The question affected the lovely lady over by the fireplace as the trumpet of battle affects a generous steed. She flashed on the instant into the middle of the hall and into the friendliest and most familiar relation with everyone and with everything. “John Anthony Yule, sir,—who passed away, poor duck, in his flower!”
They met her with low salutations, a sweep of ugly shawls, and a brush of queer German hats: she had issued, to their glazed convergence, from the dusk of the Middle Ages and the shade of high pieces, and now stood there, beautiful and human and happy, in a light that, whatever it was for themselves, the very breadth of their attention, the expression of their serious faces, converted straightway for her into a new, and oh! into the right, one. To a detached observer of the whole it would have been promptly clear that she found herself striking these good people very much as the lawful heir had, half an hour before, struck another stranger—that she produced in them, in her setting of assured antiquity, quite the romantic vibration that she had responded to in the presence of that personage. They read her as she read him, and a bright and deepening cheer, reflected dimly in their thick thoroughness, went out from her as she accepted their reading. An impression was exchanged, for the minute, from side to side—their grave admiration of the finest feature of the curious house and the deep free radiance of her silent, grateful “Why not?” It made a passage of some intensity and some duration, of which the effect, indeed, the next minute, was to cause the only lady of the party—a matron of rich Jewish type, with small nippers on a huge nose and a face out of proportion to her little Freischütz hat—to break the spell by an uneasy turn and a stray glance at one of the other pictures. “Who’s dat?”
“That?” The picture chanced to be a portrait over the wide arch, and something happened, at the very moment, to arrest Mrs. Gracedew’s eyes rather above than below. What took place, in a word, was that Clement Yule, already fidgeting in his impatience back from the front, just occupied the arch, completed her thought, and filled her vision. “Oh, that’s my future husband!” He caught the words, but answered them only by a long look at her as he moved, with a checked wildness of which she alone, of all the spectators, had a sense, straight across the hall again and to the other opening. He paused there as he had done before, then with a last dumb appeal to her dropped into the court and passed into the garden. Mrs. Gracedew, already so wonderful to their visitors, was, before she followed him, wonderful with a greater wonder to poor Chivers. “You dear old thing—I give it all back to you!”
WORKS BY HENRY JAMES.
EMBARRASSMENTS.
12mo, cloth, $1.50.
“Mr. Henry James has produced no more clever and subtle work than is to be found in his latest volume.... There are in these tales passages of splendid realism. The portrait of Geoffrey Dowling is a masterpiece of characterization. And there are sentences, unobtrusive asides, which flash with the brilliancy of true wit.”—New York Tribune.
“Mr. James’s writings are distinctively works of art. One and all of them appeal most strongly to cultivated minds. In no instance does he descend from his transcendent ideals of literature. An acquaintance with Henry James means an appreciation of the finer style of written English, and an inhalation of the atmosphere of purest English literature. No list of books for the summer will be complete without ‘Embarrassments.’”—Cambridge Press.
THE OTHER HOUSE.
12mo, cloth, $1.50.