The City of Masks/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
OUT OF THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH
"AM I late?" she inquired, a trace of anxiety in her smiling blue eyes. She was clasping the hand of the taut little Marchioness, who looked up into the lovely face with the frankest admiration.
"I have only this instant finished dressing," said her hostess. "Moody informs me we're in for a blizzard. Is it so bad as all that?"
"What a perfectly heavenly frock!" cried Lady Jane Thorne, standing off to take in the effect. "Turn around, do. Exquisite! Dear me, I wish I could—but there! Wishing is a form of envy. We shouldn't wish for anything, Marchioness. If we didn't, don't you see how perfectly delighted we should be with what we have? Oh, yes,—it is a horrid night. The trolley-cars are blocked, the omnibuses are stalled, and walking is almost impossible. How good the fire looks!"
"Cheerful, isn't it? Now you must let me have my turn at wishing, my dear. If I could have my wish, you would be disporting yourself in the best that Deborah can turn out, and you would be worth millions to her as an advertisement. You've got style, figure, class, verve—everything. You carry your clothes as if you were made for them and not the other way round."
"This gown is so old I sometimes think I was made for it," said the girl gaily. "I can't remember when it was made for me."
Moody had drawn two chairs up to the fire.
"Rubbish!" said the Marchioness, sitting down. "Toast your toes, my dear."
Lady Jane's gown was far from modish. In these days of swift-changing fashions for women, it had become passé long before its usefulness or its beauty had passed. Any woman would have told you that it was a "season before last model," which would be so distantly removed from the present that its owner may be forgiven the justifiable invention concerning her memory.
But Lady Jane's figure was not old, nor passé, nor even a thing to be forgotten easily. She was straight, and slim, and sound of body and limb. That is to say, she stood well on her feet and suggested strength rather than fragility. Her neck and shoulders were smooth and white and firm; her arms shapely and capable, her hands long and slender and aristocratic. Her dark brown hair was abundant and wavy;—it had never experienced the baleful caress of a curling-iron. Her firm, red lips were of the smiling kind,—and she must have known that her teeth were white and strong and beautiful, for she smiled more often than not with parted lips. There was character, intelligence and breeding in her face.
She wore a simple black velvet gown, close-fitting,—please remember that it was of an antiquity not even surpassed, as things go, by the oldest rug in the apartment,—with a short train. She was fully a head taller than the Marchioness, which isn't saying much when you are informed that the latter was at least half-a-head shorter than a woman of medium height.
On the little finger of her right hand she wore a heavy seal ring of gold. If you had known her well enough to hold her hand—to the light, I mean,—you would have been able to decipher the markings of a crest, notwithstanding the fact that age had all but obliterated the lines.
Dinner was formal only in the manner in which it was served. Behind the chair of the Marchioness, Moody posed loftily when not otherwise employed. A critical observer would have taken note of the threadbare condition of his coat, especially at the elbows, and the somewhat snug way in which it adhered to him, fore and aft. Indeed, there was an ever-present peril in its snugness. He was painfully deliberate and detached.
From time to time, a second footman, addressed as McFaddan, paused back of Lady Jane. His chin was not quite so high in the air as Moody's; the higher he raised it the less it looked like a chin. McFaddan, you would remark, carried a great deal of weight above the hips. The ancient butler, Cricklewick, decanted the wine, lifted his right eyebrow for the benefit of Moody, the left in directing McFaddan, and cringed slightly with each trip upward of the dumb-waiter.
The Marchioness and Lady Jane were in a gay mood despite the studied solemnity of the three servants. As dinner has no connection with this narrative except to introduce an effect of opulence, we will hurry through with it and allow Moody and McFaddan to draw back the chairs on a signal transmitted by Cricklewick, and return to the drawing-room with the two ladies.
"A quarter of nine," said the Marchioness, peering at the French clock through her lorgnon. "I am quite sure the Princess will not venture out on such a night as this."
"She's really quite an awful pill," said Lady Jane calmly. "I for one sha'n't be broken-hearted if she doesn't venture."
"For heaven's sake, don't let Cricklewick hear you say such a thing," said the Marchioness in a furtive undertone.
"I've heard Cricklewick say even worse," retorted the girl. She lowered her voice to a confidential whisper. "No longer ago than yesterday he told me that she made him tired, or something of the sort."
"Poor Cricklewick! I fear he is losing ambition," mused the Marchioness. "An ideal butler but a most dreary creature the instant he attempts to be a human being. It isn't possible. McFaddan is quite human. That's why he is so fat. I am not sure that I ever told you, but he was quite a slim, puny lad when Cricklewick took him out of the stables and made a very decent footman out of him. That was a great many years ago, of course. Camelford left him a thousand pounds in his will. I have always believed it was hush money. McFaddan was a very wide-awake chap in those days." The Marchioness lowered one eye-lid slowly.
