The Roman villa was a fairy palace of light and flowers, and its long
range of windows flashed across the blue vapours of the December night,
and might have been noticed as a golden glory in the far distance by
solitary watchers in the monasteries on the Aventine hill.
It was Vera's first reception; and all that there was of Roman rank and
beauty, all that there was of transatlantic wealth and cosmopolitan
talent in the most wonderful city in the world had assembled in prompt
response to her card of invitation.
"Mrs. Claude Rutherford, at home, 9 to 12. Music.
"The Villa Provana."
The financier's palace still bore the stamp of mercantile riches.
Claude had urged his wife to give the splendid house a splendid name;
so that, in the ever-changing society of the Italian capital, the
source of all that splendour might be forgotten; but he had urged in
vain.
"It was his father's house, and it was my home with _him_," she said,
with a strange look--the look that Claude feared. "While I live it
shall never have any other name."
"You are the first woman I ever knew with such a cult of the dismal,"
he said. "Most widows wish to forget."
"Most widows _can_ forget," she answered.
He turned and left her at the word; and she heard him singing _sotto
voce_ as he went along the corridor, "La donna e mobile."
"At least _I_ do not change," she thought.
This had happened in their first winter in Rome--a mere flash of
melancholy--soon forgotten in those wild days when the pace was
fastest, and when life went by in a hurricane of fashionable
pleasures. Visiting and entertaining, opera and theatre and
race-course; a rush to Naples to hear a wonderful tenor; to Milan to
see the new dancer at the Scala; something new and fatiguing for every
week and every day. They were both calmer now, and it may be that both
were tired, though it was only Vera who talked openly of weariness.
To-night she was looking lovely; but a Russian savant, who was among
the most illustrious of her guests, whispered to his neighbour as she
passed them, "_She_ will not live her hundred and forty years."
"I am afraid it is a question of months rather than years," replied his
friend, a famous Roman doctor.
Something there was in the radiant face, pale, but full of light and
life, in which the eye of an expert read auguries of evil; but to the
elegant mob circulating through those sumptuous rooms Mrs. Rutherford
was still beautiful with the bloom of health. Her pallor was of a
transparent fairness, more brilliant than other women's carnations.
The popular American painter had made one of his most startling hits,
two years before, by his exquisite rendering of that rare beauty, the
alabaster pallor, the dreaming eyes, blue-grey, or blue with a touch of
green. He had caught her "mermaid look"; and his most fervent admirers,
looking at the portrait in the Academy crowd, declared that the colour
in those mysterious eyes changed as they looked. The portrait was the
sensation of the year. Her eyes changed, and she seemed to be moving
out of the canvas, said the superior critics; and the herd went about
parroting them. She had her far-away look to-night, as she stood near
the doorway in the Rubens room, the first of the long suite; and though
she had a gracious greeting for everybody, those who admired her most
had a strange fancy that she was only the lovely semblance or outer
shell of a woman, whose actual self was worlds away.
There was nothing dreamy or far-away about Claude Rutherford to-night.
He was a man whose nature it was to live only in the present, and
to live every moment of his life. To-night, in these splendid
surroundings, in this crowd of the noble and the celebrated, he felt
as one who has conquered Fate, and has the world at his feet. He was
a universal favourite. The hearts of women softened at his smile; and
even men liked him for his careless gaiety.
"Always jolly and friendly, and without a scrap of side."
That was what they said of him. To have the spending of the Provana
millions and to be without side, seemed a virtue above all praise.
People liked him better than his ethereal wife. She was charming, but
elusive. That other-world look of hers repelled would-be admirers, and
even chilled her friends.
The Amphletts had arrived at the villa on a long visit, just in time
for Vera's first party; and Lady Susan was floating about the rooms in
an ecstasy of admiration. She had never seen them in Mario Provana's
time, and though she had been invited by Vera more than once in the
last three years, this was her first visit.
Her tiresome husband had preferred Northamptonshire, and she had not
been modern enough to leave him; and now he had been only lured a
thousand miles from the Pytchley by the promise of hunting on the
Campagna.
