"I WILL HAVE NO MERCY ON HIM."
The Buenos Ayres steamer was within sight of land--English land. Those
shining lights yonder were the twin lanterns of the Lizard. Leonard and
his friend paced the bridge smoking their cigars, and looking towards
that double star which shone out as one light in the distance; and
thinking that they were going back to civilization--conventional
habits--a world which must seem cramped and narrow--not much better than
the squirrel's cage seems to the squirrel--after the vast width and
margin of that wilder, freer world they had just left--where men and
women were not much more civilized than the unbroken horses that were
brought out struggling, and roped in among a team of older stagers, to
be dragged along anyhow for the first mile or so, rebellious, and
wondering, and to fall in with the necessities of the case somehow
before the stage was done.
There was no thrill of patriotic rapture in the breast of either
traveller as he watched yonder well-known light brightening on the dark
horizon. Leonard had left his country too often to feel any deep emotion
at returning to it. He had none of those strong feelings which mark a
man as the son of the soil, and make it seem to him that he belongs to
one spot of earth, and can neither live nor die happily anywhere else.
The entire globe was his country, a world created for him to roam about
in, climbing all its hills, shooting in all its forests, fishing in all
its rivers, exhausting all the sport and amusement that was to be had
out of it--and with no anchor to chain him down to any given spot. Yet,
though he had none of the deep feeling of the exile returning to the
country of his birth, he was not without emotion as he saw the Lizard
light broadening and yellowing under the pale beams of a young moon. He
was thinking of his wife--the wife whose face he had not seen since that
gloomy morning at Mount Royal, when she sat pale and calm in her place
at the head of his table--maintaining her dignity as the mistress of his
house, albeit he knew her heart was breaking. From the hour of her
return from the Kieve, they had been parted. She had kept her room,
guarded by Jessie; and he had been told, significantly, that it was not
well they should meet.
How would she receive him now? What were her thoughts and feelings about
that dead man? The man whom she had loved and he had hated: not only
because his wife loved him--though that reason was strong enough for
hatred--but because the man was in every attribute so much his own
superior. Never had Leonard Tregonell felt such keen anxiety as he felt
now, when he speculated upon his wife's greeting--when he tried to
imagine how they two would feel and act standing face to face after
nearly a year of severance.
The correspondence between them had been of the slightest. For the first
six months his only home-letters had been from Miss Bridgeman--curt,
business-like communications--telling him of his boy's health and
general progress, and of any details about the estate which it was his
place to be told. Of Christabel she wrote as briefly as possible. "Mrs.
Tregonell is a little better." "Mrs. Tregonell is gradually regaining
strength." "The doctor considers Mrs. Tregonell much improved," and so
on.
Later there had been letters from Christabel--letters written in
Switzerland--in which the writer confined herself almost entirely to
news of the boy's growth and improvement, and to the particulars of
their movements from one place to another--letters which gave not the
faintest indication of the writer's frame of mind: as devoid of
sentiment as an official communication from one legation to another.
He was going back to Mount Royal therefore in profound ignorance of his
wife's feelings--whether he would be received with smiles or frowns,
with tears or sullen gloom. Albeit not of a sensitive nature, this
uncertainty made him uncomfortable, and he looked at yonder faint grey
shore--the peaks and pinnacles of that wild western coast--without any
of those blissful emotions which the returning wanderer always
experiences--in poetry.
Plymouth, however, where they went ashore next morning, seemed a very
enjoyable place after the cities of South America. It was not so
picturesque a town, nor had it that rowdy air and dissipated flavour
which Mr. Tregonell appreciated in the cities of the South; but it had a
teeming life and perpetual movement, which were unknown on the shores of
the Pacific; the press and hurry of many industries--the steady fervour
of a town where wealth is made by honest labour--the intensity of a
place which is in somewise the cradle of naval warfare. Mr. Tregonell
breakfasted and lunched at the Duke of Cornwall, strolled on the Hoe,
played two or three games on the first English billiard-table he had
seen for a year, and found a novel delight in winners and losers.
An afternoon train took the travellers on to Launceston, where the Mount
Royal wagonette, and a cart for the luggage, were waiting for them at
the station.
"Everything right at the Mount?" asked Leonard, as Nicholls touched his
hat.
"Yes, Sir."
