The Rubicon

That evening there was a great reception at one of the Foreign Embassies. Mrs. Davenport was the sister of the Ambassador's wife, and, after dinner, she asked whether anybody was going with her. Her husband eschewed such festivities; like a sensible man, he preferred, he said, to sit quietly at home, than to stand wedged in among a crowd of people who didn't care whether they saw him or not, and fight his way into a stuffy drawing-room. Reggie was sitting in the window, which he had thrown wide open, and was reading The Field. He had written a short note to Gertrude because he missed her, and as her bodily presence was not there, he felt it was something to communicate with her, but letter-writing was a difficulty to him, and the note had been very short.

An idea seemed to strike Mrs. Davenport when she saw him.

"Reggie, why don't you come?"

"I'll come if you like. Will it be amusing? Yes; I should like to come. Let me smoke in the carriage, mummy."

The two went downstairs together, and got into the carriage.

"Poor old boy," said Mrs. Davenport, laying her hand on his, "you will feel rather lonely to-night. I thought you'd like to come."

"It's an awful bore, Gerty having to go away," said Reggie, without any obvious discontent, "but it's only for a month, you know. I'm going to join her at Lucerne, if you don't want me. I hope there's something to do there. She said there were some mountains about. I shall climb."

Mrs. Davenport was conscious of a slight chill.

"Well, there'll be Gerty there," she said.

"Oh, yes; of course," said Reggie. "I shouldn't think of going if she wasn't there. You said I might smoke, didn't you?"

"I'm very happy about you and Gerty," said Mrs. Davenport, after a pause. "I should have chosen her of all others for a daughter-in-law."

"Oh! but I chose her first," said Reggie. "That's more important, isn't it? I wrote her a line this evening. I wish I didn't hate writing letters so. I can never think of anything to say. What do you say in letters, mother, you always write such good ones?"

"But you don't find it difficult to talk, Reggie. Why should you find it difficult to write?"

"Oh! but I do find it difficult to talk," said he. "It's dreadfully puzzling. I never talk to Gerty."

"Are you always quite silent, then?"

"No; but I don't talk. At least, I suppose I do talk, in a way. I babble, you know. She does most of the talking."

Mrs. Davenport laughed.

"Babble on paper, then," she said; "Gerty will like it just as well."

"Oh! but I can't. It's so silly if you put it down. Is this the Embassy? I hope I shall meet a lot of people I know."

Reggie's common sense was enormous. Gertrude had gone away, and she wouldn't come back for the wishing. He wished she had not gone very much, but here he was in England without her. Surely England without her was the same as England with her, except that she was not there. Her absence, from a practical point of view, did not take the taste out of everything else. How should it? She was a very charming person, the most charming person Reggie had ever met. But there were other charming people, on a distinctly lower level, no doubt, but they did not cease to be charming because Gertrude had gone to Aix. After all, Reggie agreed with the great materialistic philosophers of all time, though he had never read their works. Mrs. Davenport felt somewhat annoyed with this school of thought as she dismounted from the carriage.

The Embassy stood at the corner of a large square, and a broad, red carpet ran from the door across to the road, for royalty was expected. Inside the house the arrangements all corresponded with the magnificent promise of the red carpet. A row of gorgeous flunkies, a band in the hall beneath the stairs, several hundred pounds' worth of hot-house flowers banked up against the wall, a crowd of perfectly-dressed, bustling aristocrats, crowding up and staring, in the worst possible breeding, at a small space between two pillars, where three princesses were looking rather bored, and a similar number of princes were talking to the few who had managed, by dint of loyal shoves, to edge themselves into the august presences; the smiling host and hostess, the pleasant music of women's voices, crossing the somewhat sombre strains of the band below, all these things are the invariable concomitants of such festivities, and on the whole one crush is rather like another crush.

Mrs. Davenport and Reggie had moved slowly up the staircase, and Reggie certainly was finding it amusing. There were lots of people he knew, and he stood chatting on the stairs while Mrs. Davenport talked for a few moments to her sister.

