UN MENAGE A DEUX.
HAROLD JERNINGHAM lived in Park Lane. To say this, and to say in
addition to this that it was his privilege to inhabit a snug little
bachelor dwelling, with bay-windows from the roof to the basement, is
to say that he was one of those favoured beings for whom this world
must needs be a terrestrial paradise. There are mansions in Park
Lane, stately and gigantic--mansions with lofty picture-galleries,
and staircases of polished marble, and conservatories which roof-in
small forests of tropical verdure: but the glory of this western
Eden lies not in them. Are there not mansions in Belgravia and
Tyburnia, in Piccadilly and Mayfair? Palaces are common enough in
this western hemisphere, and the roturier may find one ready for
his occupation, seek it when he will. But it is only in Park Lane
that those delicious little bachelor snuggeries are to be found,
those enchanting toy-houses, “too small to live in, and too big to
hang at your watch-chain,” as Lord Hervey said of the Duke’s cottage
at Chiswick--those irregular little edifices, with bow-windows,
and balconies, and miniature conservatories breaking out in every
direction, and with a perfume of the country still about them.
The house which Harold Jerningham occupied when he favoured the
metropolis by his presence was one of the most enchanting of these
enviable habitations. The house had been a pretty old-fashioned cottage
with bow-windows, when Mr. Jerningham took it in hand, but in his
possession it had undergone considerable change. He had transformed the
rustic bows into deep roomy bays, and had thrown out balconies of iron
scroll-work, whereon there flourished bright masses of flowers, and
ferns, and mosses, amidst which no eye save that of the nurseryman’s
minions ever beheld a faded leaf. He had built mysterious and spacious
chambers at the back of the small dwelling, on ground that had once
been a garden; and beyond these chambers you came suddenly upon a shady
quadrangle roofed-in with glass, where there was a wonderful tesselated
pavement, which had been transported bodily from a chamber in Pompeii,
and where there were ferns and cool grasses, and a porphyry basin of
water-lilies, and the perpetual plashing of a fountain.
Mr. Jerningham had furnished his house after his own fashion, without
regard to the styles that were “in,” or the styles that were “out.”
One rich carpet of dark crimson velvet-pile lined the house from the
hall to the attics, like a jewel-casket; and the same warm and yet
sombre tint pervaded the window-hangings and the walls. The ordinary
visitor found very little to admire in Mr. Jerningham’s drawing-room.
Thin-legged tables and chairs adorned with goats’ heads and festoons
of flowers; a shabby little writing-table, considerably the worse for
wear, but enlivened by patches of china, whereon rosy little Cupids
frisked and tumbled against a background of deep azure; a generally
untidy effect of scattered bronzes and intaglios, gold-and-enamel
snuff-boxes and bonbonnières, Chelsea tea-cups, and antique miniatures;
and on the walls some tapestry, just a little faded, with the eternal
shepherds and shepherdesses of the Watteau school. The connoisseur
only could have told that the spindle-legged chairs and tables were
in the purest style of the Louis-Seize period; that the shabby little
writing-table with the _plaques_ of old Sèvres had belonged to
Marie Antoinette, and had been sold for something over a thousand
pounds; that the bronzes and intaglios, the miniatures and bonbonnières
were the representatives of a fortune; and that the somewhat faded
tapestry was the choicest work of the Gobelins, after designs by
Boucher.
Harold Jerningham was fifty years of age, and one of the richest men
in London. The poorer members of the world in which he lived talked
of him as “a lucky fellow, by Jove, and a man who ought to consider
himself uncommonly fortunate never to have known what it was to be
hard-up, or to have a pack of extravagant sons sucking his blood,
like so many modern vampires, confound ’em!” Harold Jerningham had
neither sons nor daughters, and lived in a bachelor’s snuggery. But
Harold Jerningham was not a bachelor. He had married a very beautiful
young first cousin some seven years before, and the union had not
been a happy one. It had only endured for two years, at the end of
which time the husband and wife had separated, without open scandal
of any kind whatsoever. Mr. Jerningham had chosen that occasion for a
long-postponed journey to the East, and Mrs. Jerningham had quietly
withdrawn herself from the toy-house in Park Lane to another toy-house
on the banks of the Thames, within two or three hundred yards of
Wolsey’s old palace at Hampton. But let man and wife arrange their
affairs never so quietly, the world will have its own ideas, and
make its own theories on the subject. The world--that is to say, Mr.
Jerningham’s world, which was bounded on the south by Great George
Street, Westminster, and on the north by Bryanstone Square--told
several different stories of Mr. Jerningham’s marriage. The beautiful
young cousin had possessed the real Jerningham pride, which was the
pride of the Miltonic Lucifer himself, wherefore the peaceful union
of two Jerninghams was an impossibility, said one faction. But the
majority were inclined to believe Mr. Jerningham in some manner guilty.
