XLHAPPY POTTERS
To Ordham’s astonishment Bridgminster proffered the castle for the honeymoon. This graceful wedding-present was communicated by Lady Bridgminster soon after her return to London, and Mabel clapped her hands when told of it by her lover.
“It has been the dream of my life to see the inside of that heavenly castle,” she cried. “And now I am going to live there! I cannot believe it.”
“We can stay quite a month, I should think.” Ordham was smiling into her triumphant face and feeling inanely happy. “I have received private intimation that I can replace one of the secretaries in Rome—he cannot stand the climate—and put in my time at the Foreign Office later. No doubt I can get out of that altogether, especially as I have already served a year abroad. But I cannot express my delight at spending a month in that old place as if it really were my own—and with you! with you!”
Mabel did not give her usual ready response to his rare ebullitions. The more deeply he descended into the depths of sentimentality induced by this wondrous creature and his general good fortune, the more shy he became, and Mabel, who had her share of the feminine intuitions, divining when he was more than commonly surcharged with silent adoration, teased him into expression of it. This time, however, he had delivered himself without assistance, and to his surprise she flushed and bit her lip.
“Oh, do let us stay through the autumn! It is the ambition of my life to have a succession of house parties at Ordham.” Both eyes and voice pleaded. “Lady Bridgminster says that your brother doesn’t care how long we stay—mother had a note from her just before you came in. He never intends to live there again, and it is good for the house to keep it open.”
“I cannot imagine what induced this fit of generosity in Bridg. It must have been made in an exuberance of delight in turning his back on Ordham, which he has always hated. It never fitted him, somehow—”
“But it will us! Say you will stay through the autumn. Please! Please!”
“But—but—I cannot have my way with the Foreign Office forever. My mother has great influence at present, but a political earthquake and I am high and dry, unless established first. I might be sent to Persia or South America! My fate would be all the worse for the liberties I had taken under the present government.”
Mabel pouted and shook her head. “Don’t talk politics to me. Everybody says that I was born to be a diplomat’s wife, but thank heaven you are not in politics. Promise me that you will wait a little while—through the autumn.”
Ordham looked at her in dismay. Once or twice before a sudden unaccountable lack of comprehension had given him fleeting pause, but some new manifestation of charm had banished any inclination to dwell upon it. Her transitions from a dignified girl of the world to a spoilt child, even a magpie, were sometimes bewildering, but he always hastened to remind himself that she was most beautiful, high-bred, desirable, exquisite. On these gifts he could count even should she disappoint other hopes. But he was by no means convinced that she would disappoint him in anything. He believed in her brain, although she showed a strange determination to give it rest, and he would not have had her less adorably feminine. But he would have welcomed a trifle more reasonableness, if only for its convenience. He answered gently:
“But Mabel!” He longed to say “darling,” but starlight or moonlight was needful to work him up to that pitch; so he reiterated “Mabel” with increased tenderness of accent. “You are far more interested in my career than in giving house parties at Ordham, are you not?”
To his infinite delight Mabel leaned forward and gave him an impulsive little kiss, exclaiming with her grown-up air: “Indeed I am. We will go to Rome at once, if you wish. That was just an old dream of mine. I have cherished it since I first set eyes on Ordham three years ago. But if you want to go right away—”
“Not for worlds. A man is entitled to a month when he marries, and I shall show up at the Foreign Office every day or so until the ceremony. The place will be kept for me. How splendid you are!”
And Mabel began at once to speculate upon the vacant palaces in Rome. How perfectly heavenly it would be to transform some musty old historical hole, reeking with tragedy, into a nest for two happy little birds. Mabel’s phraseology was not always on a par with her lofty bearing and intellectual brow, but sometimes it was, and any man as much in love as Ordham would forget greater lapses still.
If Mrs. Cutting hastened the wedding that she might be present at the impending trial in New York, she was quite as determined to make it a distinguished function as if she had six months before her. And if few people were in London, nearly everybody was in England, and even Switzerland and the German baths were no great distance away. She received few regrets for the ceremony, which was to take place at St. George’s on the tenth of October. She was very busy and very happy. She thought it a great pity that her lovely flower should marry at all, for she was one of those American women that regard matrimony with refined distaste, an evil to be submitted to for the sake of fashion, position, protection, and, no doubt, the race. Moreover, with the inevitable inconsistency of her sex, she would not have liked her lovely flower to turn sere and yellow, Nature’s revenge on the mateless; but she sincerely hoped that after an heir had been presented to Ordham Castle, and, perchance, an understudy, Ordham’s youthful ardour would have evaporated, and her flower could settle down to the business of becoming a great lady, a woman of exceptional and undesecrated refinement; an easy achievement for one fastidiously reared by a fastidious mother. One reason for Mrs. Cutting’s spontaneous selection of Ordham, and her adherence, in spite of several brilliant offers, to her original decision, was because of his apparent lack of animalism, and she grew more and more convinced that only the wild confusion of first love had roused him from his lethargy. He would soon revert, and this fact, coupled with his incomparable manners, would make him the ideal husband for that rare fine type of womanhood which only her own country at its topmost civilization could produce. Mrs. Cutting was justly proud of Mabel, for the adaptable American girl was not only capable of learning a great many lessons, from a polonaise by Chopin to the tactful manipulation of a cross but important old dowager, but London society had pronounced her the one flawless American in its midst, and its midst was at that time unusually distended with charming and popular Americans. That she had become one of the belles of the season independently of the stamp of that Prince for whose favour all ambitious women, Americans as well as English, sought, but from whom she had been religiously barricaded, was in itself a stamp of original distinction. Mrs. Cutting was pronounced equally irreproachable, if somewhat chilly and invariable, and she too might have purchased a coronet had she chosen; but she had no taste for the man she must take with it, and left her daughter to make the marriage which should place her unassailably in the greatest society of the world.
