Mrs. Elles, on arriving at Newcastle, took a fly and drove straight up to her own door.
This detail was significant of the course she had undertaken to pursue, and the attitude she meant to assume with regard to her own life—what was left of it.
She was only thirty, she had presumably as many years again to live, and she had no intention of committing suicide. On the contrary, she meant to go through the process known as picking up the pieces.
Her policy of life was optimism—pessimism was her pose. But her unconscious tendency was to look forward—very much forward. The past she ignored, the present she disdained, the future she brooded over. It had always been so with her, even in the old days before this cyclone of emotion had swept over her, and the trivial round of things pleasant and unpleasant had been all her care and preoccupation. It would be so again.
She had the peculiar shrewdness of the feather-brained, the perspicacity of the trivial-minded; and the practical basis of her nature, which had been overlaid and smothered for a time by her spasmodic access of passion for the artist, began to re-assertitself. As the train passed easily through stations and scenes familiar, the domestic campaign of the immediate future took form and shape in her mind.
All that was now possible! She arranged it hopelessly, drearily, but as satisfactorily as might be under the gods’ dispensation. The door of Paradise was closed to her, she would make purgatory endurable. She had known the poetry of life, now for its prose. But dramatic and artistic fitness demanded that there should be no loose ends, no rough edges, no interfusing and overlapping of incompatible and discordant periods of existence. Her month of soul-fruition was to be a thing apart, a memory, complete, perfect, enshrined in her heart for ever and kept entirely clear of entanglement with the squalid phase of life that she was going to take up again. She was a reluctant but resolved Eurydice returning to the grey neutralities of the Hades from which Orpheus had so nearly rescued her.
Ché farò!—She knew the song. What would Orpheus do without Eurydice?
Alas!—in her shrewd heart of hearts she knew that Orpheus would do very well. Orpheus loved his Eurydice, but even the legend is compelled to admit that he went harping about the world; and Rivers would go on painting noble pictures and would soon forget her in his work, which even in the heyday of her influence had been paramount with him.
She did not allow herself to lose sight of that fact. She knew in her humility and consequent clearness ofperception that the idyllic month in the Brignal woods had been her epoch—his episode. Propinquity and a vague sense of responsibility had led him to propose to her.
She wished he had given her a ring—a sketch—anything, as a memorial of their sojourn together. She had literally nothing of his but a stump of pencil which he had lent her the day before, and which she had forgotten to return. It was only a stump—she must never permit herself to use it; it must last her her life. She laughed at herself for thinking of this.
Rivers would certainly approve of her plan. He had not allowed himself to preach at her, but he would of course wish her to make the best of Mortimer and be a good wife to him henceforward. She would try—but the very thought of Mortimer brought one of her headaches!
Driving up Grey Street from the station, she caught sight of various members of her little society. Miss Drummond was picking her way through the perennial mud of this unromantic city, and the poet was holding an umbrella over her. This looked like love—like an engagement! Had they got it settled during her absence? She was disposed to be kind to all lovers, but preferred them of the distressed variety! She would have liked something left to her to do! But there were other lovers and other people in the world. She would begin her Friday “At Homes” again and her friends would muster and she would give them tea, and they would wonder why shelooked “different.” There would be a look in her eyes which no one would remember having seen there before, a kind of “Love among the ruins” look, and she would not be able to smile quite so freely.
The thought awakened her own ready sympathy for herself and there were tears in her eyes and a flush on her cheek when she stood on her own doorstep and rang the bell of her own house.
A new parlour-maid—she could not help starting—though she must have known on reflection that this would be the case—opened the door and stood looking politely receptive.
Mrs. Elles saw the comedy of the situation and laughed gently. Then she put a florin into the girl’s hand, and, bidding her pay the cabman, brushed past her into the house and into the dining-room.
The room was empty, unchanged, a little untidier than it used to be in her day. A sour look came over her face as the accustomed horrors smote her sense, fresh and undulled by previous contact with them.
“If he has dared to touch my drawing-room!” she muttered and, opening the door of that apartment, surveyed it.
It was just as she had left it, a passably pretty and tasteful room. She went up to the wall and instinctively set the frame of a picture straight.
“Bring tea at once,” she ordered peremptorily of the astonished maid, sitting down in her own especial place at the corner of the sofa. “Where is Mrs. Poynder?”
“Oh, Miss, did you want Mrs. Poynder?” said the servant, with obvious relief. “Mrs. Poynder is away. She went into Yorkshire yesterday. Mrs. Elles is away too.”
“I am Mrs. Elles,” said that lady calmly, judging that the comedy in the maid’s case had lasted long enough. “You are the new parlour-maid, I suppose. What is your name? When do you expect Mrs. Poynder back?”
“Mrs. Poynder only went for the night, Miss—Ma’am. She expects to be home for dinner.”
“What an extraordinary thing for Aunt Poynder to do!” said Mrs. Elles, speaking aloud. “Now go and get tea. I am dying for it.”
The girl went. Then her mistress gave one despairing look around the room and hid her face in the sofa cushion. Sorrow’s crown of sorrow had come upon her suddenly—the contrast between her own drawing-room and the little ascetic room at Rokeby, that spoke so clearly of its inmate, had come across her mind with cruel poignancy.
“Oh, God, if it is going to be like this!” she murmured, choking with sobs. Only a few hours ago, in the plain bald room that was Paradise to her, and now here among all these pictures, photographs, books, symbols of the tedious domesticity she had been prepared to take up, but which struck her now as horrible, so much more horrible than she had anticipated!
“I hate you!” she said to the grandfather over themantelpiece. She kicked the early Victorian embroidered footstool at her feet savagely away.
The door opened a little and she wearily raised her eyes. Her little cat came wandering deviously in, having pushed the door open for itself, and, purring for joy of seeing her again, rubbed its head against the footstool and the foot. She looked down with a sudden fiendish instinct—then seized the creature and kissed it and buried her face in its soft fur and let it lick away the tears that coursed down her cheeks uncontrollably.
There was a crash of sticks in the hall—how well she knew that sound! Mortimer! In spite of the comedy of the situation Mrs. Elles turned pale. It was the first time in her life that her husband had had that effect upon her. Through the chink in the door that the cat had made for itself, she saw a vertical slice of her husband. In a moment he would enter the room and the comedy would have to begin. She put down the cat and dried her eyes on the muslin chair-cover.
Very rarely did Mortimer enter the drawing-room. If she had only thought of that! He did not enter it now. He walked into his study and closed the door.
Now he had made her feel foolish—another rare occurrence. The only thing for her to do now was to go and “dig him out,” in pursuance of her plan of making things go smoothly. She would do it, for once. And if she could only bring herself to put her arms round his neck and kiss him, also for once,domestic peace would be fully ensured, for a season at any rate.
