CHAPTER LV.—ON SHAKESPEARE AND ARCHIE BROWN.

IT was early on the same afternoon that Beatrice Avon received intimation of a visitor—a lady, the butler said, who gave the name of Mrs. Mowbray.

“I do not know any Mrs. Mowbray, but, of course, I’ll see her,” was the reply that Beatrice gave to the inquiry if she were at home.

“Was it possible,” she thought, “that her visitor was the Mrs. Mowbray whose portraits in the character of Cymbeline were in all the illustrated papers?”

Before Beatrice, under the impulse of this thought, had glanced at herself in a mirror—for a girl does not like to appear before a woman of the highest reputation (for beauty) with hair more awry than is consistent with tradition—her mind was set at rest. There may have been many Mrs. Mowbrays in London, but there was only one woman with such a figure, and such a face.

She looked at Beatrice with undisguised interest, but without speaking for some moments. Equally frank was the interest that was apparent on the face of Beatrice, as she went forward to meet and to greet her visitor.

She had heard that Mrs. Mowbray’s set of sables had cost someone—perhaps even Mrs. Mowbray herself—seven hundred guineas.

“Thank you, I will not sit down,” said Mrs. Mowbray. “I feel that I must apologize for this call.”

“Oh, no,” said Beatrice.

“Oh, yes; I should,” said Mrs. Mowbray. “I will do better, however, for I will make my visit a short one. The fact is, Miss Avon, I have heard so much about you during the past few months from—from—several people, I could not help being interested in you—greatly interested indeed.”

“That was very kind of you,” said Beatrice, wondering what further revelation was coming.

“I was so interested in you that I felt I must call upon you. I used to know Lady Innisfail long ago.”

“Was it Lady Innisfail who caused you to be interested in me?” asked Beatrice.

“Well, not exactly,” said Mrs. Mowbray; “but it was some of Lady Innisfail’s guests—some who were entertained at the Irish Castle. I used also to know Mrs. Lampson—Lord Fotheringay’s daughter. How terrible the blow of his death must have been to her and her brother.”

“I have not seen Mrs. Lampson since,” said Beatrice, “but—”

“You have seen the present Lord Fotheringay? Will you let me say that I hope you have seen him—that you still see him? Do not think me a gossiping, prying old woman—I suppose I am old enough to be your mother—for expressing the hope that you will see him, Miss Avon. He is the best man on earth.”

Beatrice had flushed the first moment that her visitor had alluded to Harold. Her flush had not decreased.

“I must decline to speak with you on the subject of Lord Fotheringay, Mrs. Mowbray,” said Beatrice, somewhat unequally.

“Do not say that,” said Mrs. Mowbray, in the most musical of pleading tones. “Do not say that. You would make me feel how very gross has been my effrontery in coming to you.”

“No, no; please do not think that,” cried Beatrice, yielding, as every human being could not but yield, to the lovely voice and the gracious manner of Mrs. Mowbray. What would be resented as a gross piece of insolence on the part of anyone else, seemed delicately gracious coming from Mrs. Mowbray. Her insolence was more acceptable than another woman’s compliment. She knew to what extent she could draw upon her resources, both as regards men and women. It was only in the case of a young cub such as Archie that she now and again overrated her powers of fascination. She knew that she would never pat Archie’s red head again.

“Yes, you will let me speak to you, or I shall feel that you regard my visit as an insolent intrusion.”

Beatrice felt for the first time in her life that she could fully appreciate the fable of the Sirens. She felt herself hypnotized by that mellifluous voice—by the steady sympathetic gaze of the lovely eyes that were resting upon her face.

“He is so fond of you,” Mrs. Mowbray went on. “There is no lover’s quarrel that will not vanish if looked at straight in the face. Let me look at yours, my dear child, and I will show you how that demon of distrust can be exorcised.” Beatrice had become pale. The word distrust had broken the spell of the Siren.

“Mrs. Mowbray,” said she, “I must tell you again that on no consideration—on no pretence whatever shall I discuss Lord Fotheringay with you.”

“Why not with me, my child?” said Mrs. Mowbray. “Because I distrust you—no I don’t mean that. I only mean that—that you have given me no reason to trust you. Why have you come to me in this way, may I ask you? It is not possible that you came here on the suggestion of Lord Fotheringay.”

“No; I only came to see what sort of girl it is that Mr. Airey is going to marry,” said Mrs. Mowbray, with a wicked little smile.

Beatrice was no longer pale. She stood with clenched hands before Mrs. Mowbray, with her eyes fixed upon her face.

Then she took a step toward the bell rope. “One moment,” said Mrs. Mowbray. “Do you expect to marry Edmund Airey?”

Beatrice turned, and looked again at her visitor. If the girl had been less feminine she would have gone on to the bell rope, and have pulled it gently. She did nothing of the sort. She gave a laugh, and said, “I shall marry him if I please.”

She was feminine.

So was Mrs. Mowbray.

“Will you?” she said. “Do you fancy for a moment—are you so infatuated that you can actually fancy that I—I—Gwendoline Mowbray, will allow you—you—to take Edmund Airey away from me? Oh, the child is mad—mad!”