"At last Vera is in her proper environment," Lady Susan told a young
attache, who had been among the intimates in London. "She was out of
her proper setting in Portland Place. Nothing less beautiful than this
palace is in harmony with her irresistible charm. Other women have
beauty, don't you know; Mrs. Bellenden, _par exemple_."
"Mrs. Bellenden is an eye-opener," murmured the diplomat.
"Yes, I know what you are thinking, the handsomest woman in Europe, and
all that kind of thing; but utterly without charm. Even we women admire
her, just as we admire a huge La France rose, or a golden pheasant,
or a bunch of grapes as big as plovers' eggs, with the purple bloom
upon them; the perfection of physical beauty. But the light behind
the painted window, the secret, the charm is not in it. Beauty and to
spare, but nothing more."
Mrs. Bellenden sailed past them on the arm of the English Ambassador
while Susie expatiated.
It was her first appearance in Roman society, and she was the sensation
of the evening.
A form as perfect as the Venus of the Capitol, a face of commanding
beauty, a toilette of studied simplicity, a gown of dark green velvet,
without a vestige of trimming, the _dêcolletage_ audacious, and for
ornament an emerald necklace in a Tiffany setting, which even among
hereditary jewels challenged admiration, just a row of single emeralds
clasping a throat of Parian marble.
Mrs. Bellenden had the men at her feet; from Ambassadors to callow
striplings, new to Rome and to diplomacy, sprigs of good family,
who were hardly allowed to do more than seal letters, or index a
letter-book. All these courted her as if she had been royal; but the
women who had known her in London kept themselves aloof somehow, except
the American women, who praised and patronised her, or would have
patronised, but for something in those dark violet eyes that stopped
them.
"It isn't safe to say sarcastic things to a woman with eyes like hers,"
they told each other. "It would be as safe to try to take a rise out of
a crouching tiger, or to put a cobra's back up, for larks."
Lady Susan was about the only woman of position who talked to Mrs.
Bellenden; but Susie loved notorieties of all kinds, and had never kept
aloof from speckled peaches, if the peaches were otherwise interesting.
"I call Bellenden a remarkable personality," she told Claude, whom
she contrived to buttonhole for five minutes in the corridor after
supper. "A rural parson's daughter, brought up on cabbages and the
tithe pig. A woman who has spent a year in a lunatic asylum, and yet
has brains enough to set the world at defiance. You will see she'll be
a duchess--a pucker English duchess--before she has finished."
"She is more than worthy of the strawberry leaves; but I don't see
where the pucker duke is to come from. Her only chance would be a
fledgling, who had never crossed the Atlantic."
* * * * *
If her own sex persisted in a certain aloofness, Mrs. Bellenden had her
court, and could afford to do without them. In the picture gallery,
after supper, she was the centre of a circle, and her rich voice and
joyous laughter sounded above all other voices in the after-midnight
hour, when the crowd had thinned and most of the great ladies had gone
away.
Susie watched that group from a distance, and wondered when Mrs.
Bellenden was going to break through the ring of her worshippers and
make her way to the Rubens room, where the mistress of the house was
waiting to bid the last of her guests good-night.
The first hour after midnight was wearing on, and Susan Amphlett, who
had eaten two suppers, each with an amusing escort, was beginning to
feel that she had had enough of the party and would like to be having
her hair brushed in the solitude of her palatial bedroom. But she
wanted to see the last of Mrs. Bellenden, if not the last of the party;
and she kept her cicisbeo hanging on, and pretended to be interested
in the pictures, while she furtively observed the proceedings of the
notorious beauty. She was making the men laugh. That was the spell she
was weaving over the group who stood entranced around her. Light talk
that raised lighter laughter: that was her after-midnight glamour. She
had been grave and dignified as she moved through the rooms by the side
of the Ambassador. But now, encircled by a ring of "nice boys," she was
frankly Bohemian, and amused herself by amusing them, with splendid
disregard of conventionalities. Reckless mirth sparkled in her eyes;
uproarious laughter followed upon her speech. Whatever she was saying,
however foolish, however outrageous, it was simply enchanting to the
men who heard her; and in the heart of the ring Claude Rutherford was
standing close beside the lovely freelance, hanging upon her words,
joyous, irresponsible as herself. The spell was broken at last, or
the fairy laid down her wand, and allowed Claude to escort her to her
hostess, who just touched her offered hand with light finger-tips; and
thence to the outer vestibule, an octagon room where the white marble
faces of Olympian deities, who were immortal because they had never
lived, looked with calm scorn upon the flushed cheeks and haggard
eyes of men and women too eager to drain the cup of sensuous life.
