“Tell his lordship.”
The butler went out, and Lady Holme’s maid put a long black cloak carefully over her mistress’s shoulders. While she did this Lady Holme stood quite still gazing into vacancy. They were in the now deserted yellow drawing-room, which was still brilliantly lit, and full of the already weary-looking flowers which had been arranged for the reception. The last guest had gone and the carriage was waiting to take the Holmes to Arkell House.
The maid did something to the diamonds in Lady Holme’s hair with deft fingers, and the light touch seemed to wake Lady Holme from a reverie. She went to a mirror and looked into it steadily. The maid stood behind. After a moment Lady Holme lifted her hand suddenly to her head, as if she were going to take off her tiara. The maid could not repress a slight movement of startled astonishment. Lady Holme saw it in the glass, dropped her hand, and said:
“C’est tout, Josephine. Vous pouvez vous en aller.”
“Merci, miladi.”
She went out quietly.
Two or three minutes passed. Then Lord Holme’s deep bass voice was audible, humming vigorously:
“Ina, Ina, oh, you should have seen her!
Seen her with her eyes cast down.
She looked upon the floor,
And all the Johnnies swore
That Ina, Ina—oh, you should have seen her!—
That Ina was the chic-est girl in town.”
Lady Holme frowned.
“Fritz!” she called rather sharply.
Lord Holme appeared with a coat thrown over his arm and a hat in his hand. His brown face was beaming with self-satisfaction.
“Well, old girl, ready? What’s up now?”
“I wish you wouldn’t sing those horrible music-hall songs. You know I hate them.”
“Music-hall! I like that. Why, it’s the best thing in The Chick from the Army and Navy at the Blue Theatre.”
“It’s disgustingly vulgar.”
“What next? Why, I saw the Lord Chan—”
“I daresay you did. Vulgarity will appeal to the Saints of Heaven next season if things go on as they’re going now. Come along.”
She went out of the room, walking more quickly than she usually walked, and holding herself very upright. Lord Holme followed, forming the words of his favourite song with his lips, and screwing up his eyes as if he were looking at an improper peepshow. When they were in the electric brougham, which spun along with scarcely any noise, he began:
“I say, Vi, how long’ve you known Miss Schley?”
“I don’t know. Some weeks.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did. I said I had met her at Mrs. Wolfstein’s lunch.”
“No, but why didn’t you tell me how like you she was?”
There was complete silence in the brougham for a minute. Then Lady Holme said:
“I had no idea she was like me.”
“Then you’re blind, old girl. She’s like you if you’d been a chorus-girl and known a lot of things you don’t know.”
“Really. Perhaps she has been a chorus-girl.”
“I’ll bet she has, whether she says so or not.”
He gave a deep chuckle. Lady Holme’s gown rustled as she leaned back in her corner.
“And she’s goin’ to Arkell House. Americans are the very devil for gettin’ on. Laycock was tellin’ me to-night that—”
“I don’t wish to hear Mr. Laycock’s stories, Fritz. They don’t amuse me.”
“Well, p’r’aps they’re hardly the thing for you, Vi. But they’re deuced amusin’ for all that.”
He chuckled again. Lady Holme felt an intense desire to commit some act of physical violence. She shut her eyes. In a minute she heard her husband once more beginning to hum the refrain about Ina. How utterly careless he was of her desires and requests. There was something animal in his forgetfulness and indifference. She had loved the animal in him. She did love it. Something deep down in her nature answered eagerly to its call. But at moments she hated it almost with fury. She hated it now and longed to use the whip, as the tamer in a menagerie uses it when one of his beasts shows its teeth, or sulkily refuses to perform one of its tricks.
Lord Holme went on calmly humming till the brougham stopped in the long line of carriages that stretched away into the night from the great portico of Arkell House.
People were already going in to supper when the Holmes arrived. The Duke, upon whom a painful malady was beginning to creep, was bravely welcoming his innumerable guests. He found it already impossible to go unaided up and down stairs, and sat in a large armchair close to the ball-room, with one of his pretty daughters near him, talking brightly, and occasionally stealing wistful glances at the dancers, who were visible through a high archway to his left. He was a thin, middle-aged man, with a curious, transparent look in his face—something crystalline that was nearly beautiful.
The Duchess was swarthy and masterful, very intelligent and grande dame. Vivacity was easy to her. People said she had been a good hostess in her cradle, and that she had presided over the ceremony of her own baptism in a most autocratic and successful manner. It was quite likely.
After a word with the Duke, Lady Holme went slowly towards the ballroom with her husband. She did not mean to dance, and began to refuse the requests of would-be partners with charming protestations of fatigue. Lord Holme was scanning the ballroom with his big brown eyes.
“Are you going to dance, Fritz?” asked Lady Holme, nodding to Robin Pierce, whom she had just seen standing at a little distance with Rupert Carey.
The latter had not seen her yet, but as Robin returned her nod he looked hastily round.
“Yes, I promised Miss Schley to struggle through a waltz with her. Wonder if she’s dancin’?”
Lady Holme bowed, a little ostentatiously, to Rupert Carey. Her husband saw it and began at once to look pugilistic. He could not say anything, for at this moment two or three men strolled up to speak to Lady Holme. While she was talking to them, Pimpernel Schley came in sight waltzing with Mr. Laycock, one of those abnormally thin, narrow-featured, smart men, with bold, inexpressive ayes, in whom London abounds.
