Marie was sitting alone under the striped awning which covered the end of the terrace behind their country house in Surrey. The flap at the end was open, and from the bushes beyond came the hot, languid scent of the lilacs, the hot, languid murmur of the bees as they shouldered themselves into the clubs and clusters of the blossoms, the busy chirrup of sparrows intent on some infinitesimal occupation demanding a great deal of discussion. Unseen on the lawn below, a mowing-machine was making its clicking journeys up and down the grass, but no other sound marked the passage of the hot afternoon; no breeze stirred in the level fans of the cedar nor ruffled the lake, where the unwavering reflections of the trees were spread as sharp-cut and immobile as if they had been painted on a silver shield. On Marie's lap lay an unopened book, and she was as motionless as the mirroring lake.
A week had passed since her scene with Jack on the evening of the thunderstorm, and she had left London three days after in obedience to an instinct which she felt she could not disobey. That scene had unfocused her; she had to adjust herself to a new view of things, and the need to go away and be alone for a day or two had been overmastering. For the one thing which she had always regarded as impossible had happened to her: the snowflake—herself—was supposed to have melted. And, from the fact that this slander affected her so deeply, she knew, for the first time fully, how utterly different she was to the rest of the world. Some months ago she had heard Lady Ardingly say in her slow, sensible voice: "Ah, my dear, there are so many people who can lose their reputation, but so few who know how valuable the loss is! They were perfectly capable of valuing it when it existed, but they cannot appreciate its loss at the proper figure." At the time she had laughed, as she would have laughed at any outrageous piece of cynicism in some modern play. Now she choked at it; it was gall to her.
So, then, according to the world's view, she was in the position of many women whoheld their heads high, and thought of the world generally as their playground, the place kindly provided for the amusement of their spare time, of which they had twenty-four hours every day. Whether the disrepute of all these was as reliable as that which she had herself just gained was not the immediate point to be considered; but certainly, if one took a man like Arthur Naseby into a corner, he would, with no encouragement at all, tell an intimate and abominable history of half the folk he knew. For herself, she was not in the habit of taking this stout and poisonous gentleman into corners. Scandalous stories did not amuse her, particularly if they were true, and immorality she thought to be a thing not only wicked, but vulgar. Wickedness, as she had once said, seemed to the world in which she lived merely an obsolete term, describing a moral condition which had no appreciable existence; and sometimes she wondered whether vulgarity was not passing into the category of words without significance. And now it appeared that people were saying about her what they said about so many others, with no sense of condemnation, but—and here lay the nausea of the thing—with amusement. She could almosthear Arthur's voice stridently declaiming: "After all, poor thing, why shouldn't she amuse herself like everybody else? It was the one thing wanted to make her perfectly charming. But I think we shall hear less about the stupidity and vulgarity of the world. Artistically speaking, she ought to have modulated the change more. Just a shade too abrupt—a little Wagnerian in its change of key;" and roars of laughter would follow.
But this new condition in her life had by no means constituted the sum of these three days' meditation in the country. With the elasticity inherent in human nature, the moment the new condition had been made, her mental fibres set themselves automatically to adjust themselves to it. Doctors say that any patient adjusts himself to the most fatal sentence in twenty-four hours; the thing becomes a part of life. It was so with her, and now she felt, though not reconciled, at any rate used to the thing. Though highly introspective, she was not, in the ordinary sense of the word, self-conscious, and she no longer believed that the changed glances of the world at her would affect her very seriously. Surely she could manage to take them at theircorrect and worthless valuation. At first the thought of that had seemed intolerable; but after three days she was beginning to feel she cared very appreciably less.
So far her solitude had been successful, but beyond that it had been a complete failure. For the larger of the two reasons which had induced her to come here remained, and she could not even now conjecture what in the future should be her attitude to Jim. With this problem she had wrestled and struggled in vain, and it seemed to her, in these first days of her consciousness as to her essential relations to him, that all her life-long consistency of thought and habit on such a point were cancelled and worthless. The truth was that she had not known at all before that she was really capable of passion. Her nature, including something far deeper and stronger than mere physical nature, had till quite lately been dormant; she had been ignorant all her life of what the longing for another meant; all her life she had judged men and women by a blind standard which did not really measure that to which it was applied. All her life she had labelled immorality as vulgar, and, as such, she shrugged her shoulders at it and passed by. But nowit was beginning to be burned into her that it was not her fastidiousness that labelled things vulgar, but her ignorance. She had thought Blanche Devereux vulgar because she herself had not understood. Now she was afraid she was beginning to understand, and with the gradual comprehension came growing bewilderment. And step by step with the bewilderment marched an inward tumult of ecstasy, of which she had not known herself capable. A sort of horrified wonder at herself was there, and withal a singing in her heart. It had awoke, and, like the roar of the sea which drowns the idle clatter of the Corniche road, it made a huge soft tumult.
This, then, was the problem she had brought unsolved from London, and which, she was afraid, she would bring back there without solution. The knowledge of it had burst upon her on the evening when Jack had told her what he had heard said of her, and her first conscious utterance that showed she knew of its existence was when that involuntary cry, "Ah, don't touch me!" came uninvited to her lips. Her long and gradual estrangement from her husband had immeasurably widened at that moment. In an instanthis figure had leaped to remote horizons, and she had but to turn her head to see how close beside her stood another, he of whom her husband had spoken. This she had not known before; but the knowledge had come in a flash, staining backwards, as it were, through the past pages of her life, so that it seemed to her that she had loved him since the time when they were boy and girl together, and it made her view her married life with an incredulous horror. And by what sinister revelation had she gained this knowledge? For it was the fact that people spoke of Jim as her lover that had made her definitely aware she loved him. And it had been Jack through whom this knowledge was conveyed.
