“You teach me such a lot,” he said.
He drank his Kummel.
“I always learn something when I talk to a woman. I’ve learnt something from you.”
Lady Holme did not ask him what it was. She saw that he was now more intent on her than he had been on Miss Schley, and she got up to go, feeling more cheerful than she had since she left theatelierof “Cupido.”
“Don’t go.”
“I must.”
“Already! May I come and call?”
“Your father knows my address.”
“Oh, I say—but—”
“You’re not going already!” cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was having a second glass of Benedictine and beginning to talk rather outrageously and with a more than usually pronounced foreign accent.
“I must, really.”
“I’m afraid my son has bored you,” murmured Sir Donald, in his worn-out voice.
“No, I like him,” she replied, loud enough for Leo to hear.
Sir Donald did not look particularly gratified at this praise of his achievement. Lady Holme took an airy leave of everybody. When she came to Pimpernel Schley she said:
“I wish you a great success, Miss Schley.”
“Many thanks,” drawled the vestal virgin, who was still looking into her coffee cup.
“I must come to your first night. Have you ever acted in London?”
“Never.”
“You won’t be nervous?”
“Nervous! Don’t know the word.”
She bent to sip her coffee.
When Lady Holme reached the door of the Carlton, and was just entering one of the revolving cells to gain the pavement, she heard Lady Cardington’s low voice behind her.
“Let me drive you home, dear.”
At the moment she felt inclined to be alone. She had even just refused Sir Donald’s earnest request to accompany her to her carriage. Had any other woman made her this offer she would certainly have refused it. But few people refused any request of Lady Cardington’s. Lady Holme, like the rest of the world, felt the powerful influence that lay in her gentleness as a nerve lies in a body. And then had she not wept when Lady Holme sang a tender song to her? In a moment they were driving up the Haymarket together in Lady Cardington’s barouche.
The weather had grown brighter. Wavering gleams of light broke through the clouds and lay across the city, giving a peculiarly unctuous look to the slimy streets, in which there were a good many pedestrians more or less splashed with mud. There was a certain hopefulness in the atmosphere, and yet a pathos such as there always is in Spring, when it walks through London ways, bearing itself half nervously, like a country cousin.
“I don’t like this time of year,” said Lady Cardington.
She was leaning back and glancing anxiously about her.
“But why not?” asked Lady Holme. “What’s the matter with it?”
“Youth.”
“But surely—”
“The year’s too young. And at my age one feels very often as if the advantage of youth were an unfair advantage.”
“Dare I ask—?”
She checked herself, looking at her companion’s snow-white hair, which was arranged in such a way that it looked immensely thick under the big black hat she wore—a hat half grandmotherly and half coquettish, that certainly suited her to perfection.
“Spring—” she was beginning rather quickly; but Lady Cardington interrupted her.
“Fifty-eight,” she said.
She laughed anxiously and looked at Lady Holme.
“Didn’t you think I was older?”
“I don’t know that I ever thought about it,” replied Lady Holme, with the rather careless frankness she often used towards women.
“Of course not. Why should you, or anyone? When a woman’s once over fifty it really doesn’t matter much whether she’s fifty-one or seventy-one. Does it?”
Lady Holme thought for a moment. Then she said:
“I really don’t know. You see, I’m not a man.”
Lady Cardington’s forehead puckered and her mouth drooped piteously.
“A woman’s real life is very short,” she said. “But her desire for real life can last very long—her silly, useless desire.”
“But if her looks remain?”
“They don’t.”
“You think it is a question of looks?”
“Do you think it is?” asked Lady Cardington. “But how can you know anything about it, at your age, and with your appearance?”
“I suppose we all have our different opinions as to what men are and what men want,” Lady Holme said, more thoughtfully than usual.
“Men! Men!” Lady Cardington exclaimed, with a touch of irritation unusual in her. “Why should we women do, and be, everything for men?”
“I don’t know, but we do and we are. There are some men, though, who think it isn’t a question of looks, or think they think so.”
“Who?” said Lady Cardington, quickly.
“Oh, there are some,” answered Lady Holme, evasively, “who believe in mental charm more than in physical charm, or say they do. And mental charm doesn’t age so obviously as physical—as the body does, I suppose. Perhaps we ought to pin our faith to it. What do you think of Miss Schley?”
Lady Cardington glanced at her with a kind of depressed curiosity.
“She pins her faith to the other thing,” she said.
“Yes.”
“She’s pretty. Do you know she reminds me faintly of you.”
Lady Holme felt acute irritation at this remark, but she only said:
“Does she?”
“Something in her colouring. I’m sure she’s a man’s woman, but I can’t say I found her interesting.”
“Men’s women seldom are interesting to us. They don’t care to be,” said Lady Holme.
Suddenly she thought that possibly between Pimpernel Schley and herself there were resemblances unconnected with colouring.
“I suppose not. But still—ah, here’s Cadogan Square!”
She kissed Lady Holme lightly on the cheek.
“Fifty-eight!” Lady Holme said to herself as she went into the house. “Just think of being fifty-eight if one has been a man’s woman! Perhaps it’s better after all to be an everybody’s woman. Well, but how’s it done?”
She looked quite puzzled as she came into the drawing-room, where Robin Pierce had been waiting impatiently for twenty minutes.
“Robin,” she said seriously, “I’m very unhappy.”
“Not so unhappy as I have been for the last half hour,” he said, taking her hand and holding it. “What is it?”
“I’m dreadfully afraid I’m a man’s woman. Do you think I am?”
He could not help smiling as he looked into her solemn eyes.
“I do indeed. Why should you be upset about it?”
“I don’t know. Lady Cardington’s been saying things—and I met a rather abominable little person at lunch, a little person like a baby that’s been about a great deal in a former state, and altogether—Let’s have tea.”
“By all means.”