Lord Holme’s under-jaw resumed its natural position, and he walked away and was lost in the crowd, following the two dancers.
“Take me in to supper, Robin. I’m tired.”
“This way. I thought you were never coming.”
“People stayed so late. I can’t think why. I’m sure it was dreadfully dull and foolish. How odd Mr. Carey’s looking! When I bowed to him just now he didn’t return it, but only stared at me as if I were a stranger.”
Robin Pierce made no rejoinder. They descended the great staircase and went towards the picture-gallery.
“Find a corner where we can really talk.”
“Yes, yes.”
He spoke eagerly.
“Here—this is perfect.”
They sat down at a table for two that was placed in an angle of the great room. Upon the walls above them looked down a Murillo and a Velasquez. Lady Holme was under the Murillo, which represented three Spanish street boys playing a game in the dust with pieces of money.
“A table for two,” said Robin Pierce. “I have always said that the Duchess understands the art of entertaining better than anyone in London, except you—when you choose.”
“To-night I really couldn’t choose. Later on, I’m going to give two or three concerts. Is anything the matter with Mr. Carey?”
“Do you think so?”
“Well, I hope it isn’t true what people are saying.”
“What are they saying?”
“That’s he’s not very judicious in one way.”
A footman poured champagne into her glass. Robin Pierce touched the glass.
“That way?”
“Yes. It would be too sad.”
“Let us hope it isn’t true, then.”
“You know him well. Is it true?”
“Would you care if it was?”
He looked at her earnestly.
“Yes. I like Mr. Carey.”
There was a rather unusual sound of sincerity in her voice.
“And what is it that you like in him?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He talks shocking nonsense, of course, and is down on people and things. And he’s absurdly unsophisticated at moments, though he knows the world so well. He’s not like you—not a diplomat. But I believe if he had a chance he might do something great.”
Robin felt as if the hidden woman had suddenly begun to speak. Why did she speak about Rupert Carey?
“Do you like a man to do something great?” he said.
“Oh, yes. All women do.”
“But I perpetually hear you laughing at the big people—the Premiers, the Chancellors, the Archbishops, the Generals of the world.”
“Because I’ve always known them. And really they are so often quite absurd and tiresome.”
“And—Rupert Carey?”
“Oh, he’s nothing at all, poor fellow! Still there’s something in his face that makes me think he could do an extraordinary thing if he had the chance. I saw it there to-night when he didn’t bow to me. There’s Sir Donald’s son. And what a dreadful-looking woman just behind him.”
Leo Ulford was coming down the gallery with a gaunt, aristocratic, harsh-featured girl. Behind him walked Mr. Bry, conducting a very young old woman, immensely smart, immensely vivacious, and immensely pink, who moved with an unnecessary alertness that was birdlike, and turned her head about sharply on a long, thin neck decorated with a large diamond dog-collar. Slung at her side there was a tiny jewelled tube.
“That’s Mrs. Leo.”
“She must be over sixty.”
“She is.”
The quartet sat down at the next table. Leo Ulford did not see Lady Holme at once. When he caught sight of her, he got up, came to her, stood over her and pressed her hand.
“Been away,” he explained. “Only back to-night.”
“I’ve been complaining to your father about you.”
A slow smile overspread his chubby face.
“May I see you again after supper?”
“If you can find me.”
“I can always manage to find what I want,” he returned, still smiling.
When he had gone back to his table Robin Pierce said:
“How insolent Englishmen are allowed to be in Society! It always strikes me after I’ve been a long time abroad. Doesn’t anybody mind it?”
“Do you mean that you consider Mr. Ulford insolent?”
“In manner. Yes, I do.”
“Well, I think there’s something like Fritz about him.”
Robin Pierce could not tell from the way this was said what would be a safe remark to make. He therefore changed the subject.
“Do you know what Sir Donald’s been doing?” he said.
“No. What?”
“Buying a Campo Santo.”
“A Campo Santo! Is he going to bury himself, then? What do you mean, Robin?”
“He called it a Campo Santo to Carey. It’s really a wonderful house in Italy, on Como. Casa Felice is the name of it. I know it well.”
“Casa Felice. How delicious! But is it the place for Sir Donald?”
“Why not?”
“For an old, tired man. Casa Felice. Won’t the name seem an irony to him when he’s there?”
“You think an old man can’t be happy anywhere?”
“I can’t imagine being happy old.”
“Why not?”
“Oh!”—she lowered her voice—“if you want to know, look at Mrs. Ulford.”
“Your husk theory again. A question of looks. But you will grow old gracefully—some day in the far future.”
“I don’t think I shall grow old at all.”
“Then—?”
“I think I shall die before that comes—say at forty-five. I couldn’t live with wrinkles all over my face. No, Robin, I couldn’t. And—look at Mrs. Ulford!—perhaps an ear-trumpet set with opals.”
“What do the wrinkles matter? But some day you’ll find I’m right. You’ll tell me so. You’ll acknowledge that your charm comes from within, and has survived the mutilation of the husk.”
“Mutilation! What a hideous sound that word has. Why don’t all mutilated people commit suicide at once? I should. Is Sir Donald going to live in his happy house?”