“Do you mean to tell me,” said Beatrice, coming close to her, “that Edmund Airey is—is—a lover of yours?”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Mowbray, smiling, “you do not live in our world, my child.”

“No, I do not,” said Beatrice. “I now see why you have come to me to-day.”

“I told you why.”

“Yes; you told me. Edmund Airey has been your lover.”

“Has been? My child, it is only when I please that a lover of mine becomes associated with a past tense. I have not yet allowed Edmund Airey to associate with my ‘have beens.’ It was from him that I learned all about you. He alluded to you in his letters to me from Ireland merely as ‘a gray eye or so.’ You still mean to marry him?”

“I still mean to do what I please,” said Beatrice. She had now reached the bell rope and she pulled it very gently.

“You are an extremely beautiful young person,” said Mrs. Mowbray. “But you have not been able to keep close to you a man like Harold Wynne—a man with a perfect genius for fidelity. And yet you expect—”

Here the door was opened by the butler. Mrs. Mowbray allowed her sentence to dwindle away into the conventionalities of leave-taking with a stranger.

Beatrice found herself standing with flushed cheeks and throbbing heart at the door through which her visitor had passed.

It was somewhat remarkable that the most vivid impression which she retained of the rather exciting series of scenes in which she had participated, was that Mrs. Mowbray’s sables were incomparably the finest that she had ever seen.

Mrs. Mowbray could scarcely have driven round the great square before the butler inquired if Miss Avon was at home to Miss Innisfail. In another minute Norah Innisfail was embracing her with the warmth of a true-hearted girl who comes to tell another of her engagement to marry an eligible man, or a handsome man, let him be eligible or otherwise.

“I want to be the first to give you the news, my dearest Beatrice,” said Norah. “That is why I came alone. I know you have not heard the news.”

“I hear no news, except about things that do not interest me in the least,” said Beatrice.

“My news concerns myself,” said Norah.

“Then it’s sure to interest me,” cried Beatrice.

“It’s so funny! But yet it’s very serious,” said Norah. “The fact is that I’m going to marry Archie Brown.”

“Archie Brown?” said Beatrice. “I hope he is the best man in the world—he should be, to deserve you, my dear Norah.”

“I thought perhaps you might have known him,” said Norah. “I find that there are a good many people still who do not know Archie Brown, in spite of the Legitimate Theatre and all that he has done for Shakespeare.”

“The Legitimate Theatre. Is that where Mrs. Mowbray acts?”

“Only for another week. Oh, yes, Archie takes a great interest in Shakespeare. He meant the Legitimate Theatre to be a monument to the interest he takes in Shakespeare, and so it would have been, if the people had only attended properly, as they should have done. Archie is very much disappointed, of course; but he says, very rightly, that the Lord Chamberlain isn’t nearly particular enough in the plays that he allows to be represented, and so the public have lost confidence in the theatres—they are never sure that something objectionable will not be played—and go to the Music Halls, which can always be trusted. Archie says he’ll turn the Legitimate into a Music Hall—that is, if he can’t sell the lease.”

“Whether he does so or not, I congratulate you with all my heart, my dearest Norah.”

“If you had come down to Abbeylands in time—before that awful thing happened—you would have met Archie. We met him there. Mamma took a great fancy to him at once, and I think that I must have done the same. At any rate I did when he came to stay with us. He’s such a good fellow, with red hair—not the sort that the old Venetian painters liked, but another sort. Strictly speaking some of his features—his mouth, for instance—are too large, but if you look at him in one position, when he has his face turned away from you, he’s quite—quite—ah—quite curious—almost nice. You’ll like him, I know.”

“I’m sure of it,” said Beatrice.

“Yes; and he’s such a friend of Harold Wynne’s,” continued the artful Norah. “Why, what’s the matter with you, Beatrice? You are as pale—dearest Beatrice, you and I were always good friends. You know that I always liked Harold.”

“Do not talk about him, Norah.”

“Why should I not talk about him? Tell me that.”

“He is gone—gone away.”

“Not he. He’s too wretched to go away anywhere. Archie was with him to-day, and when he heard that—well, the way some people are talking about you and Mr. Airey, he had not a word to throw to a dog—Archie told me so.”

“Oh, do not talk of him, Norah.”

“Why should I not?”

“Because—ah, because he’s the only one worth talking about, and now he’s gone from me, and I’ll never see him again—never, never again!” Before she had come to the end of her sentence, Beatrice was lying sobbing on the unsympathetic cushion of the sofa—the same cushion that had absorbed her tears when she had told Harold to leave her.

“My dearest Beatrice,” whispered Norah, kneeling beside her, with her face also down a spare corner of the cushion, “I have known how you were moping here alone. I’ve come to take you away. You’ll come down with us to our place at Netherford. There’s a lake with ice on it, and there’s Archie, and many other pretty things. Oh, yes, you’ll come, and we’ll all be happy.”

“Norah,” cried Beatrice, starting up almost wildly, “Mr. Airey will be here in half an hour to ask me to marry him. He wrote to say that he would be here, and I know what he means.” Mr. Airey did call in half an hour, and he found Beatrice—as he felt certain she should—waiting to receive him, wearing a frock that he admired, and lace that he approved of.

But in the meantime Beatrice and Norah had had a few words together beyond those just recorded.