He asked for no details, but took the reins from Nicholls without
another word. Captain Vandeleur jumped up by his side, Nicholls got in
at the back, with a lot of the smaller luggage--gun-cases,
dressing-bags, despatch-boxes--and away they went up the castle hill,
and then sharp round to the right, and off at a dashing pace along the
road to the moor. It was a two hours' drive even for the best goers; but
Mr. Tregonell spoke hardly a dozen times during the journey, smoking all
the way, and with his eyes always on his horses.
At last they wound up the hill to Mount Royal, and passed the lodge, and
saw all the lights of the old wide-spreading Tudor front shining upon
them through the thickening grey of early evening.
"A good old place, isn't it?" said Leonard, just a little moved at sight
of the house in which he had been born. "A man might come home to a
worse shelter."
"This man might come home to lodgings in Chelsea," said Jack Vandeleur,
touching himself lightly on the breast, with a grim laugh. "It's a
glorious old place, and you needn't apologize for being proud of it.
And now we've come back, I hope you are going to be jolly, for you've
been uncommonly glum while we've been away. The house looks cheerful,
doesn't it? I should think it must be full of company."
"Not likely," answered Leonard. "Christabel never cared about having
people. We should have lived like hermits if she had had her way."
"Then if the house isn't full of people, all I can say is there's a good
deal of candlelight going to waste," said Captain Vandeleur.
They were driving up to the porch by this time; the door stood wide
open; servants were on the watch for them. The hall was all aglow with
light and fire; people were moving about near the hearth. It was a
relief to Leonard to see this life and brightness. He had feared to find
a dark and silent house--a melancholy welcome--all things still in
mourning for the untimely dead.
A ripple of laughter floated from the hall as Leonard drew up his
horses, and two tall slim figures with fluffy heads, short-waisted
gowns, and big sashes, came skipping down the broad shallow steps.
"My sisters, by Jove," cried Jack, delighted. "How awfully jolly of Mrs.
Tregonell to invite them."
Leonard's only salutation to the damsels was a friendly nod. He brushed
by them as they grouped themselves about their brother--like a new
edition of Laocoon without the snakes, or the three Graces without the
grace--and hurried into the hall, eager to be face to face with his
wife. She came forward to meet him, looking her loveliest, dressed as he
had never seen her dressed before, with a style, a _chic_, and a daring
more appropriate to the Théâtre Français than to a Cornish squire's
house. She who, even in the height of the London season, had been
simplicity itself, recalling to those who most admired her, the picture
of that chaste and unworldly maiden who dwelt beside the Dove, now wore
an elaborate costume of brown velvet and satin, in which a Louis Quinze
velvet coat, with large cut-steel buttons and Mechlin _jabot_, was the
most striking feature. Her fair, soft hair was now fluffy, and stood up
in an infinity of frizzy curls from the broad white forehead. Diamond
solitaires flashed in her ears, her hands glittered with the rainbow
light of old family rings, which in days gone by she had been wont to
leave in the repose of an iron safe. The whole woman was changed. She
came to meet her husband with a Society smile; shook hands with him as
if he had been a commonplace visitor--he was too startled to note the
death-like coldness of that slender hand--and welcomed him with a
conventional inquiry about his passage from Buenos Ayres.
He stood transfixed--overwhelmed by surprise. The room was full of
people. There was Mrs. Fairfax Torrington, liveliest and most
essentially modern of well-preserved widows, always _dans le mouvement_,
as she said of herself; and there, lolling against the high oak
chimney-piece, with an air of fatuous delight in his own attractiveness,
was that Baron de Cazalet--pseudo artist, poet, and _littérateur_, who,
five seasons ago, had been an object of undisguised detestation with
Christabel. He, too, was essentially in the movement--æsthetic, cynical,
agnostic, thought-reading, spiritualistic--always blowing the last
fashionable bubble, and making his bubbles bigger and brighter than
other people's--a man who prided himself upon his "intensity" in every
pursuit--from love-making to gourmandize. There, again, marked out from
the rest by a thoroughly prosaic air, which, in these days of artistic
sensationalism is in itself a distinction--pale, placid, taking his ease
in a low basket chair, with his languid hand on Randie's black
muzzle--sat Mr. FitzJesse, the journalist, proprietor and editor of _The
Sling_, a fashionable weekly--the man who was always smiting the Goliahs
of pretence and dishonesty with a pen that was sharper than any stone
that ever David slung against the foe. He was such an amiable-looking
man--had such a power of obliterating every token of intellectual force
and fire from the calm surface of his countenance, that people, seeing
him for the first time, were apt to stare at him in blank wonder at his
innocent aspect. Was this the wielder of that scathing pen--was this the
man who wrote not with ink but with aqua fortis? Even his placid
matter-of-fact speech was, at first, a little disappointing. It was only
by gentlest degrees that the iron hand of satire made itself felt under
the velvet glove of conventional good manners. Leonard had met Mr.
