“We are here,” wrote Boo to her eldest brother half a year later. “It’s
quite hot: one wants summer frocks. There are no end of Germans and
Russes to play with; but I don’t like them. Mammy’s got a new man made
of millions, or rather she has not got him and it makes her cross. He
gave me a gold Cupid seal--so pretty. She took it away from me, and
sent it as a wedding-present to Daisy Ffiennes. Wasn’t that like mammy?
She never speaks of you. She says uncle Ronnie has made you a bad boy.”
The letter was dated from Cannes.
Jack had good sense enough to put the note in the roaring fire of old
salt-encrusted ship logs which was burning on the great hearth of
Faldon’s central hall, before which he and many dogs were lying in the
gloom of the December afternoon. He did not envy his sister the roses
and mimosa and white lilac of Cannes. His mother had gone there because
everybody in the winter does go there, or to Egypt, or to India; but
she was out of temper with Fate, as her little daughter had said. She
did not wish for more adventures. She dreaded other tyrants. She wanted
to have two things in one: liberty and money. Of marriage she was
afraid. Where find another Cocky?
Still in her moments of sober reflection she knew that she must marry,
or risk drifting into an insecure, shifty, and discreditable position.
Liaisons, however agreeable and amusing, are not sheet-anchors.
Besides, she had been on the verge of losing her reputation--she knew
what the danger feels like; and to become one of the throng of people
who live on their knees outside the gates which once opened wide to
them would have been infinitely more odious to her than an over dose of
chloral. She was Duchess of Otterbourne, but she was very much more in
her own sight and that of her family; she was a Courcy of Faldon.
That memory had been powerless to keep her feet straight in the path
of honor; but it was strong enough to make her feel that she would die
sooner than go down in the dust amongst the discrowned--the discrowned
who live in Pyrenean watering-places, or second-rate Italian cities,
or German baths out of their season, and are made much of at the hands
of consuls’ wives and British chaplains, and who sneak back to their
people’s country house in England, and are received there as a family
obligation, and never more are seen in London between Easter and
Goodwood. Such an existence she would no more have led than she would
have worn a three-guinea ready-made gown bought at an annual sale. She
had always led the first flight in the hunting-field or out of it.
She had, though a very unpoetic personage, this in common with
poets and grasshoppers, that she seldom looked beyond the immediate
day. But now the immediate day frowned on her, grey and ugly; and,
grasshopper-like, she began to feel the shiver and the rime of frost.
Her income under settlement was enough, as her brother had more than
once told her, to enable her to live very quietly at her dower-house,
or at any quiet rural place with her children. But as she would
infinitely have preferred a fatal dose of chloral to such an existence
her future vaguely terrified her. It was no longer possible to rely
upon Ronald, and she found bankers and lenders were all fully alive to
the fact that the widowed Duchess of Otterbourne with only her jointure
was a very different person to Lady Kenilworth, who had always had the
money potentialities of her lord’s future inheritance behind her, and
had also had the ingenious ability in matters financial of Cocky at her
back.
Poor Cocky! Whoever would have thought that she would have so sincerely
missed his support as she now did?
Her aunt’s legacy was well-nigh finished; she had spent it recklessly.
When it had come to her it had seemed inexhaustible, but it actually
dissolved as fast as a water-ice in a ballroom. She was much tormented
by the sense of her poverty. She felt that she could not afford to
run any more risks in supplying the deficiencies in her exchequer.
She knew that her brother was now aware of her tendency to replace
resources by ingenious intrigue; and any step which would compromise
her afresh she was afraid to take.
What on earth could she do?
What a wretch William Massarene had been not to leave her some portion
of his immense wealth! She thought about it until she persuaded herself
that she had been deeply wronged. After torturing her as he had done
surely he should have left her at peace for the rest of her actual
life! She really thought so. If he had only left his fortune to his
wife she could have mesmerized that dull, simple soul into anything.
But the fortune had all gone to the woman she hated the most in the
world, that stately, lily-like, silent person who had considered that
her own songs were not good enough to be sung at the Harrenden House
concerts; and who had sent her all those receipts and counterfoils
without even her compliments, just as you might send her boxes after a
dismissed maid!
She had no inclination to write good or bad music now; she was absorbed
in the discords of her life. Her tradespeople in Paris and London were
no longer pliant; they even wrote rudely; Beaumont no doubt had talked.
