CHAPTER VI
When some time in July, Mrs. Carroll told me that she had invited her nephew and niece, Gerald and Katherine Dale, to come on a visit to Derryaghy, I became at once very curious to see them. I had never even heard of them before, and now I learned such interesting items as that they lived in London, were twins, and about my own age, or perhaps a year older. Mrs. Carroll could not remember. They arrived at the end of the month, and that night I went to dinner to meet them. As it happened, I was late. My watch had stopped for a half an hour or so in the afternoon, and then gone on again, an annoying and foolish trick it occasionally played me. I was told they were already in the dining room, but that dinner had only begun. The prospect of meeting strangers always produced in me an unconquerable shyness, and, to-night, partly because I was late, and partly because these particular strangers were so nearly my own age, my shyness was doubled. I did not look at either of them as I entered the room where, through daylight had not yet quite failed, two softly shaded lamps burned, amid a profusion of flowers, upon the white and silver table. I shook hands with my hostess and with Miss Dick, mumbling out apologies, and had begun a lengthy and involved description of the cause of my delay, when Mrs. Carroll cut me short by introducing me to the Dales. I shook hands with one and bowed to the other, blushing and incapable of finding a word. I should never have guessed they were even brother and sister, let alone twins, for in appearance they were utterly unlike. Katherine pleased me. She was fresh and bright and attractive; I even thought her beautiful, for there was something of the open air about her, something of nature. At any rate she gave me that impression; her beauty had a kind of grave simplicity; and, if I had been a poet, and had been describing her, all my similes would have been taken from nature, from open hill-sides, from the wind and the sky. As I sat down beside her, her clear, dark, very blue eyes rested on me frankly, and with that she suddenly set me puzzling over where I had seen her before, or whom she reminded me of. I kept glancing at her furtively, but, seen in profile, her face was no longer suggestive, and I decided I had made a mistake. She appeared to me friendly and candid and unaffected, but I doubted if she were clever. Her brother, on the other hand, probably was clever. I did not take to him, he was smaller than she, thin and brown and subtle; also he had a way of looking at you that made you want to ask him what it was he found amusing.
"Peter will be able to show you everything, and take you everywhere," Mrs. Carroll explained, comprehensively, and then Katherine asked me if I played golf.
I answered, "No," and felt ashamed. I went on to prove that it was not my fault, that my father had refused to allow me to join the club, but at that point I caught Gerald's eyes watching me with an expression of interest, and I suddenly blushed. "Do you play!" I asked him aggressively.
He seemed surprised. His glance just brushed mine and rested on a picture above my head. "No." he answered quietly.
"Gerald is studying music abroad," said Mrs. Carroll, "at Vienna, where I don’t suppose they have ever heard of golf, He is going to be a musician,"
"How interesting!" exclaimed Miss Dick. "Fancy, Vienna!"
Miss Dick was Mrs. Carroll's companion, and was even, in some distant way, related to her. Her family, however, had fallen on evil days, and she was permanently settled at Derryaghy. She was a gushing, fussy, kindly creature, with a minimum allowance of brains, but overflowing with good intentions and amazingly loyal in her affections, though these latter, I must add, had never been bestowed upon me. I took Mrs. Carroll’s word for it that she had once been very pretty, but now her thinness, accentuating a peculiar type of feature, gave her an absurd resemblance to a lean and restless fowl. I noticed that she had attired herself to-night as for a striking festival. She was a person liable to these unexpected changes in the degree of her brilliancy, which at present was positively dazzling. She began to ask about Vienna, and expressed a deep regret at never having visited that city.
"We have had the piano specially tuned for you," said Mrs. Carroll to Gerald.
"Oh you shouldn’t have bothered," he answered.
"You evidently don’t know what it was like before!" I began, and then stopped short. Nobody took any notice.
Miss Dick, who seemed determined, cost what it might, to keep the conversation on the subject of music, mentioned that her mother had heard Patti in "La Sonnambula," and how, when that great prima donna had paused in the middle of the opera to sing "Home Sweet Home," the entire house had risen to its feet with enthusiasm. "It has always seemed to me that music is the most perfect of the arts," she added, fixing her lace collar.
"Painting is the most perfect of the arts," I contradicted. Somehow, when they were uttered, all my remarks sounded unhappy, not to say rude, though I was only trying to be agreeable. Miss Dick accentuated this last one by helping herself to potatoes in significant silence. "You can look at a picture oftener than you can read a book," I went on, addressing Gerald, "and oftener than you can listen to a piece of music."
"I daresay," he answered, and I resented his politeness. "Why can't he stand up for his own business?" I thought.
I glanced at Katherine, and wanted to say something pleasant to her, but that was apparently beyond my power. My solitary "No," in answer to her question about golf, had been the one word I had so far addressed to her. I relapsed into silence and did not speak again till dinner was over.