FitzJesse in London, at the clubs and elsewhere, and had felt that vague
awe which the provincial feels for the embodied spirit of metropolitan
intellect in the shape of a famous journalist. It was needful to be
civil to such men, in order to be let down gently in their papers. One
never knew when some rash unpremeditated act might furnish matter for a
paragraph which would mean social annihilation.
There were other guests grouped about the fireplace--little Monty, the
useful and good-humoured country-house hack; Colonel Blathwayt, of the
Kildare Cavalry, a noted amateur actor, reciter, waltzer, spirit-rapper,
invaluable in a house full of people--a tall, slim-waisted man, who rode
nine stone, and at forty contrived to look seven-and-twenty; the Rev.
St. Bernard Faddie, an Anglican curate, who carried Ritualism to the
extremest limit consistent with the retention of his stipend as a
minister of the Church of England, and who was always at loggerheads
with some of his parishioners. There were Mr. and Mrs. St. Aubyn and
their two daughters--county people, with loud voices, horsey, and
doggy, and horticultural--always talking garden, when they were not
talking stable or kennel. These were neighbours for whom Christabel had
cared very little in the past. Leonard was considerably astonished at
finding them domiciled at Mount Royal.
"And you had a nice passage," said his wife, smiling at her lord. "Will
you have some tea?"
It seemed a curious kind of welcome to a husband after a year's absence;
but Leonard answered feebly that he would take a cup of tea. One of the
numerous tea-tables had been established in a corner near the fire, and
Miss Bridgeman, in neat grey silk and linen collar, as of old, was
officiating, with Mr. Faddie in attendance, to distribute the cups.
"No tea, thanks," said Jack Vandeleur, coming in with his sisters still
entwined about him, still faintly suggestive of that poor man and the
sea-serpents. "Would it be too dreadful if I were to suggest S. & B.?"
Jessie Bridgeman touched a spring bell on the tea-table, and gave the
required order. There was a joviality, a _laissez-aller_ in the air of
the place, with which soda and brandy seemed quite in harmony.
Everything in the house seemed changed to Leonard's eye; and yet the
furniture, the armour, the family portraits, brown and indistinguishable
in this doubtful light, were all the same. There were no flowers about
in tubs or on tables. That subtle grace--as of a thoughtful woman's hand
ruling and arranging everything, artistic even where seeming most
careless--was missing. Papers, books were thrown anyhow upon the tables;
whips, carriage-rugs, wraps, hats, encumbered the chairs near the door.
Half-a-dozen dogs--pointers, setters, collie--sprawled or prowled about
the room. In nowise did his house now resemble the orderly mansion which
his mother had ruled so long, and which his wife had maintained upon
exactly the same lines after her aunt's death. He had grumbled at what
he called a silly observance of his mother's fads. The air of the house
was now much more in accordance with his own view of life, and yet the
change angered as much as it perplexed him.
"Where's the boy?" he asked, exploring the hall and its occupants, with
a blank stare.
"In his nursery. Where should he be?" exclaimed Christabel, lightly.
"I thought he would have been with you. I thought he might have been
here to bid me welcome home."
He had made a picture in his mind, almost involuntarily, of the mother
and child--she, calm and lovely as one of Murillo's Madonnas, with the
little one on her knee. There was no vein of poetry in his nature, yet
unconsciously the memory of such pictures had associated itself with his
wife's image. And instead of that holy embodiment of maternal love,
there flashed and sparkled before him this brilliant woman, with fair
fluffy hair, and Louis Quinze coat, all a glitter with cut-steel.
"Home!" echoed Christabel, mockingly; "how sentimental you have grown.
I've no doubt the boy will be charmed to see you, especially if you have
brought him some South American toys; but I thought it would bore you to
see him before you had dined. He shall be on view in the drawing-room
before dinner, if you would really like to see him so soon."
"Don't trouble," said Leonard, curtly; "I can find my way to the
nursery."
He went upstairs without another word, leaving his friend Jack seated in
the midst of the cheerful circle, drinking soda water and brandy, and
talking of their adventures upon the backbone of South America.