The memory of Rivers’ farewell kiss that morning assailed her and she sat heavily down again, struggling, striving, gathering up her resolution. No, she could not kiss Mortimer, but she could be nice to him, and she would.
She presently rose and with an assured step went to the study door and opened it.
Mortimer was standing with his back to her, in front of a case of liqueurs that he kept there, and was in the act of pouring himself out a glass of brandy. Kiss him, indeed! Under these conditions she could hardly be expected to go up to him and say “Peep-bo!” or “Guess who this is!” as she believed was done in the best bourgeois circles.
She merely said “Mortimer!” as jauntily as she could.
He turned. His face expressed no emotion but surprise, and he took a gulp of brandy from the glass he held before answering.
She shuddered with disgust, but remarked in a lively tone: “Well, Mortimer, here I am—and so much better for my little change. I simply had to go, and quickly too, or you would have had me break down on your hands. I hope you realize that—but men never do!”
Mortimer said nothing and she began to get a little nervous.
“You don’t seem to take much interest in mytravels, so I won’t enter into particulars; but you can imagine the sort of thing for yourself—perfect rest and quiet, and away from Aunt Poynder. By the way, where is Aunt Poynder?”
“Haven’t you seen her?” the man asked, with grim intention.
“No. How should I?” she replied innocently. “Jane—Mary—whatever you call the new one—said she had gone into Yorkshire for the night. What a funny thing for Aunt Poynder to do! What possessed her? Perhaps she has gone away for a cure, like me.”
Mortimer here made an inarticulate sound and his wife was quick to interrupt him.
“Oh, please don’t begin to question me! Don’t you see I am still rather nervous? Take me when you have got me, and be thankful. Are you not one little bit glad to see me?”
“God, Phœbe, what a liar you are!” he exclaimed, making a step forward.
“Really, Mortimer!”
“Read this!” he said violently, taking a crumpled sheet of notepaper out of his breast coat pocket. “Read it, and then perhaps you’ll know where your aunt is—if you don’t know already, which of course you do!”
Mrs. Elles took the note out of his hands. “Don’t, Mortimer, look at me as if you hated me!” she added deprecatingly.
The address of the letter—The Rectory, GretaBridge—was the first crowbar levelled at the fabric of the pose she had been keeping up so valiantly. Her knees shook under her.
“Dear Sir,” (the letter ran)“Will you excuse a perfect stranger for writing to you, but I fancy you will perhaps care to hear what I have to tell you. A young lady, who bears the address to which I write engraved on her umbrella, is staying here at the inn of this village under circumstances which impel me, as the wife of the Vicar of this parish, to give you at least a hint of her whereabouts, so that you may exercise the powers of a guardian over her. The only other inmate of the ‘Heather Bell’ is a single gentleman of the name of Rivers. The young lady calls herself Frick, a name which is not borne out by the initials on her objects of personal use. I may mention that she and Mr. Rivers share the same sitting-room.“Yours faithfully,“Florence Popham.”
“Dear Sir,” (the letter ran)
“Will you excuse a perfect stranger for writing to you, but I fancy you will perhaps care to hear what I have to tell you. A young lady, who bears the address to which I write engraved on her umbrella, is staying here at the inn of this village under circumstances which impel me, as the wife of the Vicar of this parish, to give you at least a hint of her whereabouts, so that you may exercise the powers of a guardian over her. The only other inmate of the ‘Heather Bell’ is a single gentleman of the name of Rivers. The young lady calls herself Frick, a name which is not borne out by the initials on her objects of personal use. I may mention that she and Mr. Rivers share the same sitting-room.
“Yours faithfully,“Florence Popham.”
Mrs. Elles raised her eyes, full of angry fire. The fighting instinct was aroused in her.
“Silly meddlesome creature!” she said scornfully. “Why may I not stay where I like, and call myself what I like, and what is it to me or to you either who happens to be staying in the same inn?”
“That’s all bluff! We’ll hear what your aunt has to say about that!”
“My aunt! What on earth has she to do withit?” And again her accent was truly surprised and therefore convincing.
“You’re a damn good actress, Phœbe!... By Jove! Here is your aunt!... Stay where you are!”
He seized her wrist with some violence just as Mrs. Poynder flung open the door of the room and stood aghast at the sight of Mrs. Elles. Then she banged her reticule, a strong, black, noticeably shabby one, down on the table, and Mrs. Elles’s eyes fastened on it.
“You got a bit start of me, Fibby!” she said grimly, “but no matter. The old woman will be a match for you before she’s done!”
Mrs. Elles slid her wrist out of Mortimer’s grasp, which tightened disagreeably when he gathered her intention of escape.
“No violence, please, Mortimer,” she said stagily. “I almost think I will leave you to discuss me with Aunt Poynder!”
She left the room with no signs of unseemly haste, delighted to feel the grasp of her husband’s fingers literally smarting on her arm. Cruelty! She had heard of that.
She went straight upstairs to her own room and locked herself in. It had been a sudden and brilliant inspiration of hers to leave them. She wanted very much to hear what it was that her aunt had to say to her husband, but still more she did want time to think. The ground had been cut beneath her feet.She felt like Alnaschar when his basket of eggs was rudely kicked away from him. A completely new plan of action was imperative, and how could she act when she was so dreadfully in the dark and so puzzled by her husband’s constant allusions to Mrs. Poynder, whom she had not seen since she left Newcastle?
But stay! In her hurried glimpse of Mrs. Poynder she had realized that that lady was wearing a black dress, trimmed with little shining things, as Rivers had called them, and that the black bag that she had slammed down on the table was the one that Rivers had described as belonging to the unknown visitor at the Heather Bell on that summer night that seemed so long ago and was only last night. And the face seen at the window at the very moment when she had fallen into her lover’s arms, for the first and only time! All these things came crowding into her mind; a bewildering vision of what had been rose before her eyes, with the damning significance in ears inimical of all the little foolish foolhardy things she had done in the innocent audacity of her unreturned love—and she realized how she and Rivers had been betrayed!
She must find out how much and what Aunt Poynder had seen before she committed herself by a single word. She must be clever and diplomatic to the full extent of her powers. Her excitement grew as she sat there on the edge of the bed thinking out a plan—many plans, and she bounded to her feet when there came a very ordinary knock at the door.
“Come in!” she cried, forgetting that she had locked it.
There was a furious rattling and “How can I?” came in Mrs. Poynder’s angry voice.
Mrs. Elles had taken her line.
“Oh, I forgot,” she said, insolently. “Well, you can say what you want to through the keyhole. I shall hear you well enough.”
“Do you want all the servants to hear what I have to say?”
“I haven’t the slightest objection, if you haven’t,” said Mrs. Elles, airily.
