Lady Perivale sent for the owner’s agent, and bought land and villa as easily as she would have bought a bonnet. The agent saw her childlike eagerness for a new toy, and only asked twice as much as the reserve price.
“It is a place that can be made anything in the hands of an owner of taste and means,” he said; “and if you find the land a burden you can always let it on the métairie system.”
“But I mean to keep the land, and employ people — to have my own olive woods, my own oranges and lemons.”
She smiled, remembering a. nursery game of her childhood. Oranges and lemons! Never had she thought to see them growing on sunlit heights, sloping upward from a sapphire sea, to that dark line where the olives cease and the pines begin, darker and darker, till they touch the rugged edge of far-off snow-peaks.
It was three years before Lady Perivale went back to the world in which everybody’s business — barring the few who live for politics or philanthropy — is to cram the utmost amusement into the shortest space of time. The briefer the season the faster the pace. Three balls a night. Mrs. A.’s concert jostling with Mrs. B.’s private theatricals, and both of them crushed under the Juggernaut car of her Grace’s fancy ball. The longer the invitation the worse chance of a dull party: for those duchesses and marchionesses can spring a great entertainment on the town at a fortnight’s notice, and empty meaner people’s dancing-rooms, and leave the Coldstreams or the Hungarians fiddling to twenty couples in a house where there is breathing space everywhere.
Lady Perivale felt as if she were awaking from a long dream of beautiful places and tranquil hours, awaking in the din and riot of a crowded fair. But she opened her own little booth with a proper dignity. She was almost glad to see old faces, and to be made a prodigious fuss about.
She was the rage in that season of her return. There was hardly a bachelor in town who did not want to marry her, though many were too wise to pursue the charming prey. Her girl-friends who had married, and her girl-friends who were still single, flocked round her, and her house was the rendezvous of all the pretty people in London. Her dinners, her luncheons, her little musical afternoons — a single artist, perhaps, or at most two, and a room only half full — but, most of all, her suppers after the play or the opera were the top of the mode.
“She spends her money on the things that are best worth having,” Mr. Howard said of her, “and that alone is genius. She breakfasts on an egg, and dines on a cutlet, but she has taken the trouble to secure an incomparable cook, and she gives him carte blanche. She drinks nothing stronger than salutaris, but she lets me order her wine, and gives me a free hand, as she does Herr Ganz when he organizes her concerts. Such a woman knows how to live.”
It was in this year of her return to the world of pleasure, when all things seemed more dazzling by contrast, that she made the acquaintance of two men whom she had not known during her married life. One was Arthur Haldane, a man of letters, who had leapt at once into renown by the success of a first novel — a work of fire and flame, which had startled the novel-reading world, and surprised even the critics, in an age when all stories have been told, and when genius means an original mind dealing with old familiar things. Since that success Mr. Haldane had devoted himself to more solid and serious works, and he was now a personage in the literary world. The other was Colonel Rannock, a Scotchman of old family, grandson of the Earl of Kirkmichael, and late of the Lanarkshire regiment, the man who was destined to bring trouble into Grace Perivale’s smooth and prosperous life. He was a reprobate, a man who had long been banished from the holy of holies in the temple of society, but who contrived to whirl in the vortex, nevertheless, by the indulgence of old friends and allies of his house, who would not cast him off utterly so long as he was only suspected and had never been found out. He was known to have ruined other men, callow subalterns who had admired and trusted him; he was known to have lived in the company of vicious women, to have said to evil, “Be thou my good”; and he was even suspected of having cheated at Captain Rook who keeps company with pigeons.
But against all this there was the man’s personal charm — that subtle, indescribable charm of a high-bred Scotchman who has lived in the best Continental society, and is also a cosmopolitan.
“A charm that no woman could resist.” That was what men who knew him well said of him.
It was this man that in an evil hour Grace Perivale admitted to her friendship. She had not known him a week before she had been lectured about him, assured solemnly that he ought not; her threshold. Her friendly mentor Mr. Howard, was the most importunate.
“I am old enough to be your father, Lady Perivale,” he began; but she stopped him with a laugh.
“If you say that I know something horrid is coming; though my dear father never said a disagreeable thing to me in his life.”
“Ah, but you were safe then — a little boat chained to a pier — and now you are a fast sailing schooner racing through unknown waters. I know the chart, and where there are shoals. You must not let Colonel Rannock visit you.”
“Why he, too, is old enough to be my father.”
“No; I am ten years older than he, and thirty years more trustworthy.”
“I don’t care about the trustworthiness of a casual acquaintance.”
“Rannock will not remain your casual acquaintance. He will make himself your friend, whether you like it or not, unless you put him in his place at once, or, in plain words, tell your butler you are never to be at home to him.”
“I am not going to shut my door against the most amusing man I have met for a long time.”
“Ah, that is how he begins. He amuses. It is the thin end of the wedge. Then he interests — then — and then —— But I need not pursue the subject. He will never reach those later stages. You will find him out before then. But in the mean time he — —”
“Why do you stop short like that?”
Howard had been nearly saying, “He will compromise you,” but would not for worlds have made an insulting suggestion to a woman he so thoroughly believed in.
