Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “So it is, Bill. Your shot.”

  “But are people sure of the story? Is there no mistake, do you think? “asked Mordaunt, missing an easy cannon.

  “Oh! people are sure enough. It isn’t one man’s word, you see. Brander met them at Ajaccio, saw her stepping into a carriage in front of the hotel, met him face to face in the coffee-room, knew by his confused manner that there was something up, questioned the manager, and found they had been living there a fortnight as Mr. and Mrs. Randall. Jack Dane saw them in Sardinia. The Willoughby Parkers came upon them in Algiers, staying at a second-rate hotel in the town, saw them sitting under a palm-tree, taking their coffee, as they drove by, and met them driving in the environs. No mistaking her — as handsome a woman as you’d see in a day’s journey; no mistaking him — a wrong ‘un, but a damn good-looking demon, with the manners of Chesterfield and the morals of Robert Macaire, the sort of man most women admire.”

  Only the wrong sort of women, I think,” said Mordaunt, resuming his cue, the soldier having spaced his sentences with cannons and losers, and made a break of twenty while he talked. “I can’t understand such a woman as Lady Perivale disgracing herself by an intrigue of that kind — least of all for such a man as Rannock Thoroughly bad style!”

  “Women don’t know bad style from good in our sex; they only know their own by the clothes.”

  “If she cared for the man, why not marry him?”

  “Not much! She is a rich woman, and doesn’t want a husband who would spend every shillin’ in two or three years.”

  “Oh! but nowadays a woman can take care of her money. The law will protect her!”

  “Not from a spendthrift that she’s fond of. And nowadays the clever women have free and easy ideas of the marriage tie. They’ve been educated up to it by novels and newspapers. Well, it isn’t a nice story, anyhow you look at it; but I thought it was friendly to call.”

  “So did I,” said Mordaunt. “But I’m afraid she’d rather not have seen us. I hope she’ll go to her place in the north, and cut the whole boiling.”

  “Not much left for her to cut, poor soul, if people have given her the cold shoulder.”

  “She can cut Mrs. Wilfred and her girls,” said Mordaunt. “I should think she’d enjoy doing it.”

  Lady Perivale drove in the park three or four afternoons a week at the fashionable hour, when carriages had to move slowly, and mounted policemen were keeping the way clear for the passing of royal personages. Some of her women friends bowed to her coldly, and she returned the salute with the same distance. The men lounging by the railings were on the alert to acknowledge a bow from her; but she had a way of not seeing them that they could hardly call offensive. The more strait-laced among the women looked at her with unrecognizing eyes; and she gave them back the same blank stare. Young, very handsome, exquisitely dressed by the. faiseuse at the top of the mode, and seated in a victoria whose every detail, from the blood horses to the men’s gloves and collars, was perfection, she drove to and fro, knowing herself under a dark cloud of undeserved disgrace. Anger was her strongest feeling. Her heart beat fast, and her cheek flushed as she drove past those treacherous women whom she had called friends. She had not cultivated sentimental friendships in the fashionable world. She had no alter ego, no bosom friend, in society. But she had liked people, and had believed they liked her; and it was difficult to think they could insult her by giving credence to such a preposterous story as some idiots had set on foot.

  She sought no society, sent out no invitations to the intimates of old, the girls who had made her little court of adorers, her Queen’s Maries, whose hats and gloves had so often figured in her milliner’s bills, since if a nice girl were assisting at her own choice of head-gear, and cast longing looks upon some sparkling vision of roses and leghorn, or ostrich feathers and spangled lace, what more natural than to insist upon buying the things for her, in spite of all protests. She had scattered such gifts with lavish hands, forgetting all about them till surprised by the total of her milliner’s bill.

  “Can I have spent so much on finery in a single season? Ah, by-the-by, I gave Kate Holloway a hat, and Emily Dashwood an ostrich fan, and Laura Vane had an ostrich boa, and a dozen long gloves. There are ever so many things I had forgotten.” And now the Lauras and Emilys and Kates had other patronesses to eke out the paternal allowance, and they went gaily down the stream with the people who thought evil of Lady Perivale.

