The Dark Lady Read Free Page A

play hockey."
    "Judge, do you think I might have a glass of wine now?"
    "Why certainly, my dear." Even in his surprise he failed to release her fingers. His free hand beckoned the butler. "Some wine for Miss Dart."
    Elesina with a slight effort brought her right hand up to table level. Only then did he release his hold. "Oh, don't let go," she protested, smiling across him at the obliquely watching Pat. "I'm always proud to have my hand held, aren't you, Mrs. Schurman? Only I insist that everybody witness my honor!"
    "Very amusing, I'm sure."
    Elesina turned away abruptly from Pat Schurman's pert stare. Let the little minx have Stein's paw in
her
lap if she wanted! Did she think Elesina Dart cared? Mrs. Schurman, indeed! Did Mrs. Schurman know there had been a Dart at Valley Forge? And a Dart at the Treaty of Ghent? Wouldn't all the Steins and Schurmans in this pompous room have given all their purchased portraits for her own little Copley, now unfortunately sold, of Elisha Dart?
    But Elesina could never long enjoy this kind of snobbish fantasy. She felt her spirits suddenly deflate. How petty it all was! What did these people care about the Darts? What was all her family's past but a few tattered albums of faded snapshots of ladies in big hats on broad verandahs, of bearded men at the wheels of unbelievable autos, a box of yellow newspaper clippings of weddings and funerals, a memory of memories, a story written on the opaque waters of the East River, gone with the dirty snows of yesteryear?
    She had to beckon the astonished butler to refill her glass. Really, it was too much! And now she was aware of a louder voice, addressing her with heavily ironic politeness.
    "Your little interchange with the Judge, Miss Dart, puts me in mind of that sonnet of the divine bard's where he contemplates his mistress' fingers on the keys, or jacks, of a spinet. It evokes this happy conceit which I presume, facetiously, to offer in my own behalf at our host's expense: 'Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.'"
    Fred Pemberton, on Pat Schurman's right, was leaning across her to gain Elesina's attention. His intrusive, watery eyes, his fixed little smile made her shiver in disgust. She decided to indulge the impulse to cut him down.
    "But those dark lady sonnets were only a cover-up. Wasn't it the 'lovely boy' whose lips he really wanted to kiss?" Elesina now glanced down the table to where David Stein was talking to Ivy. "The divine bard, as you call him, would have addressed himself to our host's son rather than to me."
    Pemberton, to her surprise, cackled with pleasure. Apparently any attention pleased him. "Aren't you forgetting, Miss Dart, the evidence of the twentieth sonnet? Where our poet tells us that nature, in molding the body of the beloved youth, intended him originally for a girl, but then fell a doting and added 'one thing to my purpose nothing.'"
    "You interpret that as a reference to the young man's sexual organ?" Elesina's question was designed to insure that Mrs. Schurman should understand the reference, which she clearly did, for her thin lips were now pursed into a ball of disgust. Irving Stein coughed loudly, uneasily. "I suppose it's clear enough. But the presence of such an organ might still have been 'nothing,' or no impediment, to the poet's particular taste. However, a truce to such speculations! I am not sure that Mrs. Schurman appreciates our scholarly freedom. Let me simply point out that this sonnet may have been intended to put the reader off the track. After all, sodomy was a serious crime in Elizabethan England. Even if it flourished at court, you could still be burned alive for it. A man in Shakespeare's unprotected social position did not lightly twit authority."
    "But, my dear Miss Dart," Stein intervened, "you are a veritable mine of authority! I told you you'd be one of us!"
    "Oh, I once played the dark lady in a comedy based on the sonnets." Elesina laughed