Ordham was somewhat amused at the renewed intimacy of his mother with Mrs. Cutting, but accepted her explanation that she was not the woman to waste her energies opposing the decrees of fate, that she was glad her son was happy, and that, after all, heiresses were heiresses. Besides, Rosamond’s front teeth had rather got on her nerves, and she had unaccountably refused to have her hair touched up. Mabel Cutting was a beauty and would do the family credit, oh, no doubt of that. So she and Mrs. Cutting might be seen any morning in Bond Street, shopping, and looking even more radiant than the young people, who saw little of one another in these busy last days.
That was a memorable wedding even in London. The church was a vast bower of maidenhair and orchids. (Nihilists in Russia gnashed their teeth when they read of it.) Ordham’s connection alone filled half the pews; many of them had ordered new gowns for the occasion in their amazement at the millions flowing toward the family coffers, and that the magnet should be the most indolent and least susceptible of them all. If it had been Stanley, that splendid type of the orthodox, handsome, athletic, sanguine Englishman (he supported his brother at the altar), they could have understood it. But while they impatiently admitted that John was clever, they resented his radical departure from the type, and his complete indifference to their disapproval.
The day was warm and mellow. Not a cloud threatened ruin to the fine costumes with which the church rustled. Royalty honoured the occasion and occupied the front row of chairs. The bridal party, which had rehearsed in the American fashion, advanced up the aisle with precisely the right spacing, that their gowns might be duly appreciated. Lady Bridgminster wore a small bonnet and a tight gown of pale grey shining stuff which made her look not unlike a silver poplar. Mrs. Cutting wore heliotrope velvet and point lace that looked as if it might dissolve before the end of the ceremony. Princess Nachmeister, in a new brocade from Paris, resembled a wicked fairy in a beneficent mood. Of the six bridesmaids, two were Americans, two were French girls who had been Mabel’s chosen friends in Paris, and two were Ordhams. Their gowns had been designed by Lady Bridgminster, and if Mrs. Cutting ran to orchids and ferns, her friend was faithful to the artistic movement to which she had so long lent the light of her ambitious countenance. These six graceful girls held up in front long clinging diaphanous gowns of gold tissue with one hand, and clasped to their bosoms immense sheaves of lilies with the other. Their sleeves were greatly puffed, and on their heads were charming caps shaped like sunflowers. The old duchess, examining them through her lorgnette, and herself apparelled in black moiré and a mantle trimmed with bugles and fringe, remarked audibly that they looked like chorus girls; but they received only a passing attention, for Mabel was as lovely a bride as ever triumphed over a pitiless noonday sun. Beneath a robe composed entirely of rose point, and once in the wardrobe of some unfortunate princess, there was a shimmer as of pale green waters. Mabel had rebelled at looking like a Morris stained-glass window with Wilde improvements, but had agreed with Lady Bridgminster that there was no objection to resembling Undine if she could still be smart. As she advanced up the aisle on the arm of the American Minister, people stood up to look at her and whispered that did she remain in London a year or two longer she would reign as a “professional beauty” and dim the halos of the celebrated group. Ordham, slinking in from the vestry, terribly frightened but magnificently dignified, almost lost his breath when he saw her. Oh, there was no doubt that she had the grand air as well as beauty; and as she walked down the aisle at the conclusion of the ceremony on the arm of her princely young husband, her veil thrown back, her cheeks stained an entrancing pink, her head very high, London set the final seal of its approval upon her, adopted her as its very own, and hastened enraptured to the great house in Grosvenor Square, where all, not merely the family, had been bidden for breakfast.
