SCENE XII

"How beautiful you are!" said Lord Verney.

He was sitting on a stool at Mrs. Bellairs' feet. She had abandoned to him one plump taper-fingered hand. The gay little parlour of the Queen Square house was full of sunshine and of the screeching ecstasy of Mistress Kitty's canary bird.

"How beautiful you are!" said he; it was for the fourth time within the half-hour. Conversation between them had languished somehow.

Kitty Bellairs flung a sidelong wistful look upon her lover's countenance. His eyes, gazing upwards upon her, devoured her beauty with the self-same expression that she had found so entrancing earlier in the day. "Deep wells of passion," she had told herself then. Now a chill shade of misgiving crept upon her.

"His eyes are like a calf's," she said to herself suddenly.

*****

"How beautiful——" thus he began to murmur once again, when his mistress's little hand, twitching impatiently from his grasp, surprised him into silence.

"Oh dear! a calf in very truth," thought she. "Baah—baa ooh.... What can I have seen in him? 'Twas a sudden pastoral yearning....!"

"May I not hold your hand?" said he, shifting himself to his silken knees and pressing against her.

Yet he was a pretty boy and there was a charm undoubted in the freshness of this innocence and youth awakening to the first glimmer of man's passion.

"Delightful task——" she quoted under her breath, and once more vouchsafed him, with a sweep like the poise of a dove, her gentle hand.

As it lay in his brown fingers, she contemplated it with artistic satisfaction and played her little digits up and down, admiring the shape and colour of the nails, the delicate dimples at the knuckles. But Lord Verney's great boy's paw engulfed them all too quickly, and his brown eyes never wavered from their devout contemplation of her countenance.

"How——"

Mistress Kitty sprang to her feet.

"I vow," she cried, "'tis my hour for the waters, and I had clean forgot them!"

She called upon her maid:

"Lydia, child, my hat!—Lord Verney, if it please you, sir, your arm as far as the Pump Room." ("At least," she thought to herself, "all Bath shall know of my latest conquest")

She tied her hat ribbons under her chin.

"How like you the mode?" said she. And, charmed into smiles again by the rosy vision under the black plumes, she flashed round upon him from the mirror. "Is it not, perhaps, a thought fly-away? Yet 'tis the latest. What says my Verney?"

The poor youth vainly endeavoured to discriminate and criticise.

"It is indeed a very fine hat," said he ... "and there seem to be a vast number of feathers upon it." He hesitated, stammered. "Oh, what care I for modes! 'Tis you, you——"

"What are you staring at, girl?" cried Mistress Bellairs sharply, to her Abigail. "Out with you!"

"Well, my Verney?" said she. "Mercy, how you look, man! Is anything wrong with my face?"

She tilted that lovely little piece of perishable bloom innocently towards him as she spoke. And the kiss she had read in his eyes landed with unprecedented success upon her lips.

"Why, who knows?" thought she, with a little satisfied smile, as she straightened her modish hat. "There may be stuff in the lad, after all!"

She took his arm. Dazed by his own audacity, he suffered her to lead him from the room. They jostled together down the narrow stairs.

"How beautiful you are!" said he; and kissed her again as they reached the sombre dark-panelled vestibule.

"Fie!" said she with a shade of testiness and pushed him back, as her little black page ran to open the door.

The kiss, like his talk, lacked any heightening of tone—and what of a lover's kiss that shows no new ardour, what of a vow of love that has no new colour, no fresh imagery? But the trees in Queen Square were lightly leafed with pale, golden-green. The sunshine was white-gold, the breeze fresh and laughing; the old grey town was decked as with garlands of Young Love.

"He is but new to it," she argued against her fleeting doubts, "and he is, sure, the prettiest youth in all Bath."

Love and Spring danced in Mistress Kitty's light heart and light heels as she tripped forth. And Love and Spring gathered and strove and sought outlet in Verney's soul as inevitably, and irresistibly, and almost as unconsciously as the sap in the young shoots that swayed under the caress of the breeze and amorously unfurled themselves to the sunlight.

