pretty, harmless little woman whom he would see within the next hour
sitting at his own table. She was one of Bella's special friends, and
Oliver had got quite fond of her, the more so that he was well aware
that she was in a difficult position, owing to the fact, not of her
seeking, or so the Germaines believed, that her husband spent most of
his life away from her, abroad.
In this special case, Germaine knew something of the hidden wounds; it
was horrible to hear this--this old devil engaged in plucking the scabs
from these same wounds, and exposing to her vulgar companion the shifts
to which the unfortunate little woman was put. Nay, more, she said
certain things concerning Mrs. Slade which, if they were true, or even
only half true, made the poor little soul under discussion no fit friend
or companion for Germaine's own spotless wife, Bella....
The burden of the old woman's talk was money, how people got money, how
they spent money, how they did without money. That was the idea running
through all her conversation, although it was, of course, concerned with
many uglier things than money.
Had they been men speaking Germaine would have been sufficiently filled
with righteous indignation to have found words with which to rebuke,
even to threaten them, but they were women, common women, and he felt
tongue-tied, helpless.
And then, suddenly, there leapt into the conversation his own name, or
rather that of his wife, the woman of whom he felt so exultantly, so
selflessly proud. The allusion came in the form of a question, a
question spoken in a shrill and odious Cockney accent.
"I should like to see that Mrs. Germaine. I wonder if she ever comes
into the Park----"
"Not she! At any rate not on Sunday. Why she'd be mobbed!" snapped out
the other.
"You don't say so! Do people run after her as much as that?"
"There's been nothing like it since Mrs. Jersey. I used to see people
get up on chairs to see Mrs. Jersey go by. Not that I ever thought much
of her figure--great, ugly, square shoulders. She started those square
shoulders, and they've never really died out."
"Mrs. Germaine's quite another sort of beauty, the pocket Venus style,
isn't she? I suppose you've had a lot to do with making her the rage,"
said the friend admiringly.
"I don't know about that--her kind of figure dresses itself. She's the
sort that gets there anyhow. She's got that 'jennysayquoy' air, as the
French put it, that makes folk turn round and stare. She gets her looks
from her mother; I remember the mother--her name was Arabin--when I was
with Cerise. They weren't London people--they was military. Mrs. Arabin
had such pretty coaxing ways, same as the daughter has. Cerise used to
let her have the things ever so much cheaper than she charged her other
customers, but it paid her too."
Germaine breathed a little more easily. He knew now who this woman was.
She was a certain Mrs. Bliss, Bella's dressmaker, in her way a famous
old lady, whom Bella's set greatly preferred to the other dressmakers in
vogue. It was Mrs. Bliss, so he remembered having heard, who had
introduced some years ago the picturesque style of dressing with which
his sister Fanny found such fault, and which remains loftily
indifferent to the fashion.
Oliver recollected now where and when he had seen her; there had been
some little trouble about an item in his wife's bill, and Bella had made
him go with her to face the formidable Mrs. Bliss in the old-fashioned
house in Sackville Street where the dressmaker wielded her powerful
sceptre. That was before Bella had become a fashionable beauty, and Mrs.
Bliss had been rather short with them both, unwilling to admit that she
was wrong, although the figures proving her so stared her in the face.
And then Germaine remembered other occasions with which Mrs. Bliss's
name, though not her personality, were associated. He had made out
cheques to her, larger cheques than Bella could manage out of her
allowance. But that was some time ago; his wife must now have given up
dealing with her; and he felt glad, very glad, that this was so. A woman
with such a tongue was a danger to society,--not that anyone need
believe a word she said....
Suddenly the shrill Cockney voice asked yet another question concerning
the beautiful Mrs. Germaine. It was couched in what the speaker would
probably have described as perfectly ladylike and delicate language,
but its purport was unmistakable, and Germaine made a restless movement;
then he became almost rigidly still--a man cannot turn and strike a
woman on the mouth.
"N-o-o, I don't think so." Mrs. Bliss spoke guardedly. "She's a lot of
gentlemen buzzing around her, but that's only to be expected; and as far
as I can hear there's not one that buzzes closer than another. To tell
you the truth, Sophy, I'm puzzled about those Germaines. It's no
business of mine, of course, but she spends three times as much as she
did when I first began dressing her and she don't mind now what she does
pay,--very different to what she used to do! It's only the best that's
good enough for my lady now."
