CHAPTER XVII
THE weeks that followed were difficult weeks for Robert. Cecily’s book was a success in so far that from the artist’s standpoint it attracted just the right sort of attention. It was praised by just the half-dozen critics whose opinion Robert held to be valuable; the critics whose good opinion he had secretly never ceased to covet, even while he consciously strayed into the broad path which leads to popular success and literary destruction.
But in her own immediate circle, comprising as it did many people whose chief interests were connected with the world of books, Cecily’s success was immediate and strikingly apparent. Already popular as a charming as well as a pretty woman, it needed only the added distinction of having written a novel that was discussed at length in the Quarterlies to make her openly courted. Robert never saw her nowadays. It had come to be tacitly understood that “the Kingslakes went theirseparate ways,” and invitations in which he was not included were showered upon his wife. The first party for several weeks to which they went together was one given in June by Lady Wilmot.
At half-past nine, Robert stood waiting in the hall for his wife. In a few minutes her bedroom door opened and she came out, followed by a maid who held her evening cloak ready.
Robert regarded her critically. She wore a white gown, which he, a connoisseur of women’s dress, thoroughly approved. Moreover, as he could not fail to see, it was extraordinarily becoming. Her dark hair looked very soft and cloudy, the color in her cheeks was faint and delicate as a wild rose. He looked at her, and saw she was a beautiful woman.
“Do I look nice?” she asked, smiling. Oddly enough Robert felt depressed that the smile was so cordial.
“Very,” he returned, and did not speak again till they were in the hansom that the hall porter had called. Even then it was she who broke the silence.
“You look rather tired,” she said, glancing at him. “Are you?”
“Not tired. Beastly depressed.” Hespoke in the tone of a child who needs comfort, a tone which Cecily knew well. It never failed to move her.
“Things aren’t going very well just now?” she asked, gently. “It’s frightfully worrying while it lasts, isn’t it? But it won’t last. Nothing lasts. Why, next year, I shall be downthere”—she indicated infinite depth,—“and you, towering on pinnacles above me!”
“Oh, no!” returned Robert, bitterly. “You’ve come to stay.”
Cecily shrank back a little into the corner of the cab. When she replied, her voice trembled.
“You speak almost as though you were sorry,” she said. “And that makes me miserable. There’s no comparison between your best work and mine, Robert—but there’s also no accounting for what will succeed.”
Robert felt a violent increase of the irritation that possessed him—an irritation which had its source in many complex, undefined emotions.
“Oh, as to that,” he began, with a contemptuous laugh, “that’s quite immaterial. Surely, my dear Cecily, you can’t imagine that I’m jealous of this little boom of yours? I don’t takethatseriously.”
She was stung by his tone. “Am I to understand that there’s something youdo?”
“Yes,” returned Robert, suddenly. “I object to your intimacy with Mayne.” The words broke from him, apparently without his own volition. He was startled at their sound.
For a long moment there was silence.
“On what grounds?” inquired Cecily at last, in the same icy tone.
“On the grounds that people are talking—and that you are my wife.”
She looked full at him and he felt, rather than saw, the scorn in her face. “Do you remember,” she said at last, “my surprise when, without consulting me, you asked Dick Mayne to the house?”
“When I trusted my wife,” he began, feeling that the confidence was fading out of his voice. “I thought she would have sufficient regard for my——”
His words were cut short by her bitter laugh.
“Oh, Robert! Are you really going to talk about your honor? That will be very funny.”
A fury, fanned to white heat by the mockery of her tone, seized Robert. While he wasstruggling for words the hansom drew up before Lady Wilmot’s door, and without his aid Cecily alighted and moved before him up the steps and into the house.
Lady Wilmot’s big drawing-room was filled to overflowing when the Kingslakes entered. Their hostess pounced at once upon Cecily, and extended a casual hand to her husband.
“Here you are, my dear! I thought you were never coming! There are a hundred people languishing for a sight of you. Here’s Mr. Fairholt-Graeme. I introduce him first, because his is a bad case, but he mustn’t monopolize you long.”
Cecily smiled as a tall, grave-looking man took her hand with an air of homage, and in a few moments she was surrounded by a little knot of men and women, all eager for a word with her.
Robert glanced round the room in search of Philippa. He caught a glimpse of her at last, on the broad landing outside the drawing-room. Some man was bending over her. Impatiently Robert struggled towards the door to see who it was, and presently discovered, as he suspected, Nevern.
