Egidia laid her head on her hands. The tale of Brignal Banks had been
told. “Good God!” she said passionately. “And it is to Edmund Rivers
that this thing has happened!”
She thought of the poignant tale of love and disaster only as it
affected the man. It was natural; Mrs. Elles had expected that she would
do so, and yet she was a little aggrieved at not being treated as the
central figure of any romance that happened to be forward. She valiantly
stifled her feelings on this occasion, however, and rising from the low
prie-dieu chair from which she had delivered her confession, knelt at
Egidia’s feet, and gently pulled her hands down from her face. The
gesture was pretty and appealing, but at this juncture it irritated the
other woman almost beyond endurance by its dash of theatricality. Thus
behave erring heroines of melodrama when they reveal “all” to their
mentors. Egidia sat and stared at the little flushed face opposite her
with an almost unfriendly gaze, and listened but coldly to the trickle
of her excitable speech.
“But it must not happen!” Mrs. Elles was saying. “It must not! It must
not! You can save him, if you will, and that is why I have come to you.
I have travelled all night, and I have not slept for two. If I tell my
story badly, that’s why. There’s an iron band across my forehead. And I
have had nothing to eat for ages. But I knew that you and he had always
been great friends, to say the very least, and that it would be so easy
for you---- You must forgive me, and understand that I did what I could.
I acted for the best--on the spur of the moment. I thought it was the
only way to save the situation--”
“What, in the name of Heaven, have you done?” exclaimed the other. “Do,
please, tell me exactly.”
“I used your name---- ” began Mrs. Elles, hesitatingly.
“Please go on!”
“I am afraid I told my husband straight out, when he pressed me, that
Mr. Rivers was engaged to you!”
“To me! Mr. Rivers! What possible authority---- ”
Egidia rose to her feet, and Mrs. Elles perforce rose too.
“Have I done such a mischief?” she asked supplicatingly. “Stay! the lace
of my dress has got caught in yours!”
She disentangled it, while Egidia stood, a prisoner, shivering with
impatience, and some disgust.
“Surely,” Phœbe Elles went on, “you are very fond of each other? I
always thought so, from the way he spoke--or rather did not speak of
you. With some men reticence about a woman is the sure sign of their
feeling keenly about her. Indeed, I was quite jealous of you sometimes!”
she added ingenuously.
Egidia’s face had stiffened into the very haughtiest expression a proud
face can assume. She was a woman who could curl her lip, and she did it
now, but Mrs. Elles was too tactless and too much excited to notice.
“So you see that I am doing this entirely for his sake--quite against
the grain, I assure you, but it seemed the only way--and I thought you
would want to do anything to keep him out of it!”
“Keep him out of it!” exclaimed the other, pointing down towards the
basement of her own house, as to the depths of an imaginary Divorce
Court. “I should think I did! But how could you suppose that such an
absurd lie as that could do him any good?”
“Couldn’t it? I thought it could. And I seem to be always being scolded
for telling lies now!” sighed Mrs. Elles, “but I really thought I was
splendide mendax this time! And though it was a lie, of course, you can
make it true to save him, don’t you see?”
Egidia recovered herself. What was the use of being angry?
“But supposing Mr. Rivers did care for--was engaged to me--I don’t see
what possible difference it could make?”
She succeeded in smiling almost indulgently on this sweet simpleton, who
was to be suffered gladly, for the sake of Rivers.
“Well, of course, I don’t know much about these things,” Mrs. Elles
said, plaintively, “but I thought if the co-respondent---- ”
“Please don’t use that word,” said Egidia, shivering.
“It is the word, I know that much. Well, if the man is already engaged
to someone else at the time that the accusation is made--it surely makes
it less--likely that he would--wouldn’t a jury think better of him? He
would have to marry her at once, of course, and send the slip of the
Times containing the announcement to my husband---- ”
She looked so serious, so innocent, so like the fair Ophelia, “incapable
of her own grief,” so utterly woe-begone, that Egidia’s mood changed.
She laughed, and sat down, and took her visitor’s little soft,
incompetent, feverish hand in her own cool firm one, and held it.
