The Head of the House of Coombe was not a title to be found in Burke or
Debrett. It was a fine irony of the Head’s own and having been accepted
by his acquaintances was not infrequently used by them in their light
moments in the same spirit. The peerage recorded him as a Marquis and
added several lesser attendant titles.
“When English society was respectable, even to stodginess at times,”
was his point of view, “to be born ‘the Head of the House’ was a
weighty and awe-inspiring thing. In fearful private denunciatory
interviews with one’s parents and governors it was brought up against
one as a final argument against immoral conduct such as debt and not
going to church. As the Head of the House one was called upon to be an
Example. In the country one appeared in one’s pew and announced oneself
a ‘miserable sinner’ in loud tones, one had to invite the rector to
dinner with regularity and ‘the ladies’ of one’s family gave tea and
flannel petticoats and baby clothes to cottagers. Men and women were
known as ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’ in those halcyon days. One
Represented things—Parties in Parliament—Benevolent Societies, and
British Hospitality in the form of astounding long dinners at which one
drank healths and made speeches. In roseate youth one danced the
schottische and the polka and the round waltz which Lord Byron
denounced as indecent. To recall the vigour of his poem gives rise to a
smile—when one chances to sup at a cabaret.”
He was considered very amusing when he analyzed his own mental attitude
towards his world in general.
“I was born somewhat too late and somewhat too early,” he explained in
his light, rather cold and detached way. “I was born and educated at
the closing of one era and have to adjust myself to living in another.
I was as it were cradled among treasured relics of the ethics of the
Georges and Queen Charlotte, and Queen Victoria in her bloom. _I_ was
in my bloom in the days when ‘ladies’ were reproved for wearing dresses
cut too low at Drawing Rooms. Such training gives curious interest to
fashions in which bodices are unconsidered trifles and Greek nymphs who
dance with bare feet and beautiful bare legs may be one’s own
relations. I trust I do not seem even in the shadowiest way to comment
unfavourably. I merely look on at the rapidities of change with
unalloyed interest. As the Head of the House of Coombe I am not sure
_what_ I am an Example of—or to. Which is why I at times regard myself
in that capacity with a slightly ribald lightness.”
The detachment of his question with regard to the newborn infant of the
airily irresponsible Feather was in entire harmony with his attitude
towards the singular incident of Life as illustrated by the World, the
Flesh and the Devil by none of which he was—as far as could be
observed—either impressed, disturbed or prejudiced. His own experience
had been richly varied and practically unlimited in its opportunities
for pleasure, sinful or unsinful indulgence, mitigated or unmitigated
wickedness, the gathering of strange knowledge, and the possible
ignoring of all dull boundaries. This being the case a superhuman
charity alone could have forborne to believe that his opportunities had
been neglected in the heyday of his youth. Wealth and lack of
limitations in themselves would have been quite enough to cause the
Nonconformist Victorian mind to regard a young—or middle-aged—male as
likely to represent a fearsome moral example, but these three
temptations combined with good looks and a certain mental brilliance
were so inevitably the concomitants of elegant iniquity that the
results might be taken for granted.
That the various worlds in which he lived in various lands accepted him
joyfully as an interesting and desirable of more or less abominably
sinful personage, the Head of the House of Coombe—even many years
before he became its head—regarded with the detachment which he had,
even much earlier, begun to learn. Why should it be in the least matter
what people thought of one? Why should it in the least matter what one
thought of oneself—and therefore—why should one think at all? He had
begun at the outset a brilliantly happy young pagan with this simple
theory. After the passing of some years he had not been quite so happy
but had remained quite as pagan and retained the theory which had lost
its first fine careless rapture and gained a secret bitterness. He had
not married and innumerable stories were related to explain the reason
why. They were most of them quite false and none of them quite true.
When he ceased to be a young man his delinquency was much discussed,
more especially when his father died and he took his place as the head
of his family. He was old enough, rich enough, important enough for
marriage to be almost imperative. But he remained unmarried. In
addition he seemed to consider his abstinence entirely an affair of his
own.