"Delicious country!" said de Cazalet, who talked remarkably good
English, with just the faintest Hibernian accent. "I have ridden over
every inch of it. Ah, Mrs. Tregonell, that is the soil for poetry and
adventure; a land of extinct volcanoes. If Byron had known the shores of
the Amazon, he would have struck a deeper note of passion than any that
was ever inspired by the Dardanelles or the Bosphorus. Sad that so grand
a spirit should have pined in the prison-house of a worn-out world."
"I have always understood that Byron got some rather strong poetry out
of Switzerland and Italy," murmured Mr. FitzJesse, meekly.
"Weak and thin to what he might have written had he known the Pampas,"
said the Baron.
"You have done the Pampas?" said Mr. FitzJesse.
"I have lived amongst wild horses, and wilder humanity, for months at a
stretch."
"And you have published a volume of--verses?"
"Another of my youthful follies. But I do not place myself upon a level
with Byron."
"I should if I were you," said Mr. FitzJesse. "It would be an original
idea--and in an age marked by a total exhaustion of brain-power, an
original idea is a pearl of price."
"What kind of dogs did you see in your travels?" asked Emily St. Aubyn,
a well-grown upstanding young woman, in a severe tailor-gown of undyed
homespun.
"Two or three very fine breeds of mongrels."
"I adore mongrels!" exclaimed Mopsy. "I think that kind of dog which
belongs to no particular breed, which has been ill-used by London boys,
and which follows one to one's doorstep, is the most faithful and
intelligent of the whole canine race. Huxley may exalt Blenheim spaniels
as the nearest thing to human nature; but my dog Tim, which is
something between a lurcher, a collie, and a bull, is ever so much
better than human nature."
"The Blenheim is greedy, luxurious, and lazy, and generally dies in
middle life from the consequences of over-feeding," drawled Mr.
FitzJesse. "I don't think Huxley is very far out."
"I would back a Cornish sheep-dog against any animal in creation," said
Christabel, patting Randie, who was standing amiably on end, with his
fore-paws on the cushioned elbow of her chair. "Do you know that these
dogs smile when they are pleased, and cry when they are grieved--and
they will mourn for a master with a fidelity unknown in humanity."
"Which as a rule does not mourn," said FitzJesse. "It only goes into
mourning."
And so the talk went on, always running upon trivialities--glancing from
theme to theme--a mere battledore and shuttlecock conversation--making a
mock of most things and most people. Christabel joined in it all; and
some of the bitterest speech that was spoken in that hour before the
sounding of the seven o'clock gong, fell from her perfect lips.
"Did you ever see such a change in any one as in Mrs. Tregonell?" asked
Dopsy of Mopsy, as they elbowed each other before the looking-glass, the
first armed with a powder puff, the second with a little box containing
the implements required for the production of piquant eyebrows.
"A wonderful improvement," answered Mopsy. "She's ever so much easier to
get on with. I didn't think it was in her to be so thoroughly _chic_."
"Do you know, I really liked her better last year, when she was frumpy
and dowdy," faltered Dopsy. "I wasn't able to get on with her, but I
couldn't help looking up to her, and feeling that, after all, she was
the right kind of woman. And now----"
"And now she condescends to be human--to be one of us--and the
consequence is that her house is three times as nice as it was last
year," said Mopsy, turning the corner of an eyebrow with a bold but
careful hand, and sending a sharp elbow into Dopsy's face during the
operation.
"I wish you'd be a little more careful," ejaculated Dopsy.
"I wish you'd contrive not to want the glass exactly when I do,"
retorted Mopsy.
"How do you like the French Baron?" asked Dopsy, when a brief silence
had restored her equanimity.
"French, indeed! He is no more French than I am. Mr. FitzJesse told me
that he was born and brought up in Jersey--that his father was an Irish
Major on half-pay, and his mother a circus rider."
"But how does he come by his title--if it is a real title?"
"FitzJesse says the title is right enough. One of his father's ancestors
came to the South of Ireland after the revocation of something--a treaty
at Nancy--I think he said. He belonged to an old Huguenot family--those
people who were massacred in the opera, don't you know--and the title
had been allowed to go dead--till this man married a tremendously rich
Sheffield cutler's daughter, and bought the old estate in Provence, and
got himself enrolled in the French peerage. Romantic, isn't it?"
"Very. What became of the Sheffield cutler's daughter?"
