The Belchambers took possession of their new town-house just in time for
the opening of Parliament in the ensuing year. It was only partially
furnished as yet, and most uncomfortable; but, as Lady Eccleston
remarked with great originality, ‘the only way to get the workmen out of
a house was to move in yourself.’ The first-floor rooms still echoed
with shouts and hammerings, but the upper part of the house was more or
less ready, and so were the dining-room and some back rooms on the
ground-floor, which Cissy had reluctantly decided should eventually be
given up to Sainty. It was astonishing how swiftly she had
‘Shaped her heart with woman’s meekness
To all duties of her rank,’
except the vulgar and obvious one which she would have shared with the
humblest of wives. Having once made it quite clear that she was to
receive everything and give nothing, she soon ceased to talk of
returning to her mother, and Sainty was amazed at the ease with which
she adapted herself to the awkwardness of the situation. In her place,
he felt sure, he would not have rung a bell, or asked for a postage
stamp, but it never seemed to occur to Cissy that there was anything
curious in the arrangement; she annexed all her husband’s possessions
without scruple or hesitation as soon as she discovered that no
embarrassing condition attached to doing so.
In spite of her son’s entreaties that she would stay with them, Lady
Charmington had retired to the dower-house immediately after the
marriage, and they had barely returned from their brief and dismal
honeymoon in the duke’s villa before Cissy began to dispose of
everything at Belchamber as if it had all been hers from earliest
childhood. There had been some talk of a wedding-journey on the
Continent, but Cissy had no desire to prolong the _tête-à-tête_ with
Sainty, which she did not enjoy. It was England, which she knew and
understood, that was to be the scene of her triumphs; and the sight of
strange lands had no charms for her compared to the fun of swooping down
as mistress on the great house, where she had been an unconsidered
little guest, settling which should be her own rooms, having them
redecorated according to the taste of the latest fashionable
upholsterer, and moving into them whatever took her fancy in other parts
of the house.
She was so happily busy that she almost forgot to regret the Season, and
gave up Ascot without a sigh, contenting herself with Cowes and
Goodwood, which she did with great _éclat_ from a friend’s yacht, while
Sainty enjoyed a fortnight of peace and seclusion.
Congenial as she found the task of establishing herself in her husband’s
ancestral home, it was nothing to the delirious enjoyment of selecting,
decorating, and furnishing a big London house, regardless of expense;
and all the time she could spare from entertaining shooting parties in
the autumn was devoted to the feverish prosecution of this new delight.
Of course every one agreed that they must have a town-house. The duke
and Lord Firth were not less convinced of its necessity than the large
circle of acquaintances who hoped to be entertained in it. Even Lady
Charmington, while she winced at the recklessness of the expenditure,
was partly consoled by the sight of her son taking what she considered
‘his proper position in the world.’ She consoled herself with the
thought that it was her long years of careful management that made all
this profusion possible. Sainty must attend the debates in the House of
Lords, and though she was rather scandalised by his Radicalism, she
reflected that the limited number of peers on that side, since the Home
Rule split, made some small office not improbable for him, when the
Liberals came in again.
And Sainty, though he cared for none of these things, had no heart to
refuse them to the girl whom he had married. The fact was that the more
he thought about the matter the sorrier he felt for his wife. For his
part, he told himself, he was not made for love, had never expected it
to play any part in his life, and was no worse off than he was before.
The disadvantage of taking a consistently humble view of one’s own
attractions is not without its compensations; thus the wound to his
self-love, of which a vain man would almost have bled to death, was to
Sainty, who had no vanity and very little self-love, only in the nature
of those scratches which smart and feel sore, but rob us of no drop of
heart’s blood. Life was not perceptibly more unpleasant to him than it
had been before, and he had still the same substitutes for a more active
happiness with which he had been accustomed to fill it, his studies, his
schemes of beneficence, the management of his property. But this poor
child, so well fitted by nature to love and be loved, whose one chance
of rising above the empty frivolity of her surroundings might have lain
in the ennobling influence of a great passion, for something how much
less satisfying than a mess of pottage had she bartered her birthright,
a handful of tin counters, a paper crown! In spite of what he considered
her generosity in taking the blame on herself, he was more and more
inclined to regard her as the victim of her mother’s worldliness,
enmeshed like himself in the toils of that careful schemer. It was not
in nature that a creature so young and fresh should be so greatly
influenced by considerations of wealth or rank; he could not think it.