“And now soothe me, Robin. I’m dreadfully strung up. Soothe me. Tell me, I’m an everybody’s woman and that I shall never bede tropin the world—not even when I’m fifty-eight.”
THE success of Pimpernel Schley in London was great and immediate, and preceded her appearance upon the stage. To some people, who thought they knew their London, it was inexplicable. Miss Schley was pretty and knew how to dress. These facts, though of course denied by some, as all facts in London are, were undeniable. But Miss Schley had nothing to say. She was not a brilliant talker, as so many of her countrywomen are. She was not vivacious in manner, except on rare occasions. She was not interested in all the questions of the day. She was not—a great many things. But she was one thing.
She was exquisitely sly.
Her slyness was definite and pervasive. In her it took the place of wit. It took the place of culture. It even took the place of vivacity. It was a sort of maid-of-all-work in her personality and never seemed to tire. The odd thing was that it did not seem to tire others. They found it permanently piquant. Men said of Miss Schley, “She’s a devilish clever little thing. She don’t say much, but she’s up to every move on the board.” Women were impressed by her. There was something in her supreme and snowy composure that suggested inflexible will. Nothing ever put her out or made her look as if she were in a false position.
London was captivated by the abnormal combination of snow and slyness which she presented to it, and began at once to make much of her.
At one time the English were supposed to be cold; and rather gloried in the supposition. But recently a change has taken place in the national character—at any rate as exhibited in London. Rigidity has gone out of fashion. It is condemned as insular, and unless you are cosmopolitan nowadays you are nothing, or worse than nothing. The smart Englishwoman is beginning to be almost as restless as a Neapolitan. She is in a continual flutter of movement, as if her body were threaded with trembling wires. She uses a great deal of gesture. She is noisy about nothing. She is vivacious at all costs, and would rather suggest hysteria than British phlegm.
Miss Schley’s calm was therefore in no danger of being drowned in any pervasive calm about her. On the contrary, it stood out. It became very individual. Her composed speechlessness in the midst of uneasy chatter—the Englishwoman is seldom really self-possessed—carried with it a certain dignity which took the place of breeding. She was always at her ease, and to be always at your ease makes a deep impression upon London, which is full of self-consciousness.
She began to be the fashion at once. A great lady, who had a passion for supplying smart men with what they wanted, saw that they were going to want Miss Schley and promptly took her up. Other women followed suit. Miss Schley had a double triumph. She was run after by women as well as by men. She got her little foot in everywhere, and in no time. Her personal character was not notoriously bad. The slyness had taken care of that. But even if it had been, if only the papers had not been too busy in the matter, she might have had success. Some people do whose names have figured upon the evening bills exposed at the street corners. Hers had not and was not likely to. It was her art to look deliberately pure and good, and to suggest, in a way almost indefinable and very perpetual, that she could be anything and everything, and perhaps had been, under the perfumed shadow of the rose. The fact that the suggestion seemed to be conveyed with intention was the thing that took corrupt old London’s fancy and made Miss Schley a pet.
Her name of Pimpernel was not against her.
Men liked it for its innocence, and laughed as they mentioned it in the clubs, as who should say:
“We know the sort of Pimpernel we mean.”
Miss Schley’s social success brought her into Lady Holme’s set, and people noticed, what Lady Holme had been the first to notice, the faint likeness between them. Lady Holme was not exquisitely sly. Her voice was not like a choir-boy’s; her manner was not like the manner of an image; her eyes were not for ever cast down. Even her characteristic silence was far less perpetual than the equally characteristic silence of Miss Schley. But men said they were the same colour. What men said women began to think, and it was not an assertion wholly without foundation. At a little distance there was an odd resemblance in the one white face and fair hair to the other. Miss Schley’s way of moving, too, had a sort of reference to Lady Holme’s individual walk. There were several things characteristic of Lady Holme which Miss Schley seemed to reproduce, as it were, with a sly exaggeration. Her hair was similar, but paler, her whiteness more dead, her silence more perpetual, her composure more enigmatically serene, her gait slower, with diminished steps.
It was all a little like an imitation, with just a touch of caricature added.
One or two friends remarked upon it to Lady Holme, who heard them very airily.
“Are we alike?” she said. “I daresay, but you mustn’t expect me to see it. One never knows the sort of impression one produces on the world. I think Miss Schley a very attractive little creature, and as to her social gifts, I bow to them.”
“But she has none,” cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was one of those who had drawn Lady Holme’s attention to the likeness.
“How can you say so? Everyone is at her feet.”
“Her feet, perhaps. They are lovely. But she has no gifts. That’s why she gets on. Gifted people are a drug in the market. London’s sick of them. They worry. Pimpernel’s found that out and gone in for the savage state. I mean mentally of course.”
“Her mind dwells in a wigwam,” said Lady Manby. “And wears glass beads and little bits of coloured cloth.”
“But her acting?” asked Lady Holme, with careless indifference.
“Oh, that’s improper but not brilliant,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “The American critics says it’s beneath contempt.”
“But not beneath popularity, I suppose?” said Lady Holme.
“No, she’s enormously popular. Newspaper notices don’t matter to Pimpernel. Are you going to ask her to your house? You might. She’s longing to come. Everybody else has, and she knew you first.”
Lady Holme began to realise why she could never like Mrs. Wolfstein. The latter would try to manage other people’s affairs.
“I had no idea she would care about it,” she answered, rather coldly.
“My dear—an American! And your house! You’re absurdly modest. She’s simply pining to come. May I tell her to?”
“I should prefer to invite her myself,” said Lady Holme, with a distinct touch of hauteur which made Mrs. Wolfstein smile maliciously.