What a pity that he should take her out of England! Why the diplomatic service—which might take them to unheard-of places? London was for the beautiful, the fortunate. And London was the apex of Earth. The Continent was all very well for baths, and gowns, and scenery, for music and old masters, or alas! economy. London being the Mecca of the civilized world, why, in heaven’s name, did any one voluntarily live out of it? And with millions—
If Ordham heard these comments once, he heard them a dozen times, and was the more annoyed as he observed that Mabel was irrepressibly gratified. The chief of all the personages present, finding speech with her for the first time, went so far as to assure her that the crown of professional beautyship was hers to grasp, even hinted that she could count upon his distinguished support. She turned to Ordham with a little gurgle of sheer happiness; but when she saw the thunder-cloud on the brow of her lord, replied prettily that she was quite convinced Nature had not fitted her to fill so exacting a rôle, and that, much as she adored England, she was quite frantic for the excitement of diplomatic life. The personage bowed and withdrew.
But these were passing clouds. Ordham carried his bride off to the country house lent them for the first few days of the honeymoon and was quite the happiest man on earth.
XLITHE PRINCESS PINCHES
As the carriage crossed the moor in the twilight, Ordham saw that not only was the vast front of the castle illuminated, but that the village at the base of the fell was also brilliant. He was not surprised that his humble friends should light their windows in honour of his bride; but when he was close enough to observe that the village wasen fête, that there were three arches in the main street composed almost wholly of lanterns, and that a torch flared on the roof of every cottage, he began to feel disquiet, and gave no heed to Mabel’s expressions of delight; and when a dozen lusty young men made a sudden rush out upon the moor, and, unharnessing the horses, dragged the carriage into the village as far as the green, where all the rest of the inhabitants were assembled, the children in white, with nosegays, he wished that he had not come; for this demonstration was not merely a compliment to himself, it was an insult to his brother.
The ancient stone village, built when “Ordham” was prefixed by “de,” and the Normans were defiling the Saxon well, squat and black under the rude illuminations, was a sight picturesque enough to gratify the heart of the most exacting American bride; and Mabel, who had been admitted to the secret, bowed graciously and won the hearts of the villagers immediately. She wore a very light grey costume and a big grey hat covered with feathers, and looked, particularly in the surroundings, exactly like a fairy princess.
The carriage halted. For some moments the cheering was deafening. Then there was a sudden expectant hush, and Ordham, who had been smiling into the faces of his old playmates, turned white and muttered to his radiant bride: “My God, they expect a speech!”
Mabel, who was not accustomed to strong language, looked shocked, but recovered herself instantly. “You must, darling,” she whispered hurriedly. “They always do.”
“They?—Oh, yes, the new lord when he comes home for the first time, or with his bride, but I am not—Bridg!—Great heaven, what a position!”
“But you must!” Mabel gave him a pinch, which so astonished him that he was on his feet before he knew it and thanking them as awkwardly as possible for their delightful kindness. Then he managed to articulate something of his pleasure in bringing his wife to the home of his childhood, and sat down amidst shouts of approval, knowing that no man had ever made a worse speech, but still able to congratulate himself that he had said nothing in poor taste, nor anything that his brother, who had consistently been ignored by the tenantry, could find offensive. He was still so much in love that, although the pinch had filled him with a sudden unaccountable anger, when they were alone in the dark avenue rising to the castle, he kissed Mabel and remarked that if he had been able to make a speech at all upon such a trying occasion, she might thank herself, not his inadequate intelligence.
“You will always do the right thing,” replied Mabel, complacently, “only you do need a lot of stirring up,”—a remark that would have created considerable amusement among the Ordhams could they have overheard it.
The courtyard was illuminated not only by the windows but by torches and coloured lanterns. All the servants of the castle stood at the foot of the staircase, and on that imposing feature itself were contributions from Grosvenor Square in the Ordham livery. Ordham noticed with fleeting astonishment that the liveries of his brother’s servants also were new. He went through this ordeal more gracefully, but was glad to find himself alone with Hines in his old suite. Mabel had been conducted to the adjoining suite by Mrs. Felt, who remarked, possibly for Ordham’s benefit, that it was most unusual kind of his lordship to allow those London decorators to do it over, and that they had done wonders in so short a time. But Ordham, who was hungry and agitated, did not follow his bride into the renovated suite, but calling after her that he would meet her in the octagonal drawing-room, sought solace in his bath and a cigarette.
