IV
WE DINE IN THE GUN-ROOM
Cecilia sat reading alone when I entered the library shortly before the dinner-hour. She put down her book and we fell into fitful talk.
"I took a walk after tea. I always feel that sunsets are best seen from the fields; you can't quite do them justice from windows," she began.
She seemed preoccupied, but this may have been the interpretation of my conscience, whose twinges reminded me unpleasantly of my precipitation into the briar bushes at the foot of the pasture, where I had witnessed her meeting with Wiggins. My admiration gained new levels. Her black evening gown became her; a band of velvet circled her throat, emphasizing its firm whiteness. It seemed incredible that I had seen her so recently, in the filmy dusk, talking with so much earnestness to Hartley Wiggins. It was my impression, gained from the few sentences I had overheard by the road, that she did not repulse him, but that some mysterious, difficult barrier kept them apart. Where, I wondered, was Wiggins now, and what were to be the further incidents of this singular affair?
While we waited for Miss Hollister to appear, she continued to speak of her joy in the hills. It is not every one who can admire a sunset with sincerity, but she conveyed the spirit of the phenomena that had attended the lowering of the bright targe of day in terms and tones that were delightfully natural and convincing. And yet the far-away look in her eyes suggested inevitably the scene I had witnessed and the phrases I had caught by the roadside. Wiggins was in her recollection of the glowing landscape,—I was confident of this; and poor Wiggins was even now wandering these hills, no doubt, brooding upon his troubles under the clear October stars.
Dinner was announced the moment Miss Hollister entered, and I walked out between them. Miss Octavia Hollister was a surprising person, but in nothing was she so delightfully wayward as in the gowns she wore. My ignorance of such matters is immeasurable, but I fancy that she designed her own raiment and that her ideas were thereupon carried out by a tailor of skill. At the Asolando and when we had met at tea in her own house, she had worn the severest of tailored gowns, with short skirt and a coat into whose pockets she was fond of thrusting her hands. To-night the material was lavender silk trimmed in white, but the skirt had not lengthened, and over a white silk waist she wore a kind of cut-away coat that matched the skirt. An aigrette in her lovely white hair contributed a piquant note to the whole impression. As we passed down the hall she talked with great animation of the Hague Tribunal, just then holding a prominent place in the newspapers for some reason that has escaped me.
"The whole thing is absurd; perfectly absurd! I know of nothing that would contribute more to human enjoyment than a real war between Germany and England. The Hague idea is pure sentimentalism,—if sentimentalism can ever be said to be pure. I will go further and say that I consider it positively immoral."
This new view of the matter left me stammering. Cecilia, I saw, had no intention of helping me over these difficult hurdles that were constantly popping up in my conversations with her aunt. This delightful old lady in lavender, the mistress of a house whose luxury and peace were antipodal to any hint of war, continued to baffle me. She had ordered dinner in the gun-room, but I thought this merely a turn of her humor; and I was taken aback when she led the way into a low, heavily raftered room, where electric sconces of an odd type were thrust at irregular intervals along the walls, which were otherwise hung with arms of many sorts in orderly combinations. They were not the litter of antique shops, I saw in a hasty glance, but rifles and guns of the latest patterns, and beside the sideboard stood a gun-rack and a cabinet which I assumed contained still other and perhaps deadlier weapons. At one end of the room, and just behind Miss Hollister, was a sunburst of swords, which gleamed with a kind of mockery behind her white head.
The small round table was conventionally set, but this only added to the grimness of the encompassing arsenal. A bowl of crimson roses in the centre of the snowy cloth would ordinarily have mitigated the effect of the grim walls; but I confess that the color reminded me a little too sombrely of the ugly business for which this steel had been designed. But for the presence of Miss Cecilia, who was essentially typical of our twentieth-century American woman, I think I might readily have yielded to the illusion that I was the guest of some eccentric chatelaine who had invited me to dine with her in a bastion of her fortress before ordering me to some chamber of horrors for execution.