Later on he was standing in a doorway between two of the big reception rooms, talking and laughing, and commanding, by reason of his height, a good deal of the room beyond, when he saw the crowd by the door opposite to him sway and move, as if a wind had passed over it; and through the room, plainly visible, for the crowd made way for her as she was walking with a prince, came a woman he had never seen before. She was tall, dressed in some pale, soft material; round her neck went a single row of diamonds, and above it rose a face for the like of which men have lived and died. Eva had a habit of looking over people's heads and noticing no one, but Reggie happened to be six foot three, and in his long, eager gaze was something that arrested Eva's attention. She looked at him fixedly and gravely, until the thing became absurd, and then she turned away with a laugh, and asked who that pretty boy was.

Reggie, when the spell of her look was broken, turned away too, and asked who the most beautiful woman in the world was.

"There, there," he cried, pointing at her, regardless of men or manners.

So the great loom clashed and crossed, and two more threads were woven, side by side, into the garment of God.

CHAPTER V

There is a distinct tendency, if we may trust books on travels and early stages of religious belief among the uncivilised, dusky masses of the world to assign every event to a direct supernatural influence. Certain savages, if they hit their foot against a stone, will say that there is a demon in that stone, and they hasten to appease him by sacrificial sops. We see the exact opposite of this among those nations, which, like those in our own favoured isle, assign every event to pure chance. There is no harm in calling it chance, and there is no harm in assigning the most insignificant event to a local god, and the lesson we may learn from these elementary reflections is, that there are, at least, two points of view from which we may regard anything.

To adopt, however, the nomenclature of the day, this chance that led Lady Hayes to walk down that room at the French Embassy, when Reggie was standing at the door, was a very big chance. One of the least important results of it was that it occasioned this book to be written.

Reggie was, as I have mentioned before, a very susceptible young man. He fully realised, in propriâ personâ, Mrs. Davenport's "healthy condition" of being in a chronic state of devotion, and this, coupled to his extreme susceptibility, will fully account for the fact that he moved slowly after Lady Hayes, till, by another chance meeting, she fell in with his mother, who had followed him from the top of the stairs, and got introduced. Mrs. Davenport pronounced the mystic words, "Lady Hayes, may I introduce my son Reggie," and the thing was done.

Lady Hayes was amused to find herself so quickly introduced to the "pretty boy" who had stared at her, and as her prince had gone away, she was ready to talk to him, and it appeared that he was ready to talk to her.

"I was so sorry I couldn't come to lunch yesterday," he began, "and I forgot to send a note to say I couldn't."

"We have lunch every day," remarked Lady Hayes, gravely. "Come to-morrow. I shall think it very rude if you cut me again. So will Percy. I shall send him to call you out."

"I know Percy very well," said Reggie. "I'm awfully fond of him. I don't believe he'd call me out."

Eva looked at him again with some amusement. This particular type was somewhat new to her. He was so extraordinarily young.

"I'm very fond of Percy too," she said.

"Oh, but he's your brother," said Reggie.

"So he is."

She laughed again.

"How extremely handsome he is," she thought to herself, in a parenthesis. "Why was I never so young as that."

Then aloud, —

"I'm going to ask you to give me your arm, and take me to get something cold to drink. Do you like ices?" she asked with some experimental malice.

"Lemon water," said Reggie after consideration, "but not cream ices, they're stuffy, somehow. I'd better tell my mother where we're going, and then I can meet her again afterwards."

"Ah! Lady Hayes," exclaimed the voice of their host's brother, "I've been looking for you. Prince Waldenech wishes to be introduced to you. Adeline sent me to find you."

Lady Hayes raised her eyebrows.

"I'll come by and by," she said. "I can't now. I'm going to eat an ice – lemon water. Tell her I will be back soon – ten minutes."

"Prince Waldenech's just going."

"Then I am afraid it will be a pleasure deferred for me. Come, Mr. Davenport. You shall have a lemon water ice, and so will I."

"That was very kind of you to keep your engagement to me," said Reggie.

"You deserved I should cut you, as you cut me yesterday. But I felt inclined to keep this engagement, which makes all the difference. Of course, if you'd felt inclined to come yesterday you wouldn't have forgotten. One never forgets things one likes."

"Oh, but I did feel inclined to come," said Reggie, and stopped short.

"It was self denial, was it?"

"No, I was wanted to do something else."

"What did you do else, if it isn't rude to ask?"

