"Souvent femme varie,
Bien foi qui s'y fie."
Lawrence Colquhoun was not, in point of fact, devoting much time to
his ward at this time. She was pretty; she was fresh; she was
unconventional; but then he was forty. For twenty years he had been
moving through a panorama of pretty girls. It was hardly to be
expected that a girl whom he had seen but once or twice should move a
tough old heart of forty. Phillis pleased him, but lazy Lawrence
wanted girls, if that could be managed, to come to him, and she
necessarily stayed at Twickenham. Anyhow, she was in good and safe
hands. It was enough to know that Agatha had her in safe charge and
custody, and when he could find time he would go down and see her
again. As he had been thirteen years trying to find time to visit
Phillis at Highgate, it was possible that he might be in the same way
prevented by adverse circumstances from going to Twickenham.
He was troubled also by other and graver matters.
Victoria Cassilis asked him in the Park to call upon her--for auld
lang syne. What he replied is not on record, because, if anybody
heard, it could only have been the lady. But he did not call upon her.
After a day or two there came a letter from her. Of this he took no
notice. It is not usual for a man to ignore the receipt from a lady,
but Lawrence Colquhoun did do so. Then there came another. This also
he tore in small pieces. And then another. "Hang the woman," said
Lawrence; "I believe she wants to have a row. I begin to be sorry I
came home at all."
His chambers were on the second floor in the Albany, and any one
who knows Lawrence Colquhoun will understand that they were furnished
in considerable comfort, and even luxury. He did not pretend to a
knowledge of Art, but his pictures were good; nor was he a dilettante
about furniture, but his was in good style. China he abhorred,
like many other persons of sound and healthy taste. Let us leave a
loophole of escape; there may be some occult reason, unknown to the
uninitiated, for finding beauty, loveliness, and desirability in
hideous china monsters and porcelain. After all we are but a flock,
and follow the leader. Why should we not go mad for china? It is
as sensible as going mad over rinking. Why should we not buy
water-colours at fabulous prices? At least these can be sold again
for something, whereas books--an extinct form of madness--cannot;
and besides, present their backs in a mute appeal to be read.
The rooms of a man with whom comfort is the first thing aimed at. The
chairs are low, deep, and comfortable; there are brackets, tiny
tables, and all sorts of appliances for saving trouble and exertion;
the curtains are of the right shade for softening the light; the
pictures are of subjects which soothe the mind; the books, if you look
at them, are books of travel and novels. The place is exactly such a
home as lazy Lawrence would choose.
And yet when we saw his laziness in the Prologue, he was living alone
in a deserted city, among the bare wooden walls of a half-ruined
hotel. But Lawrence was not then at home. He took what comfort he
could get, even there; and while he indulged his whim for solitude,
impressed into his own service for his own comfort the two Chinamen
who constituted with him the population of Empire City.
But at Empire City he was all day shooting. That makes a difference to
the laziest of men. And he would not have stayed there so long had he
not been too lazy to go away. If a man does not mind lonely evenings,
the air on the lower slope of the Sierra Nevada is pleasant and the
game is abundant. Now, however, he was back in London, where the
laziest men live beside the busiest. The sun streamed in at his
windows, which were bright with flowers; and he sat in the shade doing
nothing. Restless men take cigars; men who find their own thoughts
insufficient for the passing hour take books; men who cannot sit still
walk about, Lawrence Colquhoun simply lay back in an easy-chair,
watching the sunlight upon the flowers with lazy eyes. He had the gift
of passive and happy idleness.
To him there came a visitor--a woman whom he did not know.
She was a woman about thirty years of age, a hard-featured,
sallow-faced woman. She looked in Lawrence's face with a grim
curiosity as she walked across the room and handed him a letter.
"From Mrs. Cassilis, sir."
"Oh!" said Lawrence. "And you are----"
"I am her maid, sir."
"Where is Janet, then?"
"Janet is dead. She died three years ago, before Mrs. Cassilis
married."
"Oh, Janet is dead, is she? Ah, that accounts--I mean, where did Janet
die?"