When Lady Holme was alone she realised that she had, half unconsciously, meant that Miss Schley should find that there was at any rate one house in London whose door did not at once fly open to welcome her demure presence. But now? She certainly did not intend to be a marked exception to a rule that was apparently very general. If people were going to talk about her exclusion of Miss Schley, she would certainly not exclude her. She asked herself why she wished to, and said to herself that Miss Schley’s slyness bored her. But she knew that the real reason of the secret hostility she felt towards the American was the fact of their resemblance to each other. Until Miss Schley appeared in London she—Viola Holme—had been original both in her beauty and in her manner of presenting it to the world. Miss Schley was turning her into a type.
It was too bad. Any woman would have disliked it.
She wondered whether Miss Schley recognised the likeness. But of course people had spoken to her about it. Mrs. Wolfstein was her bosom friend. The Jewess had met her first at Carlsbad and, with that terrible social flair which often dwells in Israel, had at once realised her fitness for a London success and resolved to “get her over.” Women of the Wolfstein species are seldom jealously timorous of the triumphs of other women. A certain coarse cleverness, a certain ingrained assurance and unconquerable self-confidence keeps them hardy. And they generally have a noble reliance on the power of the tongue. Being incapable of any fear of Miss Schley, Mrs. Wolfstein, ever on the look-out for means of improving her already satisfactory position in the London world, saw one in the vestal virgin and resolved to launch her in England. She was delighted with the result. Miss Schley had already added several very desirable people to the Wolfstein visiting-list. In return “Henry” had “put her on to” one or two very good things in the City. Everything would be most satisfactory if only Lady Holme were not tiresome about the Cadogan Square door.
“She hates you, Pimpernel,” said Mrs. Wolfstein to her friend.
“Why?” drawled Miss Schley.
“You know why perfectly well. You reproduce her looks. I’m perfectly certain she’s dreading your first night. She’s afraid people will begin to think that extraordinary colourless charm she and you possess stagey. Besides, you have certain mannerisms—you don’t imitate her, Pimpernel?”
The pawnbroking expression was remarkably apparent for a moment in Mrs. Wolfstein’s eyes.
“I haven’t started to yet.”
“Yet?”
“Well, if she don’t ask me to number thirty-eight—‘tis thirty-eight?”
“Forty-two.”
“Forty-two Cadogan Square, I might be tempted. I came out as a mimic, you know, at Corsher and Byall’s in Philadelphia.”
Miss Schley gazed reflectively upon the brown carpet of Mrs. Wolfstein’s boudoir.
“Folks said I wasn’t bad,” she added meditatively.
“I think I ought to warn Viola,” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
She was peculiarly intimate with people of distinction when they weren’t there. Miss Schley looked as if she had not heard. She often did when anything of importance to her was said. It was important to her to be admitted to Lady Holme’s house. Everybody went there. It was one of the very smartest houses in London, and since everybody knew that she had been introduced to Lady Holme, since half the world was comparing their faces and would soon begin to compare their mannerisms—well, it would be better that she should not be forced into any revival of her Philadelphia talents.
Mrs. Wolfstein did not warn Lady Holme. She was far too fond of being amused to do anything so short-sighted. Indeed, from that moment she was inclined to conspire to keep the Cadogan Square door shut against her friend. She did not go so far as that; for she had a firm faith in Pimpernel’s cuteness and was aware that she would be found out. But she remained passive and kept her eyes wide open.
Miss Schley was only going to act for a month in London. Her managers had taken a theatre for her from the first of June till the first of July. As she was to appear in a play she had already acted in all over the States, and as her American company was coming over to support her, she had nothing to do in the way of preparation. Having arrived early in the year, she had nearly three months of idleness to enjoy. Her conversation with Mrs. Wolfstein took place in the latter days of March. And it was just at this period that Lady Holme began seriously to debate whether she should, or should not, open her door to the American. She knew Miss Schley was determined to come to her house. She knew her house was one of those to which any woman setting out on the conquest of London would wish to come. She did not want Miss Schley there, but she resolved to invite her if peopled talked too much about her not being invited. And she wished to be informed if they did. One day she spoke to Robin Pierce about it. Lord Holme’s treatment of Carey had not yet been applied to him. They met at a private view in Bond Street, given by a painter who was adored by the smart world, and, as yet, totally unknown in every other circle. The exhibition was of portraits of beautiful women, and all the beautiful women and their admirers crowded the rooms. Both Lady Holme and Miss Schley had been included among the sitters of the painter, and—was it by chance or design?—their portraits hung side by side upon the brown-paper-covered walls. Lady Holme was not aware of this when she caught Robin’s eye through a crevice in the picture hats and called him to her with a little nod.
“Is there tea?”
“Yes. In the last room.”
“Take me there. Oh, there’s Ashley Greaves. Avoid him, like a dear, till I’ve looked at something.”
Ashley Greaves was the painter. There was nothing of the Bohemian about him. He looked like a heavy cavalry officer as he stood in the centre of the room talking to a small, sharp-featured old lady in a poke bonnet.
“He’s safe. Lady Blower’s got hold of him.”
“Poor wretch! She ought to have a keeper. Strong tea, Robin.”
They found a settee in a corner walled in by the backs of tea-drinking beauties.
“I want to ask you something,” said Lady Holme, confidentially. “You go about and hear what they’re saying.”
“And greater nonsense it seems each new season.”
“Nonsense keeps us alive.”
“Is it the oxygen self-administered by an almost moribund society?”
“It’s the perfume that prevents us from noticing the stuffiness of the room. But, Robin, tell me—what is the nonsense of now?”
“Religious, political, theatrical, divorce court or what, Lady Holme?”
He looked at her with a touch of mischief in his dark face, which told her, and was meant to tell her, that he was on the alert, and had divined that she had a purpose in thus pleasantly taking possession of him.
“Oh, the people—nonsense. You know perfectly what I mean.”
“Whom are they chattering about most at the moment? You’ll be contemptuous if I tell you.”
“It’s a woman, then?”
“When isn’t it?”
“Do I know her?”
“Slightly.”
“Well?”
“Miss Schley.”
“Really?”