Half an hour later he strolled over to the other side of the palace and through the splendid suites of rooms, now as brilliantly alight as when his mother had given her great political house parties, but looking, in their emptiness, dim and Italian and old, with their high, darkly frescoed ceilings, their panelled walls set with religious paintings, a few of which were originals, the rest admirable replicas of the Italian masters, their tapestries, and infrequent but superb pieces of old Italian furniture, carved and gilded, upholstered with Venetian brocades,—all so carefully chosen by William Morris. The mantels were carved with large terminal figures and coats of arms; the fireplace in the octagonal drawing-room was of stone upheld by male and female figures and carved above with grinning masques. The cabinets, chests, and chairs of this room were the most elaborately carved in the palace; and on the walls, between the carved dado and the painted frieze, was a tapestry of white velveteen printed with brown acanthus leaves and powdered as with gold dust, designed by Morris. The hangings seemed to shed forth the rich and beautiful colours of the Renaissance textile fabrics; and the silks, brocades, and embroideries of this immense but sumptuous room, the silken carpet with Persian design, might have been discovered by the great decorator marvellously preserved instead of almost as marvellously made in his looms. The furniture, light, delicate, graceful, and a mass of intricate carving, had really served the grandees of the Renaissance, who, mayhap, had no such appreciation of its wonders as moderns have to-day. Even tradition did not whisper of the original furnishing of Ordham, for Cromwell’s men had left not a stick; but no doubt it was early and extremely rude Gothic, not to be compared in either comfort, elegance, or appropriateness with this interior, as Italian as the palace, or “castle” itself. The paintings and silver alone had been buried in time, and so escaped the vandals; nor had they vented their righteous wrath upon the mantels and panellings of the royalist who was distinguishing himself abominably in the army of Charles Stuart.
It was all very beautiful, very romantic, and had it been his, Ordham would have been the proudest young bridegroom in England; but he still felt in a false position, was oppressed by a sense of unreality mingled with anger that he should be compelled to experience such emotions. Commonly he excluded Bridgminster from his mind, for his last interview with his brother was a memory he would have been glad to obliterate; but to-night, when he had been forced to play at “make-believe,” he was filled with resentment once more, and in no mood to regret the news subtly conveyed to him that Bridg was “in a bad way.” “How fine you do look, sir,” one of the men in the village had said to him. “His lordship, now, was that grey when he left you might say he had death writ in his face, and he sat like an old man and never so much as looked at one of us when he drove through the village—to make room for you, sir!”
But he was young and in love, and turned expectantly toward the door at the end of the long suite through which his bride must enter. After all, why should he not be proud to bring this pampered American to his ancestral castle? And if it were not his now, it would be one of these days, so why waste emotions upon an interval possibly brief? He shrugged his shoulders and dismissed them.
There was an almost imperceptible rustling of distant skirts on marble floors, and Mabel floated down the long vista while he stood and gazed upon her in expectation of new raptures. But to his surprise he experienced a shock of disappointment. Mabel was enchantingly dressed as ever. Her white train followed her like a cloud, and her slender neck was almost hidden under ropes of pearls; a little wreath of diamonds rested in the yellow fluff of her hair. But she looked unaccountably small, out of place, insignificant, in these dim, stately, historical rooms. The white and gold spaces of Grosvenor Square, light, French, extravagant, gay, not too large, and with ceilings artfully lowered, might have been designed to frame her ethereal loveliness, and the idea crossed Ordham’s mind that perchance they had.
But no misgivings beset Mabel, and as her husband suddenly advanced to meet her, she cried out, “Isn’t this too lovely, Jackie?” (This fond nickname was, so far, her only indiscretion in his adoring regard.) “I feel like an ancient Lady Ordham come to life; and as for this immense castle, or palace, or whatever you call it,—isn’t it exactly like those old things in Italy?—I had to send for a footman to pilot me. I never was so happy in all my life.”
“You should be,” said Ordham, gallantly. “Your capacity for conferring happiness passes belief.”
Dinner was announced, and to his surprise they were conducted to the banqueting hall instead of to the dining room.
“This is my first order,” said Mabel, smiling playfully, as they entered the vast room, whose panels were set with bygone Ordhams, and whose ceiling, frescoed on wood, panelled and gilded, was in the most elaborate Italian style. Ordham was amused at his wife’s childishness, but nothing averse, for the dining room might have revived hideous memories he chose to forget. In this superb hall there were no memories for him but of great dinners to the county, hunt breakfasts, house parties numbering many Englishmen already passed into history. Now it must always be associated with his first dinner, in the company of his bride, in this splendid castle of his race.
Mabel, who seemed excited to the point of exhilaration, chattered incessantly.
“Oh, Jackie! Jackie!” she cried, as the servants finally left the room, “how simply wonderful this castle must be when it is full of guests. Your mother says she has had more than a hundred people here at once. If youwon’tstay here, we must return some fall and have a regular traditional house party—royalties and all the rest of it. It would be exactly like living in one of Scott’s novels, and as the castle is Renaissance instead of Elizabethan, we could have a fancy dress ball and make believe we were in Italy.”
“The Renaissance reached England before Elizabeth,” replied Ordham, diplomatically. “It is too good of you to feel that you will not have tired of Italy before we can return here.”
“Oh, I love Italy, although I have malaria in Rome, and there are so many beggars, and my governess made me look at so many pictures. I am sure I can’t see what good those miles and miles of tramping through dark stuffy galleries full of madonnas and saints did me, for I only remember about three pictures in all Italy. I remember my headaches much better.”