“My dear Mrs. Elles, have you been all these years married to a
solicitor, and know so little of it all as to suppose that a jury would
be affected by such a detail as the one you have mentioned!” No, no, we
must get your husband to stay proceedings altogether. I hope it isn’t
so bad as you think--in fact, I am sure it isn’t! Your husband could
not, I think, possibly divorce you merely on what you have told me--and
perhaps you have even exaggerated that a little? You are very tired----
”
“I am not hysterical!” exclaimed Mrs. Elles angrily.
“Forgive me, but your voice and your eyes belie you. Besides, you said
yourself you were ill. Of course you are, naturally, after what you have
undergone!”
“It was pretty dreadful!” Mrs. Elles owned, mollified.
“To-morrow,” Egidia continued, with a little imperceptible shudder, “you
must go over it all again to me. After you have had a night’s rest, you
will be able to think and marshall your facts more clearly. I ought to
know exactly where we stand. Meantime, will you send for your things
from the Great Northern Hotel and pay your bill?”
“But I must live somewhere!” exclaimed the other in a sick fright. “You
surely don’t want me to go back to Mortimer, when I have just run away
from him?”
“No, but you must write to him, and tell him you are staying here with
me. Though literary, I am supposed to be respectable.” She smiled. She
had taken her line. “And, by the way, I have a dinner party here
to-night, and I want you to enjoy it and look nice.”
“I have an evening dress in my box at the Hotel,” said Mrs. Elles,
eagerly.
“Well, then, we will get it here in time for you. I will send at once.”
She rang the bell, gave her orders, and then turning, stopped and kissed
the little bit of thistledown who stood there, grateful and
apprehensive. It was an effort, the whole scene had been one long
effort, but she flattered herself she had come out of it well, and had
not betrayed herself. In the exercise of her profession she had studied
the feelings of others and their development and outward manifestations
so closely that she had grown almost morbidly desirous of not showing
her own.
“Please call me Phœbe!” her visitor had murmured as she led her to her
room and left her there.
Yes, she, a simple, honest, unsophisticated woman, would do anything,
dare, contrive, and practise anything that might deliver Edmund Rivers
from the consequences of his accidental connection with this miracle of
indiscretion, this butterfly, who, unfortunately for others, took
herself so seriously.
He should not, if she could help it, have to rue the day when he had
allowed the human interest to come into his life, and occupy even a
portion of his mental foreground. That was all he had done; he had never
flirted with her, Egidia felt sure. “Love plays the deuce with
landscape!” he had once laughingly proclaimed, to excuse himself from
marrying. No, he should not be forced, by the stain of the courts, the
horrors of imputation, to take on himself the shackles of the marriage
tie, with which the little woman who had played the part of his evil
genius, would so carelessly invest him!
* * * * *
“She kissed me, but all the while, she would like to scratch my eyes
out,” Mrs. Elles in the silence of the spare room was saying to herself.
She was not spiteful--oh no, that was not her character at all--but she
had studied and could not help knowing human nature! There was no
misprision of motive in her mind; she was perfectly aware of Egidia’s
reasons for being kind to her. That lady had taken her rival to stay
with her because, as the saying is, she preferred to see mischief in
front of her--she would keep her safe under her own roof the better to
control her. It was all for the man’s sake, not for the woman’s at all!
The welfare of Edmund Rivers was the object of Phœbe Elles too, she must
not forget that, and she must consent, for his sake, to be the creature
of his cousin’s bounty. It must be so, but it was very hard. Egidia,
perhaps unconsciously, assumed proprietary airs. Her visitor stamped a
little modest stamp of the foot at the thought, and was assailed by a
wild desire to prove to Egidia and the world the genuineness of Rivers’
love, by purposely losing her case, and letting him marry her!
But would that prove it?
* * * * *
“Les hommes sont la cause que les femmes ne s’aiment pas!” Mrs. Elles
murmured to herself, as arrayed in her prettiest dress, and conscious
that she became it, she went to dinner, in the big public room of the
Mansions, where Egidia mustered all her famous little parties of twelve.