"Oh! I went to the concert at St. James'. They did the Tannhäuser overture."

"Did you like it?"

"Oh yes, it was awfully pretty."

Eva laughed again.

"I expected you would think it stupid or ugly."

"How did you know?" asked he.

"You told me yourself. I knew almost as soon as you began to speak. Never mind. Don't look so puzzled. You shall come to the opera some night with me, and hear it again. I'm dreadfully rude, am I not?"

"You rude! No!" said Reggie, stoutly. "But you mustn't mind my being stupid."

"I like stupid people."

"I should have thought you would have hated them. But I'm glad you like them," said he, blushing furiously.

"What pretty speeches! But you are quite wrong about my hating stupid people – I don't say you're stupid, you know – but in the abstract. You see I know much more about you already than you know about me. I was right about your thinking Wagner ugly, and you were wrong about my disliking stupid people. There's the buffet. I shall sit down here, and you shall bring two ices – one for yourself and one for me."

It was characteristic of Reggie that he wrote an effusive though short note to Gertrude next day, saying that he had met Lady Hayes at the French Embassy, that she was perfectly beautiful and awfully nice, and that he couldn't write any more because he was just going out to lunch with her, and that three days after this another short note followed this one, saying that Lady Hayes was awfully anxious to meet her – Gertrude – that Gertrude must come home as quick as ever she could, and that Mrs. Arbuthnot was going to Lucerne in July, so that, if Mrs. Carston could join her there, Gertrude could come straight home. He had heard that Lucerne was very slow.

Lady Hayes had been "awfully nice" to Reggie. She had hardly ever seen anything so fresh as he was. About two days after their first meeting, Reggie had told her, with unblushing candour, all about Gertrude, and Lady Hayes was charmed to hear it. Reggie's confession of his young love seemed simply delightful. He was so refreshingly unversed in the ways of the world. He had spoken of Gertrude with immense ardour, and had shown Lady Hayes her photograph. He had been there to call one afternoon, and had found her alone. They had tea in the little tent over the porch, which Eva kept there "en permanence," and in which she had routed her mother-in-law a year ago.

She was sitting in a low, basket chair, looking at the photograph, which Reggie had just put into her hand, and had turned from it to his eager, down-looking face, which appeared very attractive.

"Charming," she said, "simply charming! You will let me have this, won't you? and one of yourself, too, and they shall go on the chimney-piece in my room. Really, you have no business to be as happy as this; it isn't at all fair."

Reggie stood up, and drew in a long breath.

"Yes; I'm awfully happy. I never knew anyone as happy as I am. But may I send you another photograph of her? I can get one from the photographer. You see, she gave me this herself."

"No; certainly not," said Eva. "I want this one. I want it now. Surely you have no need of photographs. You have got the original, you see. And this is signed by her."

"Oh! but I'm sure she'd sign another one for you, if I ask her to."

"If it please my lord the king," said Eva. "No; I want this one. Mayn't I have it?"

"Yes, it doesn't make any difference, does it?" said Reggie, guilelessly. "I've got the original, as you say."

"Thanks so much. That is very good of you."

"Of course it's an exchange," said Reggie.

"Ah, you're mercenary after all. I knew I should find a weak point in you. Very good, it's an exchange. But I don't suppose Miss Carston would care for my photograph. She doesn't know me, you see."

"Well, anyhow, mine must be an exchange."

"You're very bold," said Eva. "Of course you could make me give it you; you're much stronger than I am. If you held me down in this chair, and throttled me until I promised, I should have to promise. I'm very cowardly. I should never have made an early Christian martyr. I should have sworn to believe in every heathen goddess, and the Thirty-Nine Articles long before they put the thumbscrew really on."

"Yes, I expect the thumbscrew hurt," said Reggie, meditatively.

"Don't you miss her tremendously?" said Eva, looking at the photograph again. "I should think you were miserable without her."

"Oh, I don't think I could be miserable if I tried," said Reggie.

"Most people find it so easy to be miserable. But I don't think you're like most people."

"I certainly don't find it easy to be miserable; not natural, at least. You see, Gerty's only away for a month, and it wouldn't do the slightest good if I was miserable."

