natural assurance of his birth and bringing up, for not only was he
consulted, flattered, his judgment challenged that it might inevitably
pronounce the last word, by these three women, until he felt older and
more important every day, but his position as host threw him into
intimate association with many of the most eminent men and women in
England. And besides their friendship for Lady Pat, they were much
impressed with the Aladdin-like, yet never vulgar, lavishness of these
entertainments, and really found Ordham as charming and clever as people
always did when he was on his good behaviour.
Nor did Ordham trouble himself to remember that all was not his. The
first party was not over before he had slipped insensibly into the rôle
of hereditary lord of the manor, forgotten the existence of his elder
brother, or remembered him only to feel a passing relief that he need no
longer wish him dead and experience that hateful demoralizing shame.
Some of the guests were dull, notably the most important, but there were
others whose conversation he found delightful; and the perpetual
atmosphere of gayety, brilliancy, life, which now pervaded the castle,
diverted his mind from the Continent. For not even in the old days, when
his father had been a cabinet minister, had Ordham Castle known anything
like this. The family rent-roll was large, but not inexhaustible. It was
all very romantic, enchanting, and his self-love was mightily tickled.
Had he come into his titles and estates upon the death of his father, he
would have been less impressed no doubt; but after a long interval of
petty financial annoyances, this sudden good fortune filled him with an
abiding if complacent sense of enjoyment. One moment of humiliation and
the work would have been undone. But if Mrs. Cutting and Mabel had not
discovered the pride and sensitiveness in that complicated nature, there
was always her ladyship to advise; and day by day the young man who had
accomplished nothing, who had not even been chosen by destiny to succeed
his father, was lifted higher and higher into that rarefied atmosphere
where the nectar of flattery was ever at his lips, in goblets of gold
fashioned to delight the artist within him. Mabel had even renounced the
desire to remain uninterruptedly at Ordham for a year; they were to go
to London as soon as she was no longer equal to house parties; her
husband should continue to be amused in that capital he did not pretend
to despise.
As for the chef at the castle, he had no rival in New York, and received
a higher salary than the American Minister. The wages of the old
servants were increased, and although they disapproved of alien blood,
they were well content to see their idol in his rightful position.
Nevertheless, they longed for the great day when this ancient domain
should really be his, not rented with American dollars. They
corresponded with a servant in the small household of the secluded
Bridgminster and were not as impatient as they might otherwise have
been. American wives were well enough, particularly when high-bred and
inoffensive, but they wanted to see the Ordham coffers carried back to
the castle.
But Ordham cast not a thought to the ancestral coffers, assisted perhaps
by those water-tight compartments with which nature had endowed him, and
more particularly when he strolled among his guests after dinner,
discharging his duties as host with the zest of youth under his languid
manner. It is true that the small and repeated doses of Americanism
administered by Margarethe Styr lingered in his mental system, but they
were kept sternly under. If once or twice they whispered that he was
living on his wife’s fortune, he sharply reminded them that neither Mrs.
Cutting nor Mabel could have assembled parties like this, and that,
apparently, was all they lived for. Lady Bridgminster, although
hospitable to celebrities and artists, when they knew how to behave
themselves, was notoriously one of the most exclusive hostesses in the
kingdom. “New people” had seldom found a permanent place on her visiting
list, never unless they were foreigners. Mrs. Cutting, with her unerring
social instinct, had recognized this fact during her first season in
London, but although she had the good fortune to take her ladyship’s
fancy, she would have been dropped in time had she proved of no material
benefit. Nor could Lady Bridgminster have induced certain personages to
come to an American woman’s house parties until this marriage of the
daughter had placed her in a new and infinitely more important position.
Of all this Ordham as a man of the world was fully conscious, but what
he did not suspect was that his mother also was determined to keep him
in England. Why the diplomatic career, now that he possessed the riches
to which that was to have been but the stepping-stone? Nor would he have
the same opportunities for magnificence on the Continent, certainly not
for being of service to her distinguished self. He was kind and
generous, but he had a habit of forgetting people when out of their
range. And although he had immediately settled an income on herself, as
well as on two of his brothers, that would be a small compensation
indeed for the free hand she now enjoyed.
Many young people were invited to Ordham. If he could not sit beside
them at table, he could play tennis and croquet with them, loiter about
the park and in the woods with girls almost as pretty as his wife, sit
with them in the picturesque ruin of the original castle, occupied by
generations of Ordhams before the tidal wave of the Renaissance reached
England. There was also music, private theatricals, tableaux, and not
too much dancing, which he detested. There were other young men, not all
of them mad on the subject of sport, and always some brilliant figure
from the artistic world like Wilde, then the idol of all the clever
young brains in the empire. Altogether, he thought, as he strolled
through the great rooms of his castle to-night, he felt that life was
quite enchanting and only hoped that he would not grow fat.
