Mabel was not a congenital liar. She had, indeed, displayed a fairly truthful record until John Ordham came into her life. When little, she had been duly punished for telling the fibs natural to childhood; and, during the years that followed, those faculties with which the social unit adapts itself automatically, and economically, to the exigencies of the moment, had in her case been put to little strain, indulged young beauty that she was. She was a good girl in all ways, and after turning on the fountain of those beautiful crystal tears, or terrifying the parent whose solitary passion she was, she had the grace to be ashamed of herself, vowing never to repeat the offence. As she grew older, she broke this vow less and less often.
But the long coaching of her mother and Lady Bridgminster had wrought its inevitable work. She was merely one more victim of the disabilities of her sex. She could not go frankly forth and woo the man to whom she had immediately surrendered her heart; she must scheme, and wait, blow hot and cold, demoralize her character generally. She had no cleverness save in female craft, but she was vaguely conscious during those weeks when Ordham wooed her with a silken rope round his neck and a padded prod at his back, that the crystalline quality of her girl’s mind was permanently clouding.
She had assumed, of course, that after marriage her influence would be paramount. Had not momma ruled poppa? Was not the ascendency of the American woman one of the truisms of the century? She rode gayly into the breakers of generalities oblivious of the rocks beneath, whose other name is facts.
The result of that triumphant little confession in the library had given her self-confidence a profound shock. As time went on she found her husband more and more of a mystery, caught blinding glimpses of wants far beyond her comprehension, of dissimilar tastes, of an almost world-old brain, and, in spite of his youthful ardours, of an inner impenetrable reserve. She had almost despised him at times during the courtship, so easy had been the game, so completely had he been deluded. But Ordham was not a man to be despised for more than a moment at a time, and he had won her complete respect on that fatal day in the library when he had given her to understand that when people were so simple as to lay their cards on the table no will but his would prevail. But after the lachrymal attack was over (genuine enough upon this occasion), she had reflected that the cleverest of men would be no match for three clever women if they kept their cards out of sight. She had lost no time calling to her aid Lady Bridgminster and her mother, and a new campaign of gentle manipulation began. Live on the Continent she would not; where one could never drink water and the food ruined one’s complexion, where she must be taken in to dinner by an attaché, instead of by a prince of the blood, where she must play fourth fiddle to old frumps with frizzed fronts and bugles and not a tenth part of her income. Not she. Jackie could have all the career he wanted in England.
She was enchanted at the idea of having a baby, not only because she possessed all those charming feminine instincts which would have made her an estimable woman had circumstances permitted, but because it gratified her to feel one of a line, to be the indispensable connecting link between one Bridgminster and the next. It is only the well-born American that is deeply impressed with the antiquity of English blood, of a descent in which figure historic names; for all these represent what they feel they have just missed, and to capture them for their issue is a triumph far more subtle than that experienced by the American who belongs to the aristocracy of wealth alone. Not that Mabel was capable of any such analysis, but her mother was; the instinct was in her, however, and it is doubtful if she would have adored Ordham as blindly and devoutly as she did had it not been for that long record of his family in Burke, and the magnificence of Ordham Castle. But, to be sure, minus these causes, and he would not have been John Ordham.
Once more he was unconsciously demonstrating the inferiority of his sex when pitted against hers. But like many another, she forgot that there is a psychological statute of limitations, also that it is impossible to watch the manœuvres of an enemy whose existence is unknown. She was pouting in bed late on Sunday night, wondering if her husband intended to sit up until dawn again, almost hating the social triumphs that so oddly separated them, when the door between their rooms was pushed softly open and he entered.
She was lying in a mass of pale green satin and lace; her bedroom had been done over and looked like Undine’s bower. Her hair, spread over the shimmering counterpane, might have been the golden fleece. No more enchanting vision was ever presented to a young husband; but Ordham was suffering (slightly) from conscience, and the familiar picture did not appeal to him. He kissed her affectionately, asked her solicitously if she were shockingly tired, and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“I must not awaken you in the morning,” he remarked. “I thought it better to run the risk to-night—to tell you that I must go up to London for a few days. I have some business to attend to.”
“What? Business?” She sat up straight, and she was so astonished that grievance stood off. “You never had any business in your life. You don’t know the meaning of the word.”
“But it is time I learned. I wish to consult my solicitors in regard to certain investments.”
“Well, I never!” She stared at him for a moment. Then she asked plaintively: “Am I not your wife? I expect to share all your worries, although I can’t imagine your condescending to have any.” She knew that he disliked direct questions, but there are moments when no woman can be diplomatic, and she finally asked him if that were his only reason for going up to London on the eve of another house party.
He had anticipated glittering spheres, which he would dutifully stanch, the while administering the lesson that he had not yielded a jot of his real liberty. But he answered promptly, looking straight into her surprised but unclouded eyes: “Yes, I have another reason. Quaritch has some rare books that I am to have a first look at.”
“We go up to London before long, now. Books will keep.”
“Not these, I am afraid. There are many in England quite as keen as I am on first editions.”
She explored those large ingenuous orbs. Hers was not a jealous nature, and she had been given ample opportunity to observe how little his devoted manner and challenging eyes meant, had often laughed at the girls who took him seriously. So the possibility of a feminine magnet in London she rejected with disdain, but a sensation of antagonism took possession of her. It angered her that she could not understand him better, that he never really deferred to her, that he must be eternally “managed.” Still more did it incense her that he was indifferently depriving himself of several days of her society. But she could think of no ruse to keep him at home unless she whipped up a storm, and against this indulgence she had been warned by the doctor. As for tears, better reserve them until the Continent threatened again. Much to his surprise, she lay back in her pillows and said in the grand manner:
“Nothing that I could say will hold you back if you have made up your mind to go. I never expect to have the slightest influence over you.”
