"Nothing can ever happen to a man so accomplished, so infallible, so
armed at all points," I went on, encouragingly.
"Oh, you don't know how he's armed!" she exclaimed, with such an odd
quaver that I could account for it only by her being nervous. This idea
was confirmed by her moving just afterwards, changing her seat rather
pointlessly, not as if to cut our conversation short, but because she
was in a fidget. I couldn't know what was the matter with her, but I was
presently relieved to see Mrs. Adney come toward us. She had in her hand
a big bunch of wild flowers, but she was not closely attended by Lord
Mellifont. I quickly saw, however, that she had no disaster to announce;
yet as I knew there was a question Lady Mellifont would like to hear
answered, but did not wish to ask, I expressed to her immediately the
hope that his lordship had not remained in a crevasse.
"Oh, no; he left me but three minutes ago. He has gone into the house."
Blanche Adney rested her eyes on mine an instant--a mode of intercourse
to which no man, for himself, could ever object. The interest, on this
occasion, was quickened by the particular thing the eyes happened to
say. What they usually said was only: "Oh, yes, I'm charming, I know,
but don't make a fuss about it. I only want a new part--I do, I do!" At
present they added, dimly, surreptitiously, and of course sweetly--for
that was the way they did everything: "It's all right, but something did
happen. Perhaps I'll tell you later." She turned to Lady Mellifont, and
the transition to simple gaiety suggested her mastery of her profession.
"I've brought him safe. We had a charming walk."
"I'm so very glad," returned Lady Mellifont, with her faint smile;
continuing vaguely, as she got up: "He must have gone to dress for
dinner. Isn't it rather near?" She moved away, to the hotel, in her
leave-taking, simplifying fashion, and the rest of us, at the mention of
dinner, looked at each other's watches, as if to shift the
responsibility of such grossness. The head-waiter, essentially, like all
head-waiters, a man of the world, allowed us hours and places of our
own, so that in the evening, apart under the lamp, we formed a compact,
an indulged little circle. But it was only the Mellifonts who "dressed"
and as to whom it was recognized that they naturally _would_ dress: she
in exactly the same manner as on any other evening of her ceremonious
existence (she was not a woman whose habits could take account of
anything so mutable as fitness); and he, on the other hand, with
remarkable adjustment and suitability. He was almost as much a man of
the world as the head-waiter, and spoke almost as many languages; but he
abstained from courting a comparison of dress-coats and white
waistcoats, analyzing the occasion in a much finer way--into black
velvet and blue velvet and brown velvet, for instance, into delicate
harmonies of necktie and subtle informalities of shirt. He had a costume
for every function and a moral for every costume; and his functions and
costumes and morals were ever a part of the amusement of life--a part at
any rate of its beauty and romance--for an immense circle of spectators.
For his particular friends indeed these things were more than an
amusement; they were a topic, a social support and of course, in
addition, a subject of perpetual suspense. If his wife had not been
present before dinner they were what the rest of us probably would have
been putting our heads together about.
Clare Vawdrey had a fund of anecdote on the whole question: he had known
Lord Mellifont almost from the beginning. It was a peculiarity of this
nobleman that there could be no conversation about him that didn't
instantly take the form of anecdote, and a still further distinction
that there could apparently be no anecdote that was not on the whole to
his honour. If he had come into a room at any moment, people might have
said frankly: "Of course we were telling stories about you!" As
consciences go, in London, the general conscience would have been good.
Moreover it would have been impossible to imagine his taking such a
tribute otherwise than amiably, for he was always as unperturbed as an
actor with the right cue. He had never in his life needed the
prompter--his very embarrassments had been rehearsed. For myself, when
he was talked about I always had an odd impression that we were speaking
of the dead--it was with that peculiar accumulation of relish. His
reputation was a kind of gilded obelisk, as if he had been buried
beneath it; the body of legend and reminiscence of which he was to be
the subject had crystallized in advance.
This ambiguity sprang, I suppose, from the fact that the mere sound of
his name and air of his person, the general expectation he created,
were, somehow, too exalted to be verified. The experience of his
urbanity always came later; the prefigurement, the legend paled before
the reality. I remember that on the evening I refer to the reality was
particularly operative. The handsomest man of his period could never
have looked better, and he sat among us like a bland conductor
controlling by an harmonious play of arm an orchestra still a little
rough. He directed the conversation by gestures as irresistible as they
were vague; one felt as if without him it wouldn't have had anything to
call a tone. This was essentially what he contributed to any
occasion--what he contributed above all to English public life. He
pervaded it, he coloured it, he embellished it, and without him it would
scarcely have had a vocabulary. Certainly it would not have had a style;
for a style was what it had in having Lord Mellifont. He _was_ a style.
