CHAPTER XIII.
PLAYING WITH FIRE.
Captain Standishaccepted Mrs. Piper’s invitation. He rode over to answer her note in person; and to give her another lesson in archery. This time Clementina was with her and shared in the lesson. Captain Standish had no objection to teach two pretty girls instead of one, but he preferred Mrs. Piper, as the prettier and more fascinating of the two. She possessed a great superiority too, in his eyes, as a married woman. It was the rule of this great man’s life, when he condescended to flirtation, to flirt with a married woman. No harm could come of it to himself. There was always the risk of the husband being made uncomfortable; but that was a detail. Captain Standish was not afraid of making a husband jealous, or even unhappy; but he was very much afraid of compromising himself by flirtation with a single woman, who might be absurd enoughto expect him to marry her, and whose friends might make themselves disagreeable if he declined to do so.
He was therefore the very last man to walk into the silken snare that Mrs. Dulcimer had set for him. He was kind and courteous to Clementina, who was ready to ‘worship him’ or to ‘rave about him’—in the Porkman phraseology—at a moment’s notice; but he reserved his tender attentions, his thrilling looks and lowered tones, for Bella, for whom the sweet poison, the social deadly nightshade of an unprincipled man’s flatteries had already too great a charm. Of the extent of the captain’s influence over her mind Bella herself was not yet aware. Indeed, she believed herself hardened against any such influence by the counter poison of a previous love. She had loved once, and loved unhappily, and therefore could never love again. This she firmly believed, and, secure in this belief, walked blindfold into danger. Her pleasure in the captain’s society she ascribed to the triumph of parading him before the astonished eyes of Little Yafford, the delight of lording it over the Porkmans, the fact that Captain Standish was the fashion.
The dinner party was a success. It was made up of theéliteof Little Yafford and the surrounding neighbourhood—people who had ‘places’ of twenty to thirty acres, and who were altogether the next best thing to county families—Mr. and Mrs. Dulcimer, Colonel O’Shaughnessy, and Captain Standish. Clementina looked her prettiest, and was complimented on her likeness to her sister.
‘Bella,’ said the Vicar’s wife in a confidential tone, when the ladies were alone after dinner. ‘You are doing a noble thing for your sister. In my opinion Captain Standish is struck with her already.’
‘You are sanguine, dear Mrs. Dulcimer,’ answered Bella, smiling. ‘I have not seen him particularly attentive to her.’
‘Perhaps not, but he has been particularly attentive to you. He would naturally begin in that way.’
Bella was not quite clear upon this point; she had little faith in Mrs. Dulcimer’s judgment. Were not the most miserable hours of her life, her one inexcusable sin, referable to that lady’s mistake? But she found it rather agreeable to have Clementina as acompanion. The girl was grateful, and willing to be useful, and was not in the way.
Mrs. Dulcimer was so elated at the prospect of another brilliant match, to be brought about by her agency, that, towards the end of the evening, she took Mr. Piper into her confidence.
‘Charming man, Captain Standish, isn’t he?’ she asked.
‘I’ve ‘eard that remark made a good many times, mum,’ he answered, candidly, ‘but as far as my individual opinion goes I don’t see anything remarkable about the captain that should single him out from the ruck of military men. Perhaps his hair is cropped a trifle closer, and his whiskers neater trimmed. I don’t deny either that there’s ajunny serquaw, as my wife calls it, about the cut of his clothes, and that he has a high way with him, as if we were all upon a lower level, which I believe is uncommonly taking for some people, though I can’t say I ever was took by that kind of thing myself. I like a man who is my superior and yet takes care not to remind me of it. I can feel the superiority of that kind of man. I don’t want it put before me.’
Mrs. Dulcimer looked disappointed.
‘He is of a very high family,’ she said, ‘and enormously rich.’
‘That’s always a satisfaction to one’s mind, mum.’
‘Now don’t you think it would be a very grand thing if he were to marry your sister-in-law Clementina?’
Mr. Piper was not enthusiastic.
‘She might like it, Mrs. Dulcimer,’ he said. ‘That’s just according to her feelings. But it’s no business of mine to find husbands for my wife’s sisters.’