*****

The Pump Room was cool and dim after the grey stone street upon which the young year's sunshine beat as fierce as its youth knew how. The water droned its little song as it welled up, faintly steaming.

"Listen to it," quoth Mistress Kitty. "How innocent it sounds, how dear it looks!"

With a smile she took the glass transferred to her by Verney, and: "Ugh!" said she, "how monstrous horrid it tastes, to be sure! 'Tis, I fear," she said, again casting a glance of some anxiety at her new lover's countenance, "a symbol of life."

"Yet," said he, "these waters are said to be vastly wholesome."

"Wholesome!" cried Mistress Kitty, sipping again, and again curling her nose upwards and the corners of her lips downwards, in an irresistibly fascinating grimace. "Wholesome, my lord! Heaven defend us! And what is that but the last drop to complete their odiousness! Wholesome, sir? I would have you know 'tis not for wholesomeness I drink." She put down her glass, undiminished save by the value of a bird's draught. "Do I look like a woman who needs to drink waters for 'wholesomeness?'"

"Indeed, no," floundered he in his bewildered way.

"There are social obligations," said she, sententiously. "A widow, sir, alone and unprotected, must conform to common usage. And then I have another reason, one of pure sentiment."

She cocked her head and fixed her mocking eye upon him.

"My poor Bellairs," said she, "how oft has it not been my pleasure and my duty to fill such a glass as this and convey it to his lips? In his last years, poor angel, he had quite lost the use of his limbs!"

Lord Verney had no answer appropriate to these tender reminiscences; and Mistress Kitty, having, it seemed, sufficiently conformed to the usage of Bath, as well as sacrificed to the manes of the departed, turned briskly round, and, leaning against a pilaster, began to survey the room.

"La! how empty!" quoth she. "'Tis your fault if I am so late, my lord. Nobody, I swear, but that Flyte woman, your odious Spicer, sir—ha, and old General Tilney. Verily, I believe these dreadful springs have the power of keeping such mummies in life long after their proper limit. 'Tis hardly fair on the rest of the world. Why, the poor thing has scarce a sense or a wit left, and yet it walks! Heaven preserve us! why, it runs!" she cried suddenly with a little chirp, as the unfortunate veteran of Dettingen, escaping from the guiding hands of his chairman, started for the door with the uncontrolled trot of semi-paralytic senility.

"And that reminds me," said Mistress Kitty, "that Sir George is most particular that I should walk five minutes between every glass. Here comes your estimable aunt, Lady Maria, and her ear-trumpet, and the unfortunate Miss Selina. I protest, with that yellow feather she is more like my dear dead Toto than ever.

"Was that your pet name for your husband?" murmured Lord Verney, in a strangled whisper.

"Fie, sir!" cried the widow. "My cockatoo—I referred to my cockatoo." She sighed profoundly. "I loved him," she said.

He looked at her, uncertain to which of the lamented bipeds she referred.

"Selina," cried Lady Maria, in the strident tones of the deaf woman persuaded of her own consequence (the voice of your shy deaf one loses all sound in her terror of being loud)—"Selina, how often must I tell you that you must clip in my glass yourself! Who's that over there? Where are my eyeglasses? Who's that, did you say? Mistress Bellairs? Humph! And who's she got with her in tow now? Who did you say? Louder, child, louder. What makes you mumble so? Who? Verney—Lord Verney? Why, that's my nevvy. Tell him to come to me this minute. Do you hear, Selina, this minute! I won't have him fall into the net of widow Bellairs!"

The cockatoo top-knot nodded vehemently. Poor Miss Selina, agitated between consciousness that the whole Pump Room was echoing to Lady Maria's sentiments and terror of her patroness, took two steps upon her errand, and halted, fluttering. Lord Verney had flushed darkly purple. Mistress Kitty hung with yet more affectionate weight upon his arm and smiled with sweet unconsciousness. For the moment she was as deaf as Lady Maria.