Meanwhile she wanted money every moment as a plant wants air.
There was a man near her in Cannes who was made of money and of whom
she had often thought: Adrian Vanderlin. But how to reach him she did
not know. He was a hermit. He had a beautiful place three miles from
Cannes, and was at that moment in residence there; so much she learned
from an archduke who had been to see him, but the rest was not easy
even to her audacity. Vanderlin, who had divorced his wife and was a
financier, would scarcely, she reasoned, be an _ingénu_. If she could
see him--well, she had few doubts as to the effect she produced on
those who saw her. Experience had justified her optimism.
One day she drove through the olive-woods which were on his estate and
through which a drive had been cut which was open to the public. She
saw the château at a distance; it was built in the style of François
Premier, and was at once elegant and stately; it had long terraces
which looked out on to the sea. It was precisely the sort of place
to which she would like to come when east winds were blowing down
Piccadilly and north winds down the Champs Elysées.
“How could that woman be so stupid as to separate from him?” she said
to the Archduke in whose carriage she was. That gentleman smiled.
“As to give him any cause to separate from her? Well, no one knows the
rights of the drama. She was very young and extremely beautiful. Many
suppose that she was sacrificed to intrigues of her father’s.”
“But there must have been evidence against her,” said Mouse, who had a
great dislike to this woman whom she had never seen.
“There is such a thing as suborned witnesses,” replied the Archduke.
“Besides, in German courts divorce is given on slight grounds. Myself,
I think Vanderlin regrets it, or else I do not know why a man of his
years and his wealth should shut himself up away from the world as he
does.”
“But he must be seen in Paris?”
“By men of business; scarcely anyone else. He never goes into society.”
“But you see him, sir?”
“On business, on business.”
“Could you not show me the château?”
“I grieve to refuse you, but I should not venture. I should look like
Mephisto leading a temptress of the Venusberg to disturb an anchorite
in a Paraclete.”
“What a fool he must be!” said Mouse with sincere conviction.
The Archduke laughed.
“Dear Duchess, there are people, even men, to whom, when the affections
go wrong, life seems worthless. Of course you do not understand that.
Your mission is to inspire despairing passions, not to feel them.
“You are a charming creature,” he thought as he spoke. “But you are as
keen after gold as a stoat after poultry. I shall not put you on the
track of Vanderlin’s. He is a great capitalist; but such women as you
would eat up the treasure of an empire and still cry ‘Give!’--daughter
of the horse-leech as you are, with your innocent eyes and your
childlike smile.”
Mouse said no more on the subject, but she carefully surveyed the
approaches of the château and the shore which stretched immediately
beneath its terraces. She had a plan in her fertile mind.
She was as at home in the water as a fish; the family at Faldon had
always lived half their days in the sea.
Early the next morning she rowed herself out in a small rowing-boat
which belonged to one of her friends; she had Boo with her.
“We will go and have a bathe in deep water,” she said to the child.
They frequently did so. But she did not go out very far, and she
steered eastward where the woods of Vanderlin’s château rose above the
shore. In front of the house, and in sight of it, she took advantage
of a moment in which Boo was busy clapping her hands at some gulls to
pull up the plug in the bottom of the boat. It began to leak and then
to fill. She gave a cry as the water welled up over her ankles, and
drawing the child to her rapidly pulled off Boo’s clothes, leaving her
in her chemise and drawers.
“Jump on my back and put your arms round my throat. Don’t hold too hard
to choke me. Don’t be frightened--I will take you to shore.”
With the little girl on her shoulders she cleared herself of the boat
as it filled to its edges, and let herself go into the sea, which was
quite calm and not very cold in the noontide. Boo, who had her mother’s
high spirit, and was used to dance about in sea surf, was not nervous
and did not cling too closely. Mouse struck out toward the beach
somewhat embarrassed by her clothing, but swimming with the skill which
she had acquired in childish days in the rougher waters of the Irish
Channel.
She knew that if anyone was looking through a binocular on the terraces
above she must make a very effective picture--like Venus Aphrodite
bearing Eros. Boo, who was amused, rode triumphant, keeping her
golden hair and her black Gainsborough hat out of the water. Some
men who were on the beach holloaed and ran to get a boat out of a
boathouse lower on the shore, but before they could launch it Mouse
and her little daughter had come ashore laughing and dripping like two
playfellows. Their little skiff, turned keel upward, was floating away
to the eastward as the wind drove it.