“Naturally. He’ll be there this August. He’s invited Rupert Carey to stay there with him.”
“And you?”
“Not yet.”
“I suppose he will. Everybody always asks you everywhere. Diplomacy is so universally—”
She broke off. Far away, at the end of the gallery, she had caught sight of Miss Schley coming in with her husband. They sat down at a table near the door. Robin Pierce followed her eyes and understood her silence.
“Are you going on the first?” he asked.
“What to?”
“Miss Schley’s first night.”
“Is it on the first? I didn’t know. We can’t. We’re dining at Brayley House that evening.”
“What a pity!” he said, with a light touch of half playful malice. “You would have seen her as she really is—from all accounts.”
“And what is Miss Schley really?”
“The secret enemy of censors.”
“Oh!”
“You dislike her. Why?”
“I don’t dislike her at all.”
“Do you like her?”
“No. I like very few women. I don’t understand them.”
“At any rate you understand—say Miss Schley—better than a man would.”
“Oh—a man!”
“I believe all women think all men fools.”
Lady Holme laughed, not very gaily.
“Don’t they?” he insisted.
“In certain ways, in certain relations of life, I suppose most men are—rather short-sighted.”
“Like Mr. Bry.”
“Mr. Bry is the least short-sighted man I know. That’s why he always wears an eyeglass.”
“To create an illusion?”
“Who knows?”
She looked down the long room. Between the heads of innumerable men and women she could see Miss Schley. Her husband was hidden. She would have preferred to see him. Miss Schley’s head was by no means expressive of the naked truth. It merely looked cool, self-possessed, and—so Lady Holme said to herself—extremely American. What she meant by that she could, perhaps, hardly have explained.
“Do you admire Miss Schley’s appearance?”
Robin Pierce spoke again with a touch of humorous malice. He knew Lady Holme so well that he had no objection to seem wanting in tact to her when he had a secret end to gain. She looked at him sharply; leaning forward over the table and opening her eyes very wide.
“Why are you forgetting your manners to-night and bombarding me with questions?”
“The usual reason—devouring curiosity.”
She hesitated, looking at him. Then suddenly her face changed. Something, some imp of adorable frankness, peeped out of it at him, and her whole body seemed confiding.
“Miss Schley is going about London imitating me. Now, isn’t that true? Isn’t she?”
“I believe she is. Damned impertinence!”
He muttered the last words under his breath.
“How can I admire her?”
There was something in the way she said that which touched him. He leaned forward to her.
“Why not punish her for it?”
“How?”
“Reveal what she can’t imitate.”
“What’s that?”
“All you hide and I divine.”
“Go on.”
“She mimics the husk. She couldn’t mimic the kernel.”
“Ice, my lady?”
Lady Holme started. Till the footman spoke she had not quite realised how deeply interested she was in the conversation. She helped herself to some ice.
“You can go on, Mr. Pierce,” she said when the man had gone.
“But you understand.”
She shook her head, smiling. Her body still looked soft and attractive, and deliciously feminine.
“Miss Schley happens to have some vague resemblance to you in height and colouring. She is a clever mimic. She used to be a professional mimic.”
“Really!”
“That was how she first became known.”
“In America?”
“Yes.”
“Why should she imitate me?”
“Have you been nice to her?”
“I don’t know. Yes. Nice enough.”
Robin shook his head.
“You think she dislikes me then?”
“Do women want definite reasons for half the things they do? Miss Schley may not say to herself that she dislikes you, any more than you say to yourself that you dislike her. Nevertheless—”
“We should never get on. No.”
“Consider yourselves enemies—for no reasons, or secret woman’s reasons. It’s safer.”
Lady Holme looked down the gallery again. Miss Schley’s fair head was bending forward to some invisible person.
“And the mimicry?” she asked, turning again to Robin.
“Can only be applied to mannerisms, to the ninety-ninth part, the inconsiderable fraction of your charm. Miss Schley could never imitate the hidden woman, the woman who sings, the woman who laughs at, denies herself when she is not singing.”
“But no one cares for her—if she exists.”
There was a hint of secret bitterness in her voice when she said that.
“Give her a chance—and find out. But you know already that numbers do.”
He tried to look into her eyes, but she avoided his gaze and got up.
“Take me back to the ballroom.”
“You are going to dance?”
“I want to see who’s here.”
As they passed the next table Lady Holme nodded to Leo Ulford. He bowed in return and indicated that he was following almost immediately. Mrs. Ulford put down her ear-trumpet, turned her head sharply, and looked at Lady Holme sideways, fluttering her pink eyelids.
“How exactly like a bird she is,” murmured Lady Holme.
“Exactly—moulting.”
Lady Holme meant as she walked down the gallery; to stop and speak a few gay words to Miss Schley and her husband, but when she drew near to their table Lord Holme was holding forth with such unusual volubility, and Miss Schley was listening with such profound attention, that it did not seem worth while, and she went quietly on, thinking they did not see her. Lord Holme did not. But the American smiled faintly as Lady Holme and Robin disappeared into the hall. Then she said, in reply to her animated companion:
“I’m sure if I am like Lady Holme I ought to say Te Deum and think myself a lucky girl. I ought, indeed.”