Claude and Mrs. Bellenden stood side by side in the winter moonlight
while they waited for carriage after carriage to roll away, before a
miniature brougham of neatest build came to the edge of the crimson
carpet. They had had plenty of time for whispered talk while they
waited, but there had been no more laughter, rather a subdued and
almost whispered interchange of confidential speech; and the last word
as he stood by the brougham door was "to-morrow."
Lady Susan and Vera went up the great staircase together, Susie with
her usual demonstrative affection, her arm interwoven with her friend's.
"Your party has been glorious, darling!" she began. "I see now that
it is the house that makes the glory and the dream. Your parties in
Portland Place were just as good, as parties, but oh, the difference!
Instead of the vulgar crush upon the staircase, and the three
overcrowded drawing-rooms, immense for London--this luxury of space,
this gorgeous succession of rooms, so numerous that it makes one giddy
to count them. Vera, I see now that it is only vast space that can give
grandeur. The bricks and stone in your London house would have made a
street in Mayfair; but it is a hovel compared with this. And to think
of that good-for-nothing cousin of mine leaving a bachelor's diggings
in St. James's to be lord of this palace. There never was such luck!"
"I don't think Claude cares very much for the villa, or for Rome," Vera
answered coldly. "He prefers London and Newmarket."
"That's what men are made of. They don't care for houses or for
furniture. They only care for horses and dogs, and other women,"
assented Susan lightly.
They were at the door of Vera's rooms by this time, but Susie's
entwining arms still held her.
"Do let me come in for a _cause_."
"I'm very tired."
"Only five minutes."
"Oh, as long as you like. I may as well sit up and talk as lie down,
and think."
"What, are you as bad a sleeper as ever?"
"I have lost the knack of sleep. But I suppose I sleep enough, as I am
alive. Some people talk as if three or four sleepless nights would kill
them; but Sir Andrew Clarke let Gladstone lie awake seven nights before
he would give him an opiate."
"But you will lose your beauty--worse than losing your life. You looked
lovely to-night--too lovely, too much like an exquisite phantom. And
now, my sweet Vera, don't be angry if I touch upon a delicate--no, an
indelicate subject. You must never let Mrs. Bellenden enter your house
again."
"Indeed, Susie! But why?"
"Because she is simply too outrageous!"
"Do you mean too handsome, too attractive?"
"I mean she is absolutely disreputable. If you had seen her in the
picture gallery, with a crowd of men round her--your husband among
them--laughing immoderately, as men only laugh when outrageous things
are being said!"
"And was she saying the outrageous things?"
"Undoubtedly. I watched her from a distance, while I pretended to be
looking at the pictures. Vera, I don't want to worry you, but that
woman is dangerous!"
"Dangerous?"
"Yes, like the Lurlei and people of that class. She is the very woman
Solomon described in Proverbs--and _he_ knew. She is a danger for you,
Vera, a danger for your peace of mind. She is a wicked enchantress, an
enemy to all happy wives; and she is trying to steal your husband."
"I am not afraid.".
"But you ought to be afraid. Roger and I are not a romantic couple; but
if I saw him too attentive to such a woman as Mrs. B. I should--well,
Vera, I should take measures. Remember, the woman is the danger. It
doesn't matter how much a man flirts, as long as he flirts with the
harmless woman. You really should take measures."
"That is not in my line, Susie. When my husband has left off caring for
me I shall know it, and that will be the end."
Susan looked at her with anxious scrutiny.
"I'm afraid you are leaving off caring for him," she said rather sadly.