Lady Holme’s voice sounded perfectly indifferent and just faintly surprised. There was no hint of irritation in it.
“And what are they saying about Miss Schley?” she added, sipping her tea and glancing about the crowded room.
“Oh, many things, and among the many one that’s more untrue than all the rest put together.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s too absurd. I don’t think I’ll tell you.”
“But why not? If it’s too absurd it’s sure to be amusing.”
“I don’t think so.”
His voice sounded almost angry.
“Tell me, Robin.”
He looked at her quickly with a warm light in his dark eyes.
“If you only knew how I—”
“Hush! Go on about Miss Schley.”
“They’re saying that she’s wonderfully like you, and that—have some more tea?”
“That—?”
“That you hate it.”
Lady Holme smiled, as if she were very much entertained.
“But why should I hate it?”
“I don’t know. But women invent reasons for everything.”
“What have they invented for this?”
“Oh—well—that you like to—I can’t tell you it all, really. But in substance it comes to this! They are saying, or implying—”
“Implication is the most subtle of the social arts.”
“It’s the meanest—implying that all that’s natural to you, that sets you apart from others, is an assumption to make you stand out from the rest of the crowd, and that you hate Miss Schley because she happens to have assumed some of the same characteristics, and so makes you seem less unique than you did before.”
Lady Holme said nothing for a moment. Then she remarked:
“I’m sure no woman said ‘less unique.’”
“Why not?”
“Now did anyone? Confess!”
“What d’you suppose they did say?”
“More commonplace.”
He could not help laughing.
“As if you were ever commonplace!” he exclaimed, rather relieved by her manner.
“That’s not the question. But then Miss Schley’s said to be like me not only in appearance but in other ways? Are we really so Siamese?”
“I can’t see the faintest beginning of a resemblance.”
“Ah, now you’re falling into exaggeration in the other direction.”
“Well, not in realities. Perhaps in one or two trifling mannerisms—I believe she imitates you deliberately.”
“I think I must ask her to the house.”
“Why should you?”
“Well, perhaps you might tell me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Aren’t people saying that the reason I don’t ask her is because I am piqued at the supposed resemblance between us?”
“Oh, people will say anything. If we are to model our lives according to their ridiculous ideas—”
“Well, but we do.”
“Unless we follow the dictates of our own natures, our own souls.”
He lowered his voice almost to a whisper.
“Be yourself, be the woman who sings, and no one—not even a fool—will ever say again that you resemble a nonentity like Miss Schley. You see—you see now that even socially it is a mistake not to be your real self. You can be imitated by a cute little Yankee who has neither imagination nor brains, only the sort of slyness that is born out of the gutter.”
“My dear Robin, remember where we are. You—a diplomatist!”
She put her finger to her lips and got up.
“We must look at something or Ashley Greaves will be furious.”
They made their way into the galleries, which were almost impassable. In the distance Lady Holme caught sight of Miss Schley with Mrs. Wolfstein. They were surrounded by young men. She looked hard at the American’s pale face, saying to herself, “Is that like me? Is that like me?” Her conversation with Robin Pierce had made her feel excited. She had not shown it. She had seemed, indeed, almost oddly indifferent. But something combative was awake within her. She wondered whether the American was consciously imitating her. What an impertinence! But Miss Schley was impertinence personified. Her impertinence was herraison d’etre. Without it she would almost cease to be. She would at any rate be as nothing.
Followed by Robin, Lady Holme made her way slowly towards the Jewess and the American.
They were now standing together before the pictures, and had been joined by Ashley Greaves, who was beginning to look very warm and expressive, despite his cavalry moustache. Their backs were towards the room, and Lady Holme and Robin drew near to them without being perceived. Mrs. Wolfstein had a loud voice and did not control it in a crowd. On the contrary, she generally raised it, as if she wished to be heard by those whom she was not addressing.
“Sargent invariably brings out the secret of his sitters,” she was saying to Ashley Greaves as Lady Holme and Robin came near and stood for an instant wedged in by people, unable to move forward or backward. “You’ve brought out the similarities between Pimpernel and Lady Holme. I never saw anything so clever. You show us not only what we all saw but what we all passed over though it was there to see. There is an absurd likeness, and you’ve blazoned it.”
Robin stole a glance at his companion. Ashley Greaves said, in a thin voice that did not accord with his physique:
“My idea was to indicate the strong link there is between the English woman and the American woman. If I may say so, these two portraits, as it were, personify the two countries, and—er—and—er—”
His mind appeared to give way. He strove to continue, to say something memorable, conscious of his conspicuous and central position. But his intellect, possibly over-heated and suffering from lack of air, declined to back him up, and left him murmuring rather hopelessly:
“The one nation—er—and the other—yes—the give and take—the give and take. You see my meaning? Yes, yes.”
Miss Schley said nothing. She looked at Lady Holme’s portrait and at hers with serenity, and seemed quite unconscious of the many eyes fastened upon her.
“You feel the strong link, I hope, Pimpernel?” said Mrs. Wolfstein, with her most violent foreign accent. “Hands across the Herring Pond!”
“Mr. Greaves has been too cute for words,” she replied. “I wish Lady Holme could cast her eye on them.”
She looked up at nothing, with a sudden air of seeing something interesting that was happening along way off.
“Philadelphia!” murmured Mrs. Wolfstein, with an undercurrent of laughter.
It was very like Lady Holme’s look when she was singing. Robin Pierce saw it and pressed his lips together. At this moment the crowd shifted and left a gap through which Lady Holme immediately glided towards Ashley Greaves. He saw her and came forward to meet her with eagerness, holding out his hand, and smiling mechanically with even more than his usual intention.
“What a success!” she said.
“If it is, your portrait makes it so.”
“And where is my portrait?”
Robin Pierce nipped in the bud a rather cynical smile. The painter wiped his forehead with a white silk handkerchief.