When we went to the drawing-room it looked as if we were going to have a musical evening, for Miss Dick sat down at the piano with all the air of a person opening a concert. She played an arrangement of something or other, by Thalberg. All Miss Dick's pieces were arrangements, except those that were fantasias, and it was a feature of them that the beginning of the end could be heard about a couple of pages off, in a series of frantic rushes and arpeggios. She played now with a fierce concentration on the task to be accomplished; her face getting redder as Thalberg became more surprising; her mouth screwed up slightly at the right corner, through which just the tip of her tongue was visible; her eyes glaring, devouring the sheet of music before her, at which every now and then she made a frantic grab with her left hand, to turn the page—she would never allow anybody to turn for her.
When she had struck the last note, to which she indeed gave an astonishing rap, there was a general sigh, as for a danger evaded.
"My dear, I don't know how you do it!" Mrs. Carroll murmured, almost as breathless as the performer.
"It does take it out of one," Miss Dick panted complacently.
Gerald sat looking on with a barely perceptible smile.
"Won't you play something now?" Miss Dick said to him.
His eyebrows twitched slightly. "Not just yet, I think. In a little. I want to smoke a cigarette first." He passed out on to the terrace, and we all gazed after him. When he thought, I suppose, that the echoes awakened by Miss Dick had had time to subside, he came back, and began to fiddle with the music-stool, screwing it up and down. Yet when he did commence to play, after many preliminaries, it was in a broken fragmentary fashion, beginning things and suddenly dropping them after a few bars. I was prepared not to like him, but he had not struck more than a note or two when I knew I had never heard the piano really played before. In spite of myself I felt the dislike I had conceived for him slipping away, and then, just as I was commencing to enjoy myself, he stopped abruptly. He got up and walked over to the window where I sat.
"You haven't altered, Gerald," said Mrs. Carroll dryly.
"Do you mean my playing, Aunt?" he asked sweetly. "It is supposed to have got rather better, but I am sure you are right."
Mrs. Carroll gave something as nearly resembling a sniff as she could give. I saw she was not in love with her nephew; but Miss Dick's cat jumped on to his knee and he began to stroke it. There was something in his extreme self-possession which, though I knew it to be based on a profound sense of superiority to everybody present, I could not help admiring, just as I could not help admiring his playing, or, for that matter, his personal beauty, which was striking. And I admired the way he was dressed. While remaining quite conventional, it managed to suggest individuality, and its perfect taste, apparent in the slightest details, gave him, as he sat there, something of the finish, of the harmony and tone, of an old portrait. Again his glance met mine. I believe he knew I had been watching him, and perhaps something of what I had been thinking, and I turned away abruptly. Miss Dick, who had taken a great fancy to him, begged him to play again. He refused, yet a moment later he said, speaking so that nobody but I could hear him, "Would you like me to?"
"Not in the least," I answered rudely. Rather ashamed of myself I got up, crossed the room, and boldly took possession of a chair beside his sister. But with that my boldness ended, and I could think of nothing to say. I had not even sufficient courage to look her in the face, and the fact that I had so deliberately come to sit beside her only to maintain a fixed and gloomy silence made me feel ridiculous.
"Do you play golf?" I stammered out at last, the inanity of my remark only striking me after it had left my lips. "She will think I am a fool, and dislike me," I told myself miserably; but Katherine answered as if the subject had never been alluded to before. Her reply only left me to rack my brains anew. It was no use; a malignant spell appeared to have been cast upon me, holding me tongue-tied, my mind a blank. A perspiration broke out all over my body and I could feel my shirt sticking to my back. Every minute was like an hour, yet I could think of nothing but this accursed golf. I described the links and even the Club House, and might have gone on to enumerate the caddies had I remembered their names. I became suddenly conscious that my hands and feet were enormous. I thrust my hands in my trouser pockets, but my feet still remained visible. I knew my thick nose had neither shape nor character, that my coarse, brown hair was more like a kind of tropical plant than like hair, and that my over-hanging brows and the shape of my mouth gave me a sullen look. I had tried to alter my appearance by doing my hair in different ways, but it was no use. I remembered having noticed in the morning, when I was tying my tie, that a slight frown made me more thoughtful looking, and I instantly assumed one. I compared the appearance I imagined myself to present with Gerald's, and then I saw him watching me with what I believed to be a kind of veiled mockery in his eyes. My shyness turned to rage. Katherine tried to talk to me, but I answered in monosyllables, and, an hour earlier than I had intended, I got up to say good-night.
"We shall see you to-morrow, Peter," Mrs. Carroll suggested, as I shook hands with her. "What would you like to do to-morrow?" she added, turning to Katherine.
Katherine smiled at me as if we were quite old friends. "I want to climb some of the mountains," she said. "I planned that the minute I saw them."
Again her face awakened in me the memory of another face I had known—but where? when?
"In that case you ought to start early," Mrs. Carroll went on, "and you could take your lunch with you. Peter knows all the different walks for miles round."
I was on the point of declaring that I had an engagement, but I overcame the temptation. I promised to come soon after breakfast, and made my escape.