“I am—sometimes,” said the Baroness.
“I will go, then, and announce to our cousins the arrival of a personage so extraordinary. They will immediately come and pay you their respects.”
Eugenia paced the length of the room again, and then she stopped before her brother, laying her hand upon his arm. “They are not to come and see me,” she said. “You are not to allow that. That is not the way I shall meet them first.” And in answer to his interrogative glance she went on. “You will go and examine, and report. You will come back and tell me who they are and what they are; their number, gender, their respective ages—all about them. Be sure you observe everything; be ready to describe to me the locality, the accessories—how shall I say it?—the mise en scène. Then, at my own time, at my own hour, under circumstances of my own choosing, I will go to them. I will present myself—I will appear before them!” said the Baroness, this time phrasing her idea with a certain frankness.
“And what message am I to take to them?” asked Felix, who had a lively faith in the justness of his sister’s arrangements.
She looked at him a moment—at his expression of agreeable veracity; and, with that justness that he admired, she replied, “Say what you please. Tell my story in the way that seems to you most—natural.” And she bent her forehead for him to kiss.
CHAPTER II
The next day was splendid, as Felix had prophesied; if the winter had suddenly leaped into spring, the spring had for the moment as quickly leaped into summer. This was an observation made by a young girl who came out of a large square house in the country, and strolled about in the spacious garden which separated it from a muddy road. The flowering shrubs and the neatly-disposed plants were basking in the abundant light and warmth; the transparent shade of the great elms—they were magnificent trees—seemed to thicken by the hour; and the intensely habitual stillness offered a submissive medium to the sound of a distant church-bell. The young girl listened to the church-bell; but she was not dressed for church. She was bare-headed; she wore a white muslin waist, with an embroidered border, and the skirt of her dress was of colored muslin. She was a young lady of some two or three and twenty years of age, and though a young person of her sex walking bare-headed in a garden, of a Sunday morning in spring-time, can, in the nature of things, never be a displeasing object, you would not have pronounced this innocent Sabbath-breaker especially pretty. She was tall and pale, thin and a little awkward; her hair was fair and perfectly straight; her eyes were dark, and they had the singularity of seeming at once dull and restless—differing herein, as you see, fatally from the ideal “fine eyes,” which we always imagine to be both brilliant and tranquil. The doors and windows of the large square house were all wide open, to admit the purifying sunshine, which lay in generous patches upon the floor of a wide, high, covered piazza adjusted to two sides of the mansion—a piazza on which several straw-bottomed rocking-chairs and half a dozen of those small cylindrical stools in green and blue porcelain, which suggest an affiliation between the residents and the Eastern trade, were symmetrically disposed. It was an ancient house—ancient in the sense of being eighty years old; it was built of wood, painted a clean, clear, faded gray, and adorned along the front, at intervals, with flat wooden pilasters, painted white. These pilasters appeared to support a kind of classic pediment, which was decorated in the middle by a large triple window in a boldly carved frame, and in each of its smaller angles by a glazed circular aperture. A large white door, furnished with a highly-polished brass knocker, presented itself to the rural-looking road, with which it was connected by a spacious pathway, paved with worn and cracked, but very clean, bricks. Behind it there were meadows and orchards, a barn and a pond; and facing it, a short distance along the road, on the opposite side, stood a smaller house, painted white, with external shutters painted green, a little garden on one hand and an orchard on the other. All this was shining in the morning air, through which the simple details of the picture addressed themselves to the eye as distinctly as the items of a “sum” in addition.
A second young lady presently came out of the house, across the piazza, descended into the garden and approached the young girl of whom I have spoken. This second young lady was also thin and pale; but she was older than the other; she was shorter; she had dark, smooth hair. Her eyes, unlike the other’s, were quick and bright; but they were not at all restless. She wore a straw bonnet with white ribbons, and a long, red, India scarf, which, on the front of her dress, reached to her feet. In her hand she carried a little key.
“Gertrude,” she said, “are you very sure you had better not go to church?”
Gertrude looked at her a moment, plucked a small sprig from a lilac-bush, smelled it and threw it away. “I am not very sure of anything!” she answered.
The other young lady looked straight past her, at the distant pond, which lay shining between the long banks of fir trees. Then she said in a very soft voice, “This is the key of the dining-room closet. I think you had better have it, if anyone should want anything.”
“Who is there to want anything?” Gertrude demanded. “I shall be all alone in the house.”
“Someone may come,” said her companion.
“Do you mean Mr. Brand?”
“Yes, Gertrude. He may like a piece of cake.”
“I don’t like men that are always eating cake!” Gertrude declared, giving a pull at the lilac-bush.
Her companion glanced at her, and then looked down on the ground. “I think father expected you would come to church,” she said. “What shall I say to him?”
“Say I have a bad headache.”
“Would that be true?” asked the elder lady, looking straight at the pond again.
“No, Charlotte,” said the younger one simply.
Charlotte transferred her quiet eyes to her companion’s face. “I am afraid you are feeling restless.”
“I am feeling as I always feel,” Gertrude replied, in the same tone.
Charlotte turned away; but she stood there a moment. Presently she looked down at the front of her dress. “Doesn’t it seem to you, somehow, as if my scarf were too long?” she asked.
Gertrude walked half round her, looking at the scarf. “I don’t think you wear it right,” she said.
“How should I wear it, dear?”
“I don’t know; differently from that. You should draw it differently over your shoulders, round your elbows; you should look differently behind.”
“How should I look?” Charlotte inquired.
“I don’t think I can tell you,” said Gertrude, plucking out the scarf a little behind. “I could do it myself, but I don’t think I can explain it.”
Charlotte, by a movement of her elbows, corrected the laxity that had come from her companion’s touch. “Well, some day you must do it for me. It doesn’t matter now. Indeed, I don’t think it matters,” she added, “how one looks behind.”
“I should say it mattered more,” said Gertrude. “Then you don’t know who may be observing you. You are not on your guard. You can’t try to look pretty.”
Charlotte received this declaration with extreme gravity. “I don’t think one should ever try to look pretty,” she rejoined, earnestly.
Her companion was silent. Then she said, “Well, perhaps it’s not of much use.”
Charlotte looked at her a little, and then kissed her. “I hope you will be better when we come back.”
“My dear sister, I am very well!” said Gertrude.
Charlotte went down the large brick walk to the garden gate; her companion strolled slowly toward the house. At the gate Charlotte met a young man, who was coming in—a tall, fair young man, wearing a high hat and a pair of thread gloves. He was handsome, but rather too stout. He had a pleasant smile. “Oh, Mr. Brand!” exclaimed the young lady.
“I came to see whether your