Ainslee's magazine, Volume 16, No. 3, October, 1905

She had turned her head away, and was stretching over her shoulders for her wrap.

“I’m going,” she said.

He rose to put it round her, and caught the reflection in the glass of her averted eyes. They were shining with tears.

She held out her hand, shook his shortly, and went toward the door.

“You needn’t come down,” she said, as he followed her.

“No, but I will.”

“No, you won’t; I don’t want you.”

There was something more imperative in her decree than its tone – a sob; that stopped him at the open door.

The sound of her feet ceased from the stair, the front door slammed, and he walked across to the window, waiting there till the noisy motion of her hansom ebbed into the dull roar of the streets.

He stayed even longer, and the May sky had lost its last memory of the day ere he sat down again before his dying fire.

The girl’s gay audacity seemed to linger like an odor in the room; made pungent, as it were, by that sob. He had not noticed it before. Conscious audacity it was not; for she wore her beauty as a sort of decoration, the star of some regal order, which sanctioned the fine animal magnificence with which she had set the obligations of nobility behind those of good looks, and doubted if the charmed circle of coronets might not prove too dull for her endurance; putting, without a tinge of affectation, nature’s creations before those of dead kings.

But it was not of her vivid exuberance that South was thinking; he had inhaled that before, and the intoxication of it was dissolved. But those sly touches of humility, too faint to be felt through the written record of her words, dropped lids, and looks, and pauses, so unlike her, pressed still as a hand upon his lifted arm. Yet he told himself he had understood them, without the compulsion of her tears.

At least he understood this: that she had thrown the weight of her beauty without avail against the ease and freedom of his unwedded days. Yet it left him with a pricking sense – not of repentance – but that repentance might confront, might even confound, him.

II

Some five months earlier in the year Lord Veynes had returned from a voyage round the world.

It was to have completed his education, which included, besides some Greek grammar, the use of a cue, a little Cavendish and the racing calendar. He was five-and-twenty, a gentleman; dressed well, looked well and lived well; on the whole, a nice fellow, deeply attached to his father and devotedly to himself.

The former was becoming an old man, having married late in life; was short, had a stoop, a halo of whitened hair, and a face that was a mask of merriment. His kindliness and humor were bywords, and his stories always made a widening silence in a room, to which fresh listeners drifted. He would laugh at them himself, yet his laughter seemed their best part, their sincerest compliment; it was like humor itself holding its sides.

He had filled every county dignity in turn, but they made no mark on him nor he on them; he bore them dutifully, but he was glad to be rid of them; they added something to his tales, to the fullness of his humor, to the softness of his heart; perhaps to public knowledge of his incompetence. Yet he was liked none the less for his failures; his blunt honesty thrust out of them obtrusively, as an elbow through a ragged sleeve.

Veynes was the one relic of his married life, having cost his mother her life; and he was adored as things may be that are made so ruinously unique. He was a good boy, and stood a great deal of spoiling; but he had argued, naturally, his own adorableness from so much adoration, and would have honored his father’s encomiums to any amount.

His home-coming had all the decoration of triumphal entries – flags, festival arches and singing children; afterward a tenant dinner, tenant humor and considerable drowsiness.

When it was all over, and the two men sat together by the log fire in the hall, which burned red splashes on the armored walls, the earl opened the subject nearest his heart – an heir.

“I want to see him here before I’m gone,” he concluded, with a kind of ruefulness which was a part of his pathos and of his humor; “and, by George, my boy, if you don’t marry soon, I will.”

“Oh, I’ll marry, I’ll marry,” laughed the other, “but you must find me the girl.”

Love, however, did that, though the earl was assiduous, surrounding the young man for the betterment of his choice with half the eligible petticoats in the county; a mistake, seeing that iteration and propinquity in affairs of the heart are of more assistance than variety.

Yet it was, in the end, variety which succeeded, in the person of Miss Rosamond Merlin.

She had come to lend terpsichorean relief to an amateur performance of burlesque in the neighborhood, and her appearance transformed Veynes, in a single night, from a conscientious brigand to a distracted and distracting piece of stage furniture; though it is but fair to add he was not the only one affected; for none of his brother bandits were, when slain – while Miss Rosamond was upon the stage – as stiff as their previous rigidity had led one to expect.

