A DOOR closed and Francesca Bassington sat alone in her well-beloved
drawing-room. The visitor who had been enjoying the hospitality of her
afternoon-tea table had just taken his departure. The tête-à-tête had
not been a pleasant one, at any rate as far as Francesca was concerned,
but at least it had brought her the information for which she had been
seeking. Her rôle of looker-on from a tactful distance had necessarily
left her much in the dark concerning the progress of the all-important
wooing, but during the last few hours she had, on slender though
significant evidence, exchanged her complacent expectancy for a
conviction that something had gone wrong. She had spent the previous
evening at her brother’s house, and had naturally seen nothing of Comus
in that uncongenial quarter; neither had he put in an appearance at the
breakfast table the following morning. She had met him in the hall at
eleven o’clock, and he had hurried past her, merely imparting the
information that he would not be in till dinner that evening. He spoke
in his sulkiest tone, and his face wore a look of defeat, thinly masked
by an air of defiance; it was not the defiance of a man who is losing,
but of one who has already lost.
Francesca’s conviction that things had gone wrong between Comus and
Elaine de Frey grew in strength as the day wore on. She lunched at a
friend’s house, but it was not a quarter where special social information
of any importance was likely to come early to hand. Instead of the news
she was hankering for, she had to listen to trivial gossip and
speculation on the flirtations and “cases” and “affairs” of a string of
acquaintances whose matrimonial projects interested her about as much as
the nesting arrangements of the wildfowl in St. James’s Park.
“Of course,” said her hostess, with the duly impressive emphasis of a
privileged chronicler, “we’ve always regarded Claire as the marrying one
of the family, so when Emily came to us and said, ‘I’ve got some news for
you,’ we all said, ‘Claire’s engaged!’ ‘Oh, no,’ said Emily, ‘it’s not
Claire this time, it’s me.’ So then we had to guess who the lucky man
was. ‘It can’t be Captain Parminter,’ we all said, ‘because he’s always
been sweet on Joan.’ And then Emily said—”
The recording voice reeled off the catalogue of inane remarks with a
comfortable purring complacency that held out no hope of an early
abandoning of the topic. Francesca sat and wondered why the innocent
acceptance of a cutlet and a glass of indifferent claret should lay one
open to such unsparing punishment.
A stroll homeward through the Park after lunch brought no further
enlightenment on the subject that was uppermost in her mind; what was
worse, it brought her, without possibility of escape, within hailing
distance of Merla Blathington, who fastened on to her with the enthusiasm
of a lonely tsetse fly encountering an outpost of civilisation.
“Just think,” she buzzed inconsequently, “my sister in Cambridgeshire has
hatched out thirty-three White Orpington chickens in her incubator!”
“What eggs did she put in it?” asked Francesca.
“Oh, some very special strain of White Orpington.”
“Then I don’t see anything remarkable in the result. If she had put in
crocodile’s eggs and hatched out White Orpingtons, there might have been
something to write to _Country Life_ about.”
“What funny fascinating things these little green park-chairs are,” said
Merla, starting off on a fresh topic; “they always look so quaint and
knowing when they’re stuck away in pairs by themselves under the trees,
as if they were having a heart-to-heart talk or discussing a piece of
very private scandal. If they could only speak, what tragedies and
comedies they could tell us of, what flirtations and proposals.”
“Let us be devoutly thankful that they can’t,” said Francesca, with a
shuddering recollection of the luncheon-table conversation.
“Of course, it would make one very careful what one said before them—or
above them rather,” Merla rattled on, and then, to Francesca’s infinite
relief, she espied another acquaintance sitting in unprotected solitude,
who promised to supply a more durable audience than her present rapidly
moving companion. Francesca was free to return to her drawing-room in
Blue Street to await with such patience as she could command the coming
of some visitor who might be able to throw light on the subject that was
puzzling and disquieting her. The arrival of George St. Michael boded
bad news, but at any rate news, and she gave him an almost cordial
welcome.
“Well, you see I wasn’t far wrong about Miss de Frey and Courtenay
Youghal, was I?” he chirruped, almost before he had seated himself.
Francesca was to be spared any further spinning-out of her period of
uncertainty. “Yes, it’s officially given out,” he went on, “and it’s to
appear in the _Morning Post_ to-morrow. I heard it from Colonel Deel
this morning, and he had it direct from Youghal himself. Yes, please,
one lump; I’m not fashionable, you see.” He had made the same remark
about the sugar in his tea with unfailing regularity for at least thirty
years. Fashions in sugar are apparently stationary. “They say,” he
continued, hurriedly, “that he proposed to her on the Terrace of the
House, and a division bell rang, and he had to hurry off before she had
time to give her answer, and when he got back she simply said, ‘the Ayes
have it.’” St. Michael paused in his narrative to give an appreciative
giggle.