“There will be several napoleons to pay for that,” she thought, as she
saw the derelict going fast out of sight. “Never mind if one gets into
the enchanted castle.”
At that moment of her landing, whilst she stood shaking the salt water
off her on to the sand, a voice addressed her from the marble sea-wall
above:
“Have you had an accident, madam? You have displayed great courage.
Pray come up those steps; my house is at your disposal.”
“God helps those who help themselves,” thought Mouse, as she looked up
and saw a man above who, she felt certain, must be Adrian Vanderlin. “I
shall be glad to dry my little daughter’s clothes,” she said, as she
began to ascend the stone steps. “The plug of the boat was rotten; it
filled before one could call out even. If you have any outhouse you can
put us in--we are as wet as two Newfoundlands.”
Boo, feeling that it would be more interesting to do so, had begun to
tremble a little and cry, looking a very pretty watery baby-syren.
“Don’t cry, Boo,” said her mother. “You know you’re not frightened a
bit, only cold.”
“I have sent to my women servants to bring you cloaks,” said the owner
of the château as he came down the steps to meet her, unconscious of
the comedy which had been acted for him. “It was very venturesome,” he
added, “to come in a rowing-boat with no one to aid you.”
“It was very stupid of me not to examine the condition of the boat,”
she replied. “As for danger there was none. I kept close to land, and
my child and I swim like fish.”
“So I have seen; but the Mediterranean, if only a salt-water lake as
some say, can be a very turbulent one.”
At that moment his servants came, bringing wraps in which they hastened
to enfold the lady and her little girl, who were beginning to feel
really chilly. They went up to the house, over whose façade the
appreciative eyes of Mouse ranged enviously.
“Pray consider everything here at your disposal,” he said courteously.
“My housekeeper will take you upstairs, and if you will allow me to
advise you, you will go to bed. Meantime, can I send to inform your
people?”
She thanked him gracefully, not too warmly, and gave him her address in
Cannes.
“If you could get my maid over with some clothes I should be glad,” she
said, as she went up the staircase looking, as no other woman would
have looked, lovely despite the thick wraps and the soaked hair.
“But you have not told me your name?”
“Duchess of Otterbourne,” she called back to him, whilst she went up
the stairs followed by Boo, who by this time had grown cold and equally
cross.
She was taken into a beautiful bedchamber of the Louis Quinze style,
with silver dogs on the hearth where a wood fire already blazed.
“It was really very well done,” she thought with self-complacency.
“I only hope to goodness Boo will not take cold. That man must be
Vanderlin himself. He is more good-looking than I expected; and for an
anchorite he is civil.”
“They’re silver,” said Boo, surveying the andirons, whilst two maids
were rubbing dry her rosy limbs. “So’s the mirror,” she added as she
looked around her after drinking a cup of hot milk; after which she
allowed herself to be put to bed and soon fell fast asleep.
Her mother sat by the fire wrapped in blankets and eider-down.
Even to Boo’s busy and suspicious intelligence it did not occur that
the plug had been pulled out on purpose. The little secret was quite
safe in her mother’s own brain.
“This is a very nice house,” said Boo with condescension to the owner
of it when, three hours later, the maid and the clothes having arrived
from Cannes, they went downstairs with no trace in either of their late
immersion in salt water, and saw their host in his library.
“I am honored by your approval,” said Vanderlin.
“Boo is a great connoisseur,” said her mother.
Vanderlin was a tall and slender man, with a handsome face, spoiled by
melancholy and fatigue; his eyes were dreamy and gentle, his manner was
grave and gave the impression that his thoughts were not greatly in
what he was saying; he at all times spoke little.
He smiled at the child indulgently. “I hope she has felt no ill
effects,” he said to her mother. “Nor yourself?”
“They took too good care of us,” replied Mouse. “It is so very kind of
you to have been so hospitable to two drowned rats.”
“I am happy to have been of use.” He said it with perfect politeness,
but the tone suggested to her that he would be grateful if she went
away and left him to his solitude.
The indifference stimulated her vanity.
“You have not told me who you are,” she said with that abruptness which
in her was graceful. “But I think I know. You are Baron Vanderlin.”
He assented.
“Why do you not see people?” she asked brusquely. “Why do you shut
yourself up all alone in this beautiful place?”
“I come here for rest.”
“But even in Paris or London or Berlin you shun society?”
“I do not care for it.”