Miss Merlin attended but three rehearsals; yet ere the night of the performance, Veynes had decided, as he put it, that they were made for one another – a phrase which has not, in a man’s mouth, all the reciprocity that it conveys. He offered the idea to Miss Rosamond while applying some powder to her cheek.

She laughed, knocked the puff out of his hand, and ran on to the stage; but she found him awaiting her exit, deaf to cues and stage directions, in a kind of tragic calm.

“I mean it,” he protested.

She widened her eyes.

“Well, mean it a little later,” she said.

He took the hint and waited till, having found her some food, they were sitting in the deserted supper room, in an atmosphere of exhausted hilarity, among the ruins of the waiters.

“Have you thought it over?” he asked, impressively.

“I, no! – do I ever think anything over but a new step? Besides, such a simple little thing!”

“Simple!” he stammered.

“To say no to. Do you think I’d have the cheek to marry you?”

“Wouldn’t you?” dropped the young man, feebly.

He was innocent of having conceived, still less suggested, so tremendous a contingency; indeed, her contemplation of it, even in dismissal, appeared unseemly. For he had been strictly brought up, and had added, “Thou shalt not wed the name of Veynes in vain,” to a decalogue somewhat abridged, and, as his, father put it, “edited by Debrett.”

But neither his decalogue nor his delicacy prevented him from sketching airily the insignificance of wedding symbols in an aristocratic connection when the heart was involved.

“People talk such nonsense, you know,” he said.

She smiled with engaging innocence, and he edged a little nearer to his meaning, hoping she would meet him halfway.

It was like laying a wash of color beside another which might be wet; he was horribly afraid of a smear; he thought she might have assured him, figuratively, that she would not run. But she only helped herself to another meringue.

He made pauses and filled the silence with his eyes; but she met them with a pensive examination through the prongs of her fork; and the smiles he fancied ambiguous seemed, reflected on her mouth, to be merely inane; so he was driven back upon words and impersonal allusiveness. He groaned, in explanation, over the austerity which would tie all love knots to a wedding ring; suggesting that some people were able to conceive of them apart.

“Couldn’t you?” he inquired.

She gleamed with malicious coquetry.

“Couldn’t and wouldn’t,” she said, decisively. “Love and marry and trust to luck, that’s my sentiment; but don’t marry if you can’t love; and don’t love if you can’t marry; and don’t do either – ”

“Well?”

“If you think you’re going to do both.”

“Poof!” he pouted.

“Oh, no, it’s not; it’s the very sober fact. Love’s a fever, you know, and no better than most of them – contagious and malagious and infectious and – and – ”

“Go on!”

“But that’s the truth; it’s carried in frocks, pretty ones; and it’s caught by touching, and it’s regular poison to breathe! Then it must be in the air, because people take it in clumps, perfect epidemics; and the best way to catch it is to let yourself get low and dumpy. When you’ve got it, the only thing to cure you is marriage – and it does generally – a ring dissolved in syrup night and morning; kind of quinine, you know; takes away the shivering and gives you a headache.”

His face was whitening with disapproval, and she burst, as she caught a glimpse of it, into a gust of laughter.

“Shocking, isn’t it?”

“Well, it’s a matter of taste,” he remarked, with a further twist of his nose, to indicate that its flavor, at least in his mouth, was nasty. It is never the hangman can joke when he is hung.

She looked at him, with her head tilted over her plate, and a slow, broad smile.

“You’ll do!” she said. “But you know even your eight pearls won’t run to quite all that – every time.”

He moved impatiently on his chair as she raised her champagne glass and peered mockingly at him across its yellow brim.

She set it down with a laugh.

“My!” she exclaimed; “what a row they are making upstairs! Come along, I believe they are dancing.”

She went up three steps at a time, but Veynes followed more slowly. He feared he was sickening for the fever.

III

The woman’s orbit – in a civil state – is, like that of other celestial bodies, either annular or elliptic.

Those of the circle are orderly satellites, turning an eternal sameness to the attraction they patrol, and as incapable of suiting themselves to a suitor, or of varying their reflection of his passion to a man’s requirements, as of coyness with its quoted sunlight is the cold face of the moon.