"Germaine's an army chap, isn't he?"
"He was--and a handsome fellow he is, too. He came into a good bit of
money just after they got married, but that must be melting pretty
quick. Why, she goes everywhere! Last season she really wore her clothes
out. They"--she waved her hand comprehensively round a vague area
comprising Marylebone and Mayfair--"scratched and fought with each other
in order to get her."
"Then I suppose you don't bother about your money."
"Yes, I do," said Mrs. Bliss shortly. "I'm not that kind; I don't work
for the King of Prussia, as my French tailor used to say."
There was a pause, and then in a rather different voice Mrs. Bliss went
on, "I _do_ get my money from Mrs. Germaine, but lately,--well, I won't
say lately, but for the last eighteen months or so, _she's always paid
me in notes_, two, three, sometimes four hundred pounds at a time,
always in five-pound notes."
She spoke in a low voice, and yet, to Oliver Germaine, it seemed as if
she shouted the words aloud.
The young man got up, and, careless of the lateness of the hour, walked
away without looking around towards the Marble Arch; so alone could he
be sure that Mrs. Bliss would not see him, and perchance leap to the
recollection of who he was.
The words the woman had said so quietly seemed to be reverberating with
loud insistence in his ear: "_She's always paid me in notes._" "_Two,
three, sometimes four hundred pounds._"
What exactly had Mrs. Bliss meant by this statement? What significance
had she intended it to carry? There had been a touch of regret in the
hard voice, a hesitation in the way she had conveyed the pregnant
confidence, which made Oliver heartsick to remember.
But after a time, as Oliver Germaine walked quickly along, uncaring as
to which way he was going, almost running in his desire to outstrip his
own thoughts, there came a little lightening of his bewildered misery.
It was possible, just possible, that Mrs. Bliss was really thinking of
some other customer.
Notes? The idea was really absurd to anyone who knew Bella, as he,
Oliver, thank God, knew his wife! Why, there was never any loose money
in the house, both he and Bella were always running short of petty cash.
Then the young man remembered, with a sudden tightening of the heart,
that this had not been the case lately. During the last few months,
since they had moved into their new house, Bella had always had
money--plenty of sixpences and shillings, half crowns and half
sovereigns--at his disposal. Nay more, looking back, he realised that
his wife no longer teased him, as she had once perpetually teased him,
for supplements, large or small, to her allowance; he had to face the
fact that of late Bella's allowance had borne a surprising resemblance
to the widow's cruse; it had actually sufficed for all her wants.
But he had been unsuspecting, utterly unsuspecting, and even now he
hardly knew what he did suspect.
The horrible things he had heard Mrs. Bliss say about other people acted
and reacted on Germaine's imagination. If these things were true, then
the world in which he and Bella lived was corrupt and rotten; and, as
even Oliver Germaine knew by personal experience, pitch defiles. If
Daphne Slade did the things Mrs. Bliss implied she did, Bella must know
it,--know it and condone it. Bella was far too clever to be taken in, as
he, Oliver, had been taken in, by Mrs. Slade's pretty pathetic manner,
and appealing eyes. If Mrs. Slade took money from men, what an example,
what a model----Germaine's mind refused to complete the thought.
Certain of Oliver's and Bella's old acquaintances--people whom they were
too kind to drop, but of whom they couldn't see as much now as they had
once done, in the days before Bella became a famous beauty--would
sometimes hint darkly as to the wickedness of some of the people they
knew. Even Fanny had told him bluntly that Bella had got into a very
fast set. "Fast" was the word his sister had used, and it had diverted
him.
But was it possible that these people, whom he had thought envious and
silly--and that Fanny, his rather narrow-minded and old-fashioned
sister,--had been right after all? Was it possible that like so many
husbands of whom he had heard, for whom he had felt contempt and pity,
he had--as regarded his own cherished wife--lived in a fool's paradise?
Germaine now remembered several things that he had known--known and
thought forgotten--for they had been completely apart from his own life.