"You have great common sense. Really, common sense is one of the rarest things in the world. Ah, Hayes, that is you, is it? Do you know Mr. Reggie Davenport?"

Lord Hayes made a neat little bow, and took some tea.

"There is a footman waiting to know if you were in," he said. "Somebody has called."

"Please tell the man that I'm not in, or that I'm engaged."

Reggie started up.

"Why didn't you tell me to go?" he said. "I'm afraid I've been here an awful time."

"Sit down again," said Eva. "You are my engagement. I don't want you to go at all."

Reggie sat down again.

"Thank you so much," he said.

"There has been," said Lord Hayes, stirring his tea, "there has been a most destructive earthquake in Zante. The town, apparently, has been completely demolished."

Reggie tried to look interested, and said "Indeed."

"Do you know where Zante is?" asked Eva. "I don't."

"I think it's in the Levant," said Reggie.

"That makes it worse."

"Zante is off the west coast of Greece," said Lord Hayes. "I was thinking at one time of building a villa there."

"Ah," said Eva, "that would be charming. Have you finished your tea, Hayes? Perhaps you would order the carriage for to-night. I have to go out at half-past ten. You must find it draughty here with your bad cold. You would be prudent to sit indoors."

Reggie looked at him with sympathy as he went inside.

"I'm sorry he's got a cold," he said.

"It is an intermittent catarrh," said Eva, with amusement. "There is nothing to be anxious about – thanks."

Lord Hayes had gone indoors without protest or remonstrance, but he was far from not feeling both. The polite indifference which Eva had practised earlier in their married life – the neutral attitude – had begun to wear very thin. When they were alone, he did not care much whether she was polite or not, but he distinctly objected to be made a fool of in public. Why he had not made a stand on this occasion, and insisted that he had no cold at all, which was indeed the case, he found himself wondering, even as he was making his retreat, but that wonder brought him no nearer to doing it. Investigation into mesmerism and other occult phenomena are bringing us nearer a rational perception of such forces, and we are beginning to believe that each man has a set of moral muscles, which exercise moral force, just as he has a similar physical system which is superior or inferior to that of another man. And to judge by any analogy which is known to us, it appears inevitable that when one moral organisation strips as it were to another moral organisation, that a fight, a victory and a defeat will be the result. Eva's prize fight with her husband had lasted more than a year, and though it was practically over, yet the defeated party still delivered itself of small protests from time to time, which resembled those anonymous challenges, or challenges in which it is not distinctly stated that "business is meant," and which are common in the columns of such periodicals as register the more palpable sort of encounters.

Lord Hayes, in fact, still preserved his malignant potentialities. It was a source of satisfaction to him that he still retained a slight power of annoying Eva in small ways. This he did not venture to use in public, because, if Eva suspected anything like a whisper of a challenge not strictly in private, she would take steps to investigate it, and these public investigations were not to his taste. But in private he could vent a little malignity without being publicly pommelled for it.

Thus it came about that, when they were seated at dinner alone that night, Lord Hayes said, —

"May I ask who that young man was with you? He was here yesterday, I believe."

"Didn't I introduce you?" said Eva. "I thought I did. It was Reggie Davenport."

"What do you intend to do with him?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Is he to be a sort of Jim Armine the second?"

Eva finished eating her soufflé without replying, and Lord Hayes rather prematurely thought the shot had told.

"Oh! dear no," she said at length, "nothing of the sort. I am very fond of Reggie Davenport. Quite devoted to him, in fact. He is quite the nicest young man I ever saw."

"I thought you were very fond of Jim."

"How dull men are," said Eva. "Any woman would have seen at once that it was he who was fond of me. But with Reggie – he asked me to call him Reggie – it is reciprocal, I think. I should advise you to be jealous."

"I should not think of such a thing," said he. "Nothing makes a man so ridiculous as to be jealous."

"Except, perhaps, to be complaisant," said Eva, not sparing herself in the desire not to spare him. "I think that is absurder still."

"I have no intention of being complaisant."

"That is such a comfort," said Eva; "it is a great thing to know that one's honour is safe in one's husband's hands. You are my guardian angel. Are you coming to the ball to-night? Yes? I shall be upstairs in my room. Please send a man to tell me when the carriage is round. And don't keep me waiting as you did on Thursday."