“What a pity!”
“Do you think so?”
“Certainly I do. No one should live alone who is not old and blind and
poor.”
He smiled slightly.
“If one were old and blind and poor, one would be probably left alone,
_malgré soi_.”
“Ah, you are a pessimist! I am not. I think the world very delightful
and people very good.”
“Your experiences have been fortunate--and brief.”
He looked vaguely round the room as if he looked for somebody to take
her away.
Boo, who had been examining the library, came up to him with a little
agate Cupid, a paper weight; the Cupid had gold wings and quiver, and
was a delicate work of art. “It’s pretty,” she said; “will you let me
have it?”
“Pray keep it,” said Vanderlin. Her mother scolded her and protested,
she was indeed considerably annoyed at the child’s effrontery; but Boo
kept tight hold on the Cupid.
“Gentleman don’t want it,” she said. “He’s too old for toys.”
He laughed. He had not laughed for a long time.
“Have you any children?” asked Boo.
“No, my dear.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“They are treasures not accorded to all.”
“Treasure is great anxiety, whether it is your kind of treasure or
mine, M. Vanderlin,” said Boo’s mother. “You have been very kind to
this naughty little girl; and we have trespassed too long on your
hospitality. Yet, if it wouldn’t bore you too much, I should so like to
see something of the house before I go. I have often wished to enter as
I sallied past it or drove through your olive woods.”
He assented to her wish with a reluctance which she ignored; and he
showed her over the chief part of his château, which contained much
which was beautiful and rare. Boo, wishing for everything she saw but
warned by her mother’s eyes not to ask for anything more, went jumping
and running through the rooms, her hat in her hand and the light on her
golden head.
“You have several children, I think,” said Vanderlin to her mother.
“Four,” replied Mouse; and she felt that she would have preferred for
this hermit to know nothing about her by reputation.
“Are they all with you?”
“No; they are little boys; their guardians have more to do with them
than I.”
There was a sadness in her tone which made him look at her with a
certain interest.
“Law is very hard on women,” she added. “Especially as regards their
offspring.”
She was, to men of serious temper, most interesting in her maternal
feeling, and it was genuine in a sense though used with artifice.
Vanderlin looked at her with less indifference and unwillingness,
but she made little way in his intimacy; he remained distant in his
courtesy, and as she drove away with baskets of roses for herself and
of fruit for her little daughter she felt discontentedly that she had
gone through the trouble of her invention, and spent the money which
the lost boat would cost, for small purpose.
Boo turned and looked back at the turrets of the château already
distant above its woods.
“That’s a nice man,” she said decidedly. “Won’t you marry him, mammy?”
Her mother colored at such unexpected divination of her own projects.
“What odious things you say, Boo,” she answered; “and how odiously you
behaved, asking for things in that bare-faced way. I have told you
fifty times never to ask.”
“I shouldn’t have got it else,” replied Boo, calmly and unmoved, taking
the Cupid out of the pocket of her fur paletôt, and contemplating it
with satisfaction. She had improved in the science of looting since
the day when her mother had made her give back the gold box to Mrs.
Massarene.
As the carriage drove along the sea-road Vanderlin returned to the
solitude of his library.
It had been unwelcome to him to be obliged to entertain them, and yet
now that they were gone he momentarily missed them, the gay bright
presence of the child and the graceful nonchalance in speech and
movement of the woman. It was years since either child or woman had
been in the rooms of Les Mouettes.
The days passed and brought her no recompense whatever for her
self-inflicted immersion in the cold January waves. The boat had been
found and restored to its owner, so it did not cost her very much. But
the sense of failure irritated her exceedingly. Boo importuned her
several times to return to the château of the silver dogs, but only
encountered a sharp reprimand and was scolded for effrontery. The
Cupid had been taken away from her and found its home in her mother’s
dispatch-box till it was sent as a wedding-gift to somebody who was
being married in the fog in Belgravia. Boo resented the injustice
bitterly and meditated compensation or revenge. More than once she was
on the point of starting by herself for Les Mouettes, but it was far
off, her feet would not take her there, and she could not get away in
a boat because her governess or her maid was always after her. “If I
could only get there alone he’d give me a lot of things,” she thought;
she could see the promontory on which it stood some five miles off
to westward. But she had to stay in Cannes, and be walked out by her
women, and play stupid games with little Muscovite princesses, pale
and peevish, and little German countesses, rustic and rosy. Mammy took
little notice of her. “She’s always nasty when she’s got no money,”
reflected Boo.
