by George Moore
“If you see Mr. Seymour,” she asked a young man, an admirer who aspired to Lewis’s succession, “will you tell him I’d like to speak to him?”
“Certainly, Mrs. Bentham”; and he told her that he had seen Lewis in the supper-room.
Lucy answered that she had just come up from the supper-room, and Lewis was not there; but the young man assured her that he was, and thinking that perhaps he had gone down to supper while she had been speaking to Lord William in the card-room, she said: “Thank you; if you see him, tell him I want to speak to him.”
“But may I not go down to the supper-room and fetch him for you?” and once more she descended the staircase, now full of light dresses and black coats passing up and down, looking at themselves in the great mirror as they passed.
At the bottom of the staircase was a tessellated pavement with high pillars that supported the gallery overhead, and as she passed across this hall the sounds of music died away amid the clatter of supper in a long room wainscoted as high as the doors in oak, with pilasters dividing the walls, and dark-green velvet curtains hanging from massive gold cornices.
“The feast of the chaperons,” Lucy heard somebody say, and the phrase would have amused her at any other time, for everywhere she caught sight of lumpy shoulders, and the young men in attendance on these called to the servants for pâté de foie gras, salmis de pleuvier doré, ham, cutlets, cream and jelly. A young man asked Lucy if he could get her anything, and she asked if he had seen Mr. Seymour. “A friend of mine, Lady Ascot, is most anxious to meet him. Do try to find him for me.”
The young man returned without news of Lewis, and Lucy returned to the ballroom with a great number of dancers, who began to form themselves into quadrilles. And Lucy watched them dancing, the fumes of champagne in their heads, the different couples coming and going in a confusion of bright stuffs. And the rhythm, having mixed the colours, brought back on certain notes the same rose satin skirt, the same blue velvet bodice, next to the same black coats. Then, like a shower of fireworks, they all disappeared up the room, and so on hour after hour.
A melancholy gaiety, it all seemed to her — dancers and card-players; and leaving the card-players she walked round the gallery encircling the head of the stairs, thinking of the bedrooms which were reached by two small staircases united by a long passage.
“Surely they cannot be sitting up there alone! She wouldn’t be mad enough to hide behind this curtain.” And she drew aside the curtain. Nobody was on the staircase. She ascended the stairs and stopped for a moment, puzzled, passed along the passage by her room, from whence came a faint odour of verveine, and prepared to descend to the ballroom by the other. But on the sound of voices she stopped again, and descending a few steps, looked over the banisters and saw Lewis sitting with Helen.
The temptation to eavesdropping was overpowering, and she gave an anxious ear to the broken murmur of talk that reached her — without, however, being able to divine the words.
“Will he kiss her?” she asked herself; and a moment after she saw Lewis kiss Helen on the point of her shoulder, and the sight smote her with such violence that, stifling a cry, she stole away to her room. As she stood there dazed, the thought struck her that the kiss that she had witnessed might he but a prelude to an act that would divide her from Lewis irreparably. “He will marry her,” she said, and hastened to the staircase, hoping that she might not arrive too late; but the lovers were gone, and she lingered at the head of the stairs, asking herself if they had gone away to dance and would return. As it seemed to her not unlikely that they would return to kiss again, she sat on the top stair waiting for them, her brain becoming gradually benumbed with music. Waltz upon waltz, polka upon polka, a false gaiety that burdened her brain till she could bear it no longer, and she returned to her room, her mind filled with broken thoughts. “I’m done for, I’m done for!” she repeated again and again, till she was weary of the words, and looked around her room in search of some means whereby she might end her life. But there was no poison on her dressing-table, nor even an opiate; and she lay awake hour after hour crazed with grief — or was it jealousy? She did not know, and she cared not — nothing mattered to her now; and the words that came up again and again in her mind were: “My life is ended, my life is ended; I’m done for!” And then she remembered that other men had made love to her. That very evening a man had told her that she was a delectable morsel. She turned from the remembrance with mingled anger and disgust, and with the knowledge that she would not find forgetfulness of Lewis in another man’s arms. The thought of revenge passed quickly. She did not wish to revenge herself upon him. “Moreover,” she said to herself, “even if he knew that I’d gone over to another, he might not care.”
“He must never know!” she wailed out, and prayed for strength not to speak of Helen when he called. “He will be sure to call about tea time and she feared the interview so much that the reality, when it appeared, seemed trivial compared with the anticipation. He mentioned that she looked tired, and she answered that every woman is tired after her ball. She noticed that he did not dare to congratulate her on the success of her ball, and seemed glad to hear that she was going away to Claremont House for rest.
“Good-bye, Lewis.”
“Good-bye, Lucy; but I shall see you in a few days,” he answered.
And she left him, wondering at his perfidy; leaving him to return to the Vale, to wonder at his good fortune. He was now free!
CHAP. XXIX.
