The Convert. Elizabeth Robins
the easy supporting and enfolding of the childish figure. The little girl was absorbed in the necklace after her strenuous hour; the boy, content for a moment, having gained his point, just to lie at his ease; the woman rested her cheek on his ruffled hair and looked straight before her.
As she sat there holding him, something came into her face, guiltless though it was of any traceable change, without the verifiable movement of a muscle, something none the less that would have minded the beholder uneasily to search the eyes for tears, and, finding no tears there, to feel no greater sense of reassurance.
So motionless she sat that presently the child turned up his rosy face, and seeing the brooding look, it was plain he had the sense of being somehow left behind. He put up his hand to her cheek, and rubbed it softly with his own.
'I don't like you like that. Tell me about——'
'Like what?' said the lady.
'Like—I don't know.' Then, with a sudden inspiration, 'Uncle Ronald says you're like the Sphinx. Who are they?'
'Who are who?'
'Why, the Sfinks. Have they got a boy? Is the little Sfink as old as me? Oh, you only laugh, just like Uncle Ronald. He asked us why we liked you, and we told him.'
'You've never told me.'
'Oh, didn't we? Well, it's because you aren't beady.'
'Beady?'
'Yes. We hate all beady ladies, don't we, Sara?'
'Yes; but it's my turn.' However, she said it half-heartedly as she stopped drawing the shining jewels lightly through her slim fingers, and began gently to swing the fleur-de-lys back and forth like a pendulum that glanced bewitchingly in the light.
Miss Levering knew that the next phase would be to try it on, but for the moment Sara had still half an ear for general conversation.
'We hate them to have hard things on their shoulders!' Cecil explained.
'On their shoulders?' Miss Levering asked.
'Here, just in the way of our heads.'
'Yes, bead-trimming on their dresses,' explained the little girl.
'Hard stuff that scratches when they hold you tight.' Cecil cuddled his impudent round face luxuriously on the soft lace-covered shoulder of the visitor, and laughed up in her face.
'Aunts are very beady,' said Sara, absent-mindedly, as she tried the effect of the glitter against her night-gown.
'Grandmothers are worse,' amended Cecil. 'They're beady and bu-gly, too.'
'What's bewgly?'
'Well, it's what my grandmother called them when I pulled some of them off. Not proper bugles, you know, what you "too! too! too!" make music with when you're fighting the enemy. My grandmother thinks bugles are little shiny black things only about that long'—he measured less than an inch on his minute forefinger—'with long holes through so they can sew them on their clothes.'
'On their caps, too,' said Sara; 'only they're usurally white when they're on caps.'
'Here's your mother coming! Now, what will she say to you, Cecil?'
They turned their eyes to the door, strangely unwelcoming for Laura Tunbridge's children, and their young faces betrayed no surprise when the very different figure of Nurse Dampney emerged from behind the tall chintz screen that protected the cots from any draught through the opening door. Cecil, with an action of settled despair, turned from the spectacle, and buried his face for one last moment of comfort in Vida Levering's shoulder; while Sara, with a baleful glance, muttered—
'I knew it was that old interfiddler.'
'Now, Master Cecil——'
'Yes, nurse.' Miss Levering carried him back to his cot.
'Mrs. Tunbridge has sent up, miss, to know if you've come. They're waiting dinner.'
'Not really! Is it a quarter past already?'
'More like twenty minutes, miss.'
The lady caught up her necklace, cut short her good-byes, and fled downstairs, clasping the shining thing round her neck as she went—a swaying figure in soft flying draperies and gleaming, upraised arms.
She entered the drawing-room with a quiet deliberation greater even than common. It was the effect that haste and contrition frequently wrought in her—one of the things that made folk call her 'too self-contained,' even 'a trifle supercilious.'
But when other young women, recognizing some not easily definable charm in this new-comer into London life, tried to copy the effect alluded to, it was found to be less imitable than it looked.
CHAPTER II
There were already a dozen or so persons in the gold-and-white drawing-room, yet the moment Vida Levering entered, she knew from the questing glance Mrs. Freddy sent past her children's visitor, that even now the party was not complete.
Other eyes turned that way as the servant announced 'Miss Levering.' It is seldom that in this particular stratum of London life anything so uncontrolled and uncontrollable as a 'sensation' is permitted to chequer the even distribution of subdued good humour that reigns so modestly in the drawing-rooms of the Tunbridge world. If any one is so ill-advised as to bring to these gatherings anything resembling a sensation, even if it is of the less challengeable sort of striking personal beauty, the general aim of the company is to pretend either that they see nothing unusual in the conjunction, or that they, for their part, are impervious to such impacts. Vida Levering's beauty was not strictly of the éclatant type. If it did—as could not be denied—arrest the eye, its refusal to let attention go was mitigated by something in the quietness, the disarming softness, with which the hold was maintained. Men making her acquaintance frequently went through four distinct phases in their feeling about her. The first was the common natural one, the instant stirring of the pulses that beauty of any sort produces in persons having the eye that sees. The second stage was a rousing of the instinct to be 'on guard,' which feminine beauty not infrequently breeds in the breasts of men. Not on guard so much against the thing itself, or even against ready submission to it, but against allowing onlookers to be witness of such submission. Even the very young man knows either by experience or hearsay, that women have concentrated upon their faculty for turning this particular weapon to account, all the skill they would have divided among other resources had there been others. Yet the charm is something too delicious even to desire to escape from—the impulse centres in a determination to seem untouched, immune.
The third stage in this declension from pleasure through caution to reassurance is induced by something so gentle, so unemphatic in the Vida Levering aspect, so much what the man thinks 'feminine,' that even the wariest male is reassured. He comes to be almost as easy before this particular type of allurement as he would be with the frankly plain 'good sort'; only there is all about him the exquisite aroma of a subtle charm which he may almost persuade himself that he alone perceives, since this softly gracious creature seems so little to insist upon it—seems, indeed, to be herself unaware of its presence. Whereupon the man conceives a new idea of his own perspicacity in detecting a thing at once so agreeable and so little advertised. He may, with a woman of this kind, go long upon the third 'tack'—may, indeed, never know it was she who gently 'shunted' him, still unenlightened, and left him side-tracked, but cherishing to the end of time the soothing conviction that he 'might an' if he would.' To the more robust order of man will come a day of awakening, when he rubs his eyes and retreats hurriedly with a sense of good faith injured—nay, of hopes positively betrayed. If she were 'that sort,' why not hang out some signal? It wasn't playing fair.
And so without anything so crude as a sensation, but with a retinue of covert looks following in her train, she made