This was Mrs. Elles’s first taste of London society. She had thought of
it, dreamed of it, yearned for it for years. Now it had come to her,
like a draught of heady champagne, vivifying after the two nights of
waking misery and anxiety she had undergone. Only two nights ago, she
had stood, a shaking, quaking figure in the dark passage of the inn at
Rokeby, hearing the clock tick, and the rustle of the heavy leaf screen
against the pane outside the door of her lover’s room, whence no sound
came--no voice of pardon. Here in the successful novelist’s pretty
electric-lighted rooms all was gaiety, easy, social merriment, facile
smiles and light-hearted repartee. She was made for this. She held her
own. She smiled and retorted with all but the last touch of
up-to-dateness, and her hostess put her forward, and gave her every
opportunity of shining. Mrs. Elles thoroughly appreciated her
generosity, and, woman-like, was far more deeply touched by Egidia’s
kindness in this instance, than by her greater charity in so ardently
espousing her cause in the matter of the divorce.
She for a time forgot the Damocles sword that hung over her head. In a
few months, perhaps, nobody would care to speak to her; now they were at
any rate glad enough to do so. She went in to dinner with Mr. St.
Jerome, the popular novelist, and he seemed to think her interesting.
She had intended at first to try to sink her disqualification of country
cousin, but by the time they had got to the first entrée, decided
otherwise, since the assumption of mundaneity prevented her asking
questions, and she did so want to know so many things. She would make
conversational capital out of it instead.
“Is every one here a celebrity?” she asked.
“So much so, that they are all trying to hide it,” St. Jerome answered.
“Did you ever see a more modest looking set of people, calmly eating
their fish, and saving their good things for their books?”
“Are you doing that too?” she asked with the sweetest of smiles. She
knew he wrote novels. She allowed a little time to elapse before she
removed the sting, then--“Because, if so, you succeed very badly. You
have said several things I shall feel obliged to use again in the
provinces. But--forgive me, I am like Pope’s definition of a mark of
interrogation---- ”
“You want to know who that is?” he said briskly, indicating a dark,
bearded man, with impressive eyes, who sat next Egidia.
“How quick you are!”
“Not at all. Everybody wants to know who Dr. André is!”
She felt snubbed; he went on.
“He is the celebrated occultist and oculist. The first is his business,
the second his pleasure. But he works the two together with great
success. I don’t know if he quite succeeds in taking in our dear Egidia;
she is very shrewd, for a woman novelist. André’s theory of ocular
practice consists largely of the due relation of the state of the
eyesight to general health, and thence to hypnotism, do you see? People
are unkind enough to call him a quack, but I think that very unfair, for
he is quite amusing!”
Mrs. Elles did not know if St. Jerome was amusing or not; she was sure
he was spiteful. She felt that his flighty and casual manner suggested
some disrespect towards the Lady from the Provinces, but perhaps that
was London’s way? She meant that London’s way should not by any means
astonish or perturb her, so she went on calmly.
“If I were not afraid of your thinking me conceited, I should say that I
think the hypnotist is looking at me!”
“Of course he is. He is trying to mesmerize you. That is his little
game. He boasts that he can make anyone in the world cross the whole
length of the room to him if he has a mind--and yet he lives only three
floors down, in these very Mansions.”
Mrs. Elles again suspected Mr. St. Jerome of making fun of her.
“I hope he won’t care to thoroughly exercise his powers just now,” she
said, “for I am a very impressionable subject. I might get up, and go to
him this very minute, and that would be awkward. Introduce me after
dinner, and I will tell him that I once wore blue spectacles for a month
without stopping.”
“That is why your eyes look so bright!” said St. Jerome, lightly. As a
matter of fact he suspected her of taking morphia.
“Oh, I had a better reason than that!” she said, impatiently. “Tell me,
do you know an artist called Rivers?”
“Was he your reason? And a very nice reason too!”
“Mr. St. Jerome, you are chaffing me, and it is not fair, as I come from
the provinces! Besides,” she explained, beginning to be terrified at the
possible consequences of her imprudence, “I hardly know Mr. Rivers. I
met him here for the first time at tea.”
“Of course you did!”