“Just the sort of inanity that would go the rounds,” remarked Francesca,
with the satisfaction of knowing that she was making the criticism direct
to the author and begetter of the inanity in question. Now that the blow
had fallen and she knew the full extent of its weight, her feeling
towards the bringer of bad news, who sat complacently nibbling at her
tea-cakes and scattering crumbs of tiresome small-talk at her feet, was
one of wholehearted dislike. She could sympathise with, or at any rate
understand, the tendency of oriental despots to inflict death or
ignominious chastisement on messengers bearing tidings of misfortune and
defeat, and St. Michael, she perfectly well knew, was thoroughly aware of
the fact that her hopes and wishes had been centred on the possibility of
having Elaine for a daughter-in-law; every purring remark that his mean
little soul prompted him to contribute to the conversation had an easily
recognizable undercurrent of malice. Fortunately for her powers of
polite endurance, which had been put to such searching and repeated tests
that day, St. Michael had planned out for himself a busy little
time-table of afternoon visits, at each of which his self-appointed task
of forestalling and embellishing the newspaper announcements of the
Youghal-de Frey engagement would be hurriedly but thoroughly performed.
“They’ll be quite one of the best-looking and most interesting couples of
the Season, won’t they?” he cried, by way of farewell. The door closed
and Francesca Bassington sat alone in her drawing-room.
Before she could give way to the bitter luxury of reflection on the
downfall of her hopes, it was prudent to take precautionary measures
against unwelcome intrusion. Summoning the maid who had just speeded the
departing St. Michael, she gave the order: “I am not at home this
afternoon to Lady Caroline Benaresq.” On second thoughts she extended
the taboo to all possible callers, and sent a telephone message to catch
Comus at his club, asking him to come and see her as soon as he could
manage before it was time to dress for dinner. Then she sat down to
think, and her thinking was beyond the relief of tears.
She had built herself a castle of hopes, and it had not been a castle in
Spain, but a structure well on the probable side of the Pyrenees. There
had been a solid foundation on which to build. Miss de Frey’s fortune
was an assured and unhampered one, her liking for Comus had been an
obvious fact; his courtship of her a serious reality. The young people
had been much together in public, and their names had naturally been
coupled in the match-making gossip of the day. The only serious shadow
cast over the scene had been the persistent presence, in foreground or
background, of Courtenay Youghal. And now the shadow suddenly stood
forth as the reality, and the castle of hopes was a ruin, a hideous
mortification of dust and débris, with the skeleton outlines of its
chambers still standing to make mockery of its discomfited architect.
The daily anxiety about Comus and his extravagant ways and intractable
disposition had been gradually lulled by the prospect of his making an
advantageous marriage, which would have transformed him from a
ne’er-do-well and adventurer into a wealthy idler. He might even have
been moulded, by the resourceful influence of an ambitious wife, into a
man with some definite purpose in life. The prospect had vanished with
cruel suddenness, and the anxieties were crowding back again, more
insistent than ever. The boy had had his one good chance in the
matrimonial market and missed it; if he were to transfer his attentions
to some other well-dowered girl he would be marked down at once as a
fortune-hunter, and that would constitute a heavy handicap to the most
plausible of wooers. His liking for Elaine had evidently been genuine in
its way, though perhaps it would have been rash to read any deeper
sentiment into it, but even with the spur of his own inclination to
assist him he had failed to win the prize that had seemed so temptingly
within his reach. And in the dashing of his prospects, Francesca saw the
threatening of her own. The old anxiety as to her precarious tenure of
her present quarters put on again all its familiar terrors. One day, she
foresaw, in the horribly near future, George St. Michael would come
pattering up her stairs with the breathless intelligence that Emmeline
Chetrof was going to marry somebody or other in the Guards or the Record
Office as the case might be, and then there would be an uprooting of her
life from its home and haven in Blue Street and a wandering forth to some
cheap unhappy far-off dwelling, where the stately Van der Meulen and its
companion host of beautiful and desirable things would be stuffed and
stowed away in soulless surroundings, like courtly émigrés fallen on evil
days. It was unthinkable, but the trouble was that it had to be thought
about. And if Comus had played his cards well and transformed himself
from an encumbrance into a son with wealth at his command, the tragedy
which she saw looming in front of her might have been avoided or at the
worst whittled down to easily bearable proportions. With money behind
one, the problem of where to live approaches more nearly to the simple
question of where do you wish to live, and a rich daughter-in-law would
have surely seen to it that she did not have to leave her square mile of
Mecca and go out into the wilderness of bricks and mortar. If the house
in Blue Street could not have been compounded for there were other
desirable residences which would have been capable of consoling Francesca
for her lost Eden. And now the detested Courtenay Youghal, with his
mocking eyes and air of youthful cynicism, had stepped in and overthrown
those golden hopes and plans whose non-fulfilment would make such a world
of change in her future. Assuredly she had reason to feel bitter against
that young man, and she was not disposed to take a very lenient view of
Comus’s own mismanagement of the affair; her greeting when he at last
arrived, was not couched in a sympathetic strain.
