The Goodwood of that year was a brilliant meeting. The winners were the
horses that all the smart people wanted to win. The weather, with the
exception of that first rainy twilight, was perfect, and all the smart
frocks and hats spread themselves and unfolded their beauty to the sun,
like flowers in a garden by the Lake of Como.
Among the owners of winning horses Mr. Rutherford was conspicuous.
"You rich people are always lucky," said his friends. "You never buy
duffers, and you can afford to pay for talent. I don't suppose you make
much by your luck, but you have the glory of it."
The house in which Claude Rutherford was staying was one of the
smartest houses between Goodwood and Brighton, a house where there
were always to be found clever men and handsome women--musical people
and painting people, and even acting people--people who could sing and
people who could talk; women who shone by the splendour of physical
beauty, and women whose audacious wit made the delight of princes. It
was a house in which cards were a secondary consideration, but where
stakes were high and hours were late.
Lady Waterbury, the hostess, expressed poignant disappointment at
Vera's non-arrival.
"My poor little wife is completely run down," Claude told her. "She
was a rag this morning, and it would have been cruel to persuade her
to come with me, though I hated leaving her in London at this dismal
fag-end of the season. I thought her pal, Susan Amphlett, would have
spent most of the week with her, but I hear Lady Susie is at the
Saxemundhams'."
"Do you suppose Susie would miss a Goodwood--no, not for friendship,"
exclaimed Sir Joseph, the jovial host, one of the last of the private
bankers of London, coming of a family so long established in wealth
that he could look down upon new money. "Well, there is one of our
beauties ruled out. I don't know what we should do if we hadn't secured
Mrs. Bellenden."
"It was just as well to ask her this year," said his wife, with pinched
lips, "though it was Sir Joseph's idea, not mine. I doubt if the best
people will care about meeting her next season."
"What has Mrs. Bellenden done to risk her future status?" Claude asked,
and then, with his cynical smile. "Certainly she has committed the
unforgivable sin of being the handsomest woman in London, which is
quite enough to set all the other women against her."
"It isn't her beauty that is the crime, but the use she makes of it.
She has made more than one wife I know unhappy."
"And yet you ask her to your house?"
"Sir Joseph invites her. I only write the letter. So far she is just
possible; but if I have any knowledge of character, she will be quite
impossible before long."
"Let us make the most of her while her good days last," Claude said,
laughing. "I should like to make a sketch of her before the brand of
infamy is on her forehead. I have met her often, but my wife and she
have not become allies; and if she is a snare for husbands and a peril
for wives, it's rather lucky that Vera is not with me, for after a week
in this delightful house they must have become pals."
"I don't think proximity would make two such women friends," Lady
Waterbury replied severely. "Again, if I am any judge of character, I
should say that Vera and Mrs. Bellenden must be utterly unsympathetic."
"My wife and I have a friendly compact," said Sir Joseph. "She may
invite as many dowdy nieces and boring aunts as she likes, provided she
asks no troublesome questions about the pretty women I want her to ask,
and gives my nominees the best rooms."
"Poor Aunt Sophia had a mere dog-hole last Christmas," sighed Lady
Waterbury.
"Well, didn't she bring her dog?"
"Poor darling; she never goes anywhere without Ponto: and, of course,
she is a shade tiresome, and it is rather sweet of Joe to put up with
her. Mrs. Bellenden may pass this time."
"Did I hear somebody talking of me?" cried a crystal clear voice, and
a woman as lovely as a midsummer dawn came with swift step across the
velvet turf towards the stone bench where Claude Rutherford and his
host and hostess were seated.
