“Then the allowance is all you want?” said Everard, with British brevity. This seemed to him the easiest of arrangements. With his mind quite relieved, and a few jokes laid up for the amusement of the future, touching Miss Susan’s powers and disabilities, he strolled into the drawing-room, M. Guillaume preferring to take himself to bed. The drawing-room of Whiteladies had never looked so thoroughly unlike itself. There seemed to Everard at first to be no one there, but after a minute he perceived a figure stretched out upon a sofa. The lamps were very dim, throwing a sort of twilight glimmer through the room; and the fire was very red, adding a rosy hue, but no more, to this faint illumination. It was the sort of light favorable to talk, or to meditation, or to slumber, but by aid of which neither reading, nor work, nor any active occupation could be pursued. This was of itself sufficient to mark the absence of Miss Susan, for whom a cheerful light full of animation and activity seemed always necessary. The figure on the sofa lay at full length, with an abandon of indolence and comfort which suited the warm atmosphere and subdued light. Everard felt a certain appropriateness in the scene altogether, but it was not Whiteladies. An Italian palace or an Eastern harem would have been more in accordance with the presiding figure. She raised her head, however, as he approached, supporting herself on her elbow, with a vivacity unlike the Eastern calm, and looked at him by the dim light with a look half provoking half inviting, which attracted the foolish young man more perhaps than a more correct demeanor would have done. Why should not he try what he could do, Everard thought, to move the rebel? for he had an internal conviction that even the allowance which would satisfy M. Guillaume would not content Giovanna. He drew a chair to the other side of the table upon which the tall dim lamp was standing, and which was drawn close to the sofa on which the young woman lay.
“Do you really mean to remain at Whiteladies?” he said. “I don’t think you can have any idea how dull it is here.”
She shrugged her shoulders slightly, and raised her eyebrows. She had let her head drop back upon the sofa cushions, and the faint light threw a kind of dreamy radiance upon her fine features, and great glowing dark eyes.
“Dull! it is almost more than dull,” he continued; though even as he spoke he felt that to have this beautiful creature in Whiteladies would be a sensible alleviation of the dulness, and that his effort on Miss Susan’s behalf was of the most disinterested kind. “It would kill you, I fear; you can’t imagine what it is in Winter, when the days are short; the lamps are lit at half-past four, and nothing happens all the evening, no one comes. You sit before dinner round the fire, and Miss Austin knits, and after dinner you sit round the fire again, and there is not a sound in all the place, unless you have yourself the courage to make an observation; and it seems about a year before it is time to go to bed. You don’t know what it is.”
What Miss Susan would have said had she heard this account of those Winter evenings, many of which the hypocrite had spent very coseyly at Whiteladies, I prefer not to think. The idea occurred to himself with a comic panic. What would she say? He could scarcely keep from laughing as he asked himself the question.
“I have imagination,” said Giovanna, stretching her arms. “I can see it all; but I should not endure it, me. I should get up and snap my fingers at them and dance, or sing.”
“Ah!” said Everard, entering into the humor of his rôle, “so you think at present; but it would soon take the spirit out of you. I am very sorry for you, Madame Jean. If I were like you, with the power of enjoying myself, and having the world at my feet—”
“Ah! bah!” cried Giovanna, “how can one have the world at one’s feet, when one is never seen? And you should see the shop at Bruges, mon Dieu! People do not come and throw themselves at one’s feet there. I am not sure even if it is altogether the fault of Gertrude and the belle-mère; but here—”
“You will have no one to see to,” said Everard, tickled by the part he was playing, and throwing himself into the spirit of it. “That is worse—for what is the good of being visible when there is no one to see?”
This consideration evidently was not without its effect. Giovanna raised herself lazily on her elbow and looked at him across the table. “You come,” said she, “and this ’Erbert.”