It was this knowledge that made her distrust herself as utterly as if her own soul and spirit had just been introduced to her among a crowd of strangers. She had thought she had known herself, and now this thing had started out upon her as if she had been asleep in a dark room, and had been wakened to find the chamber blazing with lights. Whether she had the will or the strength to resist she did not yet know; the purpose alone she could utterly answer for. But she realized that if again she saw him in such sort as she hadseen him on the Sunday afternoon by the river, or on that afternoon when she had told him of her conversation with Maud Brereton, it would be a more difficult task to make him keep silence. She felt she could scarcely answer for her own silence. How much less, then, for her power of stopping the speech which a word from her would have even then brought to utterance! And now——
She rose, feeling that the only hope of victory lay in turning away from thoughts like these, and not, under the specious pretext of consciously fighting them, in reality making them familiar to her mind; for familiarity in such things breeds, not contempt, but acquiescence, half contemptuous it may be, but half consenting, and she knew that in face of certain temptations it is cowardice not to run away. The sun was already off the lawn, and a cooler breeze had begun to stir the intense heat of the afternoon. Tea had long been waiting for her under the cedar, and she walked slowly along the terrace and down the ten steps which led on to the lawn. This terrace had been an expensive whim of Jack's grandfather; it ran the length of the house, and was paved and balustraded with rose-coloured Numidian marble; urns,wreathed in delicate creepers which spilt splashes of vivid colour, stood at intervals along it; and below it blossomed a superb riband flower-bed bordering the lawn where stood the cedar.
On this restful velvet she walked up and down, again taken up and possessed by the absorption of that which lay before her. Her pride shied and jibbed at the thought of refusing to see any more of Jim Spencer because some slanderous tongue had started a vile falsehood about her, and she told herself that to do this would but confirm these inventions in the minds of such people as could ever have entertained them. She knew well enough the form the story would take. It would be supposed that the report had got to Jack's ears, and that he forbade her to see him. This would be intolerable; intolerable also was the thing itself, that she should not see him. So much she confessed frankly to herself. But one thing, one thing above all, was certain, and the thought brought to her the glow which is inseparable from all honest endeavour. She had been slandered in a way that touched her with deep resentment, but never should she give that lie a moment's harbourage, even on the thresholdof her thoughts. The vileness of it, indeed, was a safeguard, and she could not without shuddering picture herself touching the subject-matter of it.
She had not walked long before a servant came out and approached her.
"Mr. Spencer wants to know if your ladyship will see him," he said.
Marie paused, feeling suddenly that this had happened before, but was unable to recollect what came next.
"Mr. Spencer?" she repeated.
"Yes, my lady."
Marie turned away from the man without replying, and walked a pace or two from him. Her mind seemed to be making itself up without any volition on her part. Then, without turning her head, "Ask him to come out," she answered, and the sound of the utterly commonplace words conveyed to her the nature of her own decision; for she had yielded, and knew it, not to be the imperative demand of her pride, which insisted that she should show not the smallest change of behaviour towards him, just because people had lied about her, but to her imperative desire to see the man.
She walked back to where the tea-tablestill stood, with the shining points of sunlight that filtered through the cedar making stars on the silver, and sat there a moment listening with a sort of incredulous wonder to the hammer of her pulse, and observing with the same incapacity for belief that these were her hands which trembled. But the interval was a short one, for in a moment his step sounded crisp on the terrace, and then became noiseless on the lawn. She was sitting with her back to the quarter of advance, but turned her head as he approached.
"Where in the world have you sprung from?" she asked. "Have some tea, Jim, or whisky-and-soda? I am delighted to see you, though it was not in my programme to see anybody."
"I am an intruder then, I fear," said he. "No sugar, thanks."
"Yes, but not unwelcome. I left London three days ago, and am going back to-morrow. I am eccentric, as you know, and, what is more useful, I have the reputation of being so. Thus, nobody wonders if I disappear for a few days."
To her great relief and her hardly less surprise, Marie found not the slightest difficulty in assuming a perfectly natural manner,and even mentally classed it under the heading of phenomena which show that ordinary people in trying circumstances for the most part behave normally. It was natural to her, in fact, to be natural. But even as she drew these comforting conclusions, she had leisure to observe that Jim, too, was in the grip of some inward struggle. Its nature she did not try to guess, but continued talking under a sense of stress, a fear of silences.
"You know my gospel, do you not?" she said, "or, rather, I am sure you do not, as I have only formulated it to myself during this last day or two. There are two halves to the world, which make the whole, and each is the antidote to the other. One half is people; the other half is things. Now, the country is the place of things, and London of people. Cows, flowers, hay, all these are a certain antidote to the poisoning which unmixed people give one. In the same way, one flies from the country to town to take the antidote to the poison, a narcotic one, of things. Dipsomaniacs, so to speak, live entirely in London. They die young; it is a quick poison. The opposite dipsomaniacs live entirely in the country; it is a slow poison, and they live, or, at any rate, do not die, until a very advancedage. But oh, Jim, what a difference there is between living and not dying! They sound the same thing, but there is all the difference in the world between them."
Jim stirred his sugarless tea slowly, then drank it quickly and put down the cup. Being a man, airy nothings were not part of his stock in trade, a deficiency from a merely social standpoint.
"And so you have been poisoned with people?" he said directly. "I feel uncomfortable; I am afraid I have interrupted the cure."
"Not a bit. The treatment is over, and I am going back to London to-morrow. You are the junction, so to speak, where some one gets in, where one first sees the smoke and the sea of houses. But who told you I was here?"
"Jack told me," he said. "Why?"
On his words Marie suddenly became conscious that definite drama had entered. From this point she saw herself as she might see a character in a play, with a feeling of irresponsibility. The author of the play was responsible. It was, in fact, overwhelmingly interesting to know the manner in which Jack had said this.
"When did you see him?" she asked.
"This morning only, and by accident. He suggested I should come here, in fact, and escort you back to London."
