned away from it. He heard a fresh, cheerful voice giving some parting directions to an invisible person. The blood rose suddenly to his head and he began to be confused. He waited in almost an agony of suspense for the Speaker’s daughter to turn and enter the room.
He had indeed experienced disturbing premonitions of this sort before. Now and again it had happened in the life of his own lecture-rooms and of his friends studios, that, without reason, he wondered why he had been so immune from serious love-sickness. Now and again, like a child with a penny to spend, he would take his bachelor state out of some pocket in his thoughts, turn it over lovingly, and ask himself what he should do with it. He had indeed a great fear of spending it rashly; but often, after one of these moods, the mention of an unknown girl he was to meet would set his heart throbbing, or he would look at one of his pupils or one of his friends with a new and faintly pleasant speculation in his mind. Yet there had never been anything in it. He had had one flirtation over test-tubes and balances, ended by his timely discovery of the girl’s pretentious ignorance in the matter of physics. He would not have minded her being ignorant, but he was repelled when he thought that she had baited a trap for him with a show of knowledge. There had been another over canvases and brushes. But he had not been able to talk with enough warmth about the fashions of art; and, before he had made much progress, the girl had found another lover more glib than he—which was, he reflected, when he was better of his infatuation and considered the kind of picture she painted, something of a deliverance. Now his heart was absurdly beating at the approach of a princess—of a princess who was nearly two hundred years younger than himself!
She turned and came into the room, stopping a few paces inside and staring at him as frankly as he at her. She must have seen in him at that moment what we see in the house where a great man was born—a house that would be precisely like other houses if we knew nothing about it. Or did her defeated curiosity wake in her even then extraordinary thoughts about this ordinary young man? Jeremy’s mind had become too much a stage set for a great event for him to get any clear view of the reality. But he received an impression, ridiculously, as though the fine, blowing, temperate, sunshiny day he had seen through the windows had come suddenly into his presence. And, though this tall, straight-backed girl, with her wide, frank eyes and all the beauty of health and youth, had plainly her mother’s features, distinguished only by a long difference of years, he guessed somehow in her expression, in her pose, something of the father’s intelligence.
The pause in which they had regarded one another lasted hardly ten seconds. “I wanted so much to see you,” she cried impulsively. “My maids have told me all about you, and when I was out riding——” She stopped.
The Lady Burney frowned, and the Speaker asked in a slow, dragging voice, as though constraining himself to be gentle, “Whom did you meet when you were out riding?”
“Roger Vaile,” the girl answered, with a faint tone of annoyed defiance. “And he told me how he came to find this gentleman yesterday.”