Mr. Tregonell dressed himself a little more carefully than he was wont to dress — thinking for the most part that anything which suited him was good enough for his friends — and went down to the drawing-room, feeling like a visitor in a strange house, half inclined to wonder how he would be received by his wife and his wife’s guests. He who had always ruled supreme in that house, choosing his visitors for his own pleasure — subjugating all tastes and habits of other people to his own convenience, now felt as if he were only there on sufferance.
It was early when he entered the drawing-room, and the Baron de Cazalet was the only occupant of that apartment. He was standing in a lounging attitude, with his back against the mantelpiece, and his handsome person set off by evening dress. That regulation costume does not afford much scope to the latent love of finery which still lurks in the civilized man, as if to prove his near relationship to the bead and feather-wearing savage — but de Cazalet had made himself as gorgeous as he could with jewelled studs, embroidered shirt, satin under-waistcoat, amber silk stockings, and Queen Ann shoes. He was assuredly handsome — but he had just that style of beauty which to the fastidious mind is more revolting than positive ugliness. Dark-brown eyes, strongly arched eyebrows, an aquiline nose, a sensual mouth, a heavy jaw, a faultless complexion of the French plum-box order, large regular teeth of glittering whiteness, a small delicately trained moustache with waxed ends, and hair of oily sheen, odorous of pommade divine, made up the catalogue of his charms. Leonard stood looking at him doubtfully, as if he were a hitherto unknown animal.
“Where did my wife pick him up, and why?” he asked himself. “I should have thought he was just the kind of man she would detest.”
“How glad you must be to get back to your Lares and Penates,” said the Baron, smiling blandly.
“I’m uncommonly glad to get back to my horses and dogs,” answered Leonard, flinging himself into a large armchair by the fire, and taking up a newspaper. “Have you been long in the West?”
“About a fortnight, but I have been only three days at Mount Royal. I had the honour to renew my acquaintance with Mrs. Tregonell last August at Zermatt, and she was good enough to say that if I ever found myself in this part of the country she would be pleased to receive me in her house. I needn’t tell you that with such a temptation in view I was very glad to bend my steps westward. I spent ten days on board a friend’s yacht, between Dartmouth and the Lizard, landed at Penzance last Tuesday, and posted here, where I received a more than hospitable welcome.”
“You are a great traveller, I understand?”
“I doubt if I have done as much as you have in that way. I have seldom travelled for the sake of travelling. I have lived in the tents of the Arabs. I have bivouacked on the Pampas — and enjoyed life in all the cities of the South, from Valparaiso to Carthagena; but I can boast no mountaineering exploits or scientific discoveries — and I never read a paper at the Geographical.”
“You look a little too fond of yourself for mountaineering,” said Leonard, smiling grimly at the Baron’s portly figure, and all-pervading sleekness.
“Well — yes — I like a wild life — but I have no relish for absolute hardship — the thermometer below zero, a doubtful supply of provisions, pemmican, roasted skunk for supper, without any currant jelly — no, I love mine ease at mine Inn.”
He threw out his fine expanse of padded chest and shoulders, and surveyed the spacious lamp-lit room with an approving smile. This no doubt was the kind of Inn at which he loved to take his ease — a house full of silly women, ready to be subjugated by his florid good looks and shallow accomplishments.
The ladies now came straggling in — first Emily St. Aubyn, and then Dopsy, whose attempts at conversation were coldly received by the county maiden. Dopsy’s and Mopsy’s home-made gowns, cheap laces and frillings, and easy flippancy were not agreeable to the St. Aubyn sisters. It was not that the St. Aubyn manners, which always savoured of the stable and farmyard, were more refined or elegant; but the St. Aubyns arrogated to themselves the right to be vulgar, and resented free-and-easy manners in two young persons who were obviously poor and obviously obscure as to their surroundings. If their gowns had been made by a West End tailor, and they had been able to boast of intimate acquaintance with a duchess and two or three countesses, their flippancy might have been tolerable, nay, even amusing, to the two Miss St. Aubyns; but girls who went nowhere and knew nobody, had no right to attempt smartness of speech, and deserved to be sat upon.