He recalled the case of a man in his own regiment who had shot himself
three days after his wife's death. It had been publicly given out that
the poor fellow had been mad--distraught with grief; but there had been
many to mutter that the truth was far other, and that the man had made a
shameful discovery among his dead wife's papers....
Concerning any other woman than Bella, Germaine would have admitted,
perhaps reluctantly,--but still, if asked the plain question, he would
have admitted, that women are damned tricky creatures, and that--well,
that you never can tell!
Again, out of the past, there came back to him, with horrid vividness,
the memory of a brief episode which at the time had filled him with a
kind of pity, even sympathy.
It was at a ball; he was quite a youngster, in fact it was the year
after he had joined, and a woman sitting out with him in a conservatory
had fallen into intimate talk, as people so often do amid unfamiliar
surroundings. There came a moment when she said to him, with burning,
unhappy eyes, "People think I'm a good woman, but I'm not." And she had
hurried on to make the nature of her sinning quite clear; she had not
passion for her excuse--only lack of means and love of luxury. He had
been startled, staggered by the unasked-for confidence--and yet he had
not thought much the worse of her; now, retrospectively, he judged her
with terrible severity.
But _Bella_? The thought of Bella in such company was inconceivable; and
yet, deep in Oliver Germaine's heart, there grew from the seed sown by
Mrs. Bliss a upas tree which for the moment overshadowed everything. He
was torn with anguished jealousy, which made him forget, excepting as
affording a proof of what he feared, the sordid, horrible question of
the money.
Germaine had already been jealous of Bella, jealous before their
marriage, and jealous since, but that feeling had been nothing,
_nothing_ to that which now held him in its grip.
As a girl, Bella had been a flirt, and, as she had since confessed more
than once, she had loved to make Oliver miserable. Then, for some time
after their marriage he had been angered at the way she had welcomed and
courted admiration. But he had never doubted her, never for a moment
thought that her love was leaving him, still less that her flirtations
held any really sinister intent. He now remembered how a man, a fool of
a fellow, had once brought her a beautiful jewel by way of a Christmas
gift; but it had annoyed her, and, without saying anything about it to
Oliver at the time, she had actually made the man take back his present!
Was it conceivable that in three or four short years Bella could have
entirely altered--have become to all intents and purposes, not only
another woman, but a woman of a type,--as even he was well aware, a very
common type,--he would not have cared to hear mentioned in her
presence?
Germaine was now at the Marble Arch. After a moment's bewildered
hesitation, he went up Oxford Street, and then took a turning which
would ultimately lead him home; home where Bella must be impatiently
awaiting him--home where their intimates had already doubtless gathered
together for lunch.
And then, during his walk through the now deserted and sun-baked streets
and byways of Mayfair, Oliver Germaine passed in slow review the men and
the women who composed his own and Bella's intimate circle. They rose in
blurred outline against the background of his memory, and gradually the
women fell out, and only the men remained,--two men, for Henry Buck did
not count.
Which of these two men who came about his house in the guise of close
friends, had planned to steal, to buy, the wife on whose absolute purity
and honour he would an hour ago have staked his life?
Germaine's fevered mind leapt on Bob Uvedale. What were Uvedale's
relations, his real relations, with Bella? Oliver, so he now told
himself sorely, was not quite a fool; he had known men who hid the
deepest, tenderest--he would not say the most dishonourable--feelings,
towards a married woman, under the skilful pretence of frank laughing
flirtation.
Uvedale, when all was said and done, was an adventurer, living on his
wits. He talked of his poverty, talked of it over-much, but he often
made considerable sums of money; in fact twice, in moments of unwonted
expansiveness, Uvedale had offered to put Germaine on to a "good thing,"
to share with him a tip which had been given him by one of his financial
friends. Germaine now remembered, with a sick feeling of anger, how
seriously annoyed Bella had been to find that her husband had refused to
have anything to do with it; nay more, how she had taunted him
afterwards when the "good thing" had turned out good after all. But that
was long ago, when they had first known Uvedale.
They now knew Uvedale too well--at least Bella did. Oliver was an
outdoor man; he hated crowds. He remembered how often Uvedale took his
place as Bella's companion at those semi-public gatherings, charity
fêtes, and so on, which apparently amused her, and where the presence of
the beautiful Mrs. Germaine was always eagerly desired.
