“Mr. Rowland, you are a darling,” said Lady Leighton, “quite too great a darling, Evelyn, for this wicked world. I am so glad you have invited me! But is it not the Scotch way to tear one into little pieces after one is gone? The balance must be kept straight somehow.”
“It is not the way in my house,” he said, with a certain severity, not liking that little scoff at the Scotch way, though he had brought it on himself. Rowland had no objection to have his fling at his fellow-Scot when occasion served. He had vituperated the Glasgow tradesman largely for being slow, for being behind the time. He had thought everything “provincial”—the hardest word to be applied to such a huge and important place; but he felt offended when any one else followed his example. Evelyn had begun to know the look in his face.
That afternoon when they had completed all their last emplettes, chosen everything, ordered everything they wanted, and were seated together over the little tea-table which has once more become, though under changed circumstances from those of the eighteenth century, one of the confidential centres of life in England, a visitor appeared who disturbed their talk, and gave to the astonished Rowland another new sensation. He was tired with much movement, declaring that London fatigued him more than the hottest of the plains, and that the shops made a greater call on his energies than any railway or canal he had ever had to do with; and the rest and comparative coolness of the room was pleasant to them both, the beginning of the day having been unlucky, and a disagreeable turn given, as sometimes happens, to all its occurrences. There is something in luck after all, and perhaps the primitive people who turn back from the day’s adventure at sea and labour on land, because they have met an ill-omened passenger—an evil eye—have more reason in their superstition than is generally supposed. That morning’s encounter with the invalid in his chair had been bad for the Rowlands. They had found nothing they wanted. The persons they desired to see had been out of the way. The commissions they had given were not executed to their mind. Everybody knows that sometimes, without any apparent cause, this will be the case to the trial of one’s temper and the confusion of all one’s arrangements. Some one else had snapped up the picture which they had selected at the picture-dealer’s. There had been nothing successful that they had done that day. Rowland, of course, was too enlightened and modern to think of anything like an evil eye. But Evelyn was old-fashioned, and not without a touch of natural and womanish superstition. She set it down to the score of Saumarez and that meeting which she had wished so much to avoid; and the thought oppressed her more than the contrarieties of the day. “It was all our unlucky meeting with that man,” she even went so far as to say, when she came in, jaded and disappointed, feeling the unsuccessful day all the more that everything hitherto had been so very much the reverse. “Do you think he threw a spell upon us?” Rowland said with a laugh. “He doesn’t look at all unlike an old magician, to say the truth.” Evelyn’s little outburst of temper somehow soothed her husband. And though he grumbled a little at the heat, which was worse than Indian, and declared that the English were asses never to have introduced the punkah, yet he soon recovered his elasticity of mind. And when the door opened and Miss Saumarez was announced, he was lounging in the easiest way upon a sofa, and discoursing to his wife, as he loved to discourse, upon the beautiful country to which he was about to take her, and the views from the colonnade which encircled Rosmore.
“Miss Saumarez.” There walked in a tall girl in the simplest of dresses, but without a soil or sign of dust, or crease, or crumple of any description, perfectly self-possessed, yet perfectly unpretending, with that air of being and knowing that she was the best of her kind, which is born with some people, and to others is utterly beyond the possibility of being acquired. Rosamond would not have been fluttered, she would have known perfectly what to do and how to behave herself, had she walked into the presence of the Queen instead of into that of James Rowland, who, very much flustered, and conscious that he had loosed his necktie a little, and that his collar was not so stiff as it ought to be, got up in much surprise and discomfiture. Evelyn rose slowly from her low chair, with a feeling more wretched still. A sort of sick loathing of the very name, and of the connection she had so foolishly allowed herself to be drawn into, overwhelmed her; and it was all she could do to keep this sensation out of her face as Rosamond came forward and offered a peachy cheek to her kiss. The young lady took in the aspect of things in a moment.
“I am afraid I have disturbed you,” she said, “just when you are tired and resting. I asked the man if it was a good time, but he did not know. They never know anything, those servants in a hotel. But I will go away directly, as soon as I have asked one little question. Thank you very much, but I don’t think I had better sit down.”
She had a high-bred voice, soft but perfectly clear, with the finest low intonation. She spoke very quietly, but Rosamond always had the gift of being heard.
“Yes, yes, you must sit down,” said Rowland, awakening to a more agreeable sentiment as he handed her a chair.
“We have just come in,” said Evelyn. “You must forgive me: we have had a very tiring day.”
“It is so hot and dusty, I do not wonder. One feels as if one were breathing dust and noise and people, anything but air. But you have it hotter in India,” she said, turning her face towards Rowland, with a little gracious acknowledgment of his presence, and of what and who he was.
“It is hotter, but there are more appliances. I was saying to my wife we should have had a punkah.”