Amethyst: The Story of a Beauty

She turned her head idly to look for Amethyst, and suddenly her heart stopped beating, and then began to throb with suffocating violence. Two figures detached themselves from the crowd, and came towards her mother. One was an insignificant little lady, sumptuously dressed, the other, a tall man with stiff moustaches and bold outlooking eyes.

“Why, it’s Tony!” exclaimed Lady Haredale, “and Mrs Fowler too! Why, it’s ages since we met! What a pleasure! How are you? when did you come to town?”

“Only last week; we have been abroad. My wife was intending to call,” said Major Fowler.

“So glad to see you! Why, the little girls will be charmed! Here’s one of your old playmates. You know, Mrs Fowler, he was always the children’s friend – Una.”

Una rose and came forward, holding out her hand.

“How d’ye do?” she said, coolly.

Major Fowler fairly started. His mental vision of Una was so different from the reality.

“Really,” he said, “I should never have known her.”

“No, I’ve grown so much,” said Una, with the languid drawl that was sufficiently familiar. “Ah, here’s Amethyst.”

Amethyst, feeling as if her namesake jewels burnt into her neck and arms, gave a cold, gracious greeting.

“You’ll dine with us to-morrow, quite without ceremony?” said Lady Haredale. “We are in Eaton Square, you know, taking the girls out. I like it as much as they do.”

Mrs Fowler accepted the invitation, Miss Haredale and the rest of the party came up and were introduced, and then they all walked round together, looking at the people and the pictures. Sylvester, quite unable to keep at a distance, was glad to join Mr Carisbrooke and follow in their wake.

Amethyst kept Una by her side, and Major Fowler walked with them. Sylvester caught echoes of his voice in familiar tones, which called up before him the white-robed girl in the sunny garden at Loseby, the mystery and the misery of that fatal afternoon, when the clouds had gathered round his fair ideal, and when his hateful share in her fate had been forced on him.

He was noticed himself. His tall angular figure, marked features, and fine, restless eyes were striking, and suited the author of ‘Iris,’ in the opinion of the literary set which was prepared to admire it, and he had his own little success on his hands, and had to reply to remarks and congratulations, which just then seemed a mere interruption to his eager watch. He caught the remarks too of the passing crowd, the wonder if Sir Richard Grattan was the accepted one, the questions as to who Major Fowler might be. He had not been seen before with the beauty. Then a laugh, and Charles Haredale was pointed out “as a reformed character,” with his heiress, and Sylvester, startled, glanced at his companion. Was he really throwing his nice little niece into the arms of such a man as he must know young Haredale to be?

Mr Oliver Carisbrooke walked calmly on, without apparently hearing the remark. He had large, and peculiarly bright eyes, which now followed Sylvester’s, and were fixed on Amethyst’s graceful head. Then he turned and looked at his companion.

“She will not be satisfied. She shines in these rainbow tints, but they will not be enough for her,” he said, rather sentimentally.

Sylvester was startled, held for a moment by the curious gaze fixed on him, but he resented it.

“If you are speaking of Miss Haredale,” he said, “I do not see what a young lady can desire more. This sort of success is, I suppose, what women desire.”

“Ah,” said Mr Carisbrooke dryly, “ah, Mr Riddell, you keep your soul for your poem, not for real life. You write of passion, you don’t believe in it.”

He moved away before Sylvester could reply, and made his way into the group round Amethyst. Sylvester had no excuse for following him, and presently saw that he had engaged her attention, and was talking to her with earnestness. She turned her head, and Sylvester perceived that she was attentive, interested, and presently a bystander remarked —

“Miss Haredale is looking like her picture.”

Chapter Twenty One

At the End of the Rainbow

“Amethyst, Amethyst, I must talk to you. I can’t bear it by myself. Oh, that man, I hate and I loathe him, and my own self! But I can’t get him out of my eyes or my mind, his face blots everything else out. Oh, don’t make me come down to-night!”

This despairing outcry met Amethyst’s ears, as, late in the afternoon of the day after the soirée at the Art Gallery, she came into the little up-stairs sitting-room appropriated to her sisters and herself. Una was lying on a couch by the window. She raised herself, stretching out her hands, as if for help in dire distress, and Amethyst, putting down the flowers she was carrying, came and knelt down by her side.