Lady Holme had not been in the ballroom five minutes before Leo Ulford came up smiling.
“Here I am,” he remarked, as if the statement were certain to give universal satisfaction.
Robin looked black and moved a step closer to Lady Holme.
“Thank you, Mr. Pierce,” she said.
She took Leo Ulford’s arm, nodded to Robin, and walked away.
Robin stood looking after her. He started when he heard Carey’s voice saying:
“Why d’you let her dance with that blackguard?”
“Hulloa, Carey?”
“Come to the supper-room. I want to have a yarn with you. And all this”—he made a wavering, yet violent, gesture towards the dancers—“might be a Holbein.”
“A dance of death? What nonsense you talk!”
“Come to the supper-room.”
Robin looked at his friend narrowly.
“You’re bored. Let’s go and take a stroll down Park Lane.”
“No. Well, then, if you won’t—”
“I’ll come.”
He put his arm through Carey’s, and they went out together.
Lady Holme was generally agreeable to men. She was particularly charming to Leo Ulford that night. He was not an interesting man, but he seemed to interest her very much. They sat out together for a long time in the corner of a small drawing-room, far away from the music. She had said to Robin Pierce that she thought there was something about Leo Ulford that was like her husband, and when she talked to him she found the resemblance even greater than she had supposed.
Lord Holme and Leo Ulford were of a similar type. Both were strong, healthy, sensual, slangy, audacious in a dull kind of fashion—Lady Holme did not call it dull—serenely and perpetually intent upon having everything their own way in life. Both lived for the body and ignored the soul, as they would have ignored a man with a fine brain, a passionate heart, a narrow chest and undeveloped muscles. Such a man they would have summed up as “a rotter.” If they ever thought of the soul at all, it was probably under some such comprehensive name. Both had the same simple and blatant aim in life, an aim which governed all their actions and was the generator of most of their thoughts. This aim, expressed in their own terse language, was “to do themselves jolly well.” Both had, so far, succeeded in their ambition. Both were, consequently, profoundly convinced of their own cleverness. Intellectual conceit—the conceit of the brain—is as nothing to physical conceit—the conceit of the body. Acute intelligence is always capable of uneasiness, can always make room for a doubt. But the self-satisfaction of the little-brained and big-muscled man who has never had a rebuff or a day’s illness is cased in triple brass. Lady Holme knew this self-satisfaction well. She had seen it staring out of her husband’s big brown eyes. She saw it now in the boyish eyes of Leo Ulford. She was at home with it and rather liked it. In truth, it had at least one merit—from the woman’s point of view—it was decisively masculine.
Whether Leo Ulford was, or was not, a blackguard; as Mrs. Trent had declared, did not matter to her. Three-quarters of the men she knew were blackguards according to the pinched ideas of Little Peddlington; and Mrs. Trent might originally have issued from there.
She got on easily with Leo Ulford because she was experienced in the treatment of his type. She knew exactly what to do with it; how to lead it on, how to fend it off, how to throw cold water on its enterprise without dashing it too greatly, how to banish any little, sulky cloud that might appear on the brassy horizon without seeming to be solicitous.
The type is amazingly familiar to the woman of the London world. She can recognize it at a glance, and can send it in its armchair canter round the circus with scarce a crack of the ring-mistress’s whip.
To-night Lady Holme enjoyed governing it more than usual, and for a subtle reason.
In testing her power upon Leo Ulford she was secretly practising her siren’s art, with a view that would have surprised and disgusted him, still more amazed him, had he known it. She was firing at the dummy in order that later she might make sure of hitting the living man. Leo Ulford was the dummy. The living man would be Fritz.
Both dummy and living man were profoundly ignorant of her moving principle. The one was radiant with self-satisfaction under her fusillade. The other, ignorant of it so far, would have been furious in the knowledge of it.
She knew-and laughed at the men.
Presently she turned the conversation, which was getting a little too personal—on Leo Ulford’s side—to a subject very present in her mind that night.
“Did you have a talk with Miss Schley the other day after I left?” she asked. “I ran away on purpose to give you a chance. Wasn’t it good-natured of me, when I was really longing to stay?”
Leo Ulford stretched out his long legs slowly, his type’s way of purring.
“I’d rather have gone on yarning with you.”
“Then you did have a talk! She was at my house to-night, looking quite delicious. You know she’s conquered London?”
“That sort’s up to every move on the board.”
“What do you mean? What board?”
She looked at him with innocent inquiry.
“I wish men didn’t know so much,” she added; with a sort of soft vexation. “You have so many opportunities of acquiring knowledge and we so few—if we respect the convenances.”
“Miss Schley wouldn’t respect ‘em.”
He chuckled, and again drew up and then stretched out his legs, slowly and luxuriously.
“How can you know?”
“She’s not the sort that does. She’s the sort that’s always kicking over the traces and keeping it dark. I know ‘em.”
“I think you’re rather unkind. Miss Schley’s mother arrives to-morrow.”
Leo Ulford put up his hands to his baby moustache and shook with laughter.
“That’s the only thing she wanted to set her up in business,” he ejaculated. “A marmar. I do love those Americans!”
“But you speak as if Mrs. Schley were a stage property!”
“I’ll bet she is. Wait till you see her. Why, it’s a regular profession in the States, being a marmar. I tell you what—”
He leaned forward and fixed his blue eyes on Lady Holme, with an air of profound acuteness.
