His companion contrasted strongly with him both in appearance and manner. With a complexion bronzed by exposure to Southern suns, with flashing black eyes, a firm but flexible mouth, shaded with a silky raven mustache, and thick black hair brushed carelessly back from his superb forehead, Gilbert Margrave, artist, engineer, philanthropist, poet, seemed the very type of manly energy.
The atmosphere of a crowded ball-room appeared unnatural to him. That daring spirit was out of place amidst the narrow conventionalities of fashionable life; the soaring nature needed wide savannas and lofty mountain tops, distant rivers and sounding waterfalls; the artist and poet mind sighed for the beautiful—not for the beautiful as we see it in a hot-house flower, imprisoned in a china vase, but as it lurks in the gigantic cup of the Victoria regia on the broad bosom of the mighty Amazon.
But Gilbert Margrave was one of the lions of 1860. An invention in machinery, which had enriched both the inventor and the cotton spinners of Manchester, had made the young engineer celebrated, and when it was discovered that he belonged to a good Somersetshire family, that he was handsome and accomplished, an artist and a poet, invitations flocked in upon him from all the fashionable quarters of the West End.
He had been silent for some time, his gaze riveted upon one of the brilliant groups in the ball-room, when Mortimer Percy tapped him lightly on the shoulder with his gloved hand.
"Why, man, what are you dreaming of?" he said, laughing; "what entrancing vision has enchained your artist glance? What fairy form has bewitched your poet soul? One would think you were amid solitudes of some forest on the banks of the Danube instead of a ball-room in Grosvenor Square. Confess, my Gilbert, confess to your old friend, and reveal the nymph whose spells have transformed you into some statue."
Gilbert smiled at his friend's sally. The two young men had met upon the Continent, and had traveled together through Germany and Switzerland.
"The nymph is no other than yonder lovely girl, talking to your cousin, Miss Horton," said Gilbert; "look at her, Mortimer, watch the graceful head, the silky raven hair, as she bends down to whisper to her companion. Is she not lovely?"
Few who looked upon the young girl of whom Gilbert Margrave spoke, could well have answered otherwise than in the affirmative. She was indeed lovely in the first blush of youth, with the innocence of an angel beaming in every smile; with the tenderness of a woman lying shadowed in the profound depths of her almond-shaped black eyes. Features, delicately molded and exquisitely proportioned; a tiny rosebud mouth; a Grecian nose; a complexion fairer than the ungathered lily hiding deep in an untrodden forest; it was difficult for the imagination of the poet, or the painter, to picture aught so beautiful.
"Is she not lovely?" repeated Gilbert Margrave.
The young South American put his head critically on one side, with the calculating glance with which a connoisseur in the fine arts regards a valuable picture. The used-up Mortimer Percy made it a rule never to commit himself by admiring anything, or anybody.