Lord Reggie had quite made up his mind to ask Lady Locke to marry him.
He didn't in the least wish to be married, and felt that he never
should. But he also felt that marriage did not matter much either way.
In modern days it is a contract of no importance, as Esmé Amarinth often
said, and therefore a contract that can be entered into without
searching of heart or loss of perfect liberty. To him it simply meant
that a good-natured woman, who liked to kiss him, would open an account
for him at her banker's, and let him live with her when he felt so
disposed. He considered that such an arrangement would not be a bad one,
especially as the good-natured woman would in course of time cease to
like kissing him, and so free him from the one awkwardness that walked
in the train of matrimony. He told Esmé Amarinth of his decision.
Esmé sighed.
"So you are to be a capitalist, Reggie," he said. "Will you sing in the
woods near Esher? Will you flute to the great god whom stockbrokers
vulgarly worship? I wonder what a stockbroker is like. I don't think I
have ever seen one. I go out in Society too much, I suppose. Society has
its drawbacks. You meet so few people in it nowadays, and Royalties are
of course strictly tabooed. I was dining with Lady Murray last week and
mentioned the Prince by mistake. She got quite red all down her neck and
snorted--you know how she snorts, as if she had been born a
Baroness!--'One must draw the line somewhere.' The old aristocracy draws
it at Princes now, and who can blame them? Vulgarity has become so
common that it has lost its charm, and I shall really not be surprised
if good manners and chivalry come into vogue again. How strange it will
feel being polite once more, like wearing a long curled wig, and making
a leg and carrying a sword. You would look perfectly charming in a wig,
Reggie, and a cloak of carnation velvet with rosy shadows in the folds.
You would wear it beautifully, as you wear your sins, floating
negligently over your shoulders. Yes, you will be a strange and unique
capitalist. The average capitalist has the face of a Gentile, and the
stupidity of a Jew. I wonder how the fallacy that the Jews are a clever
race grew up? It is not the man who makes money that is clever, it is
the man who spends it. The intelligent pauper is the real genius. I am
an intelligent pauper."
"You are marvellous, Esmé. You are like some heavy scent that hangs in
clouds upon the air. You make people aware of you, who have never seen
you, or read you. You are like a fifth element."
"What shall I give you for a wedding present, Reggie? I think I will
give you the book of Common Prayer in the vulgar tongue. One would think
it was something written by a realist. The adjectives would apply to the
productions of George Moore, which are boycotted by Smith on account of
their want of style or something of the sort. If George Moore could only
learn the subtle art of indecency he might be tolerable. As it is, he
is, like Miss Yonge, merely tedious and domesticated. He ought to
associate more with educated people, instead of going perpetually to the
dependent performances of the independent theatre, whose motto seems to
be, 'If I don't shock you, I'm a Dutchman!' How curiously archaic it
must feel to be a Dutchman. It must be like having been born in Iceland,
or educated in a Grammar School. I would give almost anything to feel
really Dutch for half-an-hour."
Reggie was looking a little pensive. The performance of his anthem on
the morrow weighed slightly upon his mind. He had an uneasy feeling that
Jimmy Sands and his followers would throw nuances to the winds when they
found themselves in the public eye. When the critical morning was over
he meant to propose to Lady Locke, and in the meanwhile he supposed that
he ought to woo her, or court her, or do something of the kind. He was
not in the least shy, but he had not the faintest idea how to woo a
woman. The very notion of such a proceeding struck him as highly
ridiculous and almost second-rate. It was like an old-fashioned notion.
"Esmé," he said, "what do people do before they propose? I suppose they
lead up to it in some absurd way. If I were a rustic I could go and sit
upon a stile with a straw in my mouth, and whistle at Lady Locke, while
she stood staring at me and giggling. But I am not a rustic--I am an
artist. Really, I don't see what I can do. Will she expect something?"
"My dear Reggie, women always expect something. Women are like minors,
they live upon their expectations."
"Well, then," Reggie said petulantly, "what am I to do? Shall I ask her
to take a walk, or what? I really can't put my arm round her waist. One
owes something to oneself in spite of all the nonsense that Ibsen
talks."