"She drank herself to death two years after her marriage. FitzJesse says
they both lived upon brandy, but she hadn't been educated up to it, and
it killed her."
"A curious kind of man for Mrs. Tregonell to invite here. Not quite good
style."
"Perhaps not--but he's very amusing."
Leonard spent half an hour with his son. The child had escaped from
babyhood in the year that had gone. He was now a bright sentient
creature, eager to express his thoughts--to gather knowledge--an active,
vivacious being, full of health and energy. Whatever duties Christabel
had neglected during her husband's absence, the boy had, at least,
suffered no neglect. Never had childhood developed under happier
conditions. The father could find no fault in the nursery, though there
was a vague feeling in his mind that everything was wrong at Mount
Royal.
"Why the deuce did she fill the house with people while I was away," he
muttered to himself, in the solitude of his dressing-room, where his
clothes had been put ready for him, and candles lighted by his Swiss
valet. The dressing-room was at that end of the corridor most remote
from Christabel's apartments. It communicated with the room Leonard had
slept in during his boyhood--and that opened again into his gun-room.
The fact that these rooms had been prepared for him told him plainly
enough that he and his wife were henceforth to lead divided lives. The
event of last October, his year of absence, had built up a wall between
them which he, for the time being at least, felt himself powerless to
knock down.
"Can she suspect--can she know"--he asked himself, pausing in his
dressing to stand staring at the fire, with moody brow and troubled
eyes. "No, that's hardly possible. And yet her whole manner is changed.
She holds me at a distance. Every look, every tone just now was a
defiance. Of course I know that she loved that man--loved him
first--last--always; never caring a straw for me. She was too careful of
herself--had been brought up too well to go wrong, like other
women--but she loved him. I would never have brought him inside these
doors if I had not known that she could take care of herself. I tested
and tried her to the uttermost--and--well--I took my change out of him."
Mr. Tregonell dressed himself a little more carefully than he was wont
to dress--thinking for the most part that anything which suited him was
good enough for his friends--and went down to the drawing-room, feeling
like a visitor in a strange house, half inclined to wonder how he would
be received by his wife and his wife's guests. He who had always ruled
supreme in that house, choosing his visitors for his own
pleasure--subjugating all tastes and habits of other people to his own
convenience, now felt as if he were only there on sufferance.
It was early when he entered the drawing-room, and the Baron de Cazalet
was the only occupant of that apartment. He was standing in a lounging
attitude, with his back against the mantelpiece, and his handsome person
set off by evening dress. That regulation costume does not afford much
scope to the latent love of finery which still lurks in the civilized
man, as if to prove his near relationship to the bead and
feather-wearing savage--but de Cazalet had made himself as gorgeous as
he could with jewelled studs, embroidered shirt, satin under-waistcoat,
amber silk stockings, and Queen Ann shoes. He was assuredly
handsome--but he had just that style of beauty which to the fastidious
mind is more revolting than positive ugliness. Dark-brown eyes, strongly
arched eyebrows, an aquiline nose, a sensual mouth, a heavy jaw, a
faultless complexion of the French plum-box order, large regular teeth
of glittering whiteness, a small delicately trained moustache with waxed
ends, and hair of oily sheen, odorous of _pommade divine_, made up the
catalogue of his charms. Leonard stood looking at him doubtfully, as if
he were a hitherto unknown animal.
"Where did my wife pick him up, and why?" he asked himself. "I should
have thought he was just the kind of man she would detest."
"How glad you must be to get back to your Lares and Penates," said the
Baron, smiling blandly.
"I'm uncommonly glad to get back to my horses and dogs," answered
Leonard, flinging himself into a large armchair by the fire, and taking
up a newspaper. "Have you been long in the West?"
"About a fortnight, but I have been only three days at Mount Royal. I
had the honour to renew my acquaintance with Mrs. Tregonell last August
at Zermatt, and she was good enough to say that if I ever found myself
in this part of the country she would be pleased to receive me in her
house. I needn't tell you that with such a temptation in view I was very
glad to bend my steps westward. I spent ten days on board a friend's
yacht, between Dartmouth and the Lizard, landed at Penzance last
Tuesday, and posted here, where I received a more than hospitable
welcome."
"You are a great traveller, I understand?"
"I doubt if I have done as much as you have in that way. I have seldom
travelled for the sake of travelling. I have lived in the tents of the
Arabs. I have bivouacked on the Pampas--and enjoyed life in all the
cities of the South, from Valparaiso to Carthagena; but I can boast no
mountaineering exploits or scientific discoveries--and I never read a
paper at the Geographical."
