With the arrival of Lorna Vale the excitement reached its peak; even the gipsies played more wildly. She was an actress! And in those days it was impossible to imagine an actress and the Champion virgins in the same room. The Bishop stared at her, somewhat furtively to be sure, and Mrs. Champion, quivering, again executed her swooping gesture of protection toward her two daughters. But Mrs. Sigourney, perhaps seeing in her an ally, pierced the surrounding phalanx of eager young men and found a place by her side. Each benefited by the contrast, for the one was large, an opulent beauty with tawny hair, and the other, thin as a hairpin, black and glittering.
Then, during a brief pause in the music, the wide doors opened again and there entered Sabine Cane and Mrs. Callendar’s son Richard.
At their approach there was, even in that nervous, chattering throng, a sudden hush, a brief heightening of interest as if the crowd, like a field of wheat, had been swayed faintly for an instant by the swift eddy of a zephyr. Then all was noisy again. It was a demonstration of interest, polite, restrained, as it should have been at a gathering so fashionable, but a demonstration that could not be entirely disguised.
It was in the women that the excitement found its core ... women who saw in the dark young man a great match for their daughters, girls who desired him for his fortune and his rakish good looks and found the legend of his wild living a secret and sentimental attraction; widows and spinsters who discerned in him matchmaking material of the first order. Beyond doubt the glittering Mrs. Sigourney and the tawny Lorna Vale held other ideas, not to be expressed in so polite an assemblage. He had been, after all, notoriously attentive to both though they were years older. But there was one element in the situation which raised the interest to the pitch of hysteria; it was his attention to Sabine Cane, a fact of growing importance which many a jet-hung bosom found hard to support.
She was a year or two older than Richard Callendar (every woman present could have told the very hour she made her entrance into society) and she was not, like most of young Callendar’s women, an acclaimed beauty. Yet there were other qualities which set her aside from the commonplace round of marriageable girls. She was easily the most smartly dressed in all the room; there was about her clothes a breathless sort of perfection that bespoke the taste of an artist. In place of an overwhelming beauty, she had developed a wit that could be infinitely more disastrous. In this, she resembled Cleopatra, Madame de Staël and the Montespan. These things made her perilous and caused many an ambitious mother hours of sleeplessness.
A long nose, a generous mouth frankly painted, green eyes set a trifle too near each other, a mass of brick red hair and a marvelous figure ... these things comprised the physical aspect of Sabine Cane, a combination that was changeable and a trifle bizarre and therefore, as Thérèse Callendar had observed more than once, enormously intrigante. But there was more than this, for in the green eyes there lay a light of humor and malice and beneath the brick red hair a brain which had a passion for the affairs of other people. What disconcerted her enemies most was her air of entering a room; she did not walk in, she made an entrance. It was as if such women as Mrs. Sigourney and Lorna Vale did not exist. Lily Langtry or Cléo de Merode were less effective. To-night she wore a brilliant yellow dress with a wide full train. It was as if she understood shrewdly her ugliness and made capital of it.
Sabine knew things about these people who filled the drawing room—little bits of gossip, scraps of information picked up here and there in the course of her twenty-six years. She knew, for example, that Mrs. Champion (mother of the virgins and most rarefied of aristocrats) had a grandmother known as Ruddy Mary who in her first assault upon the social ranks had invited people to a monstrous ball by invitations written in red ink, and so gained a sobriquet that was now forgotten. She knew that Wickham Chase had a maternal grandfather who had been a Jewish pawnbroker and laid up the money which he now spent. She knew that the Honorable Emma Hawksby (niece of the notorious Duke of Middlebottom) was without a cent in the world and found an easy winter in New York by living off those who liked to speak of the dear Duke’s cousin. “Honorable” was not a great title, but it went far enough in those days to keep the Honorable Emma in bed and board for the winter. She even knew that a brother of the Apostle to the Genteel had to be kept, at some expense to the Apostle, in an out of the way country town in order that he might not make a drunken spectacle of himself before the Apostle’s many “wa’am friends.”
Sabine kept a great many family skeletons in her clever memory and it was impossible to know the moment when she might bring them forth and rattle them in the most grisly fashion.
It was clear that her companion, shrewder than the well-fed young men about him, penetrating with those instincts which came to him from the plump bundle of satin and diamonds who stood receiving the guests, understood perfectly the atmospheric disturbance. He was young, clever, handsome in a fashion that was a little sinister, and very rich, so rich that the whispers of gossip that clustered about him—even the talk of Mrs. Sigourney and Lorna Vale—made no difference. Mrs. Champion found him not entirely beneath consideration as a possible match for Margaret or Janey, the redoubtable virgins.
“Look at Boadicea and her daughters,” Sabine whispered maliciously in his ear as they came abreast of this virtuous group.