The Way of Ambition. Robert Hichens
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to-night she was in a tiresome mood, as her mother had hinted.
As she talked to Paul Lane, whom she had known pretty well for years, and liked as much as she could ever like him, she was secretly intent on the new note. Her quick mind of an intelligent girl, who had seen many people and been much in contact with the London world, was pacing about him, measuring, weighing, summing up with the audacity of youth. Whether he pleased her eyes she was not sure. But through her eyes he interested her.
Heath was tall, and looked taller than he was because he was almost emaciated, and he was a plain man whom something made beautiful, not handsome. This was a strange, and almost mysterious imaginativeness which was expressed by his face, and even, perhaps, by something in his whole bearing and manner. It looked out certainly at many moments from his eyes. But not only his eyes shadowed it forth. The brow, the rather thin lips, the hands, and occasionally their movements, suggested it. His face was not what is often called "an open face." Although quite free from slyness, or anything unpleasantly furtive, it had a shut, reserved look when his eyes were cast down. There was something austere, combined with something eager and passionate, in his expression and manner. Charmian guessed him to be twenty-six or twenty-seven.
He was now turned sideways to Charmian, and was moving rather restlessly on the sofa beside Mrs. Mansfield, but was listening with obvious intentness to what she was saying. Charmian found herself wondering how she knew that he had taken a swift liking to her mother.
"Did you have an interesting time at dinner?" she asked Paul Lane.
"Not specially so. Music was never mentioned."
"Was boxing?"
"Boxing!"
"Well, Mr. Elliot said he and Mr. Heath met first at a place in Whitechapel where Conky somebody was fighting the Nutcracker."
Lane smiled with his mouth.
"I suspect the new note to be a poseur, not quite of the usual species, but a poseur. Most musicians are ludicrously of their profession. This one is too much apparently detached from it to be quite natural. But the truth is, nobody is really natural. And no doubt it's a great mercy that it is so."
Charmian looked at him for a few seconds in silence. Then she observed:
"You know there's something in you that I can't abide, as old dames say."
This time Lane really smiled.
"I hope so," he said. "Or else I should certainly lack variety. Well, Max, what is it?"
"Mrs. Shiffney wants you."
"I always want him. I swim in his irony and can't sink, like a tourist in the Dead Sea."
"What a left-handed compliment!"
"A right-handed one would bore you to death, and my aim in life is—"
"To avoid being bored. How often do you succeed in your aim?"
"Whenever I am with you in this delightful house."
"It is delightful," said Charmian to her host. "But why? Of course it is beautiful. But that's not all. It's personal. Perhaps that's it."
She got up, and walked slowly away from the fire, very naturally, with a gesture, just touching her soft cheek and fluttering her fingers toward the glow, as if she were too hot. Max Elliot accompanied her.
"And all the lovely music that has sounded here," she continued, "perhaps lingers silently in the air, and, without being aware of it, we feel the vibrations."
She sat down on a sofa near the Steinway grand piano, which stood on a low dais, looked up at Max Elliot, and added, in quite a different voice:
"Shall we hear any of his music to-night?"
"I believe now we may."
"Why—now?"
Elliot looked toward Mrs. Mansfield.
"Because of mother, you mean?"
"He likes her."
"Anyone can see that."
After a moment she added, with a touch of irritation:
"He's evidently very difficile for an unknown man."
"No, it isn't that at all. If you ever know him well, you will understand."
"What?" she asked with petulance.
"That his reserve is a right instinct, nothing more. Between ourselves," he bent toward her, "I made a little mistake in asking Mrs. Shiffney, delightful though she is."
"I wondered why you had asked her, when you didn't want even to ask me."
"Middle-aged as I am, I get carried away by people. I met Mrs. Shiffney to-day at a concert. She was so absolutely right in her enthusiasm, so clever and artistic—though she's ignorant of music—over the whole thing, that—well, here she is."
"And here I am!"
"Yes, here you are!" he said genially.
He had been standing. Now he sat down beside her, crossed one leg over the other, held his knee with his clasped hands, and continued:
"The worst of it is Mrs. Shiffney has made him bolt several doors. When she looked at him I could see at once that she made him feel transparent."
"Poor thing! Tell me, do you enjoy very much protecting all the sensitive artistic temperaments that come into this room? Do you enjoy arranging the cotton-wool wadding so that there may be no chance of a nasty jar, to say nothing of a breakage?"
He pursed his rather thick lips, that smiled so easily.
"When the treasure is a treasure, genuinely valuable, I don't mind it. I feel then that I am doing worthy service."
"You really are a dear, you know!" she said, with a sudden change, a melting. "It was good of you to ask me, when you didn't want to."
She leaned a little toward him, with one light hand palm downward on the cushion of the sofa, and her small, rather square chin thrust forward in a way that made her look suddenly intense.
"I'll try not to be like Mrs. Shiffney. I'll try not to make him feel transparent."
"I'm not sure that you could," he said, smiling at her.
"How horrid of you to doubt my powers! Why, why will nobody believe I have anything in me?"
She brought the words out with a force that was almost vicious. As she said them it happened that Claude Heath turned a little. His eyes travelled down the room and met hers. Perhaps her mother had just been speaking to him of her, had been making some assertion about her. For he seemed to look at her with inquiry.
When Charmian turned away her eyes from his she added to Max Elliot:
"But what does it matter? Because people, some people, can't see a thing, that doesn't prove that it has no existence. And I don't really care what people think of me."
"This—to your old friend!"
"Yes. And besides, I expect one must possess to discover."
Her voice was almost complacent.
"You deal in enigmas to-night."
"One ought to carry a light when one goes into a cave to seek for gold."
But Elliot would not let her see that he had from the first fully understood her impertinence.
"Let us go back to the fire," he said. "Unless you are really afraid of the heat. Let us hear what your mother and Heath are talking about."
"I'm not afraid of anything except a Te Deum."
"There's Mrs. Shiffney speaking to him. I don't think we shall have it to-night."
"Then I'll venture to draw near," said Charmian, again assuming a semblance