Gloria Mundi. Frederic Harold
his slender shoulders, and turned with resolution to his book.
A minute later the impossibility of the situation had mastered every fiber of his brain. He put down the volume, feeling himself to be a fool for doing so, yet suffering himself with an unheard-of gladness.
“If I anger you, I shall be much pained,” he said, with a set face turned not quite toward her, and a voice that he kept from breaking by constant effort, “but I am going to England for the first time, and there are some things that I am very anxious to ask about.”
She seemed to reflect a little before she lifted her head. Now again he was priviledged to look squarely into her face, and he added swiftly to his store a new impression of her. The ruling characteristic of the countenance was a certain calm and serious reasonableness. The forehead was broad and comely; the glance of the eyes was at once alert and steady. The other features were content to support this controlling upper part of the face; they made a graceful and fitting frame for the mind which revealed itself in the eyes and brow—and sought to do no more. Studying her afresh in this moment of her silence, he recalled the face of a young Piedmontese bishop who had come once to his school. It had the same episcopal serenity, the same wistful pride in youth’s conquest of the things immortal, the same suggestion of intellectuality in its clear pallor.
“I should dislike to seem rude,” she said, slowly. “What is it that you want to ask?” What was it indeed? He searched confusedly about in his mind for some one question entitled to precedence among the thousand to which answers would come in good time. He found nothing better than a query as to the connection between New Haven and Brighton.
“In this little book,” he explained, “there is a time for New Haven and for London, but I cannot find a mention of Brighton, yet I am expected there this evening, or perhaps, early to-morrow morning.”
“I am sure I cannot tell you,’” she answered. “However, the places are not far apart. I should say there would certainly be trains.”
She lifted the book again as she spoke, and adjusted her shoulders to the cushions. He made haste to prevent the interview from lapsing.
“I have never seen England,” he urged dolefully, “and yet I am all English in my blood—and in my feelings, too.”
A flicker of ironical perception played for an instant in her eye and at the corner of her lip. “I have heard that a certain class of Americans adopt that pose,” she remarked. “I dare say it is all right.”
He did not grasp her meaning all at once, though the willingness to give umbrage conveyed in her tone was clear enough. He looked doubtfully at her, before he spoke again. “Oh,” he began, with hesitation—“yes, I see—you thought I was American. I am not in the least—I am all English. And it affects me very much—this thought that in a few hours now I am to see the real England. I am so excited about it, in fact,” he added with a deprecatory little laugh, “that I couldn’t bear it not to talk.”
She nodded comprehendingly. “I thought that your accent must be American—since it certainly isn’t English.”
“Oh, I have too facile an ear,” he answered readily, as if the subject were by no means new to him. “I pick up every accent that I hear. I have been much with English people, but even more with Americans and Australians. I always talk like the last family I have been in—until I enter another. I am by profession a private tutor—principally in languages—and so I know my failings in this matter very well.” She smiled at some passing retrospect. “You must have had an especially complete sense of my shortcomings as a linguist, too. I have often wondered what effect my French would produce upon an actual professor, but I should never have had the courage to experiment, if I had known.”
He waved his hand—a pale hand with veined, thin, nervous fingers, which she looked at in its foreign gesture. “Too much importance is attached to languages,” he declared. “It is the cheapest and most trivial of acquirements, if it stands alone, or if it is not put to high uses. Parents have so often angered me over this: they do not care what is in their children’s minds and hearts, but only for the polish and form of what is on their tongues. I have a different feeling about education.”
She nodded again, and laid the book aside. “You are coming to a country where everything will shock you, then,” she said. “I would rather do scullery work, or break stones by the roadside, than be a schoolteacher in England.”
“Oh, it’s the same everywhere,” he urged. “I would not think that the English were worse than the others. They are different, that is all. Besides, I do not think I shall be a teacher in England. Of course, I speak in the dark; for a few hours yet everything is uncertain. But as the old American senator at Monte Carlo used to say, ‘I feel it in my bones’ that I will not have to teach any more.”
The expression of her face seemed somehow not to invite autobiography at the moment. “The prospect of not having to work any more for one’s living,” she mused at him—“how curiously fascinating it always is! We know perfectly well that it is good for us to work, and that we should be woefully unhappy if we did not work, and yet we are forever charming our imagination with a vision of complete idleness.”
“I would not be idle!” the young man broke forth, enthusiastically. He leaned forward in his seat, and spoke with eager hands as well as words against the noise that filled the swaying carriage. “I have that same feeling—the longing to escape from the dull and foolish tasks I have to do—but I never say to myself that I would be idle. There are such a host of things to do in the world that are worth doing! But the men who have the time and the money, who are in the position to do these things—how is it, I ask myself, that they never think of doing them? It is the greatest of marvels to me. Then sometimes I wonder, if the chance and the power came to me, whether I also would sit down, and fold my hands, and do nothing. It is hard to say; who can be sure what is in him till he has been tested? Yet I like to think that I would prove the exception. It is only natural,” he concluded, smilingly, “that one should try to think as well as possible of oneself.”
The young lady surveyed his nervous, mobile face with thoughtful impassivity. “You seem to think, one way or another, a good deal about yourself,” she remarked.
He bowed to her, with a certain exaggeration in his show of quite sincere humility which, she said to herself, had not been learned from his English-speaking connections.
“What you say is very true,” he admitted with candor. “It is my fault—my failing. I know it only too well.”
“My fault is bad manners,” she replied, disarmed by his self-abasement. “I had no business to say it at all.”
“Oh, no,” he urged. “It is delightful to me that you did say it. I could not begin to tell you how good your words sounded in my ears. Honest and wise criticism is what I have not heard before in years. You do not get it in the South; there is flattery for you, and sneering, and praise as much too high as blame is too cruel—but no candid, quiet judgments. Oh, I loved to hear you say that! It was like my brother—my older brother Salvator. He is in America now. He is the only one who always said the truth to me. And I am glad, too, because—because it makes you seem like a friend to me, and I have been so agitated this whole week, so anxious and upset, and all without a soul to talk to, or advise with—and the pressure on me has been so great——”
He let the wandering sentence lose itself in the clamor of the train, and put the rest of his meaning into the glance with which he clung to hers. The appeal for sympathetic kindliness of treatment glowed in his eyes and shone upon his eager face.
She took time for her answer, and when she spoke it was hardly in direct reply. “Your business in England,” she said, as unconcernedly as might be—“it is that, I take it, which causes so much anxiety. Fortunately it is soon to be settled—to-morrow, I think you said.”
“I wish I might tell you about it,” he responded with frank fervency. “I wish it—you cannot imagine how much!”
The look with