“I wish you would not say such things!” He looked as uncomfortable as she intended he should feel. “How can you? I shall be gone only four days. Please do not make me feel a brute.”
“Four days will seem very long.”
She uttered these artistically simple words with a quiver of her little pink mouth, which was not altogether deliberate, for although she was determined not to be commonplace, those four days without her husband unrolled before her in an endless procession. He felt very contrite, and kissed her fondly; but he did not retreat from his purpose. The next night saw him in London, enjoying himself hugely at the theatre, from which he had been divorced for nearly three months. It so happened that there were a number of good plays on, and Hans Richter was out of town when he arrived. Mabel received long impassioned telegrams and brief impassioned notes, apologies and explanations that would have hoodwinked a wronged and suspicious wife; but the castle did not see him again for ten days. Then he was so charming, so repentant, so indignant at a cruel destiny, and so unfeignedly happy in being with his lovely little wife once more, that he was not only forgiven, but Mabel, in her joy at having him again after that dreary watch, was persuaded to move up to London a month earlier than she had intended.
The hopes that rise insistent in the cold discouraging mind when the first shock and depression have run their course have their origin, no doubt, in the subterranean chambers of the brain; mean, when it is a case of outraged love, that the soul is continuing its eternal struggle for completion with another soul. These are immemorial rights, and do not endure disintegration and change every seven years.
Margarethe had passed through many phases, not only since the night she had heard of Ordham’s engagement, but since the beginning of her deliberate correspondence with him. As is commonly the case, she found more satisfaction in the writing of her own letters than in the reading of his; although that excited, hopeful, terrified, tremulous, forlorn waiting for the post was a new and astounding experience. Men, the cleverest of them, are indifferent letter writers, and Ordham was no exception. A woman lets her pen run on with a freedom and felicity which conscious art but intensifies, the while it exercises selection and restraint. But men are prone to say what they have to say in the fewest possible words, rather rejecting all subjects but the essential than wandering afield in search of others that might make their compositions interesting.
Although Styr, in a manner, enjoyed this correspondence even more deeply than her personal intercourse with the man who had strolled into her inner kingdom and taken possession (for it gave her a sense of greater intimacy, liberated her imagination), she was too wise to give alarm to his limited amount of masculine endurance by writing him twenty pages when she was artistically capable of packing news, gossip, personalities, disquisitions upon books, the opera, the drama, and politics, into ten. Nor, although she longed to write daily, did she gratify this new passion oftener than once a week; and even so, she cultivated a certain irregularity, that the assured appearance of a too familiar envelope on his morning tray might not in time inspire him with that nervous irritability which so often takes shape in ennui. Not for nothing had she been forced to accept man as her chief study before Wagner transposed her from life to art; but she hated these restraints, longed to be natural. She knew, however, that, given a man of Ordham’s temperament, only nature heightened by art could hold him, never nature unbridled and ingenuous.
Ordham’s disposition was so far from frank that although while within her magnetic radius he had been more confidential and revealing than he had ever been before, he could not shed his diplomatic shell with nothing but a sheet of paper before him, headed “Dear Countess Tann.” Moreover, with all his soul he hated letter writing, and only answered these fascinating epistles with a reasonable promptness for the sake of others to come. If she had tacitly agreed to write alone, he would have been completely happy. And she, of course, wanted a running picture of his daily life at Ordham, of the companies assembled there, of trivial but always interesting personalities and incidents. But he could as easily have written a book; the bare suggestion would have appalled him; and, while making his letters as short as decency would permit, he confined himself to a brief comment upon the literary and artistic people invited to the castle, music, and books—he sent her many new ones—and devoted the last page to herself, expressing his desire to see her again, and his regret that their summer had been all too short. Sometimes she smiled at these laborious epistles, and sometimes she flung them across the room and stamped her foot. She had to read them over and over to extract any comfort out of them; then, finally, she succeeded in reading between the lines, rewrote them, in short, as women will.
There were times when she intensely disliked him for his apostasy to herself, his weakness in being blindly steered into a commonplace attack of puppy love when he should have risen superior to the follies of youth and gone unscathed till thirty, then loved some one worthy of him. She hurled him from his pedestal and rolled him in the dirt, announcing that he belonged there, delighted with the sense of emancipation that permeated to her finger tips. Not even yet did her mind dwell upon the possibility of any closer union with him; she dreamed only of the insatiable mysterious immaterial tie; she indulged herself in attacks of bitterness, of furious regret that he had not so ordered his life that she might think of him always as the exceptional man, instead of seeing, against her will, a vision of a love-sick white-faced youth, idiotically in love with a pretty girl, then as a fatuous young husband complacent to all the selfish whims of his bride; drifting with her on a river of gold that threatened to rise and suffocate what energies he had. If he must be “managed,” she was the woman for this office, for she would have steered him to greater goals. She was a thorough woman, was Margarethe Styr, but her saving grace was that she knew it. When she laughed at herself, then was Ordham forgiven, excused, dusted off, and restored to his pedestal, his sovereignty in the realm of the ideal.
When there crept into his letters—after the return of his household to London—a tinge of sadness, deepening at times into melancholy, more than a hint of impatience at enforced inertia, at passing opportunities; when his polite desire to see her again began to vibrate with something like passion, then did she understand that not only was he tiring of his wife, but that her own letters, with their insidious but unremitting spur to his ambitions, were reaping the harvest she had planned. It was after one of these letters of his, longer than usual, more personal, asserting that could he but find a decent excuse, could he but exercise his freedom at this time without brutality, he would take the next train for Munich, that a voice seemed to cry through her brain: “Let him alone! Let him alone! In silence and absence men forget.” This spasm of conscience brought her face to face with a good many possible results that she had ignored; and as she really loved him and was fairly consistent in her desire to see him happy and great, she delayed her answer to this letter, half resolving to drop the correspondence.
