THE INTRUSIONS OF PEGGY
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
A MAN OF MARK.
MR. WITT'S WIDOW.
FATHER STAFFORD.
A CHANGE OF AIR.
HALF A HERO.
THE PRISONER OF ZENDA.
THE GOD IN THE CAR.
THE DOLLY DIALOGUES.
COMEDIES OF COURTSHIP.
THE CHRONICLES OF COUNT ANTONIO.
THE HEART OF PRINCESS OSRA.
PHROSO.
SIMON DALE.
RUPERT OF HENTZAU.
THE KING'S MIRROR.
QUISANTÉ.
TRISTRAM OF BLENT.
THE INTRUSIONS OF PEGGY
BY
ANTHONY HOPE
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1902
[All rights reserved]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. LIFE IS RECOMMENDED 1
II. COMING NEAR THE FIRE 12
III. IN DANES INN 23
IV. 'FROM THE MIDST OF THE WHIRL' 36
V. THE WORLD RECALCITRANT 48
VI. CHILDREN OF SHADOW 62
VII. A DANGEROUS GAME 75
VIII. USURPERS ON THE THRONE 89
IX. BRUISES AND BALM 103
X. CONCERNING A CERTAIN CHINA VASE 116
XI. THE MIXTURE AS BEFORE 128
XII. HOT HEADS AND COOL 141
XIII. JUSTIFICATION NUMBER FOUR 155
XIV. A HOUSE OF REFUGE 169
XV. NOT EVERYBODY'S FOOTBALL 183
XVI. MORAL LESSONS 197
XVII. THE PERJURER 210
XVIII. AN AUNT--AND A FRIEND 225
XIX. NO MORE THAN A GLIMMER 240
XX. PURELY BUSINESS 256
XXI. THE WHIP ON THE PEG 271
XXII. THE PHILOSOPHY OF IT 286
XXIII. THE LAST KICK 302
XXIV. TO THE SOUL SHOP 315
XXV. RECONCILIATION 331
THE INTRUSIONS OF PEGGY
CHAPTER I
LIFE IS RECOMMENDED
The changeful April morning that she watched from the window of her flat
looking over the river began a day of significance in the career of Trix
Trevalla--of feminine significance, almost milliner's perhaps, but of
significance all the same. She had put off her widow's weeds, and for
the first time these three years back was dressed in a soft shade of
blue; the harmony of her eyes and the gleams of her brown hair welcomed
the colour with the cordiality of an old friendship happily renewed.
Mrs. Trevalla's maid had been all in a flutter over the momentous
transformation; in her mistress it bred a quietly retrospective mood. As
she lay in an armchair watching the water and the clouds, she turned
back on the course of her life, remembering many things. The beginning
of a new era brought the old before her eyes in a protesting flash of
vividness. She abandoned herself to recollections--an insidious form of
dissipating the mind, which goes well with a relaxed ease of the body.
Not that Mrs. Trevalla's recollections were calculated to promote a
sense of luxury, unless indeed they were to act as a provocative
contrast.
There was childhood, spent in a whirling succession of lodging-houses.
They had little individuality and retained hardly any separate identity;
each had consisted of two rooms with folding doors between, and
somewhere, at the back or on the floor above, a cupboard for her to
sleep in. There was the first baby, her brother, who died when she was
six; he had been a helpless, clinging child, incapable of living without
far more sympathy and encouragement than he had ever got. Luckily she
had been of hardier stuff. There was her mother, a bridling, blushing,
weak-kneed woman (Trix's memory was candid); kind save when her nerves
were bad, and when they were, unkind in a weak and desultory fashion
that did not deserve the name of cruelty. Trix had always felt less
anger than contempt for her half-hysterical outbursts, and bore no
malice on their account. This pale visitor soon faded--as indeed Mrs.
Trevalla herself had--into non-existence, and a different picture took
its place. Here was the Reverend Algernon, her father, explaining that
he found himself unsuited to pastoral work and indisposed to adopt any
other active calling, that inadequate means were a misfortune, not a
fault, that a man must follow his temperament, and that he asked only to
be allowed to go his own way--he did not add to pay it--in peace and
quiet. His utterances came back with the old distinction of manner and
the distant politeness with which Mr. Trevalla bore himself towards all
disagreeable incidents of life--under which head there was much reason
to surmise that he ranked his daughter.
