If life at Cocker’s, with the dreadful drop of August, had lost
something of its savour, she had not been slow to infer that a heavier
blight had fallen on the graceful industry of Mrs. Jordan.
With Lord Rye and Lady Ventnor and Mrs. Bubb all out of town, with the
blinds down on all the homes of luxury, this ingenious woman might well
have found her wonderful taste left quite on her hands. She bore up,
however, in a way that began by exciting much of her young friend’s
esteem; they perhaps even more frequently met as the wine of life
flowed less free from other sources, and each, in the lack of better
diversion, carried on with more mystification for the other an
intercourse that consisted not a little in peeping out and drawing
back. Each waited for the other to commit herself, each profusely
curtained for the other the limits of low horizons. Mrs. Jordan was
indeed probably the more reckless skirmisher; nothing could exceed her
frequent incoherence unless it was indeed her occasional bursts of
confidence. Her account of her private affairs rose and fell like a
flame in the wind—sometimes the bravest bonfire and sometimes a handful
of ashes. This our young woman took to be an effect of the position, at
one moment and another, of the famous door of the great world. She had
been struck in one of her ha’penny volumes with the translation of a
French proverb according to which such a door, any door, had to be
either open or shut; and it seemed part of the precariousness of Mrs.
Jordan’s life that hers mostly managed to be neither. There had been
occasions when it appeared to gape wide—fairly to woo her across its
threshold; there had been others, of an order distinctly disconcerting,
when it was all but banged in her face. On the whole, however, she had
evidently not lost heart; these still belonged to the class of things
in spite of which she looked well. She intimated that the profits of
her trade had swollen so as to float her through any state of the tide,
and she had, besides this, a hundred profundities and explanations.
She rose superior, above all, on the happy fact that there were always
gentlemen in town and that gentlemen were her greatest admirers;
gentlemen from the City in especial—as to whom she was full of
information about the passion and pride excited in such breasts by the
elements of her charming commerce. The City men _did_, in short, go in
for flowers. There was a certain type of awfully smart stockbroker—Lord
Rye called them Jews and bounders, but she didn’t care—whose
extravagance, she more than once threw out, had really, if one had any
conscience, to be forcibly restrained. It was not perhaps a pure love
of beauty: it was a matter of vanity and a sign of business; they
wished to crush their rivals, and that was one of their weapons. Mrs.
Jordan’s shrewdness was extreme; she knew in any case her customer—she
dealt, as she said, with all sorts; and it was at the worst a race for
her—a race even in the dull months—from one set of chambers to another.
And then, after all, there were also still the ladies; the ladies of
stockbroking circles were perpetually up and down. They were not quite
perhaps Mrs. Bubb or Lady Ventnor; but you couldn’t tell the difference
unless you quarrelled with them, and then you knew it only by their
making-up sooner. These ladies formed the branch of her subject on
which she most swayed in the breeze; to that degree that her confidant
had ended with an inference or two tending to banish regret for
opportunities not embraced. There were indeed tea-gowns that Mrs.
Jordan described—but tea-gowns were not the whole of respectability,
and it was odd that a clergyman’s widow should sometimes speak as if
she almost thought so. She came back, it was true, unfailingly to Lord
Rye, never, evidently, quite losing sight of him even on the longest
excursions. That he was kindness itself had become in fact the very
moral it all pointed—pointed in strange flashes of the poor woman’s
nearsighted eyes. She launched at her young friend portentous looks,
solemn heralds of some extraordinary communication. The communication
itself, from week to week, hung fire; but it was to the facts over
which it hovered that she owed her power of going on. “They _are_, in
one way _and_ another,” she often emphasised, “a tower of strength”;
and as the allusion was to the aristocracy the girl could quite wonder
why, if they were so in “one way,” they should require to be so in two.
She thoroughly knew, however, how many ways Mrs. Jordan counted in. It
all meant simply that her fate was pressing her close. If that fate was
to be sealed at the matrimonial altar it was perhaps not remarkable
that she shouldn’t come all at once to the scratch of overwhelming a
mere telegraphist. It would necessarily present to such a person a
prospect of regretful sacrifice. Lord Rye—if it _was_ Lord Rye—wouldn’t
be “kind” to a nonentity of that sort, even though people quite as good
had been.
One Sunday afternoon in November they went, by arrangement, to church
together; after which—on the inspiration of the moment the arrangement
had not included it—they proceeded to Mrs. Jordan’s lodging in the
region of Maida Vale. She had raved to her friend about her service of
predilection; she was excessively “high,” and had more than once wished
to introduce the girl to the same comfort and privilege. There was a
thick brown fog and Maida Vale tasted of acrid smoke; but they had been
sitting among chants and incense and wonderful music, during which,
though the effect of such things on her mind was great, our young lady
had indulged in a series of reflexions but indirectly related to them.
One of these was the result of Mrs. Jordan’s having said to her on the
way, and with a certain fine significance, that Lord Rye had been for
some time in town. She had spoken as if it were a circumstance to which
little required to be added—as if the bearing of such an item on her
life might easily be grasped. Perhaps it was the wonder of whether Lord
Rye wished to marry her that made her guest, with thoughts straying to
that quarter, quite determine that some other nuptials also should take
place at Saint Julian’s. Mr. Mudge was still an attendant at his
Wesleyan chapel, but this was the least of her worries—it had never
even vexed her enough for her to so much as name it to Mrs. Jordan. Mr.
Mudge’s form of worship was one of several things—they made up in
superiority and beauty for what they wanted in number—that she had long
ago settled he should take from her, and she had now moreover for the
first time definitely established her own. Its principal feature was
that it was to be the same as that of Mrs. Jordan and Lord Rye; which
was indeed very much what she said to her hostess as they sat together
later on. The brown fog was in this hostess’s little parlour, where it
acted as a postponement of the question of there being, besides,
anything else than the teacups and a pewter pot and a very black little
fire and a paraffin lamp without a shade. There was at any rate no sign
of a flower; it was not for herself Mrs. Jordan gathered sweets. The
girl waited till they had had a cup of tea—waited for the announcement
that she fairly believed her friend had, this time, possessed herself
of her formally at last to make; but nothing came, after the interval,
save a little poke at the fire, which was like the clearing of a throat
for a speech.