You would not have called Berenice Fleming sensuous—though she was—because she was self-controlled. Her eyes lied to you. They lied to all the world. They looked you through and through with a calm savoir faire, a mocking defiance, which said with a faint curl of the lips, barely suggested to help them out, “You cannot read me, you cannot read me.” She put her head to one side, smiled, lied (by implication), assumed that there was nothing. And there was nothing, as yet. Yet there was something, too—her inmost convictions, and these she took good care to conceal. The world—how little it should ever, ever know! How little it ever could know truly!
The first time Cowperwood encountered this Circe daughter of so unfortunate a mother was on the occasion of a trip to New York, the second spring following his introduction to Mrs. Carter in Louisville. Berenice was taking some part in the closing exercises of the Brewster School, and Mrs. Carter, with Cowperwood for an escort, decided to go East. Cowperwood having located himself at the Netherlands, and Mrs. Carter at the much humbler Grenoble, they journeyed together to visit this paragon whose picture he had had hanging in his rooms in Chicago for months past. When they were introduced into the somewhat somber reception parlor of the Brewster School, Berenice came slipping in after a few moments, a noiseless figure of a girl, tall and slim, and deliciously sinuous. Cowperwood saw at first glance that she fulfilled all the promise of her picture, and was delighted. She had, he thought, a strange, shrewd, intelligent smile, which, however, was girlish and friendly. Without so much as a glance in his direction she came forward, extending her arms and hands in an inimitable histrionic manner, and exclaimed, with a practised and yet natural inflection: “Mother, dear! So here you are really! You know, I’ve been thinking of you all morning. I wasn’t sure whether you would come to-day, you change about so. I think I even dreamed of you last night.”
Her skirts, still worn just below the shoe-tops, had the richness of scraping silk then fashionable. She was also guilty of using a faint perfume of some kind.
Cowperwood could see that Mrs. Carter, despite a certain nervousness due to the girl’s superior individuality and his presence, was very proud of her. Berenice, he also saw quickly, was measuring him out of the tail of her eye—a single sweeping glance which she vouchsafed from beneath her long lashes sufficing; but she gathered quite accurately the totality of Cowperwood’s age, force, grace, wealth, and worldly ability. Without hesitation she classed him as a man of power in some field, possibly finance, one of the numerous able men whom her mother seemed to know. She always wondered about her mother. His large gray eyes, that searched her with lightning accuracy, appealed to her as pleasant, able eyes. She knew on the instant, young as she was, that he liked women, and that probably he would think her charming; but as for giving him additional attention it was outside her code. She preferred to be interested in her dear mother exclusively.
“Berenice,” observed Mrs. Carter, airily, “let me introduce Mr. Cowperwood.”
Berenice turned, and for the fraction of a second leveled a frank and yet condescending glance from wells of what Cowperwood considered to be indigo blue.
“Your mother has spoken of you from time to time,” he said, pleasantly.
She withdrew a cool, thin hand as limp and soft as wax, and turned to her mother again without comment, and yet without the least embarrassment. Cowperwood seemed in no way important to her.
“What would you say, dear,” pursued Mrs. Carter, after a brief exchange of commonplaces, “if I were to spend next winter in New York?”
“It would be charming if I could live at home. I’m sick of this silly boarding-school.”
“Why, Berenice! I thought you liked it.”
“I hate it, but only because it’s so dull. The girls here are so silly.”
Mrs. Carter lifted her eyebrows as much as to say to her escort, “Now what do you think?” Cowperwood stood solemnly by. It was not for him to make a suggestion at present. He could see that for some reason—probably because of her disordered life—Mrs. Carter was playing a game of manners with her daughter; she maintained always a lofty, romantic air. With Berenice it was natural—the expression of a vain, self-conscious, superior disposition.
“A rather charming garden here,” he observed, lifting a curtain and looking out into a blooming plot.
“Yes, the flowers are nice,” commented Berenice.
“Wait; I’ll get some for you. It’s against the rules, but they can’t do more than send me away, and that’s what I want.”
“Berenice! Come back here!”
It was Mrs. Carter calling.
The daughter was gone in a fling of graceful lines and flounces. “Now what do you make of her?” asked Mrs. Carter, turning to her friend.
“Youth, individuality, energy—a hundred things. I see nothing wrong with her.”
“If I could only see to it that she had her opportunities unspoiled.”
Already Berenice was returning, a subject for an artist in almost studied lines. Her arms were full of sweet-peas and roses which she had ruthlessly gathered.
“You wilful girl!” scolded her mother, indulgently. “I shall have to go and explain to your superiors. Whatever shall I do with her, Mr. Cowperwood?”
