"Tal?" asked Marion.
"Tal. Her name's Atalanta, Lady Atalanta Walkenshaw--but everyone calls
her Tal--Lady Tal. She's the daughter of Lord Ossian, you know."
"And who is or was Walkenshaw?--is, I presume, otherwise she'd have
married somebody else by this time."
"Poor Tal!" mused Miss Vanderwerf. "I'm sure she would have no
difficulty in finding another husband to make up for that fearful old
Walkenshaw creature. But she's in a very sad position for so young a
creature, poor girl."
"Ah!" ejaculated Marion, familiar with ladies thus to be commiserated,
and remembering his friend's passion for romance, unquenchable by many
seriocomic disenchantments, "separated from her husband--that sort of
thing! I thought so."
"Now, why did you think that, you horrid creature?" asked his hostess
eagerly. "Well, now, there's no saying that you're not _real_
psychological, Jervase. Now _do_ tell what made you think of such a
thing."
"I don't know, I'm sure," answered Marion, suppressing a yawn. He hated
people who pried into his novelist consciousness, all the more so that
he couldn't in the least explain its contents. "Something about her--or
nothing about her--a mere guess, a stupid random shot that happens to
have hit right."
"Why, that's just the thing, that you haven't hit quite right. That is,
it's right in one way, and wrong in another. Oh, my! how difficult it is
just to explain, when one isn't a clever creature like you? Well, Lady
Tal isn't separated from her husband, but it's just the same as if she
were----"
"I see. Mad? Poor thing!" exclaimed Marion with that air of concern
which always left you in doubt whether it was utterly conventional, or
might not contain a grain of sympathy after all.
"No, he's not mad. He's dead--been dead ever so long. She's one and
thirty, you know--doesn't look it, does she?--and was married at
eighteen. But she can't marry again, for all that, because if she
marries all his money goes elsewhere, and she's not a penny to bless
herself with."
"Ah--and why didn't she have proper settlements made?" asked Marion.
"That's just it. Because old Walkenshaw, who was a beast--just a
beast--had a prejudice against settlements, and said he'd do much better
for his wife than that--leave her everything, if only they didn't plague
him. And then, when the old wretch died, after they'd been married a
year or so, it turned out that he had left her everything, but only on
condition of her not marrying again. If she did, it would all go to the
next of kin. He hated the next of kin, too, they say, and wanted to keep
the money away from him as long as possible, horrid old wretch! So there
poor Tal is a widow, but unable to marry again."
"Dear me!" ejaculated Marion, looking at the patterns which the
moonlight, falling between the gothic balcony balustrade, was making on
the shining marble floor; and reflecting upon the neat way in which the
late Walkenshaw had repaid his wife for marrying him for his money; for
of course she had married him for his money. Marion was not a stoic, or
a cynic, or a philosopher of any kind. He fully accepted the fact that
the daughters of Scotch lords should marry for money, he even hated
all sorts of sentimental twaddle about human dignity. But he rather
sympathised with this old Walkenshaw, whoever Walkenshaw might have
been, who had just served a mercenary young lady as was right.
"I don't see that it's so hard, aunt," said Miss Vanderwerf's niece, who
was deeply in love with Bill Nettle, a penniless etcher. "Lady Tal might
marry again if she'd learn to do without all that money."
"If she would be satisfied with only a little less," interrupted the
sharp-featured Parisian-American whom Mrs. Vanderwerf wanted for a
nephew-in-law. "Why, there are dozens of men with plenty of money who
have been wanting to marry her. There was Sir Titus Farrinder, only last
year. He mayn't have had as much as old Walkenshaw, but he had a jolly
bit of money, certainly."
"Besides, after all," put in the millionaire in distraction about the
sideboard, "why should Lady Tal want to marry again? She's got a lovely
house at Rome."
"Oh, come, come, Clarence!" interrupted Kennedy horrified; "why, it's
nothing but Japanese leather paper and Chinese fans."
"I don't know," said Clarence, crestfallen. "Perhaps it isn't lovely. I
thought it _rather_ pretty--don't you really think it _rather_ nice,
Miss Vanderwerf?"
"Any house would be nice enough with such a splendid creature inside
it," put in Marion. These sort of conversations always interested him;
it was the best way of studying human nature.
"Besides," remarked the Roumanian Princess, "Lady Tal may have had
enough of the married state. And why indeed should a beautiful creature
like that get married? She's got every one at her feet. It's much more
amusing like that----"
"Well, all the same, I _do_ think it's just terribly sad, to see a
creature like that condemned to lead such a life, without anyone to
care for or protect her, now poor Gerald Burne's dead."
"Oh, her brother--her brother--do you suppose she cared for _him_?"
asked the niece, pouring out the iced lemonade and Cyprus wine. She
always rebelled against her aunt's romanticalness.