"Never mind, dear. The sands are running through the glass, whether we
are glad or sorry, and the end of the hour will come."
"Don't!" cried Susie, wincing as if she had been hit.
"Good night, dear, I am very tired."
"Yes, that's what it means!" Susie kissed her effusively. "Your nerves
are worn to snapping point, you poor, pale thing. Good night."
Vera was on the Palatine Hill next morning before Lady Susan had
left her sumptuous bed, a vast expanse of embroidered linen and down
pillows, under a canopy of satin and gold. Painted cherubim looked down
upon her from the white satin dome, cherubs or cupids, she was not
sure to which order the rosy cheeks and winged shoulders belonged.
"They must be cupids," she decided at last. "They have too many legs
for cherubim."
Vera was wandering among the vestiges of Imperial Rome with the dog
Boroo for company. She liked to roam about these weedy pathways, among
the dust of a hundred palaces, in the clear, sunlit morning, at an hour
when no tourist's foot had passed the gate.
The custodians knew her as a frequent visitor, and left her free
to wander among the ruins as she pleased, without guidance or
interference. They had been inclined at first to question the Irish
terrier's right to the same licence, but a sweet smile and a ten-lire
note made them oblivious of his existence. He might have been some
phantom hound of mediæval legend, passing the gate unseen. Simply clad
in black cloth, a skirt short enough for easy walking, a loose coat
that left her figure undefined, and a neat little hat muffled in a
grey gauze veil through which her face showed vaguely, Vera was able
to walk about the great city in the morning hours without attracting
much notice. Among some few of the shopkeepers and fly drivers who had
observed her repeated passage along particular streets, she was known
as the lady with the dog. In her wanderings beyond the gates, in places
where there were still rural lanes and cottagers' gardens, she would
sometimes stop to talk to the children who clustered round her and
received the shower of baiocchi which she scattered among them with
tumultuous gratitude, kissing the hem of her gown, and calling down the
blessings of the Holy Mother on "_la bella Signora, e il caro cane_,"
Boroo coming in for his share of blessings.
They were lovely children some of them, with their great Italian eyes,
and they would be sunning themselves on the steps of the Trinità del
Monte by and by, when the spring came, waiting to attract the attention
of a painter on the look-out for ideal infancy; wicked little wretches,
as keen for coin as any Hebrew babe of old in the long-vanished Ghetto,
dirty, and free, and happy; but they struck a sad note in Vera's
memory, recalling her honeymoon year in Rome, and how fondly Mario
Provana had hoped for a child to sanctify the bond of marriage, and
to fill the empty place that Giulia's death had left in his heart.
A year ago Vera had been killing thought in ceaseless movement, in
ephemeral pleasures that left no time for memory or regret, but since
the coming of satiety she had found that to think or to regret was less
intolerable than to live a life of spurious gaiety, to laugh with a
leaden heart, and to pretend to be amused by pleasures that sickened
her. Here she found a better cure for painful thought, in a city whose
abiding beauty was interwoven with associations that appealed to her
imagination, and lifted her out of the petty life of to-day into the
life of the heroic past. In Rome she could forget herself, and all that
made the sum of her existence. She wandered in a world of beautiful
dreams. The dust she trod upon was mingled with the blood of heroes and
of saints.
She had seen all that was noblest in the city with Mario Provana for
her guide, he for whom every street and every church was peopled with
the spirits of the mighty dead, from the colossal dome that roofed the
tomb of the warrior king who made modern Italy, to the vault where St.
Peter and St. Paul had lain in darkness and in chains.
She had seen and understood all these things with Mario at her side,
enchanted by her keen interest in his beloved city, and delighted to
point out and explain every detail.
For Mario every out-of-the-way corner of Rome had its charm--for Claude
Rome meant nothing but the afternoon drive along the Corso, and the
bi-weekly meet of hounds on the Appian Way. Everything else was a bore.
