The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

"Not the continent of North America," replied the Duke.

"Then," she said, "you must come to visit me."

These words startled the Duke of Dorset. He had heard not a little of American disregard of conventions, but he was in no sense prepared for this abrupt, remarkable invitation.

"Then you will come to visit me!" spoken quietly, surely, like one in authority, by a girl under twenty, apparently but yesterday from the gardens of a convent. He could not imagine a girl of Italy, of France, of Austria, speaking words like those. A girl on the continent of Europe giving such an invitation would be mad, or something infinitely worse. Evidently all standards known to the people of the old world were unfitted to these people of the new.

The Marchesa Soderrelli was right when she thought him to have found here in the bay of Oban something which he had not believed to exist. He was wholly unable to place and classify this girl. She was strange, new, unbelievable. He felt himself as perplexed and astonished as if, on the border of the Sahara, he had come upon a panther like that one imagined by Balzac; or by accident, in some remote jungle of Hindustan, a leopard with wings. Instinctively he swung around his great shoulders and looked up into her face. There was nothing in that face to indicate that these words were other than ordinary. The girl sat straight as a pine, her chin lifted, her face shadowed by her dark hair, illumined by her dark eyes, imperious, as though these men in spangled coats, in bare knees, as though these women in rich colors, danced before her as before a Sheba. Instantly, as under the medium of this picture, the Duke of Dorset got a new light flashed onto those jarring words. Persons accustomed to be obeyed spoke sometimes like that. He sat a moment, silent, looking at the girl before he opened his mouth to reply; in that moment his opportunity departed.

The young girl arose. "The heat is oppressive," she said; "let us go out." And he followed her, skirting the crowds of dancers.

The door from the ballroom led first into a long scantily furnished antechamber, hung in yellow, and then into the street. This chamber, now deserted, is, during the early hours of the ball, packed with women. Here, by a local custom, they remain until partners for their entire card have been selected. This room has been called facetiously "The Market." Because, here, in open competition, the debutante must win her place, and the veteran hold that which she has already won.

The two went through this room out into the street. The night, like those of this north country in summer, was in no sense dark. The sky was brightened, as in other countries it appears at dawn or twilight; one standing in the street could easily read the lines of a newspaper. The street was not deserted; others, oppressed by the heat and fatigue of the ballroom, had come out into the cool night. The pair walked slowly down toward the sea. They passed, now and then, a couple returning, and here and there, some girl and a Highlander seated on the step of a silent house; the man's kilt spread out to protect his companion's gown from the stone.

They came presently upon a bench under the wall of a garden, and sat down there, looking out on the sea. The hay below the town blinked with lights; every yacht was illumined; some were hung from their masts with many colored lamps, others were etched in outline by strings of light, following their contour. The sea, meeting the horizon, was broken here and there with flecks of white, increasing with the distance; as though sirens sported—timid, modest sirens, flashing but an arm or the tip of a white shoulder where any human eye could see it, but in the security of distance tumbling their bodies in abandon.

Within the ballroom the Duke of Dorset had been able to regard this girl in a certain detached aspect, but here, now, on this bench before the sea, that sense of something intimate and personal assailed his faculties and possessed them. And there came with it a subtle illusion of the unreal creeping over the world, a faint insidious something, like the first effects of opium that one strives to drive away by dashing the face with water. And the source of this vague compelling dream, the thing from which it issued, or the thing toward which, from far-off, mysterious sources, it approached, was this woman—this woman seated here beside him, this slender, exquisite girl.