CHAPTER XIX

THE NEW GOVERNESS

None of the little household at Mallory Grange, Lord St. Maurice's Norfolk seat, ever forgot Margharita's first appearance among them. She came late in the afternoon, and was shown into Lady St. Maurice's own little sitting room, without the ceremony of an announcement. Lady St. Maurice had many kind words ready to say, but the sight of the figure who crossed the threshold, and came out of the dusk toward the center of the room, struck her dumb. She stood up for a moment perfectly silent, with her hand pressed to her side. Such a likeness was marvelous. In this girl's proud, dark face she could recall Leonardo's features one by one. The air seemed suddenly full of voices, sobbing and cursing and threatening. Then she came to herself, and held out her hand—forced her lips even to wear a kindly welcoming smile.

"I am so glad to have you here, Margharita," she said. "Do you know that your likeness to your mother—and her family—has startled me. It is wonderful."

"It is very nice to hear you say so," the girl answered, taking the chair which, at Lady St. Maurice's motion, a servant had wheeled up to the fire. "I like to think of myself as belonging altogether to my mother and her people. I have been very unhappy with my father's relations."

"I am only sorry that you remained with them so long," Lady St. Maurice said. "Let me give you some tea, and then you must tell me why you never wrote to me before."

"Because I made up my mind to bear it as long as I was able," she answered. "I have done so. It was impossible for me to remain there any longer, and I determined to take my life into my own hands, and, if necessary, find a situation. I wrote first to you, and you have been kind enough to engage me."

To Lady St. Maurice, who was a woman of genial manners and kindly disposition, there seemed to be a curious hardness in the girl's tone and mode of expressing herself. She had avoided the kiss with which she had been prepared to greet her, and had shaken hands in the most matter-of-fact way. This last phrase, too, was a little ungracious.

"Engage you! I hope you are not going to look upon our little arrangement in that light," Lady St. Maurice said pleasantly. "For your mother's sake, Margharita, I should have been only too glad to have welcomed you here at any time as my daughter, and I hope that when we know one another better, you will not be quite so independent. Don't be afraid," she added, "you shall have your own way at first. Some day I hope that you will come round to mine."

Margharita sipped her tea quietly, and made no reply; but in the firelight her dark eyes glowed softly and brightly, and Lady St. Maurice was quite satisfied with her silence. For a few moments neither of them spoke. Then Lady St. Maurice leaned back in her chair, away from the firelight, and asked a question.

"Did you know that the Count di Marioni, your uncle, was in London?"

"I knew that he had been there," Margharita answered in a low tone.

"Had been! Has he gone away?"

"I suppose so," the girl continued, looking steadily at her questioner. "Yesterday I called to see him at a hotel in Piccadilly, and they told me that he had left that morning for abroad. I was sorry to be too late."

"Yes."

Lady St. Maurice asked no more. The dark eyes seemed to be trying to pierce the dusk between them, and read her face. She turned the conversation, and asked a few questions about the journey. Afterward would be time enough to find out how much this girl knew.

Soon Lord St. Maurice came in from shooting, wet to the skin, and stood by the fire, drinking his tea and talking pleasantly to Margharita and his wife. She talked more readily to him than to Lady St. Maurice, but in the middle of the conversation she checked herself and stood up.

"I am tired," she said abruptly. "May I go to my room?"

Lady St. Maurice took her away herself, and showed her the suite which had been prepared for her. There was a bedroom, a daintily furnished little sitting room, and a bath room, all looking out upon the sea. A bright fire had been lit in both the rooms, and bowls of flowers and many little feminine trifles helped to unite comfort to undoubted luxury. Margharita went from one to the other without remark.

"These are far too nice," she said simply, when Lady St. Maurice turned to go. "I have not been used to such luxury."

Lady St. Maurice left her with a sigh, and went downstairs. She had hoped to see the cold proud face relax a little at the many signs of thought in the preparations which had been made for her, and she was disappointed. She entered her sitting room thoughtfully, and went up to her husband.

"Geoffrey, she is horribly like him."

"If poor Marioni had had this girl's looks I should have felt more jealous," he answered lightly. "I'm almost sorry Lumley is here."

She shook her head.

"She is beautiful, but I don't think Lumley will admire her. He places expression before everything, and this girl has none. She must have been very unhappy, I think, or else she is very heartless!"

He stood with his back to the fire, twisting his mustache and warming himself.

