The Gorgeous Isle

Chapter 13

Lady Hunsdon, having in vain besought the poet to read aloud to a select audience, acted upon the hint he had unwittingly dropped to Anne Percy and organised a charity performance for the benefit of an island recently devastated by earthquake. Warner was visibly out of countenance when gaily reminded by Anne of his careless words, but he could do no less than comply, for the wretched victims were in want of bread. Lady Mary, Miss Bargarny, and several others offered their services. All aristocratic Nevis were invited to contribute their presence and the price of a ticket, and the performance would end with a dance that should outlast the night.

Nevis was in a great flutter of excitement, partly because of the promised ball, for which the military band of St. Kitts was engaged, partly because but a favoured few, and years ago, had heard Byam Warner read. Indeed, his low voice was never heard three yards away, in a drawing-room, although it had frequently made Charlestown ring. He was now on his old footing at the Great Houses. The nobler felt many a pang of conscience that they had permitted a stranger at Bath House to accomplish a work so manifestly their own, while others dared not be stigmatised as provincial, prejudiced, middle-class. If London could afford a superb indifference to the mere social offences of a great poet, well, so could Nevis. They forgot that London had arisen as one man and flung him out, neck and crop. Lady Hunsdon had eclipsed London; rather, for the nonce did she epitomise it. Her gowns came not even from Bond Street. They were confected in Paris. Hers was the most distinguished Tory salon in London. Her son was the golden fish for which all maidens fortunate enough to be within reach of the sacred pond angled. It was whispered that Warner would accompany Hunsdon to London, be a guest in his several stately homes, possibly be returned from one of his numerous boroughs. The poet approached his zenith for the second time.

Curricles, phaetons, gigs, britzskas, barouches, family chaises brought the elect of Nevis, and their guests, from St. Kitts to Bath House a little before nine o’clock; the lowly of Charlestown to the terrace before the ever open windows of the saloon where the performance was to be held. In the friendly bedrooms of the hotel there was a great shaking down of skirts, rearranging of tresses. Miss Medora Ogilvy went straight to Anne’s room, by invitation, and finding it empty, proceeded to beautify herself. Byron had been much in vogue at the time of her birth-was yet, for that matter-and she had been named romantically. But there was little romance in the shrewd brain of Miss Ogilvy. She was well educated and accomplished-like many of her kind she had gone to school in England; she could cook and manage even West Indian servants-her mother was an invalid; and she wished for nothing under heaven but to marry a man of “elegant fortune” and turn her back upon Nevis for ever. She really liked Anne and thought her quite the most admirable girl she had ever met, but she was not of those that deceive themselves, and frankly admitted that the chief attraction of her new friend was her almost constant proximity to Lord Hunsdon.

Miss Ogilvy was petite, with excellent features and slanting black eyes that gave her countenance a slightly Oriental cast. She wore her black hair in smooth bands over her ears, la Victoria, and her complexion was as transparently white as only a West Indian’s can be. To-night she pirouetted before the pier glass with much complacency. She wore a full flowing skirt of pink satin, with little flounces of lace and rosettes on the front, puffed tight sleeves, and a corsage of white illusion, pink bands, flowers, and rosettes. As she settled a wreath of pink rosebuds on her head and wriggled her shoulders still higher above her bodice, she felt disposed to hum a tune. She was but nineteen and Lady Mary was twenty-nine if she was a day.

Anne, who had been assisting Mrs. Nunn’s maid to adjust lavender satin folds and the best point lace shawl, entered at the moment and was greeted with rapture.

“Dearest Miss Percy! What a vision! A Nereid! A Lorelei! You will extinguish us all. Poor Lord Hunsdon. Poor Mr. Warner-ah, ma belle, I have eyes in my head. But what a joy to see you in colour. How does it happen?”

“My aunt insisted while we were in London that I buy one or two coloured gowns. My father has been dead more than a year. I put this on to-night to please her, although I have two white evening gowns.”

She wore green taffeta flowing open in front over a white embroidered muslin slip, and trimmed with white fringe. A sash whose fringed ends hung down in front, girt her small waist. Her arms and neck were bare, but slipping from the shoulders, carelessly held in the fashion of the day, was a white cr pe scarf fringed with green. She wore her hair in the usual bunch of curls on either side of her face, but in a higher knot than usual, and had bound her head with the golden fillet Mrs. Nunn had pressed upon her in London. Depending from it and resting on her forehead, was an oblong emerald; Anne had a few family jewels although she wore no others to-night.