“You’re quite shameless, then?”
“Perhaps, Aunt, you had better take care what you say, for your own sake.”
“For my own sake, says she! Jane Poynder has nought to be ashamed of. But I should have thought, after what I saw last night with my own eyes——”
“Through the keyhole?” interrupted her niece impertinently.
“Through the window, woman!—the window of the hotel where you were living with——”
“Hush, Aunt,” Mrs. Elles interrupted again—this time really for the sake of the servants and common decency. And then there was nothing fine, dramatic or romantic about this discussion; it sickened her. Not so should a husband accuse his wife of infidelity: through the mouth of a vulgar, foul-mouthed beldam. How different from Hero’s “Let me butknow of what man I am accused”! Still it behooved her to listen and learn, if she could, from Aunt Poynder the precise terms of the indictment against her.
“And I saw you in his arms,” continued the old lady, “and the girl Jane Anne saw you walking hand in hand out in the public street! Don’t attempt to deny it!”
In point of fact Mrs. Elles said nothing, but Mrs. Poynder thought she did, and her fury rose.
“You have the face——! Well, it’s more than your man has. He turned as white as a leaf when I was giving him a piece of my mind this morning. He’d nothing to say for himself except that your room was the common room.”
“So it was!”
“Tell that to me! I know what’s what. It’s I that made him promise to marry you, when all’s said and done. But, Lord!—trust him! He’ll not touch you with a pair of tongs! Men aren’t so fond of marrying the women they have disgraced. Mercy, what’s that?” she added in extreme perturbation.
“Only the dinner gong, Aunt,” said Mrs. Elles, spitefully smiling on the other side of the door. She had learned what she wanted. “I can’t come down,” she said decidedly. “Tell Mortimer to come up here and speak to me after he has dined.”
“You give your orders, my lady!” grumbled the older woman. “What’s to say that Mortimer’s going to condescend to even speak to you?”
“Give him my message,” said Mrs. Elles peremptorily.
Mrs. Poynder’s footsteps creaked on the stairs as she withdrew, and her angry mutterings were like a heavy ground swell at sea as she went downstairs. How her niece loathed her! And the man whose comfort and well-being she placed before every other earthly consideration had been exposed for at least half an hour to that malign influence. She realized the full horrors of the scene at the Heather Bell which her aunt had only faintly adumbrated, and most of her thought was for him.
“I must get him out of this,” she said to herself, “at all costs! I used to think myself clever—I shall be clever if I manage this. I don’t care a pin for myself, but for him! If I only knew something about it all—how they set about these things. What can be done? What is possible? If only I could look it up somewhere.”
A vain glance at the little bookcase stocked with Ibsens and Merediths did not help her.
“What is the good of you?” she said, apostrophising them violently. “You are no good when it comes to the serious crises of life. Even a common old ‘Enquire Within’ would be better. I don’t know what it is I am in for—what it all means. Can Mortimer divorce me straight away? What is the formula?” She wrung her hands. “If only I could keep his name out of it?”
She unlocked the door of her room and went outupon the landing and looked down over the banisters. Mortimer was dining! “Though empires crumble,” she murmured to herself. She heard the clatter of knives and forks; through the long well-like slip between the banisters she could see the parlour-maid carrying dishes. Mortimer was dining well, and intending to divorce his wife!
She was too frightened to properly enjoy the antithesis. She went back into her own room and lay down upon the bed, shaking in every limb. She had eaten hardly anything that day.
She must have dozed a little. She woke with a start, to see a broad shaft of light coming in from the doorway, and her husband, a stout undignified sort of avenging angel, standing on the threshold. She sprang into a sitting posture.
“Make some light!” he said impatiently.
“Why bother?” she said languidly. “You can see to scold me quite well enough in the dark!”
“Scold!” he said, in an accent of contemptuous reproach, coming nearer. He was flushed, but quite sober. She wondered if he really had had the heart to dine.
He enlightened her. “You don’t seem to realize,” he said, “the position of affairs. I have been quite unable to eat any dinner.”
“What about me? But, however, that is neither here nor there. The point is”—assuming as viragoish an air as she could—“will you please tell me what you can have meant by allowing Aunt Poynderto come up here as your emissary and abuse me, your wife, and say awful things out loud for all the house to hear?”
“You are begging the question, Phœbe,” her husband said, and in his earnestness and sincerity he was almost dignified. “You must know how serious all this is! What have you to say in explanation of the charges which Aunt Poynder brings against you, and that woman’s letter to me which I showed you?”
“What are the charges?” she asked valiantly and without the flippancy with which she had thought fit to characterize all her previous remarks.
“Wait!” he said, and she gave a little frightened cry, and clutched his arm.
“What are you going to do, Mortimer?”
“I am going to look at your face while you sit there and lie to me!” he said, striking a match, and lighting the gas. It showed her countenance frightened and pale, his reddish and set. Even in her agitation she was struck by the expression he had used. It was the second time she had been taxed with the mendacious habit. She began to think there was something in it. It was, however, the first time Mortimer had permitted himself to allude to it so roundly. She was nonplussed by his attitude; she had expected him to bluster and be ridiculous. He was dignified even to a tragedy. The thought crossed her mind that he still loved her, which would make it difficult for him to adopt the point of view she was intending to put before him.
“Mortimer,” she said, raising her eyes to his with an intentional effect of extreme and businesslike candour, “what Aunt Poynder tells you she saw she did see, but the inferences she draws are false.”
“Explain yourself more clearly.”
“I mean”—she strictly persevered in her steadfast gaze—“that it is not true that I have been unfaithful to you.”
“Not——!”
“I swear it,” she said simply, “but I do not expect you to believe me. Are you going to divorce me?”
“What—and leave you free to run off and join your lover!” roared Mortimer in a spasm of jealous rage. “I’m——”
“I have no lover—I wish I had!” she interrupted. Her sad sincerity had a convincingness her husband was too angry to apprehend.
“Mortimer,” she went on, clasping her hands, “could you possibly divorce me—I know nothing of these things—without having a co-respondent at all? I do so hate having him dragged in!”
The solicitor stared at her.
“Mortimer, isn’t it possible? You are a man of business, you ought to know about these things. We do get on so badly together, don’t we? It is quite hopeless our trying to get on. Isn’t there—there must be—some sort of arrangement by which husband and wife can agree to live apart because they are unsuited to each other, without dragging in a thirdperson? There isn’t a third person, I do assure you, and I know how he would hate it. This poor man Aunt Poynder saw is a painter—a hater of women. I bored him really, only I laid myself out to please him and plagued his life out! I interfered terribly with his work. You would not understand how. He wanted to be left alone. Artists are like that. He did not know I was married, and when he found I had compromised myself against him—that’s the only honest way to put it—he proposed to me because he was a gentleman and thought he ought. It is I who am to blame, for trying to make him like me. I kissed him, not he me!... I am a wretch, I know, but if only you knew how miserable my life is here with you! We ought never to have married. Let me go! I am sure you will be happier without me, believe me! Let me go quietly—let it be between you and me! Don’t let all the world in! Don’t ruin an innocent man’s life over it—for it would! He is a Royal Academician and might be President some day, and if he is forced to marry me he will lose that and his position in the world, and it is such a good one. Besides, he is engaged to be married to another woman—he really is!”