“If you had a guide-book mind, there would be no room in it for anything else.” Ordham was very indulgent to this bride of nineteen short years who so often shot him a glance of sweet appeal, or prettily begged him not to be severe if he discovered that she did not know as much as he did. “How could a girl just out of school compete with quite the cleverest young man on earth?” He had already begun to wonder how he could have expected her to know anything, and still oftener how any woman could look such unutterable wisdom out of an apparently empty skull. That bony structure, which included a high intellectual brow, width between the eyes, and a fine decided nose, was merely the shell inherited from a long line of able Americans who had made history, political and financial. It was a perfect and a very roomy shell. He had also begun to ask himself how long it would take to furnish it, and if the process would be as interesting as he had fancied. But what mystified him more than all was that during those weeks of his courtship, conscious and unconscious, he should have believed her to be serious, studious, remote, vastly above her sex and age in all respects. Of course, he reflected, he was in love all the time—no doubt—and blind from the moment her beauty and grace had dazzled him in that incomparable setting. He knew now that Mabel had not progressed in her literary drudgeries beyond Scott and Macaulay, and had by no means exhausted those prolific authors; indeed, she openly yearned for abridged editions.
But that she possessed the shrewdness and adaptability of her sex and race was indisputable. Her brain was active if empty, and he had observed that during the long hour of the wedding reception she had talked with ease and volubility to every one, while sacrificing nothing of her girlish dignity. That she possessed grace, tact, the social talent, and was brilliantly, if superficially, accomplished, went far toward reconciling the future diplomatist to her complete indifference to Balzac, Flaubert, Meredith, Maupassant, Ibsen, and Turgénev. He chided himself for his unreasonableness in having deliberately created an ideal, and expected a girl just out of the school-room to fulfil it. And they had been married only a week. At least, if she had chattered almost incessantly, she knew when to drop a subject before it drove him mad, and she had suggested almost every phase of femininity. She had embroidered a bit one rainy morning when they could not roam in the woods; she had ridden horseback with him, played tennis and croquet, and sketched him in twenty different attitudes. Of her accomplishments and variety there could be no doubt. Nor of her young fascination. As they rose at the end of the dinner, although he involuntarily noticed again that the room dwarfed her, he also reminded himself that her cheek was like the traditional rose leaf, her pink mouth and even little teeth were worthy of a sonnet, and that she was altogether exquisite and desirable.
XLIIHIS HOUSE OF CARDS
For three weeks they roamed about the beautiful gloomy old park with its formal gardens, its old-fashioned English rose garden and shrubberies, and its many groves and alleys. The Italian garden was their favourite setting for the love drama still in progress; and Ordham could imagine no more beautiful picture composed by woman and Nature than Mabel leaning on the moss-grown balustrade above the sunken garden, with the high rigid cypresses and the setting sun behind her, and her hand resting lightly on one of the urns. But if Mabel had the gift of making pictures of herself, she was as often absorbed in the pleasures offered by perfect country weather. They rode, drove, played tennis and croquet, received and returned calls and dinners, and even attended a meet. But one day the weather changed abruptly. They awoke to the sound of a steady hopeless downpour. This, to married lovers, bent only on being happy, was but an enchanting variation. They explored the castle, ransacked trunks in a garret, searched for hidden springs in panels and secret drawers of cabinets, and, with the aid of a lantern and conducted by Mrs. Felt, investigated underground rooms that may once have done duty as dungeons.
Finally, exhausted and chilled, they retreated to the library fire, where Ordham extended himself on the hearthrug, and Mabel, again a picture in a red scarf over her white frock and thrown into high relief by LaLa, lay in a deep easy chair and discoursed of popping corn and roasting chestnuts. Suddenly she sat erect, struck by a brilliant idea.
“I’ll cable mother to-morrow to bring over a lot of poppers and boxes of corn. It will be such fun to teach people, and so original.”
“I am afraid there are only tile stoves in Italy,” murmured Ordham, sleepily.
“Oh! I had forgotten Italy! Dear, darling Jackie, do let us spend six months at Ordham. With all my dreams I had hardly the ghost of an idea of how fascinating, how perfectly heavenly, it would be to live here. And not only the castle—but England, this country life, everything! I can’t go away!”
“But Mabel—not only am I due in Rome one week from to-day, but we cannot outstay our welcome. Bridg is not the most generous and hospitable of mortals. It is a miracle that he lent us the place at all, and if we stayed too long—What is the matter?”
Mabel was staring down at him with a face deeply flushed and the light of a terrified defiance in her eyes.
“What is it?” repeated Ordham, uneasily. “You are not ill?”
“Oh, no! Well—it would have to come out pretty soon, anyhow. Jackie, I have a terrible confession to make.”
“Confession?”
“Yes—don’t look as if you thought I was going to say I had been engaged before, or something. You will be surprised at first, but afterward you will be perfectly delighted. Oh, Jackie! I have leased Ordham for five years.”
“What?” Ordham rose slowly to his feet. There was a red stain on his face; he looked as if he had been struck. “What? I don’t understand.”