  “We never were really intimate with her, don’t you know?” they explained, to acquaintance who had seen them in her barouche or in her opera-box three or four times a week.

  Her opera-box had been one of her chief splendours, a large box on the grand tier. Music was her delight, and except for a scratch performance of II Trovatore or La Traviata, she had seldom been absent from her place. It was at the opera that Colonel Rannock had been most remarkable in his attendance upon her. Sheliked him to be there, for it was pleasant to have the sympathy of a fine musician, whose critical faculty made him a delightful guide through the labyrinth of a Wagnerian opera. Their heads had been often seen bending over the score, he explaining, she listening as if enthralled. To the unmusical, that study of Wagner’s orchestration seemed the thinnest pretext for confidential whispers, for lips hovering too near perfumed tresses and jewelled throat.

  “No need to inquire for the Leit-motif, there,” said the men in the stalls; and it was generally supposed that Lady Perivale meant to marry Colonel Rannock, in spite of all that the world had to say against him.

  “If she hadn’t carried on desperately with him last year one might hardly believe the story,” said the people who had accepted the truth of the rumour without a moment’s hesitation.

  She occupied her opera-box this year, resplendent in satin and diamonds, radiating light on a tiara night from the circlet of stars and roses that trembled on their delicate wires as she turned her head from the stage to the auditorium. She had her visitors as of old: attachés, ambassadors even, literary men, musical men, painters, politicians. Coldly as she received them, she could not snub them, she could not keep them at bay altogether; and, after all, she had no grudge against the foreigners, and her box scintillated with stars on a gala night. It pleased her to face her detractors in that public arena, conspicuous by her beauty and her jewels.

  There were waverers who would have liked to go to laugh off the story of her infamy; but the fiat had gone forth, and she was taboo. The bellwether had scrambled up the bank and passed through the gap in the hedge, and all the other sheep must follow in that leading animal’s steps. Life is too short for individual choice in a case of this king.

  She had half a mind to go to the May Drawing-room, and had no fear of repulse from Court officials, who are ever slow to condemn; but, on reflection, she decided against that act of self-assertion. She would not seem to appeal against the sentence that had been pronounced against her by confronting her traducers before the face of royalty. The card for the Marlborough House garden-party came in due course, but she made an excuse for being absent. She would not hazard an appearance which might cause annoyance to the Princess, who would perhaps have been told afterwards that Lady Perivale ought not to have been asked, and that it was an act of insolence in such a person to have written her name in the sacred book when she came to London.

  But June had not come yet, and the royal garden-party was still a thing of the future.

  As yet Lady Perivale had taken no trouble to discover how the slanderous story had been circulated, or who the people were who pretended to have met her. She could not bring herself to search out the details of a scandal that so outraged all her feelings — her pride, her self-respect, her belief in friendship and human kindness.

  She had made no attempt to justify herself. She had accepted the situation in a spirit of dogged resentment, and she faced her little world with head erect, and eyes that gave scorn for scorn, and the only sign of feeling was the fever spot that burnt on her cheek sometimes, when she
passed the friends of last year.

  She had been living in Grosvenor Square more than a month, and her drawing-room windows were wide open on a balcony full of May flowers, when the butler announced —

  “Lady Morningside,” and a stout, comfortable-looking matron, in a grey satin pelisse and an early Victorian bonnet, rolled in upon her solitude.

  “My dear, I am so glad to find you at home and alone,” said Lady Morningside, shaking hands in her hearty fashion, and seating herself in a capacious grandfather chair. “I have come for days ago. I have been at Wiesbaden about these wretched eyes of mine. He can’t do much”, name understand “but he does something, and that keeps my spirits up”.

  “I am so sorry you have been suffering.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t very bad. An excuse for being away”.

  “You have been at Wiesbaden, Marchioness? Then you haven’t heard — —”

  “What? How handsome you are lookin’. But a little too pale.”