Neither his youth nor his middle age had been spotless. Too proud and
too refined to affect coarse vices or common dissipations, he had done
more mischief and had been infinitely more dangerous than the common
sinner. The master of a ruined household had cursed the name of Harold
Jerningham, and innocent children had grown up to blush at the mention
of that fatal name. For three-and-forty years of his life he had been
a bachelor, and had laughed at the men who bartered their liberty
for the sake of a wife’s monotonous companionship and the prattle of
tiresome children. He had not been a deliberate sinner--indeed, the
deliberate sinners seem to be a very small minority, and even the
man who poisons his wife with minim doses of aconite will tell the
gaol-chaplain that he was a poor, weak creature, led away from time to
time by the impulse of the moment. The Tempter took him by the hand,
and drew him on, foot by foot, to his destruction. There is a thick and
blinding fog for ever hanging over that fatally easy slope which leads
to Avernus, whereby the traveller cannot perceive what progress he has
made upon the dreadful downward road.
Mr. Jerningham had not been a deliberate sinner. He was not
altogether vile and wicked. He was too selfish a man not to wish for
the approbation of his fellow-man; he was too much of a poet and
an artist not to perceive the loveliness of virtue. He was not an
honourable man, but he knew that honour was a very beautiful thing
in the abstract, and he had a vague sense of discomfort when he acted
dishonourably--just such an unpleasant sensation as he would have felt
if he had worn an ill-fitting coat or an ill-made boot. He was not
without benevolence, and could even be generous on occasion; but in
all his useless life he had never sacrificed his own enjoyment for the
good of another. He had taken his pleasure--all was told in those few
words--and if pleasure was only to be had at the cost of evil-doing,
he had shrugged his shoulders regretfully, and paid the price. He
had gathered his roses, and other people had been inconvenienced by
the thorns. The roses were still blooming about his pathway, but Mr.
Jerningham no longer cared to pluck them. A man may grow tired even
of roses. His marriage had been the result of one of those generous
impulses which redeemed his character from utter worthlessness. A
kinsman had died in Paris, in the extreme depths of patrician poverty,
leaving behind him a very lovely daughter, and a letter addressed to
Harold Jerningham. The lovely daughter came to London, unattended,
to deliver the letter, which she presented with her own hands to the
elegant bachelor of three-and-forty. If she had not been a Jerningham,
there is no knowing what story of sin and folly this interview might
have inaugurated. But she was the daughter of Philip Jerningham, and
the direct descendant of a Plantagenet prince; so, after a brief
acquaintance, she became the wife of the eldest representative of her
family, and the mistress of that delicious little house in Park Lane,
to say nothing of parks and mansions, farms and forests, in three of
the fairest counties in England.
She ought to have considered herself the most fortunate of women, said
the western world. Whether she did so consider herself or not, it
speedily transpired that she was not a happy woman. For a few months
the world had the pleasure of beholding Mr. Jerningham in frequent
attendance on his wife. He handed her in and out of carriages, he went
out to dinner with her, he stood behind her chair at the Opera, he was
even seen occasionally to drive her in his unapproachable mail-phaeton;
and this seemed the perfection of domestic felicity. Then there came an
interregnum, during which the Jerninghams were rarely seen together.
They led an erratic existence, the rule of which seemed to be that Mr.
Jerningham should be at Spa when his wife was in London, and that Mrs.
Jerningham should be on her way to one of the country houses whenever
her lord came to town. Then all at once arose the awful rumour that
the Jerninghams had parted from each other for ever. Elegant gossips
discussed the subject at feminine assemblies, and men talked about it
in the clubs. Why had the Jerninghams separated? Was he to blame? Was
she? Had Jerningham, the irresistible, dropped in for it at last? Or
had he been playing his old trick, and had the little woman plucked up
a spirit, and cut him? It is to be observed that Mrs. Jerningham was
amongst the tallest of her sex; but your genuine club-lounger would
call Juno herself a little woman.
It became generally understood before long that Harold Jerningham had
himself alone to thank for the failure of his matrimonial venture. He
made his name somewhat notorious just at this time in conjunction with
that of a French opera-dancer; so Mrs. Grundy shrugged her shoulders
deprecatingly, and pitied Mrs. Jerningham. “A superb creature, my dear;
the very model of propriety; and a thousand times too good for that
dissipated wretch, Harold Jerningham,” exclaimed the sagacious Mrs.
Grundy.
While the world made itself busy with the story of her brief married
life, Emily Jerningham endured her wrongs and sorrows very quietly in
the toy-villa at Hampton. She had an ample income settled on her by
her husband; and as she had been steeped in poverty to the very lips
before her marriage, it is scarcely strange, perhaps, if she forbore
to complain of Mr. Jerningham’s conduct, and elected to talk about
him--whenever intrusive people compelled her to mention his name--as
her friend and benefactor. The world lauded her generosity, but
considered itself injured by her reticence.
