VII

“O wild western light in a winter’s sky,
I have watched your radiance flame and die,”

read Arthur Glynde, in the impassioned tone which poets, as a rule, reserve for their own productions.

Juliet held up her hand.

“No,” she said, languidly, “I can’t realise a winter’s sky on this sultry morning. Besides, Peggy and I have just had⁠—well, a passage of arms, call it, and your second line too painfully recalls Peggy’s face a moment ago.”

The two were seated in Lord Culvers’s study, a quiet, cool room, at the back of the house, where they were not likely to be disturbed by untimely callers.

These tête-à-têtes with the young poet had, in a measure, been forced upon Juliet. With that craving for an audience which goes hand in hand with authorship, he had come to the house early one morning with a roll of manuscript under his arm, and, taking Lord Culvers by surprise, had asked permission to read to him “a stanza or two,” as he was anxious for the opinion of a competent critic as to whether the poems were worthy of publication.

Lord Culvers had listened patiently for twenty minutes, then he had recollected an engagement.

“Excuse me, Glynde,” he had said, noting that the packet of manuscript was far from exhausted, “if you don’t mind, I’ll send Juliet to hear the remainder. She is a much better critic than I am⁠—reads Browning, you know⁠—and her opinion will be worth having.”

Arthur Glynde did not demur to the change of audience, and from that day forward, whenever he made his appearance with a few quarto sheets under his arm, Lord Culvers invariably found that he had a pressing engagement, and resigned his easy-chair to Juliet.

Notwithstanding his poetic tendencies, Arthur Glynde was a very general favourite on account of his happy, genial temper. In appearance he was fair and the reverse of robust. His skin was white as a girl’s, and he had the large, dreamy, changeful grey eye of the poet. His voice in speaking was soft, low, pathetic.

He laid down his manuscript at Juliet’s behest with a little sigh. He would so much have preferred in fancy to watch a winter’s sunset “flame and die,” than to conjure up the image of the commonplace “Peggy.”

“You came off victorious, I hope?” he presently asked.

“That goes without saying,” answered Juliet. “It was all about a letter of mine. Peggy has been at her old tricks of opening letters⁠—by mistake, of course. ‘The Hon. Juliet Culvers’ on the back of an envelope could so easily be mistaken for ‘Lady Culvers,’ could it not?”

And then she went on to relate a little scene that, in one form or another, must have been of daily occurrence in the Culvers household. She had come down late that morning, and on seating herself at the breakfast-table, had seen in Lady Culvers’s hand a letter in the writing of a girl friend⁠—one of those “greatest friends of Ida’s” whose intimacy the stepmother would have fain put an end to. Before, however, Juliet had time to claim her property, Lady Culvers, with a sweet and very humble apology, had handed the letter to her, saying that she had mistaken it for one of her own.

“It’s a mistake that has occurred before, Peggy, and that I beg will not happen again, or the consequences will be serious,” Juliet had replied, in lofty, stately fashion.

Upon this Lord Culvers very mildly had expressed a wish that Juliet would cease to address her stepmother by the obnoxious nickname.

“Doesn’t she like it?” Juliet had said, half closing her eyes, and surveying Lady Culvers. “Then I’ll address her as Margaret, it’ll do just as well⁠—it’ll suggest the other name to her mind.”

A threat which the young lady had not hesitated to put into execution.

“I think, after all,” she continued to Arthur Glynde as she finished her narration, “pussy would be a far more appropriate nickname⁠—she is so emphatically of the cat tribe. Don’t you know ‘The velvet paw, and the hidden claw’? Oh, how stifling it is this morning⁠—please give me that fan.”

Arthur did not give her the fan; he preferred to retain it, and save her the trouble of using it.

Juliet smiled up at him as he bent over the capacious and very easy chair in which she reclined.

“Thank you, that is delightful. Now if I had asked Clive to hand me a fan, he’d have done it nothing more. It would never have occurred to him to save me the trouble of using it.”

This was dangerous ground to take with a man who would have given ten years off his life to stand in Clive’s shoes. But dangerous ground had always a strong attraction for Juliet.

Arthur’s face changed, his arm fell to his side.

“That man has more luck than he deserves,” he said, in a low tone.

“I don’t think he appreciates his luck either, and sometimes I think I’ll take it away from him,” she said, drooping her full white lids till the shadow of her long lashes fell upon her cheek.

“And bestow it upon another man!” cried Arthur. And then before she could realise what was coming, he was down on his knees beside her with a passionate declaration of love on his lips.

Possibly, however, if she had known what was coming, she would have made no effort to prevent it. She took his protestations and despairing entreaties very calmly.

“Please get up off your knees,” she said; “the words were no sooner out of my mouth than I regretted them. After all, I prefer being engaged to Clive!”

Arthur rose from his knees ruefully. He folded his arms, and stood a little distance off looking down on her; his fair, boyish features telling only too plainly his tale of love and disappointment.

Juliet smiled up at him again.

“Oh, don’t look so rueful⁠—there’s a bright side to everything,” she said, cheeringly.

“A bright side to this!” he exclaimed.

“Yes. Don’t you see so long as I’m engaged to Clive I want to marry someone else? But the chances are, if I broke off my engagement with him, that I should immediately fall in love with him all over again. Oh, no! Pray⁠—pray don’t go down on the carpet again.”

In order the more effectually to prevent such a catastrophe, she left her chair, and walked away to the window. It opened over a miniature rockery planted with ferns and sweet-scented flowers. She plucked a spray of heliotrope, and began toying with it.

“Clive has never said to me one-quarter of the sweet things that you said just now,” she said, softly, meditatively.

