“And it’s no amusement to you?” she prompted, with innate coquetry, dropping back into her careless tone. “If it isn’t, don’t come then. I shall try to get along, never fear. Why shouldn’t I know fine people?” she went on, a degree less hardly. “I’m tired of this foggy, bread-and-butter life. It was bad enough at Godwin’s stuffy house with poverty and a stepfather. I don’t wonder Mary has run away to marry her Shelley! He’ll be a baronet some day, and she can see life. I don’t intend to be tied to London always, either—even with the playing! I want to know things and see something of the world. Why do you stay here? Why don’t you go to sea again? I’m sure I’d like to.”
“You know why I don’t,” he said, “well enough. I deserted the service once, besides. But I’d like to see the world—with you, Jane!”
He did not see the line that curved her lips, half-scornful, half-pitying, for his look had fastened on a figure in a ministerial cloak, who was passing on the pavement. The figure was Dr. James Cassidy, taking his evening walk with the under-curate of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West—an especially enjoyable hour with him.
Now, as Cassidy’s insect eyes lifted, they fell on the oriental face in the shadow of the doorway with a sudden interrogative start. He took a step toward it, hesitatingly, but the curate was in the midst of a quotation from Eusebius, and the pause was but momentary. The girl’s Moorish-looking companion had not moved, but his hands had clenched and his face had an ugly expression as Cassidy passed on.
“Only a resemblance,” remarked the latter, as he proceeded. “The man in the doorway there reminded me of an ensign who deserted the Pylades once when we were lying at Bombay.” His hand touched a broad white scar on his cheek. “I trust he may yet be apprehended—for the good of the service,” he added softly.
Gordon’s eyes, as the carriage picked its way, had been on the front of the theater, but they were preoccupied. He did not see the look of dislike from the mustachioed face in the shadow, nor the girl as she vanished through the stage-door. Yet, as it happened, the first glimpse of the theater had brought a thought of her.
“Fond, flippant, wild, elusive, alluring—the devil!” he mused. “That’s Jane Clermont—she would furnish out a new chapter for Solomon’s Song. The stage is her atmosphere: she came to it as naturally as a humming-bird to a garden of geraniums. Yet she will never make a Siddons; she lacks purpose and she is—méchante. She appeals to the elemental, raw sense of the untamed and picturesque men own in common with savages. Nature made such women to cure man’s ennui: they fit his mood. Jane Clermont was not born for fine ladies’ fripperies. What is it she lacks? Balance?—or is it the moral sense? After all, I’m not sure but that lack is what makes her so interesting. I have been attracted a million times by passion; have I ever been attracted by sheer purity? Yes—there is one. Annabel Milbanke!”
There rose before his mind’s eye a vision of the tall stateliness he had so often seen at Melbourne House. He seemed to feel again the touch of cool, ringless fingers. How infinitely different she was from others who had been more often in his fancy! She had attracted him from his first street glimpse of her—from the first day he looked into her calm virginal eyes across a dinner-table. It was her placidity—the very absence of chaos—that drew him. She represented the one type of which he was not tired. Besides, she was beautiful—not with the ripe, red, exotic beauty of Lady Caroline Lamb, or the wilder eccentric charm of Jane Clermont, but with the unalterable serenity of a rain-washed sky, a snow-bank, a perfect statue.
On his jaded mood the thought of her fell with a salving relief, like rain on a choked highway. A link-boy, throwing open the carriage door, broke his reverie.
He looked up. The bright, garish lanterns smote him with a new and alien sense of distaste. Beyond the stage-entrance and the long dim passage lay the candle-lighted greenroom, the select coterie that gossiped there, and—Jane Clermont. In Portman Square, in the city’s west end, Lady Jersey was standing by her bower of roses and somewhere in the throng about her moved a tall, spirit-looking girl with calm, lash-shaded eyes.