"In lodgings at Ventnor, sir. Mrs. Cassilis--Miss Pengelley she was
then, as you know, sir,"--Lawrence looked up sharply, but there was no
change in the woman's impassive face as she spoke,--"Miss Pengelley
sent me with her, and Janet died in my arms, sir, of consumption."
"Ah, I am sorry! And so Mrs. Cassilis has sent you to me with this
letter, has she?" He did not open it. "Will you tell Mrs. Cassilis
that I will send an answer by post, if there is any answer required?"
"I beg your pardon, sir; but Mrs. Cassilis told me expressly that if
you were in town I was to wait for an answer, if I had to wait all
day."
"In that case I suppose I had better read the letter."
He opened it, and it seemed as if the contents were not pleasant,
because he rose from his chair and began to walk about. The
sallow-faced woman watched him all the time, as one who has fired a
shot, and wishes to know whether it has struck, and where.
He held the letter in his left hand, and with his right moved and
altered the position of things on the mantel-shelf, a sign of mental
agitation. Then he turned round brusquely and said:
"Tell your mistress that I will call upon her in the afternoon."
"Will you write that, sir?"
"No, I will not," he replied fiercely. "Take your answer and begone."
She went without a word.
"There will be trouble," she said to herself. "Janet said it would all
come up again some day. He's a handsome chap, and missus is a fool.
She's worse than a fool; she's a hard-hearted creature, with no more
blood than a stone statue. If there's to be trouble, it won't fall on
_his_ head, but on hern. And if I was him, I'd go away again quiet,
and then maybe no one wouldn't find it out. As for her, she'll blow on
it herself."
Lawrence's thoughts assumed a form something like the following:
"Three notes from her in rapid succession, each one more vehement than
the first. She must see me; she insists on my calling on her; she will
see me; she has something important to tell me. It's a marvellous
thing, and great proof of the absence of the inventive faculty in all
of them, that when they want to see you they invariably pretend that
they have something important to tell you. From the duchess to the
nursemaid, by Jove, they are all alike! And now she is coming here
unless I call upon her to-day.
"It won't do to let her come here. I might go down to the seaside, go
into the country, go anywhere, back to America; but what would be the
good of that? Besides, I have not done anything to be afraid of or
ashamed of, unless a knowledge of a thing is guilt. I have nothing to
fear for myself. Remains the question, Ought I not to screen her?
"But screen her from whom? No one knows except Janet, and Janet is
dead. Perhaps that woman with a face like a horse knows; that would be
awkward for Victoria if she were to offend her, for a more damned
unforgiving countenance I never set eyes upon. But Janet was faithful;
I am sure Janet would not split even when she was dying. And then
there was very little to split about when she died. Victoria hadn't
married Mr. Cassilis.
"What the deuce does she want to rake up old things for? Why can't she
let things be? It's the way of women. They can't forget; and hang me
if I don't think she can't forgive me because she has done me a wrong!
Why did I come back from Empire City! There, at all events, one could
be safe from annoyance.
"On a day like this, too, the first really fine day of the season; and
it's spoiled. I might have dined with cousin Agatha and talked to
Phillis--the pretty little Phillis! I might have mooned away the
afternoon in the Park and dined at the Club. I might have gone to
half-a-dozen places in the evening. I might have gone to Greenwich and
renewed my youth at the Ship. I might have gone to Richmond with old
Evergreen and his party. But Phillis for choice. But now I must have
it out with Victoria Cassilis. There's a fate in it: We can't be
allowed to rest and be happy. Like the schoolboy's scrag-end of the
rolly-polly pudding, it is helped, and must be eaten."
Philosophy brings resignation, but it does not bring ease of mind.
Those unfortunate gentlemen who used to be laid upon the wheel and
have their limbs broken might have contemplated the approach of
inevitable suffering with resignation, but never with happiness. In
Colquhoun's mind, Victoria Cassilis was associated with a disagreeable
and painful chapter in his life. He saw her marriage in the fragment
of Ladds's paper, and thought the chapter closed. He came home and
found her waiting for him ready to open it again.