To Dopsy succeeded Mopsy, then some men, then Mrs. St. Aubyn and her younger daughter Clara, then Mrs. Tregonell, in a red gown draped with old Spanish lace, and with diamond stars in her hair, a style curiously different from those quiet dinner dresses she had been wont to wear a year ago. Leonard looked at her in blank amazement — just as he had looked at their first meeting. She, who had been like the violet sheltering itself among its leaves, now obviously dressed for effect, and as obviously courted admiration.
The dinner was cheerful to riotousness. Everybody had something to say; anecdotes were told, and laughter was frequent and loud. The St. Aubyn girls, who had deliberately snubbed the sisters Vandeleur, were not above conversing with the brother, and, finding him a kindred spirit in horseyness and doggyness, took him at once into their confidence, and were on the friendliest terms before dinner was finished. De Cazalet sat next his hostess, and talked exclusively to her. Mr. FitzJesse had Miss Bridgeman on his left hand, and conversed with her in gentle murmurs, save when in his quiet voice, and with his seeming-innocent smile, he told some irresistibly funny story — some touch of character seen with a philosophic eye — for the general joy of the whole table. Very different was the banquet of to-day from that quiet dinner on the first night of Mr. Hamleigh’s visit to Mount Royal, that dinner at which Leonard watched his wife so intensely, eager to discover to what degree she was affected by the presence of her first lover. He watched her to-night, at the head of her brilliantly lighted dinner-table — no longer the old subdued light of low shaded lamps, but the radiance of innumerable candles in lofty silver candelabra, shining over a striking decoration of vivid crimson asters and spreading palm-leaves — he watched her helplessly, hopelessly, knowing that he and she were ever so much farther apart than they had been in the days before he brought Angus Hamleigh to Mount Royal, those miserable discontented days when he had fretted himself into a fever of jealousy and vague suspicion, and had thought to find a cure by bringing the man he feared and hated into his home, so that he might know for certain how deep the wrong was which this man’s very existence seemed to inflict upon him. To bring those two who had loved and parted face to face, to watch and listen, to fathom the thoughts of each — that had been the process natural and congenial to his jealous temper; but the result had been an uncomfortable one. And now he saw his wife, whose heart he had tried to break — hating her because he had failed to make her love him — just as remote and unapproachable as of old.
“What a fool I was to marry her,” he thought, after replying somewhat at random to Mrs. St. Aubyn’s last remark upon the superiority of Dorkings to Spaniards from a culinary point of view. “It was my determination to have my own way that wrecked me. I couldn’t submit to be conquered by a girl — to have the wife I had set my heart upon when I was a boy, stolen from me by the first effeminate fopling my silly mother invited to Mount Royal. I had never imagined myself with any other woman for my wife — never really cared for any other woman.”
This was the bent of Mr. Tregonell’s reflections as he sat in his place at that animated assembly, adding nothing to its mirth, or even to its noise; albeit in the past his voice had ever been loudest, his laugh most resonant. He felt more at his ease after dinner, when the women had left — the brilliant de Cazalet slipping away soon after them, although not until he had finished his host’s La Rose — and when Mr. St. Aubyn expanded himself in county talk, enlightening the wanderer as to the progress of events during his absence — while Mr. Fit
zJesse sat blandly puffing his cigarette, a silent observer of the speech and gestures of the county magnate, speculating, from a scientific point of view, as to how much of this talk were purely automatic — an inane drivel which would go on just the same if half the Squire’s brain had been scooped out. Jack Vandeleur smoked and drank brandy and water, while little Monty discoursed to him, in confidential tones, upon the racing year which was now expiring at Newmarket — the men who had made pots of money, and the men who had been beggared for life. There seemed to be no medium between those extremes.
When the host rose, Captain Vandeleur was for an immediate adjournment to billiards, but to his surprise, Leonard walked off to the drawing-room.
“Aren’t you coming?” asked Jack, dejectedly.
“Not to-night. I have been too long away from feminine society not to appreciate the novelty of an evening with ladies. You and Monty can have the table to yourselves, unless Mr. FitzJesse — —”
“I never play,” replied the gentle journalist; “but I rather like sitting in a billiard-room and listening to the conversation of the players. It is always so full of ideas.”
