me—yet, at all events. I may not be quite nineteen, but I have had a
good many men in love with me, all the same. They began while I was in
short frocks and wore my hair in plaits. If I don’t know much about
anything else, I am not quite a fool on that subject. Ah, here is
luncheon being announced and I cannot ask you to stop. How hateful are
all these little _convenances_ that hedge a girl about!” She rose and
held out her hand. “But we will play tennis on Monday? Meanwhile do not
let us think of such serious things as love and marriage. Youth does not
last so very long. When you are thirty and I am twenty-four, come and
propose to me again. And please, please do not tell mother that you
proposed to me to-day, or I shall not have a happy time. Mother is sweet
and dear, but when she sets her mind upon a thing—Will you promise?”
“Of course. But I don’t intend to wait until I am thirty to propose
again.”
He was dismissed with a bewildering, tantalizing smile beneath sad,
unfathomable eyes, that sent him up the wrong street and caused him
nearly to be run down twice by hansom cabs.
XXXVI
THE RACE
During the ensuing fortnight he looked as if a blight had passed over
him. His face grew pinched and white, he lost his magnetism, his fine
remote dignified assurance, even his good manners. His mother, in as
superb an outburst of disdain as he had ever witnessed on the stage,
told him that the very cabbies, to say nothing of the servants, must see
that he was in the throes of his calf-love, and that he was even more
odious than young men usually were during that last and worst of
children’s diseases; thanking her stars that she was not forced to
remain under the same roof with him, she flounced off to Paris with
Rosamond Hayle. Ordham, could he have experienced pleasure in anything
during this excruciating period, would have felt delight in being rid of
her.
Alas! he could no longer flatter himself with doubts regarding his
feeling for the young American beauty, indulge in mental analyses. He
had forgotten Styr, his ambitions, his calm belief in himself and his
star. But one woman, one object, existed on this earth for him, and he
only paused to wonder that he had ever thought himself incapable of
love. No man ever got sharper wounds from the archaic darts. He was
sentimentally, passionately, wretchedly in love. He thought of nothing
else. For the first time in his life appetite and sleep were affected.
Several people from whom he had received much hospitality while in Paris
paid a short visit to London and sought him out as a matter of course.
He took no notice of them. Styr, at last, found time to write him a long
letter. He did not even read it. He forgot the existence of the Foreign
Office.
Meanwhile, he saw the young lady daily. If she had been merely
indifferent before, she was now almost rude, regretting, no doubt, her
girlish recrudescence. Mrs. Cutting, were it possible, was even more
impressive in her attentions to him. He felt as if tossed between fire
and ice, and although this torment had its fascination, he sometimes
wished that the mother would gratify the daughter and turn him out. Then
he could flee to the ends of the earth, and make some attempt to
extinguish the flames that devoured him. He was quite aware of his
changed appearance, and one morning, while brushing his hair and
scowling at his nervous white face, recalled what Styr had said about
young people in the ferment of first love being the mere victims of the
race, reversions to type. That, no doubt, was what was the matter with
him, and it was no consolation to reflect that it was so much good
passion thrown away. If a man had to undergo such torments, why, in
heaven’s name, didn’t the girl catch the fever? He should not in the
least mind being one of Nature’s victims if he were permitted to be
happy with a fellow-victim. Otherwise, there was no sense in it.
The tennis games were abandoned, as he slept late after his bad nights,
and Hines, after one conscientious attempt to awaken him, declined the
office of mentor a second time. But he spent a part of every day in
Grosvenor Square, from which he could not keep away; although he
believed that no old-time martyr boiling in a cauldron and pinched with
red-hot nippers ever suffered such agonies as his. But at last pride
revolted, his spirit cried out under its crushing load, and he had an
attack of acute indigestion. He pointedly broke an engagement for
luncheon, and presented himself at five o’clock determined to say
good-by and leave England next day. He should not return to Munich, for
he never wanted to see another woman; probably he should go out to India
and remodel himself upon the commonplace family likeness by shooting
tigers and sending home the skins.