“Come, my dear Mr. Howard, you must credit me with some knowledge of human nature, and believe that if I find Colonel Rannock unworthy of my acquaintances, I shall know how to dismiss him. I want to be amused. I have had two great sorrows in my life — the loss of a father I adored, and of the best of husbands. Perhaps you don’t know how sad life is when one is always looking back.”
“Do I not? I, who have lived nearly half a century!”
“Ah, no doubt you too have your griefs. But you are a sportsman and an explorer, a politician and a philanthropist. You have so many ways of forgetting. I have only a woman’s distractions, dawdling about the Continent, or steeping myself in London gaieties.”
Mr. Howard did not pursue the argument, and he never recurred to it. He was too proud a man to hazard a second repulse. If she made so light of his counsel she should be troubled with no more of it. He admired and esteemed her, and there may have been some touch of deeper feeling, which, at his sober age, he would scarcely confess to himself, though Lafontaine’s sad question often found an echo in his breast—”Ai-je passé le temps d’aimer?”
Lady Perivale lived in a crowd all that season, but Colonel Rannock was a prominent figure in the crowd, and people were kinder to him than they had been, on her account. It was thought that she would marry him, and he would shine forth rehabilitated, rich, and a power in society; and the clever, pushing, second-rate people who had cut him last season began to think they had been precipitate and ill-advised. The end of the season came in a moment, as it seemed, after Goodwood. Everybody was going or gone, and the Park was a Sahara sprinkled with nursemaids and perambulators. Lady Perivale made up her house-party for her Border Castle, but Colonel Rannock was not of the party. She let him haunt her footsteps in London, but she would not admit him to the intimacy of a houseguest. So much evil had George Howard’s warning done him. He tried hard for an invitation, and was irritated at failing.
“They were my husband’s friends, and I am very glad for them to shoot his birds, Poor Hector! I always think of the birds and the moor as his still — the cruel moor that cost him his life.”
Her eyes clouded as she spoke of her husband. Commonplace and kindly, a homely figure in the drama of life, he had been her first and only lover, her faithful and devoted husband, and, after three years of mourning, regret was not lessened. Colonel Rannock talked again of her house-party. He was going to Iceland to shoot things, and to live under canvas in unconceivable roughness and discomfort. He spoke with bitterness of a joyless holiday, and then, as if on the impulse of the moment, confessed his passion, his jealous rage at the thought of her surrounded by other men, and asked her to be his wife.
This was his first throw of. the dice. She rejected him with a kindly firmness which she thought would settle the question for ever. He promised that it should be so. He would be content to know himself her friend, and so he went off to Iceland without further murmuring.
History repeated itself next season, when people were beginning to wonder why she did not marry him — nay, even to say that she ought to marry him. Mr. Howard was in China, on a diplomatic mission, so there was no prophet in Israel to warn her of coming evil. In this year Colonel Rannock offered himself to her twice, and was twice refused; but even after the third disappointment, he declared himself still her friend, and the concertante duets, and the dinners and suppers, at which he was her most brilliant talker, went on. And people said, “Dear Lady Perivale is so very unconventional.”
CHAPTER IV.
“Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed:
Drink deep, until the habits of the slave,
The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite
And slander, die. Better not be at all
Than not be noble.”
SUSAN RODNEY and her friend dined téte-â-téte in a solemn splendour of butler and silk-stockinged footmen, and talked of music and the Opera. They spent the evening in Lady Perivale’s sitting-room on the second floor, a delightful room, with three windows on a level with the tree tops in the square, and containing all her favourite books, her favourite etchings, her favourite piano, and her marron poodle’s favourite easy-chair. The poodle was the choicest thing in ornamental dogs, beautiful exceedingly, with silken hair of the delicatest brown, and a face like a Lord Chief Justice, beautiful, but cold hearted, accepting love, but hardly reciprocating, thinking nothing the world holds too good for him. Susan Rodney called him marron glacé.
Lady Perivale glanced at the drawing-rooms, and turned away with a faint shiver. Their spacious emptiness glittered with a pale brilliancy in the electric light.
“We shall be cosier in my den, Sue,” she said; and they went upstairs together, and seated themselves in low, luxurious chairs, by tables loaded with roses and lilies of the valley.
A wood fire flamed and crackled on the amber-tiled hearth, and the varied colouring of exquisitely bound books, the brightness of rosebud chintz, and satin pillows heaped on low sofas, gave an air of life and cheerfulness which was wanting in the sumptuous spaciousness below.
“Why, what has happened to your photographs?” cried Sue, looking round the room, where one attractive feature had been a collection of panel, promenade, and other portraits of handsome and fashionable women, in court gowns, in ball gowns, in tea gowns, in riding habits, in fancy dress, nay, even in bathing dress, at Trouville or Dieppe, each in the costume the sitter thought most becoming — photographs framed in silver, in gold, in tortoiseshell, in ivory, in brocade, in Dresden china, in every kind of frame that ingenious manufacturers devise for people with expensive tastes. They had filled a long shelf at the top of the dado. They had been stuck up in every available corner, when Sue was last in the room; and, behold, there was not one of them left!