She paused breathless, and caught hold of his hand. He shook her off.
“Lies! Lies! Lies!” he said. “I don’t believe a single word you have been saying, Phœbe. And as for a judicial separation between us, which is what you seem to want, I say ‘No, thank you.’ The lawsare made to enable a man to get completely rid of such a woman as you!”
He left her and she heard him leave the house. It was exactly nine o’clock.
She knew what she had to do. She composed her features and covered them with powder, and rang the bell.
It was the cook who answered it, not the new parlour maid. The cook, whom Mrs. Poynder worked hard and bullied, was in consequence a firm ally of the young and far niente mistress of the house, who preferred pleasant and flattering looks even to good service.
“Mary,” Mrs. Elles said urbanely, “come and help me! I want to catch the night mail for the south.”
They pulled open drawers and dragged in trunks. Mrs. Elles was not sure that she was not leaving her husband’s house for ever, and she did not mean to go without her things. The two women worked hard, carrying on a fragmentary conversation the while.
“How has your master been while I was away?” she asked of the cook, proud of being able to show that amount of good feeling.
“He’s not been to say sae well. The doctor’s been in once or twice, to please the missis—Mrs. Poynder, I mean. But the master doesn’t seem to hold with doctors much.”
“No, I know he hates them,” said his wife, carefully controlling her surprise. It was natural that Mortimer should have given way a little during her absence, partly through temper, and partly for want of her supervision, but still a little fit of excess did not seem to indicate so important a step as the calling in of doctors. “But I wonder why I have not heard anything of all this except through you?” she added, forgetting to be prudent. “What was it?”
“Oh, just a fainting fit like. Missis Poynder found him in his study a day or two back, and it took a fair half hour to bring him round.”
“Why wasn’t I telegraphed for?”
“Eh, ma’am, ye were away for your health, and so Missis Poynder thought she wouldn’t go for to agitate ye. It’s all passed off, but the doctor he says as Master behoved to be car’ful.”
“Heart?” murmured Mrs. Elles, with the interrogative inflexion, not liking to ask a direct question. She was really a little anxious. She did not positively hate her husband.
“Yes, that’s what doctor said. Avoid excitement—sperrits the worst thing!”
Everyone in the house knew that this prohibition was by no means unnecessary.
“Well, Mary, you must look after him while I am away. I am going up to London on business. See that he has what he likes.” She pressed five shillings into the cook’s hand, feeling the glow of accomplishment of the whole duty of a married woman and picturesque forgiveness of insult and injuries.
Her packing was done. It was half-past eleven. She had a whole hour before her.
Of the laws of her country she had about as much practical knowledge as most women—that is to say none at all! She was full of the proposition she had made to Mortimer, of a bloodless duel, an amicable separation, a social catastrophe which should affect herself only, leaving Rivers untouched. The engagement between Rivers and Egidia, which she was going to London to suggest, would surely tell very much in favour of her plan, but she must neglect nothing, leave no stone unturned for the accomplishment of his salvation. She had made up her mind to work this thing for Rivers, to be his diplomatic angel, and that her heroic plan involved the surrendering of him to another woman only added to the sublimity of the act.
She went down to her husband’s study; she knew he was out; she hoped she would not have the ill luck to meet Mrs. Poynder.
The house was perfectly still. There stood the row of collected legal wisdom, dusty, dull, abstruse, but full of vital truths for her at this moment. In a few minutes she was deep in law, and covered and daubed with its dust.
She found no hint of a previous engagement of the co-respondent being considered as a circumstance invalidating the divorce, but she saw that she and her husband must on no account sleep under the same roof to-night. That was why he had gone out.He probably did not intend to return. It was a pity he did not know that she was going to take the initiative and leave him, and could not see her boxes at that very moment standing in the hall, strapped and corded and mountainous.
She stood there, taking down one volume after another, feeling the thief of knowledge, since it was from her husband’s own books that she was gleaning the wherewithal to discomfit him when the time came. At any rate they would start fair! About on a level with her hand, she noticed a Blue Book on the Laws of Divorce. She eagerly took it down from the shelf. It seemed clearly written and fairly explanatory.
“There is no divorce by mutual consent of husband and wife.”
She saw that she had been talking nonsense to Mortimer upstairs. How he must have laughed at her absurd proposition!
“The Causes of Divorce.” This seemed a useful heading! She read on eagerly.
“Attempt by one of the parties on the life of the other, either personally, or by an accomplice.”
But she had not attempted Mortimer’s life, nor had Rivers attempted that of Mortimer, and though she had heard of cruelty, she had not thought of this definition of it.
“I had no idea the laws of my country were so absurd!” she exclaimed, laying down the blue book in a pet. Then a glance at its cover showed her that the volume she held referred to the Laws of ForeignCountries, and this was the procedure of the Argentine Republic that she was looking at!
She gave that up, and reached down Stephen’s Commentaries, and tried to find some hint there that would be useful to her.
She read on it for a good quarter of an hour, but the legal phrases puzzled her, the scantiness of details left her uncertain, the heavy volumes tired her hands to hold. She was no wiser, and a good deal wearier.
The door opened behind her. Instinctively she turned round.
“Oh, Mortimer, what is a femme sole?”
. . . . . . . .
She laughed to herself, as the train sped southwards through the night, when she thought of her last sight of her husband as he stood in the doorway, apparently transfixed by her extraordinarily indiscreet question. His abrupt volte face and retreat reminded her that an injured husband is not to be used as an Encyclopædia Britannica. Henceforth she was as a noxious animal, to be got rid of, not argued with. She laughed, and then she cried, but finally her offended dignity won the day, and the train deposited a heroine, rugless, hopeless, comfortless, but still a heroine, every inch of her, on the platform at King’s Cross in the early dawn.
She took a room at the Great Northern Hotel and waited in all the day till the calling hour, except for a little excursion to a jeweller’s shop near the station, where she sold her one magnificent diamond ring forabout a third of its value. At four o’clock she dressed herself beautifully and took a hansom to Queen Anne’s Mansions, where Egidia lived. She made sure of finding the novelist at home; she had heard her say she was at home on Fridays; if she was not alone she would outstay the other callers. As she drove along she looked at herself critically in the little glass in the corner of the cab.
