CHAPTER VIII
Sara had spent the morning crying bitterly, in bed. Her letter to the Duke of Marshire was on the table by her side. From time to time she had taken it up, turned it over, shed fresh tears, and reproached herself for indecision. She held at bay every thought of Robert Orange, and formed the resolve of banishing him from her mind for ever. When the time came to dress for luncheon, she brightened a little, for the prospect of disguising her true feelings in the presence of Lord Reckage and Pensée appealed to that genius for mischief which animated the whole current of her life. To baffle the looker-on seemed not merely a great science, but the one game of wits which could never lose its interest. She was not insincere. She thought that lies, as a rule, were clumsy shifts, and abominable. Even in the moments when she was most thoroughly conscious of her talent for misleading others, she had never brought herself to think well of deception. She would have liked to feel that her heart was an open book for her friends to read. It would have been pleasant, she believed, if all could have known always that she practised a delicate art and played, consummately, fine comedy whenever she found spectators. But a solitary, mismanaged childhood, and the constant sense of being in many ways a foreigner, had taught her the penalty of frankness where sympathy could not supply, from its own knowledge, the unutterable half which makes up every confidence. The bitter pleasures of a conscience which caresses its worst burden were the only real ones of her daily existence. When she could say, at the end of the day, “I have fooled them all: they think I am happy, I am not: they think Reckage amuses me, he doesn't. They think I delight in these dull dinners and balls, I hate them,” a sort of exultation—the pride of a spirit singing under torture—would fill her whole being. All youth that is strong and thoughtful has much of this instinct of dissimulation. The world—to a young mind—appears controlled by elderly, suspicious, hateful custodians ever on the alert to capture, or thwart, every high enterprise and every passionate desire. There seems a vast conspiracy against happiness—the withered, dreary wiseacres in opposition to the joy, the daring, the beauty, the reckless vitality of souls still under the spell of spring. When poor Sara could escape from town into the country, mount her horse, and tear through a storm, the neighbours compared her to a witch on a broomstick, and, shaking their heads, would foresee much sipping of sorrow by the spoonful in the future of Lord Garrow. To-day, however, the young lady assumed her most demure expression, and received the guests at luncheon as though she had never learnt the meaning of tears nor joined the gale in spirit.
Sir Piers Harding was the last to arrive. He was a thick-set, livid man with an unyielding smile and the yellow eyes of one whom rich diet rather than an angry god had rendered melancholy.
“You haven't changed in the least,” he said, considering Lord Garrow with some resentment.
“Ah, well!” replied his lordship, “eleven years do not make much difference at my time of life. You, however, are decidedly greyer. Where have you been hiding yourself? I think you were foolish to leave England. Gladstone was remarking but the other day, ‘Harding was always so cocksure.’ ‘And wasn't he right?’ said I. ‘Of course,’ said he; ‘and that was the worst of him. He was right. Who could stand it?’ That's the world. It's devilish unappreciative of the truth.”
Reckage, much bored by the old men, stood by Pensée's chair, where he could watch Sara and angle for her glance. When it happened that she smiled at him a little—either in mere friendship or mockery—he felt a kind of fire steal through his veins, and he told himself that she was a dangerous woman—a woman who could get her own way in the long run. That she was a girl—and, with all her shortcomings, a very innocent one—made her odd powers of fascination but the more insidious. She wore a dress of wine-coloured silk which fitted plainly over her breast and shoulders and fell in graceful flounces from the waist. The warm, olive lines of her cheek and throat appeared the darker in contrast with a twist of white lace which she wore round her neck; and her black hair, dressed higher than usual, was held in place by a large ruby comb which caught the fire-light as she moved. Reckage was conscious, for the first time in his life, of a real embarrassment. He could not talk to her; he felt tongue-tied when she addressed him. Ill at ease, yet not unhappy, he struggled to maintain some coherence in his conversation; but, at each moment, his own ideas grew less certain and Sara's voice more enchanting. It seemed to convey the lulling powers of an anodyne. When he tried to rouse himself, the effort was as painful as the attempt to wake from a dream within a dream.
“You were at the wedding this morning?” she asked lightly.
“No.... What a fool I am! Yes, of course. You mean Robert's wedding?”
She gave a little smile, and murmured, dropping her voice, “I meant Robert's wedding.”