Hugo | Page 8

then he rang for Simon.
'Do you think I might have some tea?' he asked.
'I am disposed to think you might, sir,' said Simon the cellarer. 'It is eight days since you indulged after dinner.'
'Bring me one cup, then, poured out.'
He was profoundly disturbed by Albert's news. He was, in fact, miserable. He had a physical pain in the region of the heart. He wished he could step off Love as one steps off an omnibus, but he found that Love resembled an express train more than an omnibus.
'Can she be secretly married to him?' he demanded half aloud, sipping at the tea.
The idea soothed him exactly as much as it alarmed him.
'The question is,' he murmured angrily, 'am I or am I not an ass?... At my age!'
He felt vaguely that he was not, that he was rather a splendid and Byronic figure in the grip of tremendous emotions.
Having regretfully finished the tea, he unlocked a bookcase, and picked out at random a volume of Boswell's 'Johnson.' It was the modern Oxford edition--the only edition worthy of a true amateur--bound by Rivi��re. Like all wise and lettered men, Hugo consulted Boswell in the grave crises of life, and to-night he happened upon the venerable Johnson's remark: 'Sir, I would be content to spend the remainder of my existence driving about in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.'
He leaned back in his chair and laughed. 'In the whole history of mankind,' he asserted to the dome, 'there have only been two really sensible men. Solomon was one, and Johnson the other.'
He restored the book to its place, and sat down to the piano-player, and in a moment the overture to 'Tannh?user,' that sublime failure to prove that passion is folly, filled the vast apartment. The rushing violin passages, and every call of Aphrodite, intoxicated his soul and raised his spirits till he knew with the certainty of a fully-aroused instinct that Camilla Payne must be his. He became optimistic on all points.
'A lady insists on seeing you, sir,' said Simon Shawn, intruding upon the Pilgrims' Chant.
'She may insist,' Hugo answered lightly. 'But it all depends who she is. I'm--'
He stopped, for the insisting lady had entered.
It was Camilla.
He jumped up. Never before in his career had he been so astounded, staggered, charmed, enchanted, dazzled, and completely silenced.
'Miss Payne?' he gasped after a prolonged pause.
Simon Shawn effaced himself.
'Yes, Mr. Hugo.'
'Won't you sit down?'
The singular prevalence of beautiful women in England is only appreciated properly by Englishmen who have lived abroad, and these alone know also that in no other country is beauty wasted by women as it is wasted in England. Camilla was beautiful, and supremely beautiful; she was tall, well and generously formed, graceful, fair, with fine eyes and fine dark chestnut hair; her absolutely regular features had the proud Tennysonian cast. But the coldness of Tennysonian damsels was not hers. Whether she had Latin blood in her veins, or whether Nature had peculiarly gifted her out of sheer caprice, she possessed in a high degree that indescribable demeanour, at once a defiance and a surrender, a question and an answer, a confession and a denial, which is the universal weapon of women of Latin race in the battle of the sexes, but of which Englishwomen seem to be almost deprived. 'I am Eve!' say the mocking, melting eyes of the Southern woman, and so said Camilla's eyes. No man could rest calm under that glance; no man could forbear the attempt to decipher the hidden secrecies of its message, and no man could succeed in the task.
Hugo felt that he had never seen this woman before.
And he might have been excused for feeling so; for instead of the black alpaca, Camilla now wore a simple but effectively charming toilette such as 'Hugo's' created and sold to women for the rapture of men in summer twilights, and over the white dress was thrown a very rich pearl-tinted opera-cloak, which only partly concealed the curves of the shoulders, and poised aslant on the glistening coiffure was the identical blue hat with its wide brims that had visited the dome seventeen hours before. The total effect was calculated, perfect, overwhelming.
'I'm sorry to disturb you, Mr. Hugo,' said Camilla, throwing back her cloak on the left side with a fine gesture, 'but I am in need of your assistance.'
'Yes?' Hugo whispered, seating himself.
She had a low voice, rare in a blonde, and it thrilled him. And she was so near him in the great chamber!
'I want you to tell me what plot I am in the midst of. What is the web that has begun to surround me?'
'Plot?' stammered Hugo. 'Web?'
Her eyes flashed scrutinizingly on his face.
'You have a kind heart,' she said; 'everybody can see that. Be frank. Do you know,' she asked