"Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed:
Drink deep, until the habits of the slave,
The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite
And slander, die. Better not be at all
Than not be noble."
Susan Rodney and her friend dined _tête-à-tête_, in a solemn splendour
of butler and silk-stockinged footmen, and talked of music and the
Opera. They spent the evening in Lady Perivale's sitting-room on the
second floor, a delightful room, with three windows on a level with
the tree tops in the square, and containing all her favourite books,
her favourite etchings, her favourite piano, and her _marron_ poodle's
favourite easy-chair. The poodle was the choicest thing in ornamental
dogs, beautiful exceedingly, with silken hair of the delicatest brown,
and a face like a Lord Chief Justice, beautiful, but cold-hearted,
accepting love, but hardly reciprocating, thinking nothing the world
holds too good for him. Susan Rodney called him _marron glacé_.
Lady Perivale glanced at the drawing-rooms, and turned away with a
faint shiver. Their spacious emptiness glittered with a pale brilliancy
in the electric light.
"We shall be cosier in my den, Sue," she said; and they went upstairs
together, and seated themselves in low, luxurious chairs, by tables
loaded with roses and lilies of the valley.
A wood fire flamed and crackled on the amber-tiled hearth, and the
varied colouring of exquisitely bound books, the brightness of rose-bud
chintz, and satin pillows heaped on low sofas, gave an air of life and
cheerfulness which was wanting in the sumptuous spaciousness below.
"Why, what has happened to your photographs?" cried Sue, looking round
the room, where one attractive feature had been a collection of panel,
promenade, and other portraits of handsome and fashionable women, in
court gowns, in ball gowns, in tea gowns, in riding habits, in fancy
dress, nay, even in bathing dress, at Trouville or Dieppe, each in the
costume the sitter thought most becoming--photographs framed in silver,
in gold, in tortoiseshell, in ivory, in brocade, in Dresden china, in
every kind of frame that ingenious manufacturers devise for people with
expensive tastes. They had filled a long shelf at the top of the dado.
They had been stuck up in every available corner, when Sue was last in
the room; and, behold, there was not one of them left!
"Oh, I put the horrid things away," Grace said impatiently; "I
wonder I didn't burn them. Who would wish to be surrounded by lying
smiles--false friends?"
Sue said nothing; and even here, within four walls, the conversation
was still about impersonal matters, the books the friends had read in
the last half-year--a subject which both were fond of discussing--the
authors they loved, the authors they hated, the successes they wondered
at.
After an hour's talk Miss Rodney persuaded her friend to sing, but Lady
Perivale was not in voice. She sang "There was a King in Thule" with
less than her usual power, and then played desultory bits of Schumann
and Schubert, while Sue turned over a pile of new magazines.
They parted without any allusion to the scandal, except that angry
remark about the photographs.
"Good night, dear; it has been so sweet to spend a quiet evening with
you."
"Come again very soon, Sue. Come to luncheon or dinner, whenever you
can spare an hour or two."
The week wore itself out. Lady Perivale received plenty of letters,
but they were almost all of them appeals to her purse--programmes of
concerts, applications from hospitals, tradesmen's circulars; not a
single letter or card of invitation from anybody of mark.
She was not without visitors on Wednesday afternoon; but they made a
vastly different appearance in her drawing-rooms to her visitors of
last year, and there were no yellow barouches and French victorias
waiting in the square. A gushing widow with two rather tawdry
daughters, whom she had met only at charity bazaars and an occasional
_omnium gatherum_, and had severely kept at a distance, came sailing
and simpering in, followed by two bushy fringes, pert _retroussé_
noses, and suspiciously rosy lips, under picture hats of a cheap
smartness, scintillating with mock diamonds.
"Dear Lady Perivale, I know you are at home on Wednesday, so I thought
I would take my courage in my two hands, and call on you, in the hope
of interesting you in the bazaar at the Riding School. The cause is
such a good one--providing bicycles for daily governesses of small
means. I think you know my girls, Flora and Nora?"