“Talk of the empire of the mind over the body, it is nothing to that of the mind over the complexion!” she said to herself, but was pleased to see that two sleepless nights had only made her eyes larger and her face more interesting. Looks are the sinews of a woman’s war and, though she was not going to quarrel with Egidia but merely give up her lover to her, her prettiness would serve to mark and accentuate her heroism.
It was five o’clock when her cab drove under the archway and pulled up at the big door which is the portal to so many homes. Egidia lived very near the top, but she preferred to walk up, she was afraid of the lift. On the threshold of the door which was the novelist’s, as the boy who rang the bell for her informed her, she caught her dress in the mat and stumbled as the maid opened the door.
“It means something!” she said to herself.
It meant that she was nervous. She was going to do an absurd thing; make a most curiously intimate proposition to a woman she hardly knew! It was like a scene in a novel. If only Egidia would not be toomatter-of-fact,—would consent to stay in the picture, as it were! As a novelist she would be apt for irregular situations, and able to enjoy and employ them.
The parlour-maid mumbled her name, which she had mumbled to her. Egidia, in a red teagown, like a handsome velvet moth, rose from a low seat to receive her, and Mrs. Elles felt like a frivolous butterfly in the somewhat freakish, bizarre habiliments in which she elected to express her personality.
“Oh, it is you!” exclaimed the novelist, her lips breaking into a kind smile and her eyes diffusing cordiality, as she held out both hands.
A tall figure rose from his seat on the other side of the fireplace, and Mrs. Elles’s eyes were fixed on him while Egidia was speaking.
“So you have found your way here at last! Where are you staying? Let me introduce Mr. Edmund Rivers—Mrs. Mortimer Elles!”
Why should he not be calling on Egidia? It was the most natural thing. Mrs. Elles had never thought of this contingency, and yet she would not have had it not happen for the world. She was not a woman who would go out of her way to avoid situations. She bowed—he bowed; and then Egidia seeming by her manner to prescribe a greater intimacy, they shook hands. Oh! why was it so dark? She could not see his face.
“Will you ring the bell, Edmund, please, for another cup. Mrs. Elles, you must have some tea!”
“Thank you, no. I think I won’t——” beganMrs. Elles. To calmly sit down and drink a cup of tea at a juncture like this! It was not to be thought of.
“Oh, but you must. North country people can’t do without their tea, I know that. Only in London we don’t have sweet little cakes like yours. What do you call them—girdle cakes?”
So Egidia ran on, putting her visitor into a chair and pouring out a cup of tea and looking after her comfort in the most solicitous manner. Mrs. Elles felt that, considering “everything,” this made her look ridiculous—but then Egidia could not be expected to know about “everything”! Rivers would surely not have told her about what had happened in the woods of Brignal. That was their affair—hers and his. Egidia would never have received her like this had she known. She felt a warm glow of pleasure on recognising the bond between her and him of a common secret.
But he was very cleverly neutral in manner. As he handed her the cake his eyes met hers with a curious look, searching but impenetrable. It disconcerted her. It seemed to take her all in, but it gave nothing out. But she was at least positive that there was no love in it, no pleasurable excitement in a loved mistress refound. Under the oppression of this idea she took a draught of hot tea that scalded her and in the access of pain that ensued persuaded herself that she was glad of the counter-irritant.
“Look, Mrs. Elles, at this little sketch Mr. Rivershas just given me for my birthday,” Egidia was saying, as she held up a framed water-colour drawing lovingly.
Mrs. Elles looked at it. The rush of recollection was not so blinding as she expected, but poignant enough.
“Where is it?” she asked, for form’s sake. She knew well enough.
“May I tell her, Edmund?”
He made a little nod in the affirmative.
“Well, he could scarcely try to keep that knowledge from me,” Mrs. Elles thought to herself.
“It is Rokeby,” Egidia went on, “Scott’s Rokeby—that place where Mr. Rivers works so much. Rather near your part of the world, I believe.”
“I know it well,” Mrs. Elles said.
Rivers was standing abstractedly a few yards away from the two women. Mrs. Elles resented his lack of emotional interest.
“It is quite charming!” she said, raising her voice. “And is that a little figure I see—on the edge of the stream? Some village girl you got to stand for you, I suppose?”
It was no village girl, and she knew it. It was herself, done by her own desire. She had begged him to put in some human interest for once, and he had indulgently agreed to do so, on condition she supplied it herself. She had posed for twenty minutes under a broiling sun, and had refused the gift of the sketch when it was done. She had somehowwished that the memento of her should be retained by him, not her.
No, he could never have cared for her, or he could never have borne to give away that sketch to another woman! Her lips stiffened and then quivered. Had she known what was actually the fact, that the circumstance of her posing for that particular sketch had completely lapsed from the painter’s memory, would she have been less distressed?
“That is the very reason I chose it,” Egidia said, taking the drawing out of her hands. “Mr. Rivers gave me my choice of the Rokeby sketches, and out of a whole quantity of them in his studio I chose this one because it had a little human interest in it. I like people, you know. I should feel the world so cold, so dull, without them. I can’t think how you, Cousin Edmund, manage to do without them so nicely!”
The painter actually laughed—from an excess of nervousness, Phœbe Elles hoped.
“Do say that I may bring Mrs. Elles to see your studio one day? I am sure she would like to see it!”
“I should be delighted,” he said, “only you know a landscape painter’s studio is not much to look at. Now Tadema’s——”
“Ah! but then Mrs. Elles is not blasée on the subject of studios as yet, are you, Mrs. Elles? She wants to see a little bit of everything now that she is here, don’t you? You remember our conversation in Newcastle? We must go about a little together and seethe sights. I don’t mean the Tower and the Monument—you are of course far above these. You might ask us to tea in your studio,” she ended, turning, suddenly appealing, to Rivers.
“She wants to show off her intimacy with him,” Mrs. Elles thought bitterly.
“I will,” said Rivers gravely. “You must write and name your own day. It will have to be when I come back from Paris.”
“Oh, are you going to Paris?” Egidia exclaimed, obviously surprised and completely uninstructed in his movements.
“I think I shall have to, on business; but I will let you know when I come back, and I will try to get a few interesting people to meet you—and your friend!”
Mrs. Elles had to make what she could out of the slight hesitation. He smiled, forcedly—she was sure it was forcedly.
Egidia’s face was wreathed in kindly natural smiles as he bade good-bye—so was hers. It was pathetic. Mrs. Elles, with her superior knowledge of “fearful consequences, yet hanging in the stars,” felt as if they were all dancing on a grave—treading a volcano. She knew well enough that she would never go to tea with him, never touch his hand again perhaps, as she gave hers, and dreamt of the accustomed thrill of pleasure that the mere contact used to give her. It did not now. Was it that she was too nervous, too frightened to be receptive, or was it that his magnetism had ceased to flow for her, as a consequence of his indifference?