Then, a week later, arrived a letter charged with a curious hotchpotch of anger and jubilance, an astonished sense of semi-defeat and almost royal triumph. He had not given her a hint of his scheme to organize a season of Wagner opera at Covent Garden, for, although hopeful at the first, he had met, upon his return to London, with so many objections and difficulties, so much ignorance, prejudice, and pharisaical folly, that he had at times despaired of attaining an object which opposition fanned into a passion. But, calling to his aid older and more influential men than himself, the last barrier had finally gone down, and although he could not hire the opera house for the season, owing to other contracts, he had succeeded in capturing it for five weeks by depositing, as a guarantee against failure, twenty thousand pounds with the committee he had formed. Of this guarantee he naturally made no mention to Styr, but had he been able to conceal the fact that the enterprise was his, a letter received in the same mail from the great conductor would have enlightened her.
She was infinitely touched. If resentments had lingered in her mind, they were swept out, and they never returned. She knew—who better than she?—what all this had meant to that indolent nature, steeped in self-indulgence. For the first time in his life he had really exerted himself, worked to accomplish an object, and not for himself, but for her. He wrote with enthusiasm of being the means of educating his country musically with her assistance, and there was no doubt that he assumed this responsibility in all sincerity, but he dwelt upon it too emphatically, in his desire to save her from any sense of obligation. The deeper tenderness of her nature was stirred; it was the first poignant sweetness in an affair that had already given her far more joy than sorrow, pleasure than disappointment. Moreover, there was a new and a very keen delight in the gratitude she was forced to render to this noble but torpid nature, which she had revealed to itself, to be the first object of his energies.
But she hesitated some time before she accepted the formal offer to sing in London from the first of May until the seventh of June. She vowed anew to spare Ordham the certain disaster of materializing their bond, and herself as well. But this offer arrived very opportunely in her affairs. The King came no more to Munich, summoned her no more to his castles; and although, owing to her popularity with the public, and the still potent shadow of Ludwig, the opera house cabal might not dare to compass her sudden dismissal, they contrived that she sing less and less, gave her the worst support of which that admirable company was capable. Their object, of course, was to wean the public by degrees, to insinuate that the Styr had grown capricious, indifferent to her once beloved Munich, was losing health and nursing her voice; to tickle the Bavarian love of variety with as many Gasts as they could command, to press against her cold resistance until she lost control of her furious temper and flung her contract in the face of the intendant.
This she had no mind to do, and her will was as strong as theirs combined; but she was worn with the unremitting silent struggle, the countless mortifications; she knew that the death or deposition of the King would push her hard against the wall, battling for the supreme position she had held so easily. Now, through the influence of Princess Nachmeister, or the Queen-mother, she could obtain the signature necessary for a leave of absence. Then, London conquered, she knew that Munich would clamour for her return, and, with or without the support of the King, her position would be impregnable for a long time to come. For the matter of that it must be the first step in that greater career which her ambition had never ceased to picture. She had written to Damrosch several months since, but had received the reply she had expected: the artists were already engaged for the first Wagner season in New York; but it was expressed in a tone of sharp regret that she had written too late—even, perhaps, for that projected second season, were the experiment a success; but she had not the least doubt that did she create a furore in the most musically indifferent of all cities, to which, however, New York bent the knee, a place during the second season would be made for her as a matter of course.
And after London, she also would be invited to sing in every capital in Europe, with the possible exception of Paris; although to be sure she might sing to the public that still visited their hatred of Germany upon Wagner, in such rôles as Dido, Aida, Fidelio, Donna Anna, Katharine, in The Taming of the Shrew, and even the Countess, in The Marriage of Figaro; for after all these years of daily vocalization, besides her stage experience, there was little she could not do with her voice, and it would be interesting to prove that she could subdue that tremendous organ to pure melody. She was not even sure that she should not attempt Carmen, as a tour de force; and she could act it! Great God, how she could act it! She had only to conjure up Ordham’s marriage in all its details.
And how she should revel in the conquest of New York, look down with serenity or laughter from the unassailable position of the season’s idol upon the mire that had nurtured her, and upon the good respectable people that held their skirts so high, shuddering at the mere acknowledgment of the horrors upon which they danced, or lived their comfortable lives. She wanted no social recognition from that great city, where so many proud names covered secrets little less appalling than her own; but to dominate where she had once shrunk far from the limelight, to be crowned where she had been despised!—little she cared for the sleuths of the press. Their revelations would but excite the public the more, for that public almost resents the reflection of their own necessary virtues in a great prima donna, her failure to indulge the rights of genius.
But she hesitated, for John Ordham could not be shoved long from the forefront of her mind,—that young friend who would annihilate her worries, who had unrolled this glorious future. It would be a poor return to wreck his life. But was she not sure of herself? That, after all, was the whole point. She had managed him before, she could manage him again. She must live in a hotel, she would meet many people, five weeks pass very quickly. She could strengthen the bond, deepen her influence, even while she avoided the dangers inherent in mending a broken intimacy. . . .
Yes, she would go. What was more, she would make sure of his career before she left London, raze forever his wife’s selfish defences. Little she cared whether the silly child had married him for love or not; her possible sufferings were of no consequence whatever. She would not break up his peace in the common fashion; but give him to Europe she would, and his wife might console herself with her baby and the great position for which she had schemed quite as much as for the love of this exceptional creature to whom she had but the flimsiest, the most transient rights. Not in nine short years could Margarethe Styr swallow ten whole commandments.
Nevertheless, perhaps unconsciously, she possessed the large vision, the contempt of petty detail, of obstructing means, when a great end promised. There were times when she put even herself out of mind, and saw Ordham, his fine and peculiar abilities in full flower, moving his sure hand among the destinies of Europe, making as sure a place for himself in history. Of what earthly importance was the possible happiness, or the crushing, of one more American girl in the face of a great and useful career? She was, in truth, a negligible quantity.