And the moons are many. They rise, wax, wane; are new, old and eclipsed; pass by progressive phases of the familiar to the lean crescent of contempt, with a constancy in decrepitude – speaking amorously – which cannot only be followed, but – foretold.

And those of the ellipse? They, too, revolve, but come, enkindled, from the unknown night, torn with fantastic splendors toward their sun – drawn into him, it may be, by his spell, or past him with unsolved desires, yet bent to him still – dying out, darkened, into the empty way, spent, speedless, splendorless; a danger to orderly patrollers of an orbit, and a possible acquisition for any new system of superior attractions; being, at their ebb, but weak and idle wanderers – inconstant, easily attached; though at other times superb, imperious; yet malign portents to the thatched propriety that lives in fear of sparks.

Such divide the sex, the passive and the passionate; the reflectors and the inflamed. Men love the second, but they wed the first – moon, not comet, and they do well. For men prefer comfort to coronation, and like the easy sense of lordship which a satellite confers; for there is something soothing to mortal vanity in centripetal rigors when oneself is the center sought; and, though men disparage the sameness which they wive, they would be but ill content with its reverse.

Veynes knew as much; or, rather, knew that as much was known. He had, morever, warning in the fate of a too recent ancestor, who, allying himself to one of the comet kind – the frame of her picture still hung empty, in evicted memorial, at the court – came to unrecounted grief. So, fearing his desires, and the failure of his desires, and the outcome of either, he told himself, shaking his head with that unvalorous and how-to-perform-I-wot-not wisdom of youth, that his refined perceptions had been estranged by Miss Rosamond’s too candid lack of quality. Which may have been; for our refined perceptions are so often only an injected opiate, in spite of which our heart still beats and sickens. Yet he shook his head sadly. He had his father to consider; he had the estate to consider; he had his name to consider; but, firstly and finally, he had himself. And, alas! it takes more than honor, piety and pride together to make a man forget that. And a young man in especial. For we are very practical when young, and only fight the good fight for a substantial share in the plunder; we ask what a man will get in exchange for his soul.

Veynes fought it, there is that to his credit; and it is pleasant to remember that, of all his obligations, duty to his father died the hardest; sheer tenderness for the old man’s hopes often wringing from him a resolve to conquer passion and wed a pedigree. But the resolutions of the young are, happily, impermanent; and this kind beyond the rest, being written in acid, eats its way out – through the stuff of our wills.

So it was that, in spite of this clamoring chorus of expediencies, the small voice which claims in every man the justice of joy made itself heeded, and Miss Merlin received an offer of marriage; which, stung by South’s indifference, she allowed herself to accept.

After that, of course, the deluge! – and, thinking to float it out the better on a certificate of marriage, Veynes took Miss Rosamond to the registrar.

Then, with Lady Veynes in her prettiest frock, they went down together to the court, and crossing, with a sense of diplomacy, from the station by a field path into the French garden, which lay behind the western wing of the house, Veynes left his wife and advanced alone.

He was some time gone, and the lady, tired at last of the flowers, the reflector, and the mossy sundial, and tempted by the cropped turf, turned to her ancient consolation for leisures that were too long; so that the first thing which met Veynes’ eye on his return was her lithe figure, in fawn and gold, doing a little melancholy dance between the scarlet flower beds.

The sight did not sweeten his temper; it emphasized too loudly reproaches which hummed still against his ears. Even those red blossoms, which had lived in their mute livery so many years about the court, might have been too surprised to recognize, by the swift, small feet that brushed their petals, a future mistress.

As Veynes drew near, the dance became a little more flamboyant, still further ruffling him; the spaces of dainty petticoat seemed to enlarge his grievance.

“Well?” she inquired, loftily, as he approached, dropping into an attitude.

“Well,” he echoed, gruffly, “you needn’t fool about for the benefit of the gardeners. He won’t see you.”

His tone sided with the rebuff, and brought a flush of color to her face. She had been his wife only a night and a day.

“All right,” she replied, simply. “I will see him; and meanwhile the gardeners are very welcome.”

He flung himself into a seat. “Just as you please,” he grunted; “only he doesn’t know you’re here.”

