"There isn't much to tell."
"What have you been doing?"
"Painting miniatures--one of the last things."
"Oh, delightful! Copies?"
"Copies from life. May I take you? and then perhaps, if I succeed, you will get me work."
"Work!" repeated Christina.
Dolly nodded. "Yes; I want work."
"Work!" cried Christina again. "Dolly, you don't mean that you _need_ it? Don't say that!"
"I do. That's nothing so dreadful, if only I can get it. I paint miniatures for--I have had ten and I have had twenty pounds," said Dolly with a laugh; "but twenty is magnificent. I do not ask twenty."
Christina exclaimed with real sorrow and interest, and was eager to know the cause of such a state of things. Dolly could but give her the bare facts, not the philosophy of them.
"You poor, dear, lovely little Dolly!" cried Christina. "A thought strikes me. Why don't you marry this handsome, rich young Englishman?"
Again Dolly's face dimpled all over.
"The thought don't strike me," she said.
"But he's very rich, isn't he?"
"Yes. That is nothing to me. I wouldn't give my father and mother for him."
"But for your father and mother's sake?"--There was a knock at the door here. "What is it? dinner? Come, Dolly; we'll reason afterwards."
The dinner was excellent. More than the excellence, however, went to Dolly's enjoyment. The rare luxury of eating without having to think what it cost, and without careful management to make sure that enough was left for the next day's breakfast and lunch. It was great luxury!
and how Dolly felt it, no one there could in the least guess. With that, however, as the evening went on and the unwonted soft atmosphere of ease was taking effect upon her, Dolly again and again drew the contrast between herself and her friend. How sheltered and guarded, and fenced in and fenced off, Christina was! how securely and safely blooming in the sacred enclosure of fatherly and motherly care! and Dolly--alas, alas! _her_ defences were all down, and she herself, delicate and tender, forced into the defender's place, to shield those who should have shielded her. It pressed on her by degrees, as the sweet unaccustomed feeling of ease and rest made itself more and more sensible, and by contrast she realised more and more the absence of it in her own life. It pressed very bitterly.
The girls had just withdrawn again after dinner to the firelight cosiness of Christina's room, when Mrs. Thayer put her head in.
"Christina, here's Baron Kramer and Signor Count Villa Bella, come to know if you will go to the Sistine Chapel."
"Mother!--how you put titles together! Oh, I remember; there is music at the Sistine to-night. But Sandie might come."
"And might not," said Mrs. Thayer. "You will have time enough to see Sandie; and this is Christmas Eve, you know. You may not be in Rome next Christmas."
"Would you like to go, Dolly?" said Christina doubtfully.
Dolly's heart jumped at the invitation; music and the Sistine Chapel!
But it did not suit her to make an inconvenient odd one in a partie carree, among strangers. She declined.
"I said I would go," said Mrs. Thayer. "Since the gentlemen have come to take you, I think you had better. Dolly will not mind losing you for an hour or two."
Which Dolly eagerly confirmed; wondering much at the same time to see Christina hesitate, when her lover, as she said, might come at any minute.
She, too, finally resolved against it, however; and when Mrs. Thayer and the gentlemen had gone, and Mr. Thayer had withdrawn, as his custom was, to his own apartment, the two girls took possession of the forsaken drawing-room. It was a pretty room, very well furnished, and like every other part of the present home of the Thayers, running over with new possessions in the shape of bits of art or antiquity, pictures, and trinkets of every kind, which they were always picking up. These were an infinite amusement to Dolly; and Christina was good-humouredly pleased with her pleasure.
"There's no fun in being in Rome," she remarked, "if you cannot buy all you see. I would run away if my purse gave out."
"But there is all that you cannot take away," said Dolly. "Think of what your mother has gone to this evening."
"The Sistine Chapel," said Christina. "I don't really care for it.
Those stupid old prophets and sybils say nothing to me; though of course one must make a fuss about them; and the picture of the Last Judgment, _I_ think, is absolutely frightful."
But here Dolly's eyes arrested her friend.
"Well, I tell you the truth; I do think so," she said. "I may tell the truth to you. I do not care one pin for Michael Angelo."
"Mayn't you tell the truth to anybody?"