“Are you as wicked as people say you are?” a reckless young woman once
asked him. She belonged to the younger set which was that season trying
recklessness, in a tentative way, as a new fashion.
“I really don’t know. It is so difficult to decide,” he answered. “I
could tell better if I knew exactly what wickedness is. When I find out
I will let you know. So good of you to take an interest.”
Thirty years earlier he knew that a young lady who had heard he was
wicked would have perished in flames before immodestly mentioning the
fact to him, but might have delicately attempted to offer “first aid”
to reformation, by approaching with sweetness the subject of going to
church.
The reckless young woman looked at him with an attention which he was
far from being blind enough not to see was increased by his answer.
“I never know what you mean,” she said almost wistfully.
“Neither do I,” was his amiable response. “And I am sure it would not
be worth while going into. Really, we neither of us know what we mean.
Perhaps I am as wicked as I know how to be. And I may have painful
limitations—or I may not.”
After his father’s death he spent rather more time in London and rather
less in wandering over the face of the globe. But by the time he was
forty he knew familiarly far countries and near and was intimate with
most of the peoples thereof. He could have found his way about
blind-folded in the most distinctive parts of most of the great cities.
He had seen and learned many things. The most absorbing to his mind had
been the ambitions and changes of nations, statesmen, rulers and those
they ruled or were ruled by. Courts and capitals knew him, and his
opportunities were such as gave him all ease as an onlooker. He was
outwardly of the type which does not arouse caution in talkers and he
heard much which was suggestive even to illumination, from those to
whom he remained unsuspected of being a man who remembered things long
and was astute in drawing conclusions. The fact remained however that
he possessed a remarkable memory and one which was not a rag-bag filled
with unassorted and parti-coloured remnants, but a large and orderly
space whose contents were catalogued and filed and well enclosed from
observation. He was also given to the mental argument which follows a
point to its conclusion as a mere habit of mind. He saw and knew well
those who sat and pondered with knit brows and cautiously hovering hand
at the great chess-board which is formed by the Map of Europe. He found
an enormous interest in watching their play. It was his fortune as a
result of his position to know persons who wore crowns and a natural
incident in whose lives it was to receive the homage expressed by the
uncovering of the head and the bending of the knee. At forty he looked
back at the time when the incongruousness, the abnormality and the
unsteadiness of the foundations on which such personages stood first
struck him. The realization had been in its almost sacrilegious novelty
and daring, a sort of thunderbolt passing through his mind. He had at
the time spoken of it only to one person.
“I have no moral or ethical views to offer,” he had said. “I only
_see_. The thing—as it is—will disintegrate. I am so at sea as to what
will take its place that I feel as if the prospect were rather
horrible. One has had the old landmarks and been impressed by the old
pomp and picturesqueness so many centuries, that one cannot see the
earth without them. There have been kings even in the Cannibal
Islands.”
As a statesman or a diplomat he would have seen far but he had been too
much occupied with Life as an entertainment, too self-indulgent for
work of any order. He freely admitted to himself that he was a
worthless person but the fact did not disturb him. Having been born
with a certain order of brain it observed and worked in spite of him,
thereby adding flavour and interest to existence. But that was all.
It cannot be said that as the years passed he quite enjoyed the fact
that he knew he was rarely spoken of to a stranger without its being
mentioned that he was the most perfectly dressed man in London. He
rather detested the idea though he was aware that the truth was
unimpeachable. The perfection of his accompaniments had arisen in his
youth from a secret feeling for fitness and harmony. Texture and colour
gave him almost abnormal pleasure. His expression of this as a
masculine creature had its limits which resulted in a concentration on
perfection. Even at five-and-twenty however he had never been called a
dandy and even at five-and-forty no one had as yet hinted at Beau
Brummel though by that time men as well as women frequently described
to each other the cut and colour of the garments he wore, and tailors
besought him to honour them with crumbs of his patronage in the
ambitious hope that they might mention him as a client. And the simple
fact that he appeared in a certain colour or cut set it at once on its
way to become a fashion to be seized upon, worn and exaggerated until
it was dropped suddenly by its originator and lost in the oblivion of
cheap imitations and cheap tailor shops. The first exaggeration of the
harmony he had created and the original was seen no more.