Mabel, seated in a high-back Gothic chair, looking, in her ample flowing gown of white brocade embroidered with gold, her soft mass of “harvest-yellow hair” caught on either side with a jewel in an antique setting, like a cross between Rossetti’s Monna Vanna and his Venus Verticordia, wondered if this mob of people would never go. It seemed to her that all London, fashionable and artistic, lived in her mother’s drawing-rooms, and she wished that it had occurred to her to take a house of her own. True, the suggestion would have precipitated another discussion about that tiresome diplomatic future to which “Jackie” alluded now and again as a matter of course (he had returned to the Foreign Office), and, no doubt, it was as well to be relieved of all detail and care at this time: she felt well, but tired. Moreover, confident as she was in herself, normally, she had discovered that it was no light task to amuse a man who had been born bored, and that if he were to be kept in England, he must have its cream served up daily.
She congratulated herself, however, that she was growing cleverer every minute. Her husband had no suspicion that his departure for the Continent was to be delayed upon one pretext after another until pretexts were no longer necessary; did he retain his interest in diplomacy, the time would surely come when the Foreign Office would have no more of him. His good humour was unruffled. He was more kind, more captivating, than ever, and so considerate that his delicate young wife saw little of him. He sent her to bed early, and took himself off to the theatre, that “he might not keep her awake by roaming round the house; he had never gone to bed early in his life.” He made her lie down immediately after luncheon and remain on her couch until it was time to dress for the afternoon drive. Between half-past five and seven they had a crowded salon. He never had luncheon or dined away from home, and, like the courteous soul he was, entertained formally or familiarly those whose invitations he and his wife were obliged to decline for the present. It was the dinners that, for the most part, were informal, consisting of intimate friends of his mother or the Cuttings, whom he did not feel obliged to follow up to the drawing-room. The luncheons, or “breakfasts,” as it was the fashion to call them, were often imposing functions.
Of the impromptu afternoon salon he was even more the gay and fascinating host than at Ordham. No longer were Mrs. Cutting’s drawing-rooms the studiously select assemblies of the ante-Ordham-Bridgminster régime. True, there were many of greater social importance than she had mustered unaided, as well as that bevy of smart young American wives of English husbands so famous during the eighties, but in addition she found herself receiving all the prominent artists, authors, actors, poets, æsthetes, musicians, and many—discoveries of her son-in-law—not yet famous but indisputably endowed. It was Ordham’s grief that Rossetti had died before he was able to do him honour, but he consoled himself by buying every picture of this consummate painter that found its way to the market. As they did not harmonize with the light, almost frivolous, effect of the drawing-rooms, he had them hung in the stately entrance hall downstairs, which Mrs. Cutting had left untouched that the effect of the French rooms above might seem the more brilliant by contrast. They lit up those dim spaces with their living colours, and Ordham often sat there alone. As available Rossettis were few, and he had an almost equal admiration for Burne-Jones, several fine paintings of this artist shared honours with the master. They would accompany him to the Continent.
Mabel, although at first delighted to be admired by artists, especially when they told her that she looked like The Blessed Damozel, to deck herself in Pre-Raphaelite gowns designed by her mother-in-law, and sit in a Gothic chair, was grown, in this month of March, heartily tired of it all, and confided to her maid that as soon as she was well again she should send æsthetic duds to the old-clothes man, order a trousseau from Paris, such as even she had never possessed before, and become the smartest woman in London. Her husband might continue to have his artists if he wanted them, and they would cut their hair, but she had been born to grace another sphere.
Moreover, she was irritably tired of all this talk about Wagner and that Munich prima donna; London, always on the alert for a new fad, seemed to be obsessed. Five weeks of Wagner at Covent Garden! She devoutly hoped her Jackie would not demand that she sit in the back of his box and share his raptures. With all her little barrel-organ soul she hated Wagner; but she had not forgotten those carefully prepared appreciations of the courtship, and dared not retract them so soon after that first misguided confession she had worked so hard to obliterate.
At the end of five months she had progressed far in matrimonial tactics. But what a protracted mental campaign it was! And she had pictured a rose garden for two light-hearted lovers! Well, there was compensation in all things; she had become clever, at least. She might have married some nice, simple, unexacting person like poppa,—a gentleman who had attended strictly to his own affairs,—and become one of those undeveloped little American matrons who brought letters to them, and whose husbands talked of nothing but business or football. She felt her infinite superiority to all of them, happy and bright as they were; although there were times when she longed for the mental rest which one of these fine busy young fellows, whose brains were not crowded with their ancestors, would have afforded her. And how often she longed to be natural and free. But she was a true female; she adapted herself readily enough to her lot, at times thoroughly enjoyed the atmosphere of intrigue in which she felt herself moving, sure that in the long silent tussle of wills, she, with the superior tact and finesse of woman, must conquer. If Ordham had been a bold masterful person, such as his brother Stanley would be one of these days when his shyness had worn off, she would have knuckled under as a matter of course, enjoyed with all her feminine soul the battles royal which preceded each sure defeat, while remaining “good,” and “natural,” and “above board.” But the Machiavelli in Ordham had pumped to the surface all those obscure currents of intrigue and deceit which track through every woman’s nature. It was a strange circumstance, this secret pursuit of John Ordham’s ego, in the mysterious regions of the spirit, by two women at the same time; but they hunted on different planes and never met.
The last caller drifted out and down the stair. Ordham returned, and bending over his wife, asked her solicitously if she was tired.
“Not in the least!” said Mabel, brightly. All the married women she knew told her that men hated tired women. “How interesting you have made our salon, darling. Mother, can you imagine how we were ever satisfied with just smart people before?”
