His room looked out on to the aforementioned courtyard, and before beginning his letter, he went across to the window to close it, for he had heard that the night air of Algiers is unwholesome. Just as he was in the act of taking this little precaution, there lighted on his ear the grumbling noise of a basket chair being dragged in passive, grating resistance over a stone floor, followed by the sound of Eva's voice. As he could not see her, he came to the very logical conclusion that she was sitting directly below his window, and where she could not see him, and as she was talking, and Jim Armine was the only person in the house, he pictured her talking to him. After all, the eveningair was not unpleasant, and instead of closing the window he stood by it and listened. The emphatic deliberation of this manœuvre was, he felt vaguely, in its favour from a conventional point of view.
The voices, at first, were inaudible to him, for the sense of hearing requires focussing as much as the sense of sight, and he only caught a word here and there. But, for the sake of the reader, it will be necessary to give the inaudible part of the conversation.
The two seated themselves in their basket chairs, and Jim Armine lit a cigarette. There was a small lamp by him, the flame of which burned steadily in the still air. It cast a square of brilliant light into the courtyard beyond, across which, as across a magic-lantern sheet, white moths wandered from time to time, losing themselves again in the surrounding dark. There were several moments' silence, and then he looked at Eva, half of whose face was in brilliant illumination, and said,—
"You look tired to-night."
"No, I am not tired," she said, "but I am feeling blank. Just now everything appears to me extremely uninteresting. I know from experience that things are not uninteresting really, and that is the worst of it. They are there, but I cannot touch them. I live in a grey fog; there is sunshine somewhere, quite close, but I cannot get to it. What else could I expect?"
Jim was attending eagerly.
"Of course I mayn't say how sorry I am for you," he said in a low voice.
Eva did not turn her head, but the least sparkle returned to her eyes. Perhaps things were going to be amusing, after all, for a few minutes.
"I am grateful, of course," she said. "One is to be pitied when the fog is so palpably dense. Of course, it will lift again; fogs don't last for ever. I am glad you are with us, though I don't think you ought to be. After all, nothing matters much."
Lord Hayes had by this time successfully focussed his ear to the indistinct sounds, and Eva's last remark was perfectly audible.
"Ah! but thingsdomatter," said the young man earnestly. "And all men are not like some men."
"By which I suppose you mean me to understand that you are not like some men. How can I know that? You have no halo round your head, no dawning of ineffable joy in your face. Why should I suppose you are more than others? You have spoken to me before now of your great aims, your enthusiasms for great causes, by which, as far as I know, you only mean Home Rule, or the Unionist policy—I forgot what your politics are—and even that seems to have been in abeyance lately. You have been with us a week or more, and what have you done, what have you thought about? You seem to prefer, after all, talking to me—"
"You are very cruel, Eva," said he.
Lord Hayes shut his window. Perhaps the night air was unwholesome after all. In any case, he had heard enough. Suspicion was running down the avenue, and growing clearer at every step. He hesitated a moment, and then left his room and walked downstairs. As he came out into the courtyard he heard the echo of Eva's light, cruel laughter.
Jim Armine was standing in front of her, with his arms hanging listlessly by his side. He did not look exactly happy, and the sight of Lord Hayes only added a very slightly deeper shade to his face.
Eva's husband never felt more methodically cool in his life. He had quite determined what to do. She had not seen him approach, and a smile still lingered on her lips. She was lying back in her chair, in indolent languor; only in her eyes was amusement and excitement.
"You looked very fine just then," she was saying to Jim, and turning, she saw her husband.
The smile died off her lips, the amusement from her eyes. Only that air of utter languor was left. But she saw her vengeance coming near, as Lord Hayes had seen suspicion, and she met it joyfully.
Lord Hayes laid his hand on the young man's shoulder.
"The steamers only go twice a week to Marseilles," he said, "and there will be no steamer to-morrow.In the meantime, I am sure you will see the advisability of your spending the next two nights at the Hotel St. George. They say it is a very good hotel. Of course we shall not receive callers."
Eva shifted her position slightly, and looked at her husband.
"Kindly explain why he should go off so suddenly," she said.
"I would not insult you by doing so."
"The insult lies in your silence. I suppose you overheard something."
"Yes," said her husband. "I was listening."
"Ah! that is so like you. What were you listening for?"
"I was listening more or less for what I heard."
"In fact, you suspected something of the sort?"
"Yes."
"And yet you did not warn me. Go away, Mr. Armine, and don't listen, please. Sit down, Hayes; I wish to talk to you. What a lovely night it is. Quite idyllic. By the way, I wish to know whether your suspicions are entirely confined to him."
"Absolutely and entirely."
"You are quite sure?"
"Quite."
"That is good," said Eva. "But naturally I wanted to know. To return—why did you not warn me?"
Lord Hayes found that things were not going exactly as he had foreseen.
"I did not think it would be of any use to warn you," he said at length.
"Then, as you have no suspicions whatever of me, what purpose is served by his going away?"
"His presence here, under this roof, is an insult to you and me."
"Yet you did not warn me," said Eva. "It seems to me that you have cancelled the insult to yourself. Shall I tell you exactly what has happened, or do you know it all?"
"I know enough," he said.
"Possibly, from your point of view. But I am afraid you must have left your box before the end. The end was important. How much did you hear exactly? However, it doesn't matter. He said something—well, extremely ill-judged, and I told him he had mistaken me altogether. I laughed as well. Did you hear me laugh? I said I had not the slightest doubt of his devotion, but that I did not feel the least inclined to accept it. I don't appreciate devotion, except my husband's, of course."
Eva waited a moment. A refined cruelty waits a little every now and then for the full effect of the pain to be felt.
"It is impossible that he should remain here," said he.
"Please listen to me a moment. I have not finished yet. You have insulted me grossly, twice; in the first place, by not warning me, in the second, by listening. I do not like insults in the least, and I have no intention of receiving them. Jim committed an extreme indiscretion, for which you are mainly responsible. If you had spoken to him or me before, this would not have happened. Again, if you had not listened, you would have known nothing of it, and you will be good enough to take my word for it, that no one would have been the worse. He would have learnt a lesson, and I should have had the pleasure of teaching it him. I did not expect this in the least, for I did not think he would have been so foolish as to speak of it."
The degradation which her husband would have imposed on her grew more and more bitter. She stood up with intense anger intensely repressed.
