Babe Page 10

  “I thought he was from Verona,” she replied, intrigued at his odd behavior and not unaware of his beauty either.

  His face softened into a very sweet smile. “You have a sense of humor too. You are perfect. I shall paint you, Golden Aphrodite.”

  The coming together of the two most interesting persons at the assembly drew considerable attention. As a little crowd seemed to be drawing close around them, Clivedon hastened his steps in the same direction. Like everyone else, he had been informed of the young man’s peculiar habits, and was sorry to see anyone of questionable behavior near his charge. But at least he was a gentleman, one of whom no worse was said but that he was odd. He watched, alert to intervene, and waited.

  Barbara had heard about the artist as well by this time, and decided to be rid of him by a gentle teasing. “What color do you mean to paint me, sir?” she asked.

  “Silver and gold, like a moonbeam, is the effect I shall strive for. Hair gold as sun-kissed wheat, skin luminous as an opening rose, cherry-ripe lips, cornflower eyes and . . .” He raised his hands like a priest making a sacrificial offering. “That neck defies comparison.”

  “I see,” she said, blushing in confusion at this outpouring. “What shall you do after it is done? Eat it, or put it in a vase to water it?”

  “After I am done, I shall marry you, Zeus permitting,” was his simple answer, accompanied by a bow of superb grace.

  Clivedon concluded this came close enough to scandal that he stepped forward to rescue her. “Lady Barbara, have you met Lord Romeo?” he asked. He had not done so himself, and felt rather foolish.

  “Not exactly,” she admitted, seeing Clivedon was displeased.

  “Allow me to make you known to him. The Duke of Stapford’s younger son. Lord Romeo, this is my ward, Lady Barbara Manfred.” He hastily considered introducing himself as well, and was about to do so when Romeo spoke.

  “What a delightful irony! I adore it. But I would have recognized Aphrodite; I have known her before, in many guises. Come, my sweet Barbarian, we shall move together.” Without more speech, and without so much as a glance at Clivedon, Romeo took her hand and walked to the very center of the floor, where no sets were yet forming. Horrified as to what might ensue, Clivedon grabbed the closest lady, who was Lady Angela, and walked swiftly after them, to try to give an air of standing idly waiting for the music.

  “You are just returned from Greece, I understand?” he mentioned.

  “Via Taunton,” Lord Romeo told him, sparing a quick look. He then cast a glance at Angela and shook his head sadly. “You should go to Greece to improve your complexion, ma’am,” he told her, with a face perfectly innocent of malice.

  She said nothing, but looked to her partner, bewildered. The distracted lord could think of nothing more to the point than performing another introduction, which he did, and again silence descended.

  “How did you like Greece, Lord Romeo?” Barbara asked, with a helpless look at the others.

  “The Grecian women are not so beautiful as they were in days of yore. The features are coarsened by the invasions from the north. When we go there, we shall breed a new race in the Hellenic mold.”

  Stunned, she said nothing for a moment. Her partner seemed to prefer silence. At length she asked, “Have you seen the Elgin Marbles yet? Perhaps you would be interested in them.”

  “Lord Elgin should be drawn and quartered for having removed them,” he told her in a soft, silken voice. “Gold does not confer the right to rob a people of its cultural heritage. There is a good deal of resentment in Greece over it.”

  “I don’t fancy they resented the thirty-five thousand pounds paid for them,” Clivedon said.

  “I shall not go to see them, as an act of disapproval,” the soft voice spoke on. “I don’t need cold marble. You will be my inspiration,” he said to Barbara.

  Three of the four were vastly relieved when two more couples joined them. Lord Romeo ignored the newcomers, which was better than he might have done. One of the ladies had a figure not even an Englishman would find attractive, and which a lover of the Hellenic ideal was bound to denigrate.

  Lord Romeo was sufficiently in the world to realize that motion was expected from him on a dance floor, and was graceful enough in his movements that he did not look quite absurd, though his steps were at odds with those of his partner and everyone else in his set. His mincings and gyrations, quite lovely as a solo performance, occupied him enough that he uttered no more outrages till the dance was over. At its end, Clivedon took Lady Barbara’s arm and began to lead her off.