"But I am not going to-day," said Marie.
"No; he expects you back to-morrow. He suggested I should spend the night here, and come back with you then."
"Ah, that is charming!" said she. "You have told them you are stopping?"
"But I am not. I must get back to-night."
Marie felt and knew that the words were wrung from him, that they had been difficult to speak. But, well as she knew it, Jim knew it infinitely better. His tongue, so to speak, he had to tie like a galley-slave to its oar, and it made its monotonous strokes, which, unwilling as they were and mutinously inclined, yet moved the vessel towards its safety in harbour. Then a pause which both dreaded was broken by the crisp sound of the trodden terrace, and the servant again approached Marie.
"Which room shall I put Mr. Spencer's things in, my lady?" he asked, and again the commonplace words had a hideous momentousness.
The temptation in her mind to give himmerely the number of a room was almost overwhelming, for she felt morally certain that, had she done so, Jim would have said nothing. Furthermore, Jack had suggested his coming, and within herself she bore the conscious witness of her own rectitude. Only—and this was the reason for her decision—she knew that her desire that he should stop, that events should then take their course, was stronger than could have been accounted for by her desire to have a companion at dinner, even the most desirable, and a companion during her journey the next day. Further, he had come down here with the intention of stopping. But her purpose held.
"Mr. Spencer will go back to-night," she said. "But you will stop for dinner, Jim!"
"Thanks. I should like to. There is a train back at nine."
"Then, we must dine at eight instead of half-past. Let us have dinner on the terrace. We often dine there when it is warm."
The man took the tea-tray and retired with it. Then Jim leaned forward in his chair.
"Thank you," he said to Marie.
Again her hands so trembled that she had to catch hold of both arms of her chair, lestit should be apparent. And her voice, as she felt to her rebellious impotence, shook as she answered.
"For the dinner?" she said. "Indeed it will not be much, Jim—soup and a cutlet, I expect."
Great emotion has its moments of calm and hurricane, like the sea. It may lie glassy and level, though deep; again, with the speed of tropical storm, it may have its surface lashed to mountainous billows, against which no ship can make way, but must run before them. And the pitiless and intentional lightness of her words made an upheaval in him of all he was trying to suppress. He had come down here meaning to stop till the next day, but somehow the sight of her, and some deep abiding horror—the root of morality—of that for which his flesh cried out, had revealed to him the grossness of, not his design, but his acquiescence. Thus he had not even told her that he had his luggage with him; but of this blind Fate, in the shape of a liveried servant, had informed her. She knew as well as he what he had intended to do. And looking at her hands as they clutched the wickerwork of her basket chair, he could see that she, too, wrestled with, and tried tothrottle, some secret enemy. Then came her light words, interpreted by the quivering of the tense hands, and his passion surged and overwhelmed him.
"Let me change my mind, Marie," he said, "and stop."
Again she told herself that it was perfectly right and natural that he should do so, but again her clear, clean judgment, recognising the force of the desire that he should, overruled her; but she was tired and nerve-jangled from the struggle, and her voice, pitched high and entreatingly, was no longer under her command.
"No, no, Jim!" she cried. "You must go."
The word she was afraid she would not be able to speak was spoken. The operation was over; she had only to keep quiet and recuperate. But she had betrayed herself to him: both knew it. A barrier had been broken down between them; each soul in its secret place was visible to the other, and in the awe and amazement of that the cries and strivings of the debatable were for the moment stilled. There was no satisfaction in the world that could equal the self-surrender that each had already made; there was nothingthat either could do or say which would not spoil and degrade that which had passed between them. Jim, on his part, though he knew why he had asked to change his mind and stop, could not yet regret it, so tremendous and soul-filling was that which lay behind her refusal; and she could not find it in her heart to blame him, since his weakness had ended so gloriously. Thus in silence for a long moment each looked at the other, unashamed, acknowledging by that look, without fear or regret, the great bond that bound them indissolubly together, the great renunciation that irrevocably divided them.
Marie reached out her hand for her ivory silver-handled stick, which had fallen by her chair.
"Come and stroll for half an hour before dinner," she said. "See whether I am not right about the antidote to people which one can find in the country."
He rose, too.
"But who has been poisoning you in town?" he asked.
"Who? The six million people who live there. No, I will except you. I do not find you are poisonous here, at least."
"Thank you. But what have you done with yourself these three days?"
"Ah, that is the secret of the country! In town one has to do things one's self; the country does them all for you. You sit and you walk; you pick long feathery pieces of grass, and chew them like a cow; you think very intently for long periods, and at the end find that you have been thinking about nothing whatever. There is nothing so restful; and I have been wanting rest. I was a good deal worried about a certain matter before I left town."
He looked at her.
"I will subscribe to any institution that will guarantee you freedom from worry," he said.
"That is very kind of you, but the only way your institution could be of use would be by giving me a painless death; and I do not wish to die at all. No, you must spend your money some other way. Talking of that, have you made up your mind to stand for Parliament? It looks as if I accused you prospectively of bribery and corruption. I do not mean to."
"I wanted to talk to you about that. That was—one of the reasons why I camedown to-day. I have been asked to stand for East Surrey, but by the Liberals."
She stopped suddenly.
"By the Liberals?" she said. "That will come as a great surprise to your friends, will it not?"
"Possibly. Of course, rich people are as a rule Conservative; in fact, it seems sufficient for a man that he should acquire a large fortune to make a Conservative of him. Personally I detest party politics, though no doubt they are a necessity. For myself, I only recognise one party just now, whose sole object is efficiency, not effectiveness."
She resumed walking again, with a quicker pace.
"Have you told Jack?" she asked.
"Yes. He approves warmly. He added, however, that he couldn't do anything for me, that he was bound to do all he could against me, in fact, during the election. That must be so. He is the land-owner here and a Conservative, and he does not see sufficient reason for ratting. There is nowhere to rat to, he says."