It was the Palatine where she and Mario had returned oftenest and
lingered longest, for it seemed the sum of all that was grandest in the
story of Rome, or, rather, it was Rome. How often she had stood by her
husband's side on this noble terrace, gazing at the circle of hills,
and recalling an age when this spot was the centre of the civilised
earth! Here were the ruins of a forgotten world; and the palaces of
Caligula and Nero seemed to belong to modern history, as compared with
the rude remains of a city that had perished before the War-God's twins
had hung at their fierce foster-mother's breast. Every foot of ground
had its traditions of ineffable grandeur, and was peopled with ghosts.
They stood upon the ashes of palaces more splendid and more costly than
the mind of the multi-millionaire of to-day had ever conceived--the
palaces of poets and statesmen, of Rome's greatest orators, and of
her most successful generals; of Emperors whose brief reign made but
half a page of history, ending in the inevitable murder; of beautiful
women with whom poison was the natural resource in a difficulty; of
gladiators elevated into demi-gods; of mothers who killed their sons,
and sons who killed their mothers; and of all those hundred palaces,
and that strange dream of glory and of crime there was nothing left but
ruined walls, and the dust in which the fool's parsley and the wild
parsnip grew rank and high.
Amidst those memories of two thousand years ago, Vera felt as if life
were so brief and petty a thing, such a mere moment in the infinity of
time, that no individual story, no single existence, with its single
grief, no wrong done, could be a thing to lament or to brood over.
Nothing seemed to matter, when one remembered how all this greatness
had come and gone like a ray of sunshine on a wall, the light and the
glory of a moment.
And what of those grander lives, the Christian martyrs, the men who
fought with beasts, and gave their bodies to be burned, the women who
went with tranquil brow and steadfast eyes to meet a death of horror,
rather than deny the new truth that had come into their lives?
There were other, darker memories in her solitary wanderings. She
returned sometimes to the hill behind the Villa Medici. She lingered
in the dusty road outside the Benedictine monastery, and peered
through the iron gate, gazing into the desolate garden, where only the
utilitarian portion was cared for, and where shrubs, grass, and the
sparse winter flowers languished in neglect, where the gloomy cypresses
stood darkly out against the mouldering plaster on the wall; the prison
gate, within which she had seen her lover sitting by the dying fire, a
melancholy figure, with brooding eyes that refused to look at her.
"It would have been better for us both if he had stayed there," she
thought. "If we had been true to ourselves we should have parted at
the door of his prison for ever. It would have been better for us
both--better and happier. The cloister for him and for me. A few years
of silence and solitude. A few years of penitential pain; and then the
open gate, and the Good Shepherd's welcome to the lost sheep."
Yes, it would have been better. No pure and abiding joy had come to
her from her union with her lover. They had loved each other with
a love that had filled the cup of life in the first years of their
marriage; they had loved each other, but it had been with a passion
that needed the stimulus of an unceasing change of pleasures to keep it
alive; and when the pleasures grew stale, and there were no more new
things or new places left in the world, their love had languished in
the grey atmosphere of thought.
She knew that her love for Claude Rutherford was dead. The third year
of wedlock had killed it. She looked back and remembered what he had
once been to her. She saw the picture of her past go by, a vivid
panorama lit by a lurid light--from the July midnight in the rose
garden by the river, to the November evening in Rome, when he had
come back to her from his living grave--and she had fallen upon his
breast, and let him set the seal of a fatal love upon her lips--the
seal that had made her his in the rose garden, and had fixed her fate
for ever. This later kiss was more fatal; for it meant the hope of
heaven renounced, and a soul abandoned to the sinner's doom. For her
part, at least, love had died. Slowly, imperceptibly, from day to day,
from hour to hour, the glamour had faded, the light had gone. Slowly
and reluctantly she had awakened to the knowledge of her husband's
shallow nature, and had found how little there was for her to love
and honour below that airy pleasantness which had exercised so potent
a charm, from the hour when she met and remembered the friend of her
childhood, until the night of the ball, when he had whispered his
plan for their future as they spun round in their last waltz. All had
shown the lightness of the sunny nature that charmed her. Even in
talking of the desperate step they were going to take he had seemed
hardly serious. His confidence was so strong in the future. Just one
resolute act--a little unpleasantness, perhaps; and then emancipation,
and a life of unalloyed happiness--"the world forgetting, by the world
forgot"--themselves the only world that was worth thinking about.