Boo knew that there was a scarcity of money.
One day, as she was walking with her governess, which she hated, she
saw two gentlemen on the other side of a myrtle hedge. She kissed her
hand to one of them and rushed headlong to where a break in the hedge
enabled her to join them.
“Good morning!” she cried, rapturously throwing her arms about
Vanderlin. He looked down at her, surprised at such a welcome.
“Is it you, my little friend? How is your mother?”
“Why haven’t you been to see us?” asked Boo.
He smiled.
“I am remiss in those matters. I need education.”
“I’ll tell you what to do,” said Boo. “I know what people ought to do.
Come and see mammy now.”
“Not now, my dear. I have other engagements.”
Boo’s brows knit together.
“People break engagements when I tell them,” she said with hauteur.
“Mine are business engagements.”
“Come!” she said with a stamp of one small foot.
“No, my dear, I will call on you at three if you wish it so much.”
“That is a rude way to speak.”
“I am not a courtier, my dear. Run away now. I am occupied. I will call
on you at three.”
Boo was forced to be content with this compromise; she looked after him
as he walked on with his companion, a prime minister.
“He’s made of millions,” she said to her governess, and her little face
had a reverential look upon it.
Her mother was at home at three o’clock in the pretty room with its
windows opening on to a flower-filled balcony which cost so much in
the first hotel in Cannes. She was reading, and Boo, at a table,
was dabbling with some water-color paints, when he who was “made of
millions” entered, being faithful to his word.
“Your little daughter reminded me that I have been to blame in not
earlier doing myself this honor,” he said as he bent over her hand: she
thought that he did not look either honored or enthusiastic.
She had a vague sense of hostility to her in him which stimulated her
interest and her intentions.
“You owed no duty to two shipwrecked waifs whom you entertained only
too amiably,” she said with a charming smile. “I am surprised that you
have given us a thought.”
He had scarcely given her a thought, but he could not tell her so.
He remained with her half an hour, talking in a somewhat absent manner
of French literature and of German music.
“What’ll you give me, mammy?” said Boo when he had taken his leave, as
she dropped down at her mother’s feet.
“Give you? What do you mean?” said Mouse, who was irritated that he had
not invited her to his château.
“What’ll you give me, mammy?” repeated Boo; and her upraised saucy
imperious eyes said plainly, “Reward me for bringing the person you
wanted or I shall tell him you’ve sent his Cupid--my Cupid--as a
wedding-present to Daisy Ffiennes.”
“I will give you a kiss first,” said Mouse with apparent ignorance of
the meaning of the upraised eyes, “and then I will give you a drive.
Run away.”
To Boo the recompense seemed small besides the greatness of the service
rendered. But her short years of life had been long enough to convince
her that people were not grateful.
“Man’s made of millions,” she said dreamily when she was seated by her
mother’s side in the victoria and Vanderlin, driving a pair of horses
on his homeward way, passed them.
“I believe he is,” said her mother. “But his millions are nothing to
us.”
Boo turned her head away that she might grin unrepressed, showing all
her pretty teeth to an eucalyptus tree on the road.
Her mother did not like Vanderlin. His grave abstracted manner, his
visible indifference to herself, his somewhat ceremonious words bored
her, chilled her; she felt in his presence very much as she did when in
church.
But she intended him to marry her. She fancied he was weak and
unintelligent; she thought she would do as she liked with him and the
millions which were undoubtedly his. On his part he would benefit, for
he wanted rousing and being reconciled to the world. What was the use
of the millions if there were nobody to spend them? She knew that no
one could distance her in the art of making money fly about and diffuse
itself.
She would much sooner have married Wuffie.
Wuffie was His Serene Highness Prince Woffram of Karstein-Lowenthal;
he was twenty-four years old, very good-looking, very mirthful and
pleasure-loving, very popular and sociable; he was extremely in love
with her, and would have given her all he possessed with rapture. But,
alas! that all was represented by a rank which was negotiable in the
marriage market, and bills which were not negotiable anywhere. He was a
fourth son, and his parents were so poor that Daddy Gwyllian declared
he knew for a fact that, when they were dining alone, they had the
_Volkzeitung_ outspread for a tablecloth to save their palatial damask.
Wuffie was charming, but matrimonially he was impossible.