I was freshly struck with it as, in the _salle à manger_ of the little
Swiss inn, we resigned ourselves to inevitable veal. Confronted with his
form (I must parenthesize that it was not confronted much), Clare
Vawdrey's talk suggested the reporter contrasted with the bard. It was
interesting to watch the shock of characters from which, of an evening,
so much would be expected. There was however no concussion--it was all
muffled and minimized in Lord Mellifont's tact. It was rudimentary with
him to find the solution of such a problem in playing the host, assuming
responsibilities which carried with them their sacrifice. He had indeed
never been a guest in his life; he was the host, the patron, the
moderator at every board. If there was a defect in his manner (and I
suggest it under my breath), it was that he had a little more art than
any conjunction--even the most complicated--could possibly require. At
any rate one made one's reflections in noticing how the accomplished
peer handled the situation and how the sturdy man of letters was
unconscious that the situation (and least of all he himself as part of
it), was handled. Lord Mellifont poured forth treasures of tact, and
Clare Vawdrey never dreamed he was doing it.
Vawdrey had no suspicion of any such precaution even when Blanche Adney
asked him if he saw yet their third act--an inquiry into which she
introduced a subtlety of her own. She had a theory that he was to write
her a play and that the heroine, if he would only do his duty, would be
the part for which she had immemorially longed. She was forty years old
(this could be no secret to those who had admired her from the first),
and she could now reach out her hand and touch her uttermost goal. This
gave a kind of tragic passion--perfect actress of comedy as she was--to
her desire not to miss the great thing. The years had passed, and still
she had missed it; none of the things she had done was the thing she had
dreamed of, so that at present there was no more time to lose. This was
the canker in the rose, the ache beneath the smile. It made her
touching--made her sadness even sweeter than her laughter. She had done
the old English and the new French, and had charmed her generation; but
she was haunted by the vision of a bigger chance, of something truer to
the conditions that lay near her. She was tired of Sheridan and she
hated Bowdler; she called for a canvas of a finer grain. The worst of
it, to my sense, was that she would never extract her modern comedy from
the great mature novelist, who was as incapable of producing it as he
was of threading a needle. She coddled him, she talked to him, she made
love to him, as she frankly proclaimed; but she dwelt in illusions--she
would have to live and die with Bowdler.
It is difficult to be cursory over this charming woman, who was
beautiful without beauty and complete with a dozen deficiencies. The
perspective of the stage made her over, and in society she was like the
model off the pedestal. She was the picture walking about, which to the
artless social mind was a perpetual surprise--a miracle. People thought
she told them the secrets of the pictorial nature, in return for which
they gave her relaxation and tea. She told them nothing and she drank
the tea; but they had, all the same, the best of the bargain. Vawdrey
was really at work on a play; but if he had begun it because he liked
her I think he let it drag for the same reason. He secretly felt the
atrocious difficulty--knew that from his hand the finished piece would
have received no active life. At the same time nothing could be more
agreeable than to have such a question open with Blanche Adney, and from
time to time he put something very good into the play. If he deceived
Mrs. Adney it was only because in her despair she was determined to be
deceived. To her question about their third act he replied that, before
dinner, he had written a magnificent passage.
"Before dinner?" I said. "Why, _cher maître_, before dinner you were
holding us all spellbound on the terrace."
My words were a joke, because I thought his had been; but for the first
time that I could remember I perceived a certain confusion in his face.
He looked at me hard, throwing back his head quickly, the least bit like
a horse who has been pulled up short. "Oh, it was before that," he
replied, naturally enough.
"Before that you were playing billiards with _me,_" Lord Mellifont
intimated.
"Then it must have been yesterday," said Vawdrey.
But he was in a tight place. "You told me this morning you did nothing
yesterday," the actress objected.
"I don't think I really know when I do things." Vawdrey looked vaguely,
without helping himself, at a dish that was offered him.
"It's enough if _we_ know," smiled Lord Mellifont.
"I don't believe you've written a line," said Blanche Adney.
"I think I could repeat you the scene." Vawdrey helped himself to
_haricots verts._
"Oh, do--oh, do!" two or three of us cried.
"After dinner, in the salon; it will be an immense _régal_," Lord
Mellifont declared.
"I'm not sure, but I'll try," Vawdrey went on.
"Oh, you lovely man!" exclaimed the actress, who was practising
Americanisms, being resigned even to an American comedy.
"But there must be this condition," said Vawdrey: "you must make your
husband play."
"Play while you're reading? Never!"
"I've too much vanity," said Adney.
Lord Mellifont distinguished him. "You must give us the overture, before
the curtain rises. That's a peculiarly delightful moment."
"I sha'n't read--I shall just speak," said Vawdrey.
"Better still, let me go and get your manuscript," the actress
suggested.
Vawdrey replied that the manuscript didn't matter; but an hour later, in
the salon, we wished he might have had it. We sat expectant, still under
the spell of Adney's violin. His wife, in the foreground, on an ottoman,
was all impatience and profile, and Lord Mellifont, in the chair--it was
always _the_ chair, Lord Mellifont's--made our grateful little group
feel like a social science congress or a distribution of prizes.