Mrs. Cutting shrugged her shoulders, but smiled indulgently. “We never receive those people in New York, but no doubt we make a great mistake. Genius ought to be recognized, and when artists and others are quite convenable, I certainly think they should be encouraged to remain so. Besides, it helps them to meet patrons.”
Ordham concealed a smile and replied gently, “I feel greatly honoured that they should come to my house.” Mrs. Cutting noted with some amusement that he characteristically assumed that this splendid mansion, leased, furnished, and supported by the Cutting millions, was his own. But, although she too had some time since discovered that she knew him very little, she liked him too well to feel more than a passing irritation. In her own way she was in love with him, as mothers often are with a charming young man come suddenly into the family as the husband of an idolized child. It is the only opportunity a woman has to love a man with a passion that is not legitimately sexual or maternal, but a little of both, boned of both danger and responsibilities.
“I might point out,” continued Ordham, “that we are not the first to receive the great in art, although, naturally, they prefer their own circles. But even this absurd æsthetic movement has been of service to London society, for it has popularized art, at least, and permanently banished antimacassars. It only remains for some culinary genius to follow in their track to make England almost as inhabitable as Paris or Italy.”
“Don’t you love your country, Jackie darling?” asked Mabel, wistfully.
“Of course. But I was born, remember, when the Brotherhood, unknown to the herd, was commanding the attention of the elect, and of these my mother aspired to be. Naturally I became imbued with a love of change as well as of beauty; quite as naturally I find it necessary to gratify both out of England.”
“It is odd that you should be so different from your brothers,” interposed Mrs. Cutting, hastily.
“Oh, they are all reversions to the ancestral type, Ordhams from marrow to skin. My father did not like artists, and in time, my mother, being a dutiful wife, got her gowns from Worth until he died, although permitted to invite Rossetti and a few others to her big parties. And she had much political entertaining, political work generally, to do; she had little leisure to cultivate that side of London.”
“Well, I am rather glad she has followed her natural bent since,” said Mrs. Cutting, pleasantly. “Those nice Burne-Jones gowns she wears—or are they Rossettis? Frankly, I can’t tell the pictures of one from the other, except that Burne-Jones’s women seem to be longer and thinner, particularly as to neck. I wonder what beauty Rossetti could have found in incipient goitres.”
Ordham got up suddenly and lit a cigarette some distance away. Less than a week since he had received a letter from Count Kilchberg, in which that gentleman, innocently regaling him with the gossip of Munich, mentioned that Frau von Wass had no goitre, had been shut up by her husband, suddenly jealous of somebody, no one could discover whom. The story ran that the Nachmeister had opened the eyes of the Herr Geheimrath in order to save some friend of her own from the clutches of the fair Hélène. No key was necessary for Ordham, and his conscience had given him a bad hour, although it was with a pleasant sense of relief that he realized he could do nothing. He had accordingly locked up the memory again, and was irritated with his mother-in-law for liberating it. But when he turned, he said carelessly:
“That was Rossetti’s chief fault in his last years, and due, no doubt, to failing eyesight and too much chloral. Talking of throats always brings to my mind the great Styr’s. That is one of her assets. It really is as like a column of ivory as mere flesh can be. I have taken a box for the Wagner season, and hope that both of you will go with me to every performance.”
He hoped nothing of the sort, but he knew he was quite safe in expressing himself with propriety, and words never cost him anything.
“How wonderful five whole weeks of Wagner will be!” cried Mabel, with glittering eyes.
But Mrs. Cutting felt herself at liberty to be quite frank. “The first night; thank you very much. No doubt it will be a great sight. I understand the Prince has promised your mother to go, and of course that means the world. But I have no hesitation in admitting that Wagner bores me to extinction, no doubt because I cannot appreciate him. But I was raised on composers whose characters do not talk interminably in a sort of singing register, and I am too old to be converted. You do not mind my frankness, I hope?”
“Of course not. But Mabel must come, as she loves all music, and has heard nothing but The Mikado for months.”
“Occasionally,” said Mrs. Cutting, playfully. “But for a while yet we must be inflexible guardians.”
“Of course!” Ordham smiled into his wife’s eyes, but in truth was ill at ease and screwing up his courage. After all, this was not his house, and there was a point to be settled before Margarethe Styr arrived in London. He had delayed the inevitable discussion as long as possible, but now seemed as propitious a time as any; and although he did not suspect the cause, it had by no means escaped his attention that these people were at all times anxious to please him. He attributed it to the fact that he was English and they Americans, but thought it very nice of them.
He strolled over to the table again and lit another cigarette, came back to his deep chair, and turned his charming smile and large ingenuous eyes upon his mother-in-law.
“Did I ever mention that Countess Tann is quite a friend of mine?”
Mrs. Cutting also braced herself. She, too, had anticipated this crisis. “I think we spoke of her the first time we met again in London,” she answered vaguely. “But you are such a diplomat! I should hardly know the name of a single one of your London acquaintance if they did not come to the house. I don’t think you have ever mentioned any of your Continental friends. I doubt”—with a brilliant smile—“if your left hand is on bowing terms with your right.”
“How can you say such a thing? How very odd! It seems to me that I must often have spoken of Countess Tann—she was so very hospitable to me in Munich. I met her at Neuschwanstein, where we both were guests of that strangest of all strange mortals, Ludwig of Bavaria. Otherwise, I might not have met her at all, for although Munich society is at her feet, she goes about very little. No doubt she opened her doors to me because we are both such good friends of your own good friend, Princess Nachmeister, but she certainly showed me marked hospitality, and I shall be glad to return it here in London.”
There was an ominous silence. Mrs. Cutting fanned herself vehemently, a bright spot in either cheek. Ordham, his nervousness conquered, looked at her steadily. Mabel twisted the ears of LaLa until he squealed and ran off in dudgeon.