“Load her with daisy chains and transport her to Cytherea,” commented Cowperwood, who had once visited this romantic isle, and therefore knew its significance.
Berenice paused. “What a pretty speech that is!” she exclaimed. “I have a notion to give you a special flower for that. I will, too.” She presented him with a rose.
For a girl who had slipped in shy and still, Cowperwood commented, her mood had certainly changed. Still, this was the privilege of the born actress, to change. And as he viewed Berenice Fleming now he felt her to be such—a born actress, lissome, subtle, wise, indifferent, superior, taking the world as she found it and expecting it to obey—to sit up like a pet dog and be told to beg. What a charming character! What a pity it should not be allowed to bloom undisturbed in its make-believe garden! What a pity, indeed!
Chapter XLII.
F. A. Cowperwood, Guardian
It was some time after this first encounter before Cowperwood saw Berenice again, and then only for a few days in that region of the Pocono Mountains where Mrs. Carter had her summer home. It was an idyllic spot on a mountainside, some three miles from Stroudsburg, among a peculiar juxtaposition of hills which, from the comfortable recesses of a front veranda, had the appearance, as Mrs. Carter was fond of explaining, of elephants and camels parading in the distance. The humps of the hills—some of them as high as eighteen hundred feet—rose stately and green. Below, quite visible for a mile or more, moved the dusty, white road descending to Stroudsburg. Out of her Louisville earnings Mrs. Carter had managed to employ, for the several summer seasons she had been here, a gardener, who kept the sloping front lawn in seasonable flowers. There was a trig two-wheeled trap with a smart horse and harness, and both Rolfe and Berenice were possessed of the latest novelty of the day—low-wheeled bicycles, which had just then superseded the old, high-wheel variety. For Berenice, also, was a music-rack full of classic music and song collections, a piano, a shelf of favorite books, painting-materials, various athletic implements, and several types of Greek dancing-tunics which she had designed herself, including sandals and fillet for her hair. She was an idle, reflective, erotic person dreaming strange dreams of a near and yet far-off social supremacy, at other times busying herself with such social opportunities as came to her. A more safely calculating and yet wilful girl than Berenice Fleming would have been hard to find. By some trick of mental adjustment she had gained a clear prevision of how necessary it was to select the right socially, and to conceal her true motives and feelings; and yet she was by no means a snob, mentally, nor utterly calculating. Certain things in her own and in her mother’s life troubled her—quarrels in her early days, from her seventh to her eleventh year, between her mother and her stepfather, Mr. Carter; the latter’s drunkenness verging upon delirium tremens at times; movings from one place to another—all sorts of sordid and depressing happenings. Berenice had been an impressionable child. Some things had gripped her memory mightily—once, for instance, when she had seen her stepfather, in the presence of her governess, kick a table over, and, seizing the toppling lamp with demoniac skill, hurl it through a window. She, herself, had been tossed by him in one of these tantrums, when, in answer to the cries of terror of those about her, he had shouted: “Let her fall! It won’t hurt the little devil to break a few bones.” This was her keenest memory of her stepfather, and it rather softened her judgment of her mother, made her sympathetic with her when she was inclined to be critical. Of her own father she only knew that he had divorced her mother—why, she could not say. She liked her mother on many counts, though she could not feel that she actually loved her—Mrs. Carter was too fatuous at times, and at other times too restrained. This house at Pocono, or Forest Edge, as Mrs. Carter had named it, was conducted after a peculiar fashion. From June to October only it was open, Mrs. Carter, in the past, having returned to Louisville at that time, while Berenice and Rolfe went back to their respective schools. Rolfe was a cheerful, pleasant-mannered youth, well bred, genial, and courteous, but not very brilliant intellectually. Cowperwood’s judgment of him the first time he saw him was that under ordinary circumstances he would make a good confidential clerk, possibly in a bank. Berenice, on the other hand, the child of the first husband, was a creature of an exotic mind and an opalescent heart. After his first contact with her in the reception-room of the Brewster School Cowperwood was deeply conscious of the import of this budding character. He was by now so familiar with types and kinds of women that an exceptional type—quite like an exceptional horse to a judge of horse-flesh—stood out in his mind with singular vividness. Quite as in some great racing-stable an ambitious horseman might imagine that he detected in some likely filly the signs and lineaments of the future winner of a Derby, so in Berenice Fleming, in the quiet precincts of the Brewster School, Cowperwood previsioned the central figure of a Newport lawn fete or a London drawing-room. Why? She had the air, the grace, the lineage, the blood—that was why; and on that score she appealed to him intensely, quite as no other woman before had ever done.