A LESSON.
“Whom the gods mean to destroy, they blind.”
Mrs. Vansittart had passed the age of blind love. She had not the
incentive of a healthy competition. She had not that more dangerous
incentive of middle-aged vanity, which draws the finger of derision so
often in the direction of widows. And yet she took a certain pleasure
in playing a half-careless and wholly cynical Juliet to Percy Roden's
_gauche_ Romeo. She had no intention of marrying him, and yet she
continued to encourage him even now that open war was declared between
Cornish and the malgamite makers. Cornish had indeed thanked Mrs.
Vansittart for her assistance in the past in such a manner as to convey
to her that she could hardly be of use to him in the future. He had
magnified her good offices, and had warned her to beware of arousing
Von Holzen's anger. Indeed, her use of Percy Roden was at an end, and
yet she would not let him go. Cornish was puzzled, and so was
Dorothy. Percy Roden was gratified, and read the riddle by the light of
his own vanity. Mrs. Vansittart was not, perhaps, the first woman to
puzzle her neighbours by refusing to relinquish that which she did not
want. She was not the first, perhaps, to nurse a subtle desire to play
some part in the world rather than be left idle in the wings. So she
played the part that came first and easiest to her hand--a woman's
natural part, of stirring up strife between men.
She was, therefore, gratified when Von Holzen made his way slowly towards
her through the crowd on the Kursaal terrace one afternoon on the
occasion of a Thursday concert. She was sitting alone in a far
corner of the terrace, protected by a glass screen from the wind which
ever blows at Scheveningen. She never mingled with the summer visitors
at this popular Dutch resort--indeed, knew none of them. Von Holzen
seemed to be similarly situated; but Mrs. Vansittart knew that he did
not seek her out on that account. He was not a man to do anything--much
less be sociable--out of idleness. He only dealt with his fellow-beings
when he had a use for them.
She returned his grave bow with an almost imperceptible movement of the
head, and for a moment they looked hard at each other.
“Madame still lingers at The Hague,” he said.
“As you see.”
“And is the game worth the candle?”
He laid his hand tentatively on a chair, and looked towards her with an
interrogative glance. He would not, it appeared, sit down without her
permission. And, womanlike, she gave it, with a shrug of one shoulder.
A woman rarely refuses a challenge. “And is the game worth the candle?”
he repeated.
“One can only tell when it is played out,” was the reply; and Herr von
Holzen glanced quickly at the lady who made it.
He turned away and listened to the music. An occasional concert was the
one diversion he allowed himself at this time from his most absorbing
occupation of making a fortune. He had probably a real love of music,
which is not by any means given to the good only, or the virtuous.
Indeed, it is the art most commonly allied to vice.
“By the way,” said Von Holzen, after a pause, “that paper which it
pleased madame's fantasy to possess at one time--is destroyed. Its
teaching exists only in my unworthy brain.”
He turned and looked at her with his slow smile, his measuring eyes.
“Ah!”
“Yes; so madame need give the question no more thought, and may turn
her full attention to her new--fancy.”
Mrs. Vansittart was studying her programme, and did not look up or
display the slightest interest in what he was saying.
“Every event seems but to serve to strengthen our position,” went on
Von Holzen, still half listening to the music. “Even the untimely death
of Lord Ferriby--which might at first have appeared a _contretemps_.
Cornish takes home the coffin by tonight's mail, I understand. Men may
come, madame, and men may go--but we go on for ever. We are still
prosperous--despite our friends. And Cornish is nonplussed. He does not
know what to do next, and fate seems to be against him. He has no luck.
We are manufacturing--day and night.”
“You are interested in Mr. Cornish,” observed Mrs. Vansittart, coolly;
and she saw a sudden gleam in Von Holzen's eyes.
After all, the man had a passion over which his control was
insecure--the last, the longest of the passions--hatred. He shrugged
his shoulders.
“He has forced himself upon our notice--unnecessarily as the result has
proved--only to find out that there is no stopping us.”
He could scarcely control his voice as he spoke of Cornish, and looked
away as if fearing to show the expression of his eyes.
Mrs. Vansittart watched him with a cool little smile. Von Holzen had
not come here to talk of Cornish. He had come on purpose to say
something which he had not succeeded in saying yet, and she was not
ignorant of this. She was going to make it as difficult as possible for
him, so that when he at last said what he had come to say, she should
know it, and perhaps divine his motives.
“Even now,” he continued, “we have succeeded beyond our expectations.
We are rich men, so that madame--need delay no longer.” He turned and
looked her straight in the eyes.
“I?” she inquired, with raised eyebrows. “Need delay no longer--in
what?”
“In consummating the happiness of my partner, Percy Roden,” he was
clever enough to say without being impertinent. “He--and his banking
account--are really worth the attention of any lady.”
Mrs. Vansittart laughed, and, before answering, acknowledged stiffly
the stiff salutation of a passer.
“Then it is suggested that I am waiting for Mr. Roden to be rich enough
in order to marry him?”
“It is the talk of gossips and servants.”
Mrs. Vansittart looked at him with an amused smile. Did he really know
so little of the world as to take his information from gossips and
servants?