"And, by all reports, the Marquis of Camelford was very well worth watching," said Lady Jane.
"Hear the wind!" cried the Marchioness, with a little shiver. "How it shrieks!"
"We were speaking of the Marquis," said Lady Jane.
"But one may always fall back on the weather," said the Marchioness drily. "Even at its worst it is a pleasanter thing to discuss than Camelford. You can't get anything out of me, my dear. I was his next door neighbour for twenty years, and I don't believe in talking about one's neighbour."
Lady Jane stared for a moment. "But—how quaint you are!—you were married to him almost as long as that, were you not?"
"My clearest,—I may even say my dearest,—recollection of him is as a neighbour, Lady Jane. He was most agreeable next door."
Cricklewick appeared in the door.
"Count Antonio Fogazario," he announced.
A small, wizened man in black satin knee-breeches entered the room and approached the Marchioness. With courtly grace he lifted her fingers to his lips and, in a voice that quavered slightly, declared in French that his joy on seeing her again was only surpassed by the hideous gloom he had experienced during the week that had elapsed since their last meeting.
"But now the gloom is dispelled and I am basking in sunshine so rare and soft and—"
"My dear Count," broke in the Marchioness, "you forget that we are enjoying the worst blizzard of the year."
"Enjoying,—vastly enjoying it!" he cried. "It is the most enchanting blizzard I have ever known. Ah, my dear Lady Jane! This is delightful!"
His sharp little face beamed with pleasure. The vast pleated shirt front extended itself to amazing proportions, as if blown up by an invisible though prodigious bellows, and his elbow described an angle of considerable elevation as he clasped the slim hand of the tall young woman. The crown of his sleek black toupee was on a line with her shoulder.
"God bless me," he added, in a somewhat astonished manner, "this is most gratifying. I could not have lifted it half that high yesterday without experiencing the most excruciating agony." He worked his arm up and down experimentally. "Quite all right, quite all right. I feared I was in for another siege. I cannot tell you how delighted I am. Ahem! Where was I? Oh, yes— This is a pleasure, Lady Jane, a positive delight. How charming you are look—"
"Save your compliments, Count, for the Princess," interrupted the girl, smiling. "She is coming, you know."
"I doubt it," he said, fumbling for his snuff-box. "I saw her this afternoon. Chilblains. Weather like this, you see. Quite a distance from her place to the street-cars. Frightful going. I doubt it very much. Now, what was it she said to me this afternoon? Something very important, I remember distinctly,—but it seems to have slipped my mind completely. I am fearfully annoyed with myself. I remember with great distinctness that it was something I was determined to remember, and here I am forgetting— Ah, let me see! It comes to me like a flash. I have it! She said she felt as though she had a cold coming on or something like that. Yes, I am sure that was it. I remember she blew her nose frequently, and she always makes a dreadful noise when she blows her nose. A really unforgetable noise, you know. Now, when I blow my nose, I don't behave like an elephant. I—"
"You blow it like a gentleman," interrupted the Marchioness, as he paused in some confusion.
"Indeed I do," he said gratefully. "In the most polished manner possible, my dear lady."
Lady Jane put her handkerchief to her lips. There was a period of silence. The Count appeared to be thinking with great intensity. He had a harassed expression about the corners of his nose. It was he who broke the silence. He broke it with a most tremendous sneeze.
"The beastly snuff," he said in apology.
Cricklewick's voice seemed to act as an echo to the remark.
"The Right-Honourable Mrs. Priestly-Duff," he announced, and an angular, middle-aged lady in a rose-coloured gown entered the room. She had a very long nose and prominent teeth; her neck was of amazing length and appeared to be attached to her shoulders by means of vertical, skin-covered ropes, running from torso to points just behind her ears, where they were lost in a matting of faded, straw-coloured hair. On second thought, it may be simpler to remark that her neck was amazingly scrawny. It will save confusion. Her voice was a trifle strident and her French execrable.
"Isn't it awful?" she said as she joined the trio at the fireplace. "I thought I'd never get here. Two hours coming, my dear, and I must be starting home at once if I want to get there before midnight."
"The Princess will be here," said the Marchioness.
"I'll wait fifteen minutes," said the new-comer crisply, pulling up her gloves. "I've had a trying day, Marchioness. Everything has gone wrong,—even the drains. They're frozen as tight as a drum and heaven knows when they'll get them thawed out! Who ever heard of such weather in March?"
"Ah, my dear Mrs. Priestly-Duff, you should not forget the beautiful sunshine we had yesterday," said the Count cheerily.
"Precious little good it does today," she retorted, looking down upon him from a lofty height, and as if she had not noticed his presence before. "When did you come in, Count?"
"It is quite likely the Princess will not venture out in such weather," interposed the Marchioness, sensing squalls.
