Lady Mallowe and her daughter did not pay their visit to Asshawe Holt,
the absolute, though not openly referred to, fact being that they had
not been invited. The visit in question had merely floated in the air as
a delicate suggestion made by her ladyship in her letter to Mrs. Asshe
Shaw, to the effect that she and Joan were going to stay at Temple
Barholm, the visit to Asshawe they had partly arranged some time ago
might now be fitted in.
The partial arrangement itself, Mrs. Asshe Shaw remarked to her eldest
daughter when she received the suggesting note, was so partial as to
require slight consideration, since it had been made “by the woman
herself, who would push herself and her daughter into any house in
England if a back door were left open.” In the civilly phrased letter
she received in answer to her own, Lady Mallowe read between the lines
the point of view taken, and writhed secretly, as she had been made to
writhe scores of times in the course of her career. It had happened so
often, indeed, that it might have been imagined that she had become used
to it; but the woman who acted as maid to herself and Joan always knew
when “she had tried to get in somewhere” and failed.
The note of explanation sent immediately to Miss Alicia was at once
adroit and amiable. They had unfortunately been detained in London a day
or two past the date fixed for their visit to Asshawe, and Lady
Mallowe would not allow Mrs. Asshe Shawe, who had so many guests, to
be inconvenienced by their arriving late and perhaps disarranging her
plans. So if it was quite convenient, they would come to Temple
Barholm a week earlier; but not, of course, if that would be the least
upsetting.
When they arrived, Tembarom himself was in London. He had suddenly found
he was obliged to go. The business which called him was something which
could not be put off. He expected to return at once. It was made very
easy for him when he made his excuses to Palliser, who suggested that
he might even find himself returning by the same train with his guests,
which would give him opportunities. If he was detained, Miss Alicia
could take charge of the situation. They would quite understand when she
explained. Captain Palliser foresaw for himself some quiet entertainment
in his own meeting with the visitors. Lady Mallowe always provided a
certain order of amusement for him, and no man alive objected to finding
interest and even a certain excitement in the society of Lady Joan. It
was her chief characteristic that she inspired in a man a vague, even if
slightly irritated, desire to please her in some degree. To lead her
on to talk in her sometimes brilliant, always heartlessly unsparing,
fashion, perhaps to smile her shade of a bitter smile, gave a man
something to do, especially if he was bored. Palliser anticipated a
possible chance of repeating the dialogue of “the ladies,” not, however,
going into the Jem Temple Barholm part of it. When one finds a man whose
idle life has generated in him the curiosity which is usually called
feminine, it frequently occupies him more actively than he is aware or
will admit.
A fashionable male gossip is a curious development. Palliser was, upon
the whole, not aware that he had an intense interest in finding out the
exact reason why Lady Mallowe had not failed utterly in any attempt to
drag her daughter to this particular place, to be flung headlong, so
to speak, at this special man. Lady Mallowe one could run and read, but
Lady Joan was in this instance unexplainable. And as she never deigned
the slightest concealment, the story of the dialogue would no doubt
cause her to show her hand. She must have a hand, and it must be one
worth seeing.
It was not he, however, who could either guess or understand. The
following would have been his summing up of her: “Flaringly handsome
girl, brought up by her mother to one end. Bad temper to begin with.
Girl who might, if she lost her head, get into some frightful mess.
Meets a fascinating devil in the first season. A regular Romeo and
Juliet passion blazes up--all for love and the world well lost. All
London looking on. Lady Mallowe frantic and furious. Suddenly the
fascinating devil ruined for life, done for. Bolts, gets killed. Lady
Mallowe triumphant. Girl dragged about afterward like a beautiful young
demon in chains. Refuses all sorts of things. Behaves infernally. Nobody
knows anything else.”
Nobody did know; Lady Mallowe herself did not. From the first year in
which Joan had looked at her with child consciousness she had felt
that there was antagonism in the deeps of her eyes. No mother likes to
recognize such a thing, and Lady Mallowe was a particularly vain woman.
The child was going to be an undeniable beauty, and she ought to adore
the mother who was to arrange her future. Instead of which, she plainly
disliked her. By the time she was three years old, the antagonism had
become defiance and rebellion. Lady Mallowe could not even indulge
herself in the satisfaction of showing her embryo beauty off, and thus
preparing a reputation for her. She was not cross or tearful, but she
had the temper of a little devil. She would not be shown off. She hated
it, and her bearing dangerously suggested that she hated her handsome
young mother. No effects could be produced with her.