“Now, Una, there’s a dear child, don’t begin to cry about it. Of course we both hate the sight of him. But he was sure to turn up some time, and you mustn’t put yourself into an agony about it.”

Una hid her face in the comforting arms, the very touch of which brought strength to her.

“I was afraid you might worry yourself,” continued Amethyst, “but I haven’t had a chance of looking after you before. If you stay away to-night, it will still have to be done some time. Take it as easy as you can.”

“I thought he had dropped my lady,” whispered Una.

“Well, you know, they had some intercourse when the amethysts – Ah! talk of hating, I should like to throw them into the sea – when they were got back. It would look very odd if he cut us. And as for you, darling, you are so different now – like another person.”

Una turned round and looked up into her sister’s face.

“Am I so changed?” she said.

“Why, yes, no one would know you for the same silly little girl,” said Amethyst, jestingly, but she felt, as she spoke, that her words gave a pang. “Change is best for us both,” she said steadily, with a certain sombre look in the eyes that were bent on Una’s.

Una was silent. Changed in a sense she was, for two years before she would have sobbed herself into hysterics, if half the same weight of emotion had been stirring in her breast. Now she lay still, enduring a knowledge of herself that never ought to have come to her seventeen years. The anguish that had come upon her might be shame and loathing, but it filled her soul. The face might be hateful that had once been adorable, but it blotted every other out. She had thought herself possessed by a new spirit, a holy spirit of love and peace, and behold the old possession had driven the new one away. There was a Face to which she had learned to turn, a Love she was beginning to know, and now – and now.

She pressed her hand on her heart, and was silent. Instinctively she felt that even Amethyst would not understand. With an effort to turn to a trouble that could be spoken of, she said —

“And Sylvester Riddell – I am ashamed to see him.”

“Sylvester Riddell knows nothing about you, darling,” said Amethyst.

“Amethyst, does seeing him make you – feel?”

“Oh, I don’t mean to feel,” returned Amethyst, lightly, “I have a great deal too much to do; let bygones be bygones. Now then, don’t let us make mountains of molehills. Here is all your hair tumbling down, I’ll do it up prettily. If you had any consideration for the small amount of lady’s-maiding we ever get, you wouldn’t grow such a quantity.”

“My ridiculous hair,” said Una, pulling it through her fingers, and lingering a little on the epithet. Then, with a hot blush she rose.

“Yes, it tires me dreadfully to do it myself.”

A deficiency of personal attendance was one of the forms of “simplicity” with which the Miss Haredales had to put up, and both Amethyst and Kattern spent most of their leisure in “fixing” – to use a convenient Americanism – their own and their sisters’ costumes. A constant attention to frills does not leave much time for feelings, but it was of set purpose that Amethyst absorbed herself in the present.

“You know, dear,” she said, as she divided and twisted the long heavy lengths of Una’s hair, “it is absurd to think that all one’s cargo must be in one ship. No one thing is enough, and there’s always something more. For instance, one can’t think only of society, and of looking well. That’s one thing. It’s a good big thing, but there are so many others. Now last night I should have liked to have looked at all those pictures, and talked about them to some one that understood. If I go to a concert, I feel as if there was enough in music to fill up one’s life. I want to have something of it all. There’s no end to the possibilities of everything. I could talk to that queer Mr Carisbrooke for hours!”

“I wonder what Sir Richard would say if you told him that,” said Una, rather dryly.

“Oh, it’s only that he gave me a new idea. I want to work it out. So you see, no one thing ought to spoil everything else. Of course we’re none of us likely to expect beds of roses, we’ve learned our lesson. But when there are so many chances, it is wise and right to take the life that offers the most – the most chances of doing, and being.”

Una’s hair was finished by this time, and she stood up in her long white dressing-gown, leaning her hand on the toilet-table, and looking at her sister with searching eyes.

“Amethyst,” she said, “I don’t believe you were ever really in love with Lucian Leigh at all.”

The colour flamed into Amethyst’s face, and her bosom heaved.

