The Way of Ambition | Page 2

As to Paul Lane, he stared at his remarkably perfect boots, and drew down the corners of his lips, and his white face seemed to darken as if a cloud floated through his mind and cast a shadow outward.
In the pause the drawing-room door opened, and a woman with blazing dark eyes and snow-white hair, wearing a white tea-gown and a necklace of very fine Egyptian scarabs, came in, with an intense, self-possessed and inquiring look. This was Mrs. Mansfield, "my only mother," as Charmian sometimes absurdly called her.
"You are talking, or you were talking, of something or somebody interesting," she said at once, looking round her at the three occupants of the room.
Max Elliott turned eagerly toward her. He rejoiced in Mrs. Mansfield, and often came to her to "warm his hands at her delightful blaze."
"Of somebody very interesting."
"Whom we don't know?"
"Whom very few people in London know."
"A composer, my only mother, who never publishes, and who is the son of a banker in the West of England."
Charmian seemed suddenly to have recovered her former mood, but she blinked away two tears as she spoke.
"Why shouldn't he be?" said Mrs. Mansfield, sitting down on a large sofa which stood at right angles to the wood fire.
"I know, but it doesn't seem right."
"Don't be ridiculously conventional, my only child."
Charmian laughed, showing lovely, and very small teeth. She was not unlike her mother in feature, but she was taller, more dreamy, less vivid, less straightforward in expression. At times there was a hint of the minx in her. She emerged from her dreams to be impertinent. A certain shrewdness mingled with her audacity. At such moments, as men sometimes said, "you never knew where to have her." She was more self-conscious and more worldly than her mother. Secret ambition worried at her mind, and made her restless in body. When she looked at a crowd she sometimes felt an almost sick sensation as of one near to drowning. "Oh, to rise, to be detached from all these myriads!" she thought. "To be apart and recognized as apart! Only that can make life worth the living." She had been heard to say, "I would rather sink forever in the sea than in the sea of humanity. I would rather die than be one of the unknown living." Charmian sometimes exaggerated. But she was genuinely tormented by the modern craze for notoriety. Only she called it fame.
Once she had said something to her mother of her intense desire to emerge from the crowd. Mrs. Mansfield's reply was: "Do you believe you have creative force in you then?" "How can I know?" Charmian had answered. "I'm so young." "Try to create something and probably you'll soon find out," returned her mother. Since that day Charmian had tried to create something, and had found out. But she had not told Mrs. Mansfield. She was now twenty-one, and had been just eighteen when her mother's advice had driven her into the energy which had proved futile.
Max Elliot crossed the room and sat down on the sofa by Mrs. Mansfield. He adored her quite openly, as many men did. The fact that she was a widow and would never marry again made adoration of her agreeably uncomplex. Everybody knew that Mrs. Mansfield would never marry again, but nobody perhaps could have given a perfectly clear explanation of how, or why, that knowledge had penetrated him. The truth was that she was a woman with a great heart, and had given that heart to the husband who was dead, and for whom she had never worn "weeds."
"What are we to do for Charmian, my dear Max?" continued Mrs. Mansfield, throwing a piteous look into her mobile face, a piteous sound into her voice. "What can anyone do for a young woman of twenty-one who, when she is thinking naturally, thinks it impossible for a West of England banker to cause the birth of a son talented in an art?"
"I always said there was intellectual cruelty in mother," said Charmian, drawing her armchair nearer to the fire.
"It's bracing, tones up the mind," said Paul Lane. "But what about this new note? All we know is a Cornish extraction, a banker papa and a Te Deum."
"Oh--a Te Deum!" observed Mrs. Mansfield, looking suddenly sceptical.
"I know! I know!" said Max Elliot. "I didn't want to hear it till I had heard it. And then I wanted to hear nothing else. The touch of genius startles everything into life."
"Another genius!" said Paul Lane.
And thereupon, as if acting on a sudden impulse, he got up, said good-bye, and went away with his curiosity, if he had any, ungratified.
"He's spoilt by the French blood his mother gave him," said Mrs. Mansfield as the door closed. "If he had been all French, one might have