He raised the heavy portière, and the light seemed to go out of two women’s lives as it fell to behind him.
“Well,” said Egidia, complacently, “that will be the first tea party my cousin has ever given in his studio in his life, to my knowledge! I do hope it will come off, for I want you two to be great friends. You will—you are the veritable antithesis of each other.”
Mrs. Elles interrupted her with a sudden burst of hysterical laughter.
“Friends!” she said. “Friends! And my husband is going to make a co-respondent of him!”
Egidia laid her head on her hands. The tale of Brignal Banks had been told. “Good God!” she said passionately. “And it is to Edmund Rivers that this thing has happened!”
She thought of the poignant tale of love and disaster only as it affected the man. It was natural; Mrs. Elles had expected that she would do so, and yet she was a little aggrieved at not being treated as the central figure of any romance that happened to be forward. She valiantly stifled her feelings on this occasion, however, and rising from the low prie-dieu chair from which she had delivered her confession, knelt at Egidia’s feet, and gently pulled her hands down from her face. The gesture was pretty and appealing, but at this juncture it irritated the other woman almost beyond endurance by its dash of theatricality. Thus behave erring heroines of melodrama when they reveal “all” to their mentors. Egidia sat and stared at the little flushed face opposite her with an almost unfriendly gaze, and listened but coldly to the trickle of her excitable speech.
“But it must not happen!” Mrs. Elles was saying. “It must not! It must not! You can save him, if you will, and that is why I have come to you. Ihave travelled all night, and I have not slept for two. If I tell my story badly, that’s why. There’s an iron band across my forehead. And I have had nothing to eat for ages. But I knew that you and he had always been great friends, to say the very least, and that it would be so easy for you—— You must forgive me, and understand that I did what I could. I acted for the best—on the spur of the moment. I thought it was the only way to save the situation—”
“What, in the name of Heaven, have you done?” exclaimed the other. “Do, please, tell me exactly.”
“I used your name——” began Mrs. Elles, hesitatingly.
“Please go on!”
“I am afraid I told my husband straight out, when he pressed me, that Mr. Rivers was engaged to you!”
“To me! Mr. Rivers! What possible authority——”
Egidia rose to her feet, and Mrs. Elles perforce rose too.
“Have I done such a mischief?” she asked supplicatingly. “Stay! the lace of my dress has got caught in yours!”
She disentangled it, while Egidia stood, a prisoner, shivering with impatience, and some disgust.
“Surely,” Phœbe Elles went on, “you are very fond of each other? I always thought so, from the way he spoke—or rather did not speak of you. With some men reticence about a woman is the sure sign of their feeling keenly about her. Indeed, I wasquite jealous of you sometimes!” she added ingenuously.
Egidia’s face had stiffened into the very haughtiest expression a proud face can assume. She was a woman who could curl her lip, and she did it now, but Mrs. Elles was too tactless and too much excited to notice.
“So you see that I am doing this entirely for his sake—quite against the grain, I assure you, but it seemed the only way—and I thought you would want to do anything to keep him out of it!”
“Keep him out of it!” exclaimed the other, pointing down towards the basement of her own house, as to the depths of an imaginary Divorce Court. “I should think I did! But how could you suppose that such an absurd lie as that could do him any good?”
“Couldn’t it? I thought it could. And I seem to be always being scolded for telling lies now!” sighed Mrs. Elles, “but I really thought I was splendide mendax this time! And though it was a lie, of course, you can make it true to save him, don’t you see?”
Egidia recovered herself. What was the use of being angry?
“But supposing Mr. Rivers did care for—was engaged to me—I don’t see what possible difference it could make?”
She succeeded in smiling almost indulgently on this sweet simpleton, who was to be suffered gladly, for the sake of Rivers.
“Well, of course, I don’t know much about these things,” Mrs. Elles said, plaintively, “but I thought if the co-respondent——”
“Please don’t use that word,” said Egidia, shivering.
“It is the word, I know that much. Well, if the man is already engaged to someone else at the time that the accusation is made—it surely makes it less—likely that he would—wouldn’t a jury think better of him? He would have to marry her at once, of course, and send the slip of the Times containing the announcement to my husband——”
She looked so serious, so innocent, so like the fair Ophelia, “incapable of her own grief,” so utterly woe-begone, that Egidia’s mood changed. She laughed, and sat down, and took her visitor’s little soft, incompetent, feverish hand in her own cool firm one, and held it.
“My dear Mrs. Elles, have you been all these years married to a solicitor, and know so little of it all as to suppose that a jury would be affected by such a detail as the one you have mentioned!” No, no, we must get your husband to stay proceedings altogether. I hope it isn’t so bad as you think—in fact, I am sure it isn’t! Your husband could not, I think, possibly divorce you merely on what you have told me—and perhaps you have even exaggerated that a little? You are very tired——”
“I am not hysterical!” exclaimed Mrs. Elles angrily.
“Forgive me, but your voice and your eyes belie you. Besides, you said yourself you were ill. Of course you are, naturally, after what you have undergone!”
“It was pretty dreadful!” Mrs. Elles owned, mollified.
“To-morrow,” Egidia continued, with a little imperceptible shudder, “you must go over it all again to me. After you have had a night’s rest, you will be able to think and marshall your facts more clearly. I ought to know exactly where we stand. Meantime, will you send for your things from the Great Northern Hotel and pay your bill?”
“But I must live somewhere!” exclaimed the other in a sick fright. “You surely don’t want me to go back to Mortimer, when I have just run away from him?”
“No, but you must write to him, and tell him you are staying here with me. Though literary, I am supposed to be respectable.” She smiled. She had taken her line. “And, by the way, I have a dinner party here to-night, and I want you to enjoy it and look nice.”
“I have an evening dress in my box at the Hotel,” said Mrs. Elles, eagerly.
“Well, then, we will get it here in time for you. I will send at once.”
She rang the bell, gave her orders, and then turning, stopped and kissed the little bit of thistledown who stood there, grateful and apprehensive. It was an effort, the whole scene had been one long effort,but she flattered herself she had come out of it well, and had not betrayed herself. In the exercise of her profession she had studied the feelings of others and their development and outward manifestations so closely that she had grown almost morbidly desirous of not showing her own.
“Please call me Phœbe!” her visitor had murmured as she led her to her room and left her there.
Yes, she, a simple, honest, unsophisticated woman, would do anything, dare, contrive, and practise anything that might deliver Edmund Rivers from the consequences of his accidental connection with this miracle of indiscretion, this butterfly, who, unfortunately for others, took herself so seriously.