Before she was four the antagonism was mutual, and it increased with
years. The child was of a passionate nature, and had been born intensely
all her mother was not, and intensely not all her mother was. A
throw-back to some high-spirited and fiercely honest ancestor created in
her a fury at the sight of mean falsities and dishonors. Before she was
old enough to know the exact cause of her rage she was shaken by it. She
thought she had a bad temper, and was bad enough to hate her own mother
without being able to help it. As she grew older she found out that
she was not really so bad as she had thought, though she was obliged to
concede that nothing palliative could be said about the temper. It had
been violent from the first, and she had lived in an atmosphere which
infuriated it. She did not suppose such a thing could be controlled.
It sometimes frightened her. Had not the old Marquis of Norborough
been celebrated through his entire life for his furies? Was there not a
hushed-up rumor that he had once thrown a decanter at his wife, and so
nearly killed her that people had been asking one another in whispers if
a peer of the realm could be hanged. He had been born that way, so had
she. Her school-room days had been a horror to her, and also a terror,
because she had often almost flung ink-bottles and heavy rulers at her
silly, lying governesses, and once had dug a pair of scissors into one
sneaking old maid fool's arm when she had made her “see red” by her
ignoble trickeries. Perhaps she would be hanged some day herself. She
once prayed for a week that she might be made better tempered,--not that
she believed in prayer,--and of course nothing came of it.
Every year she lived she raged more furiously at the tricks she saw
played by her mother and every one who surrounded her; the very servants
were greater liars and pilferers than any other servants. Her mother was
always trying to get things from people which they did not want to give
her. She would carry off slights and snubs as though they were actual
tributes, if she could gain her end. The girl knew what the meaning of
her own future would be. Since she definitely disliked her daughter,
Lady Mallowe did not mince matters when they were alone. She had no
money, she was extremely good looking, she had a certain number of years
in which to fight for her own hand among the new debutantes who were
presented every season. Her first season over, the next season other
girls would be fresher than she was, and newer to the men who were worth
marrying. Men like novelty. After her second season the debutantes would
seem fresher still by contrast. Then people would begin to say, “She
was presented four or five years ago.” After that it would be all
struggle,--every season it would be worse. It would become awful.
Unmarried women over thirty-five would speak of her as though they had
been in the nursery together. Married girls with a child or so would
treat her as though she were a maiden aunt. She knew what was before
her. Beggary stared them both in the face if she did not make the most
of her looks and waste no time. And Joan knew it was all true, and that
worse, far worse things were true also. She would be obliged to spend
a long life with her mother in cheap lodgings, a faded, penniless,
unmarried woman, railed at, taunted, sneered at, forced to be part of
humiliating tricks played to enable them to get into debt and then to
avoid paying what they owed. Had she not seen one horrible old woman of
their own rank who was an example of what poverty might bring one to,
an old harpy who tried to queen it over her landlady in an actual back
street, and was by turns fawned upon and disgustingly “your ladyshiped”
or outrageously insulted by her landlady?
Then that first season! Dear, dear God! that first season when she met
Jem! She was not nineteen, and the facile world pretended to be at her
feet, and the sun shone as though London were in Italy, and the park was
marvelous with flowers, and there were such dances and such laughter!
And it was all so young--and she met Jem! It was at a garden-party at
a lovely old house on the river, a place with celebrated gardens which
would always come back to her memory as a riot of roses. The frocks of
the people on the lawn looked as though they were made of the petals of
flowers, and a mad little haunting waltz was being played by the band,
and there under a great copper birch on the green velvet turf near her
stood Jem, looking at her with dark, liquid, slanting eyes! They were
only a few feet from each other,--and he looked, and she looked, and the
haunting, mad little waltz played on, and it was as though they had been
standing there since the world began, and nothing else was true.
Afterward nothing mattered to either of them. Lady Mallowe herself
ceased to count. Now and then the world stops for two people in this
unearthly fashion. At such times, as far as such a pair are concerned,
causes and effects cease. Her bad temper fled, and she knew she would
never feel its furious lash again.
With Jem looking at her with his glowing, drooping eyes, there would be
no reason for rage and shame. She confessed the temper to him and told
of her terror of it; he confessed to her his fondness for high play, and
they held each other's hands, not with sentimental youthful lightness,
but with the strong clasp of sworn comrades, and promised on honor that
they would stand by each other every hour of their lives against their
worst selves.
They would have kept the pact. Neither was a slight or dishonest
creature. The phase of life through which they passed is not a new
one, but it is not often so nearly an omnipotent power as was their
three-months' dream.