These things had been dangled before her eyes till she had been dazzled
by their false lustre. She was too innocent, he reflected, to realise to
what extent she had sacrificed all chances of woman’s best happiness to
gain them. The question was how to shield her from the consequences of
her own act, to save her from the bitter repentance only too likely to
follow. To do so might not be permanently in his power; but meanwhile,
if she so keenly desired the undesirable as to be ready to risk the ruin
of her life for it, what was simpler than to give it to her? Jewels,
clothes, a house in town, the means to feed the thankless rich, the
power to walk out of the room before older women--if these things could
make her happy, as far as they were his to give, let her take them in
full measure. They were freely hers. He had no particular use for them
himself.
Perhaps the spectacle of the ease and gusto with which she flung herself
into her new _rôle_ of the great lady was not without a certain satiric
amusement for him.
One day he would find her on the pavement before the house, attended by
Algy Montgomery and a grave professional gentleman who looked the ideal
of a racing duke, while a pair of high-stepping bays were driven up and
down for her inspection. ‘Haven’t we more horses than we know what to do
with?’ Sainty would ask.
‘My dear boy!’ Cissy cried, ‘a parcel of old screws. Jane Rugby was
saying only the other day that we hadn’t a decent pair o’ horses in the
stable.’
On another, she would be busy comparing designs for carriages. ‘Those
old bathing-machines at Belchamber,’ she remarked loftily, ‘are all very
well for the country; but in my position it would be too grotesque for
me to be seen driving about London in them. The duchess has been awfully
kind about advising me. It was her idea to send for the old chariot and
see if it can’t be done up for drawing-rooms. She says unless it has got
dry-rot or anything, that a couple of hundreds spent on it ought to make
it as good as new; and of course I don’t want to waste money on a
tiresome thing one would never use on other occasions, if by spending a
little on the old one it can be made to do. But I _must_ have a decent
brougham and open carriage at once; you must see yourself there are no
two ways about it. And, come to think of it, you ought to have a
brougham of your own. We are sure to clash and want it at the same time,
if we try and do with one.’
‘Perhaps one of the bathing-machines from Belchamber might do for _me_,’
suggested Sainty, not without malice.
‘Well,’ said Cissy quite gravely, ‘I don’t know that it mightn’t.’
‘Who told you of these people?’ Sainty asked, examining the neatly
painted little pictures.
‘Oh, they make all the duke’s carriages, and _they_ are always smartly
turned out. Your cousin Claude told them to send me these sketches, and
he has promised to go with me to Longacre to see what they have in the
shop.’
Since she married, Cissy had ceased to mention Claude as ‘Mr. Morland,’
and the prefix ‘your cousin’ was bridging the narrow chasm between that
and calling him ‘Claude.’ Morland was able to be uncommonly useful to
the pretty new cousin; not only at the coachbuilder’s were his taste and
knowledge invaluable, but at the upholsterer’s, the _bric-à-brac_ shops,
the sales at Christy’s, and he had even been called on to give his views
(and very sound views too) in the more intimate province of the modiste
and the dressmaker. Sainty was obviously of no assistance. What could be
more natural, if the lady needed counsel in such matters, than to turn
to a near kinsman of her husband, and one so well qualified to help? It
is true that Lady Eccleston was more than ready to assist her daughter
in mounting her establishment on a suitable scale, and would very
willingly have accompanied her to the shops, not, perhaps, without a
hope of gleaning a few scattered ears on her own account from the
harvest Cecilia was reaping with so large a hook; but that unnatural
young person seemed to prefer almost any advice or companionship to her
mamma’s. Ill as he thought of her, for the manœuvres with which she had
compassed his union with her daughter, Sainty could not help a secret
sympathy with the poor lady, who bore her pitiless relegation to a back
place with a smiling stoicism worthy of a Red Indian. The old fiction of
the perfect confidence and sisterlike relation between herself and her
daughter was still gallantly maintained even to him, and when he
reflected what potentialities of tearful complainings she had
heroically foregone, he came near to feeling actual gratitude. But he
need have been under no apprehension of plaintive confidences; anything
natural or direct had long ceased to be possible to Lady Eccleston.