Mrs. Elles inferred from this speech that Rivers was a constant visitor
at Egidia’s tea-table, which is perhaps what St. Jerome intended her to
do. She was piqued. “I--that is we--are going to tea with him in his
studio, one of these days,” she remarked.
“I congratulate you! Rivers is not a quiet tea-party man at all, and
enjoys the reputation of being a misogynist. I have long tried to
acquire it in vain. Naturally all your sex are devoted to him. He takes
it very well, I must say, and shows no signs of being unduly puffed up.
A lady’s man sans le savior!”
“There are a good many people like that!” remarked Mrs. Elles, though in
her heart of hearts she thought there was but one. But she wanted to
draw the polite and analytical novelist, and lead him on to discuss the
man she loved.
“Yes, and all the women adore them, confound it! They mistake; they see
the man full of energy and spirit, making for a given point in life, and
allowing nothing to distract his attention from it, like a horse with
blinkers on. They naturally want to remove the blinkers, and divert a
little of that force and energy into a more useful channel, i. e.,
love-making. They take no account of the correlation of forces; they
don’t see that what a man gives to one thing he cannot give to another,
that dominated as he is by an abstraction, charming concrete
objects”--he looked at Mrs. Elles--“have no chance at all!”
“You are making Mr. Rivers out a mild kind of Robespierre!”
“Oh, well, I don’t go so far as to suppose that he would wade through
seas of blood to his ambition--let us say the painting of the most
perfect landscape in the world; his easel is not a guillotine, and
besides, he has more or less realized his ambition, he has everything he
wants, name, and fame, and money, and the right to be as misogynistical
as he pleases. He is no curmudgeon, but he is eminently unsociable. I
have never even been in his studio myself, for he doesn’t go in for the
vulgarity of a Show Sunday, and he is away in the country half the year,
propitiating the deities of woods and streams. I meet him now and then
at the Athenæum--young women, you know, are not admitted there, only
bishops and so on!”
“Isn’t it a great honour to belong to the Athenæum?”
“Yes, especially if you are elected under Rule II. Rivers is a great
swell. I shouldn’t be surprised if they made him President some
day--that is, if they ever make a landscape painter President of the R.
A., which they have a natural prejudice against doing.”
Rule II. of the Athenæum Club--the limitations of landscape painters as
Possible Presidents of the Royal Academy--it was all Greek to Mrs.
Elles, but still she managed very well. Her eyes sparkled, she was gay
and sympathetic; the two things that London wants. There was no denying
it, she was happy here, happier than she had ever been, dining in the
lonely inn with the man of her heart, though she would not for worlds
have admitted such a truth had she been taxed with it. She would have
liked Rivers with her here; she would have been friends with God and
Mammon. Love, and the World! Rivers and she were true incompatibles; but
that again she would not have owned.
Looking down the table, she sometimes caught Egidia’s deep-set, serious
eyes fixed on her, and immediately composed her own face to a decent
semblance of mental distress, subdued and controlled by the dictates of
social standards of gaiety.
Egidia smiled sweetly at her now and then, as a mother might at a
promising débutante daughter. She herself was feeling it an effort to
sustain her own reputation for brilliancy and repartee. Her spirits were
so leaden; she had received such a shock. She could think of nothing but
the painter’s affairs, and the crushing blow that was so soon to fall on
him. Edmund Rivers, a very Galahad of stainless life, a knight sans peur
and sans reproche! The social fall of such is always the severer, since
the eager hounds of envy are so glad of an excuse to worry a name that
has heretofore stood high. What though the aspersion was so utterly
false, it would be cast all the same; the mud would be flung, and some
of it would stick. And she who would lay down her life to save him a
moment’s annoyance must endure to look on the little enemy of his peace,
sitting opposite her, careless, irresponsible, drinking in flattery and
champagne, flashing her bright eyes about, and waving the little
fluttering hands that held the future of a man worth twenty such as she,
in the might of his art and intellect!
However, that Phœbe Elles should thoroughly enjoy her dinner party was
necessary for the furtherance of a plan of action that Egidia had
conceived--one of the many plans that she had conceived. The better
pleased Mrs. Elles was, the better would the particular plan work, but
though Egidia was an authoress, she was human, and presently found
herself actually avoiding her guest’s laughing eyes.
