ANOTHER NEW FRIEND
The country folk did call upon the Steels, as indeed, they could
scarcely fail to do, having called on him already as a bachelor the year
before. Nor were the Uniackes and the Invernesses the bell-wethers of
the flock. Those august families had returned to London for the season;
but the taboo half-suggested by Mrs. Venables had begun and ended in her
own mind. Indeed, that potent and diplomatic dame, who was the undoubted
leader of society within a four-mile radius of Northborough town hall,
was the first to recognize the mistake that she had made, and to behave
as though she had never made it. Quite early in June, the Steels were
bidden to a dinner-party in their honor at Upthorpe Hall.
"Mrs. Venables!" cried Rachel, in dismay. "Is that the gushing woman
with the quiet daughters who called last Thursday?"
"That is the lady," said Steel, a gleam of humor in his grim eyes. He
never expressed an opinion to his wife about any one of their
neighbors, but when she let fall an impression of her own, he would
look at her in this way, as though it was the very one that he had
formed for himself a year ago.
"But need we go?" asked Rachel, with open apprehension.
"I think so," he said. "Why not?"
"A dinner-party, of all things! There is no cover at the dinner-table;
you can't even wear a hat; you must sit there in a glare for hours and
hours!" And Rachel shuddered. "Oh, don't let us go!" she urged; but her
tone was neither pathetic nor despairing; though free from the faintest
accent of affection, it was, nevertheless, the tone of a woman who has
not always been denied.
"I am afraid we must go," he said firmly, but not unkindly. "You see, it
is in our honor--as I happen to know; for Venables gave me a hint when I
met him in the town the other day. He will take you in himself."
"And what is he like?"
"Fond of his dinner; he won't worry you," said Steel, reassuringly. "Nor
need you really bother your head about all that any more. Nobody has
recognized you yet; nobody is in the least likely to do so down here.
Don't you see how delightfully provincial they are? There's a local
lawyer, a pillar of all the virtues, who has misappropriated his own
daughter-in-law's marriage portion and fled the country with the
principal boy in their last pantomime; there are a lot of smart young
fellows who are making a sporting thousand every other day out of iron
warrants; the district's looking up after thirty years' bad times; and
this is the sort of thing it's talking about. These are its heroes and
its villains. All you hear from London is what the last man spent when
he was up, and where he dined; and from all I can gather, the Tichborne
trial made less impression down here than that of a Delverton parson who
got into trouble about the same time."
"They must have heard of my trial," said Rachel, in a low voice. They
were walking in the grounds after breakfast, but she looked round before
speaking at all.
"They would glance at it," said Steel, with a shrug; "an occasional
schoolboy might read it through; but even if you were guilty, and were
here on view, you would command much less attention than the local
malefactor in an infinitely smaller way. I am sorry I put it quite like
that," added Steel, as Rachel winced, "but I feel convinced about it,
and only wish I could convince you."
And he did so, more or less; but the fear of recognition had increased
in Rachel, instead of abating, as time went on. It had increased
especially since the rapid ripening of her acquaintance with Morna
Woodgate into the intimacy which already subsisted between the two young
wives. Rachel had told her husband that she would not have Morna know
for anything; and he had appeared in his own dark way to sympathize with
a solicitude which was more actual than necessary; but that was perhaps
because he approved of Mrs. Woodgate on his own account. And so rare was
that approval, as a positive and known quantity, yet so marked in this
case, that he usually contrived to share Morna's society with his wife.
"You shall not monopolize Mrs. Woodgate," he would say with all urbanity
as he joined them when least expected. "I was first in the field, you
know!"
And in the field he would remain. There were no commands, no wishes to
obey in the matter, no embargo upon the comings and goings between the
two new friends. But Mr. Steel invariably appeared upon the scene as
well. The good vicar attributed it to the elderly bridegroom's jealous
infatuation for his beautiful young bride; but Morna knew better from
the first.
"Are you going?" asked Rachel, eagerly, when she and Morna met again;
indeed, she had gone expressly to the Vicarage to ask the question; and
not until she had seen the Woodgates' invitation could Steel himself
induce her to answer theirs.
The Woodgates were going. Morna was already in alternate fits of despair
and of ideas about her dress.
"I wish I might dress you!" said Rachel, knowing her well enough already
to say that. "I have wardrobes full of them, and yet my husband insists
upon taking me up to London to get something fit to wear!"
"But not necessarily on your back!" cried Steel himself, appearing at
that moment in his usual way, warm, breathless, but only playfully put
out. "My dear Mrs. Woodgate, I must have a special wire between your
house and ours. One thing, however, I always know where to find her! Did
she tell you we go by the 12:55 from Northborough?"
It was something to wear upon her neck--a diamond necklet of superb
stones, gradually swelling to one of the first water at the throat; and
Rachel duly wore it at the dinner-party, with a rich gown of bridal
white, whose dazzling purity had perhaps the effect of cancelling the
bride's own pallor. But she was very pale. It was her first appearance
at a gathering of the kind, not only there in Delverton, but anywhere
at all since her second marriage. And the invitation had been of the
correct, most ample length; it had had time to wind itself about
Rachel's nerves.