“So you have lost your chance with the heiress,” she remarked abruptly.
“Yes,” said Comus, coolly; “Courtenay Youghal has added her to his other
successes.”
“And you have added her to your other failures,” pursued Francesca,
relentlessly; her temper had been tried that day beyond ordinary limits.
“I thought you seemed getting along so well with her,” she continued, as
Comus remained uncommunicative.
“We hit it off rather well together,” said Comus, and added with
deliberate bluntness, “I suppose she got rather sick at my borrowing
money from her. She thought it was all I was after.”
“You borrowed money from her!” said Francesca; “you were fool enough to
borrow money from a girl who was favourably disposed towards you, and
with Courtenay Youghal in the background waiting to step in and oust
you!”
Francesca’s voice trembled with misery and rage. This great stroke of
good luck that had seemed about to fall into their laps had been thrust
aside by an act or series of acts of wanton paltry folly. The good ship
had been lost for the sake of the traditional ha’porth of tar. Comus had
paid some pressing tailor’s or tobacconist’s bill with a loan unwillingly
put at his disposal by the girl he was courting, and had flung away his
chances of securing a wealthy and in every way desirable bride. Elaine
de Frey and her fortune might have been the making of Comus, but he had
hurried in as usual to effect his own undoing. Calmness did not in this
case come with reflection; the more Francesca thought about the matter,
the more exasperated she grew. Comus threw himself down in a low chair
and watched her without a trace of embarrassment or concern at her
mortification. He had come to her feeling rather sorry for himself, and
bitterly conscious of his defeat, and she had met him with a taunt and
without the least hint of sympathy; he determined that she should be
tantalised with the knowledge of how small and stupid a thing had stood
between the realisation and ruin of her hopes for him.
“And to think she should be captured by Courtenay Youghal,” said
Francesca, bitterly; “I’ve always deplored your intimacy with that young
man.”
“It’s hardly my intimacy with him that’s made Elaine accept him,” said
Comus.
Francesca realised the futility of further upbraiding. Through the tears
of vexation that stood in her eyes, she looked across at the handsome boy
who sat opposite her, mocking at his own misfortune, perversely
indifferent to his folly, seemingly almost indifferent to its
consequences.
“Comus,” she said quietly and wearily, “you are an exact reversal of the
legend of Pandora’s Box. You have all the charm and advantages that a
boy could want to help him on in the world, and behind it all there is
the fatal damning gift of utter hopelessness.”
“I think,” said Comus, “that is the best description that anyone has ever
given of me.”
For the moment there was a flush of sympathy and something like outspoken
affection between mother and son. They seemed very much alone in the
world just now, and in the general overturn of hopes and plans, there
flickered a chance that each might stretch out a hand to the other, and
summon back to their lives an old dead love that was the best and
strongest feeling either of them had known. But the sting of
disappointment was too keen, and the flood of resentment mounted too high
on either side to allow the chance more than a moment in which to flicker
away into nothingness. The old fatal topic of estrangement came to the
fore, the question of immediate ways and means, and mother and son faced
themselves again as antagonists on a well-disputed field.
“What is done is done,” said Francesca, with a movement of tragic
impatience that belied the philosophy of her words; “there is nothing to
be gained by crying over spilt milk. There is the present and the future
to be thought about, though. One can’t go on indefinitely as a
tenant-for-life in a fools’ paradise.” Then she pulled herself together
and proceeded to deliver an ultimatum which the force of circumstances no
longer permitted her to hold in reserve.
