A FACE IN THE CROWD.
Vansittart spent five weeks at Merewood, hunting a good deal, dining
with some of his neighbours once a week or so, and occasionally
entertaining them at dinner or luncheon; tiring himself prodigiously
with long rides to cover, or railway journeys before and after the
chase, and falling asleep of an evening by the drawing-room fire,
lulled by the monotonous click of his mother’s knitting needles, or the
flutter of the turning leaves as she read.
Those fireside evenings after the chase in January and February were
delightful to Mrs. Vansittart. She rejoiced with an exceeding joy at
having brought her son safe and sound out of the cave of the syren,
having no suspicion of those serious thoughts of the syren which
occupied his mind. There were half a dozen girls in the neighbourhood,
two of them heiresses, any one of whom would be welcome to her as a
daughter-in-law, for any one of whom she would have resigned her place
in that household without a murmur, almost without a regret. But she
shuddered at the idea of a girl brought up in a Bohemian fashion; a
girl who had suffered all the disadvantages which poverty carries with
it; the skimped education; the vulgarizing influence of petty household
cares; a girl whose father never went to church. Such a girl would
be unspeakably distasteful to her. If Eve Marchant were to reign at
Merewood, Mrs. Vansittart’s grey hairs must go down in sorrow to the
grave.
She rejoiced in her son’s company, and was even reconciled to the
perils of the hunting field, since hunting occupied his days, and
prevented his running after Eve Marchant. If he was unusually silent
and thoughtful by the fireside, she ascribed silence and thoughtfulness
to physical exhaustion. He was there, safe within her ken; and that
was enough. She took infinite pains to bring the girls she liked about
her, and in her son’s way, which was not easy, since Vansittart was
far afield nearly every day. She would invite one of her favourites to
a friendly dinner, escorted by a young brother, perhaps--a proceeding
which bored her son infinitely, since instead of sleeping or brooding
by the fire he must needs play billiards with the cub, or put himself
out of the way to amuse the young lady.
He was very fond of music of a broad dramatic style--loved grand
opera, from Gluck to Meyerbeer and Verdi; but he had no passion for
Grieg or Rubinstein, as expounded, neatly, elegantly, with lady-like
inexpressiveness, by his mother’s protégées; and it seemed to his
ignorant ear that all his mother’s protégées played exactly the same
pieces in precisely the same manner.
* * * * *
If perchance he spent an afternoon at home, he invariably found one of
those selected vestals in morning-room or drawing-room when he went to
five o’clock tea, that meal being one which his mother loved to share
with him, and at which dutiful affection constrained his presence
whenever he was on the premises. All the charm of that unconstrained
half-hour of chat between mother and son was scared away by the
presence of a young lady, albeit the most admirable of her sex. His
mother’s favourites were very nice girls, every one of them, and only
two out of the six were painfully religious. He liked them all well
enough, in the beaten way of friendship; but the handsomest and most
attractive of them left him cold as marble. He had gone beyond the
season of easily kindled fires. He had passed the age at which a man
falls in love once in six weeks. His heart was no longer touch-paper.
A few months ago he had believed that he would spend his days as a
bachelor, had calculated the manifold advantages of remaining single,
with an estate which for a single man meant wealth, but which for a man
with wife and family would only mean a modest competence.
He grew so weary at last of those social tea-drinkings and those
eminently domestic evenings, that before the hunting season was over
he suddenly announced his intention of going to London. It was an
understood thing between his mother and himself that the house in
Charles Street was always ready for him. The housekeeper left in charge
had been his nurse, and administered to his comfort with unwearying
devotion. She was an excellent cook, by force of native talent rather
than by training and experience, and, with a housemaid under her, kept
the house in exquisite order. These two women, with Vansittart’s valet,
an Italian, able to turn his hand to anything, made up an efficient
bachelor establishment.
To Charles Street, therefore, Vansittart repaired, in the Lenten month
of March. He had been at some trouble to resist the inclination which
would have taken him to Redwold Towers, rather than to London. It would
have been so easy to offer himself to his sister for a week; and at
Redwold it would have been so easy to see Eve Marchant; so difficult,
perhaps, to avoid seeing her, since Lady Hartley, who was, above all
things, cordial and impulsive, had told him in one of her letters that
she had taken a fancy to Miss Marchant, and had invited her and one of
the sisters to Redwold very often.
“As a wife for you, she is impossible,” wrote Maud Hartley. “Pray
remember that, Jack. Mother and I are ambitious about your future. We
want you to look high, to improve your position from that of a small
country gentleman, to make your mark in the world. But, although quite
impossible as your wife, as a human being Miss Marchant is charming,
and I mean to do all I can in a neighbourly way to make things
pleasanter for her. The father is shockingly neglectful, spends the
greater part of his life in London; but that is perhaps an advantage
for his daughters, for when he is at home Eve is a slave to him, has to
worry about his dinners, and fetch and carry for him, and try to amuse
the unamusable, as Madame de Maintenon said. I gather this not from any
murmurings of Eve’s, but from the young sisters, who are appallingly
outspoken.”
