“You did not expect him to throw himself at my feet the first afternoon?”
“I didn’t, but perhaps you did.”
“No, Flory. I knew it would be uphill work after the shabby way I treated him. But the chance of thirty thousand a year, with a man I could turn round my little finger, was worth behaving badly for. Think of the yacht, and the good times ashore, of all the fun we had, instead of pigging in a South Kensington flat with two maids. He couldn’t have afforded more then, for he wasn’t earning anything, and he was too proud to draw on his uncle. Now, of course, he is as rich as ever Fred was — that’s the irony of it. One never knows!”
XXX
MARY’S winter in Rome had been a season of repose. She had held herself aloof from all society, glad to be alone as regards the great world, and with a feeling that it might be her lot to be alone on the other side of society’s border-line for the rest of her life. Rayner had threatened her with disgrace — and she told herself that he would do the worst that an angry man could do. She had defied him without counting the cost. She had refused to be his wife, and she had to reckon with an almost savage enmity. She had but to recall the past, and the revelation of his character in the years of their companionship — his implacable hatred of the men who crossed his will, the men who opposed him when they came to the vital question of self-interest. “I have never been beaten, I have always been top dog.” She thought that he would be as implacable in his hatred of her as he had been in more than one case, when something had come between him and his purpose — when he had been found out.
And knowing the man she had to reckon with, she had to face the future, and to contemplate a loss of all that women value in the aspect of their world. She had made a host of acquaintances and a good many friends — real friends, who had valued her for her own sake — people for whom other people’s money had no attraction — who did not want to be feasted in a house that they might treat as their inn. She had won the friendship of gifted men and women, to be intimate with whom was an honour — and she had been happy in their society; indeed, for Mary Tremayne that overworked word “Society” had meant only such friendships. And she told herself that of these even the kindest would fall away from her when they heard her story, as Rayner would tell it — or rather as the women who hung upon him would repeat it at his suggestion.
So she took quiet walks on the Aventine hill, in the sound of convent bells — or in the princely Doria Gardens at dusk. And Garland, walking meekly by her side, wondered at her mistress’s curious taste for dull and lonely places, when she might have been looking at the shops in the Corso, which had a lively air when lighted that almost suggested Oxford Street.
Mary loved the lonely places, the byways of Rome, the spots that no tourist ever wanted to see, where no declamatory voice of the hired guide sounded loud and monotonous in the distance. Mary liked the places where there was nothing to see — dull streets that seemed forgotten by the life of to-day — which had drifted away to that modern city of stucco and shoddy — the new Rome beyond the Church of the Angels.
Mary walked in such solitude as she could find for herself, and the lonely places, and the spring twilights had their soothing influences, and she braced herself to meet the future and the worst cloud that John Rayner could spread about her. She had been his victim in the past and she was prepared to be his victim in the future. She had enjoyed her brief reign as a personage; she had been the fashion; and people whose friendship had been worth having had been her friends. But she was strong enough to put all that on one side, as if it were a sumptuous gown she had worn and done with, and to put on her nun’s habit, and retire to her convent cell.
After all, there was the London beyond the pale — the greater London where nothing could change — and there would be Austin, her true and loyal friend. If she had to leave the world that had been so dazzling, the world where her reign had been so short, she would not go and spend idle days at Madingley in a life of brooding and discontent — as useless as Mariana’s in her moated grange — she would establish herself in the Barking Road or at Plaistow, and Austin must plan a new life for her — full of activity and hope — work done for others, happiness contrived for others.
There must always be something to do in the world for a woman with youth and health and money. She could not afford to be idle, to renounce all forward-looking hopes.
And so the days and weeks went by, and there were summer flowers at all the street corners, and the fountains were flashing in the April sunshine, and Tiny and Julia were having what they called the time of their lives. Their Roman winter had been a succès fou, they told the lady who paid the bill. If they had not been in the best society, the “black,” a fact which they had not quite realized, they had been made much of by a set of rich Americans — the really live people, not fossils or back-numbers, but charming go-ahead matrons who boasted that they were dans le train, and whose supper parties in the Colosseum when there was a full moon filled a column in the Paris edition of The New York Herald.
“Never was there anyone as generous as you, carissima mia,” Julia exclaimed apropos of some exceptional expenditure on hospitality in which Mary herself took no share, a girl’s luncheon for instance, girls from seventeen to thirty-seven, the kind of thing that was given for “buds” in Boston. “To spend so much upon us, and for things you must despise, after being steeped for years in Uncle Conway’s learning.”
“You have been twenty times as liberal as any blood relation we ever had,” said Clementina; “but what is even more wonderful is the way Aunt Elaine has come out of her shell since we left London, and has forgotten all her dowdy ways and spent some money on her clothes; has left off talking of that sickening garden, and has been a model chaperon.”
Elaine had done her work with a will — rejoicing in seeing the Rome that Walter had so wanted her to see, though he could not afford to take her there. Elaine had taken all labour and responsibility off Mary’s shoulders and had more than earned Mary’s splendid gifts.
