him – he is such a good man, or at least, what is better,” she laughed, “he has always been so very kind to me.”
“You know him, Mr. Darnley?” inquired Lady May.
“By Jove, I do!”
“And like him?”
“No one on earth has better reason to like him,” answered the young man warmly – “he has been my best friend on earth.”
“It is pleasant to know two people who are not ashamed to be grateful,” said fat Lady May, with a smile.
The young lady returned her smile very kindly. I don't think you ever beheld a prettier creature than Alice Arden. Vivian Darnley had wasted many a secret hour in sketching that oval face. Those large, soft, grey eyes, and long dark lashes, how difficult they are to express! And the brilliant lips! Could art itself paint anything quite like her? Who could paint those beautiful dimples that made her smiles so soft, or express the little circlet of pearly teeth whose tips were just disclosed? Stealthily he was now, for the thousandth time, studying that bewitching smile again.
“And what is the story about Uncle David?” asked Alice again.
“Well, what will you say – and you, Mr. Darnley, if it should be a story about a young lady?”
“Do you mean that Uncle David is going to marry? I think it would be an awful pity!” exclaimed Alice.
“Well, dear, to put you out of pain, I'll tell you at once; I only know this – that he is going to provide for her somehow, but whether by adopting her as a child, or taking her for a wife, I can't tell. Only I never saw any one looking archer than Mr. Brounker did to-day when he told me; and I fancied from that it could not be so dull a business as merely making her his daughter.”
“And who is the young lady?” asked Alice.
“Did you ever happen to meet anywhere a Miss Grace Maubray?”
“Oh, yes,” answered Alice quickly. “She was staying, and her father, Colonel Maubray, at the Wymerings' last autumn. She's quite lovely, I think, and very clever – but I don't know – I think she's a little ill-natured, but very amusing. She seems to have a talent for cutting people up – and a little of that kind of thing, you know, is very well, but one does not care for it always. And is she really the young lady?”
“Yes, and – Dear me! Mr. Darnley, I'm afraid my story has alarmed you.”
“Why should it?” laughed Vivian Darnley, partly to cover, perhaps, a little confusion.
“I can't tell, I'm sure, but you blushed as much as a man can; and you know you did. I wonder, Alice, what this under-plot can be, where all is so romantic. Perhaps, after all, Mr. David Arden is to adopt the young lady, and some one else, to whom he is also kind, is to marry her. Don't you think that would be a very natural arrangement?”
Alice laughed, and Darnley laughed; but he was embarrassed.
“And Colonel Maubray, is he still living?” asked Alice.
“Oh, no, dear; he died ten or eleven months ago. A very foolish man, you know; he wasted a very good property. He was some distant relation, also; Mr. Brounker said your uncle, Mr. David Arden, was very much attached to him – they were schoolfellows, and great friends all their lives.”
“I should not wonder,” said Alice smiling – and then became silent.
“Do you know the young lady, this fortunate Miss Maubray?” said Lady May, turning to Vivian Darnley again.
“I? Yes – that is, I can't say more than a mere acquaintance – and not an old one. I made her acquaintance at Mr. Arden's house. He is her guardian. I don't know about any other arrangements. I daresay there may be.”
“Well, I know her a little, also,” said Lady May. “I thought her pretty – and she sings a little, and she's clever.”
“She's all that,” said Alice. “Oh, here comes Dick! What do you say, Richard – is not Miss Maubray very pretty? We are making a plot to marry her to Vivian Darnley, and get Uncle David to contribute her dot.”
“What benevolent people! You don't object, I dare say, Vivian.”
“I have not been consulted,” said he; “and, of course, Uncle David need not be consulted, as he has simply to transfer the proper quantity of stock.”
Richard Arden had drawn near Lady May, and said a few words in a low tone, which seemed not unwelcome to her.
“I saw Longcluse this morning. He has not been here, has he?” he added, as a little silence threatened the conversation.
“No, he has not turned up. And what a charming person he is!” exclaimed Lady May.
“I quite agree with you, Lady May,” said Arden. “He is, take him on every subject, I think, about the cleverest fellow I ever met – art, literature, games, chess, which I take to be a subject by itself. He is very great at chess – for an amateur, I mean – and when I was chess-mad, nearly a year ago and beginning to grow conceited, he opened my eyes, I can tell you; and Airly says he is the best musical critic in England, and can tell you at any hour who is who in the opera, all over Europe; and he really understands, what so few of us here know anything about, foreign politics, and all the people and their stories and scandals he has at his fingers' ends. And he is such good company, when he chooses, and such a gentleman always!”
“He is very agreeable and amusing when he takes the trouble; I always like to listen when Mr. Longcluse talks,” said Alice Arden, to the secret satisfaction of her brother, whose enthusiasm was, I think, directed a good deal to her – and to, perhaps, the vexation of other people, whom she did not care at that moment to please.
“An Admirable Crichton!” murmured Vivian Darnley, with a rather hackneyed sneer. “Do you like his style of —beauty, I suppose I should call it? It has the merit of being very uncommon, at least, don't you think?”
“Beauty, I think, matters very little. He has no beauty, but his face has what, in a man, I think a great deal better – I mean refinement, and cleverness, and a kind of satire that rather interests one,” said Miss Arden, with animation.
Sir Walter Scott, in his “Rob Roy” – thinking, no doubt, of the Diana Vernon of his early days, the then beautiful lady, long afterwards celebrated by Basil Hall as the old Countess Purgstorf (if I rightly remember the title), and recurring to some cherished incident, and the thrill of a pride that had ceased to agitate, but was at once pleasant and melancholy to remember – wrote these words: “She proceeded to read the first stanza, which was nearly to the following purpose. [Then follow the verses.] ‘There is a great deal of it,’ said she, glancing along the paper, and interrupting the sweetest sounds that mortal ears can drink in – those of a youthful poet's verses, namely, read by the lips which are dearest to them.” So writes Walter Scott. On the other hand, in certain states, is there a pain intenser than that of listening to the praises of another man from the lips we love?
“Well,” said Darnley, “as you say so, I suppose there is all that, though I can't see it. Of course, if he tries to make himself agreeable (which he never does to me), it makes a difference, it affects everything – it affects even his looks. But I should not have thought him good-looking. On the contrary, he appears to me about as ugly a fellow as one could see in a day.”
“He's not that,” said Alice. “No one could be ugly with so much animation and so much expression.”
“You take up the cudgels very prettily, my dear, for Mr. Longcluse,” said Lady May. “I'm sure he ought to be extremely obliged to you.”
“So he would be,” said Richard Arden. “It would upset him for a week, I have no doubt.”
There are few things harder to interpret than a blush. At these words the beautiful face of Alice Arden flushed, first with a faint, and then, as will happen, with a brighter crimson. If Lady May had seen it, she would have laughed, probably, and told her how much it became her. But she was, at that moment, going to her chair in the window, and Richard Arden would,