Captain Vandeleur and Mr. Montagu went their way, and the other men repaired to the drawing-room, whence came the sound of the piano, and the music of a rich baritone, trolling out a popular air from the most fashionable opera-bouffe — that one piece which all Paris was bent upon hearing at the same moment, whereby seats in the little boulevard theatre were selling at a ridiculous premium.
De Cazalet was singing to Mrs. Tregonell’s accompaniment — a patois song, with a refrain which would have been distinctly indecent, if the tails of all the words had not been clipped off, so as to reduce the language to mild idiocy.
“The kind of song one could fancy being fashionable in the decline of the Roman Empire,” said FitzJesse, “when Apuleius was writing his ‘Golden Ass,’ don’t you know.”
After the song came a duet from “Traviata,” in which Christabel sang with a dramatic power which Leonard never remembered to have heard from her before. The two voices harmonized admirably, and there were warm expressions of delight from the listeners.
“Very accomplished man, de Cazalet,” said Colonel Blathwayt; “uncommonly useful in a country house — sings, and plays, and recites, and acts — rather puffy and short-winded in his elocution — if he were a horse one would call him a roarer — but always ready to amuse. Quite an acquisition.”
“Who is he?” asked Leonard, looking glum. “My wife picked him up in Switzerland, I hear — that is to say, he seems to have made himself agreeable — or useful — to Mrs. Tregonell and Miss Bridgeman; and, in a moment of ill-advised hospitality, my wife asked him here. Is he received anywhere? Does anybody know anything about him?”
“He is received in a few houses — rich houses where the hostess goes in for amateur acting and tableaux vivants, don’t you know; and people know a good deal about him — nothing actually to his detriment. The man was a full-blown adventurer when he had the good luck to get hold of a rich wife. He pays his way now, I believe; but the air of the adventurer hangs round him still. A man of Irish parentage — brought up in Jersey. What can you expect of him?”
“Does he drink?”
“Like a fish — but his capacity to drink is only to be estimated by cubic space — the amount he can hold. His brain and constitution have been educated up to alcohol. Nothing can touch him further.”
“Colonel Blathwayt, we want you to give us the ‘Wonderful One-Horse Shay,’ and after that, the Baron is going to recite ‘James Lee’s Wife,’ said Mrs. Tregonell, while her guests ranged themselves into an irregular semicircle, and the useful Miss Bridgeman placed a prie-dieu chair in a commanding position for the reciter to lean upon gracefully, or hug convulsively in the more energetic passages of his recitation.
“Everybody seems to have gone mad,” thought Mr. Tregonell, as he seated himself and surveyed the assembly, all intent and expectant.
His wife sat near the piano with de Cazalet bending over her, talking in just that slightly lowered voice which gives an idea of confidential relations, yet may mean no more than a vain man’s desire to appear the accepted worshipper of a beautiful woman. Never had Leonard seen Angus Hamleigh’s manner so distinctively attentive as was the air of this Hibernian adventurer.
“Just the last man whose attentions I should have supposed she would tolerate,” thought Leonard; “but any garbage is food for a woman’s vanity.”
The “Wonderful One-Horse Shay” was received with laughter and delight. Dopsy and Mopsy were in raptures. “How could a horrid American have written anything so clever? But then it was Colonel Blathwayt’s inimitable elocution which gave a charm to the whole thing. The poem was poor enough, no doubt, if one read it to oneself. Colonel Blathwayt was adorably funny.”
“It’s a tremendous joke, as you do it,” said Mopsy, twirling her sunflower fan — a great yellow flower, like the sign of the Sun Inn, on a black satin ground. “How delightful to be so gifted.”
“Now for ‘James Lee’s Wife,’” said the Colonel, who accepted the damsel’s compliments for what they were worth. “You’ll have to be very attentive if you want to find out what the poem means; for the Baron’s delivery is a trifle spasmodic.”
And now de Cazalet stepped forward with a vellum-bound volume in his hand, dashed back his long sleek hair with a large white hand, glanced at the page, coughed faintly, and then began in thick, hurried accents, which kept getting thicker and more hurried as the poem advanced. It was given, not in lines, but in spasms, panted out, till at the close the Baron sank exhausted, breathless, like the hunted deer when the hounds close round him.