The Sedgwick girls accepted all that was done for them with just a little burst of gratitude after their peculiar fashion now and then. They had each been admired by men of different ideas as to beauty, and each might have married money; but such a marriage would have meant New York or Boston, not Mayfair or Park Lane, and good as it would have been in the way of clothes and jewellery it did not appeal to them.
Everything had been done to gratify them. They had hunted in the Campagna as long as the voice of a hound was to be heard there, and now the April sunshine was almost tropical, and there were no more joyous meeting: by the tomb of Caecilia Metella, the Sedgwick girls were talking of London, and the grand things that were going to be done at Warburton House in the coming season.
They told Mary that their mother wanted them at home and they really ought not to leave her any longer alone in that dismal house, to be tyrannized over by her maid and worried by a husband whose conversation at a home dinner was devoted to abusing the cook, and grumbling at the weekly bills. “To think of what I pay the butcher and that the woman can’t send up a joint that is eat able!” he repeated, until Julia would murmur in he: sister’s ear that the governor was a sickening pig!
They were not pleasant, those Eaton Square dinners and the sisters did not wonder that Austin preferred living in rooms, to the home life over which Mr. Sedgwick presided Mary saw them depart with a sigh of relief. She ha< not been much troubled by their company, since their days were delightfully filled, and it was only Aunt Elaine who found them exhausting. An hour in the drawing room in the afternoon, when the new friends whom the girls gathered from day to day were permitted to see the interesting Miss Tremayne, whose romantic history had been made familiar in New York even before it was known in London, was about all of her society that Mary had vouchsafed to her visitors. She had lived as much apart from them on the Pincian Hill as at Madingley. All they ever had wanted of her was “a good time” — and she had given them that i
n Rome as in Hampshire, without stint.
They were gone, and she sat alone among her books in the solitude of spacious rooms meant for crowds — rooms in which Princes of the Church had received their courtiers, and great noblemen had squandered their fortunes.
The solitude suited her. She was facing the future — summoning all her force of mind and will to meet the clouds that might be gathering over Warburton House.
XXXI
THE bubble had burst, and the modern South-Sea House had its season of excitement, albeit there were no seething crowds and nobody had been assassinated. Leaflets full of dark hints had lately reached the shareholders, suddenly awakened to the fear that they had been “let in.” The magnetic man had, it seemed, magnetized them to a tune that for some might mean ruin — some who had first dabbled and then plunged, and who now saw big losses in front of them.
The tide had turned, and was running with torrential force. The Rastac had his back to the wall, and the crowd confronting him was of the fiercest — gamblers who had asked no questions while he was on the crest of the wave — but who had now become suddenly voracious of information, wanting to have exact figures, strictest accountancy.
No one knew when or why doubt had begun. Dividends had been duly paid — but South America had somehow ceased to be a name to conjure with, Peru no longer represented wealth without limit. Investors had rapidly grown uncomfortable, and had wanted first to reduce their risk, and, later, to get out altogether — but had found escape no easier than it was from the Mississippi Scheme, as the shares that had risen by leaps and bounds were now dropping with a fatal regularity like water oozing out of a leaky vessel.
Argentine Jack had been washing one hand with the other, window-dressing with borrowed assets and paying dividends out of capital. But though hard pushed to answer certain home questions, he stoutly affirmed the soundness of his finance.
He had not been an impostor from the beginning. All he had told the world about his knowledge of the Great Continent was true. There was scarcely a region in that wonder-world that he had not explored, scarcely an industry that he had not weighed and measured. He knew exactly what had been done, and what still remained to be done — and had seized opportunities that few men would have seen. He had undoubted flair — and for some time his enterprises had prospered. Railways in regions where a railway had seemed impossible till he solved geographical problems by sheer audacity, rather than by science, had been accomplished with a success that had stamped him as a true pioneer; and there had been substantial profits, and dividends had surprised the shareholders, whereby the shares had risen in the market, people had begun to talk, and from that to believing that the Rastac was a kind of financial necromancer was but a step. But now all at once those awkward questions were being asked, and special meetings had been called. The parent company was still solvent, perhaps. There were, however, too many of these subordinate schemes, since Rayner had been obliged to start a new one whenever the old ones began to weaken, and his reckless methods had been discovered by certain inquisitive people more difficult to deal with than the general public, who can be caught by an attractive prospectus, and hoodwinked by the plausible statements of a fine speaker. He was a past-master in the composition of a prospectus and he could hold the average meeting spellbound. Without any taste for literature, he had acquired an inexhaustible vocabulary, and had become an adept in the black art of transmuting facts and figures into a rose-tinted cloud of rhetoric. A man with a quick brain and a strong memory can do without book-learning. It was one of Rayner’s axioms that only a fool wanted to live with his nose in a book.
“Men are my books,” he said, “men and cities.”
And now that Rayner had his back to the wall, the shareholders’ meetings in the big hotel room, at which he was chairman, were more or less stormy.