He paused beside Mabel, who immediately turned her shoulder upon her
little court and looked up at him with a brilliant smile. She was too
well-bred to display her adoration in public, but at least she might
pretend that he was an illustrious guest. She wore her favourite
shimmering green, with lilies in her girdle. Her golden hair shone like
nebulæ against a dull piece of green tapestry, thrown over the back of a
tall chair by an unerring æsthete.
“Are you bored, Jackie darling?” she whispered.
“Of course not. How can you ask such a thing? No one is bored. It is
quite astonishing how you and the respective maters manage. Even the men
that have been out all day seem to have got hold of the right women and
look almost awake.”
“Lady Pat says that English women are much more amusing than they used
to be, and I adore them, myself. How wonderful it all is, and the most,
most, most wonderful is that I have a husband, although I am only
nineteen, whom all these distinguished and worldly people admire.”
This speech struck him as obscurely pathetic, consequently its flattery
missed the mark. He looked down upon her kindly. “Don’t overdo it,” he
whispered. “I must go now and talk to that old lady with her wig on one
side. Fortunately she is rather amusing, or I might resent being her
host.”
“Do you mean the duchess—your grandmother?” asked Mabel, wonderingly.
Why were English people so odd sometimes?
“I believe she is. I only remembered for the moment that she often makes
me laugh.”
Mabel stood watching him as he bent with his formal manner and charming
smile over the old lady of whom she stood in some awe, for there was no
more caustic tongue in England than the old duchess’s, and she lost no
opportunity of informing the Cuttings that they were the first Americans
she had ever met. But it was her husband’s careless words that held
Mabel’s puzzled attention. She understood her own departures from the
truth, because they were deliberate and inevitable; but it was difficult
for the direct and businesslike American mind to comprehend the
casual—or affected?—lie when the truth would have been far less
trouble. Ordham, unless driven to the wall—when he lied as coolly as if
it were a sort of royal prerogative—thought no one worth a deliberate
fabrication. But he had an instinctive dislike of the obvious, and all
the little affectations of his class. He was sometimes audaciously
candid, but he rarely thought in a straight line. The wit of the day
said of him, several years later, that whereas all the English were
liars, the Scotch more liars, and the Irish most liars, Bridgminster was
the only man he had ever met who could lie with the simplicity of a
savage, the grace of an artist, and the blandness of an Oriental.
Therefore when his opportunity came would he prove himself the greatest
diplomatist in Europe.
At eleven o’clock he stood watching the charming procession of women in
their flashing jewels and trailing gowns filing down the long gallery,
candle in hand, when Mabel passed him.
“Shall you come over soon?” she whispered, with her head on one side in
the fashion which seems to be peculiar to American women when begging
their lords not to stay out late. Ordham looked at her in surprise and a
faint sense of displeasure, but he said kindly:
“I am afraid not. The men sit up late—those that have not been out, you
know. I cannot well leave them.”
“You leave them when you are tired of them in the field, fast enough.”
Mabel looked pretty, even when she pouted, but her husband replied
calmly:
“You should get to sleep as early as possible. I’ll look in later and
see if you are awake, but better put the light out and drop off.”
“I can sleep in the morning, and I hardly see anything of you now that
we have such a lot of company.”
“I thought you wanted house parties.”
“I did—I do. But I did not realize that they would separate us so
much.”
It was on the tip of Ordham’s tongue to remark that he did not fancy any
man saw more of his wife, but bethought himself in time that this might
sound ungallant. Nevertheless, he was tired of reiterating his adoration
when he wanted to go to sleep or to talk with people whose minds were
engaged with less personal matters, and he had, perhaps unconsciously,
drifted into the habit of seeking his couch as late as possible. He
often assured himself that he loved Mabel as much as ever (of course),
but love was entitled to vacations, and a man should feel that his soul
was his own, not his wife’s. Mabel had been well coached, and her
woman’s instincts were sharp, her brain calculating, but she loved with
as much passion as her nature was capable of generating, and no woman in
love avoids mistakes. Love made her insistent, demand constant verbal
demonstration, until Ordham sometimes felt that if called upon once more
to reiterate “I love you,” he should give full rein to the sulks which
so often arose in him. But Mabel reasoned that he was hers, he had
received proof that she had married him for love alone, why should not
he seek her every moment when he was off duty as host, instead of
compelling her to resort to wiles, coaxings, tears? She was still
astonished at the discovery that the ceremony of marriage had not put an
end to all effort. Where was the happy ever after?