“It’s not much use talking to you about money, as I know from long
experience, but I can only tell you this, that in the middle of the
Season I’m already obliged to be thinking of leaving Town. And you, I’m
afraid, will have to be thinking of leaving England at equally short
notice. Henry told me the other day that he can get you something out in
West Africa. You’ve had your chance of doing something better for
yourself from the financial point of view, and you’ve thrown it away for
the sake of borrowing a little ready money for your luxuries, so now you
must take what you can get. The pay won’t be very good at first, but
living is not dear out there.”
“West Africa,” said Comus, reflectively; “it’s a sort of modern
substitute for the old-fashioned _oubliette_, a convenient depository for
tiresome people. Dear Uncle Henry may talk lugubriously about the burden
of Empire, but he evidently recognises its uses as a refuse consumer.”
“My dear Comus, you are talking of the West Africa of yesterday. While
you have been wasting your time at school, and worse than wasting your
time in the West End, other people have been grappling with the study of
tropical diseases, and the West African coast country is being rapidly
transformed from a lethal chamber into a sanatorium.”
Comus laughed mockingly.
“What a beautiful bit of persuasive prose; it reminds one of the Psalms
and even more of a company prospectus. If you were honest you’d confess
that you lifted it straight out of a rubber or railway promotion scheme.
Seriously, mother, if I must grub about for a living, why can’t I do it
in England? I could go into a brewery for instance.”
Francesca shook her head decisively; she could foresee the sort of steady
work Comus was likely to accomplish, with the lodestone of Town and the
minor attractions of race-meetings and similar festivities always
beckoning to him from a conveniently attainable distance, but apart from
that aspect of the case there was a financial obstacle in the way of his
obtaining any employment at home.
“Breweries and all those sort of things necessitate money to start with;
one has to pay premiums or invest capital in the undertaking, and so
forth. And as we have no money available, and can scarcely pay our debts
as it is, it’s no use thinking about it.”
“Can’t we sell something?” asked Comus.
He made no actual suggestion as to what should be sacrificed, but he was
looking straight at the Van der Meulen.
For a moment Francesca felt a stifling sensation of weakness, as though
her heart was going to stop beating. Then she sat forward in her chair
and spoke with energy, almost fierceness.
“When I am dead my things can be sold and dispersed. As long as I am
alive I prefer to keep them by me.”
In her holy place, with all her treasured possessions around her, this
dreadful suggestion had been made. Some of her cherished household gods,
souvenirs and keepsakes from past days, would, perhaps, not have fetched
a very considerable sum in the auction-room, others had a distinct value
of their own, but to her they were all precious. And the Van der Meulen,
at which Comus had looked with impious appraising eyes, was the most
sacred of them all. When Francesca had been away from her Town residence
or had been confined to her bedroom through illness, the great picture
with its stately solemn representation of a long-ago battle-scene,
painted to flatter the flattery-loving soul of a warrior-king who was
dignified even in his campaigns—this was the first thing she visited on
her return to Town or convalescence. If an alarm of fire had been raised
it would have been the first thing for whose safety she would have
troubled. And Comus had almost suggested that it should be parted with,
as one sold railway shares and other soulless things.
Scolding, she had long ago realised, was a useless waste of time and
energy where Comus was concerned, but this evening she unloosed her
tongue for the mere relief that it gave to her surcharged feelings. He
sat listening without comment, though she purposely let fall remarks that
she hoped might sting him into self-defence or protest. It was an
unsparing indictment, the more damaging in that it was so irrefutably
true, the more tragic in that it came from perhaps the one person in the
world whose opinion he had ever cared for. And he sat through it as
silent and seemingly unmoved as though she had been rehearsing a speech
for some drawing-room comedy. When she had had her say his method of
retort was not the soft answer that turneth away wrath but the
inconsequent one that shelves it.
“Let’s go and dress for dinner.”
The meal, like so many that Francesca and Comus had eaten in each other’s
company of late, was a silent one. Now that the full bearings of the
disaster had been discussed in all its aspects there was nothing more to
be said. Any attempt at ignoring the situation, and passing on to less
controversial topics would have been a mockery and pretence which neither
of them would have troubled to sustain. So the meal went forward with
its dragged-out dreary intimacy of two people who were separated by a
gulf of bitterness, and whose hearts were hard with resentment against
one another.
Francesca felt a sense of relief when she was able to give the maid the
order to serve her coffee upstairs. Comus had a sullen scowl on his
face, but he looked up as she rose to leave the room, and gave his
half-mocking little laugh.
“You needn’t look so tragic,” he said, “You’re going to have your own
way. I’ll go out to that West African hole.”