“Yes, I was,” she said, “but that’s just what I want to show you. That’s over, but one isn’t all heart, any more than I hope and believe one is all face. One has a mind, and a soul, and possibilities. I won’t go to the bottom, if I was shipwrecked once. Nothing can ever take up the whole of one, I suppose. I thought it could then. Now if I don’t get ready quick, I shall be late.”

She ran away as she spoke. It was not her way to neglect the necessity of the moment, and she made such good speed, that she was in the drawing-room before any of the guests arrived. On the table lay a thin square book bound in bluish-green, with a silver iris in the corner.

“Sylvester Riddell’s poem, my dear,” said Lady Haredale. “I bought it when I was out with the children. He’ll like to see it on the table. Look at it, then you can talk to him about it.”

Amethyst took it up, and glanced over the pages. She was a rapid reader, and in a very few minutes, she caught the idea of the poem, the passionate search for an ideal, and it attracted her. Did it contradict the philosophy which she had been preaching to Una, or was it in truth its justification? The look of interest was still on her face, the book in her hand, when its author was announced, and, when she put it down and greeted him with a delightful smile, as of one caught in the act, Sylvester felt that all the reviews in London might cut ‘Iris’ to pieces. She had had her day.

He sat by Amethyst at dinner, and neither prince nor millionaire was there to claim her attention. She appeared neither cold nor resentful, and that she was somewhat excited, he did not guess. Her lovely eyes, with their mysterious depths, were turned upon him, and she referred to his poem with a certain modest deference, as if in explaining it, he did her an honour. Sylvester had never known before, how utterly he had failed to express his hero’s rapture, when Iris shone upon him with no cloud between.

“It is no new subject,” he said, modestly, “but the idea possessed me – ”

“It seems new, I think,” said Amethyst, who, at twenty, had not quite exhausted all the ideas of life. “It is very interesting, but, practically, when Iris was so unattainable, don’t you think he would have managed to get on without her – by the help of his music – and his battles?”

“You see,” said Sylvester, eagerly and nervously, “in a measure he found her in art, and in the struggle of life, and, in so far as she was embodied in them, she gave them value.”

“I am not sure that I understand,” said Amethyst, in soft considerate tones. “What is it that you intend Iris to signify?”

“She was his dream of perfection,” said Sylvester, very low, “his vision – well, his Beatrice. He found something of perfect beauty in many things – when he sought it with sufficient pains, but – but love, of course, was the higher revelation. He could be content with nothing less.”

“Ah, I must read to the end. Was she always an abstraction?”

“She did not always seem so,” said Sylvester, as for a moment he met her eyes.

Amethyst blushed, with an inward start, she had forgotten for the moment her resentment; now came a throb of triumph. So he did not hate and despise her, this man who had thought her false to his friend. Had she conquered him too? As her thoughts glanced at the other conquest awaiting her disposal, she might be pardoned for feeling that, for her at least, life held many different possibilities.

“I don’t think your father would believe in Iris,” she said suddenly, with girlish abruptness.

“I am afraid he doesn’t,” said Sylvester. “But why do you say so?”

“He gave me some advice once, that I have found out to be true. But it wasn’t at all consistent with dreams of finding perfection. – At least – after all, I am not quite sure of that.”

She sat for a moment with a perfectly simple, considerate expression on her beautiful face, evidently pursuing a new idea. But she did not tell Sylvester what it was; and turned off the subject with an inquiry for Mr Riddell and other Cleverley friends.

Meantime, it was Una’s unlucky fate to find herself sitting by Major Fowler. Outwardly she was mistress of the situation, and behaved with creditable self-possession; while he talked in a good-humoured, half-joking strain, that would have been suitable enough if Tory or Kattern had been his companion. He took up the old intimacy, asked home questions as to this thing and the other, how Charles fitted in to the family circle, how “Aunt Anna” managed to hit it off with my lady, and Una answered like one under a spell. Then he began to talk about himself, praised his wife to her, said certainly he’d done the right thing, laughed a little at the way he was kept in order – all in the old way, the familiar chatter to his little sympathetic friend. It was all very natural – if only to poor Una it had not been such exquisite – rapture or anguish, she could not tell. Then he went back to an old habit of talking about herself. She was quite grown-up – not a little school-girl – such a fine young lady. Somehow, he had always thought of her as a little long-haired girl. All the awkwardness was ignored, and he made their old relation seem the most natural thing in the world. The poor child’s eyes turned to his, and he smiled in the half-familiar, half-flattering fashion of old times. For an instant his hand, as he poured her out some water, touched her ungloved fingers. There was storm and tumult in Una’s soul, she turned her head away, and put all the distance possible into her voice. He gave an odd little smile, took up the cue, and began to talk society chit-chat, but all the while there was an undercurrent, and Una felt that in another moment they would laugh together at the idea of making talk for each other. There was nothing else like it in the world.