Grace was coldly civil. She promised to think about the bicycles, and
she began to pour out tea, which had just been brought in.
"My girls" composed themselves upon low chairs, whisking the
rose-coloured flounces under their pale-green frocks into due
prominence, unconscious of a slightly draggled effect in skirts that
had done church parade on three Sundays. They scanned the spacious
drawing-rooms with eyes accustomed to the band-box limitations of a
flat in West Kensington, where, if a sudden gust blew, one could shut
the window with one hand, and the door with the other.
How vast and splendid the rooms were, and yet Lady Perivale was only
a country parson's daughter! They appraised her beauty, and wondered
at her good luck. They took in every detail of her pale lavender
frock--softest silk, tucked, and frilled, and ruched, and pleated, by
a fashionable dressmaker, until, by sheer needle-work, twenty yards of
China silk were made to look worth forty guineas. There was more work
in that little visiting-gown than in six of Nora's frocks, although she
spent most of her morning hours at her sewing machine.
"How delicious it must be to be so rich," thought Flora. "And what can
a trumpery scandal matter to a woman with a house in Grosvenor Square
and powdered footmen? It's ridiculous of mother to be 'poor thing-ing'
her."
"Flora and Nora are helping Lady de Green at the tea-stall," Mrs.
Wilfred explained. "They mean to have a quite original tea, don't you
know; Japanese cups and saucers, and tiny brown and white sandwiches."
"Nora has a German friend who can make thirty kinds of sandwiches,"
said Flora. "I believe sandwich cutting ranks before Wagner's music as
an accomplishment in Berlin."
Three young men straggled in while the tea was circulating. They were
men whom Lady Perivale knew very well, but they were not in the best
set, not the men with highly placed mothers and sisters, whose presence
gives a cachet. She thought them a shade too _empressé_ in their
satisfaction at her return to town. They hoped she was going to give
some of her delightful parties, and that she was not going to waste
time before she sent out her cards.
"The season is so short nowadays. Everybody rushes off to some German
cure before July is half over," said Mr. Mordaunt, a clerk at the
Admiralty.
Nobody asked Lady Perivale where she had spent the winter. She hated
them for their reticence, hated them for finding her in the emptiness
of her three drawing-rooms, with only that detestable Mrs. Wilfred,
and still more hateful Flora and Nora. It was so much worse than being
quite alone. But she had sworn to herself to stay in Grosvenor Square,
and could not deny herself to detrimentals. Nobody stopped long. Mrs.
Wilfred did not feel her visit a success, and the men saw that Lady
Perivale was bored.
Captain Marduke, of the Blues, outstayed the others, and put on a
certain familiarity of tone. It was the faintest shade of difference,
but Lady Perivale was aware of it, and froze him out in five minutes by
her distant manner.
He met Mordaunt at his club before dinner.
"Wasn't it awful in Grosvenor Square, Tommy?" said his friend.
"Ghastly. Don't you think she was a fool to show herself in London
after her escapade?" returned Marduke, who had been christened Reginald
Stuart Ponsonby, and was Tommy to his friends and the Society papers.
"I can't understand it," said Mordaunt, chalking his cue slowly, and
looking at the tip with a puzzled expression, as if the mystery were
there. "Such a good woman I always thought her. The very last, don't
you know, to pitch her cap over the mill. And the way she looked at us
this afternoon, through and through, with such proud, steady eyes! It's
damn perplexing."
"So it is, Bill. Your shot."
"But are people sure of the story? Is there no mistake, do you think?"
asked Mordaunt, missing an easy cannon.