It lasted only that length of time. Then came the end of the world. Joan
did not look fresh in her second season, and before it was over men were
rather afraid of her. Because she was so young the freshness returned to
her cheek, but it never came back to her eyes.
What exactly had happened, or what she thought, it was impossible to
know. She had delicate, black brows, and between them appeared two
delicate, fierce lines. Her eyes were of a purplish-gray, “the color of
thunder,” a snubbed admirer had once said. Between their black lashes
they were more deeply thunder-colored. Her life with her mother was a
thing not to be spoken of. To the desperate girl's agony of rebellion
against the horror of fate Lady Mallowe's taunts and beratings were
devilish. There was a certain boudoir in the house in Hill Street which
was to Joan like the question chamber of the Inquisition. Shut up in it
together, the two went through scenes which in their cruelty would have
done credit to the Middle Ages. Lady Mallowe always locked the door to
prevent the unexpected entrance of a servant, but servants managed to
hover about it, because her ladyship frequently forgot caution so far as
to raise her voice at times, as ladies are not supposed to do.
“We fight,” Joan said with a short, horrible laugh one morning--“we
fight like cats and dogs. No, like two cats. A cat-and-dog fight is more
quickly over. Some day we shall scratch each other's eyes out.”
“Have you no shame?” her mother cried.
“I am burning with it. I am like St. Lawrence on his gridiron. 'Turn me
over on the other side,'” she quoted.
This was when she had behaved so abominably to the Duke of Merthshire
that he had actually withdrawn his more than half-finished proposal.
That which she hated more than all else was the God she had prayed to
when she asked she might be helped to control her temper.
She had not believed in Him at the time, but because she was frightened
after she had stuck the scissors into Fraulein she had tried the appeal
as an experiment. The night after she met Jem, when she went to her
room in Hill Street for the night, she knelt down and prayed because she
suddenly did believe. Since there was Jem in the world, there must be
the other somewhere.
As day followed day, her faith grew with her love. She told Jem about
it, and they agreed to say a prayer together at the same hour every
night. The big young man thought her piety beautiful, and, his voice was
unsteady as they talked. But she told him that she was not pious, but
impious.
“I want to be made good,” she said. “I have been bad all my life. I was
a bad child, I have been a bad girl; but now I must be good.”
On the night after the tragic card-party she went to her room and
kneeled down in a new spirit. She knelt, but not to cover her face, she
knelt with throat strained and her fierce young face thrown back and
upward.
Her hands were clenched to fists and flung out and shaken at the
ceiling. She said things so awful that her own blood shuddered as she
uttered them. But she could not--in her mad helplessness--make them
awful enough. She flung herself on the carpet at last, her arms
outstretched like a creature crucified face downward on the cross.
“I believed in You!” she gasped. “The first moment you gave me a reason
I believed. I did! I did! We both said our prayer to You every night,
like children. And you've done this--this--this!” And she beat with her
fists upon the floor.
Several years had passed since that night, and no living being knew what
she carried in her soul. If she had a soul, she said to herself, it was
black--black. But she had none. Neither had Jem had one; when the earth
and stones had fallen upon him it had been the end, as it would have
been if he had been a beetle.
This was the guest who was coming to the house where Miles Hugo smiled
from his frame in the picture-gallery--the house which would to-day have
been Jem's if T. Tembarom had not inherited it.
Tembarom returned some twenty-four hours after Miss Alicia had received
his visitors for him. He had been “going into” absorbing things in
London. His thoughts during his northward journey were puzzled and
discouraged ones. He sat in the corner of the railway carriage and
stared out of the window without seeing the springtime changes in the
flying landscape.
The price he would have given for a talk with Ann would not have been
easy to compute. Her head, her level little head, and her way of seeing
into things and picking out facts without being rattled by what didn't
really count, would have been worth anything. The day itself was a
discouraging one, with heavy threatenings of rain which did not fall.
The low clouds were piles of dark-purple gray, and when the sun tried
to send lances of ominous yellow light through them, strange and lurid
effects were produced, and the heavy purple-gray masses rolled together
again. He wondered why he did not hear low rumblings of thunder.
He went to his room at once when he reached home. He was late, and
Pearson told him that the ladies were dressing for dinner. Pearson was
in waiting with everything in readiness for the rapid performance of his
duties. Tembarom had learned to allow himself to be waited upon. He
had, in fact, done this for the satisfying of Pearson, whose respectful
unhappiness would otherwise have been manifest despite his efforts
to conceal it. He dressed quickly and asked some questions about
Strangeways. Otherwise Pearson thought he seemed preoccupied. He only
made one slight joke.