The ladies were shopping, he was informed, and he was shown up to the
small drawing-room to await them. But the small drawing-room would not
hold him, and he roamed about the beautiful rooms whose furniture and
decorations had once whispered to him of sweet love-tragedies, as well
as of terrible dramas involving the collapse into blood or obscurity of
the historic families that had loved them. But to-day they had no
confidences for Ordham. He came upon a door ajar. It led into a small
room that he had never seen, but he did not hesitate to enter, as Mrs.
Cutting had made him feel at home long since. He saw at a glance that
this must be Mabel’s boudoir, and drew back. Beyond the threshold,
however, he was powerless to retreat; he stood trembling, fascinated,
feeling himself in the presence of a subtle betrayal of the secrecies of
maidenhood,—such as he sometimes fancied emanated from the young girl
herself. He had never dreamed that a girl could be so sacred and
beautiful, so mysterious a creature. He turned pale and lost his breath.
It was a very simple room to his masculine eye, with its white flowered
silks and white enamelled furniture, but as unmistakably luxurious as
the rest of the house. Suddenly his eye was caught by a bookcase above
the writing table. This temptation was irresistible, and in a moment he
was eagerly scanning the titles of the haughty beauty’s chosen
literature. It was with something of a shock that he discovered the
books to be the essays of Macaulay, the novels of Scott and Dickens, and
a selected volume of Shakspere’s plays, as he had read all of these
works and more in his earliest teens. It could not be possible that this
represented the girl’s idea of erudition, her mother’s disappointment in
her beauty’s untimely development of bookish tastes? But what of it?
Ordham was too far gone in love and despair to be seriously affected by
a minor disappointment, although it might have staggered him a month
earlier. Poor ambitious child! What opportunities at a fashionable
school in Paris, studying “art,” music, and three languages, to delve
into literature! If she had but just begun to read, at least she had not
begun with trash, and that she had begun at all was the vital point.
Again he was turning away, and again he received a shock. The drawer of
the desk was half open. His gaze, as it dropped from the bookcase,
rested upon three letters from his mother. The ink was fresh. The
postmark was conspicuously “Paris.”
He afterwards described his sensations at that moment as of a lighted
torch trying to force its way from the base of his skull through the
dull inert mass of his brain to his upper consciousness. But at a
certain stage love is a disease analogous to death. The brain, if not
disintegrated, is very nearly so, for it is worn out by implacable
thought, despair, brooding on the impossible. It is, after long tension,
a flabby mass, through which the angry watchers in the subconsciousness
can find no avenue, force not a cry of warning. Normally with a brain so
alert that the utmost caution and tact were necessary in the handling of
him, even although his full share of masculine vanity made him as easy
game as most men, the least slip would have roused Ordham’s suspicions
and set him on his guard; but, his brain demoralized by the
greensickness of love, he was as far beyond rescue as if he had been
born a fool.
He was staring stupidly at the letters, mechanically striving to reach
their significance, when a footstep on the polished floor of the
drawing-room made him retreat hastily, trembling at the prospect of
confronting the indignant Mabel and receiving summary dismissal. So
great was his discomposure he did not notice that the footsteps were too
heavy for a woman, and was astonished to confront a young man, an
uncommonly good-looking young man, with a frank well-bred face and an
athletic spare figure. Ordham divined at once that here was the handsome
American cousin whose advent he had dreaded. Unconsciously he threw back
his own shoulders. His eyes became excessively cold, his manner almost
unbearably polite.
“No doubt you are Mr. Driscom,” he said. “Mrs. Cutting has spoken of you
to me.”
“And you are Mr. Ordham, of course.” The American shook the Englishman
warmly by the hand, but received no sort of pressure in response. He
wondered, as he had done during previous visits to London, what American
women could see in Englishmen.
“Mrs. Cutting is my second cousin,” he said. “She has often mentioned
you in her letters. The butler tells me they will be back in a moment. I
suppose we may smoke.”
His voice was agreeable and cultivated, his manner easy and cordial.
Ordham noticed with intense annoyance that there was nothing here to
ridicule and despise. Margarethe Styr had talked to him of this fine
type of the young American, and Driscom reminded him of the gallant
youth who had stood by her to the last on the wrecked steamer. He felt
that in ordinary circumstances he should have warmed to him, but now he
hated and feared him; were thought as potent as one day it may be, poor
Driscom would have expired of poison in every vein.