"Oh! people are sure enough. It isn't one man's word, you see. Brander
met them at Ajaccio, saw her stepping into a carriage in front of the
hotel, met him face to face in the coffee-room, knew by his confused
manner that there was something up, questioned the manager, and found
they had been living there a fortnight as Mr. and Mrs. Randall. Jack
Dane saw them in Sardinia. The Willoughby Parkers came upon them in
Algiers, staying at a second-rate hotel in the town, saw them sitting
under a palm-tree, taking their coffee, as they drove by, and met them
driving in the environs. No mistaking her--as handsome a woman as you'd
see in a day's journey; no mistaking him--a wrong 'un, but a damn
good-looking demon, with the manners of Chesterfield and the morals of
Robert Macaire, the sort of man most women admire."
"Only the wrong sort of women, I think," said Mordaunt, resuming his
cue, the soldier having spaced his sentences with cannons and losers,
and made a break of twenty while he talked. "I can't understand such
a woman as Lady Perivale disgracing herself by an intrigue of that
kind--least of all for such a man as Rannock. Thoroughly bad style!"
"Women don't know bad style from good in our sex; they only know their
own by the clothes."
"If she cared for the man, why not marry him?"
"Not much! She is a rich woman, and doesn't want a husband who would
spend every shillin' in two or three years."
"Oh! but nowadays a woman can take care of her money. The law will
protect her!"
"Not from a spendthrift that she's fond of. And nowadays the clever
women have free and easy ideas of the marriage tie. They've been
educated up to it by novels and newspapers. Well, it isn't a nice
story, anyhow you look at it; but I thought it was friendly to call."
"So did I," said Mordaunt. "But I'm afraid she'd rather not have seen
us. I hope she'll go to her place in the north, and cut the whole
boiling."
"Not much left for her to cut, poor soul, if people have given her the
cold shoulder."
"She can cut Mrs. Wilfred and her girls," said Mordaunt. "I should
think she'd enjoy doing it."
* * * * *
Lady Perivale drove in the park three or four afternoons a week
at the fashionable hour, when carriages had to move slowly, and
mounted policemen were keeping the way clear for the passing of royal
personages. Some of her women friends bowed to her coldly, and she
returned the salute with the same distance. The men lounging by the
railings were on the alert to acknowledge a bow from her; but she had a
way of not seeing them that they could hardly call offensive. The more
strait-laced among the women looked at her with unrecognizing eyes;
and she gave them back the same blank stare. Young, very handsome,
exquisitely dressed by the _faiseuse_ at the top of the mode, and
seated in a victoria whose every detail, from the blood horses to
the men's gloves and collars, was perfection, she drove to and fro,
knowing herself under a dark cloud of undeserved disgrace. Anger was
her strongest feeling. Her heart beat fast, and her cheek flushed as
she drove past those treacherous women whom she had called friends. She
had not cultivated sentimental friendships in the fashionable world.
She had no _alter ego_, no bosom friend, in society. But she had liked
people, and had believed they liked her; and it was difficult to think
they could insult her by giving credence to such a preposterous story
as some idiots had set on foot.
She sought no society, sent out no invitations to the intimates of old,
the girls who had made her little court of adorers, her Queen's Maries,
whose hats and gloves had so often figured in her milliner's bills,
since if a nice girl were assisting at her own choice of head-gear, and
cast longing looks upon some sparkling vision of roses and leghorn, or
ostrich feathers and spangled lace, what more natural than to insist
upon buying the things for her, in spite of all protests. She had
scattered such gifts with lavish hands, forgetting all about them till
surprised by the total of her milliner's bill.
"Can I have spent so much on finery in a single season? Ah, by-the-by,
I gave Kate Holloway a hat, and Emily Dashwood an ostrich fan, and
Laura Vane had an ostrich boa, and a dozen long gloves. There are ever
so many things I had forgotten." And now the Lauras and Emilys and
Kates had other patronesses to eke out the paternal allowance, and they
went gaily down the stream with the people who thought evil of Lady
Perivale.
"We never were really intimate with her, don't you know?" they
explained, to acquaintance who had seen them in her barouche or in her
opera-box three or four times a week.