She took no heed to the hint, but walked in her deliberate fashion to the edge of the lawn; then she turned and came back more slowly.

“What did you tell him?” she asked her husband.

His arms were stretched along the top of the seat, and he was staring gloomily at the house. He did not look up.

“I told him I was married. He nearly bucked out of his chair, and looked as frightened as if he’d heard I was dead. So I said: ‘To an actress,’ and he put his face into his hands and cried.”

“What a soft!”

“Oh, anything you please! He said some other things that were a bit harder.”

“About me?”

“About the whole sickening concern. Said I might go to the deuce my own way, but it shouldn’t be through the Court; and that while he lived – which wouldn’t be for long – the old place should know only its own sort of people.”

“What sort is that?”

“People of birth and breeding, I suppose.”

“I see! Like Lord Egglesham, for instance, who shared the honeymoon with his fond parents; or Aubrey Beauthair, who gets fuzzy before ladies. Well, I’m going to show your father what a person is like who has been neither born nor bred; I dare say it will interest him. Shall I say that you’ll dine here?”

“Say what you like,” he growled.

She turned again toward the long west wing of the great house, which glowed above the box hedges, warm and red with sunlight above its clinging roses.

Her heart was not so brave as her words, but it carried her past the powdered footman with the air of a duchess, as she gave her name, though she read doubts in his curdling face as to her reception, and shared them herself. But therein she wronged a man too proud to let any woman suffer a slight in his own house; and in due time the heavily curtained library door was opened, and the earl entered and bowed.

“I am Lady Veynes,” said his visitor, quietly. She felt a sudden kindness and pity for the frail, bent old man, who was still as white as his son had reported.

He bowed again.

“I was waiting in the garden when my hus – your son was in here,” she went on, simply; “he came out and told me all about it. I’m very sorry. I mean I’m very sorry it is so bad for you. Your son said you’d wish him better dead. I hope you won’t. He’s an awfully good son; he thinks no end of you; and he’s outside now tremendously cut up.”

Lord Egham made no sign, but he was looking in the woman’s face.

“I’ve never thought about it,” she continued, naïvely, “but I didn’t suppose there was such a difference between people as – as there seems to be. I thought if a man’s wife was pure and true to him, and loved him, he got all his change – I mean all he stood to; isn’t that it? You don’t think so, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything about you, you see,” she explained, with warming sympathy; “you were only the Earl of Something, and it didn’t seem to matter much what an earl felt; he didn’t seem quite human; it really didn’t seem as if he could feel so very much. But you see you do.”

The earl bent his head gravely, but there was the ghost of a smile about his drawn lips.

“Sir,” she said, with a little gesture which opened her arms and seemed pathetically to expose herself, “I am sorry to be here to trouble you; I didn’t come for that. I suppose you think I was very glad to catch your son, and his title, and money, and things; but I wasn’t. I didn’t want them; I don’t know what you do with them; but I wanted to belong somewhere. I’m all by myself, you see,” with a little isolating wave of her hand, “and that’s dreary enough at times, especially for a woman.”

She waited a moment to allow the earl to fill the gap, but he did not. He was watching her intently.

“I came down here with my husband,” she continued at length, with an air of embroidering the interval; “he didn’t want me to come in to – to bother you, but I felt I must. I don’t want you to fall out with him; you haven’t had him back so long, I know; it seems pretty rough on you every way; but if you can’t take us both on, I’ll go. Of course I can’t go for good, but it’ll seem good enough, I dare say; I can keep out of the way, and you can have him to yourself; and you won’t have to apologize to all your friends for his making a fool of himself.”

There was some gentle irony in her voice, and it wavered as she concluded:

“I’ve been pretty lonely before, but it was never anything like this; and if I’d known how bad you’d take me I’d have stayed so.”

Her nervousness and her desire for simple expression soaked her speech in a kind of sweetened slanginess, from which, usually, she was able to wring out her thoughts into very clean English. Slang was, in fact, the charcoal outline of most of her talk, but it was generally concealed by the color. The latter she supplied on this occasion in person. She was a very pretty woman, and seemed able to look her prettiest at will; the need for beauty painting it freshly on her face. She had the dancer’s trick, too, of seeming to float above her anchored feet, like a butterfly with folded wings.