Suddenly, instead of beginning, our tame lion began to roar out of
tune--he had clean forgotten every word. He was very sorry, but the
lines absolutely wouldn't come to him; he was utterly ashamed, but his
memory was a blank. He didn't look in the least ashamed--Vawdrey had
never looked ashamed in his life; he was only imperturbably and merrily
natural. He protested that he had never expected to make such a fool of
himself, but we felt that this wouldn't prevent the incident from taking
its place among his jolliest reminiscences. It was only _we_ who were
humiliated, as if he had played us a premeditated trick. This was an
occasion, if ever, for Lord Mellifont's tact, which descended on us all
like balm: he told us, in his charming artistic way, his way of bridging
over arid intervals (he had a _débit_--there was nothing to approach it
in England--like the actors of the Comédie Française), of his own
collapse on a momentous occasion, the delivery of an address to a mighty
multitude, when, finding he had forgotten his memoranda, he fumbled, on
the terrible platform, the cynosure of every eye, fumbled vainly in
irreproachable pockets for indispensable notes. But the point of his
story was finer than that of Vawdrey's pleasantry; for he sketched with
a few light gestures the brilliancy of a performance which had risen
superior to embarrassment, had resolved itself, we were left to divine,
into an effort recognised at the moment as not absolutely a blot on what
the public was so good as to call his reputation.
"Play up--play up!" cried Blanche Adney, tapping her husband and
remembering how, on the stage, a _contretemps_ is always drowned in
music. Adney threw himself upon his fiddle, and I said to Clare Vawdrey
that his mistake could easily be corrected by his sending for the
manuscript. If he would tell me where it was I would immediately fetch
it from his room. To this he replied: "My dear fellow, I'm afraid there
_is_ no manuscript."
"Then you've not written anything?"
"I'll write it to-morrow."
"Ah, you trifle with us," I said, in much mystification.
Vawdrey hesitated an instant. "If there _is_ anything,
you'll find it on my table."
At this moment one of the others spoke to him, and Lady Mellifont
remarked audibly, as if to correct gently our want of consideration,
that Mr. Adney was playing something very beautiful. I had noticed
before that she appeared extremely fond of music; she always listened to
it in a hushed transport. Vawdrey's attention was drawn away, but it
didn't seem to me that the words he had just dropped constituted a
definite permission to go to his room. Moreover I wanted to speak to
Blanche Adney; I had something to ask her. I had to await my chance,
however, as we remained silent awhile for her husband, after which the
conversation became general. It was our habit to go to bed early, but
there was still a little of the evening left. Before it quite waned I
found an opportunity to tell the actress that Vawdrey had given me leave
to put my hand on his manuscript. She adjured me, by all I held sacred,
to bring it immediately, to give it to her; and her insistence was proof
against my suggestion that it would now be too late for him to begin to
read: besides which the charm was broken--the others wouldn't care. It
was not too late for _her_ to begin; therefore I was to possess myself,
without more delay, of the precious pages. I told her she should be
obeyed in a moment, but I wanted her first to satisfy my just curiosity.
What had happened before dinner, while she was on the hills with Lord
Mellifont?
"How do you know anything happened?"
"I saw it in your face when you came back."
"And they call me an actress!" cried Mrs. Adney.
"What do they call _me_?" I inquired.
"You're a searcher of hearts--that frivolous thing an observer."
"I wish you'd let an observer write you a play!" I broke out.
"People don't care for what you write: you'd break any run of luck."
"Well, I see plays all round me," I declared; "the air is full of them
to-night."
"The air? Thank you for nothing! I only wish my table-drawers were."
"Did he make love to you on the glacier?" I went on.
She stared; then broke into the graduated ecstasy of her laugh. "Lord
Mellifont, poor dear? What a funny place! It would indeed be the place
for _our_ love!"
"Did he fall into a crevasse?" I continued.
Blanche Adney looked at me again as she had done for an instant when she
came up, before dinner, with her hands full of flowers. "I don't know
into what he fell. I'll tell you to-morrow."
"He did come down, then?"
"Perhaps he went up," she laughed. "It's really strange."
"All the more reason you should tell me to-night."
"I must think it over; I must puzzle it out."
"Oh, if you want conundrums I'll throw in another," I said. "What's the
matter with the master?"
"The master of what?"
"Of every form of dissimulation. Vawdrey hasn't written a line."
"Go and get his papers and we'll see."
"I don't like to expose him," I said.
"Why not, if I expose Lord Mellifont?"
"Oh, I'd do anything for that," I conceded. "But why should Vawdrey have
made a false statement? It's very curious."
"It's very curious," Blanche Adney repeated, with a musing air and her
eyes on Lord Mellifont. Then, rousing herself, she added: "Go and look
in his room."
"In Lord Mellifont's?"