Mrs. Rutherford was the fashion in that first year of her second
marriage, just as she had been in her London début as Madame Provana.
It seemed as if one of the fairies at her christening had given her
that inexpressible charm which captivates the crowd, that elusive,
indescribable attractiveness which for want of a better name people
have agreed to call magnetism. Vera Rutherford was a magnetic woman.
Mr. Symeon went about telling people that she had psychic attributes
which removed her worlds away from the normal woman, and Miranda, the
only, the inimitable dressmaker, told her patronesses that it was a
delight to work for Mrs. Rutherford, not because she was rich enough
to pay for the wildest flights in millinery, but because her pale,
ethereal beauty lent itself to all that was daring and original in the
dress-designer's art. "People preach to me about Mrs. Montressor's
lovely colouring, and what a joy it must be to invent frocks for her;
but those pink and white beauties are difficult," said the dressmaker.
"They require much study. A _nuance_, just the faintest _nuance_ on
the wrong side, and your pink and white woman looks vulgar. A wrong
shade of blue and the peach complexion becomes purple, but with Mrs.
Rutherford's alabaster skin every scheme of colour is possible."
Mrs. Rutherford was a social success, just as Madame Provana had been.
Her entertainments were as frequent and as sumptuous as in the old
days, when Mario Provana stalked like a stranger through crowded rooms
where hardly one face in twenty afforded him a moment's interest. The
entertainments were as sumptuous, but they were more original. The tone
was lighter, and gilded youth from the Embassies found the house more
amusing.
"Vera is ten years younger since her second marriage," Lady Susie told
people; "Claude aids and abets her in everything frivolous. She used
to be just a little too dreamy--Oh, you may call it 'side,' but that
it never was. But she is certainly more sociable now; more eagerly
interested in the things that interest other people. Claude has made
her forget that she is a poet's daughter. She is as keen as mustard
about their house and racing stables at Newmarket. She goes to all the
big cricket matches with him, things she never thought of in Provana's
time. They are not like commonplace husband and wife, but like boy and
girl lovers, pleased with everything. I don't wonder Mr. Symeon thinks
she has degenerated. He says she is losing her other-world look, and is
fast becoming a mere mortal."
"And as a mere mortal I hope she won't allow Rutherford to spend all
her money," said Susie's confidant, an iron-grey bachelor of fifty, who
spent the greater part of his life sitting in pretty women's pockets.
"A racing stud is a pretty deep pit for gold at the best; but a man
who has married a triple millionaire's widow may safely allow himself
one hobby. Rutherford goes in for too many things: his dirigible
balloons and his aeroplane, his racing cars and his motor launches: his
Ostend holiday, where people say he is hardly ever out of the gambling
rooms. Your friend had better keep an eye on her pass-book."
"Vera!" cried Susie, with uplifted eyebrows. "Vera look at a pass-book!"
"As a banker's widow she might be supposed to know that there are such
financial thermometers. She must have learnt something of business from
Provana."
"She never took the slightest interest in his business, and he was far
too noble to degrade her by talking of money."
"A pity," said the bachelor; "when a woman's husband is a great
financier he may want to talk about money; and his wife ought to be
interested in things that are of vital concern for him."
"That's a counsel of perfection," said Susie, "and very few women rise
to it. All I have ever known about my husband is that he is interested
in railways and insurance companies and things, and that when any of
them are going wrong I'd better not talk of my dressmaker's bills, or
let him see my pass-book."
"Then you know what a pass-book is."
"I have to," sighed Susie, "for my normal state is an overdrawn
account. I think the letters n.e. and n.s. are quite the horridest in
the alphabet."
"Yet you never ask a friend to help you out of a fix?"
"Not much; when it comes to that I shall make a mistake in measuring
my dose of chloral, and it will be 'poor Susan Amphlett, death by
misadventure'!"
Susan, who had never had adventures or "affairs" of her own, was a kind
of modern representative of the chorus in a Greek play, and was always
explaining people, more especially her bosom friends, of whom Vera was
the dearest. She was really fond of Vera, and there was no _arrière
pensée_ of envy and malice in her explanations. Her intense interest
in other people may perhaps be attributed to the fact that she hardly
ever opened a book--not even the novel of the season--and that her
knowledge of public events was derived solely from the talk at luncheon
tables.
Certainly it might be admitted, even by the malicious, that Claude and
Vera were an ideal couple. They outraged all modern custom in spending
the greater part of their lives in close companionship; he originating
all their amusements, and she keenly interested in everything he
originated.
They were happy, and they were continually telling each other how
happy. They always went back to the childish days at Disbrowe.