SHE DID NOT speak to Lewis about the kiss she had seen him exchange with Helen on the staircase, when he called at Carlton House Terrace, and she did not ask him to come to Claremont House, but just mentioned that she was going to the country for some days.
He received this welcome piece of news with an unmoved countenance, and hoping to see her when she returned, left her congratulating himself on his good-fortune, for he was free to spend whole days with Helen — only his painting interfered with his love-making; and one day, unable to endure his sitters, he put them off on the ground of ill health, and went away with Helen on a coaching excursion to Dorking. They were never alone, it is true, but they had enjoyed together a long day of twelve hours of sunshine, from ten till ten; and feeling that she deserved reproaches for her contumacy, she fled upstairs to her room. Very soon, however, the expected inquiry came. Did her ladyship require any dinner? The answer she gave the servant was that she did not need dinner; a cup of chocolate was all she required; might she have one brought up to her room? The maid retired, and returned with the message that his lordship and her ladyship would be glad if Lady Helen would come to the drawing-room.
“I shall be asked with whom I have been spending the day,” she said to herself as she arranged her hair, “but there must he no more wrangles on this subject or any other concerning me,” she added as she turned the handle of the dining-room door.
“Will you be kind enough to tell us where you have spent the day?” the inquiry began; and she answered her father that she had expected that question, and that it had been put to her many times before, and that she had come to think that she had already made it sufficiently plain that she intended to live her life in her own fashion. And at this declaration her father asked if she would be kind enough to give them some idea as to the measure of the nonconformity they might expect to have to endure — was not even the dinner hour to he respected? And he turned to his wife, and Lady Granderville interposed with some plaintive admonitions that Helen would be sorry sooner or later for her conduct, which not only would do much harm to herself, but would also prejudice her father in the eyes of Her Majesty, the lady to whom all transgressions of the kind were abhorrent, and whose life was blameless.
Lord Granderville asked his daughter if she proposed to marry Mr. Seymour, and she answered wearily that she did not know, and begged her parents to forego the discussion, at least till to-morrow morning, for she was very tired.
“My chocolate is getting cold,” she said, passing out of
the room quickly to avoid further discussion. “But it isn’t quite cold,” she said, when she got upstairs. “I shall enjoy it more when I get out of my stays and into a tea-gown. How beautiful London is in the twilight,” she said, and in the summer dusk she sat sipping her chocolate, thinking of the delightful day she had spent with Lewis on the coach and strolling with him along the hillside in front of the great expanse of country, talking of things that she had always wished to talk about: about Rossetti in principal; his poetry and his pictures both interested her, both had been an influence in her life for many years, but nobody she had met knew anything about Rossetti or wished to see his pictures or to read him. Lewis was the first man she had met who knew Rossetti’s pictures and could talk about them, and trying to reknit herself to her recollections of him and the many vital things he had said, she lamented that her father and mother had ordered her to come down to the drawing-room for reproval. If there must needs be another wrangle it would have been better to have chosen another moment. She could have listened to her father more respectfully after breakfast; on the top of her happiness she could not. Her father had spoilt everything; after that scene she couldn’t pick up the thread of her memories. “Happiness is but a cobweb,” she said, “an angry hand destroys it in a moment,” and pouring out what remained in the jug, she drank it and began to undress, hoping that as she lay between sleeping and waking she would be able to disassociate herself from the house she was in. She regretted the Vale. If she had spent the night out, her father could not have said more than he did, and she began to think that the question whether her life belonged to herself or to her father and mother would have to be settled. The sooner this question was settled, the better for all of them. For ten years she had lived in different countries, speaking to people with whom she had not a thought in common, striving to entertain them for her father’s benefit. All he thought of was his chances of going to Paris as an Ambassador. She would like to live in Paris, but not in an embassy. Of embassies she had had enough and more than enough. “Disgraced,” she cried out, “because I have been out coaching with Lewis Seymour! To go out with a man alone is disgrace, in my father’s eyes, and in mother’s — I don’t know that mother troubles much. Whereas to my mind it is disgraceful to accept any opinions but one’s own.” She slept lightly, and awoke thinking that she was married to different men. In one dream it was a Russian, in another it was a German, and in every case she was glad to find she bad only been dreaming: she was still free; that last calamity, marriage, had not befallen her — to be married to somebody whose life she would have to adopt was what she dreaded. She dozed once more, and from this doze the thought awoke her that she had been a virgin long enough. “How silly it all is!” she cried, sitting up in bed.... And how incomplete! Now, why? For the first time she felt like a fool, and when the summer dawn divided the window-curtains, she cried out in bitter rage: “Ten years of my life have been wasted, but every hour of it henceforth shall be employed upon myself, upon myself alone; enough of my life has been given to others.” She dozed again, awaking before the servant’s footsteps were heard on the stairs. “My life in this house has ended”; and slipping out of her bed she went to her writing-table and wrote a note to her father, saying that she was leaving London for a few days and would write to him again about her intentions. She wasn’t quite sure but her next letter might contain an announcement of her marriage. This done, she began to pack a small trunk, something that she thought she could carry downstairs, throwing into it the barest necessaries: some diaphanous chemises and nightgowns, drawers and fine laces; the soft things she needed — silk stockings and delicate shoes. “For we shall not do much tramping about the country,” she said to herself, gathering some phials, enamel boxes, and brushes from her dressing-table. “I can only take with me one complete change in this trunk! A second hat seems inevitable “; and a scarf of singularly delicate material embroidered with a rare pattern struck her as something that Lewis might like to paint. “But how shall I manage? This small trunk I can carry down myself, but the bandbox and dressing-case? It will be better to wait until the servants are about. The first is the kitchenmaid; she will help me. Now I must finish dressing. But my bath?” She passed her arms into a wrapper and returned to her room five minutes after, for it was now close on seven o’clock, and the servants would be about very soon.
