She pushed in three bescribbled forms which the girl’s hand was quick
to appropriate, Mr. Buckton having so frequent a perverse instinct for
catching first any eye that promised the sort of entertainment with
which she had her peculiar affinity. The amusements of captives are
full of a desperate contrivance, and one of our young friend’s
ha’pennyworths had been the charming tale of _Picciola_. It was of
course the law of the place that they were never to take no notice, as
Mr. Buckton said, whom they served; but this also never prevented,
certainly on the same gentleman’s own part, what he was fond of
describing as the underhand game. Both her companions, for that matter,
made no secret of the number of favourites they had among the ladies;
sweet familiarities in spite of which she had repeatedly caught each of
them in stupidities and mistakes, confusions of identity and lapses of
observation that never failed to remind her how the cleverness of men
ends where the cleverness of women begins. “Marguerite, Regent Street.
Try on at six. All Spanish lace. Pearls. The full length.” That was the
first; it had no signature. “Lady Agnes Orme, Hyde Park Place.
Impossible to-night, dining Haddon. Opera to-morrow, promised Fritz,
but could do play Wednesday. Will try Haddon for Savoy, and anything in
the world you like, if you can get Gussy. Sunday Montenero. Sit Mason
Monday, Tuesday. Marguerite awful. Cissy.” That was the second. The
third, the girl noted when she took it, was on a foreign form:
“Everard, Hôtel Brighton, Paris. Only understand and believe. 22nd to
26th, and certainly 8th and 9th. Perhaps others. Come. Mary.”
Mary was very handsome, the handsomest woman, she felt in a moment, she
had ever seen—or perhaps it was only Cissy. Perhaps it was both, for
she had seen stranger things than that—ladies wiring to different
persons under different names. She had seen all sorts of things and
pieced together all sorts of mysteries. There had once been one—not
long before—who, without winking, sent off five over five different
signatures. Perhaps these represented five different friends who had
asked her—all women, just as perhaps now Mary and Cissy, or one or
other of them, were wiring by deputy. Sometimes she put in too much—too
much of her own sense; sometimes she put in too little; and in either
case this often came round to her afterwards, for she had an
extraordinary way of keeping clues. When she noticed she noticed; that
was what it came to. There were days and days, there were weeks
sometimes, of vacancy. This arose often from Mr. Buckton’s devilish and
successful subterfuges for keeping her at the sounder whenever it
looked as if anything might arouse; the sounder, which it was equally
his business to mind, being the innermost cell of captivity, a cage
within the cage, fenced oft from the rest by a frame of ground glass.
The counter-clerk would have played into her hands; but the
counter-clerk was really reduced to idiocy by the effect of his passion
for her. She flattered herself moreover, nobly, that with the
unpleasant conspicuity of this passion she would never have consented
to be obliged to him. The most she would ever do would be always to
shove off on him whenever she could the registration of letters, a job
she happened particularly to loathe. After the long stupors, at all
events, there almost always suddenly would come a sharp taste of
something; it was in her mouth before she knew it; it was in her mouth
now.
To Cissy, to Mary, whichever it was, she found her curiosity going out
with a rush, a mute effusion that floated back to her, like a returning
tide, the living colour and splendour of the beautiful head, the light
of eyes that seemed to reflect such utterly other things than the mean
things actually before them; and, above all, the high curt
consideration of a manner that even at bad moments was a magnificent
habit and of the very essence of the innumerable things—her beauty, her
birth, her father and mother, her cousins and all her ancestors—that
its possessor couldn’t have got rid of even had she wished. How did our
obscure little public servant know that for the lady of the telegrams
this was a bad moment? How did she guess all sorts of impossible
things, such as, almost on the very spot, the presence of drama at a
critical stage and the nature of the tie with the gentleman at the
Hôtel Brighton? More than ever before it floated to her through the
bars of the cage that this at last was the high reality, the bristling
truth that she had hitherto only patched up and eked out—one of the
creatures, in fine, in whom all the conditions for happiness actually
met, and who, in the air they made, bloomed with an unwitting
insolence. What came home to the girl was the way the insolence was
tempered by something that was equally a part of the distinguished
life, the custom of a flowerlike bend to the less fortunate—a dropped
fragrance, a mere quick breath, but which in fact pervaded and
lingered. The apparition was very young, but certainly married, and our
fatigued friend had a sufficient store of mythological comparison to
recognise the port of Juno. Marguerite might be “awful,” but she knew
how to dress a goddess.
Pearls and Spanish lace—she herself, with assurance, could see them,
and the “full length” too, and also red velvet bows, which, disposed on
the lace in a particular manner (she could have placed them with the
turn of a hand) were of course to adorn the front of a black brocade
that would be like a dress in a picture. However, neither Marguerite
nor Lady Agnes nor Haddon nor Fritz nor Gussy was what the wearer of
this garment had really come in for. She had come in for Everard—and
that was doubtless not his true name either. If our young lady had
never taken such jumps before it was simply that she had never before
been so affected. She went all the way. Mary and Cissy had been round
together, in their single superb person, to see him—he must live round
the corner; they had found that, in consequence of something they had
come, precisely, to make up for or to have another scene about, he had
gone off—gone off just on purpose to make them feel it; on which they
had come together to Cocker’s as to the nearest place; where they had
put in the three forms partly in order not to put in the one alone. The
two others in a manner, covered it, muffled it, passed it off. Oh yes,
she went all the way, and this was a specimen of how she often went.
She would know the hand again any time. It was as handsome and as
everything else as the woman herself. The woman herself had, on
learning his flight, pushed past Everard’s servant and into his room;
she had written her missive at his table and with his pen. All this,
every inch of it, came in the waft that she blew through and left
behind her, the influence that, as I have said, lingered. And among the
things the girl was sure of, happily, was that she should see her
again.