‘I cannot have mamma dropping in to lunch whenever it suits her,’ Cissy
remarked ruthlessly. ‘I have told her she must not come more than once a
week, unless she’s asked.’
‘But I thought you said you meant to let people know you were always at
home for lunch?’
‘So I do; it is a very convenient way of seeing my friends. That’s just
why I’ve had to speak to mamma. I should have her here every day if I
didn’t. And it would bore a lot of younger women, who don’t know her
particularly well, like Vere Deans or Ella Dalsany, to find her here
perpetually--not to speak of the men.’
Sainty did not retort that Lady Deans and Lady Dalsany were not so very
much younger that Lady Eccleston. It was no affair of his; and it soon
became evident that Cissy’s mother was not the only relation whom it
bored her friends to meet at her luncheon-table. Sainty had been brought
up in a certain old-fashioned code of manners. His mother, seeing that
he was shy and awkward in company, and being not less so herself, had
insisted rather unduly on the ceremonial side of social life. He had
been taught that hospitality demanded that he should receive and take
leave of guests with some form, accompanying them to their carriages,
and putting on their cloaks, which the groom of the chambers, who was
much taller and unencumbered with a stick, would have done much better.
But he was not long in discovering that these attentions were by no
means demanded by the ladies of the set into which the duchess and
Claude had made haste to introduce his wife.
If Cissy’s friends found Sainty tiresome, it must be admitted that he
found them no less so. The repulsion was certainly mutual. He wondered
sometimes what had become of all the people she had known and liked, and
from whom she had received kindness, during the three or four seasons
that had preceded her marriage; they seemed to have vanished like smoke.
She was absorbed in a little knot of married women, for the most part
considerably her seniors, much in the world’s eye, and none of them
exactly qualified for the _rôle_ of Cæsar’s wife. Their conversation was
extremely esoteric, and the minute fragments of it which were
intelligible to him shocked him profoundly. Occasional paragraphs in the
papers assured him that ‘young Lady Belchamber,’ or ‘pretty little Lady
Belchamber, who was among the most attractive of last season’s brides,’
was ‘very smart’ or ‘quite in the innermost set’; from which he was fain
to derive such comfort as he might. He once ventured to ask Cissy why
she never saw anything of the de Lissacs; he had hoped something for her
from Alice’s influence. ‘I thought you and the girls were very
intimate,’ he said.
‘Oh! girls bore me,’ she answered; ‘and besides, they are not the least
in it; they wouldn’t have anything in common with the people they’d meet
here. Of course with their money they _might_ have done anything, but
poor dear Mrs. de Lissac has no _flair_, don’t you know; she simply
doesn’t take any trouble. I’ll ask them, if you like, some day when I’m
having a duty dinner.’ And she did.
‘Why do we never see anything of you?’ Sainty asked of his old friend on
that occasion. ‘I had hoped that when we came to town we should be much
together.’
‘Well--here we are!’ said Alice, with rather frosty playfulness. ‘And
you know,’ she added more gently, ‘how welcome you always are in
Grosvenor Square.’
‘Cissy is always at home at lunch, you know,’ Sainty persisted. ‘Why
don’t you come in sometimes?’