"You look a little too fond of yourself for mountaineering," said
Leonard, smiling grimly at the Baron's portly figure, and all-pervading
sleekness.
"Well--yes--I like a wild life--but I have no relish for absolute
hardship--the thermometer below zero, a doubtful supply of provisions,
pemmican, roasted skunk for supper, without any currant jelly--no, I
love mine ease at mine Inn."
He threw out his fine expanse of padded chest and shoulders, and
surveyed the spacious lamp-lit room with an approving smile. This no
doubt was the kind of Inn at which he loved to take his ease--a house
full of silly women, ready to be subjugated by his florid good looks and
shallow accomplishments.
The ladies now came straggling in--first Emily St. Aubyn, and then
Dopsy, whose attempts at conversation were coldly received by the county
maiden. Dopsy's and Mopsy's home-made gowns, cheap laces and frillings,
and easy flippancy were not agreeable to the St. Aubyn sisters. It was
not that the St. Aubyn manners, which always savoured of the stable and
farmyard, were more refined or elegant; but the St. Aubyns arrogated to
themselves the right to be vulgar, and resented free-and-easy manners in
two young persons who were obviously poor and obviously obscure as to
their surroundings. If their gowns had been made by a West End tailor,
and they had been able to boast of intimate acquaintance with a duchess
and two or three countesses, their flippancy might have been tolerable,
nay, even amusing, to the two Miss St. Aubyns; but girls who went
nowhere and knew nobody, had no right to attempt smartness of speech,
and deserved to be sat upon.
To Dopsy succeeded Mopsy, then some men, then Mrs. St. Aubyn and her
younger daughter Clara, then Mrs. Tregonell, in a red gown draped with
old Spanish lace, and with diamond stars in her hair, a style curiously
different from those quiet dinner dresses she had been wont to wear a
year ago. Leonard looked at her in blank amazement--just as he had
looked at their first meeting. She, who had been like the violet
sheltering itself among its leaves, now obviously dressed for effect,
and as obviously courted admiration.
The dinner was cheerful to riotousness. Everybody had something to say;
anecdotes were told, and laughter was frequent and loud. The St. Aubyn
girls, who had deliberately snubbed the sisters Vandeleur, were not
above conversing with the brother, and, finding him a kindred spirit in
horseyness and doggyness, took him at once into their confidence, and
were on the friendliest terms before dinner was finished. De Cazalet sat
next his hostess, and talked exclusively to her. Mr. FitzJesse had Miss
Bridgeman on his left hand, and conversed with her in gentle murmurs,
save when in his quiet voice, and with his seeming-innocent smile, he
told some irresistibly funny story--some touch of character seen with a
philosophic eye--for the general joy of the whole table. Very different
was the banquet of to-day from that quiet dinner on the first night of
Mr. Hamleigh's visit to Mount Royal, that dinner at which Leonard
watched his wife so intensely, eager to discover to what degree she was
affected by the presence of her first lover. He watched her to-night, at
the head of her brilliantly lighted dinner-table--no longer the old
subdued light of low shaded lamps, but the radiance of innumerable
candles in lofty silver candelabra, shining over a striking decoration
of vivid crimson asters and spreading palm-leaves--he watched her
helplessly, hopelessly, knowing that he and she were ever so much
farther apart than they had been in the days before he brought Angus
Hamleigh to Mount Royal, those miserable discontented days when he had
fretted himself into a fever of jealousy and vague suspicion, and had
thought to find a cure by bringing the man he feared and hated into his
home, so that he might know for certain how deep the wrong was which
this man's very existence seemed to inflict upon him. To bring those two
who had loved and parted face to face, to watch and listen, to fathom
the thoughts of each--that had been the process natural and congenial to
his jealous temper; but the result had been an uncomfortable one. And
now he saw his wife, whose heart he had tried to break--hating her
because he had failed to make her love him--just as remote and
unapproachable as of old.
"What a fool I was to marry her," he thought, after replying somewhat at
random to Mrs. St. Aubyn's last remark upon the superiority of Dorkings
to Spaniards from a culinary point of view. "It was my determination to
have my own way that wrecked me. I couldn't submit to be conquered by a
girl--to have the wife I had set my heart upon when I was a boy, stolen
from me by the first effeminate fopling my silly mother invited to Mount
Royal. I had never imagined myself with any other woman for my
wife--never really cared for any other woman."