He clenched his hands. How he hatedthis kind of thing; hated the glaring lights, the parrot chatter, the crush, the heat, the sight of familiar faces. Some of them were smiling invitations, and he had to go and exchangebadinage; to listen to repeated congratulations on Cecily’s success; to invent fresh sentences to express his rapture. Above the heads of the crowd, presently, he saw Mayne, and with the recognition of his face, came an intolerable stab of anger, of jealousy. He watched; saw him steadily draw near to Cecily, saw him wait quietly, without impatience, till he could speak to her; saw him move aside with her to an open window, where they stood together talking.
In the meantime, unnoticed by him, Philippa was casting uneasy glances in his direction. From her seat on the landing, she could watch his face as he leaned in the doorway of the drawing-room, carrying on a desultory conversation with a pretty, fluffy-haired woman, who looked more than a little bored.
Robert’s moods, as indicated by his expression, were too well known to Philippa to prevent her from misreading danger signals. She knew that she must get rid of Nevern.
“I think you ought to go, Nigel,” she murmured, caressingly. “Yes, dear, please,I wish it. You have been talking to me too long.”
Nevern was restive. “Why?” he whispered. “Why shouldn’t every one know? I’m so tired of all this——”
“I do so want to keep our exquisite secret a little longer,” she interrupted, hurriedly. “It’s always a profanation when it is shared by the vulgar world. Besides, you promised, Nigel!”
He drew himself up with a sigh. “Yes, I know. But how long is it to go on like this?”
She smiled at him. “Be patient a little longer. Now let’s go into the room, then I’ll stop and speak to some one I know, and you can leave me.”
“When may I come?” urged Nevern in the same low tone as she rose.
“I don’t know. I’ll write,” she told him, hurriedly, with Robert’s eyes upon her.
They took the few steps towards the drawing-room together, and taking care to make her dismissal of Nevern as casual as possible, as well as to be in full view of Robert when it was achieved, she gave both hands to Mrs. Stanley Garth, the distinguished theosophist. Philippa’s attitude, aswell as her rapid glance in passing, suggested that his moment had come. Robert allowed it to pass. Five minutes later she saw him shake hands with their hostess, and overheard the beginning of his excuses for leavetaking.
“But youcan’tgo!” exclaimed Lady Wilmot. “All nonsense about a sick friend. I don’t believe in him. Besides, you’re not going to desert your wife?”
“Lady Luton has very kindly offered to drive her home,” said Robert. “She lives almost next door, you know.”
“I believe it’s nothing but temper!” declared his hostess, jovially. “You’re rather out of it nowadays, aren’t you? When a man has a brilliant wife he must look to his laurels, eh? ’Pon my word, Robert, she’s quite cut you out. Every one’s talking about her book. Look at them now,” she jerked her head back towards the room—“all swinging incense. Why, you wicked creature, you never even told me she wrote. I believe you were jealous!”
She was walking with him towards the head of the stairs while she chattered. She was hitting a little at random, but it amused her to discover when the blows were felt. To do Lady Wilmot justice, her malice was notexclusively directed against her own sex. To exasperate a man afforded her on the whole more entertainment than she would have derived had her victim been feminine. “A man’s colossal vanity is so tempting,” she frequently observed. “I long to overthrow it. But then, I always had a taste for the impossible.”
Despite his utmost endeavors Robert could not make his rejoinders sound other than a trifle constrained.
“I admit I never took Cecily’s work very seriously,” he said. “That was my mistake. She never talked about it much herself, and—well, somehow one never thinks of one’s wife as a literary woman. But, my dear lady! jealous of her? What an idea!”
“Rather a good idea, eh? I didn’t know her well before she married, and you managed to give me quite a wrong impression of her, anyhow. I always pictured her a demure little country mouse, with scarcely a squeak in her. Look at her now!”
She put up her lorgnette. The rooms had thinned a little, and through the archway of the door they could both see Cecily, who, in the midst of a group of people, was talking animatedly.
“That’s La Roche leaning over the sofa,” said Lady Wilmot. “You know La Roche? He’s the latest dramatic critic in Paris. Supposed to be very brilliant, I hear. Graeme introduced him, I imagine. Graeme’s a tremendous admirer. You see he doesn’t leave the field to La Roche, in spite of the introduction. And there’s Mayne, of course.”
