Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/238

220 made an impetuous turn. She had caught some words on the farther side of the room, and she looked hard, eagerly, at the speaker.

"Who is that?" she inquired.

Mary Lyster, with a sharp sense of interruption, replied that she believed the lady in question was the Grosvilles' French governess. But in the very midst of her sentence Kitty deserted her, left her standing in the centre of the drawing-room, while the deserter fled across it, and sinking down beside the astonished mademoiselle, took the Frenchwoman's hand by assault and held it in both her own.

"Vous parlez Français? vous êtes Française? Ah! ça me fait tant de bien! Voyons! voyons! causons un peu!"

And bending forward, she broke into a cataract of French, all the elements of her strange, small beauty rushing, as it were, into flame and movement at the swift sound and cadence of the words, like a dancer kindled by music. The occasion was of the slightest; the Frenchwoman might well show a natural bewilderment. But into the slight occasion the girl threw an animation, a passion that glorified it. It was like the leap of a wild rain-stream on the mountains that pours into the first channel which presents itself.

"What beautiful French!" said Lady Edith, softly, to Mary Lyster, who had found a seat beside her.

Mary Lyster smiled.

"She has been at school, of course, in a French convent." Somehow the tone implied that the explanation disposed of all merit in the performance.

"I am afraid these French convent schools are not at all what they should be," said Lady Grosville.

And rising to a pyramidal height, her ample moiré dress swelling behind her, her gray head magnificently crowned by its lace cap and black velvet bandeau, she swept across the room to where the Dean's wife, Mrs. Winston, sat in fascinated silence, observing Lady Kitty. The silence and the attention annoyed her hostess. The first thing to be done with girls of this type, it seemed to Lady Grosville, was to prove to them that they would not be allowed to monopolize society.

There are natural monopolies, however; and they are not easy to deal with.

As soon as the gentlemen returned, Mr. Rankine, whom she had treated so badly at dinner, the young agent of the estate, the clergyman of the parish, the Austrian attaché, the cabinet minister, and the Dean all showed a strong inclination to that side of the room which seemed to be held in force by Lady Kitty. The Dean especially was not to be gainsaid. He placed himself in the seat shyly vacated by the French governess, and crossed his thin gaitered legs with the air of one who means to take his ease. There was even a certain curious resemblance between him and Kitty, as was noticed from a distance by Ashe. The Dean, who was very much a man of the world, and came of an historic family, was, in his masculine degree, planned on the same miniature scale, and with the same fine finish as the girl of eighteen. And he carried his gaiters, his ribbon of the Bath, and his exquisite white head with a natural charm and energy akin to hers, mellowed though it were by time and dignified by office. He began eagerly to talk to her of Paris. His father had been ambassador for a time under Louis Philippe, and he had boyish memories of the great house in the Faubourg St.-Honoré, and of the Orleanist ministers and men of letters. And, lo! Kitty met him at once, in a glow and sparkle that enchanted the old man. Moreover, it appeared that this much-beflounced young lady could talk; that she had heard of the famous names and the great affairs to which the Dean made allusion; that she possessed, indeed, a native and surprising interest in matter of the sort; and a manner, above all, with the old, alternately soft and daring—calculated, as Lady Grosville would no doubt have put it, merely to make fools of them.

In her cousins' house, it seemed, she had talked with old people, survivors of the Orleanist and Bourbon regimes, even of the Empire; had sat at their feet, a small, excited hero-worshipper; and had then rushed blindly into the memoirs and books that concerned them. So, in this French world the child had found time for other things than hunting and the flattery of her cousin Henri? Ashe was supposed to be devoting himself to the