  Lord Romeo was hard at his heels. “Did I understand you to say you are the lady’s guardian, sir?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “I must marry her. When Olympus decrees, man obeys.”

  Clivedon cleared his throat impatiently. “We’ll speak of this another time, if you please.”

  “Where may I call on you, and when?”

  “We’ll be in touch,” was the only answer he received.

  “My goodness, what a strange young man,” Barbara exclaimed.

  “He is a knock-in-the-cradle,” Lady Angela assured her at once, for she was on Clivedon’s other arm.

  “Queer as Dick’s hatband,” he agreed.

  Peering over her shoulder, Barbara saw that he still stood in the center of the floor, gazing after her, besotted. “I wouldn’t encourage him if I were you,” Angela suggested.

  “I’m not! I was afraid he meant to follow me, but I see Lady Drummond-Burrell has taken his arm to lead him off. I hope he is not going to prove a nuisance.”

  “You are an optimist,” her guardian stated, with an awful foreboding that the majority of the nuisance would fall on his own shoulders.

  The greatest, really the only flaw of the evening was that Lord Romeo continued making an ass of himself, staring at Barbara and refusing to stand up with anyone else, but this could not be attributed to any encouragement on her part, and she escaped censure. It was the strange young artist that was discussed that night. Princess Lieven was charmed with him for telling her she was so ugly she achieved a strange sort of inverted beauty. She was equally charmed with his verdicts on her friends and enemies. She was delighted to inform Sally Jersey that Romeo thought she must have been quite tolerable twenty years ago, and her hair was still not utterly contemptible. Everyone had to meet him and express amusement at his sayings, and repeat them themselves to show how little they minded. He was proclaimed an Original and adopted on the spot by Society.

  Before Clivedon’s party left, Romeo had discovered not only where he might present his offer to Lord Clivedon next day, but where he should find his model as well.

  “I will come to you at Cavendish Square tomorrow morning,” he told her as she tried to edge out the door on her guardian’s far side.

  “Oh,” was all she could think of to say, yet she was not depressed to have attached Society’s new darling.

  “Lady Barbara is busy tomorrow morning,” Clivedon told him in a dismissing way.

  “Please, the Fates have not given me a patient soul,” Romeo explained to the hiding lady. “May I come in the afternoon—at three?”

  With a strong wish to get out the door, Clivedon nodded his approval to Barbara.

  “All right,” she answered.

  “Till then, my soul is in your keeping,” he told her, with a perfectly serious face. Then he lifted her gloved hand, slowly unfastened the wrist snap, placed a kiss on her inner wrist, and stepped back with a bow for her to leave.

  “The boy is mad,” Lady Withers declared as they got beyond his hearing.

  “Yes, but he’s awfully sweet, isn’t he?” Lady Barbara replied, with a peep over her shoulder. Her guardian and chaperone exchanged a crestfallen look and hastened her steps towards the carriage.

  Chapter Twelve

  Lord Romeo may have been insane; several people thought so, but he had enough wits about him to know what he wanted, and enough tenacity of purp
ose to pursue his goal doggedly. With a morning to be got in before he could go to his lady, he made use of it by calling on her guardian. In his hands he bore a slim leather case, which Clivedon presumed to be a sort of folio of his smaller art works. With some curiosity and more annoyance he had the fellow shown in. “I have come to ask your permission to court Lady Barbara,” Romeo told him, with no time wasted on banalities.

  “Have a seat,” Clivedon invited. The graceful form folded itself onto a chair.

  At this point, the visitor’s eyes alit on a Grecian vase that stood on top of a bookcase in Clivedon’s study. “Ah, you have got one of Spiro’s forgeries,” he said, arising to examine the piece. “He does a good imitation of Clitias, especially the black figures on the exterior, but the handles give him away. He doesn’t take time to form his handles properly, Spiro. They are invariably crude, and poorly joined too. Yes, you see they do not hold at all,” he continued, pulling off the right handle and returning Clivedon’s vase to him in two pieces.

