Linnet: A Romance. Allen Grant

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СКАЧАТЬ tones to the distinctly precious suggestions of archaic influence in the shaping of the pendants; to the exquisite nature of coral as a decorative object, cast up blushing on our shores by the ungarnered sea – a material whose use we inherit from our innocent ancestors, when wild in woods the noble savage ran, his limbs untrammelled by clinging draperies – when beauty unadorned was adorned the most in the subtle and sinuous curves of its own lissome figure. Necklets and armlets, he observed, with one demonstrative white forefinger held poised above the salmon, are the string-courses, so to speak, of this our natural human architecture; they serve to emphasise and throw out into stronger relief the structural points of the grand design, to call attention to the exquisite native fulness of a faultless torso.

      The giggling inarticulates dropped their chins and stared. They were not quite sure whether such talk was proper. But the Vision of Beauty, more at home in the world, was not in the least alarmed at Florian’s torrent of eloquence. On the contrary, she answered him back, as he himself remarked a little later to Will, like the lords of the council, with grace, wisdom, and understanding. Florian brightened, and flowed on. He loved a listener who could toss the ball back to him as fast as he tossed it. And the Vision of Beauty answered him back with lightning speed, and bore her share with credit in the conversation. It was evident as she went on that she knew her Europe. Was it Munich Florian touched upon with the light hand of his craft? – she discoursed of the Van der Weydens and Crivellis in the Pinakothek, like one to the manner born, and had views of her own which were bold, if not prudent, about the meaning and arrangement of the Aeginetan marbles. Was it Florence he attacked? – she was at home at San Marco, and knew her way like a Baedeker round the rooms at the Pitti. Will listened and marvelled, talking little himself, but giving Florian and the Vision of Beauty their heads. It surprised him much to find one female brain could store in its teeming cells so much miscellaneous knowledge.

      At last, at a brief break in Florian’s flood of speech, Will found space to inquire, for a purpose of his own, “Would you mind my asking where you got that necklet?”

      The Vision of Beauty handed the lid of the box to him. It bore, on a label, the name and address of the jeweller at whose shop she had bought it. “It’s on the way up,” she said, carelessly, “to this hotel from the city.”

      That one Shibboleth betrayed her. Florian started in surprise. “Why,” he cried with open eyes, “then you must be an American.”

      The beautiful stranger smiled and nodded. “Yes, sir,” she said with marked emphasis, as if to clinch the assertion of her western nationality. “I am an American, and I don’t want to hide it. But you pay what you consider a compliment to the purity of my English all the same, if you mean that till now you haven’t even suspected it.”

      Florian made some politely condescending remark, of the sort so obnoxious to the late Mr Lowell, as to the correctness and delicacy of her English accent, and then, in order to show himself quite abreast of the times, inquired expansively if she knew the Van Rensselaers.

      “No; I haven’t had that pleasure,” the Vision of Beauty answered, curtly.

      “The Livingstones, perhaps?” Florian adventured, in tentative tones.

      The Vision shook her head.

      “My friends the Vanderbilts?” Florian essayed once more, eager to find a connecting link. “I stayed with them at Newport.”

      “No; nor yet the Vanderbilts,” the Vision answered, smiling.

      Florian paused and reflected. “Ah, then, you’re from Boston, no doubt,” he suggested, with charitable promptitude. The fine friends he had mentioned, at whose houses he had stopped, were all New Yorkers.

      “No; not from Boston,” the Vision answered with prompt negation.

      “Washington, I suppose?” Florian adventured again. They were the only three places a self-respecting American could admit she came from without shipwreck of her dignity. He would not pay so much grace and eloquence the very bad compliment, as it seemed to him, of supposing it could “register” from St Louis or New Orleans.

      The pretty woman smiled once more, a self-restrained smile. “I come from New York,” she said, simply. “I’ve lived there long. It’s my native place. But there are a good many of us there who don’t aspire to know the Roosevelts or the Livingstones.”

      Florian withdrew, with quiet tact, from this false departure. He led aside the conversation, by graceful degrees, to the old Dutch families, the New England stock – Emerson, Longfellow, Channing, the Concord set: Howells, James, and Stedman, the later American poets. On these last he waxed warm. But the Vision of Beauty, herself cosmopolitan to the core, was all for our newest school of English bards. She doted on Lang and Austin Dobson.

      “And have you seen the last Illustrated?” she asked, after awhile, with a burst of enthusiasm. “It’s on the table in the salon there. And there are three, oh, such lovely, lovely stanzas in it, – ‘Among Alps,’ by Will Deverill.”

      Her words sent a thrill of pleasure through Will’s modest soul. He had published but little, and ’twas seldom he heard his own name thus familiarly unhandled. Still, a harassing doubt possessed his soul. Could the Vision of Beauty have seen his name in the visitors’ book of the hotel, noticed the coincidence with the lines in the Illustrated, which he had sent from the Zillerthal, and managed this little coup with feminine adroitness, on purpose to deceive him? Yet she didn’t look guileful. With poetic trustfulness, he cast the evil suggestion at once behind him. “I’m so glad you liked them,” he said, timidly, looking down at his plate, and playing in nervous jerks with his fork in the chicken. “I wrote them in the Tyrol here. They’re fresh-fed from the glaciers.”

      The Vision laid down her knife and fork and stared at him, speechless. “You’re not Will Deverill,” she exclaimed, in some excitement, after a moment’s pause.

      “That’s my name,” Will answered, somewhat abashed, still perusing his plate. “But I’m very little used to – to – to meeting people who have heard of it.”

      The pretty American clasped her hands with delight “Well, I am glad to meet you,” she said, “though I’d have given you the benefit of the Mr, of course, if I’d known it was you. I just love your verses. I have ‘Voices from the Hills’ in my box upstairs, bound in calf, this minute.”

      “No; not really?” Will cried, with a young author’s delight at unexpected recognition.

      “I’ll go upstairs after dinner and fetch it down to show you,” his pretty admirer answered, with some pride. “And your friend, too, is he a poet?”

      “In soul; in soul only!” Florian interposed, airily, dashing in at a tangent; for it irked him thus to play second fiddle to Will’s first hand, and he longed to assert his “proper position.” “I string no sonnets; I play no harmonies; I take the higher place. I sit on a critical throne, weighing and appraising all arts impartially. Deverill rhymes; another man paints; a third man strums; a fourth acts, or carves stone – and all for me. I exercise none of these base handicrafts myself; but I live supreme in the Palace of Art they build, subordinating each in due place to my soul’s delight, like a subtle architect.”

      “Just the same as all the rest of us,” the pretty American put in, interrupting his period. “We all do that. We sit still and listen. The difficulty is – to produce, like Mr Deverill.”

      Florian stood aghast. To think a mere woman should thus slight his pretensions! But the pretty American, disregarding him, turned to Will once more. “And your friend’s name?” she said, interrogatively.

      “My СКАЧАТЬ