“You'd be a first-rate dresser for a quick-change artist, Pearson,” he
remarked.
On his way to the drawing-room he deflected from the direct path,
turning aside for a moment to the picture-gallery because for a reason
of his own he wanted to take a look at Miles Hugo. He took a look at
Miles Hugo oftener than Miss Alicia knew.
The gallery was dim and gloomy enough, now closing in in the purple-gray
twilight. He walked through it without glancing at the pictures until
he came to the tall boy in the satin and lace of Charles II period.
He paused there only for a short time, but he stood quite near the
portrait, and looked hard at the handsome face.
“Gee!” he exclaimed under his breath, “it's queer, gee!”
Then he turned suddenly round toward one of the big windows. He turned
because he had been startled by a sound, a movement. Some one was
standing before the window. For a second's space the figure seemed
as though it was almost one with the purple-gray clouds that were its
background. It was a tall young woman, and her dress was of a thin
material of exactly their color--dark-gray and purple at once. The
wearer held her head high and haughtily. She had a beautiful, stormy
face, and the slender, black brows were drawn together by a frown.
Tembarom had never seen a girl as handsome and disdainful. He had,
indeed, never been looked at as she looked at him when she moved
slightly forward.
He knew who it was. It was the Lady Joan girl, and the sudden sight of
her momentarily “rattled” him.
“You quite gave me a jolt,” he said awkwardly, and knowing that he said
it like a “mutt.” “I didn't know any one was in the gallery.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked. She spoke to him as though she
were addressing an intruding servant. There was emphasis on the word
“you.”
Her intention was so evident that it increased his feeling of being
“rattled.” To find himself confronting deliberate ill nature of a
superior and finished kind was like being spoken to in a foreign
language.
“I--I'm T. Tembarom.” he answered, not able to keep himself from staring
because she was such a “winner” as to looks.
“T. Tembarom?” she repeated slowly, and her tone made him at once see
what a fool he had been to say it.
“I forgot,” he half laughed. “I ought to have said I'm Temple Barholm.”
“Oh!” was her sole comment. She actually stood still and looked him up
and down.
She knew perfectly well who he was, and she knew perfectly well that no
palliative view could possibly be taken by any well-bred person of her
bearing toward him. He was her host. She had come, a guest, to his house
to eat his bread and salt, and the commonest decency demanded that she
should conduct herself with civility. But she cared nothing for the
commonest, or the most uncommon, decency. She was thinking of other
things. As she had stood before the window she had felt that her soul
had never been so black as it was when she turned away from Miles Hugo's
portrait--never, never. She wanted to hurt people. Perhaps Nero had felt
as she did and was not so hideous as he seemed.
The man's tailor had put him into proper clothes, and his features were
respectable enough, but nothing on earth could make him anything but
what he so palpably was. She had seen that much across the gallery as
she had watched him staring at Miles Hugo.
“I should think,” she said, dropping the words slowly again, “that you
would often forget that you are Temple Barholm.”
“You're right there,” he answered. “I can't nail myself down to it. It
seems like a sort of joke.”
She looked him over again.
“It is a joke,” she said.
It was as though she had slapped him in the face, though she said it so
quietly. He knew he had received the slap, and that, as it was a woman,
he could not slap back. It was a sort of surprise to her that he did not
giggle nervously and turn red and shuffle his feet in impotent misery.
He kept quite still a moment or so and looked at her, though not as she
had looked at him. She wondered if he was so thick-skinned that he did
not feel anything at all.
“That's so,” he admitted. “That's so.” Then he actually smiled at her.
“I don't know how to behave myself, you see,” he said. “You're Lady
Joan Fayre, ain't you? I'm mighty glad to see you. Happy to make your
acquaintance, Lady Joan.”
He took her hand and shook it with friendly vigor before she knew what
he was going to do.
“I'll bet a dollar dinner's ready,” he added, “and Burrill's waiting.
It scares me to death to keep Burrill waiting. He's got no use for me,
anyhow. Let's go and pacify him.”
He did not lead the way or drag her by the arm, as it seemed to her
quite probable that he might, as costermongers do on Hampstead Heath.
He knew enough to let her pass first through the door; and when Lady
Mallowe looked up to see her enter the drawing-room, he was behind
her. To her ladyship's amazement and relief, they came in, so to speak,
together. She had been spared the trying moment of assisting at the
ceremony of their presentation to each other.