“Can’t you guess? Look where the crowd is thickest.”
The people had again closed densely round the two pictures.
“You are an artist in more ways than one, I’m afraid,” said Lady Holme. “Don’t turn my head more than the heat has.”
The searching expression, that indicated the strong desire to say something memorable, once more contorted the painter’s face.
“He who would essay to fix beauty on canvas,” he began, in a rather piercing voice, “should combine two gifts.”
He paused and lifted his upper lip two or three times, employing his under-jaw as a lever.
“Yes?” said Lady Holme, encouragingly.
“The gift of the brush which perpetuates and the gift of—er—gift of the—”
His intellect once more retreated from him into some distant place and left him murmuring:
“Beauty demands all, beauty demands all. Yes, yes! Sacrifice! Sacrifice! Isn’t it so?”
He tugged at his large moustache, with an abrupt assumption of the cavalry officer’s manner, which he doubtless deemed to be in accordance with his momentary muddle-headedness.
“And you give it what it wants most—the touch of the ideal. It blesses you. Can we get through?”
She had glanced at Robin while she spoke the first words. Ashley Greaves, with an expression of sudden relief, began very politely to hustle the crowd, which yielded to his persuasive shoulders, and Lady Holme found herself within looking distance of the two portraits, and speaking distance of Mrs. Wolfstein and Miss Schley. She greeted them with a nod that was more gay and friendly than her usual salutations to women, which often lackedbonhomie. Mrs. Wolfstein’s too expressive face lit up.
“The sensation is complete!” she exclaimed loudly.
“Hope you’re well,” murmured Miss Schley, letting her pale eyes rest on Lady Holme for about a quarter of a second, and then becoming acutely attentive to vacancy.
Lady Holme was now in front of the pictures. She looked at Miss Schley’s portrait with apparent interest, while Mrs. Wolfstein looked at her with an interest that was maliciously real.
“Well?” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “Well?”
“There’s an extraordinary resemblance!” said Lady Holme. “It’s wonderfully like.”
“Even you see it! Ashley, you ought to be triumphant—”
“Wonderfully like—Miss Schley,” added Lady Holme, cutting gently through Mrs. Wolfstein’s rather noisy outburst.
She turned to the American.
“I have been wondering whether you won’t come in one day and see my little home. Everyone wants you, I know, but if you have a minute some Wednesday—”
“I’ll be delighted.”
“Next Wednesday, then?”
“Thanks. Next Wednesday.”
“Cadogan Square—the red book will tell you. But I’ll send cards. I must be running away now.”
When she had gone, followed by Robin, Mrs. Wolfstein said to Miss Schley:
“She’s been conquered by fear of Philadelphia.”
“Wait till I give her Noo York,” returned the American, placidly.
It seemed that Lady Holme’s secret hostility to Miss Schley was returned by the vestal virgin.
LORD HOLME seldom went to parties and never to private views. He thought such things “all damned rot.” Few functions connected with the arts appealed to his frankly Philistine spirit, which rejoiced in celebrations linked with the glories of the body; boxing and wrestling matches, acrobatic performances, weight-lifting exhibitions, and so forth. He regretted that bear-baiting and cock-fighting were no longer legal in England, and had, on two occasions, travelled from London to South America solely in order to witness prize fights.
As he so seldom put in an appearance at smart gatherings he had not yet encountered Miss Schley, nor had he heard a whisper of her much-talked-of resemblance to his wife. Her name was known to him as that of a woman whom one or two of his “pals” began to call a “deuced pretty girl” but his interest in her was not greatly awakened. The number of deuced pretty girls that had been in his life, and in the lives of his pals, was legion. They came and went like feathers dancing on the wind. The mere report of them, therefore, casual and drifting, could not excite his permanent attention, or fix their names and the record of their charms in his somewhat treacherous memory. Lady Holme had not once mentioned the American to him. She was a woman who knew how to be silent, and sometimes she was silent by instinct without saying to herself why.
Lord Holme never appeared on her Wednesdays; and, indeed, those days were a rather uncertain factor among the London joys. If Lady Holme was to be found in her house at all, she was usually to be found on a Wednesday afternoon. She herself considered that she was at home on Wednesdays, but this idea of hers was often a mere delusion, especially when the season had fully set in. There were a thousand things to be done. She frequently forgot what the day of the week was. Unluckily she forgot it on the Wednesday succeeding her invitation to Miss Schley. The American duly turned up in Cadogan Square and was informed that Lady Holme was not to be seen. She left her card and drove away in her coupe with a decidedly stony expression upon her white face.
That day it chanced that Lord Holme came in just before his wife and carelessly glanced over the cards which had been left during the afternoon. He was struck by the name of Pimpernel. It tickled his fancy somehow. As he looked at it he grinned. He looked at it again and vaguely recalled some shreds of the club gossip about Miss Schley’s attractions. When Lady Holme walked quietly into her drawing-room two or three minutes later he met her with Miss Schley’s card in his hand.
“What have you got there, Fritz?” she said.
He gave her the card.
“You never told me you’d run up against her,” he remarked.
Lady Holme looked at the card and then, quickly, at her husband.
“Why—do you know Miss Schley?” she asked.
“Not I.”
“Well then?”
“Fellows say she’s deuced takin’. That’s all. And she’s got a fetchin’ name—eh? Pimpernel.”
He repeated it twice and began to grin once more, and to bend and straighten his legs in the way which sometimes irritated his wife. Lady Holme was again looking at the card.
“Surely it isn’t Wednesday?” she said.
“Yes, it is. What did you think it was?”
“Tuesday—Monday—I don’t know.”
“Where’d you meet her?”
“Whom? Miss Schley? At the Carlton. A lunch of Amalia Wolfstein’s.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Yes.”
There was no hesitation before the reply.
“What colour?
“Oh!—not Albino.”
Lord Holme stared.
“What d’you mean by that, girlie?”