Eva went upstairs into her room, and found, among her letters, Reggie's photograph, which he had already sent. She took it up and looked at it for a few moments, and placed it by the side of Gertrude's. Something, perhaps the scene at dinner, had made her restless, and she walked up and down the room, with her long, white dress sweeping the ground behind her.

"What is the matter with me?" she thought to herself impatiently. "Surely I, of all people – "

She sat down again and opened some of her letters. There was one from her mother, who was coming to stay with them for a week or two.

"I hear such a lot about you," she wrote; "everyone seems to be talking about nothing else except Lady Hayes and her beauty and success. And when I think that it is my own darling little Eva, I can only feel full of gratitude and thankfulness that a mother's prayers for her own daughter's welfare have been answered so fully and bountifully. But I hope that, in the riches of love and position and success, which have been so fully granted her, she will not forget – "

Eva tore the letter in half with a sudden, dramatic gesture, and threw it into the paper-basket. She was annoyed, ashamed of herself for her want of self-control, but a new spring of feeling had been rising in her this last day or two, that gave her a sense of loss, of something missed which might never come again, a feeling which she had experienced in some degree after her marriage, when she found out what it was to be linked to a man who did not love her, and whom she was beginning to detest. But now the feeling was deeper, keener, more painful, and from the mantlepiece Reggie's photograph looked at her, smiling, well-bred, well-dressed, and astonishingly young. Surely it couldn't be that!

An hour later a message came that the carriage was round, and she went downstairs again, impassive, cold, perfectly beautiful. As she swept down into the hall, Lord Hayes, who was standing there, with a pair of white kid gloves in his hand, was suddenly struck and astonished at her beauty. He felt freshly proud at having become the owner of this dazzling, perfect piece of life. He moved forward to meet her, and in a burst of pleased proprietorship, laying his hand on her bare arm, —

"My dear Eva," he said, "you are more beautiful than ever."

Eva looked at him for a moment fixedly; then she suddenly shook his hand off.

"Ah! don't touch me," she said shuddering, and moved past him and got into the carriage.

Lord Hayes, however, had one consolation which Eva could never deprive him of, and that was the knowledge that she was his, and the knowledge that she knew it. She might writhe and shrink, or treat him with indifference, or scorn, or anger, but she could never alter that, except by disgracing herself, and she was too proud and sensitive, as he knew, to do anything of the sort. Consequently, her assaults on him at dinner on the subject of complaisance did not trouble him for a moment. It was morally impossible, he felt, for her to put him into such a position, for her own position was as dear to her as he was odious. His lordship had a certain cynical sense of humour, which whispered that though this state of things was not pleasant, it was distinctly amusing.

Meantime, as the days went on, if Eva was beginning to be a little anxious about herself, Mrs. Davenport was not at her ease about Reggie. Gertrude's letters came regularly, and he liked to let his mother read them, and they, at any rate, betrayed no dissatisfaction. But in one of these which arrived soon after the last interview recorded between Lady Hayes and Reggie, Mrs. Davenport suddenly felt frightened. It was a very short sentence which gave rise to this feeling, and apparently a very innocent one: —

"What on earth does Lady Hayes want my photograph for?"

Reggie was sitting by the open window after a particularly late breakfast, smoking into the window box. His back was turned to the room, and he was apparently absorbed in his occupation. He had read Gertrude's letter as he was having breakfast, and when he had finished, he had given it to his mother, saying —

"Such a jolly note from Gerty; you will like to see it, mummy."

Mrs. Davenport read it and looked up with some impatience at the lounging figure in the window seat.

"What's this about Gerty's photograph and Lady Hayes?" she asked. "I don't understand."

Reggie did not appear to hear, and continued persecuting a small, green fly that was airing itself on a red geranium, and was consequently conspicuous.

"You may smoke in here, Reggie," said Mrs. Davenport, raising her voice a little; "come in and sit down."

Reggie turned round somewhat unwillingly. He had heard his mother's first question, and it had suddenly struck him that it was rather an awkward one. A very frank nature will, on occasions, use extreme frankness to cover the deficiency of it, and he decided that the whole truth, very openly stated, was less liable to involve him in difficulties than the subtlest prevarication.