"Not unless I want to be stared at; and I do not want to be stared at, in _that_ way. I am glad I did not go with mamma and those people; if Sandie had come, I do not think he would have altogether liked it.
Though I don't know but it is good to make men jealous. Mamma says it is."
"Oh no!" said Dolly. "Not anybody you care for."
"What do _you_ know?" said Christina archly. Before she could receive an answer, then, she had started and sprung up; for the door gently opened and on the threshold presented himself a gentleman in naval uniform.
"Sandie!" cried Christina.
"Didn't you expect me?" he said with a frank and bright smile.
Dolly had heard enough about this personage to make her very curious; and her eyes took keen note of him. She saw a tall, upright figure, with that free poise of bearing which is a compound of strength and ease; effortless, quiet, graceful, and dignified. Though in part the result of a certain symmetry of joints and practised activity in the use of them, this sort of bearing refers itself also, and yet more surely, to the character, and makes upon the beholder the impression again of strength and ease in the mental action. It is not common; it struck Dolly in the first five steps he made into the room and in the manner of his greeting his betrothed. Out of delicate consideration, I suppose, for the company in which they found themselves, he offered only a look and a hand-clasp; but Christina jumped up and kissed him.
She was not short, yet she had to make a little spring to reach his lips. And then, quietly putting an arm round her, he gave her her kiss back. Christina was rosy when she turned to present him, and both were smiling. Letting her go, he bowed low before Christina's friend; low and gravely; with such absolute gravity that Dolly almost felt herself in the way; as if he wished her not there. Then they sat down around the fire; and the same feeling came over her again with a rush. They were three; they ought to have been but two; she was one too many; they must wish her away. And yet, Christina had asked her precisely and specially that she might be one of the company that night. Dolly would have wished herself away, nevertheless; only that she was so very much interested, and could not. The newcomer excited her curiosity greatly, and provoked her observation; and, if the truth must be told, exercised also a powerful attraction upon her. He sat before the fire, full in her view, and struck Dolly as different from all the people she had ever seen in her life. She took glances from time to time, as she could, at the fine, frank, manly face, which had an unusual combination of the two qualities, frankness and manliness; was much more than usually serious, for a man of his age; and yet, she saw now and then, could break to tenderness or pleasure or amusement, with a sweetness that was winning. Dolly was fascinated, and could not wish herself away; why should she, if Christina did not?
In all her life she never forgot the images of two of the people around the fire that evening. "Sandie" in the middle, in front of the blaze; Christina on the other hand of him. She was in a glistening robe of dark blue silk, her fair hair knotted and wound gracefully about her head; a beautiful creature; looking at her lover with complacent looks of possession and smiles of welcome. Dolly never knew what sort of a figure the third was; she could not see herself, and she never thought about it. Yet she was a foil to the other two, and they were a foil to her, as she sat there at the corner of the hearth on a low cushion, in her black dress, and with no ornament about her other than the cameo ring. A creature very different from the beauty at the other corner of the fireplace; more delicate, more sensitive, more spiritual; oddly and inexplicably, more of a child and more of a woman. That's a rare mixture. There was something exceedingly sweet and simple in her soft brown eyes and her lips; but the eyes had looked at life, the brow was grave, and the lips could close into lines of steady will. The delicate vessel was the shrine of a soul, as large as it could hold, and so had taken on the transparent nobility which belongs to the body when the soul is allowed to be dominant. One point of the contrast between the two girls was in the character and arrangement of their hair.
Christina's was smooth, massed, and in a sort massive; Dolly's clustered or was knotted about her head, without the least disorder, but with a wilfulness of elegant play most harmonious with all the rest of her appearance. To characterise the two in a word, Christina was a beautiful pearl, and Dolly was a translucent opal.
They sat down round the fire.
"Well, Sandie, you naughty boy," Christina began, "what has kept you away all this time?"
"Duty."
"Duty! I told you so, Dolly; this man has only two or three words in his vocabulary, which he trots out on all occasions to do general service. One of them is 'duty;' another is 'must.'"
"'Must' is the true child of 'duty,'" the gentleman remarked.
"Oh no, I don't allow that; it is a marriage connection, which may be dissolved by a dispensation."
"Is that your idea of the marriage connection?" said he with a smile.
"But, Sandie! don't you want something to eat?"