“Are you going to see her?”
“Mrs. Schley? I daresay.”
“Well, you remember what I tell you. She’ll be as dry as a dog-biscuit, wear a cap and spectacles with gold rims, and say nothing but ‘Oh, my, yes indeed!’ to everything that’s said to her. Does she come from Susanville?”
“How extraordinary! I believe she does.”
Leo Ulford’s laugh was triumphant and prolonged.
“That’s where they breed marmars!” he exclaimed, when he was able to speak. “Women are stunning.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” said Lady Holme, preserving a quiet air of pupilage. “But perhaps it’s better I shouldn’t. Anyhow, I am quite sure Miss Schley’s mother will be worthy of her daughter.”
“You may bet your bottom dollar on that. She’ll be what they call ‘a sootable marmar.’ I must get my wife to shoot a card on her.”
“I hope you’ll introduce me to Mrs. Ulford. I should like to know her.”
“Yours isn’t the voice to talk down a trumpet,” said Leo Ulford, with a sudden air of surliness.
“I should like to know her now I know you and your father.”
At the mention of his father Leo Ulford’s discontented expression increased.
“My father’s a rotter,” he said. “Never cared for anything. No shot to speak of. He can sit on a horse all right. Had to, in South America and Morocco and all those places. But he never really cared about it, I don’t believe. Why, he’d rather look at a picture than a thoroughbred any day!”
At this moment Sir Donald wandered into the room, with his hands behind his thin back, and his eyes searching the walls. The Duke possessed a splendid collection of pictures.
“There he is!” said Leo, gruffly.
“He doesn’t see us. Go and tell him I’m here.”
“Why? he might go out again if we keep mum.”
“But I want to speak to him. Sir Donald! Sir Donald!”
Sir Donald turned round at the second summons and came towards them, looking rather embarrassed.
“Hulloa, pater!” said Leo.
Sir Donald nodded to his son with a conscientious effort to seem familiar and genial.
“Hulloa!” he rejoined in a hollow voice.
“Your boy has been instructing me in American mysteries,” said Lady Holme. “Do take me to the ballroom, Sir Donald.”
Leo Ulford’s good humour returned as abruptly as it had departed. Her glance at him, as she spoke, had seemed to hint at a secret understanding between them in which no one—certainly not his father—was included.
“Pater can tell you all about the pictures,” he said, with a comfortable assurance, which he did not strive to disguise, that she would be supremely bored.
He stared at her hard, gave a short laugh, and lounged away.
When he had gone, Sir Donald still seemed embarrassed. He looked at Lady Holme apologetically, and in his faded eyes she saw an expression that reminded her of Lady Cardington. It was surely old age asking forgiveness for its existence.
She did not feel much pity for it, but with the woman of the world’s natural instinct to smooth rough places—especially for a man—she began to devote herself to cheering Sir Donald up, as they slowly made their way through room after room towards the distant sound of the music.
“I hear you’ve been plunging!” she began gaily.
Sir Donald looked vague.
“I’m afraid I scarcely—”
“Forgive me. I catch slang from my husband. He’s ruining my English. I mean that I hear you’ve been investing—shall I say your romance?—in a wonderful place abroad, with a fascinating name. I hope you’ll get enormous interest.”
A faint colour, it was like the ghost of a blush, rose in Sir Donald’s withered cheeks.
“Ah, Mr. Carey—”
He checked himself abruptly, remembering whet he had heard from Robin Pierce.
“No, Mr. Pierce was my informant. He knows your place and says it’s too wonderful. I adore the name.”
“Casa Felice. You would not advise me to change it, then?”
“Change it! Why?”
“Well, I—one should not, perhaps, insist beforehand that one is going to have happiness, which must always lie on the knees of the gods.”
“Oh, I believe in defiance.”
There was an audacious sound in her voice. Her long talk with Leo Ulford had given her back her belief in herself, her confidence in her beauty, her reliance on her youth.
“You have a right to believe in it. But Casa Felice is mine.”
“Even to buy it was a defiance—in a way.”
“Perhaps so. But then—”
“But then you have set out and you must not turn back, Sir Donald. Baptise your wonderful house yourself by filling it with happiness. Another gave it its name. Give it yourself the reason for the name.”
Happiness seemed to shine suddenly in the sound of her speaking voice, as it shone in her singing voice when the theme of her song was joy. Sir Donald’s manner lost its self-consciousness, its furtive diffidence.
“You—you come and give my house its real baptism,” he said, with a flash of ardour that, issuing from him, was like fire bursting out of a dreary marsh land. “Will you? This August?”
“But,” she hesitated. “Isn’t Mr. Carey coming?”
At this moment they came into a big drawing-room that immediately preceded the ballroom, with which it communicated by an immense doorway hung with curtains of white velvet. They could see in the distance the dancers moving rather indifferently in a lancers. Lord Holme and Miss Schley were dancing in the set nearest to the doorway, and on the side that faced the drawing-room. Directly Lady Holme saw the ballroom she saw them. A sudden sense of revolt, the defiance of joy carried on into the defiance of anger, rose up in her.
“If Mr. Carey is coming I’ll come too, and baptise your house,” she said.