Wuffie was then at Cannes, floating himself in the best society, as
penniless princes of his Fatherland alone can do. She liked him; she
had even more than liking for him, but she kept him at a respectful
distance, for he did not accord with the grave intentions with which
she had swum toward the terraces of Les Mouettes. In racing parlance,
she did not dare put her money on him for any big event.
“Why am I out in the cold, darling?” he asked sorrowfully of Boo, who
was always consulted by her mother’s admirers as an unfailing aneroid.
Boo shook her head and pursed up her lips.
“Why?” insisted the poor prince. “You know everything, Boo.”
This appeal to her omniscience prevailed.
“You’re very pretty, Wuffie,” she said, caressing his golden hair,
which was as bright as her own. “You’re very pretty, and you’re great
fun. But you know, poor, poor Wuffie, you haven’t got a pfennig to
spend.”
“Come and see, Boo,” said Wuffie, stung by such a statement into
mad expenditure, which resulted in the purchase for Boo of a toy
opera-house, with orchestra, costumes, and personages complete, which
had, for three days, been the object of her ardent desires in a shop
window in Nice.
“I’ll sing all the parts myself,” she said rapturously.
“You must give the tenor’s to me,” said the purchaser of it, with a
double meaning.
“Tenors is always spitted,” said Boo solemnly. “They’re always
spitted--or poisoned.”
Her mother passed some days in perplexed meditation. She felt that
all the charms of her ever-irresistible sorcery would be thrown away
on the owner of that delicious sea-palace, and that, as matters now
stood, there was not a shadow of reason for the threat of Prince
Khristof to be put into execution. But she was tenacious, and did not
like to acknowledge herself beaten. She could not readily believe that
Vanderlin was so different to other men that he could in the end remain
wholly uninfluenced by her. The great difficulty was to approach him,
for she felt that she had already committed herself to more than was
wise or was delicate in her advances to him in his solitude. She cast
about her for some _deus ex machina_ that she could set in motion, and
decided on the old Austrian Archduke.
The Archduke was an old man in years, but not in temperament, and
he was highly sensible of her attractions; she did very much as
she pleased with him, and he, sternest of martinets and harshest
of commanding officers, was like a ball of feathers in her hands.
With great adroitness, and the magnetism which every charming woman
exercises, she so interested him by her descriptions of Les Mouettes,
that he was inspired by a desire of seeing the place for himself, and
was induced to overcome both his well-bred dislike to intruding on
a recluse, and his imperial reluctance to cross the threshold of a
man not noble. In the end, so well did she know how to turn men and
things to her own purposes, that, despite the mutual reluctance of
both the guest and the host, Vanderlin did, taken at a disadvantage
one day, when he met them all three together, invite the old general
to breakfast, and invited also herself and her little girl, and the
invitations were promptly accepted. It was impossible to be more
perfectly courteous than Vanderlin was on the occasion, or to show more
urbanity and tact than he did in his reception of them; but even she,
who could easily persuade herself of most things which she wished to
believe, could not fail to see that the entertainment was a weariness
to him--a concession, and an unwilling one, to the wishes of an aged
prince with whom his banking-house had, for many years, had relations.
No one was ever, she thought, so gracefully courteous and so
impenetrably indifferent as her host was. The child alone seemed to
interest him; and Boo, who had taken her cue unbidden from her mother,
was charming, subdued, almost shy, and wholly bewitching. She had a
genuine respect for the man made of millions.
The Archduke, after the luncheon, tired by his perambulations over the
large house, and having eaten and drunk largely, fell asleep on a sofa
with some miniatures, which he was looking at, lying on his knees; he
was sunk in the heavy slumber of age and defective digestion. Not to
disturb him, Vanderlin and she conversed in low tones at some distance
from him, whilst the gentleman of his household, who had accompanied
him, discreetly played a noiseless game of ball with Boo on the terrace
outside the windows.
She, who was greatly daring, thought that now or never was the moment
to find out what her host’s feelings were toward the woman whom he
had divorced. It was difficult, and she knew that it was shockingly
ill-bred to invade the privacy of such a subject, but she felt that it
was the only way to get even with Khris Kar.