‘Lady Belchamber has never told either the girls or me that she was at
home at lunch,’ said Alice, freezing again, and went on hurriedly to
praise the beauty of the house and the taste of its mistress. Sainty
looked round him. ‘Cissy has a genius for spending money,’ he said
gloomily. ‘Wait till you see the drawing-rooms; these rooms are nothing
to the plunges she is making upstairs.’ Before Mrs. de Lissac could
answer, they were swooped upon by Lady Eccleston bringing Lady Deans
with her.
‘Dear Alice,’ she cried, ‘Lady Deans fears you don’t remember her; you
met at Belchamber. She is going to have a stall at the World’s Bazaar,
and this is such an opportunity to have a little quiet talk about it. I
have been telling Lady Deans that you are one of our _very_ kindest
helpers, and that you have given the most superb things; a few _really_
good things that can be raffled for are such a help, and one can always
raffle the same things two or three times over--no one ever knows.’
‘Why shouldn’t we have a lottery?’ asked Lady Deans. ‘I mean a _real_
lottery, not for sofa-cushions and things, but for money prizes like
they have abroad. I’m sure it’ld catch on.’
‘But I thought lotteries were illegal,’ Sainty objected.
‘Oh! not at bazaars, or for a charity,’ cried Lady Eccleston. ‘I know
dear Father Stephen of St. Rhadegund’s, Houndsditch, told me they had a
most successful one for their parish room and made heaps of money. I
think Lady Deans’s is a lovely idea.’
‘Well--it’s gambling, you know,’ said Sainty. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t
allow a roulette table----’
‘Why don’t you have a Derby sweep while you’re about it?’ suggested Algy
Montgomery. ‘You could sell the tickets at the bazaar, and as the Derby
won’t be for a good couple o’ months later you could forget to draw it
at all. People would only suppose some other fellow had won, don’t yer
know.’
Lady Eccleston was enchanted with the notion. ‘Dear Lord Algy! _Could_
you work it for us?’ But Mrs. de Lissac, inured as she was to bazaar
morality, was, as a clergyman’s daughter, a little alarmed at any
connection with the turf. ‘How are you getting on with the people for
the Café Chantant?’ she asked, to change the subject.
Lady Eccleston rattled off a list that seemed to contain every one of
any celebrity in the theatrical or musical world.
‘And have you got them all?’ asked Lady Deans.
‘Well, I’ve written to a good many of them, and one or two have
answered,’ said Lady Eccleston; ‘but I shall pop them all down--their
names will look splendid on the programme.’
‘But will they come?’ asked Sainty.
‘Oh _dear_ no, they won’t come; very few of them will _come_. But some
will; I shall make sure of one or two, and we can get some really good
amateurs; and every now and then some one can get up and say that Ellen
Terry regrets she couldn’t manage it at the last moment, or something.
We shall let people in for ten minutes at a time in batches; they’ll
think they just missed some of the best people----’
‘Seems to me you _will_ “let ’em in,”’ chuckled Lord Algy.
‘Do you think,’ asked Lady Deans, ‘there would be any chance of getting
Lady Arthur to sing or dance, or anything? I suppose, Lord Belchamber,
_you_ couldn’t ask her for us?’
‘But she never _could_ sing or dance, or do anything,’ interposed Lord
Algernon.
‘Oh! that wouldn’t matter, as long as she would appear. You see, all the
story of her marriage and everything made her a celebrity.’
‘But it was all two years ago,’ Lady Eccleston interrupted. ‘People have
forgotten all about it,’ and she deftly piloted the discussion to other
projects, so that Sainty was spared the necessity of making any answer
to this astounding proposition.
The bazaar in connection with which so many happy suggestions had been
offered was one of Society’s periodic sacrifices to philanthropy.