The state of things at last caught Amethyst’s notice, and diverted her mind from philosophy and poetry. With the manner of one from whom a word was a favour, she spoke across the table to Major Fowler, and asked him to persuade Mrs Fowler to patronise the approaching bazaar, and so made the conversation general, for everybody began to discuss it at once.

“Shall you sell rosebuds, Miss Haredale?” said Major Fowler. “Anything, of course, for the charity.”

“I shall try to do my duty,” said Amethyst. “Mr Riddell should give us some copies of his beautiful poem,” said Lady Haredale. “Get him to give them to you, Amethyst, to sell yourself!”

“I shall make a point of buying one, then, at any price,” said Major Fowler.

The bazaar was a very magnificent one, the stallholders so high in rank, that the author of ‘Iris’ might well have felt it a lucky chance; but to Sylvester the idea was agony.

“No,” said Amethyst slowly. “Books never sell at bazaars, I can’t undertake them.”

“My dear child,” said her mother, “you are really rude. This book would sell, of course.”

“I couldn’t sell it,” said Amethyst, and Sylvester felt as if he could have gone down on his knees to her, in gratitude.

He was half-wild. The atmosphere of this London world was not pure and sweet enough to hold his Iris. Here again was this old tempter, as he believed Major Fowler to be, by her side. Amethyst was no heavenly spirit, serene herself, to draw and influence struggling manhood; but a woman of the world, for whom an anxious lover saw many dangers, a jewel in which it was easy to find flaws, seen every moment in a changing light. She had indeed no time to dwell on one subject. A theory of life must give place to the exigencies of the bazaar. Una could only have a word and a kiss, as Amethyst hurried away with her mother to a great reception, as soon as the dinner-party was over. Sylvester Riddell had had his word and his thought. Now, on a grand staircase, amid a splendid throng of fine people, Sir Richard Grattan and Prince Pontresina were both awaiting her. She felt that the choice between Titian and the newest R.A. would soon be forced upon her, and was glad to turn to receive the courtesies of the very great lady at whose stall she was to help on the next day.

This was scarcely over, when she caught sight of the peculiar face of Mr Carisbrooke, standing under a group of palms and other tropical plants in the corridor, at the head of the staircase.

Her young intellect must have been vigorous and strong, her interest in new ideas very keen; for, in the midst of all the distracting whirl, her thoughts flashed back to her previous interview with him, and she made an opportunity to join him, and put her question, as if he and she had been alone in the place.

“Mr Carisbrooke,” she said, “you have set me thinking. I should like you to try your experiment. I want to know what my picture told you.”

Probably, if Amethyst had not been accustomed to find her every word taken as a favour, she would not have made so abrupt a demand; but she was quite in earnest, and stood before him as simply as a scholar before a teacher, and he answered her at once, looking straight into her eyes.

“There was the good child,” he said, “there was the young fancy. They have gone by. There is the beautiful lady. She has pleasure and power. She will have wealth, everything that the world can give. I wonder if it will satisfy her.”

“Do you think it ought to be satisfactory?” said Amethyst.

“Do you think it ever is?” he responded. “Ah! If I could have found it so! But I’m an old fellow, you know, Miss Haredale, and it is not my place to put lawless ideas into a young lady’s head, or to take up her time from more worthy claimants.”

“Oh,” said Amethyst, as Sir Richard and his sister bore down upon them, “that is as I think. Tell us the story you were speaking of the other day, Mr Carisbrooke. I want to hear the end of it.”