And it was to this shallow nature that she had given her love and her
life; for she could see nothing in life outside that fatal love. As
that perished, she felt that she must die with it. There was nothing
left--no child--no "forward looking hopes."
But there was the memory of the past! In her lonely walks about
the environs of Rome, the past was with her. She was always looking
back. She could not tread those paths without remembering who had
trodden them with her when the wonder of Rome was new. The man who
was her companion, then the strong man, the man of high thoughts and
decisive action, the thinker and the worker. The man of grave and
quiet manners, who could yet be terrible when the fire below that
calm surface was kindled. She had seen that he could be terrible.
One episode in their happy honeymoon life had always remained in her
memory, when at a crowded railway station he had been separated from
her for a few moments in the throng and had found her shrinking in
terror from the insolence of a vulgar dandy. She had never forgotten
the white anger in Mario Provana's face as he took the scared wretch by
the collar and flung him towards the edge of the platform. She never
could forget the rage in that dark face, and it had come back to her
in after years in visions of unspeakable horror. He who was so kind
could be so terrible. So kind! Now in her lonely wanderings it was
of his kindness she thought most, his fond indulgence in those days
when he had made the world new for her, days when she had looked back
at her long apprenticeship to poverty--the daily lesson in the noble
art of keeping up appearances, and Grannie's monotonous wailings over
cruel destiny--and wondered if this idolised wife could be the same
creature as the penniless girl in the shabby lodgings. She knew now
that the devoted husband of that happy year was the man who was worthy
of something more than gratitude and obedience, something more than
duty, worthy of the best and truest love that a good woman could feel
for a good man. This was the noble lover. Wherever she went in that
city of great memories the shadow of the past went with her. He was
always there--she heard his voice, and the thoughts and feelings of
years ago were more real than the consciousness of to-day. Forgotten
things had come back. The fever-dream had ended: and in the cold light
of an awakened conscience she knew and understood the noble friend and
companion she had slighted and lost.
* * * * *
Lady Susan was a somewhat exacting visitor; but it was years since
she had seen the inside of a dining-room before luncheon, so Vera's
mornings were her own. The half-past twelve o'clock _déjeuner_ even
appeared painfully early to Susie, though she contrived to be present
at that luxurious meal, where there were often amusing droppers-in,
lads from the embassies, soldiers in picturesque uniforms, literary
people and artistic people, mostly Americans, people whom Susie could
not afford to miss.
Vera's mornings were her own, but she was obliged to do the afternoon
drive in the Pincio gardens and along the Corso with Lady Susan, and
after the drive she could creep away for an hour to her too-spacious
saloon where all the gods and goddesses of Olympus looked down upon her
from the tapestry, and sit and dream in the gloaming--or brood over a
new novel by Matilda Seraio, her reading-lamp making a speck of light
in a world of shadows.
Here, by the red log-fire, where the pine-cones hissed and sputtered,
the Irish terrier was her happy companion, laying his head upon her
knee, or thrusting his black nose into her hand, now and then, to show
her that there was somebody who loved her, and only refraining from
leaping on her lap by the good manners inculcated in his puppyhood by
an accomplished canine educator.
Sometimes she would throw down her book, snatch up a fur coat from
the sofa where it lay, and go out through the glass door that opened
into the gardens; and then, with Boroo bounding and leaping round her,
letting off volleys of joyful barks, she would run to the lonely garden
at the back of the villa, where there was a long terrace on a ridge
of high ground shaded with umbrella pines, and with a statue here and
there in a niche cut in the wall of century-old ilex.
The solitary walk with her dog in a dark garden always had a quieting
effect upon her nerves--like the morning ramble in the outskirts of
Rome. To be alone, to be able to think, soothed her. The life without
thought was done with. Now to think was to be consoled. Even memories
that brought tears had comfort in them.
"What can I do for him but remember him and regret him?" she thought.