This was disheartening, but Mrs. Dulcimer was not going to renounce her project because Mr. Piper looked coldly upon it. Clementina stayed at the Park, and Bella enriched her with a great many dresses and other adornments of which she was beginning to be tired, or which were of a fashion that had become too general for a fine lady’s wear. Generosity in a person of Bella’s stamp is only another word for extravagance. Bella would have as soon contemplated cutting offher right hand as giving away anything she wanted herself. These gifts to Tina necessitated the purchase of new things, and already the second Mrs. Piper had begun to get into debt, and to feel that she had bills which must be paid next year, or at some more definite period. The three hundred a year which Mr. Piper had settled upon her in the fulness of his heart, as an all-sufficing income for dress and pocket money, was not nearly enough to supply the manifold wants of a young woman who had been brought up in poverty. Bella wanted everything, for everything was new to her. She ran riot in laces, and silks, and velvets, bric-à-brac for her boudoir, dainty stationery, devotional books, which were seldom read, but which looked well on her dressing-table, parasols, fans, slippers, albums, everything of the costliest. She was surprised to find how soon her ready money had melted away, and almost afraid to calculate how deeply she was in debt. But the burden weighed lightly upon her. It would be easy to get Mr. Piper to give her a cheque, when things got desperate. He might be surprised, perhaps, that shehad not managed her allowance better; but he would not have the strength of mind to refuse her the money.
One day poor Mrs. Scratchell ventured to ask her daughter for a little help. The tax-gatherer was pressing, and ‘father’ had nothing put aside for the taxes.
‘Oh, mamma,’ cried Bella, ‘what has he done with Mr. Harefield’s five hundred pounds? That ought to have set him up for life.’
‘My dear child, you must remember, surely. Father acted with the greatest prudence, and invested his legacy safely in railway shares. It brings us twenty-seven pounds a year. It doesn’t make a large addition, you see, and last year was so expensive. Bread was a penny dearer than it has been for ten years, and potatoes were dreadfully scarce. Altogether things have got behindhand with us——’
‘I never knew them to be beforehand,’ sighed Bella.
‘But it’s a great comfort to see you so splendidly established. I’m sure I feel a thrill wheneverI enter this house and think, “This is my daughter’s. My child is the mistress of it all.” I feel almost as Esther’s relations must have felt when they saw her sitting beside the king. And now, dear, if you could let me have ten pounds——’
‘My dear mother, I haven’t ten shillings. Look, here’s my purse. You can count the silver, if you like.’
She handed Mrs. Scratchell a toy of mother-o’-pearl and gold, lined with rose-hued silk.
‘Oh, Bella, have you spentallyour last half-year’s income?’
‘Every sixpence, except what you see there.’
‘My love, you must have been very extravagant—after such a trousseau as you had to start with.’
‘Why, mamma, there were lots of things forgotten in my trousseau. And then the fashions are always changing, and I have given my sisters such heaps of things. I dare say I have been extravagant in that particular. I am sure I have dressed Tina from head to foot.’
‘You have been very good, dear; but I so counted on you for the taxes. I thought a ten pound note would be nothing to you.’
‘That was a tremendous mistake. I assure you that for actual ready money I have been worse off since I have been Mr. Piper’s wife than I was as his governess. There are so many demands upon my purse. But if I can do anything next Christmas——’
‘Thank you, dear. We must get on somehow, I suppose. We always have struggled through our difficulties, and I suppose we always shall, thanks to Providence; but it’s a wearing life.’
The young Pipers came home for their holidays, and ran riot amidst the splendours and luxuries that Bella had introduced into the sober old house. These young people liked Bella better as a stepmother than they had liked her as a governess. She was very indulgent, so long as they did not spoil the furniture, or annoy her with too much of their society. She gave the girls fine dresses, and allowed them to share all her gaieties. She let the boys ride her ponies, when she did not wantto use them. In a word she was a model stepmother, and everybody praised her, except Miss Coyle, who never praised anybody, and Mr. Chumney, who generally reserved his opinion as something too valuable to be parted with except under strongest pressure.