“Oh, I put the horrid things away,” Grace said impatiently; “I wonder I didn’t burn them. Who would wish to be surrounded by lying smiles — false friends?”
Sue said nothing; and even here, within four walls, the conversation was still about impersonal matters, the books the friends had read in the last half-year — a subject which both were fond of discussing — the authors they loved, the authors they hated, the successes they wondered at.
After an hour’s talk Miss Rodney persuaded her friend to sing, but Lady Perivale was not in voice. She sang “There was a King in Thule” with less than her usual power, and then played desultory bits of Schumann and Schubert, while Sue turned over a pile of new magazines.
They parted without any allusion to the scandal, except that angry remark about the photographs.
Good night, dear; it has been so sweet to spend a quiet evening with you.”
“Come again very soon, Sue. Come to luncheon or dinner, whenever you can spare an hour or two.”
The week wore itself out. Lady Perivale received plenty of letters, but they were almost all of them appeals to her purse — programmes of concerts, applications from hospitals, tradesmen’s circulars; not a single letter or card of invitation from anybody of mark.
She was not without visitors on Wednesday afternoon; but they made a vastly different appearance in her drawing-rooms to her visitors of last year, and there were no yellow barouches and French victorias waiting in the square. A gushing widow with two rather tawdry daughters, whom she had met only at charity bazaars and an occasional omnium gatherum, and had severely kept at a distance, came sailing and simpering in, followed by two bushy fringes, pert retroussé noses, and suspiciously rosy lips, under picture hats of a cheap smartness, scintillating with mock diamonds.
“Dear Lady Perivale, I know you are at home on Wednesday, so I thought I would take my courage in my two hands, and call on you, in the hope of interesting you in the bazaar at the Riding School. The cause is such a good one — providing bicycles for daily governesses of small means. I think you know my girls, Flora and Nora?”
Grace was coldly civil. She promised to think about the bicycles, and she began to pour out tea, which had just been brought in.
“My girls” composed themselves upon low chairs, whisking the rose-coloured flounces under their pale-green frocks into due prominence, unconscious of a slightly draggled effect in skirts that had done church parade on three Sundays. They scanned the spacious drawing-rooms with eyes accustomed to the band-box limitations of a fiat in West Kensington, where, if a sudden gust blew, one could shut the window with one hand, and the door with the other.
How vast and splendid the rooms were, and yet Lady Perivale was only a country parson’s daughter! They appraised her beauty, and wondered at her good luck. They took in every detail of her pale lavender frock — softest silk, tucked, and frilled, and ruched, and pleated, by a fashionable dressmaker, until, by sheer needlework, twenty yards of China silk were made to look worth forty guineas. There was more work in that little visiting-gown than in six of Nora’s flocks, although the spent most of her morning hours at her sewing machine.
“How delicious it must be to be so rich,” thought Flora. “And what can a trumpery Grosvenor Square and powdered footmen? It’s ridiculous of mother to be ‘poor thing-ing’ her.”
“Flora and Nora are helping Lady de Green at the tea-stall,” Mrs. Wilfred explained. “They mean to have a quite original tea, don’t you know; Japanese cups and saucers, and tiny brown and white sandwiches.”
“Nora has a German friend who can make thirty kinds of sandwiches,” said Flora. “I believe sandwich cutting ranks before Wagner’s music as an accomplishment in Berlin.”
Three young men straggled in while the tea was circulating. They were men whom L
ady Perivale knew very well, but they were not in the best set, not the men with highly placed mothers and sisters, whose presence gives a cachet. She thought them a shade too empressé in their satisfaction at her return to town. They hoped she was going to give some of her delightful parties, and that she was not going to waste time before she sent out her cards.
“The season is so short nowadays. Everybody rushes off to some German cure before July is half over,” said Mr. Mordaunt, a clerk at the Admiralty.
Nobody asked Lady Perivale where she had spent the winter. She hated them for their reticence, hated them for finding her in the emptiness of her three drawing-rooms, with only that detestable Mrs. Wilfred, and still more hateful Flora and Nora. It was so much worse than being quite alone. But she had sworn to herself to stay in Grosvenor Square, and could not deny herself to detrimentals. Nobody stopped long. Mrs. Wilfred did not feel her visit a success, and the men saw that Lady Perivale was bored.
Captain Marduke, of the Blues, outstayed the others and put on a certain familiarity of tone. It was the faintest shade of difference, but Lady Perivale was aware of it, and froze him out in five minutes by her distant manner.
He met Mordaunt at his club before dinner.
“Wasn’t it awful in Grosvenor Square, Tommy?” said his friend.
“Ghastly. Don’t you think she was a fool to show herself in London after her escapade?”
returned Marduke, who had been christened Reginald Stuart Ponsonby, and was Tommy to his friends and the Society papers.
“I can’t understand it,” said Mordaunt, chalking his cue slowly, and looking at the tip with a puzzled expression, as if the mystery were there. “Such a good woman I always thought her. The very last, don’t you know, to pitch her cap over the mill. And the way she looked at us this afternoon, through and through, with such proud, steady eyes! It’s damn perplexing.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 986
