What Colin felt while Kathleen had witched her audience with youth and loveliness and talent may be divined by the reader. Perhaps by ruffling the leaves of the book of Memory, some chronicle may still be found there, uneffaced, to suggest the proud tingling in the young man’s veins! The little lock of darkest hair, that while she wielded the bow had the habit of breaking cover and falling down upon a fine jetty eyebrow, the rich flush in her cheek swept by the lashes of down-dropping eyes, the noble unconsciousness of her face and figure, thrilled him with a more passionate resolve than ever to win her for his own.
When she had finished playing, and the crowd thronged about her to indorse the master’s verdict, Colin had kept aloof. He did not want to spoil the hour by commonplace; and indeed his heart was too full for utterance. Maurice, just then running upon him in the throng, had bidden his friend to supper. Colin, fed with new hope, had returned again to the dressing-room, intending to take a walk until it should be time to present himself at the Blairs’. Between two men talking over the performance of the evening as they lighted their cigars, he heard Kathleen discussed in terms that he considered daringly impertinent. Although the phrases used were chiefly those of custom upon the appearance of a new performer in her field, one of the men lent to them an emphasis so offensive that Colin had much ado to restrain himself from flying at the offender and choking him backward into a pile of hats.
Tempted to leave his now oppressive offering for beauty’s shrine in Crichton’s fireplace, he took up again his box of flowers and went out into the night. How far he wandered through the chill, deserted streets in the effort to make time pass ere he thought it proper to appear before his goddess, Colin did not realize. When he could bear no longer not seeing her, he had rung Mr. Blair’s door-bell; but when he was asked into the supper room, where they were all assembled, the spurned and imprisoned lilies were tucked away on the lower shelf of the hat-rack, behind the galoches of Mr. Catullus Clarke.
“And where will you sit, Mr. Mackintosh?” asked Mrs. Blair, holding out a kind hand of welcome to her new guest, who accordingly dropped into the chair nearest her own.
Colin could hardly speak. In the stranger guest, ensconced in intimate conversation with Maurice, he recognized one of the men he had desired to knock down in the dressing-room at Crichton’s!
“Now, we may notice in Clarke’s poems,” Mr. Malvolio was saying with wicked relish, “what Emerson once remarked about Oxford. ‘Nothing new or true, and no matter.’”
“I do not pretend to solve my own problems, my dear fellow,” returned the poet, languidly, as he lay back at ease in a large arm-chair, surveying his patent-leather toes; “I only state them to average intelligence, and then pray for the interposition of the Power that brought speech out of Balaam’s ass to give understanding to some of my readers.”
“Indeed, yours is the dearest little book we have had this month, Mr. Clarke,” exclaimed Kathleen; “and your poster is the wildest and weirdest in my collection.”
“Then I have not printed in vain, Miss Blair,” answered the bardling, looking at her with admiring eyes. In reality he was entirely happy.
It was only being overlooked that ever caused Catullus pain.