Her opera-box had been one of her chief splendours, a large box on
the grand tier. Music was her delight, and, except for a scratch
performance of Il Trovatore or La Traviata, she had seldom been absent
from her place. It was at the opera that Colonel Rannock had been most
remarkable in his attendance upon her. She liked him to be there,
for it was pleasant to have the sympathy of a fine musician, whose
critical faculty made him a delightful guide through the labyrinth of
a Wagnerian opera. Their heads had been often seen bending over the
score, he explaining, she listening as if enthralled. To the unmusical,
that study of Wagner's orchestration seemed the thinnest pretext for
confidential whispers, for lips hovering too near perfumed tresses and
jewelled throat.
"No need to inquire for the Leit-motif, there," said the men in the
stalls; and it was generally supposed that Lady Perivale meant to marry
Colonel Rannock, in spite of all that the world had to say against him.
"If she hadn't carried on desperately with him last year one might
hardly believe the story," said the people who had accepted the truth
of the rumour without a moment's hesitation.
She occupied her opera-box this year, resplendent in satin and
diamonds, radiating light on a tiara night from the circlet of stars
and roses that trembled on their delicate wires as she turned her head
from the stage to the auditorium. She had her visitors as of old:
_attachés_, ambassadors even, literary men, musical men, painters,
politicians. Coldly as she received them, she could not snub them,
she could not keep them at bay altogether; and, after all, she had no
grudge against the foreigners, and her box scintillated with stars on a
gala night. It pleased her to face her detractors in that public arena,
conspicuous by her beauty and her jewels.
There were waverers who would have liked to go to her, to hold out
the hand of friendship, to laugh off the story of her infamy; but the
fiat had gone forth, and she was taboo. The bellwether had scrambled
up the bank and passed through the gap in the hedge, and all the other
sheep must follow in that leading animal's steps. Life is too short for
individual choice in a case of this kind.
She had half a mind to go to the May Drawing-room, and had no fear
of repulse from Court officials, who are ever slow to condemn; but,
on reflection, she decided against that act of self-assertion. She
would not seem to appeal against the sentence that had been pronounced
against her by confronting her traducers before the face of royalty.
The card for the Marlborough House garden-party came in due course, but
she made an excuse for being absent. She would not hazard an appearance
which might cause annoyance to the Princess, who would perhaps have
been told afterwards that Lady Perivale ought not to have been asked,
and that it was an act of insolence in such a person to have written
her name in the sacred book when she came to London.
But June had not come yet, and the royal garden-party was still a thing
of the future.
* * * * *
As yet Lady Perivale had taken no trouble to discover how the
slanderous story had been circulated, or who the people were who
pretended to have met her. She could not bring herself to search out
the details of a scandal that so outraged all her feelings--her pride,
her self-respect, her belief in friendship and human kindness.
She had made no attempt to justify herself. She had accepted the
situation in a spirit of dogged resentment, and she faced her little
world with head erect, and eyes that gave scorn for scorn, and the only
sign of feeling was the fever spot that burnt on her cheek sometimes,
when she passed the friends of last year.
She had been living in Grosvenor Square more than a month, and her
drawing-room windows were wide open on a balcony full of May flowers,
when the butler announced--
"Lady Morningside," and a stout, comfortable-looking matron, in a
grey satin pelisse and an early victorian bonnet, rolled in upon her
solitude.
"My dear, I am so glad to find you at home and alone," said Lady
Morningside, shaking hands in her hearty fashion, and seating herself
in a capacious grandfather chair. "I have come for a confidential talk.
I only came to London three days ago. I have been at Wiesbaden about
these wretched eyes of mine. He can't do much," name understood, "but
he does something, and that keeps my spirits up."
"I am so sorry you have been suffering."
"Oh, it wasn't very bad. An excuse for being away."
"You have been at Wiesbaden, Marchioness? Then you haven't heard-----"
"What? How handsome you are lookin'. But a little too pale."
