she remained in london may and june. of course it was deadly dull, but people came to dine with her; she could dine with her very intimate friends; and men were in and out all day long from the commons and the club and the guard-rooms; and she made a lovely picture in her floating crape garments, cut a little low round the throat en bébé, to show its white and slender beauty. everyone felt bound to do their best to console her, and the task was a pleasant one even to her own sex, for her house, in a subdued discreet manner, was always full of agreeable persons, and softly buzzing with the latest news.
when she drove in the park with her whole equipage turned into mourning, she had one or other of her golden-haired children always with her, and the spectacle was one which especially touched the policemen at the crossings, the old apple-women at the corners, the workingmen eating their bread and cheese on the benches, and all that good-natured, credulous, purblind throng which creates popular opinion.
“our public men don’t make up enough,” she thought, seeing the effect which she had on the multitude. “napoleon’s white horse and boulanger’s black one did half their business for them. the public should always be governed through its eyes and its appetites; our leaders of it appeal to its mind—a non-existent entity.”
black was very becoming to her. it is the surest of consolations to have a dazzlingly fair skin which crape adorns. still death in the house is always tiresome; there are so many pleasant things which we cannot do. on the whole she thought it would have been better if cocky had lived some little time longer.
cocky’s death had happened at an awkward moment. the london season was irrevocably lost to her. all her new gowns must remain shut up in their cases. there was nowhere in the known world (of society) where she[279] could by any possibility dance and laugh and flirt and play cards, and go to races, and do theatres, and sup at restaurants, and generally amuse herself for the next six months. she did not care for conventionality, but there are things which no well-bred person can do; observances which the mere usage of the world enforces as it does the wearing of clothes, or of shoes and stockings.
she was wholly unconscious of the benevolent intentions which cocky had entertained toward her; she had never dreamed that he would think of causing a cause célèbre in connection with her.
she wished devoutly that he had lived for a year or two after his succession. the tutelage of ronald was a prospect which appalled her.
she knew that ronald, however generous with his own, would be a very dragon in defence of his ward’s possessions; and the little duke’s minority would be an exceedingly long one. from all power she had herself been carefully and mercilessly excluded by all the provisions alike of her husband and of his father. the terms of the wills had been sufficiently explained to her to leave her no doubt in that respect. her courage was high and her carelessness was great; but both quailed at the idea of many matters which would inevitably now come under her brother’s eyes.
cocky had been a bore; but you could always shut cocky’s eyes and his mouth too if you had a twenty-pound note to give him; and he was never in the least degree curious whence it came.
cocky had had many defects, but he had been at times a very convenient person; she had wished him dead very often, but now that he was really dead she was rather sorry. she could not now even take any of that lace away from staghurst; it would all be locked up again to wait twenty years for jack’s wife.
she was not in the least afraid of doing wrong, but she was keenly afraid of being found out, and especially of being found out by her brother. she knew very well that ronald’s toleration of her and affection for her were entirely based on the fact that she had in a great degree always succeeded in blindfolding him.
[280]he knew her to be reckless, imprudent, and madly extravagant, but he thought her innocent in other ways, and compromised by her husband.
oh, the support that cocky had been! she did feel genuine sorrow for his loss. to lose your scapegoat, your standing apology, your excuse for everything, is worse than to lose your jewel-box, especially when it has only paste copies of your jewels in it. she would really have liked to have had cocky survive a few years as duke of otterbourne. they would not have had much money, but they would have had such quantities of credit that their want of actual money would scarcely have been felt. they would have sold everything which settlement would have allowed them to sell, and very probably found means even to break the entail.
she was wholly unaware that the very first use he would have made of his accession would have been to drag her into the glare of that transpontine melodrama which is played in the court of probate and divorce. in the glare of his dying eyes she had indeed recognized hatred, but she had not known that such hatred would have taken its worst vengeance on her had he lived.
she did not know that fate, often so favorable to her, had never done her so kind a turn as when it had made him catch that cold at his father’s grave in the bitter east winds of the march morning. he had been something to complain of, to fret about, to quarrel with; at his door she could lay any responsibility she chose, and he had been often useful in a great strait through the ingenuity and unscrupulousness of his devices. then she had cordially detested him, and that sentiment alone had something exhilarating about it like a glass of bitters.
and yet again it had been the existence of cocky which had made harry interesting. now that it could become quite proper for her to annex harry, in the manner dear to mrs. grundy, he lost a great deal of his attraction. he fell suddenly in value like a depreciated currency.
after the first moments of awe which the presence of death causes to the most indifferent person, her first reflection had been that she could now marry him.