Mrs. Cutting spoke at last. “Do you recall any of our conversation on the subject of—a—Countess Tann?”
“Was anything in particular said? I recall the fact of a conversation, nothing more.”
“I think I expressed my disapproval of that sort of people. On the stage, of course, it doesn’t matter; but to ask them under one’s roof—that is quite another question. Of course, no one knows better than yourself, dear John, that a man has many acquaintances his family cannot receive.”
“I don’t think I follow you,” he said wonderingly. “You spoke just now of feeling it a duty to encourage artists by social recognition. You surely have no objection to the stage—above all, to the operatic stage?”
“Oh, not at all! But I have to this Countess Tann.” Mrs. Cutting, driven to a defence of her principles, was the woman to fling social diplomatics to the winds.
“What objections have you to Countess Tann?”
“It is not possible that you have not heard all the—gossip about that woman?”
“I have heard gossip of every woman I have ever heard discussed at all. Gossip is the relaxation of overburdened minds, and most minds are burdened one way or another. I cannot understand your attitude to Countess Tann, when you receive—” and he mentioned the names of several women notorious for more than beauty and fashion.
Mrs. Cutting flushed. “They go everywhere,” she said tartly. “Nevertheless, I have received them only to please your mother; it has been under protest, even although nothing against them is proved. In time I shall tactfully weed them out.”
“There are no proofs against Countess Tann.”
“I am afraid proofs could easily be had. You were in the next room only this afternoon when Mr. Levering entertained a group of us, not for the first time, with reminiscences of Margaret Hill. That, he asserts, is her real name, and he not only saw her year in and out in New York, but knew her personally.”
“Levering is one of those rheumatic old beaux that sit in club windows and manufacture scandal. There is no wheat in his chaff. And what a cur to run about prejudicing people against a woman who has no man to defend her, a woman so great, for that matter, that it is a presumption to gossip about her at all! I shall cut him.”
“Dear me, I had no idea you could bring yourself to do anything so direct and undiplomatic!” Mrs. Cutting laughed, but she was growing angry. “And do remember that he is not only a very old friend of mine, but a power even here in London, where he has come every season for twenty years.”
“I have nothing to fear from Levering,” replied Ordham, coldly. “He is not even a second-rate Englishman, and these transplanted American men that have nothing better to do than invent or peddle racy gossip in order to make sure of being asked every night to meet a title or two at dinner are not taken very seriously by us.”
Mrs. Cutting made no reply for a moment. She realized that her son-in-law rude must be very much in earnest. Her American soul rose in wrath, but she kept Mabel’s happiness steadily before her, and finally said, in her usual calm even tones: “I am afraid it is all true. We won’t discuss poor old Levering. I have heard of Styr from other sources, and although it distresses me greatly to refuse you anything you wish, I fear I cannot receive her under my roof.”
“Granting that these stories are true, what difference does it make?” No tones could be more even, more mellifluous, than Ordham’s. “She is a great artist, many hold the greatest living. Shall we be more provincial than Munich, which receives the artist with no reference to what she may have been ten years ago, on the other side of the globe?”
“Why should artists be treated as if they were different from ordinary mortals?”
“Because they are.”
Mrs. Cutting set her lips in a straight white line. “I recognize only one code of morals. We Americans are brought up on splendid old-fashioned principles. Nor do I recall anything in the Bible that might be construed as exempting genius from the code that is necessary to preserve society from anarchy.”
Mabel interposed hurriedly. She knew that on certain points her mother was rigid, and she, too, regarded people that misbehaved themselves with shocked disapproval. But it was too soon to put her husband on the defensive. “Mother dear,” she said, in her clear little voice, “don’t you think you might relax your rule for once, as Countess Tann is a friend of Jackie’s? Besides, perhaps it is our duty to encourage these people when they are trying to do right. Both Princess Nachmeister and Mr. Levering say that her life has been exemplary in Munich. If we snubbed her, we might drive her to the bad again.”
As she concluded her little effort she looked eagerly at her husband, expecting a flash of gratitude from his expressive eyes, and not only for coming to his rescue, but for refraining from the common jealousy of wives. But Ordham averted his gaze, conscious of a still more intense irritation. Mabel was not clever enough to play her part in daily intercourse, little as she suspected it; and there were times when she quite forgot the rôle she now knew it was necessary to act in order to reinspire her husband with the belief that he had married the ideal woman. Few women can spend their lives in full dress. In humbler walks of life than Mabel’s, the wife exhibits herself to her husband in curl papers and untidy wrappers. Mabel’s toilettes would have been perfect on a desert island had her trunks been washed ashore, but to let her mind run down at the heels was a temptation not to be resisted, now and again, for had she not bagged her quarry? And although she schemed to please her husband, adopted all the wise advice of Lady Pat, crossing him in nothing and surrounding him with diversions, still would she read no more books, still would she chatter; and she avoided “clever” men and women as she would the plague. To know how to manage a man was cleverness enough; what she did not know was that deft management, while it may achieve certain results, is not always redolent of charm. Ordham avoided her by the aid of every device his fertile brain could suggest, for he dreaded the moment when self-restraint would snap and betray him into wounding the poor little thing. She might be a silly child, but he appreciated that she loved him devotedly. This uxorious affection, however, was irritating him in more ways than one. Since their return to town hardly a day had passed that she had not given him a present. Extravagant and wealthy, it delighted her to shower costly “trifles” on her husband; his rooms were littered with superb and superfluous baubles. The new cigarette case in his pocket was of gold incrusted with jewels, the old silver necessaries of his dressing-table had been replaced with gold; he had now five watches, eight cigarette cases and match boxes, fourteen ash trays, three sets of white pearls of the first water and one of black, more cuff links than he pretended to count, four sets of furnishings for his writing table, one of gold, one of Russian enamel, one of Dresden china, and one of antique silver; and so on, ad infinitum. Many of these precious objects were inscribed “Jackie.”