The latter's claw-like hand had now disengaged a long-stemmed eyeglass from her laces.

"'Tis indeed," she pronounced in her commanding bass, "my nevvy Verney with that vile Bellairs!—-Nevvy! Here, I say!—Selina, fool, have you gone to sleep?"

An echo, as of titters, began to circle round the Pump Room. The painted face of Lady Flyte was wreathed into a smile of peculiar significance, as she whispered over her glass to her particular friend of the moment, Captain Spicer. This gentleman's pallid visage was illumined with a radiance of gratified spite. His lips were pursed as though upon a plum of superdelicious gossip. He began to whisper and mouthe. Young Squire Greene approached the couple with an eager ear and an innocent noddy face that strove to look vastly wise.

"I assure you," mouthed the Captain. "Was I not there?"

"In his bedroom?" cried Lady Flyte, with a shrill laugh.

Lady Maria's cockatoo crest rose more fiercely. It seemed to Kitty Bellairs as if she heard the old lady's jaws rattle. It was certain that in her wrath she squawked louder than even the late lamented Toto. Then Mistress Kitty, who, to say the truth, began to find the scene a little beyond enjoyment, felt the young arm upon which she leaned stiffen, the young figure beside her rear itself with a new manliness.

"Pray, Mistress Bellairs," said my Lord Verney, he spoke loudly and, to her surprise, with perfect facility, even dignity, "will you allow me to introduce you to my aunt, Lady Maria Prideaux?—Aunt Maria," said he, and his voice rang out finely, imposing a general silence, "let me present Mistress Bellairs. This lady has graciously condescended to accept me as her future husband. I am the happiest and the most honoured of men."

The last sentence he cried out still more emphatically than the rest, and then repeated it with his eye on Kitty's suddenly flushed cheek, almost in a whisper and with a quiver of strong emotion.

The astounded Mistress Kitty rose from her deep curtesy with a swelling heart.

"The dear lad," she said to herself. "The dear, innocent chivalrous lad!"

There was almost a dimness in her brilliant black eye. Her emotion was of a kind she had never known before: it was almost maternal.

Under stress of sudden genuine emotion, the wit of intrigue in the cleverest woman falls in abeyance. Mistress Bellairs found no word out of the new situation.

Lady Maria's deafness had increased to an alarming extent.

"Gratified, I'm sure," she mumbled, stuck out her dry hand and withdrew it before Mistress Bellairs had time to touch it.

"My future wife," bawled the budding peer, in his aged relative's ear.

It was curious to note how old Lady Maria seemed suddenly to have become. Huddled in herself she nodded vacantly at her nephew.

"Thank ye for asking, child," said she, "but the waters try me a good deal."

Lord Verney attempted another shout in vain.

"So Sir George says," remarked my lady.

"'Tis the very eye of my poor dear Toto," thought Mistress Bellairs.

Lord Verney looked round in despair. Miss Selina thought him monstrous handsome and gallant, and her poor old-maid's heart warmed to the lover in him. She approached Lady Maria and gently lifted her trumpet.

Lady Maria, glad enough of a diversion, applied it to her ear with unwonted affability.

"What is it, my dear? Any sign of the Duchess?"

"Your nephew," said Miss Selina in modest accents, "your nephew, my Lord Verney, wishes to inform you that he is about to contract a matrimonial alliance with the lady he has just introduced to you."

Miss Selina blushed behind the mouthpiece as she made this announcement. Then she cried: "Oh," with an accent of suffering, for Lady Maria had rapped her over the knuckles with the instrument.

"Matrimonial fiddlesticks!" said Lord Verney's aunt. "Selina, you're a perfect fool!—Madam," remarked the wraith of the departed cockatoo, inclining her crest with much dignity towards the blooming Kitty, "I wish you good-morning."