"I choose that he should stop," she said. "I despise you for listening. If you like, you may insist on his going, and, if you do, I shall go too. I tell you I am perfectly reckless, and perfectly determined. Your point is that I have been insulted. It was you who insulted me by not giving me warning, and if you play the spy on me in this way, I owe you absolutely nothing. That is all. You may choose; and choose quickly."
She waited a moment, giving him time to reply.
"Apparently you have nothing to say. In fact,there is nothing for you to say. That is all, then. If you are going to sit out here with us, you had better tell them to bring you a chair. Understand me quite clearly; it is over. I shall never allude to this again, and I must ask you not to, either."
Lord Hayes walked away without saying a word. Eva stood still one moment, steadying herself, and then she called out to Jim, who was leaning against a pillar at the opposite corner of the court.
"You can come back," she said. "We are not going to send you away. Let us go on talking from the last remark but two."
She settled herself again in her chair and laughed. The evening had been unexpectedly amusing.
"He will not listen again, and you will not talk nonsense again, I hope. Really, this is an unique position, and I am the only one of the three who comes out of it with credit.Asuspects thatB, his friend, is making love to his wife. Does not warn her, but listens, and hears something that confirms his suspicions. Tries to driveBout of the house. They all meet amicably at breakfast next morning."
Certainly, if Eva had felt she had any small score to wipe off against her husband, she had wiped it off very cleanly. He was, for those few moments when she had stood up with her intense anger thoroughly in hand, mortally afraid of her, and she knew it. She had used her anger as a weapon against him, and hadnot let it act wildly, or unpremeditatedly. She well knew that, as a weapon, anger is most useful when it is skilfully handled, controlled, compressed. A horse without a rider, lashed into the enemies' lines, may, it is true, do some service by promiscuous kicking, but it is a blind, ungoverned force; a skilful rider, however, who adapts its savage strength to his own intelligence, can guide it and direct it, and its destructive potentialities are increased tenfold.
It was as a serviceable though savage brute that Eva employed her anger against her husband; she spurred it and lashed it into fury, but never gave it its head. That cruel, governed anger of women is a very terrible thing; the hot, blustering anger of a man is like a squib that bursts and jumps here and there, sometimes singeing its immediate surroundings and, perhaps, breaking something, but it wastes its force in childish, cracker-like explosions that hurt nothing but sensitive nerves, which regard such exhibitions as a lamentable want of taste. But Eva's anger could not have offended the most fastidious; it gave no annoying little bangs, no unexpected leaps, no fizzing, no unmomentous crackling; it was still, deep, intense, not pleasant to fight with.
Eva and Jim sat in the little courtyard for some half-hour more, which was rather a hard burden for the young man. To Eva it appeared to be no effort to talk as usual. She had required just one momentin which to steady herself, to dismount her quivering, indignant steed, and then for her, as she had told her husband, it was over. She had been angry, furious, insulted, and she had used the whip with a vengeance. The offence and the punishment were past, and she threw the whip into a corner. But Jim was silent, which was not altogether unnatural. He had no taste for scenes, and his greatcoup, his ace of trumps, which, to his shame, had been forced from him, seemed to have fallen very flat. He had played it, and Eva had seen it, but that was all—it had simply been wasted. Naturally enough he felt he had spoiled his hand. Eva had laughed at him, but she had not been offended. Surely such an attitude was almost unprecedented.
When she went upstairs half-an-hour later, she turned into her husband's room to get a book she wanted, and found him sitting by the window, as if expecting her. He rose as she entered, and stood like a servant waiting for orders. But Eva gave no orders, and, having found her book, only remarked that it was growing a little chilly. He did not reply, and she turned to look at him. There was something miserably shrunken about his appearance which was rather pitiful.
"You look tired," she said. "I should go to bed if I were you."
He did not meet her eyes, but continued to look out of the window.
"It has been a terrible night," he said.
Eva frowned.
"It has been nothing of the sort," she said. "Don't be absurd, Hayes. You made a very bad mistake; you did not treat me in the way I wish to be treated, and I was intensely angry with you. But I assure you I am angry no longer. It is quite over, as far as I am concerned. Don't let us quarrel more than is necessary. Just now, it is quite unnecessary to quarrel."
Lord Hayes had a certain potentiality for being malignant.
"It is not the quarrelling," he said; "it is the mutual position that I find we occupy to each other."
She grew a little impatient.
"Let that be enough," she said. "We only waste words."
She came a step nearer to him, and laid her hand on his shoulder, as if he had been a woman, or she a man.
"Come," she said, "be sensible. There is nothing more to say about it. You had better go to bed. Good-night!"
The little grey ghost which visited Gertrude Carston in the early morning, soon became ahabituéof her waking hours. He was a very importunate littleghost, and having once been given theentrée, he concluded that he was always welcome. But, though he was unpleasant enough at the time, he was slightly medicinal in character, or rather, not so much medicinal as health-giving. He did not exactly correct existing defects, but opened fresh springs within her. So far, however, he was medicinal, in that he was operative after the dose, which always continued bitter to the taste. But the bitterness was a good bitterness, and occasioned not discontent with Reggie, but discontent with herself, and it is always worth a good deal of bitterness to become wholesomely, not morbidly, discontented with oneself. She began to see in her nature unsuspected limitations, a thing quite as salutary, though not perhaps so pleasant, as the sight of unsuspected distances. A consciousness of unsuspected distance is liable to breed content, which is more injurious to the average mind—and she was quite average—than the discouraging discovery of a near horizon of unsuspected limitations, for the latter cause a revolt of something within us—which some call pride, and others spiritual aspiration—which refuses to acquiesce, and insists on those limitations becoming merely landmarks and milestones.
And, indeed, to see such a limitation is a long step towards correcting it. The young mind, to which growth is as natural as it is to the young body, if it has any of that irrepressible, unconscious elasticity, whichis the main characteristic of its divine remoteness from age, will never acquiesce in a limitation it sees. It will, somehow or other, clamber over that horizon's rim, and though it may get many a fall, though it may be benighted and foot-sore and weary, that same divine youthfulness, which heals its physical fibres when they are bruised or cut, will repair its mental fibres. Its potentialities for recuperation are as strong as its refusal to be bounded. Youth may be crude, exaggerated, headstrong, but when the advocates of a temperate and bloodless senility have said all they can against it, they must confess that it is young.