"You haven't heard that I am shunned like an influenza patient, on
account of a miserable slander that I am utterly unable to focus or to
refute."
"Don't say that, dear Lady Perivale. You will have to refute the
scandal, and show these people that they were fools to swallow it. Yes,
I have heard the story--insisted upon as if it were gospel truth; and I
don't believe a word of it. The man was seen, I dare say, and there was
a woman with him; but the woman wasn't you."
"Not unless a woman could be in Italy and Algiers at the same time,
Lady Morningside. I was living from November to April at my villa in
the olive woods above Porto Maurizio."
"And you had English visitors comin' and goin', no doubt?"
"Not a living creature from England. I use up all my vitality in a
London season, and I go to Italy to be alone with my spirit friends,
the choicest, the dearest--Mozart, Mendelssohn, Shakespeare, Browning.
I think one can hardly feel Browning's poetry out of Italy."
"That's a pity. I don't mean about Browning, though I do take half a
page of his rigmarole sometimes with my early cup of tea, my only time
for reading--but it's a pity that you hadn't some gossiping visitors
who could go about tellin' everybody they were with you in Italy."
"I have my old servants, who travelled with me, and never had me out of
their sight."
"Very useful if you wanted their evidence in a court of law; but you
can't send them to fight your battle at tea-parties, as you could any
woman friend--that clever Susan Rodney, for instance. You and she are
such pals! Why wasn't she with you part of the time?"
"She cannot leave her pupils."
"Poor creature! Well, it's a hard case."
"It is less hard since I know there's one great lady who believes in
me," said Grace, holding out her hand to the Marchioness in a gush of
gratitude.
"My dear, I never believe any scandal--even against a woman I detest,
and when I want to believe it--until I have had mathematical proof of
it. And I don't believe this of you, even if twenty people are going
about London who swore they met you honeymooning with that wretch."
"Twenty people! Oh, Lady Morningside! Susan Rodney spoke of three or
four."
"That was some time ago, perhaps. There are at least twenty now who
declare they saw you--saw you--in Algiers--Sardinia--on board the
Messageries steamer--Lord knows where. And they all swear that they
thought you one of the nicest women in London--only they can't go on
knowing you, on account of their daughters--their daughters, who read
Zola, and Anatole France, and Gabriele d'Annunzio, and talk about
'em to the men who take them in to dinner, and borrow money of their
dressmakers? I have only one daughter, and I'm never afraid of shocking
_her_. She has worked for a year in an East-end hospital, and she knows
twice as much about human wickedness as I do."
"And you don't believe a word of this story, Marchioness?"
"Not a syllable. But I know that Rannock is the kind of man my husband
calls a bad egg; and I think you were not very wise in having him about
you so much last season."
"You see, he wanted to marry me--for the sake of my money, no
doubt--they are so much more persevering when it's for one's money--and
I refused him three times--and he took my refusal so nicely----"
"One of the worst-tempered men in London?"
"And said, 'Since we are not to be lovers, let us at least be pals.'
And the man is clever--likes the books I like, and the music I like,
and plays the 'cello wonderfully, for an amateur."
"Oh, I know the wretch is clever. A fine manner, the well-born
Scotchman, polished on the Continent, what women call a magnetic man."
"I liked him, and thought people were hard upon him--and I had been
warned that he was dangerous."
"Oh, that was enough! To tell a young woman that a man is a villain is
the surest way to awaken her interest in him. It is only at my age that
one comes to understand that the man everybody abuses is no better than
the common herd."
"And I let him come and go in quite an easy way, as if he had been a
cousin, and we played _concertante_ duets sometimes, in wet weather."
"And people found him here, and saw him with you out-of-doors, and they
were talking about you last season, though you didn't know it. You are
too handsome and too rich to escape. The women envy you your looks; the
men envy you your income."
