“My most intimate friend? He is in England. Nottingdale. Do you know him? Or do you perchance mean Warner?”
“Never heard of the first and it certainly is not the last. Oh, my lord!” And then she laughed so archly that poor Lord Hunsdon could not fail to read her meaning. His fresh coloured face, warm with ascending heat, turned a deep brick red. He felt offended with both Miss Ogilvy and Lady Mary, and edged closer to Anne as if for protection.
This conversation took place while Lady Mary was bowing in response to the plaudits her performance evoked. She tinkled out another selection, and then, with a gently dissenting gesture, the dreaming eyes almost somnambulistic, floated through the curtains.
There was a brief interval for rapturous vocatives and then the curtains were flung apart and Spring burst through, crying,
“I come! I come! Ye have called me long.
I come o’er the mountains with light and song!
Ye may trace my step o’er the wakening earth
By the winds that tell of the violet’s birth.”
The young lady, attired in white and hung with garlands, looked not unlike the engraving of “Spring” in the illustrated editions of the poems of the gentle Felicia. For a moment Anne, who had long outgrown Mrs. Hemans, was disposed to laugh, but as the sweet ecstatic voice trilled on a wave of sadness swept over her, a familiar scene of her childhood rose and effaced the one beneath. She saw the favourite room of her mother in the tower overhanging the sea, her brothers sprawled on the hearthrug, herself in her own little chair, her mother in her deep invalid sofa holding her youngest child in her arms, while she softly recited the “Evening Prayer at a Girl’s School,” “The Coronation of Inez del Castro,” “Juana,” or, to please the more robust taste of the boys, “Bernardo del Carpio,” and “Casabianca,” the last two in sweet inadequate tones. Lines, long forgotten swept back to Anne out of the past:
The night wind shook the tapestry round an ancient palace
room,
And torches, as it rose and fell, waved through the
gorgeous gloom.
There was music on the midnight—
From a royal fane it rolled.
The warrior bowed his crested head, and tamed his heart of
fire,
And sued the haughty king to free his long imprisoned sire.
Mrs. Percy had been a gentle, sentimental, romantic creature with golden ringlets and floating sylph-like form, not unlike Lady Mary’s. She received little attention from her scientific husband and devoted her short life to her children and to poetry, writing graceful vacant verses herself. Mrs. Hemans was her favourite poet, although her eyes could kindle when she read “The Corsair,” or “The Bride of Arbydos,” particularly as she had once met Byron and remembered him as the handsomest of mortals. But she would have thought it indecorous even to mention his name before her young children. Mrs. Hemans was as much a part of the evening hour in winter as the dusk and the blazing logs, and the children loved her almost as well as the gentle being who renewed her girlhood in those romantic effusions. A malignant fever raging up the coast, had burnt out that scene for ever, leaving Anne alone and aghast, for her father, the first horror and remorse over, subsided once more into his laboratory. Then had come a succession of governesses; finally the library was discovered; she ceased to miss her old companions. But she never forgot them, and no doubt the sweetness and melancholy of the memory did as much as the imaginary Byam Warner to save her from the fate of her dry dehumanised father.
Anne came to herself as a charade progressed, and Miss Ogilvy gaily commented upon the interpretation of the middle syllable of Caterpillar, as A, in the architecture of which one of the handsomest girls and her swain made a striking silhouette. Then she remembered that the next name on the programme was Warner’s; he was to read for half an hour from his own work; after which all would hie themselves to the music room and dance.