Looking round at her own neighbour, she noticed the mesmeric eyes of
Dr. André fixed on her guest, and knew that he had singled her out for
his particular line of experiment. Egidia was “apt now at all sorts of
treasons and stratagems,” and a new idea shot through her brain. She was
no believer in hypnotism, except in its extraordinary power over a
certain kind of silly woman, in the way of suggestion.
She turned round to Dr. André.
“I see you are considering the little lady who was the occasion of my
wild appeal to you to come and dine in a hurry. Do you think she would
be a good subject for hypnotic suggestion?”
“No.”
“Too clever?”
“She could never succeed in making her mind a blank, I fancy. She thinks
all the time--nothing particularly worth thinking, I daresay. Still, she
is so pretty, I should like to try. She is not a London woman?”
“How do you know that?”
“Oh, she is beautifully dressed. It isn’t that,” he said smiling. “The
dress may be Paris, but the soul is Newcastle.”
Egidia started. “You are really a wonderful man, Dr. André, or else you
have the luck of coincidences!”
He smiled, with the fatuity of the occultist.
“You are right, she does come from Newcastle, but let me tell you that
when I introduce you, you will find her quite au fait of all the latest
London fads. She makes it her business to be. These illustrated papers
do a great deal to prepare the provincial mind for the more startling
developments of our civilization. Mrs. Elles has looked on the Medusa
head of certain aspects of society through the medium of ‘Black and
White,’ and the ‘Ladies’ Field.’”
“How you hate her!” said Dr. André.
Egidia wore mental sackcloth and ashes for the rest of the evening,
conscious that she had for once allowed herself to be drawn to the very
verge of the fathomless gulf of feminine spite.
* * * * *
“Did I look nice? Did I seem too dreadfully provincial?” was what Mrs.
Elles said to her hostess when the door had closed on the last guest.
Egidia had sunk into a chair, and sat staring at vacancy. Mrs. Elles’s
voice recalled her from her reverie.
“Not at all--I mean provincial. You and the Doctor seemed to get on? Did
he propose to mesmerize you?”
“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Elles answered eagerly. “Soon. May he? Here in your
flat?”
“Certainly!” Egidia replied, feeling now a little apprehension of the
consequences. “But you must not believe in him too much. You must not
let him get an influence over you!”
“I shouldn’t mind. I am sure he would not use his power for harm against
me--or any woman!”
“Oh, no, he is a good old thing!” Egidia said condescendingly. “And this
little social trick of his amuses people, and makes him a personage,
and asked out a great deal!”
“I believe very much in hypnotism as a serious force in life,” said the
other sturdily. “I can’t laugh at it. And I think Dr. André is a most
interesting man who could give one a real glimpse into one’s self and
into futurity, if he chose, and one turned out to be a good subject.”
“And he thinks you a very pretty woman--he told me so.”
“Oh--pretty!” said Mrs. Elles, as much as to imply that she did not wish
to stand on anything so trivial as good looks in the seër’s good
opinion.
“At any rate, you enjoyed yourself?”
“Enormously! I mean, that I did not want to be a blot on your party, so
I screwed myself up, and was gay!”
“You mean you were acting a part?” Egidia answered, coldly.
“Well, partly,” Mrs. Elles replied; then she added with the pretty smile
that leavened so many of her little insincerities, “but I confess--I
forgot every now and then, and let myself feel as if nothing had
happened, and I was a girl again, beginning life--the life I always
wanted, the life I was made for, I think. Oh, don’t you see how hard it
all is for me, this course I have to take--that I must take for his
sake?”
With a comical little twist of the mouth, she went on: “Some are born
virtuous, some are--something or other--what is it?--and some have
virtue thrust upon them! I know that I must defend this wretched case
for the sake of other people, but I can’t help thinking that if Mortimer
did win it and get his divorce, it would be the very thing for me!”
“I confess I don’t understand---- ”
“Mr. Rivers would marry me,” she said, wistfully, “and then I should
live in London!”
Egidia laughed--she could not help it! This, then, was the net result of
her carefully arranged plan for indoctrinating her guest with the
pleasures of respectability and the advantages of a defined social
position.