"I _did_ think," he said, turning over her letter in his fingers,
"that for her own sake, she would have let things be forgotten. It's
ruin for her if the truth comes out, and not pleasant for me, A pretty
fool I should look explaining matters in a witness-box. But I must see
her, if only to bring her to reason. Reason? When was a woman
reasonable?"
"I am here," he said, standing before Mrs. Cassilis at her own house a
few hours later. "I am here."
Athos, Parthos, Arimis, and D'Artagnan would have said exactly the
same thing.
"_Me voici!_"
And they would have folded their arms and thrown back their heads with
a preliminary tap at the sword-hilt, to make sure that the trusty
blade was loose in the scabbard and easy to draw, in case M. le
Mari--whom the old French allegorists called _Danger_--should suddenly
appear.
But Lawrence Colquhoun said it quite meekly, to a woman who neither
held out her hand nor rose to meet him, nor looked him in the face,
but sat in her chair with bowed head and weeping eyes.
A woman of steel? There are no women of steel.
It was in Mrs. Cassilis's morning-room, an apartment sacred to
herself; she used it for letter-writing, for interviews with
dressmakers, for tea with ladies, for all sorts of things. And now she
received her old friend in it. But why was she crying, and why did she
not look up?
"I _did_ want to see you, Lawrence," she murmured. "Can you not
understand why?"
"My name is Colquhoun, Mrs. Cassilis. And I cannot understand why----"
"My name, Lawrence, is Victoria. Have you forgotten that?"
"I have forgotten everything, Mrs. Cassilis. It is best to forget
everything."
"But if you cannot! O Lawrence!" she looked up in his face--"O
Lawrence, if you cannot!"
Her weeping eyes, her tear-clouded face, her piteous gesture, moved
the man not one whit. The power which she might once have had over him
was gone.
"This is mere foolishness, Mrs. Cassilis. As a stranger, a perfect
stranger, may I ask why you call me by my Christian name, and why
these tears?"
"Strangers! it is ridiculous!" she cried, starting up and standing
before him. "It is ridiculous, when all the world knows that we were
once friends, and half the world thought that we were going to be
something--nearer."
"Nearer--and dearer, Mrs. Cassilis? What a foolish world it was!
Suppose we had become nearer, and therefore very much less dear."
"Be kind to me, Lawrence."
"I will be whatever you like, Mrs. Cassilis--except what I
was--provided you do not call me Lawrence any more. Come, let us be
reasonable. The past is gone; in deference to your wishes I removed
myself from the scene; I went abroad; I transported myself for four
years; then I saw the announcement of your marriage in the paper by
accident. And I came home again, because of your own free will and
accord you had given me my release. Is this true?"
"Yes," she replied.
"Then, in the name of Heaven, why seek to revive the past? Believe me,
I have forgotten the few days of madness and repentance. They are
gone. Some ghosts of the past come to me, but they do not take the
shape of Victoria Pengelley."
"Suppose we cannot forget?"
"Then we _must_ forget. Victoria--Mrs. Cassilis, rouse yourself. Think
of what you are--what you have made yourself."
"I do think. I think every day."
"You have a husband and a child; you have your position in the world.
Mrs. Cassilis, you have your honour."
"My honour!" she echoed. "What honour? And if all were known!
Lawrence, don't you even pity me?"
"What is the good of pity?" he asked rudely. "Pity cannot alter
things. Pity cannot make things which are as if they are not. You seem
to me to have done what you have done knowing well what you were
doing, and knowing what you were going to get by it. You have got one
of the very best houses in London; you have got a rich husband; you
have got an excellent position; and you have got--Mrs. Cassilis, you
have got a child, whose future happiness depends upon your reticence."
"I will tell you what I have besides," she burst in, with passion. "I
have the most intolerable husband, the most maddening and exasperating
man in all the world!"
"Is he cruel to you?"
"No; he is kind to me. If he were cruel I should know how to treat
him. But he is kind."