This was the bent of Mr. Tregonell's reflections as he sat in his place
at that animated assembly, adding nothing to its mirth, or even to its
noise; albeit in the past his voice had ever been loudest, his laugh
most resonant. He felt more at his ease after dinner, when the women had
left--the brilliant de Cazalet slipping away soon after them, although
not until he had finished his host's La Rose--and when Mr. St. Aubyn
expanded himself in county talk, enlightening the wanderer as to the
progress of events during his absence--while Mr. FitzJesse sat blandly
puffing his cigarette, a silent observer of the speech and gestures of
the county magnate, speculating, from a scientific point of view, as to
how much of this talk were purely automatic--an inane drivel which would
go on just the same if half the Squire's brain had been scooped out.
Jack Vandeleur smoked and drank brandy and water, while little Monty
discoursed to him, in confidential tones, upon the racing year which was
now expiring at Newmarket--the men who had made pots of money, and the
men who had been beggared for life. There seemed to be no medium between
those extremes.
When the host rose, Captain Vandeleur was for an immediate adjournment
to billiards, but to his surprise, Leonard walked off to the
drawing-room.
"Aren't you coming?" asked Jack, dejectedly.
"Not to-night. I have been too long away from feminine society not to
appreciate the novelty of an evening with ladies. You and Monty can have
the table to yourselves, unless Mr. FitzJesse----"
"I never play," replied the gentle journalist; "but I rather like
sitting in a billiard-room and listening to the conversation of the
players. It is always so full of ideas."
Captain Vandeleur and Mr. Montagu went their way, and the other men
repaired to the drawing-room, whence came the sound of the piano, and
the music of a rich baritone, trolling out a popular air from the most
fashionable opera-bouffe--that one piece which all Paris was bent upon
hearing at the same moment, whereby seats in the little boulevard
theatre were selling at a ridiculous premium.
De Cazalet was singing to Mrs. Tregonell's accompaniment--a _patois_
song, with a refrain which would have been distinctly indecent, if the
tails of all the words had not been clipped off, so as to reduce the
language to mild idiocy.
"The kind of song one could fancy being fashionable in the decline of
the Roman Empire," said FitzJesse, "when Apuleius was writing his
'Golden Ass,' don't you know."
After the song came a duet from "Traviata," in which Christabel sang
with a dramatic power which Leonard never remembered to have heard from
her before. The two voices harmonized admirably, and there were warm
expressions of delight from the listeners.
"Very accomplished man, de Cazalet," said Colonel Blathwayt; "uncommonly
useful in a country house--sings, and plays, and recites, and
acts--rather puffy and short-winded in his elocution--if he were a horse
one would call him a roarer--but always ready to amuse. Quite an
acquisition."
"Who is he?" asked Leonard, looking glum. "My wife picked him up in
Switzerland, I hear--that is to say, he seems to have made himself
agreeable--or useful--to Mrs. Tregonell and Miss Bridgeman; and, in a
moment of ill-advised hospitality, my wife asked him here. Is he
received anywhere? Does anybody know anything about him?"
"He is received in a few houses--rich houses where the hostess goes in
for amateur acting and _tableaux vivants_, don't you know; and people
know a good deal about him--nothing actually to his detriment. The man
was a full-blown adventurer when he had the good luck to get hold of a
rich wife. He pays his way now, I believe; but the air of the adventurer
hangs round him still. A man of Irish parentage--brought up in Jersey.
What can you expect of him?"
"Does he drink?"
"Like a fish--but his capacity to drink is only to be estimated by cubic
space--the amount he can hold. His brain and constitution have been
educated up to alcohol. Nothing can touch him further."
"Colonel Blathwayt, we want you to give us the 'Wonderful One-Horse
Shay,' and after that, the Baron is going to recite 'James Lee's Wife,'
said Mrs. Tregonell, while her guests ranged themselves into an
irregular semicircle, and the useful Miss Bridgeman placed a _prie-dieu_
chair in a commanding position for the reciter to lean upon gracefully,
or hug convulsively in the more energetic passages of his recitation.
"Everybody seems to have gone mad," thought Mr. Tregonell, as he seated
himself and surveyed the assembly, all intent and expectant.