What made this inward struggle so trying to Gertrude was, that she was unable, from the essential nature of it, to guess what was happening. All she knew was the sense of tangible limitations and dim tracts beyond, and an imperative necessity to flounder, as best she could, towards them. But she found much comfort in her love for Reggie, and in the knowledge of his love for her; she felt as if she was following some thin golden thread through a maze of bewildering twilight, but while that was secure in her hand, the maze and the twilight and the bewilderment were comparatively unimportant.
The Davenports had moved up to London in April, and Gertrude was with them again for a week before she went abroad to Aix with her mother in May. Mrs. Carston was a weak, fretful invalid, who always insistedon her daughter's cheerful and robust support while she went through a course of somewhat unnecessary baths and massages. The great city was just beginning to settle down to its great effort of amusing itself for three months, and theMorning Postrecorded, morning by morning, some fresh additions to the big fair. The Davenports, in virtue of Mr. Davenport's modest contribution to the task of governing the nation, had been duly entered on the books for the year, and their blinds in Grosvenor Square testified to the accuracy of the announcement.
Reggie and Gertrude were sitting in the dining-room about half-past ten one morning. Reggie was apt to treat breakfast as a movable feast, and this morning he had been out riding till after ten, and had only just come back. It was a hot, bright day, and he had taken the liberty, which had broadened down from precedent to custom, to ride in a straw hat. This particular straw hat was new, and had a very smart I. Z. ribbon round it, and Gertrude was seeing how it would look on her. She was suffering from a slight cold, and had not gone out with him, but she found it pleasant enough to wait, after she had finished breakfast, and skim the daily papers till he returned.
She was deeply absorbed in the total disappearance of a French poodle when Reggie entered after dressing, and she laid down the paper to pour out tea for him.
"The Row was fuller this morning," said he, "and the Parliamentary train was in great force."
"What's the Parliamentary train?"
"Oh! the string of people who walk up and down very slowly, with a row of grooms behind; you know the sort."
"Any one there you knew?"
"Yes; several people. Gerty, give me another bit of sugar. Percy was there, looking for his sister. Apparently they've come back. Jim Armine was there too, also looking for Percy's sister."
"Lady Hayes?"
"Yes," said Reggie, eating steadily on. "I went and looked too. But we couldn't find her. By the way, Percy wants us to go there to lunch."
Gertrude had a sudden sense that all this had happened before, that she was going to act again in a rather distasteful scene. She had a sudden, instinctive desire not to go there, a quite irrational dislike to the idea.
"Oh! I can't," she said. "I've got a cold."
Reggie looked up innocently.
"Oh! I'm so sorry for not asking. Is it worse? Poor dear!"
Gertrude had a quite unusual dislike of white, excusable lies.
"No, it's not worse; it's rather better," she said.
"Let's go, then."
"Oh! I don't want to, Reggie," she said. "I want to go to the concert at St. James'. They're going to do the Tannhäuser overture."
"That's Wagner, isn't it?" said Reggie, doubtfully. "I think Wagner is ugly."
"Oh, you exceedingly foolish boy," said Gertrude. "You might as well call a storm at sea ugly."
"I don't care," said Reggie, "I think it is hideous. Besides, I want to go to the Hayes."
"Oh, well, then you just sha'n't," said Gertrude. "Really, I want to go awfully to this."
"But it'll be much worse for your cold than going out to lunch."
"Oh, I give up my cold," said she. "I haven't got one, really."
Reggie ate marmalade attentively.
"Do take me to the concert," said Gertrude. "I'm going away in two days. You can go and lunch with the Hayes then. It's a waste of time going out to lunch."
"You see, I promised to go to the Hayes," he said.
"Oh, nonsense! Send a note to say you have got to go to the concert. It's quite true; you have got to go."
"Of course, if I have got to—" said he slowly.
"That's right. It begins at three, doesn't it? No; don't say we can do both, because it is quite impossible. You're very good to me, Reggie."
Gertrude felt intensely relieved, but she could not have told why. There had been something in the conversation she had held with Reggie, six months before, on the subject of Eva, which remained in her mind, and gave her a sense, not of danger, but of distrust. A sensitive mind need not, usually is not, the most analytical, and for this reason, to apply analysis to her unwillingness to see Eva, would yield either no results, or false ones. There is an instinct in animals which enables them to discriminate between their friends and their foes, and the keener that instinct is, the more instantaneous it is in its working. The anatomist can tell us the action of the heart with almost absolute accuracy; he can say how the blood gets oxydised in the lungs, how it feeds the muscles and works the nerves—but the one thing he cannot tell us is, why it does so. And these instincts, like the action of the heart, can be noted and expressed, but the reason of their working we shall not know just yet. An action may be pulled to pieces like a flower, and divided into its component parts, and labelled with fifty crack-jaw names, but the life of the flower ceases not to be a delicate, insoluble mystery to us.
Reggie was very fond of music, but it was compatible, or rather essential, that his particular liking for it prompted him to say that Wagner seemed to him to be "awfully ugly." Nor was it such a far cry that he should assert, that same evening to Gertrude, that hehad thought the "Overture to Tannhäuser" "awfully pretty."
Gertrude had been rather silent as they drove back. But something had prompted her to say to Reggie that evening, as they sat in the drawing-room before dinner:
"Ah! Reggie, I am so glad you are good."
Reggie's powers of analysis were easily baffled, and it is no wonder that he felt puzzled.
"I don't like bad people," he said.
"Nor do I, a bit," said Gertrude. "I am glad you don't either. I thought of that this afternoon at the concert."
"Oh! I listened to the music," said Reggie. "I liked it awfully."
"Yes, I know, but it suggested that to me. Half of the overture—all that rippling part seemed so wicked. I think Wagner must have been a bad man. He evidently meant it to be much more attractive than the other."
"I don't see how you can say some parts are wicked and some good. It's all done on the fiddles, you know."
Gertrude laughed.
"I hope you'll never understand, then," she said. "I prefer you as you are. After all, that matters a great deal."
The gong had sounded, and Mrs. Davenport, as she entered the room, heard the last words.
"What doesn't Reggie understand?" she asked.
"Gertrude said she thought some of the overture was wicked," said he, "and I said I didn't know what she meant. Is it very stupid of me?"
Mrs. Davenport looked up quickly at Gertrude.
"No, dear; I think it's very wise of you," she said.
Reggie jumped up.
