It was on the Riviera that the preliminaries to this event occurred. Entrance to the penal colony, which is called Society there, is a matter of entire ease. Mrs. Verelst knocked and it was opened. There was a sesame in her dollars. There was another in Trella’s looks.
The particular section of the Riviera which she had selected is, geologically speaking, a Mediterranean cliff; descriptively, it is a sublimate of Paris in a tropic frame; pictorially, it is a fairyland in duodecimo; socially, it is striated with all the variegated hues of beautiful cosmopolitanism, and, familiarly, it is Monte Carlo. You may meet there kings, outlaws, demireps, professional beauties, cheap trippers, and Spanish grandees.
In the air is a smell of vitriol and violets, of vice, patented, prodigal, and perfumed. There is not an old-fashioned virtue in the place. There are tears, though, rivers of them, heightened by the click of the ball on the roulette table, the call of the dealers at trente-et-quarante, the music and monotony of Rien ne va plus. People go mad there. Others kill themselves. Some fall in love. Among the latter was Trella.
This extraordinary event occurred in a commonplace manner. At a rout given by the morganatic widow of an emperor the girl and her mother were present. During a pause in a dance, in a crash and subsidence of the orchestra, an Englishman caused himself to be presented. Before speech was possible there arose from beyond the voice of the world’s best tenor. It was an aria from the Somnambula that he was singing, the “Perche non posso odiarte,” which, for sheer beauty, is perhaps the most entrancing in all of Italy’s enchanting repertory.
The melting measures proceeded. The Englishman looked at the American girl and she at him. As they looked, the madness of the music seemed at first but the accompaniment of their thoughts, and then at once to transmit those thoughts from one to the other. Involuntarily, he moistened his lips. Into the perfection of the girl’s features a flush had come. To use a localism of the land, c’était le coup de foudre.
Trella let her long lashes fall. It was as though she had dropped a curtain. The man turned to her mother. That lady was whispering something. Yet what, he neither knew nor cared. The measures had swooned. The hush was broken by a ripple of applause.
“It is very warm,” Mrs. Verelst announced.
Before anyone could engage with her in meteorological observations, the tenor, by way of encore, was distributing the enchantment of his notes anew.
Back of Trella a balconied window opened on the April night. Already she had investigated its possibilities, and raising those lashes again, she led the Englishman to the stars without. The aria followed them. He never forgot that song. Nor, perhaps, did she.
II
Life is packed with pleasures. One of the most delightful is to awake with the consciousness of being in love. On the morning succeeding the rout Shane Wyvill awoke to just that delight. He was turbulently intoxicated by a girl whom he had never seen before, and whose name he did not know.
But the morning was a replica of others. Moreover, it was a family trait to wake up with that sensation. So far back as the family went, and it went as far back as any of the other families which Mr. Burke has so diligently catalogued, the Shane Wyvills—the Shame Wyvills as custom had corrupted the name—had, in love, been freebooters. Titularly lords of Cloden, typically they were a bad lot.
The last earl, after filling the Continent with the uproar of his debauches, gave up the ghost with a shriek. What visions he beheld he lacked the time to relate. It may be assumed that they were not very cheerful. The youth of the existing incumbent had been what the French call stormy. After the storm, the calm. The past twenty years he had passed at Shane Towers, contemplating the landscape. That landscape had been so successfully postobited that it produced less than would suffice for a sweep.
The wants of the earl were many. But they were entirely spiritual. Pending their attainment he sat in a dressing-gown at peace with all the world, including his nephew, Shane Wyvill, who was incidentally his heir.
In the latter’s father, hereditary characteristics had been so in abeyance that he had been regarded as a nonentity. He had married one of the Villiers girls, and done nothing worse than lose a portion of her portion in the City. Then he had died, she, also, leaving this heir and what was left of her property. The amount was just enough to enable him to get along on.
Apart, then, from the advantage of being in line for an empty earldom and the further advantage of good teeth and good looks, Shane Wyvill had, from the point of view of the world at large, nothing whatever to boast of.
Even otherwise, he was not of a boastful nature. By way of compensation he enjoyed the formidable repute of being the best-dressed man in London. But the repute was unrighteous. He was too sensible to do more than put himself in the hands of the right people and then forget all about them—except their bills, which he paid, as he paid all such things, on presentation. It will be seen, therefore, that if not boastful, at any rate, he was proud. No one is perfect.
But the imperfections of Wyvill will be the better understood through a showing that this mid-April morning, on which he awoke with the consciousness of being in love, was but a return of sundry others. Fed, as every decently educated
