He passed on to the picture-gallery with the lady who had brought him and was lost in the crowd, but not before George Bertram had seen him standing face to face with Mary, and heard him tell her how long he had desired to be introduced to her. Nothing could be more conventional and commonplace; but if the speech was just like anybody else’s the man was different, and George followed him into the crowd, with a dogged purpose. How easily Mary had received this stranger, but why had her colour faded as Drayson announced these late arrivals, Lady Cheveril, Mr. Rayner.
Only the man who watched her face with the eyes of a rejected lover — angry eyes in which love still lingered — would have noted so slight a change of countenance. But the change was there — a paler look, a slight contraction of the muscles — the indication of an effort to be calm.
George had arrived only a few minutes before. He had been to more than one of Mary’s parties, and they had talked a little, and she had been kind, but there had been no chance of even a minute’s intimate conversation in the midst of that moving crowd — nor had George seemed to desire any closer contact. His mother had urged him to show himself in Warburton House. It was a duty he owed to that sweet creature who had behaved so nicely in such exceptional circumstances, and who ought to be encouraged and protected by every member of the family.
“You insult her if you keep aloof,” Mrs. Bertram told her son. So George had gone to two parties out of five — parties which he would have thought inane and boring to the last degree, if it had not been for the one thrilling moment in which he touched Mary Tremayne’s hand, and heard a few words in the soft grave voice — the voice that had been an irresistible charm in the days when he was hardening his heart against her. More than two years since he had seen her face — and the time had seemed long — very long — though it had been time closely occupied, over-occupied, a good deal of it, for since the invincible J. B. was now among the judges who had to keep stuff gowns and even silk gowns in their places, John Bertram’s son, now a K.C. himself, was wanted in every big case.
The son’s rise had been more rapid than anybody could have expected. But there is no stronger incentive to strenuous work than an unhappy love-affair, and to be disappointed in love is often the prelude to becoming successful in ambition.
George had drunk the strong wine of success, but he was no happier now than he had been when the old wounds were still aching, and life had seemed worthless because Miriam Stanhope had been false.
This second love of his was of another type, but the barrier she had set up with such a stern resolve had proved impassable. She would not trust the future.
In those long slow days of Conway Field’s gradual decline he had seen her often, but never alone. She had taken infinite pains to avoid their being left together, even for minutes, while she was in attendance upon his uncle. He had written to her after she sent him his uncle’s unfinished letter. But her answer had given no room for hope.
“You have paid me the greatest honour, I suppose, that any man can offer to any woman,” she wrote, “and I ought to be grateful. I know that when we first met you distrusted and even despised me. You thought that I was a woman with a history. You were right. I have what people call a Past, and I know that sooner or later that Past will rise up against me. I am prepared to meet it — to live it down or to bear the world’s contempt. But I could not bear the contempt of a husband I loved: and strong in that conviction I refused to marry you. You will never hear my story from my lips, and if you hear it from anyone else I shall not be there to be cast off or forgiven. One would be as bad as the other. Be my friend if you like, as Austin is — on the understanding that you can never be anything more.”
He tried to hate her after he had read this letter, written a month before his uncle’s death, and he had been trying to hate her ever since. His mind alternated between cold fits of anger and hot fits of unconquerable love.
And now to-night, seeing her in her new setting with the smart world at her feet, he told himself that he had also seen the man whose existence stood between them. This stranger with the proud bearing and off-hand manner was her Past — this was the enemy who barred his path.
He walked about the gallery, stopped often by people he knew, but passing on after a few words, being always on the lookout for the tall strong figure of the stranger. To him a stranger, but not to the party-going world, for whenever George Bertram caught sight of the man he was in a group of people — women mostly. The women clustered about him — would hardly let him go. And all had the same air of eager interest, the same questioning look in their lips and eyes.
At last, after he had been watching one of these groups for a few minutes, he ran against a man he knew — a junior who had been with him in some of his cases.
“Can you tell me anything about the man over there in front of the Albert Dürer? He ought to have done something remarkable by the way those women hang about him.”
“The women are all mad about him. That is Rayner, the celebrated Jack Rayner, who is supposed to have South America in his pocket, who can put you on the board of any company you like between Patagonia and Mexico. You must have heard of Jack Rayner, Argentine Jack, who lives in rooms in the Albany, and gives the finest parties in London at the new night club which he is supposed to be running. Rayner is the rage. The women rave about him, and every hardened Bridge-player believes he can give her a tip on the S. E. that will make her fortune. He only appeared in London last winter, and now he is the fashion. Duchesses ask him to dinner; you see, there’s something pleasant about the man. He has no side, and doesn’t flaunt his millions in your face, but just goes about quietly enjoying himself. All the women get in return for their hospitality is a dance or a concert at his club.”
One of the women who had been conspicuous in the group came across the room to talk to George Bertram.