Sir Donald looked surprised, but he answered, with a swiftness that did not seem to belong to old age:
“That is a bargain, Lady Holme. I regard that as a bargain.”
“I’ll not go back on it.”
There was a hard sound in her voice.
They entered the ballroom just as the band played the closing bars of the lancers, and the many sets began to break up and melt into a formless crowd which dispersed in various directions. The largest number of people moved towards the archway near which the Duke was still sitting, bravely exerting himself to be cheerful. Lady Holme and Sir Donald became involved in this section of the crowd, and naturally followed in its direction. Lord Holme and Miss Schley were at a short distance behind them, and Lady Holme was aware of this. The double defiance was still alive in her, and was strengthened by a clear sound which reached her ears for a moment, then was swallowed up by the hum of conversation from many intervening voices—the sound of the American’s drawling tones raised to say something she could not catch. As she came out into the hall, close to the Duke’s chair, she saw Rupert Carey trying to make his way into the ballroom against the stream of dancers. His face was flushed. There were drops of perspiration on his forehead, and the violent expression that was perpetually visible in his red-brown eyes, lighting them up as with a flame, seemed partially obscured as if by a haze. The violence of them was no longer vivid but glassy.
Lady Holme did not notice all this. The crowd was round her, and she was secretly preoccupied. She merely saw that Rupert Carey was close to her, and she knew who was following behind her. A strong impulse came upon her and she yielded to it without hesitation. As she reached Rupert Carey she stopped and held out her hand.
“Mr. Carey,” she said, “I’ve been wanting to speak to you all the evening. Why didn’t you ask me to dance?”
She spoke very distinctly. Carey stood still and stared at her, and now she noticed the flush on his face and the unnatural expression in his eyes. She understood at once what was the matter and repented of her action. But it was too late to draw back. Carey stared dully for an instant, as if he scarcely knew who she was. Then, with a lurch, he came closer to her, and, with a wavering movement, tried to find her hand, which she had withdrawn.
“Where is it?” he muttered in a thick voice. “Where is it?”
He groped frantically.
“Sir Donald!” Lady Holme whispered sharply, while the people nearest to them began to exchange glances of surprise or of amusement.
She pressed his arm and he tried to draw her on. But Carey was exactly in front of her. It was impossible for her to escape. He found her hand at last, took it limply in his, bent down and began to kiss it, mumbling some loud but incoherent words.
The Duke, who from his chair, was a witness of the scene, tried to raise himself up, and a vivid spot of scarlet burned in his almost transparent cheeks. His daughter hastened forward to stop his effort. Lady Holme dragged her hand away violently, and Carey suddenly burst into tears. Sir Donald hurried Lady Holme on, and Carey tried to follow, but was forcibly prevented by two men.
When at length Lady Holme found herself at the other end of the great hall, she turned and saw her husband coming towards her with a look of fury on his face.
“I wish to go home,” she said to him in a low voice.
She withdrew her hand from Sir Donald’s arm and quietly bade him good-bye. Lord Holme did not say a word.
“Where is the Duchess?” Lady Holme added. “Ah, there she is!”
She saw the Duchess hurriedly going towards the place where the Duke was sitting, intercepted her swiftly, and bade her good-night.
“Now, Fritz!” she said.
She was conscious that a number of people were watching her, and her voice and manner were absolutely unembarrassed. A footman took the number of her cloak from Lord Holme and fetched the cloak. A voice cried in the distance, “Lord Holme’s carriage!” Another, and nearer voice, echoed the call. She passed slowly between two lines of men over a broad strip of carpet to the portico, and stepped into the brougham.
As it glided away into the night she heard her husband’s loud breathing.
He did not speak for two or three minutes, but breathed like a man who had been running, and moved violently in the carriage as if to keep still were intolerable to him. The window next to him was up. He let it down. Then he turned right round to his wife, who was leaning back in her corner wrapped up in her black cloak.
“With the Duke sittin’ there!” he said in a loud voice. “With the Duke sittin’ there!”
There was a sound of outrage in the voice.
“Didn’t I kick that sweep out of the house?” he added. “Didn’t I?”
“I believe you asked Mr. Carey not to call anymore.”
Lady Holme’s voice had no excitement in it.
“Asked him! I—”
“Don’t make such a noise, Fritz. The men will hear you.”
“I told him if he ever came again I’d have him put out.”
“Well, he never has come again.”
“What d’you mean by speakin’ to him? What d’you mean by it?”
Lady Holme knew that her husband was a thoroughly conventional man, and, like all conventional men, had a horror of a public scene in which any woman belonging to him was mixed up. Such a scene alone was quite enough to rouse his wrath. But there was in his present anger something deeper, more brutal, than any rage caused by a breach of the conventions. His jealousy was stirred.
“He didn’t speak to you. You spoke to him.”
Lady Holme did not deny it.
“I heard every word you said,” continued Lord Holme, beginning to breathe hard again. “I—I—”
Lady Holme felt that he was longing to strike her, that if he had been the same man, but a collier or a labourer, born in another class of life, he would not have hesitated to beat her. The tradition in which he had been brought up controlled him. But she knew that if he could have beaten her he would have hated her less, that his sense of bitter wrong would have at once diminished. In self-control it grew. The spark rose to a flame.
“You’re a damned shameful woman!” he said.
