‘Marcia, how you look! You’re covered with mud!’ cried Mrs. Copley.
With a slightly apprehensive glance toward the mirror, Marcia straightened her hat and rubbed a daub of mud from her cheek. ‘Kentucky Lil and Triumvirate were in too much of a hurry to get home to turn out for puddles,’ she said. ‘How much time may we have to dress, Aunt Katherine?’
‘Just fifteen minutes,’ returned her uncle; ‘and that is a quarter of an hour more than you deserve. If you are not down then, we shall eat without waiting for you.’
‘Fifteen minutes, remember!’ cried Marcia to Sybert as they parted at the top of the stairs. ‘I’ll race with you,’ she added; ‘though I think myself that a girl ought to have a handicap.’
She found Granton, a picture of prim disapproval, waiting with her dress spread out on the bed. Marcia dropped into a wicker chair with a tired sigh.
‘You’ve ridden a long way,’ Granton remarked as she removed a muddy boot.
‘Yes, Granton, I have; and dinner’s already been waiting half an hour, and Pietro looks like a thunder-cloud, and Mrs. Copley looks worried, and the guests look hungry—what François looks like I don’t dare to think. We must fly; our reputations depend on it.’
‘Am I ready?’ she inquired, not much more than fifteen minutes later, as she twisted her head to view the effect in the mirror.
‘You’ll do very well,’ said Granton.
‘I’m terribly tired,’ she sighed; ‘and I feel more like going to bed than facing guests—but I suppose, in the natural order of events, dinner must be accomplished first.’
‘To be sure,’ said the maid, critically adjusting her train.
‘Your philosophy is so comfortable, Granton! As we have done yesterday, so shall we do to-day and also to-morrow. It saves one the trouble of making up one’s mind.’
She reached the salon just in time to take Paul Dessart’s silently offered arm to the dining-room. Sybert did not appear until the soup was being removed. He possessed himself of the empty chair beside Eleanor Royston, with a murmured apology to his hostess.
‘It’s excusable, Sybert,’ said Copley, with a frown. ‘You should not allow a woman to beat you.’
‘The furniture in that room you gave me,’ he complained gravely, ‘was built as a trap for collar-buttons. The side of the bed comes to within three inches of the floor—I couldn’t crawl under.’
‘What did you do?’ Eleanor Royston asked.
‘I borrowed one of our host’s—and I had a hard time finding it.’
‘I shall put my wardrobe under lock and key the next time you visit us,’ Copley declared.
Sybert was curiously inspecting a small white globule he found by his plate.
Marcia laughed and called from the other end of the table: ‘It’s your own prescription, Mr. Sybert; drop it in your wine-glass and drink it like a man. I’ve taken my dose.’
During this exchange of badinage Paul Dessart said never a word. He sat with his eyes fixed moodily on the table-cloth, and—one hates to say it of Paul—he sulked. For the first time since she had known him, Marcia found him difficile. He started no subject himself, and those that she started, after a brief career, fell lifeless. It may have been that she herself was somewhat ill at ease, but in any case several awkward silences fell between them, which the young man made no attempt to break. Mr. Copley would never have said of him to-night that he was an ornament to any dinner-table. It fell to the Frenchman across the way to keep the ball rolling.
In an errant glance toward the other end of the table, Marcia saw Sybert laughing softly at something Eleanor had said. She stayed her glance a second to note involuntarily how well they went together. Eleanor, with her white shoulders rising from a cloud of pale-blue gauze, looked fair and distinguished; and Sybert, with his dark face and sullen eyes, made an esthetically satisfying contrast. He was bending toward her with that air of easy politeness, that superior self-sufficiency, which had always exasperated Marcia so. But Eleanor knew how to take it; she had been out nine seasons, and the smile with which she answered him was quite as mocking as his own.
He looked to-night, through and through, what Marcia had always taken him for—the finished cosmopolitan—the diplomat—the diner-out. But he was not just that, she knew; she had seen him off his guard in the midst of the storm that afternoon, and she was still tingling with the surprise of it. She recalled what Mr. Melville had said that afternoon in the ilex grove—she was always recalling what people said about Sybert. The things seemed to stick in one’s mind; he was a subject that gave rise to many mots. ‘You think you are very broad-minded because you see the man underneath the peasant. Don’t you think you could push your broad-mindedness one step further and see the man underneath the man of the world?’ She had caught a glimpse that afternoon. It seemed now as if his air of super civilization were only a mask to conceal—she did not know what, underneath. She was searching for an apt description when she heard the young Frenchman laughingly inquire: ‘Mademoiselle Copley est un peu distraite ce soir, n’est-ce pas?’
With a little start, she became aware that some one had asked her a question. For the remainder of the dinner she kept her eyes at her end of the table, and exerted herself to be gracious to her taciturn companion. Paul’s bad temper was not unbecoming, and he scarcely could have adopted a wiser course. Marcia had expected to find him sparkling, enthusiastic, convincing; and she had come down prepared to withstand his charm. Mais voilà! there was no charm to withstand. He was sullen, moody, with a frown scarcely veiled enough for politeness. Some one had once compared him, not very originally, to a Greek god. He looked it more than ever to-night, if one can imagine a Greek god in the sulks. What was the matter with him, Marcia could only guess. Perhaps, as his cousin had affirmed, he was like a cat and needed stroking the right way of the fur. At any rate, she found the new mood rather taking, and she somewhat weakly allowed herself to stroke him the right way. By the time they rose from the table he was, if not exactly purring, at least not showing his claws.
At the Royston girls’ suggestion, they put on evening wraps and repaired to the terrace—except the two elder ladies, who preferred the more tempered atmosphere of the salon. Mrs. Copley delegated her husband and Sybert to act as chaperons—a position which Sybert accepted with a bow, to the accompaniment of a slightly puzzled smile on Eleanor’s part. She could not exactly make out the gentleman’s footing in the household. They seated themselves in a group about the balustrade, with the exception of Eleanor and Sybert, who strolled back and forth the length of the flagging. Eleanor was doing her best to-night, and her best was very good; she appeared to have wakened a spark in even his indifference. Marcia, with her eyes on the two, thought again how well they went together, and M. Benoit was a second time on the verge of calling her distraite.
The two strollers after a time joined the group, Eleanor humming under her breath a little French chanson that had been going the rounds of the Paris cafés that spring.
‘Oh, sing something we all know,’ said Margaret, and with a laughing curtesy toward Sybert she struck into ‘Fair Harvard.’ The other girls joined her. Their voices, rising high and clear, filled the night with the swinging melody. It seemed strangely out of place there, in the midst of the Sabine hills, with the old villa behind them and the Roman Campagna at their feet. As their voices died away Sybert laughed softly.
‘I swear I’d forgotten it!’
Margaret shook her head in mock reproof. ‘Forgotten it!’ she cried. ‘A man ought to be ashamed to acknowledge it if he had forgotten his Alma Mater song. It’s like forgetting his country.’