Feather herself had a marvellous trick in the collecting of her
garments. It was a trick which at times barely escaped assuming the
proportions of absolute creation. Her passion for self-adornment
expressed itself in ingenious combination and quite startling
uniqueness of line now and then. Her slim fairness and ash-gold
gossamer hair carried airily strange tilts and curves of little or
large hats or daring tints other women could not sustain but invariably
strove to imitate however disastrous the results. Beneath soft drooping
or oddly flopping brims hopelessly unbecoming to most faces hers looked
out quaintly lovely as a pictured child’s wearing its grandmother’s
bonnet. Everything draped itself about or clung to her in entrancing
folds which however whimsical were never grotesque.
“Things are always becoming to me,” she said quite simply. “But often I
stick a few pins into a dress to tuck it up here and there, or if I
give a hat a poke somewhere to make it crooked, they are much more
becoming. People are always asking me how I do it but I don’t know how.
I bought a hat from Cerise last week and I gave it two little thumps
with my fist—one in the crown and one in the brim and they made it
wonderful. The maid of the most grand kind of person tried to find out
from my maid where I bought it. I wouldn’t let her tell of course.”
She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of
Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such
gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon
her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world.
Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the
mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she
might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time—particularly
if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly
about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in
her insistence on clothes—clothes—clothes—as if they were the breath of
life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat
before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair
in different styles—in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings—soft
bands and loops—in braids and coils—he broke forth into an uneasy short
laugh and expressed himself—though she did not know he was expressing
himself and would not have understood him if she had.
“If you have a soul—and I’m not at all certain you have—” he said,
“it’s divided into a dressmaker’s and a hairdresser’s and a milliner’s
shop. It’s full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs.
It’s an awful mess, Feather.”
“I hope it’s a shoe shop and a jeweller’s as well,” she laughed quite
gaily. “And a lace-maker’s. I need every one of them.”
“It’s a rag shop,” he said. “It has nothing but _chiffons_ in it.”
“If ever I _do_ think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things
floating about like little balloons,” was her cheerful response.
“That’s an idea,” he answered with a rather louder laugh. “Yours might
be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call
_paillettes_.”
The fancy attracted her.
“If I had one like that”—with a pleased creative air, “it would look
rather ducky floating from my shoulder—or even my hat—or my hair in the
evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond
pin—and with lovely little pink and blue streamers.” With the touch of
genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her
universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before.
“You mustn’t make me laugh,” she said holding up her hand. “I am having
my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny
poke bonnet—and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and
demure. You mustn’t really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like
that. You must only smile.”
Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that
she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now
that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of
his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that
she had none whatever.
It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress
and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw
her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead
and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather’s
special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every
other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in
her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them.
Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a
little nun’s or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young
great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female
creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees.
When Coombe’s eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of
people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said
afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale—almost as if he
saw something which frightened him.
“Who is that under the copper beech—being talked to by Harlow?” he
inquired.
Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids
down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke
bonnet.
“It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless—‘Feather’ we call her,” he was
answered. “Was there ever anything more artful than that startling
little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn’t see it as
quickly.”
“One wouldn’t look at it as long,” said Coombe. “One is in danger of
staring. And the little hat—or bonnet—which pokes and is fastened under
her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone
rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won’t be staring if I
am talking to her. Please.”
The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew
nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather
lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they
looked like an angel’s when they were lifted. There are eyes of that
particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he
knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his
colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the
perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she
had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes—almost before the colour
had quite returned to his face—the story of her husband’s idea of her
soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with _paillettes_.
And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or
her hair by the light sparkling chain—and with delicate ribbon
streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh—though she thought it
had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person
and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed.
“Exquisite!” he said. “I shall never see you in the future without it.
But wouldn’t it be necessary to vary the colour at times?”