"One owes everything to oneself, and I also owe a great deal to other
people--a great deal that I hope to live long enough never to repay. A
debt of honour is one of the finest things in the world. The very name
recalls a speech out of 'Guy Livingstone.' By the way, I sometimes wish
that I had been born swart as he was. I should have pleased Miss Rhoda
Broughton, and she is so deliciously prosaic. Is she not the woman who
said that she was always inspired to a pun by the sight of a cancer
hospital? or am I thinking of Helen Mathers? I can never tell them
apart--their lack of style is so marvellously similar. Why do women
always write in the present tense, Reggie? Is it because they have no
past? To go about without a past, must be like going about without one's
trousers. I should feel positively indecent."
"There is no such thing as indecency, Esmé, just as there are no such
things as right and wrong. There are only art and imbecility. But how
shall I prepare for my proposal? What did you do?"
"I did nothing. My wife proposed to me, and I refused her. Then she
went and put up some things called banns, I believe. Afterwards she sent
me a white waistcoat in a brown paper parcel, and told me to meet her at
a certain church on a certain day. I declined. She came in a hired
carriage--a thing like a large deep bath, with two enormously fat
parti-coloured horses--to fetch me. To avoid a scene I went with her,
and I understand that we were married. But the colour of the window
behind the altar was so atrocious, and the design--of Herodias carrying
about the head of John the Baptist on a dish--so inartistically true to
life, that I could not possibly attend to the service."
"Poor Esmé," said Lord Reggie, in a tone charged with pathos, "I must
trust in my intuitions, then?"
"That is like trusting in one's convictions, Reggie. For the sake of the
stars do not be sensible. I would far rather see you lying in your
grave. Trust rather in your emotions."
"But I have none about Lady Locke. How could you suppose so?"
"I never suppose. I leave that to the heads of departments when they are
answering questions in the House. It is the privilege of incompetence to
suppose. The artist will always know. But there is Lady Locke, Reggie,
being sensible in the rose garden. What must the roses think of her? Go
to her, Reggie, tell her that you do not love her, and will marry her.
That is what a true woman loves to hear."
As Lord Reggie went away, walking very delicately, with his head
drooping towards his left shoulder, and his hands dangling in a
dilettante manner at his sides, Madame Valtesi appeared at the French
window of the drawing-room, refusing to join Tommy in some boyish game.
After a parleying, which she conducted in profile, she turned her full
face round, and having shaken her tormentor off, she proceeded slowly
towards Amarinth, with an expression of extreme and illimitable
irritability.
"Children are more lacking in discernment than the beasts of the field,"
she said, as she came up to him. "That boy is actually vexed because I
will not go and play at Tom Tiddler's Ground with him. He positively
expected that I would be Tiddler! Tiddler! Did you ever hear of such a
name? It sounds like one of Dickens' characters. He says that all you
have to do is to run about! Give me the long chair, please. He has
almost succeeded in making me feel like Tiddler. It is a dreadful
sensation."
She fanned herself slowly and looked round.
"Who is that in the rose garden?" she asked, putting up her eyeglass.
"Oh! Lady Locke and Lord Reggie--an ill-assorted couple. They ought to
marry."
"Why, dear lady?" said Esmé.
"Because they are ill-assorted. Affinities never marry nowadays. They
always run away together and live on the Continent, waiting for decrees
nisi. We repent of what we do so hastily nowadays. People divorce each
other almost on sight. Will Lady Locke accept him?"
"Do widows ever refuse?"
"I am a widow."
"Indeed! I did not know it, or, if I ever knew it, I had forgotten. You
are so delightfully married in your conduct."
"Was it Whistler who said that first?"
"No, I believe it comes originally from the Dutch. But it is my own
adaptation, and I am too modest to put my name on a programme. Ah!
Madame Valtesi, why have I never set the world in a blaze? I have plied
the bellows most industriously, and I have made the twigs crackle, yet
the fire splutters a good deal. Perhaps I have too much genius. Can it
be that? My good things are in everybody's mouth."
"That's just it. You ought to have swallowed a cork years and years
ago."
"Like Mr. Henry James. I always know when he has thought of a clever
thing at a party."
"How?"
"By his leaving it immediately, and in total silence. He rushes home to
write his thought down. His memory is treacherous."
"And does he often have to leave a party?"
"Pretty often. About once a year, I believe."
"It must be very trying socially to be so clever. So Lord Reggie is
actually serious?"
"I hope he is never that. He will marry, as he sins, prettily, with the
gaiety of a young Greek god."
"Marry and not settle down, as we all do now? We have improved upon the
old code."