"It is my only atonement. If what Francis Symeon told me is true and
the dead are near us, he knows and understands. He knows, and he
forgives."
Sad, sweet thoughts, that came with a rush of tears!
These quiet hours helped her to bear the evening gaieties, the evening
splendours. She went everywhere that Claude wanted her to go, gave as
many parties as he liked, _déjeuners_, dinners, suppers after opera or
theatre, anything. Her gold was poured out like water. The Newmarket
horses were running in the Roman races; the Leicestershire hunters
were ridden to death on the Campagna. Claude Rutherford was more
talked about, and more admired, than any young man in Rome. He laughed
sometimes, remembering the old books, and told them he was like Julius
Cæsar in his adolescence, a "harmless trifler." Claude Rutherford was
happy; and he thought that his wife was happy also. Certainly she had
been happy at Disbrowe less than half a year ago; and there had been
nothing since then to distress her. The long rambles of which Susan
told him, the evening seclusion, meant nothing. No doubt she was
morbid; she had always been morbid. If she had a grief of any kind she
loved to brood upon it.
"What grief can she have?" Susan asked. "There never was such a perfect
life. She has everything."
"I don't know. We have no children. She may long for a child."
"Do _you_ feel the want of children?" Susan asked bluntly.
"Yes. I should have liked a child. Our houses are silent--infernally
silent. A house without children seems under a curse, somehow."
Susan looked at him with open-eyed wonder. This trivial cousin of
hers, who seemed to live only for ephemeral delights, this man to sigh
for offspring, to want his futile career echoed by a son. He who was
neither soldier nor senator, who had no rag of reputation to bequeath:
what should he want with an heir? And to want childish voices in his
home--to complain of loneliness! He who was never alone!
Mrs. Bellenden had not been invited to the Villa Provana after the
night when Susie had made her protest, nor had Claude urged his wife to
invite her. Mrs. Bellenden had begun to be talked about in Rome very
much as she had been talked about in London. The noblest of the Roman
palaces had not opened their Cyclopean doors to her. There were certain
afternoons when all that was most distinguished in Roman Society
crossed those noble thresholds, as by right--went in and came out
again, not much happier or richer in ideas, perhaps, for the visit, but
just a shade more conscious of superiority.
Mrs. Bellenden, driving up and down the Corso, saw the carriages
waiting, and scowled at them as she went by. Mrs. Bellenden was not
_bien vue_ in Rome. The painters and sculptors raved about her, and
she had to give sittings--for head and bust--to several of them. She
was one man's Juno, and another man's Helen of Troy. Her portrait, by
a famous American painter, was to be the rage at next year's picture
show. If to be worshipped for her beauty could satisfy a woman, Mrs.
Bellenden might have been content; but she was not.
Her exclusion from those three or four monumental palaces made her feel
herself an outsider; and she bristled with fury when no more cards of
invitation came from the Villa Provana.
"I suppose that white rag of a woman is jealous," she thought; but she
had just so much womanly pride left in her as to refrain from asking
Claude Rutherford why his wife ignored her.
Lady Susan had not even spoken of Mrs. Bellenden after the night when
she had delivered herself of a friendly warning. But although she did
not talk to Vera of the siren, she had plenty to say to other people
about her, and plenty to hear.
"I hope that foolish cousin of mine is not carrying on with that odious
woman," she had said tentatively to more than one great lady.
"Why, my dear creature, everybody knows that he is making an idiot of
himself about her. She is riding his hunters to death; and she made an
exhibition of herself at the races last Sunday when one of Rutherford's
horses won by half a length, putting her arms round the winner's neck
and shaking hands with the jockey. The King and Queen and all the
Quirinal party were looking at her. She is the kind of woman who always
advertises an intrigue. After all, I believe she is not half so bad as
people think her; only she can't keep an affair quiet. She must always
play to the gallery."
Susie shook her head, with a sigh that was almost a groan.
"Oh, my poor Vera, so sweet, so pure, so ethereal."
"That's where it is, my dear," said her friend. "Men don't care for
those ethereal women--long. Women hold men by their vices, not by their
virtues."