He had never been taken seriously by men of business. Only the prosperous idle who wanted to find an easy road to greater prosperity had been his dupes — the people who believe in the talk of men at their clubs, or women at their tea-parties, victims of the collective hallucination of a world in which soft words are accepted as hard facts. Only these had taken every railway and every copper mine he promoted on trust, and now some of them were asking if there had ever been anything more substantial than a prospectus in all these attractive-sounding schemes, and day after day Argentine Jack had to face the situation and answer difficult questions.
Here he had shown himself splendid. The handsome presence, the flashing eyes, the resonant voice with deep music in it, and the ready wit that met and swept away objections, and seemed to answer questions without answering them, and turned every interruption to a good account, all combined to make him a Napoleon among chairmen. But still the stormy, crowded meetings became more tempestuous, the shareholders more virulent, until one day undisguised accusations of fraud and threats of a criminal prosecution were flung at him and his dummy directors — and the once-triumphant chairman knew that the end must be flight or foregone defeat at the Old Bailey.
That was the night when Lady Cheveril saw the last of Jack Rayner, who surprised her by coming to the flat at eleven o’clock, an indiscretion of which he had never before been guilty.
“You have been very kind to me, Laura,” he said. “We have been pals, and I wouldn’t go away without a good-bye.”
“Oh, Jack, what has happened? Why are you going away, and where?”
“I am going because I have got into a tight corner, and don’t see my way out. It’s a case of no thoroughfare, Laura, nothing but to turn back and take another road.
My other road will be a berth on the Royal Mail. Goodbye, my dear girl, the only woman friend I ever had. If people say hard things about me, and make themselves disagreeable to you on my account, don’t mind. You can tell them you didn’t know I was a wrong ‘un, and that you have lost money by backing me. You haven’t really, you know — for the trinkets I’ve given you are worth a lot more than the margins you stand to lose.”
“You are not telling me the truth, Jack! There is no Royal Mail steamer till next month.”
“There are other steamers—”
“No. You are thinking of another road. I can see it in your face.”
She snatched up his left hand.
“You are still wearing that odious ring!”
“Yes, my mascot.”
“Throw it away! It has not brought you luck.”
“It did up to a point. Anyhow, I can’t part with it yet. I must go now, my dear. Hasla la vista.”
He was gone in a flash. She heard the outer door shut before she could follow him into the hall.
He was gone, and she knew somehow that he had gone out of her life for ever.
Mary, who had waited, like Damocles, in a mockery of splendour for the suspended sword to fall, heard nothing of what was going on in that mystery-land — the city. Austin came to see her occasionally; but then he did not read the financial newspapers, in which some far-from-complimentary “open letters” to Mr. John Rayner had appeared. The Engineering Supplement of The Times was more in his line, as it concerned the Yard whose interests were so dear to him. And the Labour Leader had to be studied carefully, much as it shocked his ideas of universal brotherhood, since it was the organ of a large minority of the men down there on the busy Clyde.
Mary knew nothing — even of the power of money, and Austin could scarcely have enlightened her. He did not possess the wisdom of the serpent, like his uncle. Had Field been alive he would, without doubt, have shown Mary how to defeat the enemy on his own ground — possibly by selling a big bear of the Transcontinental and so bringing down Rayner’s whole house of cards. As it was, she could only wait — helpless — as Austin told her he had once waited for the passage of an avalanche, when climbing in late September above the Trafoïerthal — wondering whether it would sweep him and his companions away or not.
Meanwhile the Sedgwick girls waited also, for the self promised festivities at Warburton H
ouse that did not materialize this season.
One afternoon, Drayson, who felt himself in disgrace for having sold the pass, came to the picture-gallery where Mary was sitting alone, to ask if she was at home.
“Not to strangers,” she answered sharply, without looking up from the book she was reading — one of Field’s priceless first-editions of a favourite author.
“It’s Mr. Bertram, ma’am,” said the butler diffidently, flushing with shame at the implied reproof. “He wants to see you most particular. So I thought—”
“Of course I’ll see him. He is one of my friends.”
“Was he, though?” she asked herself in the interval before George was shown upstairs. “Could a man ever be that when he has wanted to be something more? Austin — yes! He would always be her friend, one with whom she felt at ease and on whom she could count for perfect sympathy — unclouded by a shadow of doubt.”
Bertram came towards her without the smile one expects to find in the face of a friend. His expression was thoughtful to the verge of frowning — there was a set look about his mouth — a look of warning in his keen eyes.
“The blow has fallen,” thought Mary, bracing herself to meet it.
For a few seconds that seemed minutes neither of them spoke. Then George pulled a crumpled newspaper out of his pocket and said in a husky voice:
“Have you seen this?”
“No.”
“Thank God!” he cried with a deep sigh of relief. Evidently, then, he had not come to denounce her, but rather to save her from some danger — to protect her. And the discovery was peculiarly grateful to Mary.
“I’m not a good hand at breaking things to people — except in the witness-box,” he continued, with a forced laugh. “But it is not altogether bad news that I bear; at any rate, not to me.”
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