But the American, who seemed drawn to that courteous smiling exterior,
talked amiably of the yachting news in the evening telegrams, and of
yachting in general, smoking steadily the while. It was manifest that he
felt quite at home, was doing the honors, in fact! No doubt he would be
staying in the house, these Americans were so infernally hospitable.
Fortunately the tête-à-tête was not long enough to exhaust Ordham’s
falling stock of patience. Mrs. Cutting swept into the room, followed by
Mabel and LaLa. Driscom sprang to his feet and kissed his second cousin
warmly. Ordham held his breath, expecting to commit murder were Mabel
also saluted. When the young lady merely held out her hand with a
radiant smile, his apprehension increased. A kiss might have meant
nothing. Were they not cousins and old friends? This formality—before
him—might be portentous.
But Mrs. Cutting gave him little time for thought. She apologized for
being late, dilated upon “their” disappointment at his desertion of them
earlier in the day, and insisted that he remain informally for dinner.
He replied with cold decision, and with a full return of his old
dignity, that he must “wander along,” as he was dining with some friends
and had promised to look in upon others. “People were returning to
town.” He had made up his mind that he would not even tell them of his
intended departure; a note posted at the station would suffice. Mrs.
Cutting, who had regarded him intently, laid her hand firmly on his arm.
“I shall not let you go yet awhile,” she said. “I must confer with Bobby
at once, so that he may cable to-night, and meanwhile please talk to
Mabel until I can come back and pour out the tea.”
She gave him no chance to reply. Taking “Bobby” by the arm, she swept
him out the room, darting a swift look of command at her daughter.
Mabel turned pale, but she came forward with her usual girlish grace.
“Do sit down,” she said. “You look as if you never intended to sit down
again.”
“It is not worth while to sit down—to detain you. I really must go.”
“You don’t intend to come back!”
He looked steadily into her dilated eyes, wondering if he hated her, and
betrayed himself. “No,” he said. “I shall not come back.” Then he paused
abruptly, and physically braced himself. She had dropped her eyelashes,
and he was quite prepared for the coquettish net that would float from
those slowly uplifting orbs. But when he met them, he saw only terror
and appeal. Mabel’s face looked suddenly pinched and white. Then she
burst into tears, and he was swept on that flood straight through the
gates of Paradise.
When they descended to earth and were seated on a little sofa in the
remotest corner, he demanded an explanation of the torments imposed upon
him during the past fortnight. “You say you have always loved me,” he
said with automatic masculine logic. “Why, in heaven’s name, didn’t you
accept me the first time?”
“I couldn’t be sure—that you really loved me—you seemed to me to be
taken by surprise. Besides, I think I wanted to punish you for not
having loved me all that long time. I had to be rude and horrid—it was
that or betray myself. I don’t think I ever believed that you really
loved me till just now. I don’t believe you knew it yourself.”
“Oh, yes, I did,” he replied grimly. “I was so far gone that I became
utterly uninteresting.”
“No—but you made me believe that you were miserable because you had
proposed to me impulsively and could not think of a way out of it. My
only consolation was that I had refused you. But I was ashamed every
time I thought of how I had led you on that day—and I had vowed never
to be silly and flirt again. And then—well, it cannot be denied that
mother has thrown me at your head, and that made me really hate you at
times, so that it was easier to be rude.”
“Your mother was beautifully frank.” Ordham was somewhat confused by the
number of apologetic reasons advanced, but wholly happy. They talked
more or less wildly for an hour. Then Ordham, hearing the swish of Mrs.
Cutting’s gown, stood up, flushed and nervous, but so determined not to
look sheepish, that he was as formal as an aged diplomatist when his
future mother-in-law took both his hands and looked at him with eyes
that were really soft. “Thank heaven!” she said with the simplicity
appropriate to great moments. “I know that you will both be happy. And
how grateful I am that you have not put off making up your minds any
longer. Bobby tells me that I must go to New York. It is imperative. But
now I can leave Mabel with you, instead of drying her eyes and
distracting her mind for six months, when I should be giving all my
attention to business.”