"I didn't know I was ever wise," he said. "It's really a delightful discovery. Thank you, mummy. Gerty, you'll have to respect me for ever, now you know I'm wise. I shall invest in a sense of dignity."
"I never said you were wise," remarked Gertrude, "and I refuse to be responsible for any opinions but my own."
"Oh, I'll be responsible," murmured Mrs. Davenport.
Reggie looked from one to the other with the air of an intelligent dog.
"I daresay it's all right," he said, "but I don't know what it's all about."
"Oh! Reggie, you do understand," said Gertrude; "don't be ridiculous."
Reggie looked at her with the most genuine frankness.
"I don't understand a word, but I should like you to explain it very much."
Gertrude frowned and turned away to greet Jim Armine, who was dining with them. The vague pain which she had felt before was with her now. Somehow, she and Reggie seemed to have got on to different levels. It was his moral, not his intellectual, understanding which appeared to her every now and then as almost entirely wanting. What puzzled her was that she had been entirely unconscious of any such defect till a few months ago, and her present knowledge of it struck her somehow as not being the natural outcome of increased intimacy, but rather as if her own moral understanding, by which she judged Reggie, had been developed and showed the want of it in him. But here again the vague instinctiveness of the feeling in her mind precluded analysis. All she knew was that she viewed things rather differently from him, and that this difference had not always been there. But pity is akin to love, and love, when joined with pity, is not less love, but love joined to the most human protective instinct, which, if anything, adds tenderness to passion.
Jim Armine had been lunching with the Hayes, and brought a minatory message for Reggie. Why had he said he would come to lunch and bring Miss Carston, and then never turned up.
Reggie behaved in the most unchivalrous manner.
"It was all Gerty's fault," he said. "She made me go to hear music."
"But you wrote to say so, didn't you, Reggie?"
Reggie began to wish he had taken the blame on himself.
"Yes, Iwrote," he said.
"And forgot to send it," interpolated Mrs. Davenport. "Reggie, you are simply abominable. You must go to call, and explain."
"Oh, you can write a note to say how sorry you are," said Gertrude, suddenly.
The remark was insignificant enough, but to Gertrude it was the outcome of a feeling not at all insignificant. She felt as if she had inadvertently said something she did not mean to say, without reflecting that, to the others, the words were capable of a much less momentous interpretation. She looked up quickly at Mrs. Davenport, fearing for a moment that her self-betrayal was patent. Mrs. Davenport also remembered at the moment a certain conversation which she and Gertrude had had one night some months ago, and their eyes met. That look puzzled the elder woman; she had not fathomed Gertrude's feeling on the subject of Lady Hayes, when she spoke to her about her, and the mystery remained still unsolved. The idea that Gertrude was in any way the prey of a jealous fear was too ridiculous to be entertained.
The Dowager Lady Hayes, who was staying with them, entered somewhat opportunely at this moment, followed by Mr. Davenport, and they all went in todinner. That veteran lady appeared to be in a state of mind which, when it occurs in children, is called fractiousness.
She always took a homœopathic dose in globular form before dinner, which was placed in a little wooden box by her place, but to-night the dose had not been set out, and she disconcerted everybody horribly by saying, during the first moment of silence, inevitable, when English people meet to dine together, and in a voice of stentorian power,—
"My dinner pills."
A hurried consultation took place among the flunkies, and, after a few moments' search, the box was found, and handed to her on a salver. Old Lady Hayes held them up a moment and rattled them.
"Pepsine," she announced; "obtained from the gastric juices of pigs. An ostrich couldn't eat the food we eat, and at these hours, without suffering from indigestion. I would sooner eat a box of tin tacks than an ordinary English dinner at half-past eight, without my pepsine."
Mrs. Davenport cast a responsible eye over themenu, which, to the ordinary mind, appeared sufficiently innocent. She was always divided between the inclination to laugh and to be polite when dealing with Lady Hayes, which produced an inability to say anything.
Eva, as we have seen, adopted a different method;she neither laughed nor was she polite, but she was respectfully insolent, which is a very different matter. The utter indifference of her manner produced a sort of chemical affinity in those widely-sundered qualities, just as electricity produces a chemical affinity between oxygen and hydrogen, which turns them into pure water, though both gases seem sufficiently remote, to the unchemical mind, from their product.
"Soufflé," continued the dowager, glancing down themenu, "when composed of meat—that is, of nitrogenous substance—is utterly unsuitable to human food. It produces a distention—"
But Mrs. Davenport broke in,—
"Dear Lady Hayes, let me send for the wing of a chicken. I know you like chicken wing."
A sigh resembling relief went round the table. Mrs. Davenport had broken the charmed circle, who were waiting, like the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, for the unaccountable brimstone to descend on them. Reggie began to talk very rapidly about the Ascot cup; Jim Armine engaged Mrs. Davenport on the Irish question; and Mr. Davenport, by way of transition, asked Lady Hayes whether gas was not very unhealthy.
But the subject of gas did not appear to interest the old lady. She wished to talk about something else, and when she wished to do anything, she did it.
"My daughter-in-law—" she began.
Reggie was still discussing, or rather enunciating, truths or untruths on the chances of Orme, and Lady Hayes's words did not reach him. But Lady Hayes was accustomed to demand a universal deference and attention for her remarks. So she glared at Reggie, who soon caught her eye—it was impossible not to catch her eye very soon when it meant business—and subsided.
"My daughter-in-law," repeated the dowager—"whom I saw this afternoon, driving a dogcart in the Park—it was quite unheard of for a young woman to drive a dogcart alone when I was young—asked me to tell you all to keep Monday week open. She is sending out cards for a dance on that day—or rather she has sent them out, and she forgot to send them to you. Therefore I am a penny postman. She would be glad to see you all. Personally, I think the dances that are given now are simply disgusting. They are very unhealthy, because everyone sits up at the time when the ordinary evening fever sets in; that is, from twelve to two. But I promised to give her message. I am responsible no further. And the cotillion is indecent."
Mr. Davenport made a bad matter worse.
"I am sure there will be none of that romping which you so rightly—ah!—dislike," he said. "I always think—"
But what Mr. Davenport always thought will never be known, for her ladyship interrupted him.
"It is based on immorality," she announced; "it is an exhibition that would disgrace any Christian country, and more especially England."
"Why especially England?" asked Jim, who was conscious of a challenge in her words.
"Because English people seem to pretend to a high morality more than any other nation."