Was he unjust in that? Trix was puzzled. She recalled a sturdy,
stubborn, rather self-assertive child. The freshness of delicacy is
rubbed off, the appeal of shyness silenced, by a hand-to-mouth
existence, by a habit of regarding the leavings of the first-floor
lodger in the light of windfalls, by constant flittings unmarked by the
discharge of obligations incurred in the abandoned locality, by a
practical outlawry from the class to which we should in the ordinary
course belong. Trix decided that she must have been an unattractive
girl, rather hard, too much awake to the ways of the world, readily
retorting its chilliness towards her. All this was natural enough, since
neither death nor poverty nor lack of love was strange to her. Natural,
yes; pleasant, no, Trix concluded, and with that she extended a degree
of pardon to Mr. Trevalla. He had something to say for himself. With a
smile she recalled what he always did say for himself, if anyone seemed
to challenge the spotlessness of his character. On such painful
occasions he would mention that he was, and had been for twenty years, a
teetotaler. There were reasons in the Trevalla family history which made
the fact remarkable; in its owner's eyes the virtue was so striking and
enormous that it had exhausted the moral possibilities of his being,
condemned other excellencies to atrophy, and left him, in the
flower-show of graces, the self-complacent exhibitor of a single bloom.
Yet he had become a party to the great conspiracy; it was no less,
however much motives of love, and hopes ever sanguine, might excuse it
in one of the parties to it--not the Reverend Algernon. They had all
been involved in it--her father, old Lady Trevalla (her husband had been
a soldier and K.C.B.), Vesey Trevalla himself. Vesey loved Trix, Lady
Trevalla loved Vesey in a mother's conscienceless way; the mother
persuaded herself that the experiment would work, the son would not stop
to ask the question. The Reverend Algernon presumably persuaded himself
too--and money was very scarce. So Trix was bidden to notice--when those
days at Bournemouth came back to mind, her brows contracted into a frown
as though from a quick spasm of pain--how Vesey loved her, what a good
steady fellow he was, how safely she might trust herself to him. Why, he
was a teetotaler too! 'Yes, though his gay friends do laugh at him!'
exclaimed Lady Trevalla admiringly. They were actually staying at a
Temperance Hotel! The stress laid on these facts did not seem strange to
an ignorant girl of seventeen, accustomed to Mr. Trevalla's solitary but
eloquent virtue. Rather weary of the trait, she pouted a little over it,
and then forgot it as a matter of small moment one way or the other. So
the conspiracy throve, and ended in the good marriage with the
well-to-do cousin, in being Mrs. Trevalla of Trevalla Haven, married to
a big, handsome, ruddy fellow who loved her. The wedding-day stood out
in memory; clearest of all now was what had been no more than a faint
and elusive but ever-present sense that for some reason the guests,
Vesey's neighbours, looked on her with pity--the men who pressed her
hand and the women who kissed her cheek. And at the last old Lady
Trevalla had burst suddenly into unrestrained sobbing. Why? Vesey looked
very uncomfortable, and even the Reverend Algernon was rather upset.
However, consciences do no harm if they do not get the upper hand till
the work is done; Trix was already Vesey's wife.
He was something of a man, this Vesey Trevalla; he was large-built in
mind, equitable, kind, shrewd, of a clear vision. To the end he was a
good friend and a worthy companion in his hours of reason. Trix's
thoughts of him were free from bitterness. Her early life had given her
a tolerance that stood her in stead, a touch of callousness which
enabled her to endure. As a child she had shrugged thin shoulders under
her shabby frock; she shrugged her shoulders at the tragedy now; her
heart did not break, but hardened a little more. She made some
ineffectual efforts to reclaim him; their hopelessness was absurdly
plain; after a few months Vesey laughed at them, she almost laughed
herself. She settled down into the impossible life, reproaching nobody.
When her husband was sober, she never referred to what had happened when
he was drunk; if he threw a plate at her then, she dodged the plate: she
seemed in a sense to have been dodging plates and suchlike missiles all
her life. Sometimes he had suspicions of himself, and conjured up
recollections of what he had done. 'Oh, what does last night matter?'
she would ask in a friendly if rather contemptuous tone. Once she lifted
the veil for a moment. He found her standing by the body of her baby; it
had died while he was unfit to be told, or at any rate unable to
understand.
'So the poor little chap's gone,' he said softly, laying his hand on her
shoulder.
'Yes, Vesey, he's gone, thank God!' she said, looking him full in the
eyes.
He turned away without a word, and went out with a heavy tread. Trix
felt that she had been cruel, but she did not apologise, and Vesey
showed no grudge.
The odd thing about the four years her married life lasted was that they
now seemed so short. Even before old Lady Trevalla's death (which
happened a year after the wedding) Trix had accommodated herself to her
position. From that time all was monotony--the kind of monotony which
might well kill, but, failing that, left little to mark out one day from
another. She did not remember even that she had been acutely miserable
either for her husband or for herself; rather she had come to disbelieve
in acute feelings. She had grown deadened to sorrow as to joy, and to
love, the great parent of both; the hardening process of her youth had
been carried further. When Vesey caught a chill and crumpled up under it
as sodden men do, and died with a thankfulness he did not conceal, she
was unmoved. She was not grateful for the deliverance, nor yet grieved
for the loss of a friend. She shrugged her shoulders again, asking what
the world was going to do with her next.