"Heroics, Mrs. Cassilis. Most women could very well endure a kind
husband. Are you not overdoing it? You almost make me remember a
scene--call it a dream--which took place in a certain Glasgow hotel
about four years and a half ago."
"In the City he is the greatest financier living, I am told. In the
house he is the King of Littleness."
"I think there was--or is--a bishop," said Lawrence meditatively, "who
gave his gigantic intellect to a Treatise on the Sinfulness of Little
Sins. Perhaps you had better buy that work and study it. Or present it
to your husband."
"Very well, Lawrence. I suppose you think you have a right to laugh at
me?"
"Right! Good God, Mrs. Cassilis," he cried, in the greatest alarm, "do
you think I claim any right--the smallest--over you? If I ever had a
right it is gone now--gone, by your own act, and my silence."
"Yes, Lawrence," she repeated, with a hard smile on her lips, "your
silence."
He understood what she meant. He turned from her and leaned against
the window, looking into the shrubs and laurels. She had dealt him a
blow which took effect.
"My silence!" he murmured; "my silence! What have I to do with your
life since that day--that day which even you would find it difficult
to forget? Do what you like, marry if you like, be as happy as you
like, or as miserable--what does it matter to me? My silence! Am I,
then, going to proclaim to the world my folly and your shame?"
"Let us not quarrel," she went on, pleased with the effect of her
words. There are women who would rather stab a man in the heart, and
so make some impression on him, than to see him cold and callous to
what they say or think. "It is foolish to quarrel after four years and
more of absence."
"Absence makes the heart grow fonder," said Lawrence. "Yes, Mrs.
Cassilis, it is foolish to quarrel. Still I suppose it is old habit.
And besides----"
"When a man has nothing else to say, he sneers."
"When a woman has nothing else to say, she makes a general statement."
"At all events, Lawrence, you are unchanged since I left you at that
hotel to which you refer so often. Are its memories pleasing to you?"
"No; they are not. Are they to you? Come, Mrs. Cassilis, this is
foolish. You told me you had something to say to me. What is it?"
"I wanted to say this. When we parted----"
"Oh, hang it!" cried the man, "why go back to that?"
"When we two parted"--she set her thin lips together as if she was
determined to let him off no single word--"you used bitter words. You
told me that I was heartless, cold, and bad-tempered. Those were the
words you used."
"By Gad, I believe they were!" said Lawrence. "We had a blazing row;
and Janet stood by with her calm Scotch face, and, 'Eh, sir! Eh,
madam!' I remember."
"I might retaliate on you."
"You did then, Mrs. Cassilis. You let me have it in a very superior
style. No need to retaliate any more."
"I might tell you now that you are heartless and cold. I might tell
you----"
"It seems that you are telling me all this without any use of the
potential mood."
"That if you have any lingering kindness for me, even if you have any
resentment for my conduct, you would pity the lonely and companionless
life I lead."
"Your son is nearly a year old, I believe?"
"What is a baby?"
Lawrence thought the remark wanting in maternal feeling; but he said
nothing.
"Come, Mrs. Cassilis, it is all no use. I cannot help you. I would not
if I could. Hang it! it would be too ridiculous for me to interfere.
Think of the situation. Here we are, we three; I first, you in the
middle, and Mr. Cassilis third. You and I know, and he does not
suspect. On the stage, the man who does not suspect always looks a
fool. No French novel comes anywhere near this position of things.
Make yourself miserable if you like, and make me uncomfortable; but
for Heaven's sake, don't make us all ridiculous! As things are, so you
made them. Tell me--what did you do it for?"
"Speak to me kindly, Lawrence, and I will tell you all. After that
dreadful day I went back to the old life. Janet and I made up
something--never mind what. Janet was as secret as the grave. The old
life--Oh, how stupid and dull it was! Two years passed away. You were
gone, never to return, as you said. Janet died. And Mr. Cassilis
came."
"Well?"
"Well, I was poor. With my little income I had to live with friends,
and be polite to people I detested. I saw a chance for freedom; Mr.