"The fact is," he remarked, "you're disappointed because she didn't jump into your arms and cry a little, and all that sort of thing. Now, I respect the girl for it; for I think she was acting under constraint. Give her time, Adrienne, and I think you'll find her sympathetic enough. And as to the expression—well, I may be mistaken, but I should say that she had a sweeter one than most women, although we haven't seen it yet. Give her time, Adrienne. Don't hurry her."

It was two hours before they saw her again, and then she came into the drawing room just as the dinner gong was going. Neither of them had seen her save by the dim light of a single lamp, and even then she had been wrapped in a long traveling coat; and so, although Lord St. Maurice had called her beautiful, they were neither of them prepared to see her quite as she was. She wore a plain black net dinner gown, curving only slightly downward at the white throat, the somberness of which was partially relieved by an amber foundation. She had no jewelry of any sort, nor any flowers, and she carried only a tiny lace handkerchief in her left hand. But she had no need of a toilet or of adornment. That proud, exquisitely graceful carriage, which only race can give, was the dowry of her descent from one of the ancient families of Southern Europe; but the beauty of her face was nature's gift alone. It was beauty of the best and purest French type—the beauty of the aristocrats of the court of Louis the Fourteenth. The luxurious black hair was parted in the middle, and raised slightly over the temples, showing a high but delicately arched forehead. Her complexion was dazzling in its purity, but colorless. There was none of the harshness of the Sicilian type in her features, or in the lines of her figure. The severest critic of feminine beauty could have asked only for a slightly relaxed mouth, and a touch of humanity in her dark, still eyes; and even he, knowing that the great joys of womanhood—the joys of loving and being loved—were as yet untasted by her, would have held his peace, murmuring, perhaps, that the days of miracles were not yet passed, and a daughter of Diana had appeared upon the earth.

The little group, to whom her entrance was something like a thunderbolt, consisted only of Lord and Lady St. Maurice, and their son, Lord Lumley. He, although his surprise was the greatest, was the first to recover from it.

"I am happy to meet you in proper form, Miss Briscoe," he said, bowing, and then looking into her face with a humorous light in his eyes. "I was afraid that I should never have the opportunity of telling you that those fellows met with, at any rate, a part of what they deserved. I saw them locked up."

She looked at him for a moment with slightly arched eyebrows, and then suddenly smiled.

"Oh! is it really you?" she exclaimed, holding out her hand, which she had not previously offered. "I am so glad. I was afraid that I should never have the opportunity to thank you for your kindness."

"You have met Lumley before, then?" asked Lady St. Maurice, wondering.

"Scarcely so much as that," he answered, laughing. "Don't you remember my telling you of my adventure in Piccadilly, mother?"

"Yes, I remember. Do you mean that the young lady was really Margharita?"

She looked at him, and he colored slightly. For the first time he remembered how enthusiastically he had spoken of the girl whom he had assisted, and Lady St. Maurice remembered, too, that for several days afterward he had been silent and distrait. She could not fail to remember it, for it was the first time she had ever heard Lumley admire a girl in such terms.

"Yes, it was Miss Briscoe," he answered, keeping his head turned away from his mother.

"It was indeed I," she admitted. "I don't know what I should have done, but for your help, Lord Lumley. I am afraid that I should have screamed and made a scene."

"I can't imagine your doing it!" he remarked truthfully.

"Perhaps not! But I was so surprised, I could not understand it."

"May I remind you that I am completely in the dark as to this little adventure," Lord St. Maurice remarked pleasantly. "What was it, Lumley?"

"A very simple affair after all. I was in Piccadilly, and Miss Briscoe here was coming out of some milliner's shop and crossing the pavement to her carriage."

"Cab!" she interrupted.

"Cab, then. Well, it was late in the afternoon, and two drunken little cads tried to speak to her. Naturally, as I was the nearest decent person, I interfered and assisted Miss Briscoe into her cab. That I was passing was a piece of good fortune for which I have always been thankful."

"Lord Lumley does not add that his interference consisted in knocking one man down and holding the other until he almost choked with one hand, while he helped me into the cab with the other."

"I only shook him a little," he laughed, giving his mother his arm, for the butler had announced dinner while they had been talking. "If I had been he I would rather have had the shaking than the look Miss Briscoe flashed at him."

"I detest being touched," she said coldly, "especially by a stranger."

"How did the affair end?" Lord St. Maurice asked, sipping his soup. "I hope you got them locked up, Lumley."

"Why, the termination of the affair was the part on which I do really congratulate myself," he answered. "A policeman came up at once, but before I could give them in charge—in which case I should, of course, have been called upon to prosecute and got generally mixed up in the affair—one of the fellows began thumping the policeman; so of course he collared them and marched them off. I slipped away, and I noticed the next morning that they got pretty heavily fined for assaulting a policeman in the execution of his duty."