So the briefly glorious summer hurried by, and Bella lived only for pleasure, and to be flattered and followed by Captain Standish. She went to a great many parties among theWigzell, Timperley, and Porkman section of society, and to a few among the professional classes and landed gentry, which latter were not so splendid as the mercantile entertainments, in the matter of eating and drinking, and were not much more lively; for whereas the Porkmans and Timperleys talked of nothing but money-making, the landed gentry had a language of their own which Bella, clever as she was, had yet to learn. Captain Standish was teaching her a great deal. Under his tuition she had learned to look down upon her fellow-creatures as an inferior set of beings, ‘mostly fools,’ to regard mental culture as a process only valuable to schoolmasters,college dons, clergymen, doctors, lawyers, and that altogether subordinate race which has to earn its bread by the sweat of its brains, to think of money as a stepping-stone to social importance, the pleasure of the present moment as the one vital consideration, the future as an unknown quantity, not worth serious thought.
This was the code of ethics which Bella learned from Captain Standish, but before all and above all he taught her to despise her husband, her husband’s children, and her husband’s surroundings, from the lordly Timperley, swelling with the importance of the biggest mills in the district, to the unpretending Chumney, living in modest retirement upon an annuity of ninety pounds, the result of his laborious existence.
Of this gradual corruption of his wife’s mind honest Ebenezer Piper had no suspicion. Her manner and conduct to him of late had been unexceptionable. The deeper and stronger that feeling of contemptuous aversion grew in the secret depths of her heart, the more carefully did she regulate her outward seeming. She had neverappeared sweeter, fairer, or more guileless in her husband’s eyes than when she was most inclined to betray him. Vivien herself, that supreme type of falsehood in woman, employed no finer art against the enchanter Merlin than Bella used to guard herself from the hazard of discovery.
She knew herself false to the core, not quite a subject for the divorce court, but a creature whose good angel had long left her, shuddering and abhorrent.
Mr. Piper had not forgotten Mrs. Dulcimer’s ideas about Captain Standish and Clementina, and when he saw the captain and sister-in-law together he was inclined to believe that there might be some foundation for that inveterate matchmaker’s fancy. The captain had a knack of being particularly attentive to Tina under Mr. Piper’s eye.
And now autumn was approaching, the russet corn was cut in the wide shadowless fields, the ploughman’s white horses were seen moving slowly along the upland ridges, against a cool gray sky.
Captain Standish went up into the wildest part of the moors for a fortnight’s grouse-shooting, andto everybody’s surprise came back to Great Yafford in three days.
He rode over to the Park on the afternoon of his return, and found Bella alone, yawning over a novel. She started and dropped her book when the footman announced him, and changed from pale to red, and red to pale again.
‘You did not expect to see me so soon,’ said the captain, keeping her little cold hand in his.
‘No,’ she faltered, unable to say more.
‘You thought I should be able to endure a fortnight’s life without you. I was fool enough to think so too—and made all my arrangements for staying away till the 27th. But three days were quite enough. How pale and tired you look!’
‘I have had nothing to do, and I suppose that is the most tiring thing in the world. Tina has gone home. I did not want Mr. Piper to think that she was going to live here always.’
‘What does it matter what he thinks?’ said Captain Standish, with his supercilious smile. ‘Mr. Piper was only created to be useful to you and your relations. And so you have missed—Tina.’
‘I have been very dull.’
‘If you knew how desolate my life was in those three days you would pity me,’ said the captain, tenderly. ‘Yes, Isabel, you would pity me for being so weak that I cannot live without you, so miserably placed that I am obliged to hide my love.’
And then Captain Standish went on to tell his story; the old, old story, the familiar melody, subject to such endless variations, such kaleidoscopic distinctions without difference, and always coming to the same thing in the end. ‘We might have been happy had Providence willed it. Let us defy Providence, fling honour to the winds, and be happy in spite of fate.’
He talked and pleaded for a long time, and Bella listened with lowered eyelids, and lowered head, and let her hand lie locked in his, and did not answer his specious arguments by one straight outspoken denial. She paltered with this tempter, as she had paltered with temptation all her life, always choosing the road she liked best. She said neither yes nor no. It was an awful thing that he was asking her to do. No more nor less than to surrender honour, social status, everything for his sake, to go to Italywith him, and live a gay, unfettered life there, among people who, according to his showing, would be willing to accept her as his wife. He painted the picture of that ideal Italian life so vividly that all the hideousness of his proposal was lost sight of under that bright colouring.