  “You haven’t heard that I am shunned like an influenza patient, on account of a miserable slander that I am utterly unable to focus or to refute”.

  “Don’t say that, dear Lady Perivale. You will have to refute the scandal, and show these people that they were fools to swallow it. Yes, I have heard the story — insisted upon as if it were gospel truth; and I don’t believe a word of it. The man was seen, I dare say, and there was a woman with him; but the woman wasn’t you.”

  “Not unless a woman could be in Italy and Algiers at the same time, Lady Morningside. I was living from November to April at my villa in the olive woods above Porto Maurizio.”

  “And you had English visitors comin’ and goin’, no doubt?”

  “Not a living creature from England. I use up all my vitality in a London season, and I go to Italy to be alone with my spirit friends, the choicest, the dearest — Mozart, Mendelssohn, Shakespeare, Browning. I think one can hardly feel Browning’s poetry out of Italy.”

  “That’s a pity. I don’t mean about Browning, though I do take half a page of his rigmarole sometimes with my early cup of tea, my only time for reading — but it’s a pity that you hadn’t some gossiping visitor, who could go about tellin’ everybody they were with you in Italy.”

  “I have my old servants, who travelled with me, and never had me, out of their sight.”

  “Very useful if you wanted their evidence in a court of law but you can’t send them to fight your battle at tea-parties, as you could any woman friend — that clever Susan Rodney, for instance. You and she are such pals! Why wasn’t she with you part of the time?”

  “She cannot leave her pupils.

  “Poor creature! Well, it’s a hard case.”

  “It is less hard since I know there’s one great lady who believes in me,” said Grace, holding out her hand to the Marchioness in a gush of gratitude.

  “My dear, I never believe any scandal — even against a woman I detest, and when I want to believe it — until I have had mathematical proof of it. And I don’t believe this of you even if twenty people are going about London who swore they met you honeymooning with that wretch.

  “Twenty people! Oh, Lady Morningside! Susan Rodney spoke of three or four.”

  “That was some time ago, perhaps. There are at least twenty now who declare they saw you — saw you — in Algiers — Sardinia — on board the Messageries steamer — Lord knows where. And they all swear that they thought you one of the nicest women in London — only they can’t go on knowing you, on account of their daughters — their daughters, who read Zola, and Anatole France, and Gabriele d’Annunzio, and talk about’em to the men who take them in to dinner, and borrow money of their dressmakers? I have only one daughter, and I’m never afraid of shocking her. She has worked for a year in an East-end hospital, and she knows twice as much about human wickedness as I do.”

  “And you don’t believe a word of this story, Marchioness?”

  “Not a syllable. But I know that Rannock is the kind of man my husband calls a bad egg; and I think you were not very wise in having him about you so much last season.”

  “You see, he wanted to marry me — for the sake of my money, no doubt — they are so much and I refused him three times — and he took my refusal so nicely — —”

  “One of the worst-tempered men in London?”

  “And said, ‘Since we are not to be lovers, let us at least be pals.’ And the man is clever — likes the books I like, and the music I like, and plays the ‘cello wonderfully, for an amateur.”

  “Oh, I know the wretch is clever. A fine manner, the well-born Scotchman, polished on the Continent, what women call a magnetic man.”

  “I liked him, and thought people were hard upon him — and I had been warned that he was dangerous”.

  “Oh, that was enough! To tell a young woman that a man is a villain is the surest way to awaken her interest in him. It is only at my age that one comes to understand that the man everybody abuses is no better than the common herd”.

  “And I let him come and go in quite an easy way, as if he had been a cousin, and we played concertante duets sometimes, in wet weather.”

  “And people found him here, and saw him with you out-of-doors, and they were talking about you last season, though you didn’t know it. You are too handsome and too rich to escape. The women envy you your looks; the men envy you your income.”