“I have always wanted it so much! I couldn’t resist when Lady Bridgminster said your brother was so anxious to break the entail—to make money out of the place. Of course I was not such a fool as to buy what will one day be ours, but it was my own idea to lease it, and I think it a very bright one. My, but he charged a price! Bobby was furious. But I don’t care if you will only stay. What is money for? Don’t look at me like that!”
“I am very much surprised.”
Ordham walked slowly to the end of the room and back again. Then he confronted his wife. “It was my right to be consulted,” he said, with his elaborate gentle courtesy, which Mabel had yet to learn might cover a very fury of anger, cold resentment, or the instinct of self-protection on the alert.
“You would never have consented,” she said ingenuously. “You would have said, ‘What is the use?’ You were so bent on going abroad.”
“Of course.”
“I am sure that when you have thought it over you will simply love the idea of this wonderful old castle being really your own instead of waiting and waiting and waiting for it. It is horrid, waiting for people to die, anyhow.”
“Much as I should like to possess Ordham, I have no desire to live in England. I do not care for English life except at rare intervals. There is nothing of the English country gentleman in me, and I prefer the Continent. That was one of my reasons for entering the diplomatic service.”
“How can anybody like those down-at-the-heel aristocracies and vulgar bourgeoisies with all the money when one can have England—the only real thing? Oh, Jackie dear, please, please stay!” She clasped her hands, and he noted afresh, sharply displeased with himself, how beautiful she was. “I know, I know we shall be much happier here. And I haven’t half seen London, been really a part of its wonderful life.”
“You are talking like a spoilt child, crying for a toy,” he said pleasantly. “Do you realize that you are asking me to give up my career?”
“Do you really care as much about it as you think? If you had been the oldest son and inherited four years ago, should you have thought about it?”
He took another turn up and down the room. “Perhaps not,” he said finally. “But I think a great deal about it at present.”
“I don’t believe you have ever known what you wanted. Somebody always—Lady Bridgminster says that she and your father chose your career, that you were always too indolent to plan anything, take any initiative. Oh, I have heard her discuss you a thousand times. I am sure that if you settle down here, you will like it a million times better than that tiresome old Continent. You can run for Parliament if you want a career. Lady Bridgminster says that you have all sorts of abilities if you would only wake up, and politics are certainly in your blood.”
A white light was rising in his brain. “I fancy that I am quite the most dronish man alive. More than once in my life I have had the sensation of being gently engineered up to or past some crisis—and too indolent—polite word!—even to attempt to formulate the impression.” He paused a full minute as if he would repress the question that finally slipped from his tongue, “Was I engineered into this marriage?”
Mabel flushed again and her eyes expanded, but she clapped her hands with a fine assumption of gay defiance. “Should you really have thought of marrying me if the idea had not deliberately been put into your head?”
He gazed at her with heavy veiled eyes, which she misread, and which covered revolt and fury. “How interesting,” he said softly. “Do tell me about it. It was your clever mother, of course.”
“And yours! She frightened you and roused all your stubbornness by threatening you with that dreadful Rosamond Hayle—who was engaged all the time! Oh, it was too funny!” Mabel, carried away by her little sense of drama, and completely deceived by her husband’s smiling face, ran on. “You can’t find any fault with me, at least, for I was frightfully in love with you—I never thought of any one else from the moment we met in Munich. Lady Bridgminster, of course, wanted you to marry a fortune, and Momma was equally set on the match, as she is so hard to please, and you are as much her ideal as mine. Heavens! how they coached poor little me. My head nearly burst with the effort even to look intellectual. I had to play the scornful indifferent beauty lest your lordship wander off in search of more difficult game. And all the time I was simply dying to write you a little note and ask you to meet me for a walk in Kensington Gardens and have it out. That last week I had to take to embroidery in order to keep my eyes down. If you could see those stitches! But Momma and Lady Bridgminster said that I must hold off a while longer, that if I dropped into your hand like a ripe plum, you would find some way of getting out of it; your mother says that the only time you really rouse yourself is when you want to get out of something you have let yourself in for, and then you display positive genius. I was frightened half to death. Oh, thank heaven, it is all over!”
She made a graceful leap and flung her arms about his neck. “You don’t mind a bit, do you? It isn’t as if I were a poor girl angling for a rich man; and I should have been as wild about you if your brother had a dozen children. Now you can always tell yourself that you didn’t marry me for my horrid money, but really fell in love. That is much nicer. You are too funny. You might have fallen in love with me in the course of a year or two if left to yourself, but in such a short time—without pilots—oh, never! And now it has turned out so wonderfully for the best.”
“I wonder.” He disengaged himself and walked the length of the room again. He felt a fool in a world of liars.