"I know Jack's view. He thinks both parties are in a hopeless state, but, belonging to one, he has no reason to join the other.Dear me, Jim, this is news! You have a subject in South Africa; so if the Conservatives get in, you will, I suppose, be among those who make it warm for them."
"I have no intention of taking politics up as a recreation," he said; "it is to be my profession, you understand." He paused a moment. "That is, given I get in."
Instantly her woman's pride in the man awoke.
"Of course you will get in!" she said; and not till she had said it did she know what she said, for no sense of his political fitness had prompted it, only her love for him.
They walked on a little way in silence, past the end of the riband bed, and into the rose-garden beyond.
"Yes, there is a cry for efficiency," he said. "John Bull is touched in his tender point, which is his purse. The tax-payer wants to know what he is getting for his increased income-tax, and the fact that he puts only one lump of sugar instead of two into his two instead of three cups of tea. He accepts the necessity, I believe, quite willingly; but as a shareholder in that very large concern, the British Empire, he wishes to see the balance-sheet, with explanations. Somany millions for the South African War seem to him a large item. He does not dispute it, but he wants to have details given him, and through the mouths of his representatives he proposes to see that he gets them."
"That is called an unpatriotic attitude," remarked Marie with singular acidity.
"Ah, you are a Liberal, too! Of course Jack is."
"Certainly, if you take the utterance of the Conservative leaders as official. Jack, for instance, looks upon the Boer War as a war with a Power that was no Power at all, but the Government officially alludes to it as 'the great Boer War.' There is the party note. Oh, there is no such strong Conservative as the man who has once been a Radical! Conversion is always followed by exaggeration."
Marie stopped, plucked a couple of tea-roses and pinned them into the front of her dress. Then, looking up, she saw his eyes fixed on her face, and though they both had been speaking honestly about a subject that honestly interested them, she knew how superficial their talk had been; speeches had been made correctly, but automatically—nomore. She was glad to know about his future plans; he, on his side, liked to speak of them, for, as he said, he was going to make a profession of politics. But they had both been talking "shop"; and as she raised her eyes to his, "shop" became suddenly impossible.
"Another rose," he said, "and give it me."
She did not answer. Then she drew one from the two she had fastened in her dress.
"Flowers to a friend," she said, holding it out to him. "It is an Italian proverb, Jim. Do you know the response?"
"You will tell it me."
"And honour from the friend," she replied.
He was cut to the quick, yet a phantom of self-justification was up in arms.
"When did I not give you that?" he said.
"You have always given it me," she answered. "Give it me every hour, Jim, until I cease entirely to deserve it."
Thereat he bent and kissed her hand.
In the course of the next week or so Lady Brereton began to almost believe the slander that she had herself sown over the very congenial soil of London drawing-rooms; but though the town was soon as thick with it as is a cornfield in May with the green springing spears, she was afraid that her amiable object of revenging herself on Marie for the ill turn she had done her in the matter of Maud's marriage had not been blessed with the success which that masterly design deserved. Indeed, had she not known from Jack that he had told his wife what he had overheard at the "Deuce of Spades," Mildred could not have believed that Marie knew anything at all about it, so utterly unaltered was her demeanour to the world at large, and in particular to Jim Spencer. They were constantly together, but, somehow, Marie's attitude to him and his to her seemed in the eyes ofpeople in general to contradict every moment the possibility of there being anydessous des cartesat all; in fact, Mildred's springing blades had rather the appearance of having been sown on stony ground: they seemed to her eye to look curiously without stamina. Yet, as already stated, although in less than the traditional nine days the world in general had ceased to concern itself with so misbegotten a scandal, Lady Brereton almost began to believe it herself. Her own invention, in fact, appeared probable to her; but its effect on Marie, from which she had hoped so much, was entirely unfruitful.
Lady Ardingly about this time, like an old war-horse now turned out to grass, had begun to prick up her ears at the trumpets which resounded through the land on the approach of the General Election. She, like many other people, had a great belief in Jack's powers of awakening the Government from the self-congratulatory torpor which had fallen on them.
"They sit in a somnolent circle," she said to him one day, "and awake at intervals to shake hands with each other; then they go to sleep again. Ardingly, perhaps, is the most sensible. He sleeps as soundly as anybody,but he doesn't congratulate his noble colleagues."
Jack laughed.
"I almost wish I had always been a Liberal," he said.
"You always have been," said she; "but now is not the time to say so. Get your seat in the Cabinet, Jack; the Conservative Cabinet is the only opening for a Liberal nowadays. That is where Mr. Spencer makes his mistake. To be a Liberal, however prominent, is nowadays to be perfectly ineffective. You are put in a box and locked up, and the key is put in the key-basket at—well, at a certain country-house. But if you are a Conservative you are let out and given your own key. That is your chance."
"And if they don't give me a seat in the Cabinet?"
"There will be no question about that. They do not like you, but they are afraid of you. The country, on the other hand, likes you a good deal. You have a way with plebeians. I don't know how you manage it. They think you are a practical man, and just now they want practical men, and they intend to get them. But you will have to be very careful about certain things. I wantedto talk to you about those; that was why I sent for you to have lunch with me alone. People were coming, but, in fact, I put them off. We will go to my room."
Lady Ardingly rose, and Jack followed her. He was not quite sure that he would like what was coming, but he was far too sensible to quarrel with her, for he considered her quite the worst person in the world to quarrel with.
"Yes, I am going to speak plainly," she said. "It is, I think, certain that you will be offered the War Office. Now, you have a very clever wife, who will be admirably useful to you; but you have a great friend who is stupider than a mule, with all hersoi-disantbrilliance. She isau fonda really vulgar woman, and it is vulgar people who make the stupid mistakes. She has already made one, which might have damaged you seriously, but I do not think it will. Of that presently. I was saying that they will probably give you the War Office; but you cannot with any usefulness retain the post for a day if there is a scandal connected with you—a scandal, that is to say, of the wrong sort."
