Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: A Changed Heart: A Novel by Fleming May Agnes
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page
Ebook has 3585 lines and 162969 words, and 72 pages
BOOK ONE: A VERY MODERN COURTSHIP--THE TWO KISSES
PART I
PART II
BOOK TWO: A VERY MODERN MARRIAGE--A CROOKED MILE
PART I
PART II
BOOK ONE
A VERY MODERN COURTSHIP
PART I
ARGUMENT
A girl of seventeen, with a knitted tam-o'-shanter cap and a thick cable of red-bronze hair hanging down her back, walked along a gallery of the Louvre, looking for her aunt. The eyes that turned whenever she heard a footfall or, passing a statue or case, saw a fresh vista before her, were of a light brown, with just such a hint of gold in their irises as you see when some opals are turned and catch a different light; and they were confused and overfilled with the treasures on which they had rested. She was an art-student, and must return to London on the morrow in order to resume her studies at the McGrath.
It was her first visit to Paris, and she had spent the whole of her three weeks at the Cluny and the Luxembourg, at the Louvre and Versailles. Now, drenched and sated with beauty, she still could not bear to leave it all. A few minutes before, passing through the Salon Carr?, where an elderly lady had been copying the Entombment, she had wished that she too might be old and white-haired if only age might so enlarge her capacity for loveliness, that even youth would be well lost for it. Already she loved the highest when she saw it, and, being an artist, she needs must attempt it too.
It was as they passed the Antin?us for the second time that the girl felt her young bosom rise almost painfully. She could not have told why, without premeditation, she suddenly lingered, so that her aunt passed a little ahead. She watched her disappear behind some plinth or pedestal or other, and then stopped opposite the marble bust.
She crushed her lips against the Antin?us's marble cheek.
What it was she really kissed she had no idea. They say that male artists have been known to kiss the pallid mask of the Girl said to have been found in the Seine, but probably they have kissed, not the senseless plaster, but some more glowing inner image. But the girl thought of no young man, Greek and dead or modern and alive. Perhaps by her act she set young men expressly aside, adoring the imperishable expression instead. It was the first kiss she had ever given. There was no sex-impulse in it, and yet it was a gesture of sex. She would not have known what other gesture to employ.
With a fluttering heart and a heightened colour she rejoined her aunt, and on the following day returned to London. For days after that a nameless wistfulness still lingered in her shallow brook-brown eyes.
A fortnight after her return they gave a fancy-dress dance at the McGrath, and the girl made one of a supper-party of a dozen or more who, during the interval, in one of the smaller painting-rooms, settled on the floor in a wide ring, with plates of sandwiches and jelly and cakes and blancmange making a rapidly disappearing parterre of food in the middle. The ring was as noisy as a merry-go-round of painted horses on a Bank Holiday, and they played Hunt-the-Slipper, and perhaps in the scuffling there was a little crude hand-holding--though nobody held the girl's hand. Then they went back again to dance in the Antique Room, where the tall casts, the "Discobolus" and the "Gladiator," the "Germanicus" and the great writhe of the "Laoco?n," had been wheeled back against the walls, and stood, like so many sightless servitors, holding wraps and shawls and the fans and oddments that had been put down on their plinths. The girl danced again.
She was dressed this time as a porcelain shepherdess, in a hooped skirt of tender pink with tiny sprigs of green sown throughout it. She had borrowed the dress from one of the other girls. At supper, sitting in the ring, she had resembled a rose-peony that had been taken by its stalk and pressed down on the floor. About the slender hyacinth-stalk of her neck was a black velvet ribbon with a locket, and the thick mass of her hair peeped over the shoulders of her partners like an irregular knob of bronze lustre. Her shallow ribboned hat was on "Homer's" head, between the "Gladiator" and the "Greek Slave."
Some time during the later part of the evening, she was induced by a young man in evening-dress, with restrained manners but a hardy eye, to descend the stairs, and, passing the hall-porter's little glass box and pushing at the outer swing-doors, to take a walk in the courtyard of the School. The McGrath is only part of a larger institution. In the forecourt are grass plots enclosed by low swinging chains, and, tall and dim, with many broad steps and Corinthian columns, the pediment of the great main portico towers over the court on the eastern side. The girl and her cavalier crossed the grass plots, ascended the steps, and stood within the gloom of the pillars.
There, without warning, the young man suddenly stooped and kissed her.