He should not, if she could help it, have to rue the day when he had allowed the human interest to come into his life, and occupy even a portion of his mental foreground. That was all he had done; he had never flirted with her, Egidia felt sure. “Love plays the deuce with landscape!” he had once laughingly proclaimed, to excuse himself from marrying. No, he should not be forced, by the stain of the courts, the horrors of imputation, to take on himself the shackles of the marriage tie, with which the little woman who had played the part of his evil genius, would so carelessly invest him!
. . . . . . . .
“She kissed me, but all the while, she would like to scratch my eyes out,” Mrs. Elles in the silence of the spare room was saying to herself. She was notspiteful—oh no, that was not her character at all—but she had studied and could not help knowing human nature! There was no misprision of motive in her mind; she was perfectly aware of Egidia’s reasons for being kind to her. That lady had taken her rival to stay with her because, as the saying is, she preferred to see mischief in front of her—she would keep her safe under her own roof the better to control her. It was all for the man’s sake, not for the woman’s at all!
The welfare of Edmund Rivers was the object of Phœbe Elles too, she must not forget that, and she must consent, for his sake, to be the creature of his cousin’s bounty. It must be so, but it was very hard. Egidia, perhaps unconsciously, assumed proprietary airs. Her visitor stamped a little modest stamp of the foot at the thought, and was assailed by a wild desire to prove to Egidia and the world the genuineness of Rivers’ love, by purposely losing her case, and letting him marry her!
But would that prove it?
. . . . . . . .
“Les hommes sont la cause que les femmes ne s’aiment pas!” Mrs. Elles murmured to herself, as arrayed in her prettiest dress, and conscious that she became it, she went to dinner, in the big public room of the Mansions, where Egidia mustered all her famous little parties of twelve.
This was Mrs. Elles’s first taste of London society. She had thought of it, dreamed of it,yearned for it for years. Now it had come to her, like a draught of heady champagne, vivifying after the two nights of waking misery and anxiety she had undergone. Only two nights ago, she had stood, a shaking, quaking figure in the dark passage of the inn at Rokeby, hearing the clock tick, and the rustle of the heavy leaf screen against the pane outside the door of her lover’s room, whence no sound came—no voice of pardon. Here in the successful novelist’s pretty electric-lighted rooms all was gaiety, easy, social merriment, facile smiles and light-hearted repartee. She was made for this. She held her own. She smiled and retorted with all but the last touch of up-to-dateness, and her hostess put her forward, and gave her every opportunity of shining. Mrs. Elles thoroughly appreciated her generosity, and, woman-like, was far more deeply touched by Egidia’s kindness in this instance, than by her greater charity in so ardently espousing her cause in the matter of the divorce.
She for a time forgot the Damocles sword that hung over her head. In a few months, perhaps, nobody would care to speak to her; now they were at any rate glad enough to do so. She went in to dinner with Mr. St. Jerome, the popular novelist, and he seemed to think her interesting. She had intended at first to try to sink her disqualification of country cousin, but by the time they had got to the first entrée, decided otherwise, since the assumption of mundaneity prevented her asking questions, andshe did so want to know so many things. She would make conversational capital out of it instead.
“Is every one here a celebrity?” she asked.
“So much so, that they are all trying to hide it,” St. Jerome answered. “Did you ever see a more modest looking set of people, calmly eating their fish, and saving their good things for their books?”
“Are you doing that too?” she asked with the sweetest of smiles. She knew he wrote novels. She allowed a little time to elapse before she removed the sting, then—“Because, if so, you succeed very badly. You have said several things I shall feel obliged to use again in the provinces. But—forgive me, I am like Pope’s definition of a mark of interrogation——”
“You want to know who that is?” he said briskly, indicating a dark, bearded man, with impressive eyes, who sat next Egidia.
“How quick you are!”
“Not at all. Everybody wants to know who Dr. André is!”
She felt snubbed; he went on.
“He is the celebrated occultist and oculist. The first is his business, the second his pleasure. But he works the two together with great success. I don’t know if he quite succeeds in taking in our dear Egidia; she is very shrewd, for a woman novelist. André’s theory of ocular practice consists largely of the due relation of the state of the eyesight to general health, and thence to hypnotism, do you see? People are unkind enough to call him a quack,but I think that very unfair, for he is quite amusing!”
Mrs. Elles did not know if St. Jerome was amusing or not; she was sure he was spiteful. She felt that his flighty and casual manner suggested some disrespect towards the Lady from the Provinces, but perhaps that was London’s way? She meant that London’s way should not by any means astonish or perturb her, so she went on calmly.
“If I were not afraid of your thinking me conceited, I should say that I think the hypnotist is looking at me!”
“Of course he is. He is trying to mesmerize you. That is his little game. He boasts that he can make anyone in the world cross the whole length of the room to him if he has a mind—and yet he lives only three floors down, in these very Mansions.”
Mrs. Elles again suspected Mr. St. Jerome of making fun of her.
“I hope he won’t care to thoroughly exercise his powers just now,” she said, “for I am a very impressionable subject. I might get up, and go to him this very minute, and that would be awkward. Introduce me after dinner, and I will tell him that I once wore blue spectacles for a month without stopping.”
“That is why your eyes look so bright!” said St. Jerome, lightly. As a matter of fact he suspected her of taking morphia.
“Oh, I had a better reason than that!” she said,impatiently. “Tell me, do you know an artist called Rivers?”
“Was he your reason? And a very nice reason too!”
“Mr. St. Jerome, you are chaffing me, and it is not fair, as I come from the provinces! Besides,” she explained, beginning to be terrified at the possible consequences of her imprudence, “I hardly know Mr. Rivers. I met him here for the first time at tea.”
“Of course you did!”
Mrs. Elles inferred from this speech that Rivers was a constant visitor at Egidia’s tea-table, which is perhaps what St. Jerome intended her to do. She was piqued. “I—that is we—are going to tea with him in his studio, one of these days,” she remarked.
“I congratulate you! Rivers is not a quiet tea-party man at all, and enjoys the reputation of being a misogynist. I have long tried to acquire it in vain. Naturally all your sex are devoted to him. He takes it very well, I must say, and shows no signs of being unduly puffed up. A lady’s man sans le savior!”
“There are a good many people like that!” remarked Mrs. Elles, though in her heart of hearts she thought there was but one. But she wanted to draw the polite and analytical novelist, and lead him on to discuss the man she loved.
“Yes, and all the women adore them, confound it! They mistake; they see the man full of energy and spirit, making for a given point in life, and allowingnothing to distract his attention from it, like a horse with blinkers on. They naturally want to remove the blinkers, and divert a little of that force and energy into a more useful channel, i. e., love-making. They take no account of the correlation of forces; they don’t see that what a man gives to one thing he cannot give to another, that dominated as he is by an abstraction, charming concrete objects”—he looked at Mrs. Elles—“have no chance at all!”