"And are you cruel enough to include your daughter-in-law in that category?" asked Jim.
"Eva Hayes is very English," said the old lady.
"I am sure she never made any pretence of an exceptional morality," remarked Jim, eating his nitrogenous food, and getting angry.
"No one would accuse her of being exceptionally moral."
"I said she didn't make a pretence of it," said Jim.
Mrs. Davenport threw herself into the breach, and asked the dowager how digitalis was made.
Gertrude was sitting next Jim Armine, and wished to know more. Old Lady Hayes was well embarked on the structure of foxglove seeds, and she turned to Jim.
"You know Lady Hayes very well, don't you?" she asked.
"I was with them in Algiers last year."
"Do you like her very much?"
"That's a wrong word to use, somehow," he said. "I think she is the cleverest woman I ever saw, and,perhaps, the most interesting," he added, in a burst of veiled confidence.
"Ah!"—it was somewhat discouraging to hear that so many people took this as their main characteristic—"I don't know her at all. But I don't feel as if I should like her."
"I believe women dislike her very much, as a rule," remarked Jim, drily.
Something in his speech made Gertrude angry. It is always annoying, however modest an opinion we may have of ourselves, to be classed as a probable example to an universal rule. She waited a moment before she answered him.
"Why do you say that?"
"Well, there are very few people whom both women and men like much. Of course, I am not referring to the ordinary, stupid, good-natured people who are universal favourites—that is to say, whom no one dislikes—but to the people whom many men or women get excited about. She is one of those."
Mrs. Davenport was beginning to collect eyes—that is to say, she was looking at Gertrude, for no one could collect the dowager's eyes—and Gertrude rose in obedience.
"I think I know what you mean," she said.
Jim was left in excusable uncertainty as to what she meant, and the ladies left the room.
Mr. Davenport sat down again with an air of relief.
"I have always been considered a strong man," he said, "but, by the side of that old lady, I am a cripple and a baby. Get the cigarettes, Reggie."
"She told me that cigarettes were slow but certain death, yesterday," remarked Reggie, "but she cannot make me rude to her. It would be such a pity."
"Oh! she regards you as a possible convert," said Jim. "She hopes that you will go about with eight holes in your boots before long."
"How does she get on with Percy's sister?" asked Reggie, innocently.
Jim Armine laughed.
"Didn't you know you were her ark? She got routed in several pitched battles, and retired precipitately."
"That was when you were abroad last year, Reggie," said Mr. Davenport. "She came here one day with her boxes and medicines, and asked us to take her in. She gave no reason; but Lady Hayes told your mother."
"Was Lady Hayes so rude to her?"
Jim Armine laughed.
"She was so polite, on the contrary. Don't you know her?"
Gertrude went off next morning to meet Mrs. Carston at Tunbridge, and go with her to Aix. Reggie went with her to Victoria, and had parting words on the platform.
"I wish you were coming with me, Reggie," said Gertrude. "We're going to Lucerne in a month from now, when mother has had her course. That will be towards the end of June. Do come. It is an awfully nice place, and you can go up mountains—or row if you like. Will you?"
Reggie thought it a brilliant and feasible idea.
"I don't care a bit about London," he said, "and I do happen to care about you. It will be lovely. Write to me just before you go there, and tell me the hotel, and so on. Of course, I'll come. Ah! good-bye, Gerty."
The train moved slowly out of the station, and Reggie was left standing on the platform, waiting for it to curl away into the dark arch which soon swallowed it up. He had lost a great deal, and he went home somewhat silently.
That evening there was a great reception at one of the Foreign Embassies. Mrs. Davenport was the sister of the Ambassador's wife, and, after dinner, she asked whether anybody was going with her. Her husband eschewed such festivities; like a sensible man, he preferred, he said, to sit quietly at home, than to stand wedged in among a crowd of people who didn't care whether they saw him or not, and fight his way into a stuffy drawing-room. Reggie was sitting in the window, which he had thrown wide open, and was readingThe Field. He had written a short note to Gertrudebecause he missed her, and as her bodily presence was not there, he felt it was something to communicate with her, but letter-writing was a difficulty to him, and the note had been very short.
An idea seemed to strike Mrs. Davenport when she saw him.
"Reggie, why don't you come?"
"I'll come if you like. Will it be amusing? Yes; I should like to come. Let me smoke in the carriage, mummy."
The two went downstairs together, and got into the carriage.
"Poor old boy," said Mrs. Davenport, laying her hand on his, "you will feel rather lonely to-night. I thought you'd like to come."
"It's an awful bore, Gerty having to go away," said Reggie, without any obvious discontent, "but it's only for a month, you know. I'm going to join her at Lucerne, if you don't want me. I hope there's something to do there. She said there were some mountains about. I shall climb."
Mrs. Davenport was conscious of a slight chill.
"Well, there'll be Gerty there," she said.
"Oh, yes; of course," said Reggie. "I shouldn't think of going if she wasn't there. You said I might smoke, didn't you?"
"I'm very happy about you and Gerty," said Mrs.Davenport, after a pause. "I should have chosen her of all others for a daughter-in-law."
"Oh! but I chose her first," said Reggie. "That's more important, isn't it? I wrote her a line this evening. I wish I didn't hate writing letters so. I can never think of anything to say. What do you say in letters, mother, you always write such good ones?"
"But you don't find it difficult to talk, Reggie. Why should you find it difficult to write?"
"Oh! but I do find it difficult to talk," said he. "It's dreadfully puzzling. I never talk to Gerty."
"Are you always quite silent, then?"
"No; but I don't talk. At least, I suppose I do talk, in a way. I babble, you know. She does most of the talking."
Mrs. Davenport laughed.
"Babble on paper, then," she said; "Gerty will like it just as well."
"Oh! but I can't. It's so silly if you put it down. Is this the Embassy? I hope I shall meet a lot of people I know."
Reggie's common sense was enormous. Gertrude had gone away, and she wouldn't come back for the wishing. He wished she had not gone very much, but here he was in England without her. Surely England without her was the same as England with her, except that she was not there. Her absence,from a practical point of view, did not take the taste out of everything else. How should it? She was a very charming person, the most charming person Reggie had ever met. But there were other charming people, on a distinctly lower level, no doubt, but they did not cease to be charming because Gertrude had gone to Aix. After all, Reggie agreed with the great materialistic philosophers of all time, though he had never read their works. Mrs. Davenport felt somewhat annoyed with this school of thought as she dismounted from the carriage.