“My dear woman, forgive me!” she exclaimed. “Have you the very remotest
notion of what you are saying? You cannot have the most elementary
knowledge of social laws if you imagine that a man having married a
divorced woman--divorced on his account--could take her out, and expect
his friends to call on her! On the contrary, you and he--God help you
both--would have to forego all society. You would have to live abroad in
some shady place, and be thankful for the company of blacklegs and
second-rate women, or else make up your minds to live entirely apart
from the world. He would not mind that; he is used to it; but you! What
would you do without life, movement, and, above all, consideration? That
is what I was asking myself when I looked down the table to-night, and
saw you happy and gay---- ”
Mrs. Elles demurred.
“Well, pretending to be happy and gay--though I really and truly believe
you were. As you have just been saying yourself, you were in your
element. And I thought what a volcano it was that you were standing on,
and how, if the worst came to pass, how different a life yours would be
from this you covet--and all the time you were thinking that the very
fact of your divorce would entitle you to it all! Good Heavens! Instead
of sitting there, gay and important, admired and attended to, with
people taking the trouble to mesmerize you and analyze you and take your
soul to pieces for you, you would be hidden away in some little foreign
town--Boulogne, say?--cut, snubbed, and penned up for life with no other
society but that of the man you have dragged down along with you, and
involved in your ruin, and who would end by hating you in consequence.”
Mrs. Elles cried out, outraged. “You forget--you forget that he proposed
to me--when he thought I was free!”
“I beg your pardon---- ” Egidia said, vaguely.
“No, don’t beg my pardon, you meant to be kind--but---- ” She stopped,
and her whole manner altered as the humiliating suggestion took root in
her mind. “Tell me--you must mean--tell me in so many words--you must
mean to say that he never really cared for me? For God’s sake, speak
out!”
“If you ask me to speak out honestly, then I don’t think he really did!
He is not what is called a marrying man.... Now you will of course never
be able to forgive me.... Let us both go to bed now at any rate--I am
quite worn out!”
She turned aside wearily, and passed through the portière, letting her
hand drag after her, as she went. Mrs. Elles’s vexation at her plain
speaking died before a more generous instinct of gratitude to the woman
who had befriended her in her need. She caught hold of the fugitive
hand----
“Oh, don’t leave me like this; indeed, you are my best friend. Thank
you, thank you--for telling me the truth. I ought to know it.”
“It is only my opinion!” said the other, suffering herself, however, to
be drawn into the room again, by the insistent tenderness of her rival,
which touched her, and made her feel a brute.
“Yes,” Mrs. Elles went on sadly. “Only your opinion, but you have known
him so very much longer than I have.” She would have been equal to the
mental sacrifice of adding, “and so much more intimately,” but hardly
dared, lest it was taken, not as a compliment but as an impertinence. “I
only saw him for a month, and even in that time I could not help loving
him--adoring him.... How could anyone help it? Could you?”
“No,” Egidia murmured under her breath, too much moved to resent the
question.
“It is just those very silent men whom every one adores,” the other went
on. “But he always preferred his art to me. I knew it at the time, only
I was so blinded. Then when he realized that he was compromising me, he
did the honourable thing, and proposed. Of course I don’t suppose he
thought me quite impossible, he felt it would be just bearable to be
married to me, if he had to be married, but he had never meant to be
married, as you say. But you must see, that if I come to think that, how
very much more humiliating it makes it for me--how painful to have to
think that one was only proposed to out of pity and a sense of duty!”
She turned her face away, sobbing.
Egidia put her arm round her. She could unfeignedly sympathise with the
very real sorrows of wounded vanity. She felt she had spoken
plainly--with full conviction and honest intent, it was true, but still
plainly and perhaps brutally. She was conscious that her care had been
all along for the man, and not the woman.
“My dear, my dear,” she said, drawing Mrs. Elles close to her, “there is
another thing I see--that saves it a little--a good deal, I think!”
“What?” asked Phœbe Elles.
“You don’t really love him either!”
“What, not love him?”