“I vow!” continued Miss Ogilvy, tripping about her, “quite classic! And at the same time such style! Such ton! Madame Lucille made that gown. Am I not right?”

Anne confessed that Madame Celeste had made it.

“Celeste, I meant. How could I be so stupid? But it is two long years since I laid eyes on Bond Street. A humbler person, plain Mrs. Barclay, sends out my gowns. What do you think, dear Miss Percy, shall I look provincial, second-rate, amongst all these lucky people of fashion?”

“You are lovely and your gown is quite perfect,” said Anne warmly, and then the two girls went down-stairs arm in arm, vowing eternal friendship. Miss Ogilvy professed a deep interest in the poet, declared that she had begged her obdurate papa time and again to call upon and reclaim him; and Anne, who now detested Lady Mary, was resolved to further her new friend’s interests with Lord Hunsdon. He joined them at the foot of the staircase and escorted them to a little inner balcony above the saloon. There was no danger of interference from Lady Mary, who was to perform, or from Lady Hunsdon, who occupied the chair of state in the front row.

They were late and looked down upon a brilliant scene. Not even a dowager wore black, and the young women, married and single, were in every hue, primary and intermediate. Almost as many wore their hair la Victoria as in the more becoming curls, for loyalty, so long dead and forgotten, was become the rage since the young Queen had raised the corpse. But they softened the severity of the coiffure with wreaths, and feathers, and fillets, and even coquettish little lace laps, filled with flowers. The men were equally fine in modish coats and satin waistcoats; narrow and severe or deep and ruffled neckties but one degree removed from the stock, or in flowing collars la Byron. Their hair was parted in the middle and puffed out at the side; not a few wore a flat band of whisker that looked like the strap of the condemned. Both Hunsdon and Warner shaved, or Anne would have tolerated neither.

There was a platform at the end of the saloon, with curtains at the back separating it from a small withdrawing-room, and it had been tastefully embellished with rugs, jars of gorgeous flowers, a reading stand, a harp and a piano.

“Who will sway over the harp?” asked Miss Ogilvy humorously.

“Lady Mary. Ah! They are about to begin.”

A fine applause greeted Miss Bargarny, who executed the overture to Semiramide quite as well as it deserved. After the clapping was over and she had obligingly given an encore, she remained at the piano, and Mr. Stewart, a young man with red hair and complexion, in kilts and pink knees, emerged from the curtains, and sang in a thundering voice several of Burns’s tenderest songs. After their final retirement the curtains were drawn apart with much dignity, and Lady Mary stepped forth; a vision, as her severest critics were forced to admit. She was in diaphanous white, with frosted flowers amidst her golden ringlets, a little crown of stars above her brow, and a scarf of silver tissue.

“All she needs is wings!” exclaimed Miss Ogilvy, and added to herself, “may she soon get them!”

Lady Mary, acknowledging the rapturous greeting with a seraphic expression and the grand air, literally floated to the harp, where nothing could have displayed to a greater advantage her long willowy figure, her long white thin arms, the drooping gold of her ringlets. As the golden music tinkled from the tips of her taper fingers-formed for the harp, which may have had somewhat to do with her choice of instrument-her ethereal loveliness swayed in unison, and, one might fancy-if not a rival-emitted a music of its own.

“She doesn’t look a day over twenty!” exclaimed Miss Ogilvy. “Who would dream that she was thirty? But those fragile creatures break all at once. When she does fade she will be even more pass e than most.”

“But women know so many arts nowadays,” said Anne drily. “And she would be the last to ignore them.”

“Ah! no doubt she will hang on till she gets a husband. I never knew anyone to want one so badly.”

“Lady Mary?” asked Hunsdon wonderingly. “I had long since grown to look upon her as a confirmed old maid.”

“La! La! my lord!” Miss Ogilvy suddenly resolved upon a bold stroke. “She’s trying with all her might and main to marry your own most intimate friend.”

“My most intimate friend? He is in England. Nottingdale. Do you know him? Or do you perchance mean Warner?”

“Never heard of the first and it certainly is not the last. Oh, my lord!” And then she laughed so archly that poor Lord Hunsdon could not fail to read her meaning. His fresh coloured face, warm with ascending heat, turned a deep brick red. He felt offended with both Miss Ogilvy and Lady Mary, and edged closer to Anne as if for protection.

This conversation took place while Lady Mary was bowing in response to the plaudits her performance evoked. She tinkled out another selection, and then, with a gently dissenting gesture, the dreaming eyes almost somnambulistic, floated through the curtains.

There was a brief interval for rapturous vocatives and then the curtains were flung apart and Spring burst through, crying,