They had strolled into the Italian garden, after an abundant tea that
had welcomed the first batch of guests, a meal at which Mrs. Bellenden
had not appeared, preferring to take tea in her dressing-room, while
she watched her maid unpack, and planned the week's campaign; the exact
occasion for every frock and hat being thought out as carefully as
the general in command of an army might consider the position of his
forces. It was to be a visit of five days and evenings, and none of
those expensive garments which the maid was shaking out and smoothing
down with lightly caressing fingers, was to be worn twice. All those
forces had to be reviewed. Not a silk stocking not a satin slipper
must be reported missing. Silken petticoats that rustled aggressively;
petticoats of muslin and lace that were as soft and noiseless as the
snow whose whiteness they imitated; fans, jewels, everything must be
put away in perfect condition, ready for a lady who sometimes left
herself the shortest possible time for an elaborate toilette, and yet
always contrived to appear with faultless finish.
And this evening, as she came sailing across the garden, having changed
her travelling clothes for a mauve muslin frock of such adorable
simplicity that a curate's wife might have tried to copy it with the
aid of a seamstress at eighteenpence a day, she was a vision of beauty
that any hostess might have been proud to number among her guests.
She took her seat between Sir Joseph and his wife with careless grace,
and held out her hand to Claude Rutherford without looking at him.
"Lady Waterbury told me that you and Mrs. Rutherford were to be here,"
she said. "Is she resting after her journey?"
"I am sorry to say she was not able to come with me."
"Not ill, I hope?"
"Not well enough for another Goodwood."
"The race weeks come round so quickly as one gets old," sighed Mrs.
Bellenden. "There seems hardly breathing time between the Two Thousand
and the Leger--and while one is thinking about where to go for the
winter, another year has begun and people are motoring to Newmarket for
the Craven."
"The story of our lives from year to year is rather like a
merry-go-round in a fair, but Mrs. Bellenden is too young to feel the
rush."
"Too young! I feel old, ages old. As old as Rider Haggard's Ayesha when
the spell was broken and the enchantress changed to a hag. But I am
sadly disappointed at not meeting your wife," she went on, turning the
wonderful eyes that people talked about with full power upon Claude.
"I wanted to meet her in a nice friendly house. We have only met in
crowds, and I believe she rather hates me."
"How can you imagine anything so impossible?"
"At any rate, she has given me no sign of liking, while I admire her
intensely. Francis Symeon has talked to me about her. I have had so
much of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that I want to know
something of a lady whom he calls one of his beautiful souls."
Upon this Mr. Rutherford had to say something polite, a something which
implied that his wife would be charmed to see more of the lovely Mrs.
Bellenden.
People talked of Mrs. Bellenden's beauty to her face. It was one of the
things which her own sex registered against her as a mark of bad style.
She might be ever so handsome, other women admitted, but she was the
worst possible style. A circus rider, promoted from the sawdust to a
Mayfair drawing-room, could hardly have been worse.
* * * * *
It was not long since this woman had burst upon the world of London--a
revelation of physical loveliness.
Then felt they, like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken.
There are planets and planets, as there are skies and skies. Assuredly
neither Uranus nor Neptune created a greater ferment in the world of
the wise than was made by Mrs. Bellenden's first season in the world of
the foolish.
The phrase "professional beauty" had been exploded, as vulgar and
stale, but the type remained under new names.
Mrs. Bellenden was simply the new beauty; invited everywhere; the star
of every fashionable week-end party, every smart dance or dinner.
Afternoon or evening--to hear divine music or to play ridiculous games;
to be instructed about radium, or to lose money and temper at bridge,
there could be no party really successful without Mrs. Bellenden.
Men looked round the flower-garden of picture hats with a disappointed
air if her eyes did not flash lovely lightning from under one of them.
Impetuous youths made a bee-line for her, and threaded the crowd with
relentless elbows, calmly ignoring their loves of last season and the
season before last.
"Men are absolute idiots about that woman," the last seasons told each
other. "No one has a look in where she is."
Mrs. Bellenden was a young widow, a widow of two years' widowhood, the
first of which it was whispered she had spent in a private lunatic
asylum.
"That's where she got her complexion," said Malice. "It was just as
good as a year's rest in a nursing home."