"I feel as if all that ever happened after that was blotted out," Vera
whispered, one sunlit afternoon, as they sat side by side among silken
cushions on the motor launch, while all the glory of the upper Thames
moved past them; "all between those summer days and these seems vague
and dim: even the long years with poor Grannie. The wailing about want
of money, the moaning over the things we had to do without, the people
she hated because they were rich; all those years and the years that
came after have gone down into the gulf of forgotten things. A dark
curtain, like a pall, has fallen upon the past; and we are living in
the present. We love each other, and we are together. That is enough,
Claude, is it not? That is enough."
"That is enough," he echoed, smiling up at her from his lower level
among the pillows. That heap of down pillows and his lounging attitude
among them seemed to epitomise the man and his life. "All the same, I
want Sinbad the Second to win the Leger."
"Ah, you always laugh at me," she cried, with a vexed air. "You can
never be serious."
"No, I can't," he answered, with a darkening brow, and a voice that was
as heavy as lead.
They were living upon the rapture of a consummated love: which is
something like a rich man living upon his capital. There comes a time
when he begins to ask himself how long it will last.
They had loved each other for years; first unconsciously, with a
divine innocence, at least on the woman's part, then consciously, and
with a vague sense of sin; and then, all obstacles being removed,
triumphantly; assured of the long future, in which nothing could part
them.
She repeated this often--in impassioned moments. "Nothing can part us.
Whatever Fate may bring we shall be together. There can be no more
parting."
He was not given to serious thoughts. He never had been. His one
irresistible charm had been his careless enjoyment of the present hour,
and indifference to all that might come after. He had never considered
the ultimate result of any action in his life. He left the Army with no
more thought than he left off a soiled glove! He threw up a painter's
art, and all its chances of delight and fame, the moment he found
discouragement and difficulty. He hated difficult things; he hated hard
work; he hated giving up anything he liked. His haunting idea of evil
was the dread of being bored.
Once Vera found herself making an involuntary comparison between the
dead man and the living.
If Claude had had a dying daughter whom he loved, could he have watched
her sink into her grave, and kept the secret of his sorrow, and smiled
at her while his heart was breaking? She knew he could not. He was a
creature of light and variable moods, of sunshine and fine weather. She
had loved him for his lightness. He had brought her relief from ennui
whenever he crossed her threshold; he had brought her gladness and gay
thoughts, as a man brings a bunch of June roses to his sweetheart.
And now that the past was done with, and that she was his for ever,
they were to be always glad and gay. There was to be no gloom in their
atmosphere, no long, dull pause in life to give time for dark thoughts.
"Everybody has something to be sorry for," Vera told Susan Amphlett;
"that's why people's existence is a perpetual rush. Niagara can have
no time to think--but imagine, if nature were alive, what long aching
thoughts there might be under the bosom of a great, smooth lake."
"You know, my darling Vera, I generally think everything you do
is perfect," Susan answered, more sensibly than her wont, "but, I
sometimes fear that you and Claude are burning the candle at both
ends. You are too much alive. You seem to be running a race with time.
Neither your health nor your beauty can last at the pace you are
going."
"I'll take my chance of that. There is one thing that I dread more than
being ill and growing ugly."
"What is that?"
"Living to be old."
"What, you've caught my fear?"
"I dread the long, slow years--the long, slow days and sleepless
nights--old people sleep very little--in which there is nothing but
thought, an endless-web of miserable thoughts, going slowly round and
round, never stopping, never changing. That's what I am afraid of,
Susie."
"Strange for you to be afraid of anything," her friend said
thoughtfully. "I think you are the most courageous woman I ever heard
of--as brave as Joan of Arc, or Charlotte Corday."
"Why?"
"Because you are not afraid to live in this house."
"Why not? What does the house matter?"
"It must make you think sometimes," faltered Susan.
"I won't think! But if I were to think of the past, the house would
make no difference. My thoughts would be the same in Mexico--or at the
North Pole. I have heard of people who go to the end of the earth to
forget things, but I should never do that. I should know that memory
would go with me."
* * * * *
For three seasons in London, for three winters in Rome, the pace went
on, and was accelerated rather than slackened with the passing of
the years. Claude Rutherford won the Blue Ribbon of the turf, with
Sinbad the Second, and was equally fortunate with his boat at Cowes.
If he did not cross the Channel or fly from London to Liverpool, he
did at least make sundry costly excursions in the air, which kept his
name in the daily papers, and made his wife miserable, till, aviation
having resulted in boredom, he promised to content himself with the
substantial earth. After those three years this boy and girl couple
began to discover that they had done everything brilliant and exciting
that there was to be done; and the fever called living began to pall.
And now Susan Amphlett told people that Vera was killing herself, and
that her husband, though as passionately in love with her as ever he
had been, was selfish and thoughtless, and was spending her money, and
ruining her health, with the extravagances and agitations of a racing
stable that was on a scale he ought never to have allowed himself.
