Elizabeth wore a blue satin gown, the one evening dress she had, in the possibility of a candle-light visit from the officers at the outpost, brought with her from New York. Her bare forearms, and the white surface surrounding the base of her neck, were thus for the first time displayed to Peyton’s view. A pair of slender gold bracelets on her wrists set off the smoothness of her rounded arms, but she wore no other jewelry. She had not had the time or the facilities to have her hair built high as a grenadier’s cap, but she looked none the less commanding. She was, indeed, a radiant creature. Peyton, having never before seen 215 her at her present advantage, opened wide his eyes and stared at her with a wonder whose openness was excused only by the suddenness of the dazzling apparition.
She cast on him a momentary look of perfect indifference, as she might on any one that stood in her way; then walked lightly to the spinet, giving him a barely noticeable wide berth in passing, as if he were something with which it was probably desirable not to come in contact. Her slight deviation from a direct line of progress, though made inoffensively, struck him like a blow, yet did not interrupt, for more than an instant, his admiration. He stood dumbly looking after her, at her smooth and graceful movement, which had no sound but the rustling of skirts, her footfalls being noiseless in the satin slippers she wore.
Peyton was not now as impatient as he had been to depart. In fact, he lost, in some measure, his sense of being in the act of departure. What he felt was an inclination to look longer on this so unexpected vision. She sat down at the spinet with her back towards him, and somehow conveyed in her attitude that she thought him no longer in the room. He felt a necessity for establishing the fact of his presence.
“Pardon me for addressing you,” he said, with a diffidence new to him, taking up the first pretext 216 that came to mind, “but I fear your aunt requires looking to. She behaves strangely.”
“Oh,” said Elizabeth, lightly, too wise to give him the importance of pretending not to hear him, “she is subject to queer spells at times. I thought you had gone.”
She began to play the spinet, very quietly and unobtrusively, with an absence of resentment, and with a seemingly unconscious indifference, that gave him a paralyzing sense of nothingness.
Unpleasant as this feeling made his position, he felt the situation become one from which it would be extremely awkward to flee. For the first time since certain boyhood fits of bashfulness, he now realized the aptness of that oft-read expression, “rooted to the spot.” That he should be thrown into this trance-like embarrassment, this powerlessness of motion, this feeling of a schoolboy first introduced to society, of a player caught by stage fright, was intolerable.
When she had touched the keys gently a few times, he shook off something of the spell that bound him, and moved to a spot whence he could get a view of her face in profile. It had not an infinitesimal trace of the storm that had driven him from the room a short time before. It was entirely serene. There was on it no anger, no grief, no reproach of self or of another, no scorn. There was 217 pride, but only the pride it normally wore; reserve, but only the reserve habitual to a high-born girl in the presence of any but her familiars. It was hard to believe her the woman who had been stirred to such tremendous wrath a few minutes ago, by the disclosure that she had been deceived, her love tricked and misplaced. Rather, it was hard to believe that the scene of wrath had ever occurred, that this woman had ever been so stirred by such cause, that she had ever loved him, that he had ever dared pretend love to her. The deception and the confession, with all they had elicited from her, seemed parts of a dream, of some fancy he had had, some romance he had read.
As for Elizabeth, she knew not, thought not, whether, in bearing him hot resentment, she still loved him. She knew only that she craved revenge, and that the first step towards her desired end was to assume that indifference which so puzzled, interested, and confounded him. A weak or a stupid woman would have shown a sense of injury, with flashes of anger. An ordinarily clever woman would have affected disdain, would have sniffed and looked haughty, would have overdone her pretended contempt. It is true, Elizabeth had moved slightly out of her way to pass further from him, but she had done this with apparent thoughtlessness, as if the act were dictated by some inner sense of his belonging 218 to an inferior race; not with a visible intention of showing repulsion. It is true she had assumed ignorance of his presence, but she had given him to attribute this to a belief that he had left the room. When his voice declared his whereabouts, she treated him just as she would have treated any other indifferent person who was not quite her equal.
Peyton felt more and more uncomfortable. Would she continue playing the spinet forever, so perfectly at ease, so content not to look at him again, so assuming it for granted that, the operation of leave-taking being considered over between hostess and guest, the guest might properly be gone any moment without further attention on either side?