Vansittart had pledged himself to spend the Easter holidays at Redwold;
so he resisted the promptings of inclination, and swore to himself that
he would not try to see Eve Marchant before Easter. The interval would
then have been long enough to test his feelings, to give him time for
thought, before he took any fateful step, and perhaps to throw him in
the way of hearing some more specific account of Colonel Marchant’s
character and antecedents. There is no place, perhaps, in which it
is more difficult to get a faithful description of a man than in the
village where he lives. There, everything is exaggerated--his income,
if he is rich; his debts, if he is poor; his vices, eccentricities, and
shortcomings, in any case.
Although it was the Lenten season, and although the churches of
London were filled with Lenten worshippers, the town looked bright
and animated, and there were plenty of votaries in the temples of
pleasure--theatres, picture galleries, concert halls--and plenty of
snug little dinner-parties to which a man in Vansittart’s position
was likely to be bidden. He had a wide circle of acquaintance, and
was popular with men and women, accounted a clubbable man by the
former, and an eligible parti by the latter. Even the women who had no
matrimonial views for daughters, or sisters, or bosom friends, still
affected Jack Vansittart’s society. He had plenty to say to them, was
always cheery and cordial, and never seemed to think himself too good
for the particular circle in which he found himself.
He was dining one evening en petit comité with an old college chum
and his young wife; the husband a rising barrister; the wife an
accomplished woman, and a marvellous manager, able to maintain a
pretty little house in Mayfair on an income which a stupid woman would
have found hardly enough for Notting Hill or Putney, and to give an
appetizing dinner, daintily served, and unhackneyed as to menu, for the
cost of the average housekeeper’s leg of mutton and trimmings.
While the cheery little meal was being discussed, a servant brought in
a coroneted envelope for the hostess, which being opened, contained a
box for Covent Garden, where there was an early season of Italian Opera.
“For to-night,” said Mrs. Pembroke. And then she read aloud from the
letter, “‘I find at the last moment that I can’t use my box. Do go if
you are free. The opera is _Faust_, with a new “Margherita.”’ That’s
rather a pity,” sighed the lady, folding up the letter.
“Why a pity?” asked Vansittart. “Why shouldn’t you go? I dare say your
box will hold me as well as Tom, so you need have no conscientious
scruples on the ground of inhospitality.”
“Oh, there will be plenty of room. It is Lady Davenant’s box, on the
grand tier. But Tom asked you for a quiet evening, a long talk and
smoke, and perhaps an adjournment to the Turf for a rubber. I’m afraid
you’ll be dreadfully bored if I take you to the opera instead.”
“Pray don’t think so badly of me. If it were Wagner perhaps I might
be less sure of myself. There are bits I enjoy in his operas, but I
confess myself a tyro in that advanced school. Gounod’s _Faust_ I
adore. We shall be in time for the Kermess scene, and the new Gretchen.
Pray let us be off.”
A cab was sent for, and the trio packed themselves into it, Mrs.
Pembroke sparkling with pleasure. She was passionately fond of
music, and she had been looking forward to a solitary evening by the
drawing-room fire, while her husband and his friend sat smoking and
prosing together in the barrister’s ground-floor den.
* * * * *
The house was thin, this premature opera season not having been
a marked success. Lady Davenant’s box was near the proscenium, a
spacious box, which would have accommodated six people as easily as
three. Vansittart sat in the middle, between his host and hostess. Tom
Pembroke, who was no music lover, dozed in the shadow of the curtain,
agreeably lulled by melodies which were pleasant from their familiarity.
The cast was not strong, but the Margherita was very young, rather
pretty, and sang well. Vansittart and Mrs. Pembroke were both
interested.
It was near the close of the Kermess scene that the lady asked her
companion, “Do you ever look at the chorus? Such poor old things, some
of them! I can’t help thinking how weary they must be of singing the
same music season after season, and tramping in and out of the same
scenes--banquets where there is nothing to eat, too, and then going
home to bread and cheese.”
“Yes, it must be a hard life,” assented Vansittart; “all the trouble of
the show, and none of the glory.”
And then he took a sweeping survey of the gay crowd, peasants,
soldiers, citizens, feasting and rejoicing in friendly German fashion
under the open sky. Yes, Mrs. Pembroke was right; most of the chorus
were middle-aged, some were elderly--withered old faces, dark skins
which even bismuth could not transform to fairness. Italian eyes, dark
and glowing, shone out of worn faces where all other beauty was lacking.
Suddenly among all those homely countenances he saw a young face, young
and beautiful, a face that flashed upon him first with a rapid thrill
of recognition, and then with an aspect that struck into his heart like
a dagger, and when that sharp pang was over left a heaviness as of lead.
It was Fiordelisa’s face. He could not be mistaken. Nay, the fact was
made certainty as he looked, for he saw that the girl recognized him.
She was gazing upward to the spot where he sat; she was talking about
him to the woman who stood next her, indicating him with too expressive
gesticulation.