The brougham drew up softly before their house. Lord Holme, who was seated on the side next the house, got out first. He did not wait on the pavement to assist his wife, but walked up the steps, opened the door, and went into the hall. Lady Holme followed. She saw her husband, with the light behind him, standing with his hand on the handle of the hall door. For an instant she thought that he was going to shut her out. He actually pushed the door till the light was almost hidden. Then he flung it open with a bang, threw down his hat and strode upstairs.
If he had shut her out! She found herself wondering what would have become of her, where she would have gone. She would have had to go to the Coburg, or to Claridge’s, without a maid, without luggage. As she slowly came upstairs she heard her husband go into the drawing-room. Was he waiting for her there? or did he wish to avoid her? When she reached the broad landing she hesitated. She was half inclined to go in audaciously, to laugh in his face; turn his fury into ridicule, tell him she was the sort of woman who is born to do as she likes, to live as she chooses, to think of nothing but her own will, consult nothing but her whims of the moment. But she went on and into her bedroom.
Josephine was there and began to take the diamonds out of her hair. Lady Holme did not say a word. She was listening intently for the sound of any movement below. She heard nothing. When she was undressed, and there was nothing more for the maid to do, she began to feel uneasy, as if she would rather not dismiss the girl. But it was very late. Josephine strangled her yawns with difficulty. There was no excuse for keeping her up any longer.
“You can go.”
The maid went out, leaving Lady Holme standing in the middle of the big bedroom. Next to it on one side was Lord Holme’s dressing-room. On the other side there was a door leading into Lady Holme’s boudoir. Almost directly after Josephine had gone Lady Holme heard the outer door of this room opened, and the heavy step of her husband. It moved about the room, stopped, moved about again. What could he be doing? She stood where she was, listening. Suddenly the door between the rooms was thrown open and Lord Holme appeared.
“Where’s the red book?” he said.
“The red book!”
“Where is it? D’you hear?”
“What do you want it for?”
“That sweep’s address.”
“What are you going to do? Write to him?”
“Write to him!” said Lord Holme, with bitter contempt. “I’m goin’ to thrash him. Where is it?”
“You are going now?”
“I’ve not come up to answer questions. I’ve come for the red book. Where is it?”
“The little drawer at the top on the right hand of the writing-table.”
Lord Holme turned back into the boudoir, went to the writing-table, found the book, opened it, found the address and wrote it down on a bit of paper. He folded the paper up anyhow and thrust it into his waistcoat pocket. Then, without saying another word to his wife, or looking at her, he went out and down the staircase.
She followed him on to the landing, and stood there till she heard the hall door shut with a bang.
A clock below struck four. She went back into the bedroom and sank into an armchair.
A slight sense of confusion floated over her mind for a moment, like a cloud. She was not accustomed to scenes. There had been one certainly when Rupert Carey was forbidden to come to the house any more, but it had been brief, and she had not been present at it. She had only heard of it afterwards. Lord Holme had been angry then, and she had rather liked his anger. She took it as, in some degree, a measure of his attachment to her. And then she had had no feeling of being in the wrong or of humiliation. She had been charming to Carey, as she was charming to all men. He had lost his head. He had mistaken the relations existing between her and her husband, and imagined that such a woman as she was must be unhappily mated with such a man as Lord Holme. The passionate desire to console a perfectly-contented woman had caused him to go too far, and bring down upon himself a fiat of exile, which he could not defy since Lady Holme permitted it to go forth, and evidently was not rendered miserable by it. So the acquaintance with Rupert Carey had ceased, and life had slipped along once more on wheels covered with india-rubber tyres.
And now she had renewed the acquaintance publicly and with disastrous results.
As she sat there she began to wonder at herself, at the strength of her temper, the secret violence of her nature. She had yielded like a child to a sudden impulse. She had not thought of consequences. She had ignored her worldly knowledge. She had considered nothing, but had acted abruptly, as any ignorant, uneducated woman might have acted. She had been the slave of a mood. Or had she been the slave of another woman—of a woman whom she despised?
Miss Schley had certainly been the cause of the whole affair. Lady Holme had spoken to Rupert Carey merely because she knew that her husband was immediately behind her with the American. There had been within her at that moment something of a broad, comprehensive feeling, mingled with the more limited personal feeling of anger against another woman’s successful impertinence, a sentiment of revolt in which womanhood seemed to rise up against the selfish tyrannies of men. As she had walked in the crowd, and heard for an instant Miss Schley’s drawlling voice speaking to her husband, she had felt as if the forbidding of the acquaintance between herself and Rupert Carey had been an act of tyranny, as if the acquaintance between Miss Schley and her husband were a worse act of tyranny. The feeling was wholly unreasonable, of course. How could Lord Holme know that she wished to impose a veto, even as he had? And what reason was there for such a veto? That lay deep down within her as woman’s instinct. No man could have understood it.
And now Lord Holme had gone out in the dead of the night to thrash Carey.
She began to think about Carey.