There were tears in her eyes, which aided the apparent sincerity in her tone, though, indeed, she was sufficiently sorry for the silent man before her to make it a very solid counterfeit of the fact; but the tears were come of disappointment and hurt pride.

However, to a man, the tear in a woman’s eye is always a tear, a salt tear; and in such eyes they looked well enough, and ill enough, to warm a colder heart than was in Lord Veynes’ father; for age is tenderer to beauty than youth, being a wayfarer among flowers which the other wears; besides, it sees at sundown, and lips seem redder and eyelids sadder when they face the sunset.

Lord Egham made a step forward, and offered her a seat. And Rosamond murmured to herself: “I’ve come to stay!”

IV

But she had not; at least not so speedily as she supposed. She returned that evening to town with her husband, and crossed the Channel the following day for a honeymoon, which was rather endured than desired. But the earl proved, in the end, gentleman and philosopher enough – synonyms for gracious acceptance of the inevitable – to make his bow to necessity, and take fate and the prettiest lady in London on his arm.

South had heard from her twice, from Venice and Corfu; long, trivial, ill-spelt letters, lined with a secret wistfulness he had not perceived, under the brave talk of travel.

He received the second while away from town, and only learned, on his arrival in the end of October, that Lady Veynes and her husband had called some weeks earlier, and had inquired the date of his return.

He was puzzled by their presence at that time in London, and a telegram which came from the Court a few days later did not aid his enlightenment. It ran: “Please be at home this evening. – R. E. V.” He had indulged in the unusual extravagance of a box at the Variety for the amusement of some country friends who were doing London in the dull season, and was most anxious to entertain them; yet he provided a substitute and an excuse without a murmur, and dined early by himself. Then, the day having been close and warm, he pushed his chair beside the roasted greenness on the balcony and sat looking down idly, in the early evening, from behind the thick stone balusters upon the square.

The sky was clear above the mulled October mist, and a few pale stars had appeared already, weak and white as city children; there was a reek of heated brick, and an odor of brown leaves drifted from the park with the damp smell of its autumn water.

The roar of traffic had died down; it was always quieter there in the fall, and a piano-organ in the Palace Road seemed to play in an exhausted air. A clatter of wheels crushed through its tune as a hansom shot round the narrow entry and rattled across the quad.

The panels clanged, and South could hear the click of small-heeled shoes upon the pavement. The pause which might cover a payment, the long wheep of the whip, the sudden clash of hoofs, the thin clang of the bell below – all seemed borne up to him with abnormal clearness.

He sat where he was till the door opened and Lady Veynes was announced; then he rose, outlined in the open window against the sky, and called, as his landlord retired, for the lamps. Rosamond walked across to the balcony and stood beside him, gazing absently into the square; then she turned her head quickly and looked up into his eyes. There was an urgent smile in hers which was almost an appeal, but his in return seemed to satisfy it, for she stole out her hand and caught his arm lightly above the elbow.

“What does it mean?” he inquired.

She looked over his shoulder as the man entered and placed a lamp on the table; and when he had retired she stepped across the room and snapped it out.

“I don’t know why you called for it,” she said. “Was it to tint the proprieties?”

“I suppose so,” he replied, regarding her, “but I’m afraid it won’t.”

“No, it won’t. I’m going to sit in your seat here by the window; pull another beside it.”

He did as he was told, and she laid her arms limply along those of the chair, leaned back and sighed.

“Don’t you know why I’m here?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“I’m going away.”

“From what?”

“From the Court, and my husband, and his excellent father, and everything! I’m sick of it all.”

“Why?”

“Can’t you guess? Because I’m not one of them. I’m a kind of curiosity in the house; people come to stare at me, they do, really; possibly they think I’ll kick their hats off at afternoon tea, or pass them the bread and butter on my toe; I don’t know. But I don’t mind that so much, it’s the feeling that I mustn’t do these things because I can. If I was a real lady I might do anything; but because I’m not I must do nothing. Smile, sigh and say good-by; and be a pretty piece of furniture to decorate the rooms and support my husband. But I won’t. I wasn’t made on castors.”