Was she telling that stolid listener that the man yonder had slain his
fellow-creature in a tavern row; that he was a murderer? She would put
it so, no doubt--she whose lover he had killed.
If she were saying this the stolid woman received the statement very
placidly. She only nodded, and shrugged her shoulders, and then nodded
again, while Fiordelisa talked to her more and more excitedly, with
dramatic emphasis. Surely no woman would stand and shrug and nod as
this woman shrugged and nodded, at a tale of murder.
Then Lisa looked up again at him, beaming with smiles, her dark eyes
sparkling in the gaslight; and then her turn came to swell the chorus;
and then the curtain fell, and he saw her no more.
It was as much as he could do to get through the interval before that
curtain rose again. Tom Pembroke wanted him to go out for a stroll in
the foyer, for a drink of some kind. “I would rather stay with Mrs.
Pembroke,” he said, full of wild surmises, prepared for a mysterious
knock at the box door, and the appearance of a policeman from over
the way to take him in custody at Lisa’s instigation; prepared for
anything tragic that might happen to him. What might not happen when
the hot-blooded Southern nature was in question? What bounds would
there be for the revengeful passion of such a girl as Fiordelisa, who
had been robbed by his act of her lover and protector, her possible
husband? She had talked of her Englishman’s promise of marriage with an
air of innocent security, the remembrance of which smote him sharply,
recalling her light-hearted gaiety at the restaurant and at the opera,
her grief as she flung herself upon her lover’s corpse. And he, who
had thought never to see her again, never even to know her fate, found
himself face to face with her, recognized by her, having to answer to
her and to society for the deed which he had done.
With these thoughts in his mind, with his ear strained for the knocking
at the door, he had to talk small talk to Mrs. Pembroke, to counterfeit
amusement at her criticism of the people in the stalls--the man with
two strips of hair combed in streaks over a bald head, the woman with
corpulent arms bared to the shoulder, the country cousins. He had to
laugh at her little jokes, and even to attempt one or two smart sayings
on his own account.
The knocking came, and he almost started out of his seat.
“It can’t be Tom,” said Mrs. Pembroke. “He never comes back until after
the curtain is up, and sometimes not till the act is nearly over.”
Vansittart opened the box door, and a treble voice questioned, “Ices,
sir?”
He made way for the young woman with the tray of ices, and insisted
upon Mrs. Pembroke taking one of those parti-coloured slabs which
have superseded the old-fashioned rose-pink strawberry ice. He sat
down again, ashamed of his overstrained nerves, and looked at the
great curtain, wondering whether in all that wide expanse there were
any gimlet holes through which Fiordelisa’s ardent eyes might be
watching him. The curtain rose, and the act began; but Vansittart had
no longer any ear for the music he loved. His whole attention was
concentrated upon the chorus singers. He watched and waited for their
coming and going, searched out Lisa’s familiar figure amidst the throng
that watched Valentine’s death-throes and Margherita’s despair. He
singled her out again and again as the troupe moved about the spacious
stage--now on one side, now on the other, in the foreground or the
background, according to the exigencies of the scene. He watched
the stage till the green curtain fell; and then he woke as from a
dream, and began to wonder what he must do next. Something he must do
assuredly, he told himself, as he helped Mrs. Pembroke with her wraps,
and heard her chatter about the performance, which she denounced as
second-rate, declaring further that she had been taken in by Lady
Davenant’s gift of the box. Something he must do; first to ascertain
what Fiordelisa’s intentions might be--whether she would denounce him
to the police; next to make whatever atonement he could make to her
for the loss of her lover. He was not going to run away this time, as
he had done at Venice. He had been seen and recognized. He would be
watched, no doubt as he left the theatre. This girl would make it her
business to find out his name and residence. Even if he wanted to elude
her, the thing would be impossible. He had been sitting there all the
evening in a conspicuous box on the grand tier, and he had to get away
from a sparsely filled theatre.
Again there was a knock at the box door. It came while he was putting
on his overcoat, and before Mrs. Pembroke had begun to move off.
It was a boxkeeper this time, with a letter.
“For you, sir,” he said, handing it to Vansittart, after looking at the
two men.
“An unaddressed envelope,” chirruped Mrs. Pembroke; “this savours of
mystery.”
Vansittart put the letter into his pocket without a word. His most
ardent desire at that moment was to get rid of the Pembrokes.
“Can I be of any use in fetching a cab?” he said in the hall.
“You can stop with my wife while I get one, if you don’t mind,” said
Pembroke.
Happily there were plenty of cabs that night, and it was only the
carriage people who had to wait. Mr. Pembroke came back for his wife in
two or three minutes.
“I’ve got a four-wheeler,” he said. “You’ll come home with us for a
smoke and a drink, won’t you, Van?”
“Not to-night, thanks; it’s late--and--and--I’ve some letters to write.”
“Good night, then. I’m afraid you’ve been bored.”
“On the contrary. I was never more interested in my life.”