“It is very good of you to notice me,” he told her, when they had shaken hands, “while there is metal more attractive.”
“Was,” she answered, laughing. “Mr. Rayner has taken Lady Agnes Stoke down to supper; we shan’t see any more of him to-night.”
“Davenport was telling me about him. I never heard of this Rayner, and I awake to find him famous.”
“That comes of hating your fellow-creatures, and pretending to be too busy to go to their parties,” said Lady Cheveril, who belonged to the fat, fair and forty regiment of agreeable women. “Rayner is a delightful person who goes everywhere. We all adore him. He may not be quite-quite, you know, but he is so fresh, so original, so unspoilt by his wealth, and so good-natured in putting one on to a good thing now and then. We couldn’t do without Jack Rayner. Is your mother here to-night?”
“My mother, and my two aunts and my cousins. There are too many of us. Good-night, Lady Cheveril,” and George made his escape. He had heard a good deal — if not all he wanted to hear. And he left the house, dumbly raging against fate and a woman’s obduracy.
He would have married her in spite of the past, and Jack Rayner. If she would only have told him, That is the man — he would have risked the chances of the future. He would have loved her, and held her, and faced the world with her. Why, indeed, should he fear a man who was not her husband and who could not therefore take her from him by the arm of the law?
“Not quite-quite.” No, not quite a gentleman — strongest condemnation when a man is poor — a millstone round his neck. Society shrugs its shoulders; the man is condemned, and must go out into the wilderness, with Hagar and her son, and all the other outlaws. But the same society that will have none of the briefless barrister or the struggling author who lacks its hall-mark can generally find excellent reasons for welcoming the supermillionaire. He is original, he is generous, and will give to all one’s pet charities. Who can remember when he is so obliging, that he has just the same flaws in speech and accent, manner and clothes, that made the paupers impossible? In his case the hall-mark is not looked for.
Society had accepted Jack Rayne
r. After all, there was very little wrong, just a shade too loud a manner, a touch of arrogance that sometimes offended. He never misplaced an aspirate, or outraged the laws of grammar, but his voice was too loud for the dinner-table, and he talked too much — chiefly about himself and the things he had done. So, though he interested most people, he offended others, who told the women who were running him that they would not have that rastac fellow at their houses.
“He is not a rastaquonère,” Lady Cheveril exclaimed, when this was said to her. “He is one of the Irish Rayners, and was born at Castle Rayner on the Shannon. He has lived in South America, but he has not a drop of foreign blood in his veins.”
“You are very kind in answering for him, Lady Cheveril, but if he is not a rasta he is a bounder, which is worse. I don’t know the place you mention on the Shannon and I don’t want to know your Mr. Rayner.”
This was hard upon Jack, who had never talked of Castle Rayner, and who often suffered from the too much zeal of his women friends.
He had helped them to make money, and they were always hoping that he would help them to make more, on the strength of which conviction they could not do enough for him at other people’s expense.
XXVI
MARY was at Madingley, and Elaine Hailing had gone back to her garden.
“I have missed the best of my roses,” she wrote to her managing sister, who had contrived this brilliant season in London for her. “Of course, Warburton House is splendid, and all our parties were a success, and Mary’s presents were only too generous. Indeed, she is an angel in her rather reserved way, and yet I am very glad to be in my own house, my very own, the house Walter loved. I could spend hours looking at his books on the shelves — his favourite poets — his Elizabethans that he loved to talk about and to quote — you know what his memory was. But, though I never told him so, I did not always appreciate the Elizabethans; they were such gloomy people when they were tragic, and they were so quite too shocking when they tried to be funny. I sit in his study of an evening. It is very dull after Warburton House, but one likes one’s own house best.
“I hope your girls will like being at Madingley. I know Mary will try to make it nice for them.”
Mary was trying to make Madingley nice for Clementina and Julia. To enjoy the things she liked herself — her books — her solitary walks with Zamiel and two or three other dogs, she must keep those young ladies amused. It was easy enough in brilliant August weather while tennis raged on all the lawns within reach of a car.
People who had never entered those double doors at Madingley in Conway Field’s lifetime flocked to call upon
Miss Tremayne, and Miss Tremayne generally happening to be out when they called, had found themselves graciously received and at once put on a footing of intimacy, by Mrs. Sedgwick’s girls, who explained themselves as the late Mr. Field’s favourite nieces. Clementina and Julia were therefore soon well provided with friends whose luncheons and garden-parties nearly filled the week — friends who played tennis in the morning, and croquet in the afternoon, and generally had a tournament of some kind on hand, if it were only clock golf: friends who would even initiate an excursion to Southampton to see the latest “pictures” — friends who had all manner of devices for filling life with restless movement, and for killing thought. Thus assisted, Mary was free to live her own life, and visit her favourite cottagers and be happy with her books and her dogs; if it were possible to be happy anywhere with the ever-present knowledge that Jack Rayner might at any moment come between her and peace. As he had blighted the years of girlhood, he would blight the years of womanhood, if he could, if she would let him. She told herself that she would not let him — that she was strong enough to fight for her own hand. Austin would help her, Austin, the friend to whom she owed all she had ever known of happiness. Austin would be her defender, if she asked him. But she told herself that she would ask help of no one — she would stand alone and defy this man, who had always been her enemy even when he had loved her.
