第4章 A Face.(3)
At a table just within the main audience room,there sat a young lady and gentleman.Even Van berg,who made it his business to discover and study beauty,was soon compelled to admit to himself that he had never seen finer features than were possessed by this fair young stranger.Her nose was straight,her upper lip was short,and might have been modelled from Cupid's bow;her chin did not form a perfect oval after the cold and severe Grecian type,but was slightly firm and prominent,receding with decided yet exquisite curves to the full white throat.Her cheeks had a transparent fairness,in which the color came and went instead of lingering in any conventional place and manner;her hair was too light to be called brown and too dark to be golden,but was shaded like that on which the sunlight falls in one of Bougereau's pictures of "Mother and Child;"and it rippled away from a broad low brow in natural waves,half hiding the small,shell-like ears.
Van Berg at first though her eyes to be her finest feature,but he soon regarded them as the worst,and for the same reason,as he speedily discovered,that the face,each feature of which seemed perfect,became,after brief study,so unsatisfactory as to cause positive annoyance.To a passing glance they were large,dark,beautiful eyes,but they lost steadily under thoughtful scrutiny.
A flashing gem may seem real at first,but as its meretricious rays are analyzed,they lose their charm because revealing a stone not only worthless worse than worthless,since it mocks us with a false resemblance,thus raising hopes only to disappoint them.The other features remained beautiful and satisfactory to Van Berg's furtive observation because further removed from the informing mind,and therefore more justly capable of admiration upon their own merits;but the eyes are too near akin to the animating spirit not to suffer from the relationship,should the spirit be essentially defective.
That the beautiful face was but a transparent mask of a deformed,dwarfed,contemptible little soul was speedily made evident.The cream and a silly flirtation with her empty-headed attendant--a pallid youth who parted his hair like a girl and had not other parts worth naming--absorbed her wholly,and the exquisite symphony was no more to her than an annoying din which made it difficult to hear her companion's compliments that were as sweet,heavy,and stale as Mailard's chocolates,left a year on the shelves.Their mutual giggle and chatter at last became so obtrusive that an old and music-loving German turned his broad face towards them,and hissed out the word "Hist!"with such vindictive force as to suggest that all the winds had suddenly broken lose from the cave of Aeolus.
Ik Stanton,who had been watching Van Berg's perturbed,lowering face,and the weak comedy at the adjacent table,was obviously much amused,although he took pains to appear blind to it all and kept his back,as far as possible,towards the young lady.
The German's "hist"had been so fierce as to be almost like a rap from a policeman's club,and there was an enforced and temporary suspension of the inane chatter.The attendant youth tried to assume the incensed and threatening look with which an ancient gallant would have laid his hand on the hilt of his sword.But some animals and men only become absurd when they try to appear formidable.It was ludicrous to see him weakly frowning at the sturdy Teuton who had already forgotten his existence as completely as he might that of a buzzing mosquito he had exterminated with a slap.
They young girl's face grew even less satisfactory as it became more quiet.A muddy pool,rippled by a breeze,will sparkle quite brilliantly while in motion;but when quiet it is seen the more plainly to be only a shallow pool.At first the beautiful features expressed only petty resentment at the public rebuke.As this faintly lurid light faded out and left the countenance in its normal state it became more heavy and earthy in its expression than Van Berg would have deemed possible,and it ever remained a mystery to him how features so delicate,beautiful,and essentially feminine could combine to show so clearly that the indwelling nature was largely alloyed with clay.there was not that dewy freshness in the fair young face which one might expect to see in the early morning of existence.The Lord from heaven breathed the breath of life into the first fair woman;but this girl might seem to have been the natural product of evolution,and her soul to be as truly of the earth as her body.
It was evident that she had been made familiar too early and thoroughly with conventional and fashionable society,and,although this fraction of the world is seldom without its gloves,its touch nevertheless had soiled her nature.Her face did not express any active or malignant principle of evil;but a close observer,like Van Berg,in whom the man was in the ascendant over the animal,could detect the absence of the serene,maidenly purity of expression,characteristic of those girls who have obtained their ideas of life from good mothers,rather than from French novels,French plays,and a phase of society that borrows its inspiration from fashionable Paris.
With the ending of the symphony the chatting and flirting at the table began again,to Van Berg's increased disgust.Indeed,he was so irritated that he could no longer control himself,and rose abruptly,saying to his companion:
"Come,let us walk outside."
His sudden movement drew the young lady's attention,but by this time he had only his broad shoulders turned towards her.She saw Ik Stanton looking at her,however,with a face full of mischief,and she recognized him with a nod and a smile.
He,with the familiarity that indicated relationship,but with a motion too slight to be noticed by others,threw her a kiss from the tips of his fingers,as one might toss a sugar-plum to a child,and then followed his friend.