“That Miss Schley is remarkably fair—fairer than I am.”
“Is she as pretty as you?
“You can find out for yourself. I’m going to ask her to something—presently.”
In the last word, in the pause that preceded it, there was the creeping sound of the reluctance Lady Holme felt in allowing Miss Schley to draw any closer to her life. Lord Holme did not notice it. He only said:
“Right you are. Pimpernel—I should like to have a squint at her.”
“Very well. You shall.”
“Pimpernel,” repeated Lord Holme, in a loud bass voice, as he lounged out of the room, grinning. The name tickled his fancy immensely. That was evident.
Lady Holme fully intended to ask Miss Schley to the “something” already mentioned immediately. But somehow several days slipped by and it was difficult to find an unoccupied hour. The Holme cards had, of course, duly gone to the Carlton, but there the matter had ended, so far as Lady Holme was concerned. Miss Schley, however, was not so heedless as the woman she resembled. She began to return with some assiduity to the practice of the talent of the old Philadelphia days. In those days she used to do a “turn” in the course of which she imitated some of the popular public favourites of the States, and for each of her imitations she made up to resemble the person mimicked. She now concentrated this talent upon Lady Holme, but naturally the methods she employed in Society were far more subtle than those she had formerly used upon the stage. They were scarcely less effective. She slightly changed her fashion of doing her hair, puffing it out less at the sides, wearing it a little higher at the back. The change accentuated her physical resemblance to Lady Holme. She happened to get the name of the dressmaker who made most of the latter’s gowns, and happened to give her an order that was executed with remarkable rapidity. But all this was only the foundation upon which she based, as it were, the structure of her delicate revenge.
That consisted in a really admirable hint—it could not be called more—of Lady Holme’s characteristic mannerisms.
Lady Holme was not an affected woman, but, like all women of the world who are greatly admired and much talked about, she had certain little ways of looking, moving, speaking, being quiet, certain little habits of laughter, of gravity, that were her own property. Perhaps originally natural to her, they had become slightly accentuated as time went on, and many tongues and eyes admired them. That which had been unconscious had become conscious. The faraway look came a little more abruptly, went a little more reluctantly; than it had in the young girl’s days. The wistful smile lingered more often on the lips of the twenties than on the lips of the teens. Few noticed any change, perhaps, but there had been a slight change, and it made things easier for Miss Schley.
Her eye was observant although it was generally cast down. Society began to smile secretly at her talented exercises. Only a select few, like Mrs. Wolfstein, knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it, but the many were entertained, as children are, without analysing the cause of their amusement.
Two people, however, were indignant—Robin Pierce and Rupert Carey.
Robin Pierce, who had an instinct that was almost feminine in its subtlety, raged internally, and Rupert Carey, who, naturally acute, was always specially shrewd when his heart was in the game, openly showed his distaste for Miss Schley, and went about predicting her complete failure to capture the London public as an actress.
“She’s done it as a woman,” someone replied to him.
“Not the public, only the smart fools,” returned Carey.
“The smart fools have more influence on the public every day.”
Carey only snorted. He was in one of his evil moods that afternoon. He left the club in which the conversation had taken place, and, casting about for something to do, some momentary solace for his irritation andennui, he bethought him of Sir Donald Ulford’s invitation and resolved to make a call at the Albany. Sir Donald would be out, of course, but anyhow he would chance it and shoot a card.
Sir Donald’s servant said he was in. Carey was glad. Here was an hour filled up.
With his usual hasty, decisive step he followed the man through a dark and Oriental-looking vestibule into a library, where Sir Donald was sitting at a bureau of teakwood, slowly writing upon a large, oblong sheet of foolscap with a very pointed pen.
He got up, looking rather startled, and held out his hand.
“I am glad to see you. I hoped you would come.”
“I’m disturbing a new poem,” said Carey.
Sir Donald’s faded face acknowledged it.
“Sorry. I’ll go.”
“No, no. I have infinite leisure, and I write now merely for myself. I shall never publish anything more. The maunderings of the old are really most thoroughly at home in the waste-paper basket. Do sit down.”
Carey threw himself into a deep chair and looked round. It was a room of books and Oriental china. The floor was covered with an exquisite Persian carpet, rich and delicate in colour, with one of those vague and elaborate designs that stir the imagination as it is stirred by a strange perfume in a dark bazaar where shrouded merchants sit.
“I light it with wax candles,” said Sir Donald, handing Carey a cigar.
“It’s a good room to think in, or to be sad in.”
He struck a match on his boot.
“You like to shut out London,” he continued.
“Yes. Yet I live in it.”
“And hate it. So do I. London’s like a black-browed brute that gets an unholy influence over you. It would turn Mark Tapley into an Ibsen man. Yet one can’t get away from it.”
“It holds interesting minds and interesting faces.”
“Didn’t Persia?”
“Lethargy dwells there and in all Eastern lands.”
“You have made up your mind to spend the rest of your days in the fog?”
“No. Indeed, only to-day I acquired a Campo Santo with cypress trees, in which I intend to make a home for any dying romance that still lingers within me.”
He spoke with a sort of wistful whimsicality. Carey stared hard at him.
“A Campo Santo’s a place for the dead.”
“Why not for the dying? Don’t they need holy ground as much?”
“And where’s this holy ground of yours?”
Sir Donald got up from his chair, went over to the bureau, opened a drawer, and took out of it a large photograph rolled round a piece of wood, which he handed to Carey, who swiftly spread it out on his knees.
“That is it.”
“I say, Sir Donald, d’you mind my asking for a whisky-and-soda?”
“I beg your pardon.”
He hastily touched a bell and ordered it. Meanwhile Carey examined the photograph.
“What do you think of it?” Sir Donald asked.
“Well—Italy obviously.”
“Yes, and a conventional part of Italy.”
“Maggiore?”
“No, Como.”