“The best thing will be to go away about eight o’clock, leaving messages with the butler and footman just as if my departure had been arranged for. There will be less talk than if I were to sneak out of the house without saying a word....”
The footsteps she heard were the kitchenmaid’s. “Do you carry this trunk for me,” she said. The girl ran to the cabstand and returned in a hansom. The trunk was hoisted on top, Helen and the bandbox went inside.
“How long will it take you to drive to the Vale, Chelsea?”
“About half an hour, miss,” the cabby cried through the trap in the roof of the cab, “but I can hurry my horse up a bit, if you’re pressed for time.”
“There is no hurry,” she answered, and her thoughts melted into reveries. Lewis would be turning out of bed when she arrived. But on hearing she was waiting in the studio, he would hasten his sponging. He might be so anxious to see her that he might come in apologising for his dressing-gown, and she thought she would like to see him in a dressing-gown and slippers, but the news she received was unexpected. “Mr. Seymour is still in bed,” the parlour-maid said, “but I’ll wake him. He’ll not be long, your ladyship.”
“Ask Mr. Seymour if I may come up to his bedroom, for I have to speak to him of matters of some importance,” she replied, and a few minutes afterwards the parlourmaid took her upstairs; and as soon as the door had closed she burst out laughing, so comical did the situation appear to her: Lewis lying in bed, and she standing at the foot of the bed looking at him. After a while she asked him if he were not glad to see her, and he answered that of course he was glad, but would be able to appreciate her visit more as soon as he knew that no catastrophe had fallen or was imminent.
“Catastrophe, Lewis?”
“Well, dear,” he answered, “the message that Teresa brought up to me was that you wished to speak to me on a matter of importance, one that admitted of no delay.”
“A catastrophe it certainly is,” she said, “but whether pleasant or unpleasant depends upon your humour. I fancy you will find it pleasant — at least, there is a good deal to be said for it. I have come to tell you, Lewis, that we must go away together.”
“That is pleasant news, indeed,” he cried, but was taken aback when he was told there was to be no delay. To his question “Whither should they fly?” he was told that Helen had in mind a villa at Twickenham. Why Twickenham she did not know, nor could she tell him to which villa they were going, and Lewis gathered that she had in mind large drawing-rooms overflowing with pale furniture, and gardens and swards shelving to the water’s edge.
“But we shall marry,” he cried.
“Yes, we will marry,” she answered... “ultimately”; and she related her life, till at last, feeling that the story was being prolonged unduly, she said: “Lewis, you must dress yourself. I’ll give you ten minutes for a bath, and half an hour to put on your clothes, and when they are on, you will please to ring, and I will come upstairs and talk to you while you are shaving. Will you allow me to order breakfast?”
“Of course and having kissed her, he applied himself to his bath, thinking the while of the adventurous girl he had fallen in with. Yet not altogether a featherheaded girl, such a one as would wreck a man’s life.... He must insist on marriage; but marriage without notice was impossible, even in a registry office. He dried and powdered himself with care, and sought for becoming clothes, for whatever happened he was going to spend the day with his betrothed. “Whatever happens now,” he said to himself, “I shall have to accept; there is no controlling this woman, who would talk to me while I shaved,” he added. “What a genius for intimacy!” He ran
g the hell. “My dear Helen, you spoke of Twickenham, but are you sure there is a hotel there?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she answered, somewhat testily; “we shall hire a villa.”
“And sleep,” Lewis said, “under the same roof?”
“In the same bed, I hope,” Helen answered.
“But if we cannot get the villa?”
“Then we shall go to the hotel. There is always the Star and Garter waiting for us, darling. You are the star and I am the garter, dear: could anything be more providential?”
“You are more than a garter, Helen.”
“Yes, perhaps I am, but for the moment I think I would like to be the garter.”
Her wit gave him courage, and he looked upon himself as her husband already, with a delicious adventure in front of him.