"We have practically abolished codes in London. In the country I fancy
they continue to think of the commandments. How many commandments are
there?"
"I forget! Seven, I think, or is it seventeen? Probably seventeen. I
know there are a great many. I heard of a clergyman in a Northern parish
who took twenty minutes to read them, although he left out all the h's.
Lady Locke and Lord Reggie have wandered away. It is like the garden
scene of 'Faust.' Martha ought to come on now with Mephistopheles. Ah!
here are Mrs. Windsor and tea. They will have to do instead."
Although Lord Reggie was such a novice in wooing, and would very much
have preferred being wooed, he managed to convey to the mind of Lady
Locke the notion that he had some vague intentions towards her. And that
evening, as she dressed for dinner, she asked herself plainly what they
were. That he loved her, she did not even for a moment imagine. She was
not much given to self-deception. That he loved her money, a far more
reasonable supposition as she mentally allowed--she did not really and
honestly believe. For Lord Reggie, whatever were his faults, always
conveyed the impression of being entirely thoughtless and improvident
about worldly affairs. He had everything he wanted, naturally. Any other
condition would have been wholly impossible to him, and would have
seemed painfully out of place, and foreign to the scheme of the world,
to those who knew him. But he never appeared to bother about any means
for obtaining things, and Lady Locke thought him the last boy in the
universe to lay a plot for the obtaining of a fortune. Had he, then,
conceived a light passing fancy for her? She thought this possible,
though a little unlikely. He was so different from the other men whom
she had known, that she could never "place" him, or feel that she knew
at all what his mind was likely to do under given conditions, or in cut
and dried situations. Undoubtedly he had begun to think about her as
well as about himself, an unusual conjunction, which no one would have
anticipated. But exactly how he thought about her, Lady Locke could not
tell; nor could she precisely tell either how she thought about him. He
began to mean something to her. That was all she could say even to
herself. She dressed for dinner very slowly that evening. Her window was
open, and as she was pinning some yellow roses in the front of her gown,
having dismissed her maid, she heard the piping, excited voice of Tommy
asking a question of some hidden companion in the garden below.
"How does it get like that?" he exclaimed, with the penetrating squeak
of a very young child. "I don't see. Does it grow?"
"No, Tommy," replied the soft voice of Lord Reggie, "nothing grows like
that. It is too strange and beautiful to have grown."
"Well, then, Reggie, do they paint it?"
"Never mind how it is done. That is the mistake we continually make. If
the dolls dance exquisitely we should ignore the man who pulls the
wires. Results are everything. When we see you in that pretty
ivory-coloured suit we are content that you are pretty; we don't wish to
learn how every button is buttoned, how every string is tied."
"There aren't any strings," cried Tommy. "Boys don't have strings."
"We don't care to find out how the tailor cuts and fashions, how he sews
and stitches. He does all this in order that you may be beautiful. And
we have only to think of you. Do you love this carnation, Tommy, as I
love it? Do you worship its wonderful green? It is like some exquisite
painted creature with dyed hair and brilliant eyes. It has the supreme
merit of being perfectly unnatural. To be unnatural is often to be
great. To be natural is generally to be stupid. To-morrow I will give
you a carnation, Tommy, and you shall wear it at church when you go to
hear my beautiful anthem."
Tommy gave vent to ecstatic cries of joy.
Lady Locke, standing by the window, reddened all over her face, and a
fire flashed suddenly in her usually calm and gentle eyes. She threw the
yellow roses roughly down upon her dressing-table and went hastily out
of the room, leaving the door open behind her. When she reached the
drawing-room she called her boy in from the garden.
"Tommy," she said, "it is past eight. Run away to bed. You were very
late last night."
The child immediately began to protest; but she cut him short.
"Off with you," she cried. "Make haste. I can see you are looking
tired."
"I am not tired, mother," said the boy, preparing to whimper.
"Tired or not, you must go when I say it," answered Lady Locke, with a
harshness such as she had never displayed before. "Don't dispute about
the matter, but go straight off. My boy must be like a soldier and obey
the orders of his superior officer. I am your superior officer."
She pointed to the door, and Tommy departed reluctantly, with a very red
face, and the menacing expression of an angry, governed child.
Lord Reggie came in from the garden. He found Lady Locke apparently
immersed in the foreign intelligence of the _Times_ Supplement.
* * * * *