"Gerald Burne!" said Marion, collecting his thoughts, and suddenly
seeing in his mind a certain keen-featured face, a certain wide curl of
blond hair, not seen for many a long year. "Gerald Burne! Do you mean an
awfully handsome young Scotchman, who did something very distinguished
in Afghanistan? You don't mean to say he was any relation of Lady
Atalanta's? I never heard of his being dead, either. I thought he must
be somewhere in India."
"Gerald Burne was Lady Tal's half-brother--her mother had married a
Colonel Burne before her marriage with Lord Ossian. He got a spear-wound
or something out in Afghanistan," explained one of the company.
"I thought it was his horse," interrupted another.
"Anyhow," resumed Miss Vanderwerf, "poor Gerald was crippled for life--a
sort of spinal disease, you know. That was just after old Sir Thomas
Walkenshaw departed, so Tal and he lived together and went travelling
from one place to another, consulting doctors, and that sort of thing,
until they settled in Rome. And now poor Gerald is dead--he died two
years ago--Tal's all alone in the world, for Lord Ossian's a wretched,
tipsy, bankrupt old creature, and the other sisters are married. Gerald
was just an angel, and you've no idea how devoted poor Tal was to
him--he was just her life, I do believe."
The young man called Ted looked contemptuously at his optimistic
hostess.
"Well," he said, "I don't know whether Lady Tal cared much for her
brother while he was alive. My belief is she never cared a jackstraw
for anyone. Anyway, if she _did_ care for him you must admit she didn't
show it after his death. I never saw a woman look so utterly indifferent
and heartless as when I saw her a month later. She made jokes, I
remember, and asked me to take her to a curiosity shop. And she went
to balls in London not a year afterwards."
The niece nodded. "Exactly. I always thought it perfectly indecent. Of
course Aunt says it's Tal's way of showing her grief, but it's a very
funny one, anyhow."
"I'm sure Lady Tal must regret her brother," said the Roumanian Princess.
"Just think how convenient for a young widow to be able to say to all
the men she likes: 'Oh, do come and see poor Gerald.'"
"Well, well!" remarked Miss Vanderwerf. "Of course she did take her
brother's death in a very unusual way. But still I maintain she's not
heartless for all that."
"Hasn't a pretty woman a right to be heartless, after all?" put in
Marion.
"Oh, I don't care a fig whether Lady Tal is heartless or not," answered
Ted brusquely. "Heartlessness isn't a social offence. What I object to
most in Lady Tal is her being so frightfully mean."
"Mean?"
"Why, yes; avaricious. With all those thousands, that woman manages to
spend barely more than a few hundreds."
"Well, but if she's got simple tastes?" suggested Marion.
"She hasn't. No woman was ever further from it. And of course it's so
evident what her game is! She just wants to feather her nest against a
rainy day. She's putting by five-sixths of old Walkenshaw's money, so as
to make herself a nice little _dot_, to marry someone else upon one of
these days."
"A judicious young lady!" observed Marion.
"Well, really, Mr. Kennedy," exclaimed the Roumanian Princess, "you are
ingenious and ingenuous! Do you suppose that our dear Tal is putting by
money in order to marry some starving genius, to do love in a cottage
with? Why, if she's not married yet, it's merely because she's not met a
sufficient _parti_. She wants something very grand--a _Pezzo Grosso_, as
they say here."
"She couldn't marry as long as she had Gerald to look after," said Miss
Vanderwerf, fanning herself in the moonlight. "She was too fond of
Gerald."
"She was afraid of Gerald, that's my belief, too," corrected the niece.
"Those big creatures are always cowards. And Gerald hated the notion
of her making another money marriage, though he seems to have arranged
pretty well to live on old Walkenshaw's thousands."
"Of course Gerald wanted to keep her all for himself; that was quite
natural," said Miss Vanderwerf; "but I think that as long as he was
alive she did not want anyone else. She thought only of him, poor
creature----"
"And of a score of ball and dinner-parties and a few hundred
acquaintances," put in Ted, making rings with the smoke of his cigarette.
"And now," said the Princess, "she's waiting to find her _Pezzo Grosso_.
And she wants money because she knows that a _Pezzo Grosso_ will marry a
penniless girl of eighteen, but won't marry a penniless woman of thirty;
she must make up for being a little _passee_ by loving him for his own
sake, and for that, she must have money."
"For all that, poor Tal's very simple," wheezed the old peeress,
apparently awakening from a narcotic slumber. "She always reminds me of
an anecdote poor dear Palmerston used to tell----"
"Anyhow," said Kennedy, "Lady Tal's a riddle, and I pity the man who
tries to guess it. Good-night, dear Miss Vanderwerf--good-night, Miss
Bessy. It's all settled about dining at the Lido, I hope. And you'll
come, too, I hope, Mr. Marion."
"I'll come with pleasure, particularly if you ask the enigmatic Lady
Tal."
"Much good it is to live in Venice," thought Jervase Marion, looking out
of his window on to the canal, "if one spends two hours discussing a
young woman six foot high looking out for a duke."