They were in a room consecrated to the portraits of women--a collection
made by Vanderlin’s father--chiefly portraits of the eighteenth
century, some oils, some pastels, some crayons, and most of them French
work, except a Romney or two and several Conway miniatures. She had
looked, admired, criticised them with that superficial knowledge of the
technique and jargon of art which is so easily acquired in the world
by people to whom art, _quâ_ art, is absolutely indifferent. She said
the right thing in the right place, displaying culture and accurate
criticism, and looking, as she always did, like a brilliant Romney
herself, very simply attired with a white gown, a blue ribbon round her
waist, and a straw hat, covered with forget-me-nots, on her hair.
The room was in shade and silence, full of sweetness from great china
bowls of lilies of the valley; the old man slept on with his chin on
his chest; the sound of the sea and the smothered ripple of childish
laughter came from without. Now or never, she thought, and turned to
Vanderlin.
“What an exquisite place this is! What a pity you are all alone in it.”
“Solitude has its compensations, if not its distractions,” he answered;
he was profoundly distrustful of her simple, natural, friendly manner,
which seemed to him more dangerous than any other; he believed it to
be assumed on purpose to put him off his guard. He thought the Circe
who now endeavored to beguile him one of the loveliest women he had
ever seen, and he felt convinced that she was also one of the most
dangerous. But she aroused neither interest nor curiosity in him,
though his mind acknowledged her potent charms.
“Do you never regret?” she asked abruptly.
“Who can outlive youth without regret?” he replied. He was hostile to
her in his mind. He felt her charm, but he resented her approaches.
He could not but perceive her desire to draw him into confidential
conversation, and the reserve which was natural to him increased in
proportion to her persistent endeavor to overcome it.
In herself, she was irritated and discouraged; but she concealed both
feelings, and summoned all her courage.
“Is there a portrait of your wife here?” she asked abruptly, turning
and facing him.
He grew pale to his lips, and an expression of intense pain passed over
his countenance.
“Madame,” he said very coldly, “that lady’s name must not be mentioned
to me.”
“Oh, you know, I am a very impertinent person!” she answered lightly.
“Perhaps you will say I am a very ill-bred one. But her story has
always had a fascination for me. They say she is such a very beautiful
person.”
He said nothing; he retained his composure with difficulty; this
audacious stranger probed a wound which he would not have allowed his
most intimate friend to touch.
“I know her father very well,” she continued, disregarding the visible
offence and suffering with which he heard her; “he has sometimes spoken
of her to me. He is not very scrupulous. Don’t you think there may have
been some misunderstanding, some misrepresentation, some intentional
mischief?”
Vanderlin, with increasing difficulty, controlled his anger and his
emotion.
“I do not discuss these matters,” he said with great chillness. “Allow
me, madame, to remind you that the privilege of your acquaintance is to
me a very recent honor.”
“And you think me very intrusive and insupportable? Oh! I quite
understand that. But I have heard things--and it seems a pity--you are
not old enough to mope all by yourself like this; and if there was any
mistake?”
“There was none.”
He said it between his teeth; the recollections she evoked were fraught
for him with intolerable torture, and he could have taken this
intruder by her shoulders and thrust her out of his presence if he had
not been restrained by the habits and self-command of a man of the
world.
“But she ruins your life. You do not forget her?” said his unwelcome
visitant.
“I shall not replace her, madame,” replied Vanderlin curtly, weary of
the cross-examination, and wondering, half divining, what the scope of
it might be.
“Ah, there you are so right!” Mouse murmured. “How can the ruling of a
judge undo what is done, efface what is written on the heart, or make
the past a _tabula rasa_? You think me an impertinent, tiresome person,
I am sure, but I must say to you how glad, how very glad I should be,
if I could ever prove to you that you wronged the Countess zu Lynar.”
“Why do you speak of such things?” said Vanderlin, his self-control
momentarily deserting him. “Does one put out the light of one’s life,
of one’s soul, on mere suspicion? You do not know what you are saying.
You torture me. You will make me forget myself. Be silent, I tell you;
be silent!”
She looked at him, very sweetly, without offence.
“I understand. You love this woman still. She was the mother of your
dead child. I understand--oh! so completely! Well, if ever I can prove
to you that I am right and you are wrong, I shall be very glad, for I
am quite sure that you will never care for any other person. It may
seem to you very impertinent, but I have an idea--an idea---- Never
mind, if there be any grounds for it, time will show.”
“You speak very strangely, madame,” said Vanderlin, agitated to a
degree which it was hard for him to conceal, yet extremely suspicious
of her motives.