Jack leaned forward in his chair.
"I don't know why I do not resent this,Lady Ardingly," he said, "or why I do not leave the room; but I do neither."
"Because you are a selfish, or at any rate an ambitious man," she said. "Every one who is worth his salt is. Now I will put names to my advice."
She paused a moment to take some coffee, and waited till the man had left the room.
"Mildred is a very vulgar woman," she said, "and her vulgarity shows itself in the nature of her mistakes. Silly Billy came here the other day, and I asked him about his scene with you. You did not score there, and if he had not been a clever little fellow in a small sort of bird-like manner, you would have involved yourself in a row of monstrous proportions. He managed you in his microscopical way very successfully. That is so. He also told me that it was Mildred who had suggested that absurd canard to him. There is the stupidity of the woman. There was no grain of sense in it all. Nobody who knows, would believe such things about Marie for ten days together. But supposing some gutter-rag of a paper had got hold of it! The wife of the man who was in the running for the Cabinet prosecuting an intrigue with theLiberal candidate of his division of Surrey! How charming! If I had wanted to ruin you, I should have tried to think of something as damaging as that. If I had thought of that I should have been quite content. Did you not see that, my poor fellow?"
"We did not know he was standing at the time," said Jack rather feebly.
"Doubtless. But the secret of success in this world is not to make blunders where one does not know. Any one can avoid blunders if he knows everything. In any case, here is the position. It is sedulously circulated that your wife has an intrigue with Jim Spencer. And who circulates it? This cook! Luckily I did something to stop people talking."
"What was that?"
"I told them I happened to know that Mildred had quarrelled with your wife, and had invented this story out of revenge. That is the case, is it not?"
"It certainly happens to be true. But I don't see how you knew."
"I guessed it was so," said Lady Ardingly. "It was the only reasonable supposition. There is not another which holds water. Besides, if it had not been true, what does it matter? Now, this is the first way in whichMildred might have ruined you. The second concerns you also."
"I don't think we need discuss that," said Jack, who kept his temper only by the knowledge that he would lose a great deal more if he lost it.
"But we had better. You are a decent fellow, Jack; also it will amuse me to see you in the Cabinet, which I shall not, unless you are careful. Now, you have had an affair with Mildred for many years. At least, so we all suppose; that we all suppose it is the important thing. I do not mind that, morally speaking, because I am in no way responsible for your morals. It is your own business. She happens to stimulate you. Everybody knows about it except one person—your wife. Now, why not tell her?"
"For what reason?" asked Jack, far too much surprised to resent anything.
"Simply for fear she should find out, and—and blow your ships out of the water!" said Lady Ardingly. "You have fallen into a grave mistake. You have treated your wife as a negligible quantity, whereas hardly anybody is a negligible quantity, and certainly not she. That is by the way. At present we are considering your career. Now, if Mariefinds out, either while you are still not yet in the Cabinet, or even after that, before you have made yourself clearly felt to be indispensable, you go. For if the middle class gets hold of a scandal about a Minister, not yet proven, that man is beyond hope. He cannot weather the storm. The middle class, who are, after all, the people, distrust his public measures because they disapprove of his private life."
"Idiotic on their part," observed Jack.
"No doubt; but the cause of success is to estimate correctly and to take advantage of the idiocy of others. None of us are clever in the way Napoleon was clever. All we can do is to be slightly less idiotic than the rest of mankind. Now you must go. I have a hundred things to do and a thousand people to see. If I can be of any further help to you, let me know."
Jack got up, then paused, indecisive.
"You mean you will tell Marie?" he asked.
"If you wish me to. But there is a simpler plan."
"What is that?" asked Jack.
"Show Mildred the door—the back-door," she added.
"I can't."
"Very good; that is your affair," said she. "But make up your mind soon what you will do. Any line is better than none, as it was always."
At the moment a footman entered.
"Ask her to wait in the drawing-room," said Lady Ardingly, before he had spoken. Then, without pausing: "Good-bye, Jack. Send me a line; or we shall meet at Ascot, shall we not?"
Jack hesitated a moment.
"She is very obstinate," he said.
"Your wife?" asked Lady Ardingly.
"No; the person you asked to wait in the drawing-room."
Lady Ardingly laughed. She never minded being found out.
"So am I," she said. "Don't meet her on the stairs."
"Oh, I am not a fool!" said Jack, almost with gaiety.
"That may be true. But do not take your own wisdom as a working hypothesis," said that immovable woman.
After he had left, Lady Ardingly proceeded to take her maximum exercise for the day. This consisted in walking four times up anddown the long gallery of portraits which ran by the reception-rooms. It was nearly a hundred yards in length, and as she stopped once to swallow a small digestive pill, which was presented to her with a wine-glass of water by her maid, it was nearly ten minutes before she returned to her room and sent a message that the person who was waiting should be shown up. The interval sufficed to pull her auburn wig straight and settle herself with her back to the light.
Mildred was more accustomed to be waited for than to wait, and neither Lady Ardingly's message that she wished to see her at 3.30 nor the period of inaction in this drawing-room had improved a naturally irritable temper. Her determination, in fact, when the tardy summons came, was to be very effusive and full of engagements—a delighted-to-see-you—how-well-you-are-looking—such-a-pleasure—must-go attitude. Lady Ardingly often rubbed her up the wrong way, but she more often gave her advice which, when she was cool, she knew to be right. She conjectured, if no more, that the subject which was going to be discussed was Jack, but was more than half decided not to discuss it. In her mind, in fact, she labelled Lady Ardinglyas an impotent old meddler. Thus she entered.
