CHAPTER VI
Bella Wayne’s father had been in the royal navy. His health had given way about the same time as his patience on the vexed question of non-promotion. He retired from the service, went with his American wife and family to California on a visit, became enamoured of the climate, bought a place, and settled there. The three youngest of his seven children were born in Tulare County, but for him “home” was still England, however ungrateful. They all went back every second year to visit his father in Staffordshire, and when Bella’s two sisters found English husbands, there were three reasons for the recurrent visit to the old country. The eldest son, Tom Wayne, had made a fortune on the New York Stock Exchange and married a girl belonging to one of the old Knickerbocker families. Tom’s country house on Staten Island proved highly convenient as a half-way station between England and California. Mrs. Tom was a very charming person, and a certain portion of Bella’s satisfaction in going abroad lay in the chance it presented of making a visit to Staten Island, on the way over and back. Nevertheless, as she never failed to tell Hildegarde on her return, there was no place to be compared to California, no friend and no “in-law” who could make up to her for being away from Hildegarde, and she might have added, from the neighborhood of that obdurate creature with the cold blue eyes and the colder heart, Louis Cheviot. Those who thought about it at all were surprised that the friendship of the two girls was not more interrupted upon Hildegarde’s graduating from the school, when Bella was less than fifteen. But not upon community of tasks, rather upon something essential in the nature of each had their alliance been founded—kept vital by wants in each that the other could supply, excesses in each that the other helped to modify. They themselves thought their relation had its deeper roots in a conviction of the peculiar sanctity of girls’ friendships; a creed to which Hildegarde’s fidelity effected Miss Bella’s actual adhesion only by degrees and with notable backslidings.
But even in early days, Bella felt it was highly distinguished to stand in this relation to one who thought and talked about it as Hildegarde did. Hadn’t she said in that soft, deliberate way of hers, that it was capable of being one of the most beautiful things in all the beautiful world? It was something, she said, no man knew anything about. Why, they presumed to doubt its possibility even! Ah, they should have known Hildegarde Mar and Bella Wayne. Men believed that all girls were, at heart, jealous of all other girls. They thought meanly of the sex. They pointed to David and Jonathan, to Orestes and Pylades, to instances innumerable of men’s faithfulness to men. But what bard or legend celebrates woman’s friendship as toward woman? Well, you see, all the chroniclers since the beginning of the world have been of the scoffer’s sex. That was why women’s friendships had never been celebrated—though men said the real reason was—oh, they spoke blasphemies!—and they hadn’t known Hildegarde and Bella. It was Hildegarde’s theme, but Bella agreed to every word. Yes, yes, their friendship would show the world!
For qualities alien to her own, Hildegarde came to look upon her little friend with an adoring admiration. Bella’s wit and Bella’s originality, Bella’s entire “mode of being,” were at once tonic and delight. Then, too, behind her provoking charm was a finished daintiness, which with her became elevated into a special quality, distinctive, all-pervading, a certain strangeness of fragility—a physical fineness like the peculiar fineness of a flower—a something suggesting evanescence, and having the subtle pathos of the thing that may not, cannot bide.
It would have been hard to say which was of most use to the other in making clearer the riddle of life, or more radiant the beauty of the world, or more wonder-waking, the mystery of a young girl’s heart. They read, and walked, and talked, and worked, together, paying their vaunted friendship a finer tribute than words, however honestly uttered; for they grew in each other’s company.
The younger, too, was cured of certain of her more inadmissible “ways,” while the elder learned from Butterfly Bella many a thing besides the art of making the most of her beauty.
Not that Hildegarde despised this last. She had none of the comfort of knowing it was part of her largeness of nature, that she should take more easily to beautifying her home than to making the best of herself. Indeed to the end of time, she required guidance in matters of dress. And who so well qualified as Miss Bella to give advice. She went further: with her own ingenious little hands she made the most becoming of “shirt-waists,” trimmed heavenly hats, and firmly forbade fripperies.
“No, no, they’re not for the massive.” She applauded her friend for not wearing trinkets—she didn’t like to see her even with her maternal grandmother’s emerald brooch. “No, I don’t like you in ‘didoes’ of any sort. They’re too insignificant for you. You ought to wear ropes of pearls, or a tiara of diamonds, or better still, something barbaric—what’s one little lady-like emerald set in a filigree of diamond chips? Why, it can’t even be seen—on you. Of course the emerald’s a pretty little stone, and the old setting’s nice. It would shine out on me, but—well, it’s simply lost, you know, on your heroic neck.”
Hildegarde deplored her size, she carried it even with a sense of humiliation just as she bore with her lack of elegant accomplishments. It was pretty terrible to have to put up with being such a great lump—especially with the ethereal Bella always by to point the advantage of the opposite. Still, there was no blinking the facts. “You’re right, I believe, didoes of any sort are rather wasted on me,” Hildegarde would say meekly, “I must have felt that when I hardly ever wore them—though I liked them. It takes you, Bella, to explain things.”