Germaine's mind next glanced with jealous anguished suspicion at another
man who was constantly with Bella--Peter Joliffe.
There was a great, almost a ludicrous, contrast between Uvedale and
Joliffe. Uvedale, so Germaine dimly realised even now, was a man with a
wider, more generous, outlook on life than the other, capable of deeper
depths, of higher heights.
Joliffe was well off; and, as the Germaines had been told very early in
their acquaintance with him, he had the reputation of being "near." But
Bella and Oliver had both agreed that this was not true. Only the other
day Bella had spoken very warmly of Joliffe; when they had moved into
their new house he had given them a Sheraton bureau, a very charming and
certainly by no means a cheap piece of old furniture. Oliver had
supposed it to be a delicate way of paying back some of their constant
hospitality, for Joliffe was perpetually with Bella.
Time after time Germaine had come in and found Joliffe sitting with her;
walking through the hall he had heard her peals of laughter at Joliffe's
witticisms, the funny things he said with his serious face.
But after all jesters are men of like passions to their melancholy
brethren; they can, and do, throw off the grinning mask. Bella had said,
only yesterday, "There's more in Peter than you think, Oliver. Believe
me, there is!" Bella always called Joliffe Peter,--she was more formal
with Bob Uvedale.
Germaine now reminded himself that Joliffe did not like Uvedale, and
that Uvedale did not like Joliffe. There seemed a deep, unspoken
antagonism between the two men, who were yet so constantly meeting.
Joliffe had gone so far as to say something--not exactly disagreeable,
but condemnatory--of Uvedale's city connections, to Germaine. Joliffe
was annoyed, distinctly annoyed at the way Bella went about with
Uvedale, and by the fact that she often introduced him to people whose
acquaintance she had herself made through Joliffe.
What had he, Oliver Germaine, been about, to allow his wife to become so
intimate with two men, of whom he knew nothing? Yesterday he would have
said Uvedale and Joliffe were his closest pals. But what did he really
know of either of them--of their secret thoughts--their deep desires and
ambitions--their shames and secret sins? Nothing--nothing. Bella's
husband knew as little of Uvedale and Joliffe--in fact, till to-day,
far less than they knew of him, for one or the other of these men was
his enemy, and had betrayed, very basely, his hospitality.
Germaine had now lashed himself into the certainty that he was that most
miserable and pitiable of civilised beings, the trusting, kindly, nay
more, adoring husband, whose wife betrays him with his friend.
When others had laughed, as men have laughed, and will ever laugh, at
similar ironic juxtapositions of fate, Germaine had remained grave, for
he had a sensitive heart--a heart which made him realise something of
what lay beneath such tales. Now he told himself that so no doubt he
himself was being laughed at by the many, pitied--the thought stung
deeper--by the few.
As he at last turned into Curzon Street, and so was within a few yards
of his house, it struck two o'clock. By now they must all be waiting for
him, and Bella would be angry, as angry as she ever allowed her
sweet-tempered nature to be. But Germaine told himself savagely that he
didn't care,--he was sorry to be so near home, to know that in a few
moments he would have to command himself, to pretend light-hearted
indifference before a crowd of people most of whom he now feared--ay,
feared and hated, for they must all have long suspected what he only now
knew to be the truth.
Some one touched him. He started violently. It was his sister, Fanny,
pouring out a confused stream of apologies and explanations. He stared
at her in silence, and she thought he was so seriously annoyed, so "put
out" that he could not trust himself to speak.
But though, as they stood there face to face, he dimly realised what his
sister was trying to say, how she was trying to explain her failure to
keep her appointment with him in the Park, Germaine could not have told,
had his life depended on it, the nature of her excuse.
Together they walked side by side to the door of his house, and, as he
rang the bell, as he knocked, he remembered with a pang of jealous
anguish that Bella had asked him, when they moved into this house, not
to use a latch-key in the daytime; she had explained to him that to do
so prevented the servants keeping up to the mark, and he had obeyed her,
as he always did obey her. This trifle made his anger, for the moment
his impotent anger, become colder, clarified.
