Black Oxen (Unabridged). Gertrude Atherton

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СКАЧАТЬ course, faultlessly groomed, but if met in the wilds of Africa, clad in rags and bearded like the jungle, to the initiate they still would have been New Yorkers.

      "Come in! Come in!" cried the Judge heartily. "Madame Zattiany will be down in a minute—she prefers to be called Madame Zattiany, by the way. Thinks titles in America are absurd unless wearers were born to them—more particularly since continental titles today are worth about as much as rubles and marks.… Mr. Clavering, you know Mr. Osborne? Madame Zattiany kindly permitted me to bring him as she was having a little party. Families old friends."

      Clavering placed two fingers in the limp hand extended and met the cold appraising eye calmly. The New York assumption that all other Americans are rank outsiders, that, in short, not to have been born in New York is a social and irremediable crime, had often annoyed him but never caused him to feel the slightest sense of inferiority. He had his own ancestors, as important in their day as any bewigged old Dutchmen—all of whom, he reminded himself, had been but honest burghers in Holland. But he admired their consistency. The rest of the country had been commenting bitterly on the New York attitude since the eighteenth century. And when you got under their protective armor they were an honorable and a loyal lot. Meanwhile it paid to be as rude as themselves.

      "I am delighted that Madame Zattiany has decided to come out of her shell at last," said Judge Trent, shaking vigorously. "I've been urging it for some time. But she has had a long and harrowing experience, and seemed to want only to rest. I think the stir she made at your first-nights, Clavering, had something to do with it. There was a time, you know, when she never appeared without making a sensation—like poor Mary before her—but young as she is all that seems almost too remote to recall. Of course if she had been able to live in London or Paris after the war it would have been different, but she was stuck in Buda Pesth and Vienna—ah!"

      Madame Zattiany had entered the room. She wore pale green chiffon with floating sleeves that left her arms bare. In the subdued light she looked like a girl playing at Undine.

      Clavering heard Dinwiddie give a sharp hiss. "Gad! More like Mary than ever. Nile-green was her favorite color."

      She greeted the Judge and Clavering with her slight flickering smile and then turned to the other two men.

      "This must be Mr. Osborne, as Judge Trent pointed out Mr. Dinwiddie to me one day on Fifth Avenue. It was kind of you both to come in this informal manner. I appreciate it very much."

      Her manner was a little like that of a princess giving audience, Clavering reflected, a manner enhanced by her slight accent and profound repose, the negligent lifting of her hand to be kissed; and as she stood graciously accepting their expressions of unhoped for felicity she looked less American, more European, than ever. But Clavering wondered for the first time if that perfect repose were merely the expression of a profound indifference, almost apathy … but no, she was too young for that, however the war may have seared her; and she was smiling spontaneously, there was a genuine note of pleasure in her voice as she turned to him.

      "It was more than kind of you to watch my house until the policeman came," she said on a lower key. "I was really alarmed when I remembered that broken window and all those dreadful stories in the newspapers. But you kept watch beneath my windows like a preux chevalier and I felt safe."

      "I felt rather a fool if the truth be told." Her eyes had a curious exploring look and Clavering felt unaccountably irritated, in spite of all that her words implied. "I'd have done the same if you had been old and withered. Served me right. I should have thought before I left the house to telephone for a watchman."

      "Ah! Quite so. American men are famous for their gallantry, are they not? Myself, I have always liked them." The smile rose to her wise penetrating eyes, and Clavering colored like a schoolboy. Then it faded and her face looked suddenly rigid. "I wonder," she muttered, then turned her back abruptly. "You must not forget your cocktail. And dinner has been announced."

      Mr. Dinwiddie made a pretext of sipping his cocktail as the three raised their glasses simultaneously to their hostess. She had declined to join them, with a little grimace. "Perhaps in time I may become American enough to like your strange concoctions, but so far I think cocktails have a really horrid taste. Shall we go in?"

      The Judge offered his arm with the formal gallant air he could assume at will and the other men followed at a discreet distance: her shimmering gown had a long tail. Mr. Dinwiddie's eyes seemed to bore into that graceful swaying back, but he was not the man to discuss his hostess until he had left her house, and Clavering could only wonder what conclusions were forming in that avid cynical old brain.

      The dining-room, long and narrow, was at the back of the hall and extended along the entire width of the large house. Like the hall it was panelled and dark, an imposing room hung with family portraits. A small table at the end looked like a fairy oasis. It glittered and gleamed and the flowers were mauve, matching the tall wand-like candles.

      "I do hope, Madame Zattiany," said Mr. Osborne, as he took a seat at her left, "that you won't succumb to the prevailing mania for white, and paint out this beautiful old walnut. Too many of our houses look entirely too sanitary. One feels as if he were about to be shown up to a ward, to be received by a hospital nurse with a warning not to speak too loud." There was no chill formality in his mien as he bent over his young and beautiful hostess.

      "Ah, you forget this is Countess Zattiany's house," she said, smiling. "But I will admit that if it were mine I should make few changes. White was quite à la mode in London long before the war, but, myself, I never liked it."

      Judge Trent sat opposite his hostess at the round table. She had placed Mr. Dinwiddie and Mr. Osborne on either side of her, smiling at Clavering. "I am sorry I do not know any young ladies," she said graciously, although there was a twinkle in her eye. "You look rather lonesome."

      "Why should he?" growled Dinwiddie. "He is young and you are young. The rest of us are the ones to feel out of it."

      "Not a bit of it! Not a bit of it!" exclaimed Judge Trent. "You forget that Madame Zattiany has lived in Europe since infancy. She's talked to elderly statesmen all her life."

      "Well, we're not statesmen, the lord knows." Dinwiddie could always be relied on to make the obvious retort, thought Clavering, although it must be admitted that he was seldom with none at all. "But you must have seen more young men than old during the war, Madame Zattiany. I understand that Mary turned her palace in Buda Pesth into a hospital and that you were her chief assistant."

      "That is quite true, and I had by no means confined myself before that to elderly statesmen; but I had almost forgotten what a young man on his feet looked like before the war finished. Or Society, for that matter. My one temptation to enter Society here would be the hope of forming a relief organization—drive, do you call it?—for the starving children of Austria. Russian children are not the only pitiable objects in Europe, and after all, the children of civilized countries are of more value to the future of the world."

      "Another drive!" Judge Trent groaned. "New York flees to cover at the word. Enter Society by all means, but to give your youth its rights. You have been deprived of them too long."

      "I shall never feel as young as that again. Nor will any girl who was merely sixteen at the beginning of the war ever be the same as your care-free young ladies here. I sit in the restaurants and watch them with amazement—often with anger. What right have they … however … as for myself I shall not reenter the world for any but the object I have just mentioned. Luncheons! Dinners! Balls! I was surfeited before the war. And I have forgotten persiflage, small talk. I am told that Americans avoid serious topics in Society. I, alas, have become very serious."

      She swept her favored СКАЧАТЬ