Certain fair ones, to whom no form of self-advertisement came amiss,
were ready to dress up in the cause of charity and display themselves to
a wider public than that which usually had the opportunity of admiring
them, on the understanding that none of the trouble of organisation
should fall upon them, and that the date should be fixed for before
Easter, when there wasn’t much else going on. On these conditions, Lady
Eccleston and a little band of zealous fellow-workers had secured a most
imposing list of stall-holders. It was calculated that the suburbs and
the Stock Exchange would come in their thousands to see and converse
with the ladies whose names and doings Lady Eva Morland made weekly
familiar to them in the pages of ‘Maidie’s Tea Table’ in the
_Looking-glass_. The proceeds were to be handed to a charity in which a
very great personage was interested, and the bazaar was to be opened on
at least two of its three days by different members of the royal family.
Lady Eccleston was in her element, and running the whole concern. If it
was not she who had the brilliant inspiration of making the various
stalls represent the countries of the earth and dressing the fair
vendors in national costume, at least she took the credit for it. In
spite of his mother-in-law’s repeated injunctions to him to attend the
opening, Sainty had not the slightest intention of doing so. Indeed, he
had hoped, by liberal contributions, to get off altogether, but Alice de
Lissac had reinforced Lady Eccleston with gentle persistence.
‘I think you should put in an appearance,’ she said, ‘just to support
your wife, you know; it will look queer if you don’t, when she and her
mother are so much interested. _I_ should have thought you would come to
the opening’; and finally Sainty was fain to buy immunity from being
present at this ceremony with a promise to visit his wife’s stall in the
course of one afternoon. It was not till somewhat late on the last day
of the three that he brought himself to redeem his given word.
By the time he arrived, the whole show, though brilliantly lighted and
to his perception still disagreeably crowded, had become a little the
worse for wear. The stalls were denuded of half their contents, the air
had a vitiated second-hand taste, and a fine impalpable dust, raised by
the passing of so many feet, hung like a light haze over everything.
Tired dishevelled girls, looking curiously sham in their fancy dresses
by the side of people in everyday garb, and flushed under the rouge that
had been thought a necessary part of their costume, moved among the
crowd making a last effort to dispose of the remainder of their wares,
excited by competition to perilous lengths of flirtation with unknown
and rather common young men, with whom on no other occasion they would
have thought of exchanging a word.
Sainty was patiently elbowing his way like Parsifal among the
flower-maidens, and meditating on the mystery of what was and was not
permitted to the London girl, when he was suddenly confronted by Mr.
Austin Pryor. Every buttonhole of the young stockbroker’s neat
frock-coat was decorated with faded vegetation and his arms loaded with
a number of quite useless purchases.
‘Well, Belchamber,’ he began, ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with your wife;
too bad of her, I call it. I’d an awful good time here yesterday with
her, and she made me promise to come again to-day and bring a lot of our
fellows from the city. I told ’em all how ripping she looked in her
Polish get-up, and now they’ve all come and she isn’t here; she’s gone
and given us all the slip. Most unprincipled of her, I call it.’
Sainty, while expressing suitable distress at the faithless behaviour of
his spouse, was secretly not sorry to be spared her encounter with the
gallant Lotharios of Throgmorton Street, when he thought of the
fragments of conversation he had already overheard in passing.
‘I don’t know what has happened to her, I’m sure,’ he said politely; ‘I
expected to find her here myself.’
When at last he arrived at the lath and canvas pavillion, much bedraped
with liberty muslin and flags, across the front of which a scroll
displayed the legend, ‘Poland--Marchioness of Belchamber,’ he found only
the de Lissac girls and another maiden, clad in little hussar caps and
dolmans hung coquettishly on one shoulder, resentfully eyeing the ebbing
tide of custom, while Alice and Lady Eccleston, aided by her obedient
son Thomas, were feverishly tying parcels in the background.
‘Have you written on that one, Tommy,’ Lady Eccleston was saying, ‘Mrs.