It was only an hour later, but at last they were all gone, these people
whom Oliver Germaine had now begun to hate and suspect, each in their
different measure, women and men. Everyone had left, that is, excepting
Henry Buck and Fanny; and Fanny was just going away, Oliver seeing her
off at the front door.
Germaine believed that he had carried himself well. True, Uvedale had
said to him, "Feeling a bit chippy, old chap?" and twice he had noticed
Joliffe's rather cold grey eyes fixed attentively on his face, but under
the chatter of the women--Jenny Arabin was a great talker and in a
harmless sort of way a great gossip, always knowing everybody's business
better than they did themselves--under cover of the women's chatter, he
had been able to remain silent, and, whatever the two men present had
suspected,--one of the two forced thereto by his own conscience,--Bella
had certainly noticed nothing. She had not even seen, as his sister had
seen, that Oliver looked tired and unlike himself.
Why, just now Fanny had spoken to him solicitously about his
health--blundering, tactless, Fanny had actually asked him if anything
special were worrying him!
He shut the door on his sister, and crossed the little hall. The time
had now come when he must have it out with Bella.
Then, suddenly, there came over Germaine a feeling as if he had been
living through a hideous nightmare. If that were indeed so, then his
whole life would not be too long to secretly atone to Bella for his
horrible suspicion.
It seemed suddenly monstrous that he should suspect Bella on the word of
a Mrs. Bliss. His wife had a right, after all, to pay her dressmaker in
bank-notes if the fancy seized her. Sometimes when Bella did something
that he, Oliver, did not like or approve, she explained that her mother
had done the same thing, and the excuse always irritated him, left him
without an answer.
Supposing that Bella were now to tell him that the late Mrs. Arabin,
whose reputation for a certain daring liveliness and exceeding beauty
still lingered in the ever-shifting naval and military society where he
had first met his wife, always paid her bills in notes and cash rather
than by cheque--what then?
He walked up the staircase; Henry Buck passed him coming down.
Germaine's eyes rested on the awkward figure, the plain, good-natured
face. Rabbit was certainly lacking in tact; he always outstayed all
their other guests, and he never knew when Bella was tired, but still he
was the one human being present at the little lunch party at whom Oliver
had been able to look without a feeling of unease.
Slowly he turned the painted china knob of the drawing-room door.
Bella was standing before the Sheraton bureau which had been the gift of
Peter Joliffe. She had apparently been putting something away; Germaine
heard the click of the lock. She turned round quickly, and her husband
thought there was a look of constraint on her face.
"Why, Oliver," she said, "I thought you were going out with Fanny this
afternoon!"
"With Fanny?" he stammered, "I never thought of doing such a thing."
"But you're not going to stay in, are you?"
He looked at her attentively, and again there surged up in his heart
wild jealousy and suspicion. Why did she ask whether he was going to
stay in? Which of the two men who had just left the house was she
expecting to come back as soon as he, poor deluded fool, was safely out
of the way?
But Bella went on speaking rather quickly: "I shan't go out. I'm tired.
Besides, I'm expecting some people to tea. So perhaps I'd better go and
take my hat off. I shall only be a few minutes; do wait till I come
back." Bella spoke rather breathlessly, moving across the room towards
the door.
Then she didn't want him to go out? He had wronged her in this, at any
rate. Germaine stared at the door through which his wife had just gone
with a feeling of miserable uncertainty.
Then his eye travelled round to the place where she had been standing
just now, in front of Joliffe's bureau. A glance at Bella's bank-book
would set his mind at rest one way or the other. It would go far to
prove or disprove the story Mrs. Bliss had told, for it would show if
Bella were indeed in the habit of drawing considerable cheques to
"self." Why hadn't he thought of this simple test before,--before
shaming himself and shaming his wife by base suspicions?
And yet Oliver, for some few moments, stood in the middle of the room
irresolute. Yesterday it would never have occurred to him that Bella
would mind his looking at her bank-book, although, as a matter of fact
he never had looked at it. She was a tidy little woman; he knew that
everything under the flap which he had seen her close down so quickly
just now would be exquisitely neat; he knew the exact spot where her
bank-book was to be found.
With a curious feeling that he was doing something dishonourable,--and
it was a feeling which sat very uneasily on Oliver Germaine,--he took
hold of the little brass knob and slid up the flap of the sloping desk.