"And a strait-waistcoat. That's where she got her figure," said Envy.
She was now six-and-twenty, a widow, living in a small house in a
narrow street like the neck of a bottle, between Park Lane and South
Audley Street, with an income of two thousand a year, but popularly
reputed to be spending at least five thousand. Her reputation in her
first season had been unassailed, but she was rather taken upon trust,
on the strength of the houses where she was met, than by reason of
any exact knowledge that people had of her character and environment.
Good-natured friends declared that she was thoroughbred. A creature
with such exquisite hands and feet, and such a patrician turn of the
swan-like throat, could hardly have come out of the gutter; and her
husband had belonged to one of the oldest families in Wessex. So in
that first season, except among her rivals in the beauty show, the
general tone about her was approval.
Then, in her second year as the lovely widow, things began to leak out,
unpleasant things--as to the men she knew, and the money she spent,
the hours she kept in that snug little house in Brown Street; the
places at which she was seen in London and Paris, chiefly in Paris,
where people pretended that she had a _pied-à-terre_ in the new quarter
beyond St. Geneviève. People talked, but nothing was positively stated,
except that she did curious things, and was beginning to be regarded
somewhat shyly by prudish hostesses. She still went to a great many
houses--smart houses and rich houses; but not quite the best houses,
not the houses that can give a _cachet_, and stop the mouth of slander.
She gave little luncheons, little dinners, little suppers, in the
little street out of Park Lane, and her lamp-lit drawing-room used
to shine across the street in the small hours, as a token that there
were talk and laughter and cards and music in the gay little room for
_tout le monde_, or at least for her particular _monde_. She had a fine
contralto voice, and sang French and Spanish ballads delightfully,
could breathe such fire and passion into a song that the merest
doggerel seemed inspired.
But before this second season was over there were a few people in
London who had dreadful things to say about Mrs. Bellenden, and who
said them with infinite cruelty; people for whose belongings--son or
daughter, foolish youth or confiding young wife--this lovely widow had
been a scourge.
Looking at the radiant being people did not always remember, and
some people did not know, the tragedy of her youth. She had been a
good woman once, quite good, a model wife. She had married, before
her eighteenth birthday, a husband she adored. A creature of intense
vitality, made of fire and light, sense and not mind, love with her
had been a flame; unwise, unreasoning, exacting; love without thought;
wildly adoring, wildly jealous. A word, a look given to another woman
set her raging; and it was after one of the fierce quarrels that her
jealous temper made only too frequent that her husband--handsome, gay,
in the flower of his youth--left her without the goodbye kiss, for his
last ride. He was brought back to her in the winter twilight, without a
word of warning, killed at the last ditch in a point-to-point race, a
race that was always remembered as the finest of many seasons; perhaps
all the more vividly remembered because of that tragedy just before the
finish, when Jim Bellenden broke his neck.
For some time after that dreadful night Kate Bellenden was under
restraint; and then, after nearly a year, in which none but near
relations had seen her or had even known where she was, she came back
to the world; not quite sane, and desperately wicked. That small brain
of hers had not been large enough to hold a great grief. Satan had
taken possession of a mind that had never been rightly balanced.
"I have done with love," she told her _âme damnée_. She had always her
shadow and confidante, upon whom she lavished gifts and indulgences. "I
can never love anybody after _him_: but I like to be loved, and I like
to make it hard for my lovers."
And then, in still wickeder moods, she would say, "I like to steal a
woman's husband, or to cut in between an engaged girl and the man she
is to marry. I like to make another woman as desolate as I was after
Jim was killed, but I can't make her quite as miserable. I am not
Death. But," with a little exulting laugh, "I am almost as bad."
There were people--a mother, a sister, or a wife--here and there in the
crowd we call Society, who thought Mrs. Bellenden worse than Death;
people who knew the fortunes she had wasted, the houses she had ruined,
the hearts she had broken, the careers she had blighted, and the souls
that had been lost for her.