Arthur abruptly turned his back on her, and, as if afraid to venture once more within range of her coquetries, looked for his hat and made for the door.

“There’s not a man living who could stand it,” he muttered, almost fiercely.

“You’ve left your ‘Wild Western Light’ under the table,” she said, not moving from her place at the window.

He stooped to gather the loose sheets of manuscript which, in his ardour, he had let fall.

“Arthur,” she said, in a low, persuasive tone, “are you in a great hurry to go? I wanted to ask you to do something for me.”

Down went the loose sheets of manuscript to the floor once more, and back to her side he went in a moment.

“Do something for you!” he exclaimed. “What is there I would not do? You know I would lay down my life for you any hour, any day!”

“Oh, it’s nothing half so bad as that,” she answered, smilingly; “I wouldn’t trouble you at all if I had a brother, or a cousin, or anyone of whom I could ask a favour.”

She seemed utterly to ignore the fact that she had a betrothed lover.

Arthur reminded her of it.

“You forget,” he said, bitterly, “the man who doesn’t appreciate his good luck, and who doesn’t know how to say sweet things to you.”

“Clive, do you mean? Oh, it’s something I couldn’t possibly ask him to do.”

Arthur’s face flushed with a real happiness. For the moment he felt himself exalted on a pinnacle to which his rival had never attained.

Only for a moment, however. Juliet knew how to read the light of pride in his eyes, and forthwith set herself to quench it.

“I ought to apologise for troubling you in this way,” she said, sweetly; “but since Stacy⁠—she was my maid forever so many years, you know⁠—married, there is no one I can ask to do anything for me.”

The flush of happiness died out of his face. So then, after all, he only stood on a level with Stacy, the maid, in his goddess’s estimation. He drew just one step nearer to her.

“Juliet,” he said, in low, pained tones, “if you were not so exquisitely, so daintily beautiful, I could find it in my heart to say bitter things to you.”

He was right in his estimation of her beauty. She was lovely, with a grace that might well be called exquisite and dainty. To his fancy, as he stood there facing her, the exquisiteness and daintiness had never been more markedly apparent.

She was dressed in some light summer robe of the palest possible shade of mother-of-pearl green, a shade that threw into vivid relief the delicate colouring of her skin, the warm brown of her hair so tightly coiled around her small head. The upper panes of the window at which she stood were filled in with a mosaic of painted glass, whose varied tints the quivering morning sunlight threw like a changeful rainbow about her light draperies, and on the ground at her feet.

She gave a little sigh.

“I suppose, then, I am to understand that you would rather not be troubled with my requests?” she presently said.

He did not at once reply. He was still feasting his eyes on her loveliness, enjoying the beauty of lines and tints in a manner possible only to an artist or a poet.

“Your name by rights should have been Iris,” he said, at length, under his breath, and almost solemnly.

And forthwith his muse awakened, and began to sing in his ears some wonderful invocation to the rainbow messenger of the gods, which no doubt, in due course, would take its form in the orthodox iambics.

Juliet had to repeat her question before she could get it answered.

“Refuse!” he exclaimed. “Refuse you anything! Talk of the sea refusing to follow the moon before you talk of my refusing request of yours.”

“Oh, but there’s nothing half so complicated as tides and moons about what I want done,” said the girl, with a light laugh. “I only want an advertisement inserted in all the English and Continental papers⁠—all the papers, that is, that ladies and gentlemen would be likely to read.”

The young man looked his astonishment. Then, recollecting the reputation which Juliet and Ida had for careless custody of their brooches and bracelets, asked:

“Is it emeralds or diamonds this time?”

“Neither,” answered Juliet. “And you must not ask me a single question. And, above all, you mustn’t let a single person know⁠—no, not even your own mother⁠—that either you or I have had anything to do with the advertisement. Promise me.”

“I promise a thousand times over. You may rely on me as you might⁠—” He paused a moment, and then added, with as much of sarcastic bitterness as he was capable of levelling at his goddess: “On your maid Stacy.”

“Ah, you don’t know how much that says,” said Juliet, in no wise disconcerted. “Stacy was true as steel, and”⁠—this added with a little laugh⁠—“pliable as whalebone.”

“I’ll try and be the steel and whalebone combined,” he said, taking up his hat, as if ready to depart that very minute.

“Oh, please wait,” she exclaimed; “there’s no such hurry; I don’t want it inserted today, or tomorrow, but on the very day we leave town. I suppose you know that we go to Dering at the beginning of next week?”

Into the dim distance at once vanished all the pleasant meetings with his divinity at balls and theatres, dinners and garden-parties, which he was wont to say were his daily manna while he sojourned in the wilderness.

“Yes, I’ve teased father into it; I knew I should if I persevered. Peggy was furious at first⁠—I knew it, because her manner grew so alarmingly sweet and insinuating; but it was all of no use. I told father that everything had lost its charm since Ida had married, that I was pining for country air, and, finally, that my boxes were packed, and that if they didn’t come with me I should start off by myself. That made them give in at once. I think they had visions of my turning the Hall upside down in their absence, inaugurating tennis-parties without chaperons, and so forth.”

“The beginning of next week!” was all that he could find to say, in a tone almost comic from its overweight of pathos.

“Yes. And the very day we leave town I want my advertisement to appear. Pray, pray don’t forget! It is most important. Yes, I know I haven’t told you yet what the advertisement is to be. I’ll write it down, so that there’ll be no mistake.”

She went to her father’s writing-table, and wrote on the back of an envelope just five words, which she handed to him.

Those five words were:

“Sub signo et sub rosa.”