“Beautiful! exquisite! too pathetic!” exclaimed a chorus of feminine voices.
“I only wish the Browning Society could hear that: they would be delighted,” said Mr. Faddie, who piqued himself upon being in the literary world.
“It makes Browning so much easier to understand,” remarked Mr. FitzJesse, with his habitual placidity.
“Brings the whole thing home to you — makes it ever so much more real, don’t you know,” said Mrs. Torrington.
“Poor James Lee!” sighed Mopsy.
“Poor Mrs. Lee!” ejaculated Dopsy.
“Did he die?” asked Miss St. Aubyn.
“Did she run away from him?” inquired her sister, the railroad pace at which the Baron fired off the verses having left all those among his hearers who did not know the text in a state of agreeable uncertainty.
So the night wore on, with more songs and duets from opera and opera-bouffe. No more of Beethoven’s grand bursts of melody — now touched with the solemnity of religious feeling — now melting in human pathos — now light and airy, changeful and capricious as the skylark’s song — a very fountain of joyous fancies. Mr. Tregonell had never appreciated Beethoven, being, indeed, as unmusical a soul as God ever created; but he thought it a more respectable thing that his wife should sit at her piano playing an order of music which only the privileged few could understand, than that she should delight the common herd by singing which savoured of music-hall and burlesque.
“Is she not absolutely delicious?” said Mrs. Torrington, beating time with her fan. “How proud I should be of myself if I could sing like that. How proud you must be of your wife — such verve — such élan — so thoroughly in the spirit of the thing. That is the only kind of singing anybody really cares for now. One goes to the opera to hear them scream through ‘Lohengrin’ — or ‘Tannhäuser’ — and then one goes into society and talks about Wagner — but it is music like this one enjoys.”
“Yes, it’s rather jolly,” said Leonard, staring moodily at his wife, in the act of singing a refrain, of Bé-bé-bé, which was supposed to represent the bleating of an innocent lamb.
“And the Baron’s voice goes so admirably with Mrs. Tregonell’s.”
“Yes, his voice goes — admirably,” said Leonard, sorely tempted to blaspheme.
“
Weren’t you charmed to find us all so gay and bright here — nothing to suggest the sad break-up you had last year. I felt so intensely sorry for you all — yet I was selfish enough to be glad I had left before it happened. Did they — don’t think me morbid for asking — did they bring him home here?”
“Yes, they brought him home.”
“And in which room did they put him? One always wants to know these things, though it can do one no good.”
“In the Blue Room.”
“The second from the end of the corridor, next but one to mine; that’s rather awfully near. Do you believe in spiritual influences? Have you ever had a revelation? Good gracious! is it really so late? Everybody seems to be going.”
“Let me get your candle,” said Leonard, eagerly, making a dash for the hall. And so ended his first evening at home with that imbecile refrain — Bé-bé-bé, repeating itself in his ears.
CHAPTER VII.
“GAI DONC; LA VOYAGEUSE, AU COUP DU PÈLERIN!”
When Mr. Tregonell came to the breakfast room next morning he found everybody alert with the stir and expectation of an agreeable day. The Trevena harriers were to meet for the first time this season, and everybody was full of that event. Christabel, Mrs. Torrington, and the St. Aubyn girls were breakfasting in their habits and hats: whips and gloves were lying about on chairs and side-tables — everybody was talking, and everybody seemed in a hurry. De Cazalet looked gorgeous in olive corduroy and Newmarket boots. Mr. St. Aubyn looked business-like in a well-worn red coat and mahogany tops, while the other men inclined to dark shooting jackets, buckskins, and Napoleons. Mr. FitzJesse, in a morning suit that savoured of the study rather than the hunting field, contemplated these Nimrods with an amused smile; but the Reverend St. Bernard beheld them not without pangs of envy. He, too, had been in Arcadia; he, too, had followed the hounds in his green Oxford days, before he joined that band of young Anglicans who he doubted not would by-and-by be as widely renowned as the heroes of the Tractarian movement.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 723