Of course he remained to dinner, and before he left he had another
half-hour alone with Mabel. An excellent repast, the interesting
conversation of Driscom, whom he now liked as much as he had hated a few
hours earlier, unruffled bliss, and the prospect of almost immediate
marriage, had clarified and braced his normally acute and steady brain.
They were sitting among the fragrant flowers of the balcony when he told
her abruptly of his incursion into her private little domain, and added:
“As it has excited my curiosity, I may as well tell you at once that I
saw several letters from my mother in the drawer of your desk, and ask
you to explain. I do not want to be annoyed by petty imaginings. You
don’t mind?”
The hand he held had grown cold, but when he turned his head he met
suffused and smiling eyes.
“I might as well confess! I wrote to Lady Bridgminster imploring her to
withdraw her opposition—not to hate me—I know how great her influence
over you is—”
“She has not a particle of influence over me. What did she reply? How
enchanting of you!”
“Oh, she was quite nice. I believe she said that she had washed her
hands of the matter of your marriage, since you would not marry Lady
Rosamond. Should you like to read the letters?” She half rose.
“Of course not.” And knowing somewhat of the fecundity of the feminine
pen, it did not strike him as odd that his mother should have found it
worth while to write this epitome of her disgust three times.
XXXVII
ORDHAM CEASES TO BE ORIGINAL
For a day or two Ordham could hardly believe in his good fortune, so
suddenly had it descended upon him. When separated from Mabel he moved
as in a dream, looking preternaturally serious lest he wear a fatuous
grin. But this phase passed and he settled down to the business of being
supremely happy, or as happy as possible while happiness was still
incomplete. He thanked the American fates for the business complications
that called Mrs. Cutting to New York and hastened the wedding, which was
to take place early in October. Lady Bridgminster had written two frigid
letters of congratulation, which Ordham and Mabel smilingly compared;
but, being in Paris, graciously offered to confer with the great
milliner who had the honour of dressing the young beauty, and spare her
and her mother the miseries of crossing the Channel and of French
hotels.
Ordham had never felt so young. Having cared little for girls and
greatly for women of the world, he had been, and in spite of his
precocity and cleverness, under an unconscious strain for several years
past. He had always been “playing up,” as Hélène Wass once expressed it,
when she may have felt—who knows?—a moment’s pity for him. Now, he had
the sensation that Life, having long cheated him, was making sudden and
wondrous restitution. It was that perfect flower of youth in Mabel that
called to him as potently as her beauty and her high-bred grace and
charm. He no longer cared what she read; she declared herself too happy
to think of books, and he replied that they were writing a great romance
of their own; time enough for other men’s unlifelike vapourings later.
He did not see her often alone, and these sweet brief interviews gave a
romantic intensity to their engagement which London might not have
offered to a pair less severely chaperoned; although, to be sure, that
exotic mansion, with its imported atmosphere of vanished Bourbons and
their reckless nobles, exorcised the memory of grimy London, and was a
poem in itself. Even in imagination he always saw her drifting about the
lovely bright rooms with her eyes full of dreams. She treated him to a
bewildering variety of moods, sometimes even chattering for a few
moments quite like the old Mabel, only to melt insensibly into the
dignified and stately girl he longed to exhibit to every court in
Europe. Not only was he fully roused from the long lethargy of his youth
and alive as he had fancied he might be at thirty, but the romantic
cravings born during his extraordinary experience with Margarethe Styr
were eager, hungry, almost satisfied. Only that wondrous period
prosaically known as the honeymoon could perfect this poem of the prince
and princess of fairy lore.
It never occurred to him to wonder if he could have loved Mabel Cutting
had she been a poor girl and he forced to give up his diplomatic
ambitions and support her, or if he had met her only in commonplace
hotel sitting-rooms. The exquisite creature’s very wealth was a part of
her romantic fascination. It furnished the halo. It created, as with a
magic wand, the poetic setting for her aristocratic beauty and grace. It
moved her aloof from those common mortals whose gilded cages were
stuffed with unpaid bills. That his life with her was to be free of
those vulgar cares which his temperament held in particular abhorrence,
added to the ecstasy, to the belief that they two were of the elect,
chosen to dwell upon a rarefied plane, to experience a superior and
perennial happiness.