“Ah,” she said, and that was all. She rose and made a little signal
with her parasol to her coachman, who was waiting in the shadow of the
Kursaal. As she drove home, she wondered why Von Holzen was afraid that
she should marry Percy Roden, who, as it happened, was coming to tea in
Park Straat that evening. Mrs. Vansittart had not exactly invited
him--not, at all events, that he was aware of. He was under the
impression that he had himself proposed the visit.
She remembered that he was coming, but gave no further thought to him.
All her mind was, indeed, absorbed with thoughts of Von Holzen, whom
she hated with the dull and deadly hatred of the helpless. The sight of
him, the sound of his voice, stirred something within her that vibrated
for hours, so that she could think of nothing else--could not even give
her attention to the little incidents of daily life. She pretended to
herself that she sought retribution--that she wished on principle to
check a scoundrel in his successful career. The heart, however, knows
no principles; for these are created by and belong to the mind. Which
explains why many women seem to have no principles and many virtuous
persons no heart.
Mrs. Vansittart went home to make a careful toilet pending the arrival
of Percy Roden. She came down to the drawing-room, and stood idly at
the window.
“The talk of gossips and servants,” she repeated bitterly to herself.
One of Von Holzen's shafts had, at all events, gone home. And Percy
Roden came into the room a few minutes afterwards. His manner had more
assurance than when he had first made Mrs. Vansittart's acquaintance.
He had, perhaps, a trifle less respect for the room and its occupant.
Mrs. Vansittart had allowed him to come nearer to her; and
when a woman allows a man of whom she has a low opinion to come near to
her, she trifles with her own self-respect, and does harm which,
perhaps, may never be repaired.
“I was too busy to go to the concert this afternoon,” he said, sitting
down in his loose-limbed way.
His assumption that his absence had been noticed rather nettled his
hearer.
“Ah! Were you not there?” she inquired.
He turned and looked at her with his curt laugh. “If I had been there
you would have known it,” he said.
It was just one of those remarks--delivered in the half-mocking voice
assumed in self-protection--which Mrs. Vansittart had hitherto allowed
to pass unchallenged. And now, quite suddenly, she resented the manner
and the speech.
“Indeed,” she said, with a subtle inflection of tone which should have
warned him.
But he was engaged in drawing down his cuffs. Many young men would know
more of the world if they had no cuffs or collars to distract them.
“Yes,” answered Roden; “if I had gone to the concert it would not have
been for the music.”
Percy Roden's method of making love was essentially modern. He threw to
Mrs. Vansittart certain scraps of patronage and admiration, which she
could pick up seriously and keep if she cared to. But he was not going
to risk a wound to his vanity by taking the initiative too earnestly.
Mrs. Vansittart, who was busy at the tea-table, set down a cup which
she had in her hand and crossed the room towards him.
“What do you mean, Mr. Roden?” she asked slowly.
He looked up with wavering eyes, and visibly lost colour under her
gaze.
“What do I mean?”
“Yes. What do you mean when you say that, if you had gone to the
concert, it would not have been for the music; that if you had been
there, I should have known of your presence, and a hundred
other--impertinences?”
At first Roden thought that the way was being made easy for him as it
is in books, as, indeed, it sometimes is in life, when it happens to be
a way that is not worth the treading; but the last word stung him like
a lash--as it was meant to sting. It was, perhaps, that one word that
made him rise from his chair.
“If you meant to object to anything that I may say, you should have
done so long ago,” he said. “Who was the first to speak at the hotel
when I came to The Hague? Which of us was it that kept the friendship
up and cultivated it? I am not blind. I could hardly be anything else,
if I had failed to see what you have meant all along.”
“What have I meant all along?” she asked, with a strange little smile.
“Why, you have meant me to say such things as I have said, and perhaps
more.”
“More--what can you mean?”
She looked at him still with a smile, which he did not understand. And,
like many men, he allowed his vanity to explain things which his
comprehension failed to elucidate.
“Well,” he said, after a moment's hesitation, “will you marry me?
There!”
“No, Mr. Roden, I will not,” she answered promptly; and then suddenly
her eyes flashed, at some recollection, perhaps--at some thought
connected with her happy past contrasted with this sordid, ignoble
present.
“You!” she cried. “Marry you!”
“Why,” he asked, with a bitter little laugh, “what is there wrong with
me?”
“I do not know what there is wrong with you. And I am not interested to
inquire. But, so far as I am concerned, there is nothing right.”
A woman's answer after all, and one of those reasons which are no
reasons, and yet rule the world.
Roden looked at her, completely puzzled. In a flash of thought he
recalled Dorothy's warning, and her incomprehensible foresight.
“Then,” he said, lapsing in his self-forgetfulness into the terse
language of his everyday life and thought, “what on earth have you been
driving at all along?”
“I have been driving at Herr von Holzen and the Malgamite scheme. I
have been helping Tony Cornish,” she answered.
So Percy Roden quitted the house at the corner of Park Straat a wiser
man, and perhaps he left a wiser woman in it.
“My dear,” said Mrs. Vansittart to Marguerite Wade, long afterwards,
when a sort of friendship had sprung up and ripened between them--“my
dear, never let a man ask you to marry him unless you mean to say yes.
It will do neither of you any good.”
And Marguerite, who never allowed another the last word, gave a shrewd
little nod before she answered--“I always say no--before they ask me.”