It was most singular.
The doors and windows were standing open, and the blue night was pouring in. Two little boys, with scrubbed, party faces, had fallen asleep upon an upright sofa, but their dreams were obviously filled with an especial bliss.
Several kinder guests were murmuring how entertaining, how sweet, following upon the speech by their hostess, but most took refuge immediately in their own chatter and the destruction of their friends.
Amongst the gentlemen, the talk was principally of the discovery of the wild white man, said to be a survivor from the expedition led by that mad German twenty years before. The man, who professed to have been living all those years with a tribe of aboriginals, had been brought to Sydney since his rescue, and had attended the unveiling of a memorial to his leader that same day in the Domain.
Now everyone was pushing in their attempt to approach old Mr Sanderson of Rhine Towers, and Colonel Hebden, both of whom had been present at the ceremony.
‘Is it a fraud?’ voices were heard to ask.
‘It is something trumped up to discredit the Government for its slowness in developing the country,’ others maintained.
Mr Sanderson would only smile, however, and repeat that the man was a genuine survivor from the expedition, known to him personally. The assurances of the old grazier, who was rather confused by his own goodness and the size of the gathering, were a source of irritation to the guests. Colonel Hebden could have been a statue, in stone or metal, he was so detached, hence impregnable, but the people might have vented their spite on old Sanderson if something had not happened.
Just then, rather late, for she had been detained at her school by a problem of administration, Miss Trevelyan, the headmistress, arrived. Her black dress, of a kind worn by some women merely as a covering, in no way detracted from the expression of her face, which at once caused the guests to differ sharply in opinion. As she advanced into the room, some of the ladies, glittering and rustling with precious stones, abandoned their gauzy conversations and greeted her with an exaggerated sweetness or girlishness. Then, resentful of all the solecisms of which they had ever been guilty, and it appeared their memories were full of them, they seized upon the looks of this woman after she had passed, asking one another for confirmation of their own disgust:
‘Is she not plain? Is not poor Laura positively ugly? And such a freakish thing to do. As if it were not enough to have become a schoolmistress, to arrive late at Belle’s party in that truly hideous dress!’
In the meantime Miss Trevelyan was receiving the greetings of those she recognized. Her face was rather white. Holding her head on one side, she murmured, with a slight, tremulous smile, that could have disguised a migraine, or strength:
‘Una, Chattie, Lizzie. Quite recovered, Elinor, I hope.’
‘Who is this person to whom all the ladies are curtseying?’ asked Mr Ludlow, an English visitor, recommended to the Radclyffes by a friend.
‘That is Miss Trevelyan. I must attempt to explain her,’ volunteered the Englishman’s neighbour.
The latter immediately turned away, for the object of their interest was passing them. It happened that the speaker was Dr Kilwinning. Even more richly caparisoned than in the past, the physician had continued to resent Miss Trevelyan as one of the few stumbling blocks he had had the misfortune to encounter in his eminently successful career.
‘I will tell you more presently,’ he said, or whispered loudly into the wall. ‘Something to do with the German explorer, of whom they have just been speaking.’
‘What a bore!’ guffawed Mr Ludlow, to whom every aspect of the colonial existence was incredible. ‘And the young girl?’
‘The girl is the daughter,’ whispered Dr Kilwinning, still to the wall.
‘Capital,’ laughed the Englishman, who had already visited the supper room. ‘A green girl. A strapping, sonsy girl. But the mother!’
People who recognized Miss Trevelyan, on account of her connexions and the material glories of the past, did not feel obliged to accept Mercy. They received her with flat smiles, but ignored her with their eyes. Accustomed to this, she advanced with her chin gravely lowered, and an expression of some tolerance. Her glance was fixed on that point in her mother’s vertebrae at which enemies might aim the blow.
Then Laura met Belle, and they were sisters. At once they erected an umbrella in the middle of the desert.
‘Dearest Laura, I would have been here to receive you, but had gone up to Archie, who is starting a cold.’
‘I could not allow you to receive me in our own house.’
‘Do you really like the gas? I loved the lamps.’
‘To sit reading beside the lamps!’
‘After the tea had been brought in. You are tired, Laura.’
‘I am rather tired,’ the schoolmistress admitted.
It was the result of her experience of that afternoon, for Mr Sanderson had been so kind as to send Miss Trevelyan a card for the unveiling of the memorial.
‘You should have come, too, Belle.’
‘I could not,’ Belle replied, and blushed.
Small lies are the most difficult to tell.
The cousins had arrived at a stiff and ugly chair. It was one of those pieces of furniture that become cast up out of an even life upon the unknown, and probably perilous shores of a party, there to stay, marooned for ever, it would seem.
‘I shall sit here,’ said Laura.
No one else would have dared, so evident was it that the stern chair belonged to its absent owners.
‘Now you can see,’ people were saying.
‘Is she not a crow?’
‘A scarecrow, rather!’
‘Do not bring me anyone,’ Laura Trevelyan enjoined. ‘I would not care to be an inconvenience. And I have never succeeded in learning the language. I shall sit and watch them wearing their dresses.’
This woman, of the mysterious, the middle age, in her black clothes, was now commanding the room that she had practically repudiated. One young girl in a dream of white tarlatan, who was passing close enough to look, did so, right into the woman’s eyes and, although never afterwards was she able to remember exactly what she saw, had been so affected at the time that she had altered her course immediately and gone out into the garden. There she was swept into a conspiracy of movement, between leaf and star, wind and shadow, even her own dress. Of all this, her body was the struggling core. She would have danced, but her heels were still rooted, her arms had but reached the point of twitching. In her frustration the young person attempted, but failed, to remember the message of the strange woman’s eyes, so that it appeared as though she were intended to remain, at least a little longer, the victim of her own inadequacy.
Laura Trevelyan continued to sit in the company of Mercy, who did not care to leave her mother. Bronze or marble could not have taken more inevitable and lasting shapes than the stuff of their relationship. The affection she received from one being, together with her detachment from all others, had implanted in the daughter a respectful love for the forms of all simple objects, the secrets of which she was trying perpetually to understand. Eventually, she must attempt to express her great preoccupation, but in what manner, it was not yet clear. That its expression would be true was obvious, only from looking at her neat brown hair, her strong hands, and completely pleasing, square face.
In the meantime, seated upon a little stool at the feet of her mother, she was discussing with the latter the war between Roman Catholic and Protestant maids that was disturbing the otherwise tranquil tenor of life at their school.
‘I did not tell you,’ Mercy informed, ‘Bridget has blackened Gertrude’s eye, and told her it will match the colour of her soul.’