but her second and wiser was that it would be ridiculous[281] to do anything of the kind. poor harry was as poor as the traditional church mouse. the little he had ever been worth had been squeezed out of him by cocky and herself. she wanted money, an endless amount of money. women of the world want money as orchids want moisture. they cannot live except with their feet ankle deep in a pactolus. money, or its equivalent credit, is the necessity of their existence. her existence, hitherto, however brilliant on the surface, had been little better than a series of shifty expedients. she had danced her shawl dance on the brink of exposure and bankruptcy. what was the use of marrying a man with whom the same, or still worse, embarrassments would have perpetually to be endured?
at no time had she been ready to throw herself away on harry. she had been for several years fonder of him than she had ever supposed herself capable of being of anyone. when he had showed the least inclination for any other woman, her sentiment for him had become violent and ferocious in its sense of wronged ownership. but to marry him would be, she knew—she had always known—a grotesque mistake.
it would be one of those follies which are never forgiven by fate. harry was no more meant for marriage, she thought, as she sat alone in her morning-room, than that wheelbarrow was meant for use. it was a charming wheelbarrow in satin, scarlet, and green, with gilded wheels and handles; filled with cherries, plumbs, currants, and strawberries made by the first bonbon-makers of paris, and sent at easter, the week before the old duke died. one might just as well roll that barrow over the stones to covent garden market, as think of marriage with harry.
if she had been rich she would not have married again at all; men were crochetty worrying bores whenever you saw much of them, but to go on like this under ronald’s and the ormes’s tutelage, and next to nothing to amuse herself with, was wholly out of the question.
a vindictive dislike rose up in her against jack. he was everything and she was nothing. this absurd rosy-faced monkey was lord of all; this little curly-headed imp in his man-o’-war suit was owner of everything and she[282] of nothing, or of next to nothing; she felt an unreasonable and most unjust impatience at the very sight of his round laughing face and his sunny correggio curls; and he avoided her as a puppy avoids a person who kicks it or scowls at it.
“can’t mammy be nasty? oh, can’t she!” he said to his confidant harry, who frowned and answered:
“it’s blackguard of her if she’s nasty to you.”
harry himself was dull. on due consideration of his position he had felt no doubt whatever that he would have to marry jack’s mother.
cocky had been his best friend; had cocky’s duration of life depended on him the seventh duke of otterbourne would have seen a green old age.
“bother it all,” thought the poor fellow, “and i must say something about it to her, i suppose. oh, damn it! it’s telling a man in newgate that he must settle the day for his own hanging!”
his world supposed him still to be very much in love with jack’s mother, but the prospect of being wedded to her appalled him. “my granny always said she would end in doing it,” he thought, recalling the prophetic wisdom of the aged lady luce.
men as a rule are not remarkable for tact, especially in personal matters which touch on the affections, and he had less of that valuable instinct than most people. unaware that the lady of his destiny had mentally weighed him in the balance with the satin wheelbarrow, and found him wanting like the wheelbarrow in solidity, he was tormented by the feeling that he ought to speak to her on the subject and the indefinable reluctance which held him back from doing so.
the position of a man who has to marry a lady with whom his name has long been associated before his world can never be agreeable. he is conscious of paying over again in gold for what he has long ago bought with paper. he is aware that lookers-on laugh in their sleeve.
it requires the beaux restes of a veritable passion, the perennial charm of an undying sympathy, to make the most loyal of lovers accept without flinching so conspicuous and questionable a position.
[283]to her, it is triumph as to the master builder when the gilded vane crowns the giddy height of the steeple. she shows that she has kept her man well in hand, and ridden him with science to the finish. beside, the shyest of women always likes what compromises and compliments her.
but the masculine mind is differently constituted; it sincerely dislikes being talked about, it still more dislikes to be laughed at, and when it is english, it is, on matters of the affections, uncommonly shy.
the necessity of broaching this delicate matter weighed heavily on brancepeth’s spirits; he did not know how to set about it, and he felt that it was at once ungracious to her to delay and unfeeling to poor buried cocky to hasten the necessary avowal. he was always thankful when he found other people with her, and equally thankful that her respect for appearances had caused her to relax her demands on his attendance and affection ever since her return from the interments at staghurst. one day, however, some six weeks after cocky’s disappearance from a world of poker and pick-me-ups, brancepeth found himself alone with the fair mourner to whom crape was so infinitely becoming.