Mr. Trevalla took a view more hopeful than his daughter's, concluding
that there was cause for feeling considerable satisfaction both on moral
and on worldly grounds. From the higher standpoint Trix (under his
guidance) had made a noble although unsuccessful effort, and had shown
the fortitude to be expected from his daughter; while Vesey, poor
fellow, had been well looked after to the end, and was now beyond the
reach of temptation. From the lower--Mr. Trevalla glanced for a moment
round the cosy apartment he now occupied at Brighton, where he was
beginning to get a nice little library round him--yes, from the lower,
while it was regrettable that the estate had passed to a distant cousin,
Trix was left with twenty thousand pounds (in free cash, for Vesey had
refused to make a settlement, since he did not know what money he would
want--that is, how long he would last) and an ascertained social
position. She was only twenty-two when left a widow, and better-looking
than she had ever been in her life. On the whole, were the four years
misspent? Had anybody very much to grumble at? Certainly nobody had any
reason to reproach himself. And he wondered why Trix had not sent for
him to console her in her affliction. He was glad she had not, but he
thought that the invitation would have been natural and becoming.
'But I never pretended to understand women,' he murmured, with his
gentle smile.
Women would have declared that they did not understand him either, using
the phrase with a bitter intention foreign to the Reverend Algernon's
lips and temper. His good points were so purely intellectual--lucidity
of thought, temperance of opinion, tolerance, humour, appreciation of
things which deserved it. These gifts would, with women, have pleaded
their rarity in vain against the more ordinary endowments of willingness
to work and a capacity for thinking, even occasionally, about other
people. Men liked him--so long as they had no business relations with
him. But women are moralists, from the best to the worst of them. If he
had lived, Trix would probably have scorned to avail herself of his
counsels. Yet they might well have been useful to her in after days; he
was a good taster of men. As it was, he died soon after Vesey, having
caught a chill and refused to drink hot grog. That was his doctor's
explanation. Mr. Trevalla's dying smile accused the man of cloaking his
own ignorance by such an excuse; he prized his virtue too much to charge
it with his death. He was sorry to leave his rooms at Brighton; other
very strong feeling about his departure he had none. Certainly his
daughter did not come between him and his preparations for hereafter,
nor the thought of her solitude distract his fleeting soul.
In the general result life seemed ended for Trix Trevalla at twenty-two,
and, pending release from it in the ordinary course, she contemplated an
impatient and provisional existence in Continental
_pensions_--establishments where a young and pretty woman could not be
suspected of wishing to reap any advantage from prettiness or youth.
Hundreds of estimable ladies guarantee this security, and thereby obtain
a genteel and sufficient company round their modest and inexpensive
tables. It was what Trix asked for, and for two years she got it. During
this period she sometimes regretted Vesey Trevalla, and sometimes asked
whether vacancy were not worse than misery, or on what grounds limbo was
to be preferred to hell. She could not make up her mind on this
question--nor is it proposed to settle it here. Probably most people
have tried both on their own account.
One evening she arrived at Paris rather late, and the isolation ward
(metaphors will not be denied sometimes) to which she had been
recommended was found to be full. Somewhat apprehensive, she was driven
to an hotel of respectability, and, rushing to catch the flying
coat-tails of _table d'hôte_, found herself seated beside a man who was
apparently not much above thirty. This unwonted propinquity set her
doing what she had not done for years in public, though she had never
altogether abandoned the practice as a private solace: as she drank her
cold soup, she laughed. Her neighbour, a shabby man with a rather shaggy
beard, turned benevolently inquiring eyes on her. A moment's glance made
him start a little and say, 'Surely it's Mrs. Trevalla?'
'That's my name,' answered Trix, wondering greatly, but thanking heaven
for a soul who knew her. In the _pensions_ they never knew who you were,
but were always trying to find out, and generally succeeded the day
after you went away.
'That's very curious,' he went on. 'I daresay you'll be surprised, but
your photograph stands on my bedroom mantel-piece. I knew you directly
from it. It was sent to me.'
'When was it sent you?' she asked.
'At the time of your marriage.' He grew grave as he spoke.
'You were his friend?'
'I called myself so.' Conversation was busy round them, yet he lowered
his voice to add, 'I don't know now whether I had any right.'
'Why not?'
'I gave up very soon.'
Trix's eyes shot a quick glance at him and she frowned a little.
'Well, I ought to have been more than a friend, and so did I,' she said.
'It would have been utterly useless, of course. Reason recognises that,
but then conscience isn't always reasonable.'