She knew that these things happened, and daily; but tears of misery and revulsion and shame started into her eyes. It seemed--she did not know what--a soilure, a coarseness, a bringing down of some lovely and to-be-dreamed-of thing to mere brutal demonstration. The young man was not even one of her companions of the McGrath; he was a medical student, he had told her, and so perhaps naturally insensible to the finer emotions. With a sudden pained "Oh!" she started from him, her hands crushed with horror against her pretty cheeks and mouth. She thought she heard him say, "Why, what's the matter?" but she was not sure; she was sure of nothing in this moment but of her own sense of miserable outrage. She left the young man calling softly behind her, ran quickly down the steps, and reached the dancing-room again.
Near the door as she entered two men stood, looking on. Both were men of forty-four or forty-five, and one of them was Jowett, the McGrath Professor of Painting. His companion had just asked him a question; he tugged at a ragged and grey-streaked moustache before replying.
"Art students? What becomes of 'em? God knows! You might as well ask what becomes of people who eat their meals in restaurants or little girls who learn to play the piano. They aren't a class. Perhaps one in a thousand or fifteen hundred comes to something, but the rest--well, what this place really is, if you want to know, is a sort of day nursery for the children of the well-to-do middle class."
"You mean they marry and then drop it?" the other asked.
Jowett tugged again at the unkempt moustache. He spoke patiently and wearily.
The small creature dressed as a shepherdess had just run past. The eyes of both men followed her. Jowett continued.
But here the other interrupted him.... "Hallo, your little shepherdess seems to be going early."
Amory Towers, her tiny figure wrapped in a hood and cloak and her young heart one unhappy ache to know the meaning of these two first kisses of her life, was hurrying away.
CHEYNE WALK
In Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, there used to stand, and may stand yet, a tenement of which the ground floor was a small "lock-up" greengrocer's shop, and the remaining portions either dwelling-rooms or else rooms that, like the shop, were left at night and returned to again the next morning. The narrow entry to the right of the shop had once been white-washed, but was now so discoloured that the street boys had ceased to scribble on its walls the names of horses and other matters. It was full of the smell of apples and oranges and of the more suspect odour of earth and bruised rinds and decaying out When I was in London, I thought I knew something of fog, but Speckport beats it all to nothing."
"Yes," said Val, gravely, "it's one of the institutions of the country, and we're proud of it. Did you see Charley Marsh anywhere in your travels. I heard Natty just now asking for him."
"Oh, yes, I've seen him," said Captain Cavendish, significantly.
There was that in his tone which made Val look at him. "Where was he and what was he doing?" he inquired.
"Making love, to your first question; sitting in a recess of the tall window, to your second. He did not see me, but I saw him."
"Who was he with?"
"Something very pretty--prettier than anything in this room, excepting Miss Natty. Black eyes, black curls, rosy cheeks, and the dearest little waist! Who is she?"
Val gave a long, low whistle.
"Do you know her?" persisted Captain Cavendish.
"Oh, don't I though? Was she little, and was she laughing?"
"Yes, to both questions. Now, who is she?"
Val's answer was a shower of mysterious nods.
"I heard the story before, but I didn't think the boy was such a fool. Speckport is such a place for gossip, you know; but it seems the gossips were right for once. What will Natty say, I wonder?"
"Will you tell me who she is?" cried Captain Cavendish, impatiently.
"Come to supper," was Val's answer; "I'm too hungry to talk now. I'll tell you about it by-and-by."
Charley was before them at the table, helping all the young ladies right and left, and keeping up a running fire of jokes, old and new, stale and original, and setting the table in a roar. Everybody was talking and laughing at the top of their lungs; glass and china, and knives and forks, rattled and jingled until the uproar became deafening, and people shouted with laughter, without in the least knowing what they were laughing at. The mustached lip of Captain Cavendish curled with a little contemptuous smile at the whole thing, and Miss Jeannette McGregor, who had managed to get him beside her, saw it, and felt fit to die with mortification.
"What a dreadful noise they do keep up. It makes my head ache to listen to them!" she said, resentfully.
Captain Cavendish, who had been listening to her tattle-tittle for the last half-hour, answering yes and no at random, started into consciousness that she was talking again.
"I beg your pardon, Miss McGregor. What was it you said? I am afraid I was not attending."
"Let us wait," said Captain Cavendish, eying the crowd, and beginning to be gallant. "I am not going to have you jostled to death. One would think it was for life or death they were pushing."
It was fully ten minutes before the coast was clear, and then the captain drew Miss Jeannette's arm within his, and led her to the drawing-room. Mrs. McGregor, sitting there among her satellites, saw them, and the maternal bosom glowed with pride. It was the future Marquis and Marchioness of Carrabas!
Some one was singing. A splendid soprano voice was ringing through the room, singing, "Hear me, Norma." It finished as they drew near, and the singer, Miss Natty Marsh, glancing over her shoulder, flashed one of her bright bewitching glances at them.
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page