to this poor fellow, in whose breast the primitive feelings of human nature were planted too deeply for the ways of his world to have uprooted them, the idea of having the children with him, in his own house, seeing them every day and watching them grow up, was one which consoled him for being forced to sacrifice his liberty. of course, they would always be cocky’s children to the world and in “burke,” but if he were their mother’s husband nobody would think it odd if he made much of them, and took them to ride in the row, or went with them to see a pantomime, or hired a houseboat for them, and taught them how to scull; simple joys which smiled at him from the future. their mother would always be what she always had been. he had no illusions about her; he would have to give her her head whether he liked it or not; but the children—harry saw himself living very properly, as a married man, in a little house off the park, and getting every now and then “a day out” with[284] jack on the river. he would leave the guards, he reflected, and pull himself together; he had next to nothing of his own left, but some day or other he would be lord inversay, and then, though it would always be a beggarly business, for the estates were mortgaged to their last sod of grass, he would try to make things run as straight as he could for sake of these merry little men who were cocky’s children. occupied with such innocent and purifying thoughts, he had arrived in stanhope street.
it was a soft grey day in early may, and her room was a bower of lilac, heliotrope, and tea-roses. the blenheims were quiet, for cocky annoyed them no more. the tempered light fell through silk blinds on to the charming figure of their lady, as she lay back on a long low chair, her black robes falling softly about her as if she were some blessed damozel, or lady of tears, of rossetti’s or burne-jones’s. only between her lips was a cigarette and on her knee was a volume of gyp’s. harry, good soul, was not awake to the incongruity; he only thought how awfully fetching she was, and yet he groaned in spirit. but after a few preliminary nothings, with much the same desperate and unpleasant resolve as that with which he had gone up to be birched at eton, he opened his lips and spoke.
“i say,” he murmured with timidity—“i say, dear, i have wanted to ask you ever since—i suppose—i mean, of course, i understand, now you are free you will want me to—wish me to—i mean we shall have to get married, shan’t we, when the year’s out?”
when these words had escaped him he was sensible that they were not complimentary, that they were not at all what he ought to have said, and a vague sensation of fright stole over him and he felt himself turn pale.
into the blue eyes of mouse that terrible lightning flashed which had withered up his courage very often as flame licks up dry grass. then her sense of humor was stronger than her sense of offence; she took her cigarette out of her mouth and laughed with a genuine peal of musical laughter which was not affected. he stared at her, relieved, but in his turn offended. after all, he[285] thought, it was not every man who would have ridden so straight up to the fence of duty and taken it so gallantly.
“my dear harry,” she said, rather slightingly, when her mirth had subsided, “i have had to listen to many declarations in my time, but—but i never had one so eloquent, so delicate, so opportune as yours. pray will you tell me why i should be supposed to want to marry you, as you chivalrously express it?”
“it’s usual,” he answered sulkily, not daring to express the astonishment with which her tone and manner filled him.
“what is usual?” she asked, looking straight at him with serene imperturbable coolness and entire refusal to meet him half way by any kind of comprehension.
“well, it is, you know that,” he replied, looking down on the carpet.
“usual for a woman to marry again seven weeks after her husband’s death? i never heard so. i believe there is a country where a widow does marry all her husband’s brothers one after another, as fast as she can, but that country is not england.”
she put her cigarette back into her mouth again.
he looked at her apprehensively and shyly as jack did very often from under his long lashes. he was puzzled and he was humiliated. he had brought himself up with a rush to do what he thought honor and all the rest of it required of him, and his self-sacrifice was not even appreciated but derided.
“i thought, of course, you’d desire it on account of the children,” he said stupidly, insanely, for he should have known that truths like this cannot be told to women with any possibility of pardon to the teller of them.
she looked at him with an admirably imitated astonishment.
“for the children? for cocky’s children? i am really unable to guess why.”
“oh, damnation!”
the rude word escaped him despite himself; he rose and walked to and fro across the room trying to keep down the very unreasonable passion which burned within him.
[286]“pray sit down—or go out,” said mouse calmly, and she lighted a fresh cigarette at the little silver lighter.
brancepeth’s eyes filled with tears. he was wounded and unnerved. the amazing impudence of woman which always so completely outstrips and eclipses the uttermost audacity of man stunned his feebler and tender organization. she was really still fond of him, though his savor, as of forbidden fruit, was gone, and the stupid veracity and naïveté of his character irritated and bored her.
“my dear harry, don’t be so upset,” she said in a kinder tone. “there are things which should never be said. walls have ears. the chinese are quite right. if a thing is not to be told do not tell it. it is quite natural you should like cocky’s children since you were such friends with him and me; but you sometimes make too much fuss with them, especially in the nurseries. children are so soon spoilt.”
brancepeth looked at her from under his sleepy eyelids with something near akin to contempt.