“Oh! Yes—to match things,” seriously. “I couldn’t wear a pink and blue
one with this—” glancing over the smoky mousey thing “—or
_paillettes_.”
“Oh, no—not _paillettes_,” he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh
laugh having ended.
“One couldn’t imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to
think,” she reflected. “Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing—like the edge
of a rain-cloud—scarcely a colour at all.”
For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a
dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel
might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul
might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also.
Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily
through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he
really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people
they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable
letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most
rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She
scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only
taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that
it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact
summing up at the agency had been as follows:
“They’re a good looking pair and he’s Lord Lawdor’s nephew. They’re
bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house
because she’s so pretty. They’ll last two or three years perhaps and
you’ll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up
young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual.”
The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came
in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it
were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware.
Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no
doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked
her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have
money.
This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much
argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs—even in
corners of Feather’s own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument
regarded the degree of Coombe’s interest in her. There was always
curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman—especially and
privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow
observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to
a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not
possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather
might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone
could explain it—and he would not.
Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her.
It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than
one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion
stand apart a little and look at her—watch her—with an expression
suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to
betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of
profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she
best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes
which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little
but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he
was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her
at balls.
Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure
that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was
that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that
if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it.
Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life
in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the
matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at
once light and friendly.
“Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor’s as you know
him so well,” she said. “When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame
Hélène’s last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six
dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more.”
“Does she think he is going to pay for them?” asked Bob.
“It doesn’t matter what she thinks”; Feather laughed very prettily.
“Doesn’t it?”
“Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What’s the matter, Rob? You look
quite red and cross.”
“I’ve had a headache for three days,” he answered, “and I feel hot and
cross. I don’t care about a lot of things you say, Feather.”
“Don’t be silly,” she retorted. “I don’t care about a lot of things you
say—and do, too, for the matter of that.”
Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room
grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead.
“There’s a—sort of limit,” he commented. He hesitated a little before
he added sulkily “—to the things one—_says_.”
“That sounds like Alice,” was her undisturbed answer. “She used to
squabble at me because I _said_ things. But I believe one of the
reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by _saying_ things.
Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know,” she added
practically. “Somehow he _counts_. Don’t you recollect how before we
knew him—when he was abroad so long—people used to bring him into their
talk as if they couldn’t help remembering him and what he was like. I
knew quite a lot about him—about his cleverness and his manners and his
way of keeping women off without being rude—and the things he says
about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his
clothes. I adore his clothes. And I’m convinced he adores mine.”
She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the
grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine
thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that
final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He
did not wear things—they were expressions of his mental subtleties.
Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes—carried them about
with her—however beautifully.
“I like him,” she went on. “I don’t know anything about political
parties and the state of Europe so I don’t understand the things he
says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn’t
really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a
haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled
pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to
him.”
The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about
uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her
existence except on such occasions as her nurse—who had promptly fallen
in love with the smart young footman—carried her down to the kitchen
and Servants’ Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and
an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants’ Hall had been given that
name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it
was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries.
The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife’s
drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing
hard.
“Feather!” he gasped. “Don’t know what’s up with me. I believe
I’m—awfully ill! I can’t see straight. Can’t think.”
He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather
sprang at him.
“Don’t, Rob, don’t!” she cried in actual anguish. “Lord Coombe is
taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I’m going to wear—”
She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. “Oh! do try
to sit up,” she begged pathetically. “Just try. _Don’t_ give up till
afterwards.” But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear.
He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and
quite insensible.
It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that
very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa.
He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless.
“Have you sent for a doctor?” he inquired.
“He’s—only just done it!” she exclaimed. “It’s more than I can bear.
You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and—”
“Were you thinking of going?” he put it to her quietly.
“I shall have to send for a nurse of course—” she began. He went so far
as to interrupt her.
“You had better not go—if you’ll pardon my saying so,” he suggested.
“Not go? Not go at all?” she wailed.
“Not go at all,” was his answer. And there was such entire lack of
encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs.
In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely
penniless widow with a child.