  “You are not to suppose I ever cared about Colonel Rannock. I liked his playing, and his conversation amused me — and the more people told me that the Rannocks were unprincipled and disreputable, the more determined I was to be civil to him. One gets so tired of the good people who have never done wrong; and one doesn’t take much account of a man’s morals when he’s only an acquaintance.”

  “That’s just what my daughter would say. Goodness and badness with her are only differences in the measurement of the cerebrum. She’d consort with an escaped murderer if she thought him clever. Well, my dear child, you must come to my ball on the fifteenth of June. I am told it will be the event of the season, though there’s to be no ruinous fancy-dress nonsense, not even powdered heads, only a white frock and all your diamonds. I am asking everybody to wear white, and I shall have a mass of vivid colour in the decorations, banks of gloxinias, every shade of purple and crimson, and orange-coloured Chinese lanterns, like that picture of Sargent’s that we once raved about. You will all look like sylphs.”

  “Dear Marchioness, it will be a delicious ball. I know how you do things. But I can cross no one’s threshold till my character is cleared. My character! Good Heavens, that I should live to talk of my character, like a housemaid!”

  “Won’t you come — in a white frock — and all your diamonds? They would cringe to you. I know what they are — the silly sheep! You see, they are good enough to call me a leader, and when they see you at my party, and Morningside walking about with you, they’ll know what fools they’ve been.”

  “Dear Marchioness, you have a heart of gold! But I must right myself. I must do it off my own bat, as the men say.”

  “You’re a pig-headed puss! Perhaps you’ll think better of it between now and the fifteenth — nearly a month. I want to have all the pretty people. And you are a prime favourite of my husband’s. If duelling weren’t out of date I should fear for his life. I’m sure he’d be for shootin’ somebody on your account.”

  We are weak mortals, when we are civilized, and live in the best society, and that visit of Lady Morningside’s, that hearty kindness from a motherly woman who had fashion and influence, exercised a soothing and a stimulating effect on Grace Perivale.

  “I am a fool to sit quiet under such an atrocious calumny,” she thought. “There must be some way of letting the world know that I was spending my winter alone in my Italian villa, while some short-sighted fools thought they saw me in Africa. It ought not to be difficult. I must get some one to help me, somebody who knows the world. Oh, how I wish I could go to law with somebody!”

  That word “law
” reminded her of the man whose wisdom Sir Hector had believed infallible, and whose advice he had taken in all business matters, the management of his estate, the form of his new investments. Mr. Harding, the old family lawyer, was Hector’s idea of incarnate caution, “a long-headed fellow,” the essence of truth and honesty, and as rich as Crœsus.

  “Why didn’t I think of him before?” Lady Perivale wondered. “Of course he is the proper person to help me.”

  She sent a groom with a note to Mr. Harding’s office in Bedford Row, begging him to call upon her before he went home; but it was past five o’clock when the man arrived at the office, and Mr. Harding had left at four.

  He had a sumptuous modern Queen Anne house at Beckenham, moved in the best — Becken ham and Bickley — society, and amused himself by the cultivation of orchids, in a mild way. He did not affect specimens that cost £200 a piece and required a gardener to sit up all night with them. He talked of his orchids deprecatingly as poor things, which he chose for their prettiness, not for their rarity. He liked to potter about from hothouse to hothouse, in the long summer afternoons, and to feel that out of parchment and foolscap and ferret he had created this suburban paradise.

  Lady Perivale had a telegram from him before eleven o’clock next morning.

  “I shall do myself the pleasure of calling at 4.30. Impossible earlier. — JOSEPH HARDING.”

  There was another Harding, a younger brother, in the firm, and a certain Peterson, who had his own clients, and his own walk in life, which took him mostly to Basinghall Street; but Joseph Harding was the man of weight, family solicitor and conveyancer, learned in the laws of real property, the oracle whom landed proprietors and titled personages consulted.

  CHAPTER V.

  “For thee I’ll lock up all the gates of love,

  And on my eyelids shall conjecture hang,

  To turn all beauty into thoughts of harm,

  And never shall it more be gracious.

  O, she is fallen