Mabel tactfully returned to her chair and bided her time. She had a shrewd albeit a small brain, and suddenly guessed that he felt some natural resentment at having been piloted, even for his own happiness. She had wisely yielded to the impulse to confess what he must have discovered in time (she had no belief in her ability to keep any secret for long), and never could man be more complacent than during his honeymoon. What the silliest woman does not know instinctively up to a certain point is not worthy of record, and Mabel felt that she had every reason to be sure of herself. Not only was she beautiful and accomplished, but she had all the arrogance of new-world wealth. Reared in luxury, she would have found it difficult to recall an ungratified wish, save possibly for unlimited sweets, but nevertheless she had a very keen sense of the value and power of money; and as she watched the nervous figure of her husband perambulating the upper end of the room and then glanced slowly about the immense apartment with its thousands of volumes, many of them priceless, the ceiling with its carved and pictured panels and gilded rosettes, its gallery supported on Corinthian pillars, carved in suave and flowing lines, and its stone mantel in three stories cut with the arms of the house, the upper panel set with a faded picture of the Ordham that fell at Towton in 1461, she concluded that no man in his senses would quarrel for long with a ruse that had given him while still in his first youth one of the greatest properties in England. Their income was something over four hundred thousand dollars a year, and Mrs. Cutting’s was at their disposal. To spend such a sum on the Continent was practically impossible. A mere attaché could not outshine his chief in the splendour of his establishment; and as for continental society, Mabel had all that contempt for it peculiar to the ambitious American who knows nothing of the inner circles of the European aristocracies and whose Mecca is London. With what might be called the American dollar instinct she had aimed straight for the top. To an immediate title she was indifferent, for she knew that Bridgminster would not marry. With all the strength of her slender equipment—and youth is always strong—she loved Ordham. She would have spurned strawberry leaves for his sake; but live in England and be a great lady and a “beauty” she would. These were legitimate ambitions, quite compatible with love, and as she had brought so much to her husband, she was entitled to much in return. Indeed, he should be eager to give all the equivalent in his power for the fortune that had been placed at his independent disposal. Mabel would have settled her ultimate penny on him instead of the solitary million upon which both sides, without bringing the young people into the sordid discussion, had agreed; but she was too American not to feel that when a penniless young man, with no earning capacity whatever, marries a wealthy and generous girl, he should give her something besides love in return.
It was true that Ordham, supported by his mother, could give her as definite a place in London society as if his brother were already dead; but Mabel’s position was already brilliant, no girl had ever received more flattering attentions, and she was too young to be affected by her mother’s occasional lament that they did not, even under Lady Bridgminster’s wing, “go everywhere,” that there were peaks inaccessible to the Cutting millions and proud descent until some great permanent connection cleared the way as a matter of course. Nevertheless, that cool little brain, inherited from money-makers and money-conservers, reminded Mabel that her Jackie, in not yet being able to make her Countess of Bridgminster, was not giving value received; therefore should he live in England and permit her to derive every possible advantage from this marriage. Mabel’s character was not built about a deeply embedded steel frame like Ordham’s, but she was thoroughly spoilt, although so well brought up that she had never dared to snub or contradict her mother in the vulgar American style. One private little resource she had, however, which she had often brought to bear when her doting and unsuspecting parent would have spared her the fatigue of pleasures beyond her years: she could not only weep beautifully, but work herself up into a condition bordering upon hysteria; and she had invariably terrified her parent into submission when driven to this extreme, as well as her teachers and governesses,—every one, in fact, whose pleasant duty it was to keep the little feet of the amiable heiress upon the strait and narrow way that leads to perfect success.
Mabel arranged herself gracefully in her chair and spread out her voluminous white skirts as a bed for LaLa, complacently sure of her victory in this engagement with her equally spoilt young husband. In the course of a few moments he walked down the room and stood before her.
“You are so wonderfully clever,” he said, with his charming smile. “It only makes me the more confident that you were born to be the wife of a diplomatist. But I cannot loaf here on your money. You are not the first American I have known, and I have absorbed a few ideas that might not have bothered me a year or two ago. I am now all the more disposed to make a career for myself that I may in a measure balance this great fortune of yours. Bridg is not yet forty. We are a long-lived race. It may be twenty, thirty, years before I can offer you any other equivalence. I hate politics. I have passed my examinations by a miracle. The diplomatic path is almost as miraculously smoothed for me by family influence. We have been for generations what is known as one of the diplomatic families; and just now one of my mother’s cousins is prime minister and another secretary for the colonies. A year hence and they may be in opposition. I saw in this morning’sTimesthat one of my own cousins has been appointed ambassador to St. Petersburg. He will do anything for my mother. We can go there if you dislike the idea of Rome. My promotion should be very rapid. When you are the wife of an ambassador you will find it vastly more entertaining than giving tiresome house parties in England.”