Only that morning it had occurred to him that all this stuff represented a sum far in excess of the wretched thousand pounds which had caused him so much torment and debasement of spirit, and he had felt not only vexed at the senseless extravagance, but sick of saying “Thank you”; the constant repetition of which phrase creates in time a sense of obligation fatal both in love and friendship. Feeling that if called upon once more to tell her, upon her daily return from Bond Street, that she was the most marvellous and the most generous creature in the world, he should disgrace himself, he had announced with playful decision that she must waste no more money on him; he could not accustom himself all at once to such extravagance, had a vague sense of defrauding the poor—these were the only excuses he could think of. Mabel, who had heard of his princely expenditures in Paris on an income of £500 a year, was astonished, but inferred that he still felt the difference in their fortunes, and had too much humour to return her presents with the money she had given him. But nothing had been further from Jackie’s mind than this delicate hair-splitting. The £200,000 he regarded as a right and proper marriage settlement, not as a present; he had never mentioned the subject to his wife. And whereas nobody liked making presents better than himself, he made appropriate ones; and if he gave none to Mabel, it was because he could think of nothing she did not possess already.
So he avoided her eyes when she flew to his relief, left his seat once more, and with his back to them ground his teeth. He had himself well in hand, but he was still too young to have at his absolute command that gay and impenetrable mask, that perfect suavity of manner, for which he is celebrated to-day. Nevertheless, he always rallied his unevenly developed gifts in such crises as these.
“I don’t think it is worth while to discuss the question from an ethical standpoint,” he said in a moment, turning to his wife with a smile on his lips and none in his eyes. “Countess Tann, admitting that she ever dwelt without the pale, will not be driven back by any act of ours. She has the strongest character of any person I have ever known. The question is merely this: I feel under certain obligations of hospitality to her which I should be glad to discharge, and she is a great artist who gives the world far more than it can ever give her in return. Granting that she is this Margaret Hill of Levering’s, society is now too deeply in her debt to consider anything but the interest it must pay as long as she remains in the position to demand it.”
“I quite agree with you—up to a certain point.” Mrs. Cutting had almost visibly choked over the largest doses of British insolence she had ever been called upon to swallow, but she forced her lips to smile. “I am quite willing to take a box at the opera, show myself often, and lend it to my friends at other times—there are so many Americans in London just now. I am not as young and as modern as you are, but at least I should never dream of boycotting a stage artist in her own sphere; I am as ready as any one to acknowledge the debt of the ordinary mortal to genius. And nothing has ever distressed me more than the dreadful tales of gifted people dying in garrets because a selfish world would not pause to listen to them. But never, willingly at least, have I received under my roof a woman of blemished reputation. My mother and my grandmother were both leaders of society in New York, and that was their inflexible rule; I was brought up on it. As you English people are so much more—charitable, let us call it—I have endeavoured to make up my mind to believe no gossip unproven by the divorce courts; but really, some things are a bit too flagrant, and one professional beauty, at least, who was here this afternoon will never come again by invitation. And if I decline to receive a woman who has fairly blossomed in the sunshine of royalty, and who is well born and bred, I can hardly be expected to receive a creature that began life as a social outcast. I do not assert anything so foolish, of course,” she added hastily, “as that we have not a certain small percentage of wicked and foolish women in American society. I am merely emphasizing the standard of the country, and I for one shall continue to uphold it as a matter both of principle and inclination.”
“Both are highly commendable, but, it strikes me, a trifle provincial and inconvenient. In a new country I can understand that you must draw hard and fast lines, but now that you have come to live among people that are quite sure of themselves, why not emulate their independence? It has struck me more than once since I have had the pleasure of knowing so many Americans, that we have more independence, freedom, under our old-fashioned monarchy, than you under a form of government where those words may be worn meaningless with too constant iteration; you seem to have an idea that their antithesis is aristocratic.”
“I don’t think you see my point.” Mrs. Cutting’s tones were so even that they were monotonous, and she fixed her eyes on her fan. “You English aristocrats indulge in the fiction that you are above all laws, are a law unto yourselves. You are mental and moral anarchists. With us it is quite different. It may be because we are new, but one thing is quite positive: our standards are higher than yours, and they are fixed. We are as free of mind as you are, but we don’t choose to use our freedom in the same way. We reverence the laws we have accepted from the highest authority, because they are right and proper laws, because they conduce to purity of conduct and true happiness. But you—you English might exist on a planet of your own. And yet you are a mass of contradictions. Mr. Wilde was lamenting to-day, for the fortieth time, of British provincialism, respectability, philistinism. Others make the same lament. I have seen little of it myself. You—I am talking of your class, of course,—use those characteristics as an excuse when it happens to be convenient. To be just, I have not the slightest doubt that most of the women I meet are faithful wives, but it is only because the reverse does not appeal to them; they would admit, if pushed to the wall, that the laws made to govern the conduct of common mortals do not apply to them—certainly not! But if their anarchy—or, shall we say, their insolence?—does not take that form, it does some other. The only absolutely well-regulated women, according to the American standard, that I have met in England, are, it would seem, survivals from your middle class.”
“It is irresistible, dear Mrs. Cutting, to ask why, since you admire your own country and despise ours, you have come to live among us?”
Mrs. Cutting raised her cold angry eyes and met the cold impassive eyes opposite. Even had she been less fond of him, the utter absence of insolence in his voice and face, the repose and detachment of his manner, would have compelled her admiration. He continued with a smile: “It would be a genuine deprivation were you to leave us in a fit of disgust, but I am afraid you will, one of these days, unless you make up your mind to take us as we are, swallow us whole.”