"A satisfactory ending to a most unpleasant affair," Lord St. Maurice remarked.

During dinner Lord Lumley devoted himself to their guest, but for a long time the burden of the conversation lay altogether upon his shoulders. It was not until he chanced to mention the National Gallery, in connection with the season's exhibition of pictures, that Margharita abandoned her monosyllabic answers and generally reserved demeanor. He saw at once that he had struck the right note, and he followed it up with tact. He was fresh from a tour among the galleries of southern Europe and Holland, and he himself was no mean artist. But Margharita, he soon found, knew nothing of recent art. She was hopelessly out of date. She knew nothing of the modern cant, of the nineteenth century philistinism, at which it was so much the fashion to scoff. She had not caught the froth of the afternoon talk at fashionable studios, and, having jumbled it together in the popular fashion, she was not prepared to set forth her views on art in somebody else's pet phrases. Lord Lumley had met that sort of young lady, and had shunned her. Margharita had simply acquired from a hurried visit to Italy, when she was quite young, a dim but vast appreciation of the soul of the great masters. She could not have defined art, nor could she have expressed in a few nicely-rounded sentences her opinion of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, or of the genius of Pico della Mirandola. But she felt that a great world lay beyond a larger knowledge and understanding of these things, and some day she hoped, after time, and thought, and study, to enter it.

And Lord Lumley, reading her thoughts with a keen and intuitive sympathy, talked to her that night at dinner and afterward in a corner of the perfumed rose-lit drawing room, as no man had ever talked to her before—talked to her so earnestly, and with so much effect, that Lady St. Maurice rose from her writing table at the other end of the room, watched them with pale and troubled face, and more than once made some faint effort to disturb them. He showed her the systems and manner of thought by which the dimly-felt, wondering admiration of the uncultured, yet sensitive, mind can develop into the large and soul-felt appreciation of the artist. It was the keys of her promised land which he held out to her with winning speech and a kindliness to which she was unaccustomed. He was young himself, but he had all the advantages of correct training, of travel, and of delicate artistic sensibilities. He had taught himself much, and fresh from the task of learning, he had all the best enthusiasm of the teacher. He had told himself that he, too, like the Athenians, worshiped beauty, but never in his life had he seen anything so beautiful as Margharita's face as she listened to him. Spiritual life seemed to have been poured into a piece of beautiful imagery. Her lips were parted and her dark eyes were softened. It was the face of a St. Cecilia. How long before it would become the face of a woman!

It was Lord St. Maurice's arrival which dissolved the spell. He had missed his after-dinner cigar and chat with Lumley, and directly he entered the drawing room he saw the cause. Adrienne's eyes and his met. A little annoyed by his son's defection he did not hesitate to act.

"Miss Briscoe, are you too tired, or may we ask for a little music?" he said, walking up to the pair.

She looked up, frowning a little at the interruption. Then a swift recollection of her position came to her, and the light died out of her face. She rose at once.

"I shall be pleased to do what I can. I sing a little, but I play badly."

She affected not to notice Lord St Maurice's arm, but crossed the room by his side toward the piano. He opened it, arranged the stool, and remained standing there.

She struck a few minor chords, and suddenly the room seemed full of a sad, plaintive music rising gradually to a higher pitch, and then dying away as her voice took up the melody and carried it on. Lady St. Maurice held her hand to her side for a moment, and her husband frowned. It was a Sicilian love song which she was singing; the song of a peasant whose bride lies dead by his side, the victim of another's jealousy. Adrienne had heard it often in the old days, and the beautiful wild music which rang in their ears was full of memories to her. It closed abruptly, and only Lumley, with an unusual sparkle in his eyes, found words to thank her.

"Are all your songs sad ones, Miss Briscoe?" Lord St. Maurice asked abruptly. "Can't you offer us something in the shape of an antidote?"

She sat down at the piano again.

"I do not know anything gay," she said. "I can only sing what I feel. I will play something."

She dashed off into a light Hungarian dance, full of verve and sparkle, and Lord St. Maurice kept time with his foot, smiling approvingly. Directly it was over she closed the piano and turned to Lady St. Maurice.

"If I may I should be glad to go to my room now," she said. "I had no idea it was so late."

Lumley held the door open for her, and felt unreasonably disappointed because she passed out with a slight inclination of the head, but without looking at him. Then he turned back into the room, and they all three looked at one another for a moment.

"She is marvelously handsome," Lord St. Maurice pronounced.

"Marvelously!" his son echoed softly.

But Lady St. Maurice said nothing.