“the doors are shut,” he said sullenly, “and there’s nobody on the balconies. can’t we speak without bosh for once? the poor devil’s dead. can’t we let his name alone? he was a bad lot, certainly, but we didn’t try to make him better. he wasn’t a fool; he must have known, you know——”
she roused herself from her reclining attitude, and her fair features were very set and stern.
“he is dead, as you observe. ordinary intelligence would therefore suggest that it does not in the least matter what he did know and what he didn’t know. being dead he yet speaketh, cannot happily be said of cocky. he has tormented me by setting ronnie over me and the children, but that is the only annoyance he had the wit to inflict.”
“ronnie’ll do his duty.”
“of course he will. people always do their duty when it consists in being disagreeable to others.”
“answer me, mouse,” said brancepeth, bringing his walk to an end immediately in front of her. “i want to know, you know. shall we marry or not? don’t beat about the bush. say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”
[287]she blew some perfumed smoke in the air, then, in a very chilly and cutting tone, replied:
“most distinctly: no.”
“and why not?” said brancepeth, feeling an irrational offence, although a moment before he had dreaded receiving an affirmative answer.
“my dear harry, we are both as poor as church mice. if you can’t pay your own tailors how would you pay mine?”
“we should get along somehow.”
“oh, thanks! i have had nearly ten years of ‘getting along somehow,’ and it is an extremely uncomfortable and crablike mode of moving. i hope to have no more of it. it takes it out of one. i shall marry again, of course. but i shall marry money.”
he, still standing in front of her, gazed down on her gloomily. certainly he had been keenly and nervously apprehensive that she would expect to marry him—would insist on marrying him; but now that she so decidedly refused to do so the matter took another aspect in his eyes. a vague sullen sense of offended and repudiated ownership rose up in him; it is a sentiment extremely tenacious, unreasonable, and aggressive, whether it be agrarian or amorous. he did not say anything; words were not very abundant with him, but he continued to look down on her gloomily.
marry money!
and the man with money would have all this charming fair beauty of hers, and would have jack and the others in his nurseries: and he himself—where would he be? done with; rubbed off the slate; struck out of the running; allowed to do a theatre with her now and then perhaps, and see jack and the others on their ponies in the ride of a morning—where was the good of cocky having died? he wished with all his soul that cocky had not died. things had been so comfortable with poor old cocky.
he was accustomed to consider himself as a part of her property; for nearly ten years she had disposed of his time, his circumstance, and his resources; he had always been at her beck and call, and the nurseries had been[288] his recompense; he was stunned to be flung off in this way like any stranger. she saw that he was angry, more angry than he knew. she guessed all the various feelings which were at work within him; they were clearer to her than to himself. she was fond of him; she did not wish to lose him entirely; there was nobody else she liked so much, nobody else so extremely good-looking. she administered an opiate after the severe wound she had given.
“you goose!” she said softly, whilst her blue eyes smiled caressingly upon him. “you are too terribly tragic to-day. do look at things in their right form, dear; you must see that however much we might like it we can’t possibly afford to marry each other. we might as well want to drive a team of giraffes down piccadilly. we have nothing to marry upon, and we are both of us people who require a good deal. besides, society will expect us to marry, and for that reason alone i wouldn’t. it would be de me donner dans le tort. i shall marry somebody extremely rich. i don’t know who yet, but somebody, i promise you, who shall be nice to you, dear; just as nice as poor cocky was, and somebody who won’t be always wanting five pounds as cocky was, but, on the contrary, will be able to lend five hundred if you wish for it.”
the future she so delicately suggested seemed to her so seductive that she expected it to fully satisfy her companion. but he saw it in another and a less favorable aspect. his handsome face grew dark as a thunder-cloud and his teeth shut tightly together. he stood before her, staring down on her.
“the devil take you and all your soft speeches!” he said, through his clenched teeth. “you are an out and out bad woman. that’s what you are. if you weren’t their mother i would——.”
his voice choked in his throat. he turned quickly, took up his hat and cane from the chair he had left them on, and went out of the room without looking behind him. he closed the door roughly and ran down the staircase.
a youthful philosopher in powder and black shoulder-knots, who was on duty at the head of the stairs, looked[289] after his retreating figure with placid derision. “she’s wanting him to be spliced to her and he won’t hear of it,” thought the youth; but even philosophers in powder, whose portico is the vestibule of a fashionable london house, sometimes err in their conclusions.