Early in the London season she had heard of Jack Rayner, the millionaire from South America, and she had been not much shaken by the sound of his name when it came upon her suddenly at a luncheon party. She had always known that he would come into her life again, and it was not wonderful to hear that, after all these years, he had realized his dream of success. He had succeeded and failed over and over again, perhaps, since he left her in the Chelsea lodging-house. Nothing she heard of him surprised her. Several people had asked her to meet him, and she had refused — and two of her new friends had asked if they might bring him to Warburton House — and she had flatly refused. Then Lady Cheveril had brought him, quand même.
She had survived the shock — though she had seen a curious look in George Bertram’s eyes, half-questioning, half-reproachful, as he wished her good-night in the flower-scented hall, and she thought that some vague suspicion had come into his mind as he watched her meeting with Rayner. He had not been far off when Lady Cheveril introduced her protégé.
She walked in the woods where she had walked with George in that brief golden time when she had been so perilously near passing from friendship into love. She looked back now, and wondered if she had really loved him. She remembered the sweetness of that time — the sweetness of being worshipped by the man who in the beginning of their acquaintance had shown himself hostile to her. A contemptuous glance, a little cynical speech now and then, which others might not have noticed, had told her in those days at Venice that George Bertram despised her. How could any woman have seen his subjugation without pride, the proud humility of a woman whom the world had used ill?
She had been proud of seeing this hard man at her feet, and she had been happy in those summer days in wood and garden, when they had been close companions without one word of love — and then the storm had burst, and friendship had turned suddenly to tempestuous love.
She had been strong to resist him, but when the conflict was over she had wondered at her strength, and asked herself how she could have hardened her heart against such a lover. She told herself that it was because bitter experience had made her wise, and because she knew that with this man — so attractive — so love-compelling — she might have known a brief summer of happy wedded life, but she would not long have known peace. In that too passionate nature there would have been no security, no calm, no wise and tranquil thought that would have grasped what her life had been and how she herself stood apart from the shame of it.
If she had told George frankly what Rayner had been to her, and that for a brief season she had loved him, he might have taken the future on trust — but the scorn of a woman who had fallen would have been at the back of his mind — she would not have held him long. No, she had not really loved him, for she had never trusted him. Love would have blinded her to the flaw in his nature, the egoism, the passionate determination to win the desire of his heart in the present, heedless of what might happen afterwards.
A sudden crashing of beech boughs, a loud peal from Zamiel, and a man came springing out of the wood, leaping over that fallen oak upon which George Bertram sat painting on the placid day they parted. Summer then, summer now, and again a nerve-shattering conflict for Mary Tremayne. She had held to her purpose then, and she would hold to it now, and the battle would be easier to win — for there was no traitor in her own heart, no whisper of love, to make her waver.
She stood facing John Rayner as she would have faced her executioner, if she had been standing with her arms bound in front of the guillotine.
“One of your flunkeys told me I might find you here — your favourite walk,” he said; and then with a gay laugh: “Fancy Mary with a crowd of men-servants to open her door. By Jove! it is a bit of a change from Mrs. Baker’s lodgings, and the slavey, with her sleeves tucked up and a smut on her nose.”
“Yes, it is a change,” Mary answered quietly.
“And you take it deuced calmly. When I saw you at the head of your staircase with diamond stars in your hair
and a rope of pearls round your neck — royal pearls that an Empress might wear — when I saw you, my fairy princess of Port Jacob, a queen in a palace, the only thing that made me wonder was your sang-froid.”
Mary did not answer. She was no longer looking at the speaker, she was bending over Zamiel patting his soft curly head, while the other dogs clustered round her knees and did their best to throw her down.
“By Jove!” Rayner exclaimed, “you are a cool hand — a cool hand in Mayfair, a cool hand in this wood.”
His voice had grown louder, and Zamiel, whom her caressing hand had quieted, began to bark furiously, while the three other dogs joined in.
“Curse your unruly pack! If it were six o’clock in the morning the men out cubbing would take them for hounds in full cry.”
The stable dogs were dumb at the word of command, but Zamiel was the spoilt child and went on barking, though in a lower key. Mary called him to heel and then tried to walk past the unwelcome visitor. He caught her by the arm. She knew the grasp of the strong hand that had held her to his side on the cliff when a sudden gust swept her loosened hair across his face.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1028