The Embassy stood at the corner of a large square, and a broad, red carpet ran from the door across to the road, for royalty was expected. Inside the house the arrangements all corresponded with the magnificent promise of the red carpet. A row of gorgeous flunkies, a band in the hall beneath the stairs, several hundred pounds' worth of hot-house flowers banked up against the wall, a crowd of perfectly-dressed, bustling aristocrats, crowding up and staring, in the worst possible breeding, at a small space between two pillars, where three princesses were looking rather bored, and a similar number of princes were talking to the few who had managed, by dint of loyal shoves, to edge themselves into the august presences; the smiling host and hostess, the pleasant music of women's voices, crossing the somewhat sombre strains of the band below, all these things are the invariable concomitants of such festivities,and on the whole one crush is rather like another crush.
Mrs. Davenport and Reggie had moved slowly up the staircase, and Reggie certainly was finding it amusing. There were lots of people he knew, and he stood chatting on the stairs while Mrs. Davenport talked for a few moments to her sister.
Later on he was standing in a doorway between two of the big reception rooms, talking and laughing, and commanding, by reason of his height, a good deal of the room beyond, when he saw the crowd by the door opposite to him sway and move, as if a wind had passed over it; and through the room, plainly visible, for the crowd made way for her as she was walking with a prince, came a woman he had never seen before. She was tall, dressed in some pale, soft material; round her neck went a single row of diamonds, and above it rose a face for the like of which men have lived and died. Eva had a habit of looking over people's heads and noticing no one, but Reggie happened to be six foot three, and in his long, eager gaze was something that arrested Eva's attention. She looked at him fixedly and gravely, until the thing became absurd, and then she turned away with a laugh, and asked who that pretty boy was.
Reggie, when the spell of her look was broken, turned away too, and asked who the most beautiful woman in the world was.
"There, there," he cried, pointing at her, regardless of men or manners.
So the great loom clashed and crossed, and two more threads were woven, side by side, into the garment of God.
There is a distinct tendency, if we may trust books on travels and early stages of religious belief among the uncivilised, dusky masses of the world to assign every event to a direct supernatural influence. Certain savages, if they hit their foot against a stone, will say that there is a demon in that stone, and they hasten to appease him by sacrificial sops. We see the exact opposite of this among those nations, which, like those in our own favoured isle, assign every event to pure chance. There is no harm in calling it chance, and there is no harm in assigning the most insignificant event to a local god, and the lesson we may learn from these elementary reflections is, that there are, at least, two points of view from which we may regard anything.
To adopt, however, the nomenclature of the day, this chance that led Lady Hayes to walk down that room at the French Embassy, when Reggie was standing at the door, was a very big chance. One of theleast important results of it was that it occasioned this book to be written.
Reggie was, as I have mentioned before, a very susceptible young man. He fully realised,in propriâ personâ, Mrs. Davenport's "healthy condition" of being in a chronic state of devotion, and this, coupled to his extreme susceptibility, will fully account for the fact that he moved slowly after Lady Hayes, till, by another chance meeting, she fell in with his mother, who had followed him from the top of the stairs, and got introduced. Mrs. Davenport pronounced the mystic words, "Lady Hayes, may I introduce my son Reggie," and the thing was done.
Lady Hayes was amused to find herself so quickly introduced to the "pretty boy" who had stared at her, and as her prince had gone away, she was ready to talk to him, and it appeared that he was ready to talk to her.
"I was so sorry I couldn't come to lunch yesterday," he began, "and I forgot to send a note to say I couldn't."
"We have lunch every day," remarked Lady Hayes, gravely. "Come to-morrow. I shall think it very rude if you cut me again. So will Percy. I shall send him to call you out."
"I know Percy very well," said Reggie. "I'm awfully fond of him. I don't believe he'd call me out."
Eva looked at him again with some amusement. This particular type was somewhat new to her. He was so extraordinarily young.
"I'm very fond of Percy too," she said.
"Oh, but he's your brother," said Reggie.
"So he is."
She laughed again.
"How extremely handsome he is," she thought to herself, in a parenthesis. "Why was I never so young as that."
Then aloud,—
"I'm going to ask you to give me your arm, and take me to get something cold to drink. Do you like ices?" she asked with some experimental malice.
"Lemon water," said Reggie after consideration, "but not cream ices, they're stuffy, somehow. I'd better tell my mother where we're going, and then I can meet her again afterwards."
"Ah! Lady Hayes," exclaimed the voice of their host's brother, "I've been looking for you. Prince Waldenech wishes to be introduced to you. Adeline sent me to find you."
Lady Hayes raised her eyebrows.
"I'll come by and by," she said. "I can't now. I'm going to eat an ice—lemon water. Tell her I will be back soon—ten minutes."
"Prince Waldenech's just going."
"Then I am afraid it will be a pleasure deferredfor me. Come, Mr. Davenport. You shall have a lemon water ice, and so will I."
"That was very kind of you to keep your engagement to me," said Reggie.
"You deserved I should cut you, as you cut me yesterday. But I felt inclined to keep this engagement, which makes all the difference. Of course, if you'd felt inclined to come yesterday you wouldn't have forgotten. One never forgets things one likes."
"Oh, but I did feel inclined to come," said Reggie, and stopped short.
"It was self denial, was it?"
"No, I was wanted to do something else."
"What did you do else, if it isn't rude to ask?"
"Oh! I went to the concert at St. James'. They did the Tannhäuser overture."
"Did you like it?"
"Oh yes, it was awfully pretty."
Eva laughed again.
"I expected you would think it stupid or ugly."
"How did you know?" asked he.
"You told me yourself. I knew almost as soon as you began to speak. Never mind. Don't look so puzzled. You shall come to the opera some night with me, and hear it again. I'm dreadfully rude, am I not?"
"You rude! No!" said Reggie, stoutly. "But you mustn't mind my being stupid."
"I like stupid people."
"I should have thought you would have hated them. But I'm glad you like them," said he, blushing furiously.
"What pretty speeches! But you are quite wrong about my hating stupid people—I don't say you're stupid, you know—but in the abstract. You see I know much more about you already than you know about me. I was right about your thinking Wagner ugly, and you were wrong about my disliking stupid people. There's the buffet. I shall sit down here, and you shall bring two ices—one for yourself and one for me."