She agreed with a nod as she galloped through her fish, eager to
overtake the _menu_.
'Besides, I have----' He hesitated a moment, smiling apologetically and
playing nervously with a knife. 'I have a propensity myself, and that
makes me judge him more easily--and myself not so lightly.'
She looked at his pint of _ordinaire_ with eyebrows raised.
'Oh, no, quite another,' he assured her, smiling. 'But it's enough to
teach me what propensities are.'
'What is it? Tell me.' She caught eagerly at the strange luxury of
intimate talk.
'Never! But, as I say, I've learnt from it. Are you alone here, Mrs.
Trevalla?'
'Here and everywhere,' said Trix, with a sigh and a smile.
'Come for a stroll after dinner. I'm an old friend of Vesey's, you
know.' The last remark was evidently thrown in as a concession to rules
not held in much honour by the speaker. Trix said that she would come;
the outing seemed a treat to her after the _pensions_.
They drank beer together on the boulevards; he heard her story, and he
said many things to her, waving (as the evening wore on) a pipe to and
fro from his mouth to the length of his arm. It was entirely owing to
the things which he said that evening on the boulevards that she sat now
in the flat over the river, her mourning doffed, her guaranteed
_pensions_ forsaken, London before her, an unknown alluring sea.
'What you want,' he told her, with smiling vehemence, 'is a revenge.
Hitherto you've done nothing; you've only had things done to you. You've
made nothing; you've only been made into things yourself. Life has
played with you; go and play with it.'
Trix listened, sitting very still, with eager eyes. There was a life,
then--a life still open to her; the door was not shut, nor her story of
necessity ended.
'I daresay you'll scorch your fingers; for the fire burns. But it's
better to die of heat than of cold. And if trouble comes, call at 6A
Danes Inn.'
'Where in the world is Danes Inn?' she asked, laughing.
'Between New and Clement's, of course.' He looked at her in momentary
surprise, and then laughed. 'Oh, well, not above a mile from
civilisation--and a shilling cab from aristocracy. I happen to lodge
there.'
She looked at him curiously. He was shabby yet rather distinguished,
shaggy but clean. He advised life, and he lived in Danes Inn, where an
instinct told her that life would not be a very maddening or riotous
thing.
'Come, you must live again, Mrs. Trevalla,' he urged.
'Do you live, as you call it?' she asked, half in mockery, half in a
genuine curiosity.
A shade of doubt, perhaps of distress, spread over his face. He knocked
out his pipe deliberately before answering.
'Well, hardly, perhaps.' Then he added eagerly, 'I work, though.'
'Does that do instead?' To Trix's new-born mood the substitute seemed a
poor one.
'Yes--if you have a propensity.'
What was his tone? Sad or humorous, serious or mocking? It sounded all.
'Oh, work's your propensity, is it?' she cried gaily and scornfully, as
she rose to her feet. 'I don't think it's mine, you know.'
He made no reply, but turned away to pay for the beer. It was a
trifling circumstance, but she noticed that at first he put down three
_sous_ for the waiter, and then returned to the table in order to make
the tip six. He looked as if he had done his duty when he had made it
six.
They walked back to the hotel together and shook hands in the hall.
'6A Danes Inn?' she asked merrily.
'6A Danes Inn, Mrs. Trevalla. Is it possible that my advice is working?'
'It's working very hard indeed--as hard as you work. But Danes Inn is
only a refuge, isn't it?'
'It's not fit for much more, I fear.'
'I shall remember it. And now, as a formality--and perhaps as a
concession to the postman--who are you?'
'My name is Airey Newton.'
'I never heard Vesey mention you.'
'No, I expect not. But I knew him very well. I'm not an impostor, Mrs.
Trevalla.'
'Why didn't he mention you?' asked Trix. Vesey had been, on the whole, a
communicative man.
He hesitated a moment before he answered.
'Well, I wrote to him on the subject of his marriage,' he confessed at
last.
She needed no more.
'I see,' she said, with an understanding nod. 'Well, that was--honest of
you. Good night, Mr. Newton.'
This meeting--all their conversation--was fresh and speaking in her
brain as she sat looking over the river in her recovered gown of blue.
But for the meeting, but for the shabby man and what he had said, there
would have been no blue gown, she would not have been in London nor in
the flat. He had brought her there, to do something, to make something,
to play with life as life had played with her, to have a revenge, to
die, if die she must, of heat rather than of cold.
Well, she would follow his advice--would accept and fulfil it amply.
'At the worst there are the _pensions_ again--and there's Danes Inn!'
She laughed at that idea, but her laugh was rather hard, her mouth a
little grim, her eyes mischievous. These were the marks youth and the
four years had left. Besides, she cared for not a soul on earth.