Brown, Elm Lodge, Streatham? Oh dear, _which_ parcel is the big yellow
cushion? I am sure that was the one she bought. Well, never mind, this
is a cushion anyway, it feels soft; that’ll do. Ah, Sainty, you’ve come
a little late, dear. Everything is over.’
‘What’s become of Cissy?’ Sainty inquired.
The young ladies were evidently not in the best of tempers, and this
innocent question served to open the floodgates of their wrath.
‘Cissy’s gone,’ Norah de Lissac said crossly, ‘and left us in the lurch.
She _said_ she was tired, but _I_ think she was only bored. When it got
dull and shabby and all the nice people had gone it didn’t amuse her any
more.’
‘It puts us in such a foolish position,’ Gemma chimed in. ‘People
naturally come here to see her, and when they don’t find her they are
not best pleased. One man asked me if I was Lady Belchamber, and when I
said I wasn’t, he said, “Then which of you is?” Of course I had to say
we none of us were, and then he was quite rude and said, “Then you’ve no
business to put her name up over the stall.” It wasn’t at all pleasant.’
Norah took up her parable again. ‘She didn’t even take the trouble to
put on her costume to-day, just came in her ordinary clothes, and of
course we looked like dressed-up fools beside her. If she had just sent
us word she wasn’t going to we wouldn’t have put ours on either.’
‘Oh, dears, it would have been a great pity,’ said Lady Eccleston,
emerging from a pile of brown paper with her mouth full of pins. ‘You
look charming in your dresses; they really suit you better than Cissy;
and it would have been so flat if none of you had been in costume, for
there really _is_n’t much in the stall itself to suggest Poland, I must
admit I think Cissy really _was_ tired, you know; she has had a hard two
days of it.’
‘Well, we were tired too,’ said the implacable Norah. ‘She’s not the
only person who has had a hard two days. Can’t we go home now, at
least, and get off these ridiculous clothes?’ she asked, turning to her
step-mother. Alice looked distressed and murmured something about ‘not
deserting Lady Eccleston.’
‘Oh, don’t _think_ of me,’ cried that lady. ‘You and the dear girls go.
Tommy and I can soon finish what’s left to do. The people are thinning
fast, and we’ve done very well. I _can’t_ thank you enough for all your
splendid help’; and she embraced the whole party with a last galvanic
effort at cheerful enthusiasm.
Sainty saw the de Lissac party to their gorgeous equipage, and was just
turning away from the door when a small voice at his elbow demanded,
‘Shall I please to call the kerridge, m’lord?’ and looking down he had a
vision of two large appealing eyes and a white kid forefinger pressed
tightly to a curly hatbrim. He recognised the diminutive boy who
decorated Cissy’s coach-box when she rode abroad.
‘Yes,’ he said; ‘if the brougham is here, I may as well take it. Lady
Belchamber has gone home.’
In the course of the drive he wondered why he had taken the trouble to
come to the bazaar, and who had been benefited or pleased by his visit.
He had hardly got to his room and sat down to his book by the fire, with
a sigh of relief, when a servant came to him.
‘If you please, my lord, Gibson wants to know if there are any more
orders for the carriage.’
‘Not for me,’ Sainty answered, his mind on what he was reading. ‘Ask her
ladyship.’
The man looked surprised and still lingered doubtfully.
‘Well,’ said Sainty, ‘what is it?’
‘If you please, my lord, my lady hasn’t come in yet.’
‘Oh, I think she must have----’ Sainty was beginning but stopped
himself. He saw no reason for discussing Cissy’s movements with the
servants. ‘Then you must wait for orders till she does,’ he said.
He wondered a little why, if she left the bazaar because she was tired,
she had not come home. But after all, Norah’s explanation was probably
the correct one. She was bored with the whole thing and took the
shortest cut for freedom; it was not Cissy’s way to allow herself to be
bored. ‘In any case it is no affair of mine,’ he thought, as he turned
again to his book.