Mr. Venables, who of course did take her in, by no means belied her
husband's description of him; he was a rotund man with a high
complexion, and his bulging eye was on the menu before his soft body had
sunk into his chair. His conversation proved limited, but strictly to
the point; he told Rachel what to eat, and once or twice what to avoid;
lavished impersonal praise upon one dish, impartial criticisms upon
another, and only spoke between the courses. It was a large
dinner-party; twenty-two sat down. Rachel was at last driven to glancing
at the other twenty.
To the man on her left she had not been introduced, but he had offered
one or two civil observations while Mr. Venables was better engaged;
and, after the second, Rachel had chanced to catch sight of the card
upon which his name had been inscribed. He was, it seemed, a Mr.
Langholm; and all at once Rachel leant back and looked at him. He was a
loose-limbed, round-shouldered man, with a fine open countenance, and a
great disorderly moustache; his hair might have been shorter, and his
dress-coat shone where it caught the light. Rachel put the screw upon
her courage.
"These cards," she said, with a glimpse of her own colonial self, "are
very handy when one hasn't been introduced. Your name is not very
common, is it?"
"Not very," he answered, "spelt like that."
"Yes it's spelt the same way as the Mr. Langholm who writes."
"It is."
"Then are you any relation?"
"I am the man himself," said Langholm, with quite a hearty laugh,
accompanied by a flush of pleasurable embarrassment. He was not a
particularly popular writer, and this did not happen to him every day.
"I hoped you were," said Rachel, as she helped herself to the first
_entrée_.
"Then you haven't read my books," he chuckled, "and you never must."
"But I have," protested Rachel, quite flushed in her turn by the small
excitement. "I read heaps of them in Tauchnitz when we were abroad. But
I had no idea that I should ever meet you in the flesh!"
"Really?" he said. "Then that's funnier still; but I suppose Mr. Steel
didn't want to frighten you. We saw quite a lot of each other last year;
he wrote to me from Florence before you came over; and I should have
paid my respects long ago, but I have been up in town, and only just
come back."
The flush had died out of Rachel's face. Her husband told her
nothing--nothing! In her indignation she was tempted to say so to the
stranger; she had to think a moment what to say instead. A falsehood of
any sort was always a peculiar difficulty to Rachel, a constitutional
aversion, and it cost her an effort to remark at last that it was very
stupid of her, she had quite forgotten, but now she remembered--of
course! And with that she turned to her host, who was offering an
observation across his empty plate.
"Strange thing, Mrs. Steel, but you can't get the meat in the country
that you can in town. Those fillets, now--I wish you could taste 'em at
my club; but we give our chef a thousand a year, and he drives up every
day in his brougham."
The novels of Charles Langholm were chiefly remarkable for their
intricate plots, and for the hope of better things that breathed through
the cheap sensation of the best of them. But it was a hope that had been
deferred a good many years. His manner was better than his matter;
indeed, an incongruous polish was said by the literary to prevent
Langholm from being a first favorite either with the great public or the
little critics. As a maker of plots, however, he still had humble
points; and Rachel assured him that she had burnt her candle all night
in order to solve one of his ingenious mysteries.
"What!" he cried; "you call yourself a lady, and you don't look at the
end before you reach it?"
"Not when it's a good book."
"Well, you have pitched on about the best of a bad lot; and it's a
satisfaction to know you didn't cut the knot it took some months to
tie."
Rachel was greatly interested. She had never before met a literary man;
had no idea how the trick was done; and she asked many of those
ingenuous questions which seldom really displease the average gentleman
of this type. When not expatiating upon the heroine whom the exigencies
of "serial rights" demanded in his books, Charles Langholm, the talker
and the man, was an unmuzzled misogynist. But nobody would have
suspected it from his answers to Rachel's questions, or from any portion
of their animated conversation. Certainly the aquiline lady whom
Langholm had taken in, and to whom he was only attentive by remorseful
fits and penitential starts, had not that satisfaction; for her
right-hand neighbor did not speak to her at all. There was thus one
close and critical follower of a conversation which without warning took
the one dramatic turn for which Rachel was forever on her guard; only
this once, in an hour of unexpected entertainment, was she not.
"How do I get my plots?" said Langholm. "Sometimes out of my head, as
they say in the nursery; occasionally from real life; more often a blend
of the two combined. You don't often get a present from the newspaper
that you can lift into a magazine more or less as it stands. Facts are
stubborn things; they won't serialize. But now and then there's a case.
There was one a little time ago. Oh, there was a great case not long
since, if we had but the man to handle it, without spoiling it, in
English fiction!"
"And what was that?"
"The Minchin case!"
And he looked straight at her, as one only looks at one's neighbor at
table when one is saying or hearing something out of the common; he
turned half round, and he looked in Rachel's face with the smile of an
artist with a masterpiece in his eye. It was an inevitable moment, come
at last when least expected; instinct, however, had prepared Rachel,
just one moment before; and after all she could stare coldly on his
enthusiasm, without a start or a tremor to betray the pose.