“No, you think you do, you would die for him, of course, but you don’t
love him. You happen to have chosen him for an emotional centre, every
woman, if she is a woman, has to find an emotional centre, but she does
not always choose well. Edmund, like all geniuses, is self-centred
without being selfish; you understand me; he is to be regarded as exempt
from the ordinary responsibilities of humanity, morally and otherwise.
He is quite willing to be worshipped--what man is not? but he has no
time to worship, or be aux petits soins with anybody. He could not, if
he liked, make any woman happy, certainly not a passionate woman. She
could never exist long in the rarefied spiritual atmosphere into which
dear Edmund would want to lift her, where he lives--and flourishes. He
can feel, of course, the big things, but he has, as it were, no small
change of emotion at any one’s service. And he doesn’t, on his side, ask
for anything. He is sufficient unto himself. Did you not observe, when
you were with him, how he accepted your devotion, but made no demands on
it!”
“He let me rub his colours for him!” Mrs. Elles said, laughing.
“Do you mean to say you did not feel the curious sense of aloofness, of
want of sympathy with poor humanity, that the consciousness of a
mission--even an art mission--seems to bring with it? Not for humanity’s
woes; no one can be kinder than Edmund, if you are in real trouble, but
he is the kind of man who would never notice if you had cut your finger,
or had got a new frock on. Now woman wants more than that here below--at
least I think so!”
She laughed, Mrs. Elles was wondering how she could talk like this about
the man she cared for.
“I am being very didactic, I fear,” Egidia said suddenly. “And boring
you.”
“No, no,” said the other vehemently. “I love discussing people. I have
noticed all you say in Mr. Rivers, but still---- And do you know,” she
went on eagerly, “all the men who speak of him seem very fond of him, so
is it only women he snubs?”
“Oh, men like him and respect him, but they don’t slap him on the back,
and confide their pleasant weaknesses to him! He is manly enough, but I
don’t know how it is, he is quite out of it in the smoking-room.”
“He is very much at home in a woman’s boudoir, at all events!” said Mrs.
Elles, a little bitterly.
“You mean mine,” the other replied with her usual directness. “Well, he
is my cousin, and he knows I like to hear him discuss the only subject
he cares to discuss--art. He tells me his ideas for new mediums and the
experiments he is making. He laments the volatility of the prettiest
colours, such as aureoline, and the impracticability of Nature as a
model. We never talk of anything more personal than that, and all he
condescends to look at here is a sunset over Westminster as we see it
from my windows.”
“Do you like that sort of subject best yourself?” Mrs. Elles said
wistfully, going out of herself for once, into the other woman’s mind,
and realizing the bitterness of renunciation that informed the words so
laughingly spoken.
“Oh, I--well, I am a woman, and no wiser than the rest. That is why I
have been telling you all this, because if you once realize that I--have
been there myself, in short--you will more readily let me help you and
him. You see, though I am hopeless--absolutely hopeless”--Mrs. Elles
stared; this strange woman might have been talking about cooks, for all
the emotion she showed--“I am not even miserable about it. I know so
well that if Edmund came to me and went down on his knees to me to marry
him, I should refuse, he could not make me as happy as he makes me now.
If I were a wife, I should not care to be second to anything, not even
to Art, nor would you. I have realized the finality of it all, and so
must you. But now, you must trust me, please, and not think, when I talk
to you of your affairs and Edmund’s, that I am fighting for my own hand,
and mean to secure him for myself, in the end, as soon as I have helped
him to get clear of his entanglement with you. You see--I speak quite
plainly.”
Mrs. Elles’s eager disclaimer of any such interpretation of Egidia’s
behaviour was not so much the outcome of an emotional confidence in the
woman who had so bravely, so wildly, so foolishly committed herself, as
of the strong conviction which her words carried. She was secretly a
little overcome and puzzled by the spectacle of so much
single-mindedness and bonhomie in the unveiling of a soul’s tragedy,
such as she conceived Egidia’s to be. She herself could not have been
anything but tortuous in the telling of such a piece of secret history.
The novelist’s methods were not hers. They went with the whole character
of the woman, with the honest eyes, and shrewd, fine, but uncompromising
mouth.