"After all, it is her money," said Susan, "and it's bad form on his
part to be so reckless."
"But as she has only a life interest in Provana's millions, and as her
trustees are some of the sharpest business men in London, Rutherford
can't do her much harm," said masculine common-sense, while feminine
malice was lifting its shoulders and eyebrows with doleful prognostics.
"Well, I suppose the money is all right," said Chorus, still inclined
to be tragic; "it's her health I'm afraid of. She's losing her high
spirits, her joy in everything, and she is getting out of touch with
her husband. She could hardly give him a smile when Blue Rose won the
Oaks. She sat in a corner of her box, looking the other way, while
that lovely animal was coming down the hill neck and neck with the
favourite, at a moment when any other woman would have been simply
frantic."
"She is not of the stuff that racing men's wives are made of,"
said Eustace Lyon, the poet. "No doubt she was worlds away--in
dreamland--and did not even know whose mare the bookies and the mob
were cheering."
"She was not like that two years ago," said Chorus. "She and Claude
were in such perfect sympathy that it was impossible for either of them
to have a joy that the other did not share. It was a case of two souls
with but a single thought."
"I can quite believe that, for I never gave C. R. credit for thinking,"
replied the poet.
* * * * *
Satiety had come. It came in a day. The fatal day that comes to all the
favoured and the fortunate, and which never comes to the poor and the
unlucky. That evil at least is spared to Nature's stepchildren. They
never have too much of anything, except debt and difficulty. They never
yawn in each other's faces, and ask themselves where they can go for
the summer. They never turn over the leaves of a Continental Bradshaw
and complain that they are tired of everywhere.
It is the people who can go everywhere and have everything who find
the wide earth a garden run to seed, and feel the dust of the desert
in their mouths as they talk of the pleasure places that the herd long
for. This time had come for Vera, at the end of her third season as
Claude Rutherford's wife. He, the gay and the insouciant, was careless
still, but it was a new kind of carelessness: the carelessness that
comes from hating everything that an exhausted life can give.
They had fallen into the fashion of their friends of late, and were
more like the normal semi-detached couple than the boy and girl lovers
upon whose bliss Lady Susan had loved to expatiate.
When the Goodwood week came round in this third year with the
inexorable regularity that one finds in the events of the season, Vera
declared that she had had enough of Goodwood and would never go there
again.
"Of course, that won't prevent your being there," she said.
"Well, not exactly, when I have Iseult of Ireland in two races."
"Yes, of course, you must be there. I forgot."
"You seem always to forget my horses nowadays. Yet you were once so
keen about them."
"They were very interesting at first, poor, sweet things, but the
fonder I was of them, the more cruel it seemed to race them."
"You'd like them kept to look at, eh?"
"I should like to sit with them in their boxes, and feed them with
sugar, and make them lie down with their heads in my lap."
"A Lady Rarey!"
"I sometimes long for a paradise of animals, some lovely pastoral
valley with a silver stream winding through the deep grass, where I
might live among beautiful innocent creatures--sheep, and deer, and
Jersey cows, and great calm, cream-coloured oxen from the Campagna.
Creatures that can lie in the sun and bask, knowing nothing of the
past, feeling nothing but the warmth and beauty of the world; and where
I myself should have lost the faculty of thought."
"That's a queer fancy."
"I have many queer fancies. They come to me in my dreams."
"You'd much better come to Goodwood. All the world will be there, and
you'd like to see Iseult win. Haven't you enough frocks? Is that the
reason for not coming?"
"I have too many frocks, some that I have never worn."
"Hansel them at Lady Waterbury's. You'll be the prettiest woman there."
"It's dear of you to say that"--her eyes clouded as she spoke--"but I
can't go. I'm so tired of it all, Claude, so tired!"
"Do you suppose I am never tired of things? Sick, sick to death! but I
know that to be happy one must keep moving. That's a law of human life.
You'd better come, Vera. You'll be moped to extinction alone."
"I don't mind loneliness, and I shall have Susan part of the time, and
there will be a meeting in the Albany."
"De gustibus? Well, if you prefer Symeon and his spooks to a racecourse
in an old English park, there's nothing more to be said." He stooped to
kiss the pale forehead before he sauntered out of the room, yawning as
he went. He had always a tired air; but it had verily become a law of
his being to keep moving.
"Nemesis is like the policeman on night duty," he used to say. "She
won't let us lie in the dust and sleep. We must trudge on."
Trudging from one costly pleasure to another might not suggest hardship
to the loafer on the Embankment, but to a self-indulgent worldling who
has drained the cup of life to the dregs, that necessity of going on
drinking when there are only dregs to drink may seem hard to bear.