"Yes?" she said, her fine eyebrows raised a little. "And do you really
think that would make a book?"
It was characteristic of Rachel that she did not for a moment--even that
unlooked-for moment--pretend to be unfamiliar with the case.
"Don't you?" he asked.
"I haven't thought about it," said Rachel, looking pensively at the
flowers. "But surely it was a very sordid case?"
"The case!" he cried. "Yes, sordid as you like; but I don't mean the
case at all."
"Then what do you mean, Mr. Langholm?"
"Her after life," he whispered; "the psychology of that woman, and her
subsequent adventures! She disappeared into thin air immediately after
the trial. I suppose you knew that?"
"I did hear it."
Rachel moistened her lips with champagne.
"Well, I should take her from that moment," said Langholm. "I should
start her story there."
"And should you make her guilty or not guilty?"
"Ah!" said Langholm, as though that would require consideration;
unluckily, he paused to consider on the spot.
"Who are you talking about?" inquired Mr. Venables, who had caught
Rachel's last words.
"Mrs. Minchin," she told him steadily.
"Guilty!" cried Mr. Venables, with great energy. "Guilty, and I'd have
gone to see her hanged myself!"
And Mr. Venables beamed upon Rachel as though proud of the sentiment,
while the diamonds rose and fell upon her white neck, where he would
have had the rope.
"A greater scandal," he went on, both to Rachel and to the lady on his
other side (who interrupted Mr. Venables to express devout agreement),
"a greater scandal and miscarriage of justice I have never known.
Guilty? Of course she was guilty; and I only wish we could try her again
and hang her yet! Now don't pretend you sympathize with a woman like
that," he said to Rachel, with a look like a nudge; "you haven't been
married long enough; and for Heaven's sake don't refuse that bird! It's
the best that can be got this time of year, though that's not saying
much; but wait till the grouse season, Mrs. Steel! I have a moor here in
the dales, keep a cellar full of them, and eat 'em as they drop off the
string."
"Well?" said Rachel, turning to Langholm when her host became a busy
man once more.
"I should make her guilty," said the novelist; "and she would marry a
man who believed in her innocence, and he wouldn't care two pins when
she told him the truth in the last chapter, and they would live happily
ever afterwards. Nobody would touch the serial rights. But that would be
a book!"
"Then do you think she really was guilty?"
And Rachel waited while he shrugged, her heart beating for no good
reason that she knew, except that she rather liked Mr. Langholm, and did
not wish to cease liking him on the spot. But it was to him that the
answer was big with fate; and he trifled and dallied with the issue of
the moment, little dreaming what a mark it was to leave upon his life,
while the paradox beloved of the literary took shape on his tongue.
"What does it matter what she was? What do the facts matter, Mrs. Steel,
when one has an idea like that for fiction? Fiction is truer than fact!"
"But you haven't answered my question."
Rachel meant to have that answer.
"Oh, well, as a matter of fact, I read the case pretty closely, and I
was thankful the jury brought in an acquittal. It required a little
imagination, but the truth always does. It is no treason to our host to
whisper that he has none. I remember having quite a heated argument with
him at the time. Oh, dear, no; she was no more guilty than you or I; but
it would be a thousand times more artistic if she were; and I should
make her so, by Jove!"
Rachel finished her dinner in great tranquillity after this; but there
was a flush upon her face which had not been there before, and Langholm
received an astonishing smile when the ladies rose. He had been making
tardy atonement for his neglect of the aquiline lady, but Rachel had the
last word with him.
"You will come and see us, won't you?" she said. "I shall want to hear
how the plot works out."
"I am afraid it's one I can't afford to use," he said, "unless I stick
to foolish fact and make her innocent."
And she left him with a wry face, her own glowing again.
"You looked simply great--especially towards the end," whispered Morna
Woodgate in the drawing-room, for she alone knew how nervous Rachel had
been about what was indeed her social debut in Delverton.
The aquiline lady also had a word to say. Her eyes were like brown
beads, and her nose very long, which gave her indeed a hawk-like
appearance, somewhat unusual in a woman; but her gravity was rather that
of the owl.
"You talked a great deal to Mr. Langholm," said she, sounding her rebuke
rather cleverly in the key of mere statement of fact. "Have you read his
books, Mrs. Steel?"
"Some of them," said Rachel; "haven't you?"
"Oh, no, I never read novels, unless it be George Eliot, or in these
days Mrs. Humphrey Ward. It's such waste of time when there are
Browning, Ruskin, and Carlyle to read and read again. I know I shouldn't
like Mr. Langholm's; I am sure they are dreadfully uncultured and
sensational."
"But I like sensation," Rachel said. "I like to be taken out of myself."
"So you suggested he should write a novel about Mrs. Minchin!"
"No, I didn't suggest it," said Rachel, hurriedly; but the beady brown
eyes were upon her, and she felt herself reddening horribly as she
spoke.
"You seemed to know all about her," said the aquiline lady. "I'm not in
the habit of reading such cases. But I must really look this one up."