“I dare say I do,” she answered without offence, “for I know nothing
whatever, and I conjecture a great deal; very feminine that, you will
say. Hush! the Archduke is stirring.”
At that moment the Archduke awoke from his slumber, astonished to find
himself where he was, and looking round for his missing gentleman.
Vanderlin hastened, of course, to his side, and the _tête-à-tête_
was over, but it had lasted long enough for her to be certain that
it would be as easy to raise the sunken galleys of Carthage from the
violet seas beyond the windows as to revive passion in the heart of her
host.
She hastened to leave him and go out on to the terrace to tell Boo to
be quiet, for she had, as she had truly said, no knowledge whatever,
and merely some vague impressions suggested by the visit and the
warning of Prince Khris. But she had gleaned two certainties from her
conversation with Vanderlin--one, that he had never ceased to regret
his divorced wife, the other that it would be as much use to woo a
marble statue as to attempt to fascinate this man, whose heart was
buried in the deep sea grave of a shipwrecked passion. She had read
of such passions, and seen them represented on the stage, but she had
never before believed in their existence. Now that she did believe in
them, such a waste of opportunities seemed to her supremely idiotic.
The idea of a financier, a man of the world, a Crœsus of Paris and
Berlin, sitting down to weep for the broken jug of spilt milk, for the
shattered basket of eggs, like the farm-girl in the fable! What could
be sillier or less remunerative? But she remembered she had often heard
that the cleverest men in public business were always the greatest
fools in private life.
She drove away in the radiance of the late afternoon in the Archduke’s
carriage, Boo sitting opposite to her holding disconsolately a bouquet
of orchids, of which the rarity did not compensate to her for not
having got anything else.
“What a pity that man does not marry again,” said the old gentleman, as
they passed through the olive and ilex woods of the park.
“I believe he is in love with his lost wife,” said Mouse.
“Very possibly,” replied the Archduke. “I remember her as a young girl;
her beauty was quite extraordinary; it was her misfortune, for it was
the cause of his jealousy.”
“Jealous! That serene impassive man?”
“The serenity is acquired, and the impassiveness is an armor. He is a
person of strong passions and deep affections. He adored his wife, and
I have always supposed that his susceptibilities were played upon by
some Iago.”
“But what Iago? And why?”
“Her father, perhaps, and out of spite. But I really know nothing,”
said the Archduke, recollecting himself, the good wines of Les Mouettes
having loosened his tongue to unusual loquacity.
“He didn’t give me anything to-day!” said Boo woefully from the
front seat; she was unrewarded for her painful goodness, for her
sweetly-imitated shyness, for the self-denial with which she had held
her tongue, and bored herself to play ball noiselessly with that stout,
bald, florid aide-de-camp.
The Archduke laughed.
“Giving is a delightful privilege,” he said; “but when we know that all
the world is expecting us to give, the pastime palls. Adrian Vanderlin
has felt that from the time he was in his nursery. You must allow me to
remedy his omission in this instance, my charming little friend.”
Mouse went home sorely out of temper; it seemed to her quite monstrous
that two persons, like this man and Billy’s daughter, should each
have had command given them of a vast fortune by which they were each
only bored, whilst she who would have spent such a fortune so well,
and with so much enjoyment, was left a victim to the most sordid
anxieties. There was certainly something wrong in the construction of
the universe. She felt almost disposed to be a socialist.
As she went up the staircase of her hotel she was roused from her
meditations by Boo’s voice, which was saying plaintively again, “He
didn’t give me anything to-day!”
“I am very glad he did not,” said her mother. “You are a greedy,
shameless, gobbling little cat.”
“You’re the cat and I’m your kitten,” thought her young daughter, but
Boo, saucy and bold as she was, never dared to be impudent to her
mother.
When they had left him Vanderlin went up to his bedchamber, unlocked
a drawer in a cabinet, and took out of it two portraits, one of his
divorced wife, the other of her dead child.
He looked at them long with slow, hot tears welling up into his eyes.
He would have given all the millions which men envied him to have had
the child playing at his side, and the mother with her hand in his.
A sorrow of the affections may not affect the health, the strength, the
mind, the occupations, or the general life of a man, but it embitters
it as a single drop of wormwood can embitter the whole clearness and
brightness of a bowl of pure water; the bowl may be of silver, may be
of gold, but the water in it is spoilt for ever; and he who must drink
from it envies the peasant the wooden cup which he fills and refills at
a purling stream.