It was characteristic of Reggie that he wrote an effusive though short note to Gertrude next day, saying that he had met Lady Hayes at the French Embassy, that she was perfectly beautiful and awfully nice, and that he couldn't write any more because he was just going out to lunch with her, and that three days after this another short note followed this one, saying that Lady Hayes was awfully anxious to meet her—Gertrude—that Gertrude must come home as quick as ever she could, and that Mrs. Arbuthnot was going to Lucerne in July, so that, if Mrs. Carston could join her there, Gertrude could come straight home. He had heard that Lucerne was very slow.
Lady Hayes had been "awfully nice" to Reggie. She had hardly ever seen anything so fresh as he was.About two days after their first meeting, Reggie had told her, with unblushing candour, all about Gertrude, and Lady Hayes was charmed to hear it. Reggie's confession of his young love seemed simply delightful. He was so refreshingly unversed in the ways of the world. He had spoken of Gertrude with immense ardour, and had shown Lady Hayes her photograph. He had been there to call one afternoon, and had found her alone. They had tea in the little tent over the porch, which Eva kept there "en permanence," and in which she had routed her mother-in-law a year ago.
She was sitting in a low, basket chair, looking at the photograph, which Reggie had just put into her hand, and had turned from it to his eager, down-looking face, which appeared very attractive.
"Charming," she said, "simply charming! You will let me have this, won't you? and one of yourself, too, and they shall go on the chimney-piece in my room. Really, you have no business to be as happy as this; it isn't at all fair."
Reggie stood up, and drew in a long breath.
"Yes; I'm awfully happy. I never knew anyone as happy as I am. But may I send you another photograph of her? I can get one from the photographer. You see, she gave me this herself."
"No; certainly not," said Eva. "I want this one. I want it now. Surely you have no need of photographs.You have got the original, you see. And this is signed by her."
"Oh! but I'm sure she'd sign another one for you, if I ask her to."
"If it please my lord the king," said Eva. "No; I want this one. Mayn't I have it?"
"Yes, it doesn't make any difference, does it?" said Reggie, guilelessly. "I've got the original, as you say."
"Thanks so much. That is very good of you."
"Of course it's an exchange," said Reggie.
"Ah, you're mercenary after all. I knew I should find a weak point in you. Very good, it's an exchange. But I don't suppose Miss Carston would care for my photograph. She doesn't know me, you see."
"Well, anyhow, mine must be an exchange."
"You're very bold," said Eva. "Of course you could make me give it you; you're much stronger than I am. If you held me down in this chair, and throttled me until I promised, I should have to promise. I'm very cowardly. I should never have made an early Christian martyr. I should have sworn to believe in every heathen goddess, and the Thirty-Nine Articles long before they put the thumbscrew really on."
"Yes, I expect the thumbscrew hurt," said Reggie, meditatively.
"Don't you miss her tremendously?" said Eva,looking at the photograph again. "I should think you were miserable without her."
"Oh, I don't think I could be miserable if I tried," said Reggie.
"Most people find it so easy to be miserable. But I don't think you're like most people."
"I certainly don't find it easy to be miserable; not natural, at least. You see, Gerty's only away for a month, and it wouldn't do the slightest good if I was miserable."
"You have great common sense. Really, common sense is one of the rarest things in the world. Ah, Hayes, that is you, is it? Do you know Mr. Reggie Davenport?"
Lord Hayes made a neat little bow, and took some tea.
"There is a footman waiting to know if you were in," he said. "Somebody has called."
"Please tell the man that I'm not in, or that I'm engaged."
Reggie started up.
"Why didn't you tell me to go?" he said. "I'm afraid I've been here an awful time."
"Sit down again," said Eva. "You are my engagement. I don't want you to go at all."
Reggie sat down again.
"Thank you so much," he said.
"There has been," said Lord Hayes, stirring histea, "there has been a most destructive earthquake in Zante. The town, apparently, has been completely demolished."
Reggie tried to look interested, and said "Indeed."
"Do you know where Zante is?" asked Eva. "I don't."
"I think it's in the Levant," said Reggie.
"That makes it worse."
"Zante is off the west coast of Greece," said Lord Hayes. "I was thinking at one time of building a villa there."
"Ah," said Eva, "that would be charming. Have you finished your tea, Hayes? Perhaps you would order the carriage for to-night. I have to go out at half-past ten. You must find it draughty here with your bad cold. You would be prudent to sit indoors."
Reggie looked at him with sympathy as he went inside.
"I'm sorry he's got a cold," he said.
"It is an intermittent catarrh," said Eva, with amusement. "There is nothing to be anxious about—thanks."
Lord Hayes had gone indoors without protest or remonstrance, but he was far from not feeling both. The polite indifference which Eva had practised earlier in their married life—the neutral attitude—had begun to wear very thin. When they were alone, he did not care much whether she was polite or not, buthe distinctly objected to be made a fool of in public. Why he had not made a stand on this occasion, and insisted that he had no cold at all, which was indeed the case, he found himself wondering, even as he was making his retreat, but that wonder brought him no nearer to doing it. Investigation into mesmerism and other occult phenomena are bringing us nearer a rational perception of such forces, and we are beginning to believe that each man has a set of moral muscles, which exercise moral force, just as he has a similar physical system which is superior or inferior to that of another man. And to judge by any analogy which is known to us, it appears inevitable that when one moral organisation strips as it were to another moral organisation, that a fight, a victory and a defeat will be the result. Eva's prize fight with her husband had lasted more than a year, and though it was practically over, yet the defeated party still delivered itself of small protests from time to time, which resembled those anonymous challenges, or challenges in which it is not distinctly stated that "business is meant," and which are common in the columns of such periodicals as register the more palpable sort of encounters.
Lord Hayes, in fact, still preserved his malignant potentialities. It was a source of satisfaction to him that he still retained a slight power of annoying Eva in small ways. This he did not venture to use in public, because, if Eva suspected anything like a whisperof a challenge not strictly in private, she would take steps to investigate it, and these public investigations were not to his taste. But in private he could vent a little malignity without being publicly pommelled for it.
Thus it came about that, when they were seated at dinner alone that night, Lord Hayes said,—
"May I ask who that young man was with you? He was here yesterday, I believe."
"Didn't I introduce you?" said Eva. "I thought I did. It was Reggie Davenport."
"What do you intend to do with him?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Is he to be a sort of Jim Armine the second?"