His wife sat near the piano with de Cazalet bending over her, talking in
just that slightly lowered voice which gives an idea of confidential
relations, yet may mean no more than a vain man's desire to appear the
accepted worshipper of a beautiful woman. Never had Leonard seen Angus
Hamleigh's manner so distinctively attentive as was the air of this
Hibernian adventurer.
"Just the last man whose attentions I should have supposed she would
tolerate," thought Leonard; "but any garbage is food for a woman's
vanity."
The "Wonderful One-Horse Shay" was received with laughter and delight.
Dopsy and Mopsy were in raptures. "How could a horrid American have
written anything so clever? But then it was Colonel Blathwayt's
inimitable elocution which gave a charm to the whole thing. The poem was
poor enough, no doubt, if one read it to oneself. Colonel Blathwayt was
adorably funny."
"It's a tremendous joke, as you do it," said Mopsy, twirling her
sunflower fan--a great yellow flower, like the sign of the Sun Inn, on a
black satin ground. "How delightful to be so gifted."
"Now for 'James Lee's Wife,'" said the Colonel, who accepted the
damsel's compliments for what they were worth. "You'll have to be very
attentive if you want to find out what the poem means; for the Baron's
delivery is a trifle spasmodic."
And now de Cazalet stepped forward with a vellum-bound volume in his
hand, dashed back his long sleek hair with a large white hand, glanced
at the page, coughed faintly, and then began in thick, hurried accents,
which kept getting thicker and more hurried as the poem advanced. It was
given, not in lines, but in spasms, panted out, till at the close the
Baron sank exhausted, breathless, like the hunted deer when the hounds
close round him.
"Beautiful! exquisite! too pathetic!" exclaimed a chorus of feminine
voices.
"I only wish the Browning Society could hear that: they would be
delighted," said Mr. Faddie, who piqued himself upon being in the
literary world.
"It makes Browning so much easier to understand," remarked Mr.
FitzJesse, with his habitual placidity.
"Brings the whole thing home to you--makes it ever so much more real,
don't you know," said Mrs. Torrington.
"Poor James Lee!" sighed Mopsy.
"Poor Mrs. Lee!" ejaculated Dopsy.
"Did he die?" asked Miss St. Aubyn.
"Did she run away from him?" inquired her sister, the railroad pace at
which the Baron fired off the verses having left all those among his
hearers who did not know the text in a state of agreeable uncertainty.
So the night wore on, with more songs and duets from opera and
opera-bouffe. No more of Beethoven's grand bursts of melody--now touched
with the solemnity of religious feeling--now melting in human
pathos--now light and airy, changeful and capricious as the skylark's
song--a very fountain of joyous fancies. Mr. Tregonell had never
appreciated Beethoven, being, indeed, as unmusical a soul as God ever
created; but he thought it a more respectable thing that his wife should
sit at her piano playing an order of music which only the privileged few
could understand, than that she should delight the common herd by
singing which savoured of music-hall and burlesque.
"Is she not absolutely delicious?" said Mrs. Torrington, beating time
with her fan. "How proud I should be of myself if I could sing like
that. How proud you must be of your wife--such verve--such _élan_--so
thoroughly in the spirit of the thing. That is the only kind of singing
anybody really cares for now. One goes to the opera to hear them scream
through 'Lohengrin'--or 'Tannhäuser'--and then one goes into society and
talks about Wagner--but it is music like this one enjoys."
"Yes, it's rather jolly," said Leonard, staring moodily at his wife, in
the act of singing a refrain, of Bé-bé-bé, which was supposed to
represent the bleating of an innocent lamb.
"And the Baron's voice goes so admirably with Mrs. Tregonell's."
"Yes, his voice goes--admirably," said Leonard, sorely tempted to
blaspheme.
"Weren't you charmed to find us all so gay and bright here--nothing to
suggest the sad break-up you had last year. I felt so intensely sorry
for you all--yet I was selfish enough to be glad I had left before it
happened. Did they--don't think me morbid for asking--did they bring him
home here?"
"Yes, they brought him home."
"And in which room did they put him? One always wants to know these
things, though it can do one no good."
"In the Blue Room."
"The second from the end of the corridor, next but one to mine; that's
rather awfully near. Do you believe in spiritual influences? Have you
ever had a revelation? Good gracious! is it really so late? Everybody
seems to be going."
"Let me get your candle," said Leonard, eagerly, making a dash for the
hall. And so ended his first evening at home with that imbecile
refrain--Bé-bé-bé, repeating itself in his ears.