"Well, I'll stop a bit anyway and get my feet warm. I hope she doesn't come. She is a good deal of a wet blanket, you must admit."
"Wet blankets," began the Count argumentatively, and then, catching a glance from the Marchioness, cleared his throat, blew his nose, and mumbled something about poor people who had no blankets at all, God help them on such a night as this.
Lady Jane had turned away from the group and was idly turning the leaves of the Illustrated London News. The smallest intelligence would have grasped the fact that Mrs. Priestly-Duff was not a genial soul.
"Who else is coming?" she demanded, fixing the little hostess with the stare that had just been removed from the back of Lady Jane's head.
Cricklewick answered from the doorway.
"Lord Temple. Baron—ahem!— Whiskers—eh? Baron Wissmer. Prince Waldemar de Bosky. Count Wilhelm Frederick Von Blitzen."
Four young men advanced upon the Marchioness, Lord Temple in the van. He was a tall, good-looking chap, with light brown hair that curled slightly above the ears, and eyes that danced.
"This, my dear Marchioness, is my friend. Baron Wissmer," he said, after bending low over her hand.
The Baron, whose broad hands were encased in immaculate white gloves that failed by a wide margin to button across his powerful wrists, smiled sheepishly as he enveloped her fingers in his huge palm.
"It is good of you to let me come. Marchioness," he said awkwardly, a deep flush spreading over his sea-tanned face. "If I manage to deport myself like the bull in the china shop, pray lay it to clumsiness and not to ignorance. It has been a very long time since I touched the hand of a Marchioness."
"Small people, like myself, may well afford to be kind and forgiving to giants," said she, smiling. "Dear me, how huge you are."
"I was once in the Emperor's Guard," said he, straightening his figure to its full six feet and a half. "The Blue Hussars. I may add with pride that I was not so horribly clumsy in regimentals. After all, it is the clothes that makes the man." He smiled as he looked himself over. "I shall not be at all offended or even embarrassed if you say 'goodness, how you have grown!'"
"The best tailor in London made that suit of clothes," said Lord Temple, surveying his friend with an appraising eye. Out of the corner of the same eye he explored the region beyond the group that now clustered about the hostess. Evidently he discovered what he was looking for. Leaving the Baron high and dry, he skirted the edge of the group and, with beaming face, came to Lady Jane.
"My family is of Vienna," the Baron was saying to the Marchioness, "but of late years I have called Constantinople my home."
"I understand," said she gently. She asked no other question, but, favouring him with a kindly smile, turned her attention to the men who lurked insignificantly in the shadow of his vast bulk.
The Prince was a pale, dreamy young man with flowing black hair that must have been a constant menace to his vision, judging by the frequent and graceful sweep of his long, slender hand in brushing the encroaching forelock from his eyes, over which it spread briefly in the nature of a veil. He had the fingers of a musician, the bearing of a violinist. His head drooped slightly toward his left shoulder, which was always raised a trifle above the level of the right. And there was in his soft brown eyes the faraway look of the detached. The insignia of his house hung suspended by a red ribbon in the centre of his white shirt front, while on the lapel of his coat reposed the emblem of the Order of the Golden Star. He was a Pole.
Count Von Blitzen, a fair-haired, pink-skinned German, urged himself forward with typical, not-to-be-denied arrogance, and crushed the fingers of the Marchioness in his fat hand. His broad face beamed with an all-enveloping smile.
"Only patriots and lovers venture forth on such nights as this," he said, in a guttural voice that rendered his French almost laughable.
"With an occasional thief or varlet," supplemented the Marchioness.
"Ach, Dieu," murmured the Count.
Fresh arrivals were announced by Cricklewick. For the next ten or fifteen minutes they came thick and fast, men and women of all ages, nationality and condition, and not one of them without a high-sounding title. They disposed themselves about the vast room, and a subdued vocal hubbub ensued. If here and there elderly guests, with gnarled and painfully scrubbed hands, preferred isolation and the pictorial contents of a magazine from the land of their nativity, it was not with snobbish intentions. They were absorbing the news from "home," in the regular weekly doses.
The regal, respendent Countess du Bara, of the Opera, held court in one corner of the room. Another was glorified by a petite baroness from the Artists' Colony far down-town, while a rather dowdy lady with a coronet monopolized the attention of a small group in the centre of the room.
Lady Jane Thorne and Lord Temple sat together in a dim recess beyond the great chair of state, and conversed in low and far from impersonal tones.
Cricklewick appeared in the doorway and in his most impressive manner announced Her Royal Highness, the Princess Mariana Theresa Sebastano Michelini Celestine di Pavesi.
And with the entrance of royalty, kind reader, you may consider yourself introduced, after a fashion, to the real aristocracy of the City of New York, United States of America,—the titled riff-raff of the world's cosmopolis.