Eva finished eating her soufflé without replying, and Lord Hayes rather prematurely thought the shot had told.
"Oh! dear no," she said at length, "nothing of the sort. I am very fond of Reggie Davenport. Quite devoted to him, in fact. He is quite the nicest young man I ever saw."
"I thought you were very fond of Jim."
"How dull men are," said Eva. "Any woman would have seen at once that it was he who was fond of me. But with Reggie—he asked me to call him Reggie—it is reciprocal, I think. I should advise you to be jealous."
"I should not think of such a thing," said he."Nothing makes a man so ridiculous as to be jealous."
"Except, perhaps, to be complaisant," said Eva, not sparing herself in the desire not to spare him. "I think that is absurder still."
"I have no intention of being complaisant."
"That is such a comfort," said Eva; "it is a great thing to know that one's honour is safe in one's husband's hands. You are my guardian angel. Are you coming to the ball to-night? Yes? I shall be upstairs in my room. Please send a man to tell me when the carriage is round. And don't keep me waiting as you did on Thursday."
Eva went upstairs into her room, and found, among her letters, Reggie's photograph, which he had already sent. She took it up and looked at it for a few moments, and placed it by the side of Gertrude's. Something, perhaps the scene at dinner, had made her restless, and she walked up and down the room, with her long, white dress sweeping the ground behind her.
"What is the matter with me?" she thought to herself impatiently. "Surely I, of all people—"
She sat down again and opened some of her letters. There was one from her mother, who was coming to stay with them for a week or two.
"I hear such a lot about you," she wrote; "everyone seems to be talking about nothing else except Lady Hayes and her beauty and success. And when I thinkthat it is my own darling little Eva, I can only feel full of gratitude and thankfulness that a mother's prayers for her own daughter's welfare have been answered so fully and bountifully. But I hope that, in the riches of love and position and success, which have been so fully granted her, she will not forget—"
Eva tore the letter in half with a sudden, dramatic gesture, and threw it into the paper-basket. She was annoyed, ashamed of herself for her want of self-control, but a new spring of feeling had been rising in her this last day or two, that gave her a sense of loss, of something missed which might never come again, a feeling which she had experienced in some degree after her marriage, when she found out what it was to be linked to a man who did not love her, and whom she was beginning to detest. But now the feeling was deeper, keener, more painful, and from the mantlepiece Reggie's photograph looked at her, smiling, well-bred, well-dressed, and astonishingly young. Surely it couldn't be that!
An hour later a message came that the carriage was round, and she went downstairs again, impassive, cold, perfectly beautiful. As she swept down into the hall, Lord Hayes, who was standing there, with a pair of white kid gloves in his hand, was suddenly struck and astonished at her beauty. He felt freshly proud at having become the owner of this dazzling, perfect piece of life. He moved forward to meet her, and ina burst of pleased proprietorship, laying his hand on her bare arm,—
"My dear Eva," he said, "you are more beautiful than ever."
Eva looked at him for a moment fixedly; then she suddenly shook his hand off.
"Ah! don't touch me," she said shuddering, and moved past him and got into the carriage.
Lord Hayes, however, had one consolation which Eva could never deprive him of, and that was the knowledge that she was his, and the knowledge that she knew it. She might writhe and shrink, or treat him with indifference, or scorn, or anger, but she could never alter that, except by disgracing herself, and she was too proud and sensitive, as he knew, to do anything of the sort. Consequently, her assaults on him at dinner on the subject of complaisance did not trouble him for a moment. It was morally impossible, he felt, for her to put him into such a position, for her own position was as dear to her as he was odious. His lordship had a certain cynical sense of humour, which whispered that though this state of things was not pleasant, it was distinctly amusing.
Meantime, as the days went on, if Eva was beginning to be a little anxious about herself, Mrs. Davenport was not at her ease about Reggie. Gertrude's letters came regularly, and he liked to let his mother read them, and they, at any rate, betrayed no dissatisfaction.But in one of these which arrived soon after the last interview recorded between Lady Hayes and Reggie, Mrs. Davenport suddenly felt frightened. It was a very short sentence which gave rise to this feeling, and apparently a very innocent one:—
"What on earth does Lady Hayes want my photograph for?"
Reggie was sitting by the open window after a particularly late breakfast, smoking into the window box. His back was turned to the room, and he was apparently absorbed in his occupation. He had read Gertrude's letter as he was having breakfast, and when he had finished, he had given it to his mother, saying—
"Such a jolly note from Gerty; you will like to see it, mummy."
Mrs. Davenport read it and looked up with some impatience at the lounging figure in the window seat.
"What's this about Gerty's photograph and Lady Hayes?" she asked. "I don't understand."
Reggie did not appear to hear, and continued persecuting a small, green fly that was airing itself on a red geranium, and was consequently conspicuous.
"You may smoke in here, Reggie," said Mrs. Davenport, raising her voice a little; "come in and sit down."
Reggie turned round somewhat unwillingly. He had heard his mother's first question, and it had suddenlystruck him that it was rather an awkward one. A very frank nature will, on occasions, use extreme frankness to cover the deficiency of it, and he decided that the whole truth, very openly stated, was less liable to involve him in difficulties than the subtlest prevarication.
"Oh, Lady Hayes said she wanted Gerty's photograph and mine," he said, walking towards his mother. "Of course, I gave them her, and she gave me hers in exchange. I told Gerty all about it in a letter."
Mrs. Davenport looked up at him, and observed that his face was flushed.
"What an odd request," she said.
"I don't see why. I know her quite well, somehow, though I have only known her such a short time."
There was a short silence. Mrs. Davenport was casting about in her mind as to how she might learn what she wanted, without betraying her desire to know it.
"Did you write to Gerty yesterday?" she asked at length.
"No, I didn't," said Reggie, frankly. "I was out all day and then I went to the Hayes in the evening."
"Are you going out to Lucerne at the end of the month?"
"No, I think not; somebody told me—Lady Hayes, I think—that it was awfully slow. I told Gerty the Arbuthnots were going out, and suggested she shouldleave Mrs. Carston with them and come back to London. I like London, somehow, this year."
Mrs. Davenport was beginning to understand. She could have found it in her heart at that moment to label Eva with some names that would have astonished her.
"Does Lady Hayes talk about Gerty much?"
"Oh, yes, a good deal; at least, she lets me talk about her whenever I want to."