“You are making Mr. Rivers out a mild kind of Robespierre!”
“Oh, well, I don’t go so far as to suppose that he would wade through seas of blood to his ambition—let us say the painting of the most perfect landscape in the world; his easel is not a guillotine, and besides, he has more or less realized his ambition, he has everything he wants, name, and fame, and money, and the right to be as misogynistical as he pleases. He is no curmudgeon, but he is eminently unsociable. I have never even been in his studio myself, for he doesn’t go in for the vulgarity of a Show Sunday, and he is away in the country half the year, propitiating the deities of woods and streams. I meet him now and then at the Athenæum—young women, you know, are not admitted there, only bishops and so on!”
“Isn’t it a great honour to belong to the Athenæum?”
“Yes, especially if you are elected under Rule II. Rivers is a great swell. I shouldn’t be surprised ifthey made him President some day—that is, if they ever make a landscape painter President of the R. A., which they have a natural prejudice against doing.”
Rule II. of the Athenæum Club—the limitations of landscape painters as Possible Presidents of the Royal Academy—it was all Greek to Mrs. Elles, but still she managed very well. Her eyes sparkled, she was gay and sympathetic; the two things that London wants. There was no denying it, she was happy here, happier than she had ever been, dining in the lonely inn with the man of her heart, though she would not for worlds have admitted such a truth had she been taxed with it. She would have liked Rivers with her here; she would have been friends with God and Mammon. Love, and the World! Rivers and she were true incompatibles; but that again she would not have owned.
Looking down the table, she sometimes caught Egidia’s deep-set, serious eyes fixed on her, and immediately composed her own face to a decent semblance of mental distress, subdued and controlled by the dictates of social standards of gaiety.
Egidia smiled sweetly at her now and then, as a mother might at a promising débutante daughter. She herself was feeling it an effort to sustain her own reputation for brilliancy and repartee. Her spirits were so leaden; she had received such a shock. She could think of nothing but the painter’s affairs, and the crushing blow that was so soon to fall on him. Edmund Rivers, a very Galahad of stainless life, aknight sans peur and sans reproche! The social fall of such is always the severer, since the eager hounds of envy are so glad of an excuse to worry a name that has heretofore stood high. What though the aspersion was so utterly false, it would be cast all the same; the mud would be flung, and some of it would stick. And she who would lay down her life to save him a moment’s annoyance must endure to look on the little enemy of his peace, sitting opposite her, careless, irresponsible, drinking in flattery and champagne, flashing her bright eyes about, and waving the little fluttering hands that held the future of a man worth twenty such as she, in the might of his art and intellect!
However, that Phœbe Elles should thoroughly enjoy her dinner party was necessary for the furtherance of a plan of action that Egidia had conceived—one of the many plans that she had conceived. The better pleased Mrs. Elles was, the better would the particular plan work, but though Egidia was an authoress, she was human, and presently found herself actually avoiding her guest’s laughing eyes.
Looking round at her own neighbour, she noticed the mesmeric eyes of Dr. André fixed on her guest, and knew that he had singled her out for his particular line of experiment. Egidia was “apt now at all sorts of treasons and stratagems,” and a new idea shot through her brain. She was no believer in hypnotism, except in its extraordinary power over a certain kind of silly woman, in the way of suggestion.
She turned round to Dr. André.
“I see you are considering the little lady who was the occasion of my wild appeal to you to come and dine in a hurry. Do you think she would be a good subject for hypnotic suggestion?”
“No.”
“Too clever?”
“She could never succeed in making her mind a blank, I fancy. She thinks all the time—nothing particularly worth thinking, I daresay. Still, she is so pretty, I should like to try. She is not a London woman?”
“How do you know that?”
“Oh, she is beautifully dressed. It isn’t that,” he said smiling. “The dress may be Paris, but the soul is Newcastle.”
Egidia started. “You are really a wonderful man, Dr. André, or else you have the luck of coincidences!”
He smiled, with the fatuity of the occultist.
“You are right, she does come from Newcastle, but let me tell you that when I introduce you, you will find her quite au fait of all the latest London fads. She makes it her business to be. These illustrated papers do a great deal to prepare the provincial mind for the more startling developments of our civilization. Mrs. Elles has looked on the Medusa head of certain aspects of society through the medium of ‘Black and White,’ and the ‘Ladies’ Field.’”
“How you hate her!” said Dr. André.
Egidia wore mental sackcloth and ashes for therest of the evening, conscious that she had for once allowed herself to be drawn to the very verge of the fathomless gulf of feminine spite.
. . . . . . . .
“Did I look nice? Did I seem too dreadfully provincial?” was what Mrs. Elles said to her hostess when the door had closed on the last guest.
Egidia had sunk into a chair, and sat staring at vacancy. Mrs. Elles’s voice recalled her from her reverie.
“Not at all—I mean provincial. You and the Doctor seemed to get on? Did he propose to mesmerize you?”
“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Elles answered eagerly. “Soon. May he? Here in your flat?”
“Certainly!” Egidia replied, feeling now a little apprehension of the consequences. “But you must not believe in him too much. You must not let him get an influence over you!”
“I shouldn’t mind. I am sure he would not use his power for harm against me—or any woman!”
“Oh, no, he is a good old thing!” Egidia said condescendingly. “And this little social trick of his amuses people, and makes him a personage, and asked out a great deal!”
“I believe very much in hypnotism as a serious force in life,” said the other sturdily. “I can’t laugh at it. And I think Dr. André is a most interesting man who could give one a real glimpse intoone’s self and into futurity, if he chose, and one turned out to be a good subject.”
“And he thinks you a very pretty woman—he told me so.”
“Oh—pretty!” said Mrs. Elles, as much as to imply that she did not wish to stand on anything so trivial as good looks in the seër’s good opinion.
“At any rate, you enjoyed yourself?”
“Enormously! I mean, that I did not want to be a blot on your party, so I screwed myself up, and was gay!”
“You mean you were acting a part?” Egidia answered, coldly.
“Well, partly,” Mrs. Elles replied; then she added with the pretty smile that leavened so many of her little insincerities, “but I confess—I forgot every now and then, and let myself feel as if nothing had happened, and I was a girl again, beginning life—the life I always wanted, the life I was made for, I think. Oh, don’t you see how hard it all is for me, this course I have to take—that I must take for his sake?”
With a comical little twist of the mouth, she went on: “Some are born virtuous, some are—something or other—what is it?—and some have virtue thrust upon them! I know that I must defend this wretched case for the sake of other people, but I can’t help thinking that if Mortimer did win it and get his divorce, it would be the very thing for me!”