“The playground of the honeymoon couple.”
“Not where my Campo Santo is. They go to Cadenabbia, Bellagio, Villa D’Este sometimes.”
“I see the fascination. But it looks haunted. You’ve bought it?”
“Yes. The matter was arranged to-day.”
The photograph showed a large, long house, or rather two houses divided by a piazza with slender columns. In the foreground was water. Through the arches of the piazza water was also visible, a cascade falling in the black cleft of a mountain gorge dark with the night of cypresses. To the right of the house, rising from the lake, was a tall old wall overgrown with masses of creeping plants and climbing roses. Over it more cypresses looked, and at the base of it, near the house, were a flight of worn steps disappearing into the lake, and an arched doorway with an elaborately-wrought iron grille. Beneath the photograph was written, “Casa Felice.”
“Casa Felice, h’m!” said Carey, with his eyes on the photograph.
“You think the name inappropriate?”
“Who knows? One can be wretched among sunbeams. One might be gay among cypresses. And Casa Felice belongs to you?”
“From to-day.”
“Old—of course?”
“Yes. There is a romance connected with the house.”
“What is it?”
“Long ago two guilty lovers deserted their respective mates and the brilliant world they had figured in, and fled there together.”
“And quarrelled and were generally wretched there for how many months?”
“For eight years.”
“The devil! Fidelity gone mad!”
“It is said that during those years the mistress never left the garden, except to plunge into the lake on moonlight nights and swim through the silver with her lover.”
Carey was silent. He did not take his eyes from the photograph, which seemed to fascinate him. When the servant came in with the whisky-and-soda he started.
“Not a place to be alone in,” he said.
He drank, and stared again at the photograph.
“There’s something about the place that holds one even in a photograph,” he added.
“One can feel the strange intrigue that made the house a hermitage. It has been a hermitage ever since.”
“Ah!”
“An old Italian lady, very rich, owned it, but never lived there. She recently died, and her heir consented to sell it to me.”
“Well, I should like to see it in the flesh—or the bricks and mortar. But it’s not a place to be alone in,” repeated Carey. “It wants a woman if ever a house did.”
“What sort of woman?”
Sir Donald had sat down again on the chair opposite, and was looking with his exhausted eyes through the smoke of the cigars at Carey.
“A fair woman, a woman with a white face, a slim woman with eyes that are cords to draw men to her and bind them to her, and a voice that can sing them into the islands of the sirens.”
“Are there such women in a world that has forgotten Ulysses?”
“Don’t you know it?”
He rolled the photograph round the piece of wood and laid it on a table.
“I can only think of one who at all answers to your description.”
“The one of whom I was thinking.”
“Lady Holme?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t you think she would be dreadfully bored in Casa Felice?”
“Horribly, horribly. Unless—”
“Unless?”
“Who knows what? But there’s very often an unless hanging about, like a man at a street corner, that—” He broke off, then added abruptly, “Invite me to Casa Felice some day.”
“I do.”
“When will you be going there?”
“As soon as the London season is over. Some time in August. Will you come then?”
“The house is ready for you?”
“It will be. The necessary repairs will be begun now. I have bought it furnished.”
“The lovers’ furniture?”
“Yes. I shall add a number of my own things, picked up on my wanderings.”
“I’ll come in August if you’ll have me. But I’ll give you the season to think whether you’ll have me or whether you won’t. I’m a horrible bore in a house—the lazy man who does nothing and knows a lot. Casa Felice—Casa Felice. You won’t alter the name?”
“Would you advise me to?”
“I don’t know. To keep it is to tempt the wrath of the gods, but I should keep it.”
He poured out another whisky-and-soda and suddenly began to curse Miss Schley.
Sir Donald had spoken to her after Mrs. Wolfstein’s lunch.
“She’s imitating Lady Holme,” said Carey.
“I cannot see the likeness,” Sir Donald said. “Miss Schley seems to me uninteresting and common.”
“She is.”
“And Lady Holme’s personality is, on the contrary; interesting and uncommon.”
“Of course. Pimpernel Schley would be an outrage in that Campo Santo of yours. And yet there is a likeness, and she’s accentuating it every day she lives.”
“Why?”
“Ask the women why they do the cursed things they do do.”
“You are a woman-hater?”
“Not I. Didn’t I say just now that Casa Felice wanted a woman? But the devil generally dwells where the angel dwells—cloud and moon together. Now you want to get on with that poem.”
Half London was smiling gently at the resemblance between Lady Holme and Miss Schley before the former made up her mind to ask the latter to “something.” And when, moved to action by certain evidences of the Philadelphia talent which could not be misunderstood, she did make up her mind, she resolved that the “something” should be very large and by no means very intimate. Safety wanders in crowds.
She sent out cards for a reception, one of those affairs that begin about eleven, are tremendous at half past, look thin at twelve, and have faded away long before the clock strikes one.
Lord Holme hated them. On several occasions he had been known to throw etiquette to the winds and not to turn up when his wife was giving them. He always made what he considered to be a good excuse. Generally he had “gone into the country to look at a horse.” As Lady Holme sent out her cards, and saw her secretary writing the words, “Miss Pimpernel Schley,” on an envelope which contained one, she asked herself whether her husband would be likely to play her false this time.
“Shall you be here on the twelfth?” she asked him casually.
“Why? What’s up on the twelfth?”
“I’m going to have one of those things you hate—before the Arkell House ball. I chose that night so that everyone should run away early! You won’t be obliged to look at a horse in the country that particular day?”
She spoke laughingly, as if she wanted him to say no, but would not be very angry if he didn’t. Lord Holme tugged his moustache and looked very serious indeed.
“Another!” he ejaculated. “We’re always havin’ ‘em. Any music?”
“No, no, nothing. There are endless dinners that night, and Mrs. Crutchby’s concert with Calve, and the ball. People will only run in and say something silly and run out again.”