It was quite ten days before he remembered Margarethe Styr. Then he sat
down at once to write to her of his engagement, that she might not hear
of it first through the public channels; it was to be announced as soon
as the invitations were engraved. He found this letter the most
difficult he had ever attempted to write. Even as he took up his pen
that something he still did not wish to define stirred in the deeps of
his mind, whispered that he had committed an act of infidelity. Never
until that moment had he realized how close and deep his intimacy with
Styr had been. It was, as she herself had called it, a mental marriage.
There was no doubt that in a sense he had given himself to her, that he
had intended to keep her always and first in his life, that he had
vaguely looked forward to some ultimate union with her. The possibility
of falling in love with the girl possessing the requisite millions had
never occurred to him. But Margarethe Styr had gone out of his life.
There was no possible doubt on that point. He no longer felt the
slightest need of her. Henceforth he should be absorbed in his young
wife and in his career. Mabel would become one of the cleverest women in
Europe and give him all the inspiration he needed in that future of
which she even now talked with such enthusiasm and intelligence.
Friendships with other women would be superfluous and imprudent. Styr
belonged to the past, and while he should cherish her memory, she must
be content to reign in memory alone.
He spent the entire morning groaning at his desk, but finally concocted
a letter that he dared to send to Munich. Far too astute to indulge in
rhapsodies, and at the same time too much in love to be dishonest, he
hedged between an avowal and a denial of his affection for the great
heiress whom he shortly was to have the honour of leading to the altar.
But although it was a very creditable performance, that letter, he was
all youth and love and fire when he wrote it, and his pen conducted more
than one flash from his electrified being. A woman far less keen than
Styr would hardly have been persuaded that he was reluctantly steering
into matrimony through the golden gate, barely conscious of his partner
in the sordid transaction.
XXXVIII
ISOLDA FURIOSA
From the instant that Isolde raised herself slowly from the couch on the
ship’s deck the great audience that Styr’s performances always called
forth knew that some unusual influence was at work upon the
impersonation. Not even in that first silent moment was there the
reading of a princess whose tormented spirit had not permitted her to
sleep since she had left her father’s shores. At once there was such an
expression of fury, of murderous hate, in those immense pregnant eyes,
such an aura of primal devastating force emanated from the strained
body, the fixed features, that hardly a person in the house but stirred
uncomfortably. This was no indignant princess weary with night-watches,
whose wrongs would gradually set her brain on fire; here was the
infuriated woman out of leash, a woman that might have been suckled by a
tigress and forgotten what little she had ever known of civilization.
“Brangäne” said afterward that she was afraid to approach her; and had
not the audience focussed their attention wholly upon Styr, they might
have noticed that the poor little mezzo sang off the key twice.
When Isolde—who had even lifted herself and shown her face sooner than
was customary, had stared for long insupportable moments while the
sailors sang the careless satirical words of their song, “Oh, Irish
maid! My winsome Irish maid!”—sprang to her feet, crying, “What wight
dares insult me?” her great voice seemed to ring through all Munich.
“Brangäne, ho!” she shouted. “Where sail we?”
Brangäne articulated that bluish stripes were visible in the west, that
the ship fast approached the land. When Isolde bore down upon her,
demanding in a still more terrible voice, “What land?” neither she nor
the audience ever knew whether or not she managed to warble, “Cornwall’s
verdant strand,” for Styr, barely waiting for the line to finish,
towered in the centre of the stage and shrieked in tones of loosed fury
and prophecy, that not even the golden quality of her voice could
soften:
“Nevermore! To-day nor to-morrow!”
Then the minion, having given the necessary cue, Isolde hurled forth, in
tones which seemed to express the gnashing of teeth, her wild regret for
those lost arts that would have enabled her to annihilate the earth and
every hated mortal on it. Discarding the cultivated gestures with which
she so subtly suggested repressed power, growing passion, she tossed her
arms aloft, and with eyes burning and face convulsed, declaimed in a
voice that was strangely like a roar:
“Oh, subtle art of sorcery, awake in me once more power of will! Hark to
my bidding, fluttering breezes! Arise and storm in boisterous strife!
With furious rage and hurricane’s hurtle, awaken the sea from its calm!
Rouse up the deep to its devilish deeds. Fling it the prey I gladly
offer!”