For the first twelve months after the separation, Mrs. Jerningham
secluded herself from all society except that of a few chosen friends,
and devoted herself to the cultivation of orchids at the toy-villa.
She started with the intention of passing the remainder of her days
amongst the chosen friends and the orchids; but she was young and
handsome, rich and accomplished, and society had chosen to exalt her
into a social martyr. So people penetrated the depths of her suburban
retreat, and beguiled her to return to the world, of which she had seen
so little. She went into society, tolerably secured from the hazard
of meeting her husband, who had his own particular circle, and that
a very narrow one. Emily Jerningham was liked and admired. She was
a beauty of the Juno type, and the Jerningham pride became her. It
was not by any means an intolerable pride, never parading itself on
unnecessary occasions--pride defensive, and not pride aggressive; the
pride of a prince who will be hand-and-glove with his dear Brummell,
but who will order Mr. Brummell’s carriage when the beau is insolent.
Mrs. Jerningham was very popular. She had all the charm of widowhood
without its danger. There was even the faintest flavour of Bohemianism
about her position, spotless though her reputation might be. She was
a saint and martyr who gave nice little dinners, and drove the most
perfectly appointed of pony-phaetons. It was only by an indescribable
something--a tranquil grace of bearing, a subdued ease of manner,
a pervading harmony in every detail of her surroundings, from the
unobtrusive colouring of her costume to the irreproachable livery
of her servants--that strangers could distinguish her from other
unprotected women of a very different class.
Young men were ready to worship and adore her. “If the gurls a fellah
meets were like Mrs. Jerningham, a fellah might make up his mind to go
in for the domestic,” said young Tyburnia to young Belgravia. “S’pose
the odds are against Jerningham going off the hooks between this and
the first spring-meeting, so as to give a party a chance with Mrs. J.
herself,” speculates young Belgravia, dreamily.
Mrs. Jerningham had enjoyed her quasi-widowhood some two years, when
Mrs. Grundy’s attention was called to a new phenomenon in connection
with that lady.
It was observed that whoever was bidden to the nice little
dinner-parties at the toy villa, there was one gentleman whose presence
was a certainty. It was observed that whenever Mrs. Jerningham dropped
in for an hour or two at any fashionable assembly, this gentleman was
sure to drop in at the same hour, and to depart, listless and weary,
as soon as he had handed that lady to her carriage. He was not one of
the butterflies, but had been admitted amongst those gorgeous creatures
on account of certain gifts and qualities which the butterflies
were able to appreciate. He was a powerful satirist, something of a
poet, and the editor of a fashionable semi-political, semi-literary
periodical, entitled “The Areopagus.” He was five-and-thirty years
of age, as handsome as an intellectual man can venture to be, and as
elegant as a Lauzun or a Hervey. He had chambers in the Temple, a
hunting-box in Berkshire, the _entrée_ to all the best houses in
London, and a hundred country houses always open to him. The Bohemians
of the press watched his career with envious eyes, and would have
rejoiced infinitely to catch him tripping on the difficult editorial
pathway, so that they might band themselves together to rend him in
pieces. The first time these watchful enemies obtained any advantage
over him was when the western world began to whisper that he had
fallen in love with Mrs. Jerningham. Then the literary Bohemians, the
“Cherokees” and “Night-birds,” and all the little clubs and cliques in
London, set up their malicious chatter; and men who had never beheld
Emily Jerningham’s face speculated upon her conduct and gloated over
the anticipation of some tremendous scandal which should terminate in
Laurence Desmond’s expulsion from the Eden of fashion.
The clubs and cliques were doomed to disappointment. No tremendous
scandal ever arose. After a little discussion, the world agreed to
accept this Platonic attachment between the lady and the editor as the
most delightful of social romances. Mrs. Jerningham had taken care
to provide herself with a perfect dragon in the way of an elderly
widowed aunt, whose husband had been in the Church--and, sheltered
thus, she was free to bestow her friendship on whom she pleased. Time,
which sanctifies all things, gave a kind of legality to the Platonic
attachment; and in due course it became an understood thing that Mr.
Desmond would never marry until Harold Jerningham’s death should set
Emily free.
If any rumour of this romantic friendship reached Mr. Jerningham’s
ears, he received the tidings very quietly. No _preux chevalier_
ever spoke of his liege lady in a more reverential spirit than that
in which Harold Jerningham spoke of his wife. It seemed as if these
two people had agreed to sound each other’s praises. Emily declared
her husband to be the most noble and generous of men; Harold lauded
his wife as the purest and most honourable of women. Malicious people
shrugged their shoulders and hinted at hypocrisy.
“Jerningham was always a Jesuit,” said one; “he is the Talleyrand of
social life. And if you want to arrive at what he means, you must take
the reverse of what he says.”
“If they are both such delightful creatures, what a pity it is they
couldn’t live peaceably together!” said another.