  Having paid several hundred pounds for this trifle, the owner was not best pleased to be either proven a dupe or possibly to have had a genuine masterpiece vandalized.

  “Thank you,” he said in a voice laden with irony, laying the pieces aside.

  “You’re welcome,” Lord Romeo answered in quite a different spirit, and resumed his seat.

  “So you are come to sue for Lady Barbara’s hand,” Clivedon said, his eyes narrowing and a steely glint creeping into them. “She is quite an heiress, you realize. She is expected to make a good match.”

  Lord Romeo smiled, an Attic smile, and nodded his shapely head in agreement. “I am the best match she could make,” was his simple answer.

  “That is your opinion,” Clivedon pointed out, finding it strangely impossible to gauge the young man. “What is your financial position?”

  “I do not concern myself with money—my exact position I cannot tell you, but I know the Gods smiled on me. I have wealth as well as talents and beauty.”

  “What sum do you speak of?”

  “My man of business has drawn all that up for me. It is in here. Isn’t this an exquisite bag? It is made of goatskin, lined with pink silk.” He opened it and, instead of drawing out the papers, ran his fingers over the watered silk, while Clivedon threw up his eyes in impatience. “Here it is for you to look over,” he said at length. “If it is not enough, pray tell me, and I shall get more.”

  His host regarded him, wondering whether to laugh or call for a guard from Bedlam. “Fine. Just leave it with me, and I’ll be in touch with you. Where are you putting up, Lord Romeo?”

  “You’ll take good care of Paros? My leather case. Paros was my favorite goat, from the island of the same name. You were asking—ah yes, where do I stay. I am at my father’s home, in Belgrave Square. I see you are surprised I could tolerate it. I am stronger than I look, but it grieves me daily, I confess. It is very ugly, monumentally so. I disapprove of every piece of stone in it, but it is my duty to spend some time with my family.”

  “I hadn’t heard your family were in town.”

  “They are not. I commune with their spirits.”

  “I see.” What Clivedon was rapidly coming to see was that he dealt with a beautiful moron. Still, the boy was Stapford’s son. The home he abhorred was considered by the rest of the country to be one of the city’s finest, and until he got a look inside Paros, he would not turn him off.

  “Are you finished with me now, sir?”

  The speech was unpleasantly cringing, but there was no tone of self-abasement, nor any look of it. The beautiful face across from him was remote, with a soft smile curving the corners of the lips.

  “I guess that’s about all for now. I’ll call on you after I’ve looked over these papers.”

  “I could put you in touch with a real Clitias vase, if you are interested,” the boy said next.

  “What would it cost me?”

  “Cost? I have no idea. A great deal, probably. A price cannot be put on beauty. It would help to detract attention from the rest of this appalling room.” The blue eyes roamed slowly around a chamber the owner had spent considerable time and money on making elegant.

  “Kind of you.”

  “Merely an effort to ingratiate myself with Lady Barbara’s guardian, to see him in improved surroundings. My soul thrives on beauty. Your entranceway as well, if you will pardon my saying so, Sir, is barbaric. The pillars neither Doric nor Corinthian, but a poor pastiche, and the entablature . . . Shall I design a replacement for you, Lord Clydesdale?”

  “The name is Clivedon,” the host said in a tight voice, “and I am satisfied with my entablature.”

  “Clivedon? I must try to remember that. I have no memory for English names, they are all so ugly. My own included. I refer to the family name, for Fate was present at my christening and gave me a civilized first name, though it is no Grecian. Well, may I leave, then?”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Yes. I have been dreading this visit as well, and found it almost worse than my imaginings. Good day, sir.”

  Lord Romeo sauntered from the room, stopping after four paces to frown in sorrow at an Adams doorway that did not agree with him. Clivedon sat on, looking at the empty doorway for two minutes after he was gone, then opened the case and pulled out an orderly set of papers.

  He was now convinced Romeo was a fool, but his father or someone had seen to it that his business affairs were handled in a wise way. The lad possessed not only an estate in Hampshire, but another spread in Essex, and considerable monies in the funds. A regular nabob, in fact, which might possibly account for Society’s amused toleration of the boy. With his excellent family connections and no real shame attaching to his name, it was hard to turn him off. He hoped Lady Barbara would have the sense to do it.