She drooped a little at his last words, and the change from her grand
air was so sudden that he said contritely, although an angry flush rose
to his face, “You know that it is my duty to take all possible care of
you, but I’ll break loose from the smoking room as soon as I decently
can, and wander over.”
This promise he forgot before she was out of sight. Leaving the men to
take care of themselves, he sought a little room off the library which
his father had used as a den and he had appropriated to himself. He
locked the door behind him, and opening his desk, took out a letter he
had received that morning from Margarethe Styr but had not yet found
time to read.
XLVI
OUR FIRST GLIMPSE OF BRIDGMINSTER
He had appreciated at once that it was a letter, not the usual note with
which she had infrequently favoured him. Once before he had received a
letter from her. It had arrived while he was in Purgatory and he had not
opened it for a fortnight. Then, absorbed as he was, he had read it
twice, so delightful was its quality. It was evident that not the least
of Styr’s gifts was the epistolary, a common enough gift in her sex, but
reaching the superlative degree when the woman has brains, experience,
subtlety. As he opened this long letter, written on numberless sheets of
thin foreign paper, he suddenly realized that he had looked forward to
the time when he should have leisure to correspond with Margarethe Styr.
Rarely as he faced it, he was still uneasily conscious that he had not
been quite fair to this woman with whom he had enjoyed so deep and
unique an intimacy. He knew there was a bond, that it was not severed,
perhaps never would be. But he believed that he never again should seek
her deliberately, for he had no desire to dislocate the even and, all
things considered, delightful tenor of his present life; moreover, she
was inaccessible save for a day now and again, or during some brief
vacation he might pass in Munich. He was becoming dimly aware of deeper
currents in his nature than those disturbed by his first love storm,
dark and turbulent currents, perhaps, which his wife could never undam;
but this was one reason the more for immuring them. Although his body
had lost something of its inertia in this new life that took him so much
out of doors, still was his hatred of bother, exertion, his dread of
possible upheavals, no whit abated. Moreover, although it was now some
time since he had admitted that he never should find companionship in
his wife, still had he no wish to hurt her. She was, at least, a wife
for pride, and although he had every intention of seeking his mental
companionship elsewhere, still had he no desire to combine it with
intoxications that Mabel must discover. As he stared at Margarethe
Styr’s long letter, still half opened, he admitted, with that blunt
candour of which he was signally capable, that here alone was the woman
who could satisfy not only his mind but those deeper currents which run
and roar in man’s maturer nucleus. This recognition, however, merely
caused him to resolve anew to see no more of her. Correspondence,
however—why not? He should enjoy sitting up after
everybody—particularly his wife—was in bed, and living this purely
mental life that ever had fascinated him in so many of its forms, enjoy
it far more than assuring Mabel absent-mindedly that he loved her—of
course.
He read the letter. It was an extremely artful letter, for Styr was at
all times and above all things—for the present, at least—an artist. It
was so deliberately clever that Ordham smiled again and again in sheer
delight at its spontaneity, its naturalness. She talked irresistibly
this midnight to her absent friend; and how much there was to talk
about, to tell him! The letter was saturated with the atmosphere of
Munich, an atmosphere of art, beauty, indolence, independence; a world
in itself was that city on its lofty plateau, where poverty and
“business” and the rush of modern life were almost unknown; an
aristocratic, exclusive, segregated city, created as with a magic wand
for pleasure, for dreams, not for work. No wonder he had found it
difficult to study there. Never could he repay his debt to Lutz—and to
this most wonderful of women. He sighed for his lost paradise, saw the
gallery with its divan upon which he so often had made himself wholly at
home!—and talked . . . and listened as she read to him . . . or to the
Isar beneath the window, the birds in the green trees beyond . . .
She told him amusing anecdotes of his numerous acquaintance, of the
opera house cabal, of the King. And she was impelled to write to him
upon this particular night, not only because he had been even more than
commonly in her mind all day, but because of the news that he had been
accredited to Rome, and she must express the hope that he travel via
Munich instead of Paris. She had learned a new rôle—Katharine, in _The
Taming of the Shrew_; he must see her in comedy. Perhaps he would not
believe it, but the experiment was a success; the critics, even those
that belonged to the opposite faction, thought her as good as in
tragedy, and her ovation from the public had been tremendous.
He read this letter through eagerly, then again more slowly, the second
time in search of something that had induced a certain uneasiness in his
mind. It did not take a third reading to discover the causes—for they
were two.
She assumed, as a matter of course, that he was about to embark upon
that career for which nature had so consummately equipped him, and to
whose aid fortune had flown as if with a conscious sense of duty. How
often they had discussed that future of his; she was on fire to witness
the beginning of what must be an historical career; it was strange and
delightful to be able to believe that she had played her little part in
his life, and she was almost as excited as before her own début.