Mr Carisbrooke told a curious instance of thought transference in a pair of lovers, and told it very well. Amethyst listened with great interest, and perhaps chose to make her interest apparent, though Sir Richard repressed his impatience with difficulty.

When she found herself alone in her room that night, she stood for a moment and looked at herself in the glass. Why had she been so kind to Sylvester Riddell, when she had so much cause for righteous anger against him? Somehow, he belonged so much to days when she had felt kindly to every one, that she had forgotten to be unkind.

Yet he could look at her as he had done to-night, and think of her – what he had made Lucian believe!

“All for my beauty!” she said to herself. “I despise him for it!” she exclaimed, half aloud. “He ought to scorn me!”

But before she went to bed, she finished his poem. It vexed and dissatisfied her. It did not seem that the hero had managed to combine success in life with the search after, much less with the possession of, Iris. And Amethyst was finding that success in life was a very good thing.

Chapter Twenty Two

The Flaming Sword

Amethyst held many more conversations with Oliver Carisbrooke during the next few weeks, with the result that a distinct, though peculiar, relation was established between them. He was the only person she ever met – Sylvester of course having returned to Oxbridge – who had any intellectual interests, and Amethyst had so vigorous and inquiring a mind, that even fashion and frivolity could not stifle it. He gave her to understand that he was quite outside the ranks of her suitors, and only aspired to a rational friendship, and flattery of her intelligence was so much rarer, and less a matter of course, than flattery of her beauty, that it had a greater charm. He afforded an outlet to that side of her nature which could not be satisfied with the splendid outside of life.

The world was pressing hard on her soul. What had she come to London for, but to make a great marriage? Her family had made sacrifices for it, her acquaintances looked out for it, she herself intended it.

Every day made her engagement to Sir Richard Grattan more inevitable. She liked him very well, she knew that she could make the position that he offered to her splendid, she believed that she should be happy in it, and yet she was buying it at the cost of the divine spark within her which was her very self. She believed that romantic love was over for her, and that she was no longer the kind of person to whom religion could be an inspiring enthusiasm, though she did find in it a standard below which she did not mean to fall. She thought that she had outgrown a great deal in her short life.

Rather, she had hardly begun to grow, and within her were budding impulses, the nature of which she could not yet know. She had decided that the best thing she could do under the circumstances was to marry Sir Richard Grattan, and the habit she had formed, in self-defence, of keeping to the surface of life, prevented her from realising exactly what her resolution involved. In the meantime, Mr Carisbrooke lent her books and discussed them, and made her, she hardly knew how, feel that she was not cut off from the other side of life. He said daring things that stuck in her memory. He, at least, was not worldly-minded.

“Oh, the hero and heroine made a wise choice, I think,” he said, discussing a novel. “They had more – more life in one hour of each other, than in all the prosperity they sacrificed.”

“But they did wrong,” said Amethyst, who took things simply still.

“Did they? Ah, well, – perhaps that was worth while too, for each other.”

It will be seen that the discussions had become of an intimate kind.

Amethyst soon found that her friend did not bear an unblemished character. She had already learned to know that many of the men she met did not. She was told he had broken more than one heart. She smiled, and said she happily had none to break. Una, with insight sorely gained, steadily detested him. But she had no help from Amethyst in her own struggle. Her sister did not understand the hope within her, and so could not sympathise with its downfall. She merely soothed the variations of excited feeling which tried Una’s strength, and would not own that there was any adequate cause for them.

That all the girl’s emotions were violent and morbid was true enough, but Una was engaged in a real battle, and she did not yield herself captive.

For her misfortune, Major Fowler, who had always found her attractive, was caught again by her peculiar looks, and more developed character, and, though he meant nothing more than a renewal of the old sentimental relation between them, he inflicted agony on Una, to whom that relation had been so real a thing.

All the peace of her soul was gone, and as with her all was emotion, the struggle between right and wrong was a struggle between two personal loves. Her prayers seemed all in vain, no image but one haunted her visions, but she never forgot that the love that she believed herself to have lost, was the higher and the better thing; and, as she passed through the tormented weary days, she watched her sister, and wondered what fate Amethyst was preparing for herself.