“But even if your promotion were rapid, we’d be frightfully old before you became ambassador—forty-five you’d be at the very least. Lady Bridgminster—I’ve heard all that discussed—” She had looked at him steadily during his long speech, at first with smiling incredulity, then with growing apprehension. For the first time she took note of the long line of his jaw, of the coldness of which those large ingenuous blue eyes were capable. Her brain worked rapidly. She recalled Lady Bridgminster’s amused comments upon the driving of “Johnny” in any direction by employing the right sort of opposition, that distinguished dame’s tactical use of Rosamond Hayle. But something deep down within her trembled a little—hinting of impotence, so new a sensation that she barely recognized it, although she fully understood that her Jackie had made up his mind. Therefore, postponing the higher tactics, she did what all sensible women mated to obstinate men ever do, she burst into tears.
But Ordham had seen women cry easily before, and was not as moved as a husband of four short weeks should be while his lovely bride wept and sobbed over the arm of her chair. He was ice-cold with anger; Mabel’s betrayal of the secret that his mother also was indifferent to his career was the final indignity; and he reflected cynically that the sooner a man discovered just how much a woman’s tears were worth the better.
But he was always courteous. He was also quite aware that underneath his wrath he was as much in love as ever. He was young and this exquisite creature was his; he appreciated the force of that subtle argument of hers, that if she had lent herself to the plot it had been through love alone. It would be some time before he forgot that she was an accomplished liar, and that he had been made a fool of by three clever women; but there was no particular reason why either he or his wife should be miserable when they still had much to make them happy. But they should be happy in his way, not hers. So he bent down and patted her head, somewhat awkwardly, for he felt anything but affectionate, and said very kindly:
“Don’t cry, Mabel. We will think no more about it.”
“No more about what?” sobbed Mabel. “Do you mean that you will go abroad?”
“Of course.”
“That means that you hate me.”
“How can you say such a thing?”
“You do! You do! If you didn’t, you wouldn’t refuse the first thing I ever asked you.”
“But the first thing happens to affect my whole future.”
“You don’t consider that it affects mine, too!” with sobs of increasing vehemence. “I shall be utterly miserable playing third fiddle to a lot of horrid old official women that think more of themselves than the Queen of England, of never being able to get away from the everlasting cackling of foreign languages, and of always being ill, for I—I—am never well abroad—”
“Oh? I first met you in Munich, and I never saw even an English girl with so beautiful a bloom.”
“But I’m never well unless I’m happy!” articulated the desperate Mabel. “And I hate, hate, hate the Continent. I adore England. I must, must live my dreams. I have dreamed of this for years. A dozen men could have given me castles, but I wanted you, and you ought to give me that much in return.”
“If you love me so much, it seems odd to me that you do not place my future before those old fairy tales of your childhood,” said the logical male to his mate.
“I can’t, oh, I can’t!” She raised her face to his. There was a pause. Ordham stared at her, fascinated, almost forgetting his anger. He had never seen such big tears. One by one the immense crystal drops welled from those dark pools and slipped down her flushed cheeks. He felt that a woman was fortunate indeed to possess such a gift as those beautiful iridescent spheres, which, no doubt, she could command at will—irresistibly his thoughts flew to the soap bubbles of his boyhood—mechanically he began to count them—Mabel suddenly gave a strangled cry of defeat and rage, sprang to her feet, and fled from the room.
For two hours he sat by the fire and smoked, depressed and apprehensive, but determined. Then he went upstairs and knocked at his wife’s door. It was locked, but in a few moments the maid opened it gently and announced that Mrs. Ordham, after crying for the past two hours without pause, had fallen asleep.
On the following morning Hines informed him that mademoiselle—the maid—was quite worried: her mistress had cried all night, and was now in such an hysterical condition that she thought of sending for the doctor. Once more the husband craved admittance and was denied. He went for a ride, the weather being fine again. Upon his return he was told that the doctor was with his wife. In real alarm, he posted himself beside Mabel’s door, and in a few moments the little old man who had ushered him into the world came out.
“No—no—nothing serious, of course not. That is to say—you understand. She became alarmingly wrought up at the prospect of leaving England—you know what fancies—”
Ordham felt as if his very marrow had turned cold. “Not yet—surely not yet—” he stammered.
The doctor nodded. He rubbed his hands, feeling important and a trifle excited. “Indulge her for the present. You have the rest of your life for that career of lies they call diplomacy. Indulge this dear child, or I won’t answer for the consequences—her maid tells me that even when crossed in ordinary circumstances her health is menaced—the poor dear spoilt child of fortune! And so beautiful! I have pledged her my professional word to persuade you to remain in England for a year, at least. And what more natural, more beautiful, indeed, than this wish of hers that your first child should be born at Ordham? Think, too, of foreign doctors! So, go in, dear boy, and promise her to sit tight. Do, and she’ll be as fit as a fiddle to-morrow.”
Ordham, baffled and helpless, turned on his heel. “You can tell her that I will remain in England—of course,” he said. “I will see her in an hour or two. Just now I wish to go for a walk.”