fury, as though it were the drug curare, held her motionless and speechless as she heard the door close behind her self-emancipated slave. the common coarse language of the streets used to her! she could not believe her ears. her rage stifled her. she could scarcely breathe. the blenheims were frightened at her expression and went under a sofa. she took the satin wheelbarrow—she did not know why, except that it was associated in her thoughts with him—and she broke it, and tore it, and flung its contents all over the room, and trampled on the gilded wheel and handles till they were mere glittering splinters and shivers. that exercise of violence did her good, the blood ceased to buzz in her ears, her nerves grew calmer; she would willingly have killed someone or something, but even this destruction of a toy did her good, it was better than nothing, it relaxed the tension of her nerves. it had allowed her a little of that violent physical action which is the instinct of even civilized human nature when it is offended or outraged.
when she was a little calmer and could reflect, she thought she would tell his commanding officer and demand his punishment; she thought she would tell the prince of wales and entreat his exclusion from marlborough house and sandringham; she thought she would tell the editor of truth, and beg him to have a paragraph about it. then, as she grew calmer still, she became aware that she could tell nobody at all anything whatever. if the world knew that harry had used bad words to her, the world would immediately ask what tether had been given to harry that he had ever so greatly dared.
“the coward, the coward!” she said, in her teeth. “he knows i can’t even have him thrashed by another man.”
his crime against her seemed to her monstrous. it was indeed of the kind which no woman forgives. it was the[290] cruellest of all insults; one which was based upon fact. to her own idea she had very delicately and good-naturedly intimated to her friend that she would arrange her future so that their relation should be as undisturbed as in the past. if that did not merit a man’s gratitude, what did? yet, instead of thanks, he had spoken to her as she had not supposed women were spoken to outside the haymarket or the rat mort.
she never admitted to herself that she did wrong; much less had she ever permitted anyone else to hint that she did so. a bad woman! ladies like herself can no more conceive such a phrase being used to describe them than a winner of the oaks could imagine herself between a costermonger’s shafts. all that they do is ticketed under pretty or pleasant names on the shelves of their memories; tact, friendship, amusement, sympathy, convenience, amiability, health, one or other of these nice sounding words labels every one of their motives or actions. to class themselves with “bad people” never enters their minds for a moment; messalina would certainly never have dreamed of being classed with the horizontales of the suburra. what made it worse was that she was still fond of him, though he often bored her. she would have given ten years of life to have had his face under her foot and to have stamped it into blurred ugliness as she had stamped the wheelbarrow into atoms. but these fierce simple pleasures, alas! are only allowed to the women of the haymarket and the rat mort.
she had done incalculable harm to harry; she had worried, enslaved, and tormented the best years of his life; she had impoverished him utterly, she had stripped him of the little he had ever possessed, she had driven him into debt which would hang about his neck like a millstone to the day of his death; she had turned a simple and honest nature into devious and secret ways; she had made him lie, and laughed at him when he had been ashamed of lying; she had done him a world of harm, and in return he had only said five little rude words to her. but his offence seemed to her so enormous that if she had possessed the power she would have had him beaten with rods or roasted at a slow fire. that she had been his[291] worst enemy she would never have admitted for one instant, never have supposed that anyone could think it. she considered that she had made him supremely happy during a very long period, that if she had ever given him cause for jealousy he had never known it, which is all that a well-bred man should expect; and that he had enjoyed the supreme felicity of being associated in her home life, of knowing all her worries and annoyances, and of being allowed to make an ass of himself in the nurseries in a simili-domestic fashion which was just suited to his simple tastes as a simili-bronze of a classic statuette is suited to the narrow purse of a tourist. his ingratitude seemed to her so vile, so enormous, that the immensity of her own wrongs made her submit to bear them in silence out of admiration of her own magnanimity and the serenity of her own certitude that she would avenge herself somehow or other to the smallest iota.
she rang the bell, which was answered by a colleague of the young philosopher in powder of the anteroom. “the dogs have torn up this bonbon thing,” she said, pointing to the wreck of the ruined wheelbarrow. “take it away and bring me some luncheon in here; only a quail and some plover eggs and some claret; order the carriage for three o’clock.”
she felt exhausted from the extreme violence of her anger and the infamy of the affront she had received; and were phedre or dido or cleopatra living on the brink of the twentieth century no one of them would any day go without her luncheon. they would know that their emotions “took it out” of them, that their nervous system was in danger when their affections are disturbed; they would know all about neurasthenia and marasma, and however angry or unhappy for hippolytus, for æneas, or for anthony, would remember that they were organisms very easily put out of order, machines which require very regular nutrition; they would be fully conscious of the important functions of their livers, and would regulate their passions so as not to interfere with their digestions.