Cassilis offered me that, at least. And I accepted him. Say you
forgive me, Lawrence."
"Forgive! What a thing to ask or to say!"
"It was a grievous mistake. I wanted a man who could feel with me and
appreciate me."
"Yes," he said. "I know. Appreciation--appreciation. Perhaps you got
it, and at a truer estimate than you thought. I have sometimes found,
Mrs. Cassilis, in the course of my travels, people who make themselves
miserable because others do not understand their own ideals. If these
people could only label themselves with a few simple descriptive
sentences,--such as 'I am good; I am great; I am full of lofty
thoughts; I am noble; I am wise; I am too holy for this world;' and so
on,--a good deal of unhappiness might be saved. Perhaps you might even
now try on this method with Mr. Cassilis."
"Cold and sneering," she said to herself, folding her hands, and
laying her arms straight out before her in her lap. If you think of
it, this is a most effective attitude, provided that the head be held
well back and a little to the side.
"What astonishes me," he said, taking no notice of her remark, "is
that you do not at all seem to realise the Thing you have done. Do
you?"
"It is no use realising what cannot be found out. Janet is in her
grave. Lawrence Colquhoun, the most selfish and heartless of men, is
quite certain to hold his tongue."
He laughed good-naturedly.
"Very well, Mrs. Cassilis, very well. If you are satisfied, of course
no one has the right to say a word. After all, no one has any cause to
fear except yourself. For me, I certainly hold my tongue. It would be
all so beautifully explained by Serjeant Smoothtongue: 'Six years ago,
gentlemen of the jury, a man no longer in the bloom of early youth was
angled for and hooked by a lady who employed a kind of tackle
comparatively rare in English society. She was a _femme incomprise_.
She despised the little ways of women; she was full of infinite
possibilities; she was going to lead the world if only she could get
the chance. And then, gentlemen of the jury'----"
Here the door opened, and Mr. Gabriel Cassilis appeared. His wife was
sitting in the window, cold, calm, and impassive. Some four or five
feet from her stood Lawrence Colquhoun; he was performing his
imaginary speech with great rhetorical power, but stopped short at
sight of M. le Mari, whom he knew instinctively. This would have been
a little awkward, had not Mrs. Cassilis proved herself equal to the
occasion.
"My dear!" She rose and greeted her husband with the tips of her
fingers. "You are early to-day. Let me introduce Mr. Colquhoun, a very
old friend of mine."
"I am very glad, Mr. Colquhoun, to know you. I have heard of you."
"Pray sit down, Mr. Colquhoun, unless you will go on with your
description. Mr. Colquhoun, who has just arrived from America, my
dear, was giving me a vivid account of some American trial-scene which
he witnessed."
Her manner was perfectly cold, clear, and calm. She was an admirable
actress, and there was not a trace left of the weeping, shamefaced
woman who received Lawrence Colquhoun.
Gabriel Cassilis looked at his visitor with a little pang of jealousy.
This, then, was the man with whom his wife's name had been coupled. To
be sure, it was a censorious world; but then he was a handsome fellow,
and a quarter of a century younger than himself. However, he put away
the thought, and tapped his knuckles with his double glasses while he
talked.
To-day, whether from fatigue or from care, he was not quite himself;
not the self-possessed man of clear business mind that he wished to
appear. Perhaps something had gone wrong.
Lawrence and Mrs. Cassilis, or rather the latter, began talking about
days of very long ago, so that her husband found himself out of the
conversation. This made him uneasy, and less useful when the talk came
within his reach. But his wife was considerate--made allowances, so to
speak, for age and fatigue; and Lawrence noted that he was fond and
proud of her.
He came away in a melancholy mood.
"I can't help it," he said. "I wish I couldn't feel anything about it,
one way or the other. Victoria has gone off, and I wonder how in the
world---- And now she has made a fool of herself. It is not my fault.
Some day it will all come out. And I am an accessory after the fact.
If it were not for that Phillis girl--I must see after her--and she is
pretty enough to keep any man in town--I would go back to America
again, if it were to Empire City."