“It has occurred to me once or twice of late that I may return to New York.” She paused a moment and then continued deliberately: “It is an intensely disagreeable and humiliating conclusion to have come to, but I believe that I am a snob. It annoys me the more as I have no justification, like so many of these Americans at present going the pace in London, wild with delight at being able to address peers of the realm as ‘Bertie’ and ‘Billy.’ Even the founder of my family in America helped to model its social structure. What is the secret of this fascination of England for the well-born of the United States? Perhaps its mere picturesque contrast to our republican institutions, architecture, customs. Perhaps some harking back of the blood. Perhaps it is an unconscious attempt to live the literature of our childhood, where all the fascinating characters were kings and queens, lords and ladies. Perhaps the sleepless American instinct to go straight to the top, that ‘the best is none too good for us,’ as our slang so patly expresses it. Perhaps because you have reached the superlative, while we are still in the comparative degree. No doubt, however, the reason, or all the reasons, are given the complete and final expression in that one hideous little word, ‘snob.’ ”
Ordham had never felt so much respect and liking for his mother-in-law. His eyes softened and he said solicitously: “I hope you are not unhappy here. Surely no American has ever been so well treated.”
“Ah! There is another point. One must live in, not merely visit, England, to discover that its reasoning runs something like this: ‘We do not say, of course, that you are not as good as we are—pray, what does that matter? But you are different, and being different, of course you are not quite as good.’ ”
Ordham laughed heartily. “I never heard it so cleverly put!” The warmth in his voice and eyes brought the colour back to Mrs. Cutting’s face, the animation to her glance. “Indeed, you must never leave us! We should miss you too dreadfully. And you are one of us—really!—however some stupid people may regard the majority of Americans. Is not my mother devoted to you?”
“How devoted do you think Lady Bridgminster could be to any one?”
“Oh, I was not thinking of affection. She never pretends to much of that. But with whom else is she so intimate?—and at least you have never found her rude.”
“Bad manners are not one of her fads, as they are with a good many I could mention; and, beyond all question, I like her better than any woman in London, for, in her way, she is genuine; she is, in fact, too arrogant to be anything else. But that she regards me wholly as her equal—not for a moment do I believe anything of the sort. And the position is beginning to gall me.”
“Momma!” Mabel had listened to this conversation appalled, almost breathless. “Surely, you would not go away and leave me?”
“Not for a while yet, darling—certainly not! But I feel that the time will come when we shall have to satisfy ourselves with a yearly interchange of visits.” She looked at Ordham as if bracing herself again. “Let us have it out. We like each other too well to quarrel, and it is better to come to a complete understanding now than to be continually bringing up unpleasant subjects. Nothing disgusts me more than this English worship of what you call personality. To receive people that have forfeited their social rights merely because they have some remarkable personal charm, have painted a picture, or written a book, is putting a premium upon libertinage, swells the ‘artistic’ hordes that hardly dare be virtuous lest they be thought second-rate. Nor do I in the least believe in the sincerity of all this kow-towing to talent. You are a great and bored people, you must have fads; that is all there is to it!”
“Does all that mean you will not receive Countess Tann?” He stood up, looking appealingly at his mother-in-law, whom he liked better for sticking to her little guns, inconvenient as they were to himself. He drew his arms together, after his fashion when nervous. “Are you really unrelenting? Will you not call on Countess Tann, and ask her to come here? I shall feel very awkward if you do not. My mother has promised to be nice to her, but I am not living in her house.”
“Do, mother,” whispered Mabel.
But on this point Mrs. Cutting was pure steel, although she found it no easy matter to resist Ordham when he deigned to coax. “No—I am desperately sorry, but I cannot. You must not ask it of me. If I forced myself to take that woman by the hand, I should lose my self-control and be rude to her. But, indeed, to touch her would be a physical as well as a moral impossibility. I am very sorry. I hate to deny you anything.”
She swept out of the room hastily, and Mabel looked apprehensively at her husband, who, for the fourth time, was striking a match with his back to her.
“Jackie!”
Jackie gritted his teeth, but answered politely, “Well, Mabel?”
“Are you angry with me? It is too severe of mother.”
“Of course not. How can you say such a thing?”
“Well, you have a right to be. But perhaps I can talk mother over.”
“I am sure you cannot. But it doesn’t matter. I fancy Countess Tann will understand—she is an American! Besides, no doubt we have wasted a lot of talk and temper over nothing. She will be much too busy for society. Your mother might have sacrificed her principles by leaving a card. A Wagner prima donna who is to sing eighteen times in five weeks, besides rehearsing with a scratch company, would no doubt herself spare you the indignity of meeting a woman who not only has been as much gossiped about as some eight or ten that were here to-day, but who hails from the ranks—”
“Jackie! Please don’t talk as if we were dreadful snobs.”
“On the contrary, I think your mother did herself an injustice. What more natural than to prefer England to America? Besides, she has the courage of her opinions—I think nobody, certainly not Americans, appreciates that sort of courage as much as the English. By the way, you will not mind if I dine with my mother to-night? I have rather neglected her.”
“Your mother dines out every night of her life! Do you really mean that you will leave me if I beg you not to?”
“Oh, I am sure you will not do that—you are quite the most charmingly unselfish person in the world.”
Once more he watched those great crystal tears well up and over. The sight fascinated him as a phenomenon, but he too was pure steel. Mabel saw the long line of his jaw grow longer and harder under the fine firm flesh, stared into the eyes that were veiled to conceal their glitter. He felt immeasurably older than this poor silly child to whom, under God knew what delusion, he had fastened himself for life, and he was still determined to treat her with what kindness and consideration he could command. He took out his handkerchief and dried her eyes. “I am so sorry! But you must let me play the dutiful son once in a while. Suppose you take your dinner in bed. You will feel that much more refreshed to-morrow.”
“Will you come home early?” sobbed Mabel.
“Of course!”