"Ah, my dear," said Lady Ardingly, "you have been kept waiting, I am afraid. It was an idiotic footman, who thought I was engaged, and did not tell me you were here. How are you, Mildred?"
Mildred sat down. Her dress rustled incredulously.
"Driven," she said—"simply driven! How foolish one is to make a hundred engagements a day, and not enjoy any because one is always thinking about the next!"
"Yes, very foolish," said Lady Ardingly, "especially when one does not enjoy them. Now tell me the news, dear Mildred. I do not go out and I see nobody. You are always everywhere. I never saw a woman who sat in the mainspring so much. Tell me all about everybody."
Insensibly Mildred felt mollified. She knew perfectly well that, though Lady Ardingly did not rush about to see everybody, it was only because everybody rushed about to see her; but still there was to her a faint aroma of compliment about the speech. She disentangled a misshapen Yorkshire terrier from her muff.
"Who, for instance?" she said. "Now, Jack—he is a friend of yours, I know."
"Of both of ours," said Lady Ardingly with an intonation far more confirmatory, than correcting.
"Yes—such a dear, isn't he? Well, people have been talking about him as possibly going to the War Office. Dear Jack! I can scarcely imagine him there."
"Yes, that is interesting," said Lady Ardingly. "So he means to take up politics quite seriously. I am glad you have urged him to do that, and that you have used your influence with him in that direction!"
Mildred continued to melt.
"Yes, Jack really has great talent," she said. "And he knows about guns and smokeless powder, and—and that sort of thing, I believe. There is a craze just now for people managing Departments of which they know something. Quite new, isn't it?"
"Ah, you mean Ardingly," said the other. "How cruel of you!"
The liquefaction progressed.
"Dear Lady Ardingly!" said Mildred, "how can you say such a thing! Of course I did not mean anything of the sort. But,seriously, I think that Jack would do well at the War Office. Do not you?"
"Oh, he is not a fool! But it is necessary that he should have a wife. Does one count Marie Alston as a wife, do you think?"
Mildred frowned quite naturally, and Lady Ardingly, though accustomed to find her manœuvres successful, was almost surprised at the success of this.
"That reminds me," she said. "I wonder whether you have heard it? There is going about a horrid, horrid scandal about Marie. It started, as far as I know, in that Bridge club—'Deuce of Spades,' is it not? Well, there one afternoon, about ten days ago, Silly Billy remarked that the Snowflake had melted, referring to the matter. Everybody knew what he meant, and Jack, as it happened, was in the room at the time. Was it not awful? And it has gone all over London?"
Lady Ardingly sat up in her chair with the deliberation that characterized all her movements, and took a cigarette from a tray. She lighted it quite slowly without replying. It was time, she felt, to begin taking the ribs out of this poor umbrella.
"Yes, I heard something of it," she said.
"Somebody told me something. But I gathered that it did not quite originate there. I heard, in fact, dear Mildred, that you, driving to that concert the other day, put the notion into Silly Billy's head."
"I don't know who can have told you that," she replied.
"Silly Billy did. Oh, I grant you that that is no guarantee at all for its truth. I never see any reason to believe what Silly Billy says. But you must now reckon with the story as it stands—as it reached me, in fact: namely, that you told him the story which he very indiscreetly repeated in Jack's hearing. You who know the world so well know that people will not care if it is true. They will only repeat it as it reached them, as it reached me."
"But I believe the story to be true," exclaimed Mildred, completely off her guard.
"Ah! so you did tell him. The story, then, as I heard it is substantially correct. Poor Silly Billy! How annoyed he would be if he knew that he had been detected telling the truth! It would be deeply humiliating to him. However, do not let us mind him; he is particularly insignificant. Now, dear Mildred, why did you put that into his head?Not that it matters why. But, anyhow, it was not nice of you."
"I did not intend it to be," said Mildred.
"Now you are talking sensibly. You quarrelled with her, and you wanted to annoy her, I suppose. But is it possible that you do not see that in annoying her you are injuring Jack with both hands?"
"In what way?"
"Perhaps you do not know that Jim Spencer is standing for the East Surrey constituency as a Liberal. And where is Freshfield, the Alstons' place? I have never been there, but I understand it is in East Surrey. The Conservative magnate's wife has an intrigue with the Liberal candidate! I said only just now to"—Lady Ardingly paused a moment—"to myself, How damaging for Jack! How completely fatal for Jack!"
There was a short silence, and Lady Ardingly continued with the driest deliberation.
"Of course, you had not heard that Jim Spencer was standing for that division. There is nothing so dangerous as a complete absence of knowledge. And it was you who started that scandal! It is lucky for you it was such a silly one. If it had been a littlecleverer, you might have damaged him irretrievably."
"But there are lots of stories," began Mildred.
"Thousands. But not of that damaging kind. If you had said she was having an intrigue, say, with the Emperor of Russia, it would have hurt nobody, not even the Emperor. Never mind, dear, the thing is done. We must consider how we can make the best of it. A scandal is always a dangerous thing to touch. If one denies it afterwards, if even the inventor, who believes it to be true—how ridiculous, too, of you, dear Mildred!—denies it, there will always be people who think that the denial merely confirms it. In this case it is peculiarly complicated. The great thing is that the whole invention was so silly from the start. I should have thought, dear Mildred, that you had a better imagination. But you have not. It is not your fault; you cannot help it. What shall we do, do you think?"
This old woman was not so impotent as Mildred had hoped. She had been accustomed to consider herself fairly wide awake, but it appeared that her waking moments were somnolence personified to Lady Ardingly.
"I don't know," she said feebly.
"Then, I will tell you," said Lady Ardingly. "Start a scandal—you are so good at it—about yourself and Jim Spencer. Nothing circumstantial—only let it be in the air. Let people say things; there is nothing easier. Then it will appear also that you have broken with Jack. That, I tell you, will not injure him. A married man is open to damaging scandals in two ways: one through himself, one through his wife. And in Jack's case, my dear, both these doors are flung wide, and Lady Brereton enters through each, trumpeting like—like an elephant."