‘Remember, dearest, I shall have my sacrifice to make too,’ he said. ‘I must leave the army. And I shall almost break my poor mother’s heart, for she has plans for my marriage which she has cherished ever since I was at Eton. But I could sacrifice a great deal more than that for your sake.’
‘Do not talk of it any more,’ said Bella, in a frightened voice. ‘It is too awful. I like you—yes,’ as he drew her face round to him so that her eyes reluctantly met his,—‘yes, very much. I hardly think’—falteringly and in tears—‘I could go on living if you went away, and I were not to see you any more; but what you are asking is horrible—to defy everybody—to give up everything—to be pointed at and spoken of as something utterly lost and wretched—a thingto be spurned by other women—women who are my inferior in everything—except that one wicked act. Why, my very housemaids would look down upon me. No, I could not be so degraded. I could not sink so low.’
‘I see,’ said Captain Standish. ‘You love yourself and your good name better than you love me. You were not ashamed to sell yourself to Piper. The world applauds that kind of bargain. But you are not generous enough to give yourself to the man you love.’
He had let go her hand, and was walking with long quick steps backwards and forwards across the deep bay, like a lion in a cage. Bella thought there was something grand and noble about him in this lofty rage. She loved him all the more for the hard things he said to her, since his hard speeches proved the intensity of his love.
‘You are very cruel,’ she said, piteously.
‘I am very much in earnest. I thought to find in you something better and grander than the shallow conventional woman of society whoonly plays with hearts, who wants to walk through the deep waters of passion without wetting her feet. You talk of sinking very low—of degradation. Where is the degradation in the life I offer you—the fair sweet unfettered life that poets have loved ever since the world began?’
‘You would be tired of an idle life in Italy,’ said Bella.
‘With you, no. But we could wander about. We should not be tied to one spot. I would take you to Algiers—Morocco. We could ride over that strange land together—and when we had used up the Old World we would be off to the New. I would take you across the Rocky Mountains. I would make you my comrade and companion—a hardy traveller—a dead shot. You should be no slavish English wife, sitting at home while your husband enjoyed his life. No, love, you should share every sport I had, hunt with me—shoot—fish—row—ride with me. I would not have a pleasure in life that you could not share.’
The picture was full of charm for a womanwho, in her eagerness to enjoy life, had already almost exhausted the pleasures of humdrum existence. Bella felt that this would indeed be the beginning of a new life; this would be to drain to the dregs the cup of youth and gladness. And then worldly pride for once took the shape of a good angel, and pointed to the view from that wide bay-window, the Park and deer, the avenue of goodly elms, the grandeur and importance of her position as Mrs. Piper. Was she to surrender all this, and give up her name to be a byeword and a reproach into the bargain? No, she had hearkened too long to the tempter, but she was not weak enough for this.
‘You must never speak to me of this again,’ she exclaimed. ‘I will try to think there has been no serious meaning in what you have said. Let us both forget it.’
‘I shall not forget it,’ said the captain, ‘but if you tell me to keep silence I will obey. I would do anything rather than live out of your society.’
‘If you ever repeat what you have said this afternoon, our friendship will be ended.’
‘Anything sooner than that.’
He took the little hand again and kissed it tenderly. So there was a kind of compact between them. He was to go on adoring her, but was to say nothing about it.
Captain Standish rode back to Great Yafford in excellent humour. He had considerably embellished the fact of his return, in his conversation with Mrs. Piper. He had come back because the weather had been abominable, and the birds hardly visible behind a dense curtain of driving rain. Three days of such uncomfortable sport had been quite enough for the captain.
‘Poor little thing,’ he mused, as he walked his horse, after a swinging galop over a grassy waste, ‘how very weak she is! I am glad she doesn’t want me to run away with her. It would be uncommonly inconvenient. But when a man has flirted as desperately as I have a woman expects him to say something serious. She’s really very pretty—quite the most fascinating little thing I’ve met for a long time. And if she were single—all things being equal—I don’t think I should object to marry her.’