"You are not to suppose I ever cared about Colonel Rannock. I liked
his playing, and his conversation amused me--and the more people told
me that the Rannocks were unprincipled and disreputable, the more
determined I was to be civil to him. One gets so tired of the good
people who have never done wrong; and one doesn't take much account of
a man's morals when he's only an acquaintance."
"That's just what my daughter would say. Goodness and badness with her
are only differences in the measurement of the cerebrum. She'd consort
with an escaped murderer if she thought him clever. Well, my dear
child, you must come to my ball on the fifteenth of June. I am told
it will be the event of the season, though there's to be no ruinous
fancy-dress nonsense, not even powdered heads, only a white frock and
all your diamonds. I am asking everybody to wear white, and I shall
have a mass of vivid colour in the decorations, banks of gloxinias,
every shade of purple and crimson, and orange-coloured Chinese
lanterns, like that picture of Sargent's that we once raved about. You
will all look like sylphs."
"Dear Marchioness, it will be a delicious ball. I know how you do
things. But I can cross no one's threshold till my character is
cleared. My character! Good Heavens, that I should live to talk of my
character, like a housemaid!"
"Won't you come--in a white frock--and all your diamonds? They would
cringe to you. I know what they are--the silly sheep! You see, they are
good enough to call me a leader, and when they see you at my party, and
Morningside walking about with you, they'll know what fools they've
been."
"Dear Marchioness, you have a heart of gold! But I must right myself. I
must do it off my own bat, as the men say."
"You're a pig-headed puss! Perhaps you'll think better of it between
now and the fifteenth--nearly a month. I want to have all the pretty
people. And you are a prime favourite of my husband's. If duelling
weren't out of date I should fear for his life. I'm sure he'd be for
shootin' somebody on your account."
* * * * *
We are weak mortals, when we are civilized, and live in the best
society, and that visit of Lady Morningside's, that hearty kindness
from a motherly woman who had fashion and influence, exercised a
soothing and a stimulating effect on Grace Perivale.
"I am a fool to sit quiet under such an atrocious calumny," she
thought. "There must be some way of letting the world know that I was
spending my winter alone in my Italian villa, while some short-sighted
fools thought they saw me in Africa. It ought not to be difficult. I
must get some one to help me, somebody who knows the world. Oh, how I
wish I could go to law with somebody!"
That word "law" reminded her of the man whose wisdom Sir Hector had
believed infallible, and whose advice he had taken in all business
matters, the management of his estate, the form of his new investments.
Mr. Harding, the old family lawyer, was Hector's idea of incarnate
caution, "a long-headed fellow," the essence of truth and honesty, and
as rich as Crœsus.
"Why didn't I think of him before?" Lady Perivale wondered. "Of course
he is the proper person to help me."
She sent a groom with a note to Mr. Harding's office in Bedford Row,
begging him to call upon her before he went home; but it was past five
o'clock when the man arrived at the office, and Mr. Harding had left at
four.
He had a sumptuous modern Queen Anne house at Beckenham, moved in
the best--Beckenham and Bickley--society, and amused himself by the
cultivation of orchids, in a mild way. He did not affect specimens that
cost £200 a piece and required a gardener to sit up all night with
them. He talked of his orchids deprecatingly as poor things, which he
chose for their prettiness, not for their rarity. He liked to potter
about from hothouse to hothouse, in the long summer afternoons, and to
feel that out of parchment and foolscap and ferret he had created this
suburban paradise.
Lady Perivale had a telegram from him before eleven o'clock next
morning.
"I shall do myself the pleasure of calling at 4.30. Impossible
earlier.--Joseph Harding."
There was another Harding, a younger brother, in the firm, and a
certain Peterson, who had his own clients, and his own walk in life,
which took him mostly to Basinghall Street; but Joseph Harding was the
man of weight, family solicitor and conveyancer, learned in the laws of
real property, the oracle whom landed proprietors and titled personages
consulted.