  Lord Romeo spent the remainder of the morning walking about London, shaking his head at various architectural atrocities. Wren’s dome at Saint Paul’s he found a vastly inferior imitation of Saint Peter’s in Rome, a pretentious little toy. Carlton House he assumed to be a freakish joke, and the Gothic spires of Westminster Abbey he consigned to immediate demolition. Indeed, there was scarcely a building in the whole city to give him the least pleasure. The Earl of Burlington’s Piccadilly mansion found a little favor with him, a doorway on Great Ormond Street had a decent pair of pillars, and Saint Thomas’s Hospital, from a distance, had enough purity of line to appeal mildly to him. For the rest, neither a dome nor an arch of any sort was permissible. The Greeks had not discovered the arch. A lintel supported by a line of columns was the Greek way, and the botched Palladian buildings that flourished in the city were all abominations. No wonder Englishmen all looked pale and sullen, he thought. This environment would be enough to do it.

  He forgot to take any lunch, but remembered to begin wending his way towards Cavendish Square early enough to be there a little before the appointed hour. The ladies awaited him.

  He stopped in the doorway to look at them. “Who has done this to you?” he asked angrily, in a tone at odds with most of his speech.

  Barbara looked at a very pretty mulled muslin gown, quite in the highest kick of fashion. “What?” she asked, astonished.

  “Where is your peplos? The outfit you wore last night. What are you doing in that disgusting thing? And your hair is all wrong.” He paced quickly towards her. “Who is responsible for this?” he demanded of Lady Withers.

  “Pray have a seat, Lord Romeo,” the hostess replied, alarmed but still polite.

  He sat down, but could not long remain seated in his state of agitation. His eyes flew to Barbara, disliking the plait of braids around her head, the gown that did not drape, and when he saw a pair of blue kid slippers on her feet, he was up.

  “This is all wrong. This is not how I want to paint you. You must wear the peplos and sandals you had on last night. I shall arrange your hair. Those locks must fall forward wantonly, to make Olympus tremble. Lady Weather—do you have a decent
room in your house to use for a background? Or a garden not disfigured by inferior statuary?”

  The easiest remark, indeed the only one that occurred to the dame, was to correct him on her name. “I am Lady Withers, not Weather.”

  “Withers? I knew there was a horse in the family somewhere. That is why I called your brother Cydesdale.”

  Lady Barbara regarded him closely and concluded he was being purposely rude. “Do sit down and stop making such a cake of yourself,” she said quite sharply. “If you wish to paint me, you will behave, Lord Romeo.”

  He sat, meek as a lamb, and began gazing at her, finding the face, despite its coils, as perfect as ever. “Now,” she went on, pleased with his docility, “I see you don’t mean to waste time on being polite, and as you are eager to find a background for the painting, let us decide on one.” She turned to Lady Withers. “Perhaps the morning parlor, in front of that pretty fanlit window.”

  “I don’t paint windows,” Lord Romeo said at once. “And I most particularly dislike fanlights.”

  She raised one supercilious brow. “The study then, in front of the Adams fireplace.”

  “Adams has a deal to account for, destroying the saloons of half the homes in England with those atrocities. No, I see we will require an outdoor setting. You have let Adams loose in this house.” He glanced disdainfully at walls where Adams had defiled the surface with his designs. “I shall catch the play of the sun on your golden hair. Deathless Aphrodite, on your rich-wrought throne. There is a rather good doorway in Great Ormond Street—”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she said baldly. “You must do it here, if I decide to let you do it at all.”

  “Really, Lady Barbara is very busy,” her chaperone took it up at once.

  “She must make time,” was the artist’s reply. “The glorious gifts of the gods are not to be cast aside. Let me see this house.”

  He arose and went into the hallway, frowning at a very nice curved staircase, peering into a small private parlor with a shiver of revulsion. “I have seen enough. More than enough. Take me outside,” he demanded.