“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
you _won’t_ stay 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.
XLII
HIS 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’s _Times_ that 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.