Lady Ardingly nodded her head at Mildred, with the air of a nurse scolding a refractory child.
"Now, do not look so disconsolate, my dear," she went on, observing Mildred's face falling as a barometer falls before a cyclone, "but just bestir yourself. You should really in future consult somebody before you embark on these efforts. You have dug a bottomless well, so I may say, at the foot of the ladder by which your friend Jack was preparing to mount. There is room—just room—to get him on to it still. But there is only one way of doing it—that is, by stoppingsomehow or another that very silly story you made up about his wife, and by taking very great care how you are talked about in connection with him by the wrong people—just now, perhaps, by anybody. You can do both these things by letting it be supposed that you areintimewith Mr. Spencer. Let us talk of something else."
Lady Ardingly rose with the air of closing the subject altogether. She knew exactly when to stop rubbing a thing in, the object of that salutary process being to make the place smart sufficiently, but not unbearably. Mildred, she considered, was smarting enough.
"And about your tall daughter?" she said. "How does that go?"
"She is lovable, and he loves her; but he is not lovable, and she does not love him," quoted Mildred, restraining quite admirably her impulse to sulk or lose her temper.
"Ah! you must give her time. If he is really in love with her, he will be very patient. And, since you love her," she added, without any change of voice, "you will be patient with her, too."
Mildred got up.
"I must go," she said. "Thank you verymuch, Lady Ardingly. I have made a mess of things."
"Yes, dear," said the other, "and you must wipe it up. Must you be going? Some people are coming in for Bridge almost immediately. Please dine here, if you can, to-day week. I will ask Mr. Spencer, and I will not ask Jack. That is the day before we all go down to Ascot. I hope you have backed Ardingly's horse for the Eclipse Stakes. Good-bye, dear."
Mildred went out, a limp figure, leaving Lady Ardingly looking like a restored sphinx on the hearth-rug. Then she spoke to herself very gently and slowly.
"I cannot bear cooks," she said, "and other people like them so much; but I think I deserve a great many aces at Bridge."
Jack and Mildred went their respective ways full of thoughts, which up to a certain point were very similar. Prominent, at any rate, in the mind of each was that, though they knew each other very well, they would not mention that they had had an interview with Lady Ardingly. Jack here was in the superior position, since he knew that Mildred had succeeded him in audience, and felt sure that, whether Mildred told him so or not, hewould find some impress of what had taken place in the next intimate conversation they had together. With regard to his reflection on his own interview, he saw the admirable justice of the greater part of Lady Ardingly's views; he did not, however, see the fitness of telling Marie anything whatever. This appeared to him a heroic remedy for a contingency too remote to reckon with. He knew her, he told himself, well enough to know that he did not know her at all, and she was quite capable, as far as he was aware, of making what Lady Ardingly had called "a row of monstrous proportions." This, as she had herself said just now, at this juncture in his affairs would be fatal to him. She might even petition for a divorce, in which case, as Lady Ardingly said, "he went." There remained, as she had suggested, the other alternative of giving up Mildred, of terminating the whole affair. He had told Lady Ardingly he could not. At any rate, she was an invaluable friend; no false notions of sentiment or altruism ever found their way into her conversation. She advised from a flintily-logical, hard, worldly standpoint.
At this point his reflections travelled off into ways utterly unknown to her, and tilllately unknown to himself; and even now he only groped his path among them in a dim twilight. For he had said "I can't," not from certainty of diagnosis, but from mere incredulity at his own symptoms. His long intrigue with Mildred he had brought himself to believe was necessary to him; he could not clearly picture any other way of life. No less necessary, so he had always thought, was his aloofness from Marie. But lately—dating, in point of fact, from the time of that scene when he had told Marie what he had heard said at the "Deuce of Spades"—he had been conscious of a change in himself as indefinable, but as certain, as the first hint of dawn. Again, a pulse beat in him which had long been dormant—the pulse that had throbbed in his arteries when he was younger by more years than he cared to count, when women had been to him, not the vehicle, but the deity, of passion. He had thrown his earlier convictions in the mud, and in the conduct of his life had trampled them under-foot; and now, at the end, like the trodden seeds of wheat, they were already in ear. Marie's frank and honest contempt for him had begun this process, for it had first jarred and disturbed, then woke to activity some relaxedfibre which had long been overlaid by grosser tissue, but was alive for all that.
Then, feebly at first, the knowledge of the "might-have-been" dawned on him—that drug always bitter, and only sometimes salutary, producing in some contrition and amendment, in others only recklessness. At present it was bitter; but the bitterness was tonic. He could not yet tell whether the "might-have-been" had passed into the "cannot-be." That depended partly on himself, no doubt, but partly on her. And of her, out of long familiarity, he knew nothing. Then, simultaneously with remorse, or, at any rate, with his appreciation of her scorn for him, came in another factor, his reawakened knowledge of her beauty—a low motive, it may be, on which to base faithfulness or recall the unfaithful, but, as long as men are men, a very real one. Yet for years he had sought another woman, dimming the light of complete desire with the damp of physical satiety. This other had ministered to the demands of the flesh, she had also fulfilled that which lay immediately behind, for she had supplied him always with a ready response to his more carnal ambitions: she had flattered his own self-flattery. He had posed,as it were, before a quantity of mirrors, sometimes convex, sometimes concave, which had showed him himself now taller, now shorter, than he was. But she had never shown him himself, still less any ideal of what he might be. Then, still touching the same spot, had come Lady Ardingly's gentle classification of Mildred as a cook, made, not with the air of discovery, but merely as a passing allusion to what both knew. A cook, that was all.