But this was the least of the jars, and although it stirred and shamed
him, not in a moment could he be roused from the pleasant sloth into
which he had fallen. She had written little of herself, but that little
upon careful reading assumed a dark significance. The King’s moroseness
and eccentricities increased daily. There were no more midnight
performances in the Hof. And there were hints! He might shortly be
relegated to a deeper obscurity still, and permanently. His expenditures
were passing belief; drastic action by the government might be necessary
to save the state from bankruptcy.
All this meant that Styr had lost her protector. The inimical party in
the opera house, no longer restrained by fear of the King’s wrath, would
conquer, drive her forth. It had required all the influence she
possessed to obtain permission to learn two new rôles, and although her
party was not contemptible, it was not likely that her friends among the
opera house officials would go so far as to threaten Munich with their
own loss were she driven out.
Perhaps the most deeply human trait in Ordham was his quick and sincere
sympathy. He experienced it toward mere acquaintances in trouble or
slighted by fortune. It gushed warmly for those he loved, and only dried
when, sulky and obstinate, he turned his back after they had bored or
otherwise alienated him. Then he could be as cold and unrelenting as if
all his heart instead of that core were flint, and it is doubtful if he
would turn his head to observe the most malignant straits to which the
offender might be reduced. He shared this trait with certain women; the
women whom too much desire has spoilt, and who mete out the extreme
penalty to the man that bores them as coolly and remorselessly as the
law disposes of its criminals.
Ordham was filled with pity and concern for this friend that had given
him nothing but delight, and to whom he felt almost visibly linked by
those latent vitalities which he would not permit to conquer his beloved
inertia. But they shook him to-night. He rose and walked rapidly up and
down the room. Driven from Munich, what would happen to this gifted
unfortunate creature? There were other German capitals, but each had its
_hochdramatisch_, who would use all her influence to exclude such a
rival as Die Styr. She could merely _gast_ about, with no assured
income, while her lovely home was leased or sold. He had wished to think
of her always in those intensely personal rooms which still seemed half
his own, to see her moving about them with her noble pliant grace, or
looking almost like a mere woman in that ugly rocking-chair. He had
wished always to be able to close his eyes and conjure the vision of her
Isolde, the notes of her great golden voice meeting in a rendezvous of
happy birds in the cold classic dome of that opera house he had loved
even before he knew her.
What ailed the world that it was so slow to accept Richard Wagner, one
of the few positive geniuses it had produced? If he could but do
something to rouse the British public at least, create in it a thirst
for The Master, interpreted by the greatest of his pupils, surely that
must add to their happiness. The most ignorant were often quite happy
when surrendering themselves to the seductive charm of music, to that
spell which enmeshes the facile senses and makes no demand upon a brain
often tired out by nightfall. And what master had ever liberated from
those mysterious centres of the musically gifted brain such a voluptuous
perfumed sea of music as Richard Wagner? People that had been educated
on the old barrel-organ operas had only forcibly to be introduced to the
far more satisfying—intoxicating—music to crave it constantly, as the
Germans did.
Suddenly he remembered that he possessed two hundred thousand pounds in
his own right. To what better use could he put a part of it than to
educate the musical taste of his country while assuring the future of
the best of his friends? That a nice ethical point was involved in
spending the gift of one woman upon another he would have dismissed as
unworthy of consideration had it occurred to him. He was without
conscious arrogance, but he had the blood of kings in his veins, as have
all the older families of the British aristocracy, with or without the
bend sinister, for Plantagenets and Tudors had married more than one
daughter to a peer of the realm; and in blood of this order democracy is
but one more affectation, or policy, or manifest of good manners, as the
individual is composed; all tributes, therefore, are his natural due.
Ordham would have shrunk with a hot blush from admitting that his wife
belonged to a nation of upstarts, that her family pretensions were
absurd, and that the god of circumstance had shown uncommon judgment in
sweeping that river of crude American gold across the Atlantic to be
properly enjoyed by one of a mighty people to whom that bundle of states
owed its being; he would have blushed, but, driven to the wall, he would
have set his countenance into the mask of a type, opened his large cold
eyes, and carelessly admitted it.
Therefore did he give no thought whatever to the source of his present
affluence. Besides, not only would he have done as much for one or two
of his old college friends, but he was meditating a great public
service. To hold London by the nose until it swallowed, and assimilated,
and bred an appetite for the greatest music ever written, what signified
it if the artist who should help him to accomplish the miracle happened
to be his dearest friend threatened with disaster? Not that he pretended
to any such sophistry as that he was not thinking quite as much of
Margarethe Styr as of London, more perhaps; but facts were facts.