How disgusting he had been. A drunken man must be one of two things—either terrible or absurd. Carey had been absurd—disgusting and absurd. It had been better for him if he had been terrible. But mumblings and tears! She remembered what she had said of Carey to Robin Pierce—that something in his eyes, one of those expressions which are the children of the eyes, or of the lines about the eyes, told her that he was capable of doing something great. What an irony that her remark to Robin had been succeeded by such a scene! And she heard again the ugly sound of Carey’s incoherent exclamations, and felt again the limp clasp of his hot, weak hand, and saw again the tears running over his flushed, damp face. It was all very nauseous. And yet—had she been wrong in what she had said of him? Did she even think that she had been wrong now, after what had passed?
What kind of great action had she thought he would be capable of if a chance to do something great were thrown in his way? She said to herself that she had spoken at random, as one perpetually speaks in Society. And then she remembered Carey’s eyes. They were ugly eyes. She had always thought them ugly. Yet, now and then, there was something in them, something to hold a woman—no, perhaps not that—but something to startle a woman, to make her think, wonder, even to make her trust. And the scene which had just occurred, with all its weakness, its fatuity, its maundering display of degradation and the inability of any self-government, had not somehow destroyed the impression made upon Lady Holme by that something in Carey’s eyes. What she had said to Robin Pierce she might not choose ever to say again. She would not choose ever to say it again—of that she was certain—but she had not ceased to think it.
A conviction based upon no evidence that could be brought forward to convince anyone is the last thing that can be destroyed in a woman’s heart.
It was nearly six o’clock when Lady Holme heard a step coming up the stairs. She was still sitting in the deep chair, and had scarcely moved. The step startled her. She put her hands on the arms of the chair and leaned forward. The step passed her bedroom. She heard the door of the dressing-room opened and then someone moving about.
“Fritz!” she called. “Fritz!”
There was no answer. She got up and went quickly to the dressing-room. Her husband was there in his shirt sleeves. His evening coat and waistcoat were lying half on a chair, half on the floor, and he was in the act of unfastening his collar. She looked into his face, trying to read it.
“Well?” she said. “Well?”
“Go to bed!” he said brutally.
“What have you done?”
“That’s my business. Go to bed. D’you hear?”
She hesitated. Then she said:
“How dare you speak to me like that? Have you seen Mr. Carey?”
Lord Holme suddenly took his wife by the shoulders; pushed her out of the room, shut the door, and locked it.
They always slept in the same bedroom. Was he not going to bed at all? What had happened? Lady Holme could not tell from his face or manner anything of what had occurred. She looked at her clock and saw her husband had been out of the house for two hours. Indignation and curiosity fought within her; and she became conscious of an excitement such as she had never felt before. Sleep was impossible, but she got into bed and lay there listening to the noises made by her husband in his dressing-room. She could just hear them faintly through the door. Presently they ceased. A profound silence reigned. There was a sofa in the dressing-room. Could he be trying to sleep on it? Such a thing seemed incredible to her. For Lord Holme, although he could rough it when he was shooting or hunting, at home or abroad, and cared little for inconvenience when there was anything to kill, was devoted to comfort in ordinary life, and extremely exigent in his own houses. For nothing, for nobody, had Lady Holme ever known him to allow himself to be put out.
She strained her ears as she lay in bed. For a long time the silence lasted. She began to think her husband must have left the dressing-room, when she heard a noise as if something—some piece of furniture—had been kicked, and then a stentorian “Damn!”
Suddenly she burst out laughing. She shook against the pillows. She laughed and laughed weakly; helplessly, till the tears ran down her cheeks. And with those tears ran away her anger, the hot, strained sensation that had been within her even since the scene at Arkell House. If she had womanly pride it melted ignominiously. If she had feminine dignity—that pure and sacred panoply which man ignores at his own proper peril—it disappeared. The “poor old Fritz” feeling, which was the most human, simple, happy thing in her heart, started into vivacity as she realised the long legs flowing into air over the edge of the short sofa, the pent-up fury—fury of the too large body on the too small resting-place—which found a partial vent in the hallowed objurgation of the British Philistine.
With every moment that she lay in the big bed she was punishing Fritz. She nestled down among the pillows. She stretched out her limbs luxuriously. How easy it was to punish a man! Lying there she recalled her husband’s words, each detail of his treatment of her since she had spoken to Carey. He had called her “a damned shameful woman.” That was of all the worst offence. She told herself that she ought to, that she must, for that expression alone, hate Fritz for ever. And then, immediately, she knew that she had forgiven it already, without effort, without thought.
She understood the type with which she had to deal, the absurd boyishness that was linked with the brutality of it, the lack of mind to give words their true, their inmost meaning. Words are instruments of torture, or the pattering confetti of a carnival, not by themselves but by the mind that sends them forth. Fritz’s exclamation might have roused eternal enmity in her if it had been uttered by another man. Coming from Fritz it won its pardon easily by having a brother, “Damn.”
She wondered how long her husband would be ruled by his sense of outrage.
Towards seven she heard another movement; another indignant exclamation, then the creak of furniture, a step, a rattling at the door. She turned on her side towards the wall, shut her eyes and breathed lightly and regularly. The key revolved, the door opened and closed, and she heard feet shuffling cautiously over the carpet. A moment and Fritz was in bed. Another moment, a long sigh, and he was asleep.
Lady Holme still lay awake. Now that her attention was no longer fixed upon her husband’s immediate proceedings she began to wonder again what had happened between him and Rupert Carey. She would find out in the morning.
And presently she too slept.
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