Mildred's reflections were far simpler to follow, and far less disquieting. No doubt she had made a mistake about the scandal she had tried to start about Marie, and it was a comfort to think that Lady Ardingly's remarks about the silliness of it being its own doom were true. Meantime it would be amusing to "run" Jim Spencer for a while, and she felt sure that, even if she could not do it, she could easily convey the impression that she was doing it. On the whole, she would not tell Jack she had seen Lady Ardingly (this was unnecessary, for he knew), and the rest of her meditation was composed of a sense of holding Jack's rein, whatever Lady Ardingly might say, and a superb determination to do her unselfish best for him. Shewas, as a matter of fact, hopelessly incapable of doing anything unselfish, but a benignant Providence having denied her the possibility of altruism, spared her also the humiliation of the knowledge of its absence.
It so happened that they met the next evening at an omnibus kind of party at Arthur Naseby's, a bachelor host. He was a man of strange and wayward tastes, and you were liable to meet a Sioux Indian in feathers there one week, and a missionary who had crossed Africa and been eaten, so he would explain, by cannibal tribes, the next. In his way he was an admirable host, and, before introducing any one of his guests to another, hissed into his ear a rapidprécisof the chief events of the other's life. These were sometimes wildly enigmatical, as when he murmured: "Frightful scandal just five years ago. Her uncle found dead in the Underground—probably blackmail. Cut for years afterwards. Don't allude to first-class carriages. Daughter of old Toby Fairbank—mother a Jewess." But, as a rule, his information was a help to the newly introduced, and he always pronounced their names loudly and distinctly, instead of murmuring inaudibly. To-night the party centred round agifted French actress, who recited several poems in a most melodious voice and with a childlike air which was quite killing to those who knew what she was talking about. Later on there was Bridge, owing to the repeated demands of Lady Ardingly, and Jack and Mildred having cut out, it was quite natural that they should have a talk together in a somewhat secluded window-seat.
"You are getting on, Jack," said she. "I should not be the least surprised if there was a boom in you, as Andrew would say. Dear Andrew! he always remembers my birthday, while I always strive to forget it. One has so many. But he gave me these pearls. Are they not pretty? Yes, Jack, you are booming. You are in the air!"
"That is always rather a nuisance," remarked Jack. "One can't help wanting to assure people that a close inspection will not repay them."
"I don't think you need mind much. People are disposed to take a favourable view of you. You must manage to keep it up. The time of pigs and shorthorns is here," she said with a sigh. "Look: there is Silly Billy talking to Marie! She appears completely unconscious of his presence."
"She probably is, for I don't think she ever poses."
"There is faint praise in your voice," said Mildred.
"Undesignedly. At least, I had no intention of doing the other thing. By the way, I disquieted myself in vain over the Silly Billy episode, I think. It has not caught on."
"Nobody talked about anything else for three days," said Mildred, with a mother's protective instinct for her offspring. "You didn't suppose they would talk to you about it! But I am magnanimous enough to be glad it has dropped, Jack. It is very important—particularly important, I think—that you should have no joint in your harness just now. You will probably get into the Cabinet, upon which the searchlights will be turned on. I feel this strongly. I have meant to say it to you for—for some time."
He looked at her for a moment without replying.
"She caught it hot," he said to himself, not without satisfaction, for he saw vividly the truth of Lady Ardingly's estimate of her folly.
"I feel it, too," he said; and, though they agreed, a discordant note was definitelystruck, and vibrated very audibly to the inward ear, with its own-widening harmonics.
"I am glad! As you implied to me not long ago, Cæsar's wife must be above suspicion. It was not very convincing to me then. But it is now. Also, Jack, it is best that Cæsar should not inspire spicy paragraphs in the gutter press."
Jack felt unreasonably irritated. The cook spoke here.
"Have you some scandal to tell me about myself," he asked, "also invented by you?"
"No. But why show temper?"
"Because you irritate me when you speak like that."
Mildred felt suddenly a little uncomfortable; she had a sense of uncertain grip.
"Really, Jack, you are very ungrateful!" she said. "I am taking all the trouble of sitting with you in the corner, and thinking of a hundred things for your good, which would never have occurred to you, and you merely tell me that I irritate you!"
"Well, what is it?" he replied.
She rose, really annoyed.
"I will leave you to find out for yourself," she said.
"You are sufficiently lucid. You havestated what you mean quite clearly. You will leave me. I have found out for myself. So shall we discuss it?"
She had made a false move, and knew it. There was some indefinable change about Jack, which she recognised though she could not analyze it. But the prospect of losing him, even temporarily, on his initiative, was quite another matter to doing it on her own.
"Yes, that is what I mean," she said, sitting down again. "I made a mess, or I might have made one, over that other affair, and I see now that it might have been very injurious to you, especially since Jim Spencer is standing as a Liberal for East Surrey. Did you know that, by the way?"
"Oh, yes. He talked to me about it. It was not wise of you."
"Well, luckily there is no harm done. The thing didn't catch on. But the point is to avoid other dangers. And for the present I am dangerous to you, Jack. People won't begin talking again unless they get fresh cause. Do not let us give them fresh cause."
"I quite agree with you," said he.
Mildred liked this less and less. She had imagined that he would want a lot of talkinground and reasoning with, and it did not flatter her at all to find him so placidly in accord with her. Yet she had no tangible ground of complaint.
"So that is all right," she said. "Ah, here is Marie. Marie, whenever I see you in that pink dress, I think it is morning."
"It is nearly," said she. "Jack, I am going home. Are you stopping to play?"
He rose.
"No, I will come with you," he said.
Marie looked a little surprised.
"Stop by all means if you feel inclined," she said. "I will send the carriage back for you."
Mildred laughed.
"Mutual confidence of the very first water," she observed.
Again the cookmotifsounded, setting his teeth on edge.
"No, I will come with you, Marie," he repeated.