“Why ‘of course’?” inquired Robert, quickly. Lady Wilmot assumed an innocent expression.
“Why not? Isn’t he your great friend, as well as Cecily’s?”
“Certainly,” was Robert’s immediate reply.
“He seems to be exploring London drawing-rooms instead of jungles, nowadays,” she continued. “Well, it’s a fine field, and the animals are even more dangerous!”
“Good-bye, I must really go,” said Robert again, putting out his hand.
“Must you? Nonsense,” she returned, ignoring it. “I’m so enjoying this little chat. I scarcely ever see you now. How does Philippa Burton answer as a secretary?” There was a gleam of interested amusement in her eyes as she put the question.
“Excellently, thank you.”
Lady Wilmot put her head on one side andlevelled her lorgnette at Philippa. “Doesn’t look much like a secretary, does she? Her hair always reminds me of a crimped hearth-rug. And how on earth does she manage never to forget that stricken-deer expression about the eyes? It’s very effective, though. I don’t wonder that when she thinks of her son poor old Mrs——” She checked herself abruptly. “Oh, I forgot. I promised not to say a word about that.”
“About what?” asked Robert, trying to conceal his anxiety.
“Never mind, my dear. Sometimes I think I talk too much. But Philippa’s a precious little humbug, you know. Only you men are such gabies.” Her bright eyes sought his face inquisitively. “Did you see her doing the high and noble with Sam Nevern to-night? I didn’t know how to contain myself!”
“I thought his name was Nigel?”
“Samuel, my dear. Nigel for poetic purposes. I’ve known his family for years. Most respectable. Old Nevern made a lot of money in soap or candles, I forget which—both, perhaps. Sammy will come in for a nice little fortune, so he can afford to write bad poetry. Not really going? How tiresome of you.”
Robert escaped into the sweet night air with a sense of unutterable relief. The Park gates were still open, and he turned into the broad walk, and, lighting a cigarette, walked on between the trees which hung motionless above his head. His brain was whirling, but by an effort of will he retraced the events of the evening, beginning with his drive to Lancaster Gate with Cecily. His pride shrank from admitting that he had been wrong, while his sense of justice accused him. Cecily’s words came back to him.
“Do you remember my surprise when you asked Dick Mayne to the house?”
It was true,—that, and more than that. He winced as he thought of all that had been at least tacitly included in his invitation to the man whose presence he now resented. He looked back upon it as one recalls a fit of half-remembered delirium.
How madly, in those days, he had loved Philippa! How she had filled for him heaven and earth, so that he would have risked anything, stooped to any baseness, to make her as fully his as he longed to make her! And now? He scarcely knew whether he loved her at all. He had been enraged at the sight of Nevern, certainly, but was it because heloved her? Wasn’t it rather blind resentment against the suspicion of betrayal, by Philippa at least, since Cecily no longer cared; a mad determination not to be abandoned, cast off by both women? He felt like a gambler who always loses, while his fellow-gamblers have all the luck. Lady Wilmot’s chatter beat through his brain incessantly. “Mayne, of course.” So people were really talking! He raged to know with how much truth. Then came the remembrance of her incessant harping upon his wife’s success, and its effect upon his vanity. Shame at his own lack of generosity struggled in vain with the knowledge that Lady Wilmot was right. With whatever injustice, with whatever lack of generosity, hedidresent it, even though the resentment was touched with admiration and an odd sort of pride. Robert had never achieved self-analysis quite so free from self-deception, as during that short walk under the dreaming trees.
The keeper on the other side of the Park was waiting to shut the gate as he reached Hyde Park Corner, and a glance at the clock showed him that it wanted a minute to twelve. Mechanically, seeing nothing, he walked down Grosvenor Road, and on into Victoria Street,where, though the omnibuses had ceased to run, cabs still wandered, or passed one another at full speed, while an occasional motor-car shot amongst them. As he turned out of the street into the stillness of Carlisle Place, his eyes fell upon the Cathedral tower, majestic against the night sky sown with stars. Like Cecily, he felt its quietude, but only as something which accentuated the restless, uneasy tumult of his thoughts. Upstairs, when he reached the flat, the light was burning in the hall. Cecily had not returned. He felt vaguely relieved as he went straight to his room and shut the door.