“Who’s comin’?”
“Everybody. All the tiresome dears that have had their cards left.”
Lord Holme stared at his varnished boots and looked rather like a puzzled boy at aviva voceexamination.
“The worst of it is, I can’t be in the country lookin’ at a horse that night,” he said with depression.
“Why not?”
She hastily added:
“But why should you? You ought to be here.”
“I’d rather be lookin’ at a horse. But I’m booked for the dinner to Rowley at the Nation Club that night. I might say the speeches were too long and I couldn’t get away. Eh?”
He looked at her for support.
“You really ought to be here, Fritz,” she answered.
It ended there. Lady Holme knew her husband pretty well. She fancied that the speeches at the dinner given to Sir Jacob Rowley, ex-Governor of some place she knew nothing about, would turn out to be very lengthy indeed—speeches to keep a man far from his home till after midnight.
On the evening of the twelfth Lord Holme had not arrived when the first of his wife’s guests came slowly up the stairs, and Lady Holme began gently to make his excuses to all the tiresome dears who had had their cards left at forty-two Cadogan Square. There were a great many tiresome dears. The stream flowed steadily, and towards half-past eleven resembled a flood-tide.
Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mr. Bry, Sally Perceval had one by one appeared, and Robin Pierce’s dark head was visible mounting slowly amid a throng of other heads of all shapes, sizes and tints.
Lady Holme was looking particularly well. She was dressed in black. Of course black suits everybody. It suited her even better than most people, and her gown was a triumph. She was going on to the Arkell House ball, and wore the Holme diamonds, which were superb, and which she had recently had reset. She was in perfect health, and felt unusually young and unusually defiant. As she stood at the top of the staircase, smiling, shaking hands with people, and watching Robin Pierce coming slowly nearer, she wondered a little at certain secret uneasinesses—they could scarcely be called tremors—which had recently oppressed her. How absurd of her to have been troubled, even lightly, by the impertinent proceedings of an American actress, a nobody from the States, without position, without distinction, without even a husband. How could it matter to her what such a little person—she always called Pimpernel Schley a little person in her thoughts—did or did not do? As Robin came towards her she almost—but not quite—wished that the speeches at the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley had not been so long as they evidently had been, and that her husband were standing beside her, looking enormous and enormously bored.
“What a crowd!”
“Yes. We can’t talk now. Are you going to Arkell House?”
Robin nodded.
“Take me in to supper there.”
“May I? Thank you. I’m going with Rupert Carey.”
“Really!”
At this moment Lady Holme’s eyes and manner wandered. She had just caught a glimpse of Mrs. Wolfstein, a mass of jewels, and of Pimpernel Schley at the foot of the staircase, had just noticed that the latter happened to be dressed in black.
“Bye-bye!” she added.
Robin Pierce walked on into the drawing-rooms looking rather preoccupied.
Everybody came slowly up the stairs. It was impossible to do anything else. But it seemed to Lady Holme that Miss Schley walked far more slowly than the rest of the tiresome dears, with a deliberation that had a touch of insolence in it. Her straw-coloured hair was done exactly like Lady Holme’s, but she wore no diamonds in it. Indeed, she had on no jewels. And this absence of jewels, and her black gown, made her skin look almost startlingly white, if possible whiter than Lady Holme’s. She smiled quietly as she mounted the stairs, as if she were wrapt in a pleasant, innocent dream which no one knew anything about.
Amalia Wolfstein was certainly a splendid—a too splendid—foil to her. The Jewess was dressed in the most vivid orange colour, and was very much made up. Her large eyebrows were heavily darkened. Her lips were scarlet. Her eyes, which moved incessantly, had a lustre which suggested oil with a strong light shining on it. “Henry” followed in her wake, looking intensely nervous, and unnaturally alive and observant, as if he were searching in the crowd for a bit of gold that someone had accidentally dropped. When anyone spoke to him he replied with extreme vivacity but in the fewest possible words. He held his spare figure slightly sideways as he walked, and his bald head glistened under the electric lamps. Behind them, in the distance, was visible the yellow and sunken face of Sir Donald Ulford.
When Miss Schley gained the top of the staircase Lady Holme saw that their gowns were almost exactly alike. Hers was sewn with diamonds, but otherwise there was scarcely any difference. And she suddenly felt as if the difference made by the jewels was not altogether in her favour, as if she were one of those women who look their best when they are not wearing any ornaments. Possibly Mrs. Wolfstein made all jewellery seem vulgar for the moment. She looked like an exceedingly smart jeweller’s shop rather too brilliantly illuminated; “as if she were for sale,” as an old and valued friend of hers aptly murmured into the ear of someone who had known her ever since she began to give good dinners.
“Here we are! I’m chaperoning Pimpernel. But her mother arrives to-morrow,” began Mrs. Wolfstein, with her strongest accent, while Miss Schley put out a limp hand to meet Lady Holme’s and very slightly accentuated her smile.
“Your mother? I shall be delighted to meet her. I hope you’ll bring her one day,” said Lady Holme; thinking more emphatically than ever that for a woman with a complexion as perfect as hers it was a mistake to wear many jewels.
“I’ll be most pleased, but mother don’t go around much,” replied Miss Schley.
“Does she know London?”
“She does not. She spends most of her time sitting around in Susanville, but she’s bound to look after me in this great city.”
Mrs. Wolfstein was by this time in violent conversation with a pale young man, who always looked as if he were on the point of fainting, but who went literally everywhere. Miss Schley glanced up into Lady Holme’s eyes.
“I hoped to make the acquaintance of Lord Holme to-night,” she murmured. “Folks tell me he’s a most beautiful man. Isn’t he anywhere around?”
She looked away into vacancy, ardently. Lady Holme felt a slight tingling sensation in her cool skin. For a moment it seemed to her as if she watched herself in caricature, distorted perhaps by a mirror with a slight flaw in it.