So that the fate of that garden and that high-pitched roof was in fact in the hands of Cammie Fittleworth – in so far as great peers to-day have influence over the fates of their neighbours. And it is to be presumed that they have some.
And men are curious creatures. Fittleworth stiffened at queer places. He had done so last night. He had nevertheless stood a good deal in the way of allegations from her. It had to be remembered that Mark Tietjens was an old acquaintance of his – not as intimate as he would have been if the Earl had had children, for Mark preferred houses of married people who had children. But the Earl knew Mark very well… . Now a man listening to gossip about another man whom he knows very well will go pretty far in the way of believing what a beautiful woman will tell him about that other man. Beauty and truth have a way of appearing to be akin; and it is true that no man knows what another man is doing when he is out of sight.
So that in inventing or hinting at a ruinous, concealed harem, with consequent disease to account for Mark’s physical condition and apparent ruin she thought she was not going altogether too far. She had at any rate been ready to chance it. It is the sort of thing a man will believe about his best friend even. He will say: ‘Only think … all the while old X … was appearing such a quiet codger he was really …’ And the words rivet conviction.
So that appeared to get through.
Her revelations as to Christopher’s financial habits had not appeared to do so well. The Earl had listened with his head on one side whilst she had let him gather that Christopher lived on women – on the former Mrs. Duchemin, now Lady Macmaster, for instance. Yes, to that the Earl had listened with deference, and it had seemed a fairly safe allegation to make. Old Duchemin was known to have left a pot of money to his widow. She had a very nice little place not six or seven miles away from where they stood.
And it had come rather naturally to bring in Edith Ethel, for not so long ago Lady Macmaster had actually paid Sylvia a visit. It was about the late Macmaster’s debt to Christopher. That was a point about which Lady Macmaster was and always had seemed to be a little cracky. She had actually visited Sylvia in order to see if Sylvia would not use her influence with Christopher. To get him to remit the debt!
Apparently Christopher had not carried his idiocy as far as might be expected. He had dragged that wretched girl down to those penurious surroundings, but he was not going to let her and the child she appeared to be going to have suffer actual starvation or even to suffer from too great worry. And apparently, to satisfy a rather uneasy vanity, years before Macmaster had given Christopher a charge on his life insurance. Macmaster, as she well knew, had sponged unmercifully on her husband and Christopher had certainly formerly regarded the money he had advanced as a gift. She herself had many times upbraided him about it: it had appeared to her one of Christopher’s worst unbearablenesses.
But apparently the charge on the life insurance still existed and was now a charge on that miserable fellow’s rather extensive estate. At any rate the insurance company refused to pay over any money to the widow until the charge was satisfied… . And the thought that Christopher was doing for that girl what, she was convinced, he never would have done for herself had added a new impulse to Sylvia’s bitterness. Indeed her bitterness had by now given way almost entirely to a mere spirit of tormentingness – she wanted to torture that girl out of her mind. That was why she was there now. She imagined Valentine under the high roof suffering tortures because she, Sylvia, was looking down over the hedge.
But the visit of Lady Macmaster had certainly revived her bitterness as it had suggested to her new schemes of making herself a nuisance to the household below her. Lady Macmaster in widow’s weeds of the most fantastic crape that gave to her at once the elegance and the portentousness of a funeral horse had really seemed more than a little out of her mind. She had asked Sylvia’s opinion of all sorts of expedients for making Christopher loosen his grip and she had continued her supplications even in correspondence. At last she had hit on a singular expedient… . Some years before, apparently, Edith Ethel had had an affair of the heart with a distinguished Scottish Litterateur, now deceased. Edith Ethel, as was well known, had acted as Egeria to quite a number of Scottish men of letters. That was natural; the Macmasters’ establishment was Scottish, Macmaster had been a Critic and had had government funds for the relief of indigent men of letters and Edith Ethel was passionately cultured. You could see that even in the forms her crape took and in how she arranged it around her when she sat or agitatedly rose to wring her hands.
But the letters of this particular Scot had outpassed the language of ordinary Egerianishness. They spoke of Lady Macmaster’s eyes, arms, shoulders, feminine aura… . These letters Lady Macmaster had proposed to entrust to Christopher for sale to Trans-Atlantic collectors. She said they ought to fetch $30,000 at least and with the 10% commission that Christopher might take he might consider himself as amply repaid for the four thousand odd that Macmaster’s estate owed him.
And this had appeared to Sylvia to be so eccentric an expedient that she had felt the utmost pleasure in suggesting that Edith Ethel should drive up to Tietjens’s with her letters and have an interview – if possible with Valentine Wannop in the absence of Tietjens. This she calculated would worry her rival quite a bit – and even if it did not do that she, Sylvia, would trust herself to obtain subsequently from Edith Ethel a great many grotesque details as to the Wannop’s exhausted appearance, shabby clothing, worn hands.
For it is to be remembered that one of the chief torments of the woman who has been abandoned by a man is the sheer thirst of curiosity for material details as to how that man subsequently lives. Sylvia Tietjens for a great number of years had tormented her husband. She would have said herself that she had been a thorn in his flesh, largely because he had seemed to her never inclined to take his own part. If you live with a person who suffers from being put upon a great deal and if that person will not assert his own rights you are apt to believe that your standards as gentleman and Christian are below his, and the experience is lastingly disagreeable. But in any case Sylvia Tietjens had had reason to believe that for many years, for better or for worse – and mostly for worse – she had been the dominating influence over Christopher Tietjens. Now, except for extraneous annoyances, she was aware that she could no longer influence him either for evil or for good. He was a solid, four-square lump of meal-sacks too heavy for her hauling about.
So that the only real pleasure she had was when, at night in a circle of cosy friends she could assert that she was not even yet out of his confidence. Normally she would not – the members of her circle would not have – made confidantes of her ex-husband’s domestics. But she had had to chance whether the details of Christopher’s ménage as revealed by the wife of his carpenter would prove to her friends sufficiently amusing to make them forget the social trespass she committed in consorting with her husband’s dependants and she had to chance whether the carpenter’s wife would not see that, by proclaiming her wrongs over the fact that her husband had left her, she was proclaiming her own unattractiveness.
She had hitherto chanced both, but the time, she was aware, was at hand when she would have to ask herself whether she would not be better off if she were what the French call rangée as was the wife of the Commander in Chief in India than as a free-lance woman owing her popularity entirely to her own exertions. It would be slightly ignominious to owe part of her prestige to a pantaloon like General Lord Edward Campion K.C.B., but how restful might it not be! To keep your place in a society of Marjies and Beatties – and even of Cammies, like the Countess of Fittleworth – meant constant exertion and watchfulness, even if you were comfortably wealthy and well-born – and it meant still more exertion when your staple capital for entertainment was the domestic misfortune of a husband that did not like you.
She might well point out to Marjie, Lady Stern, that her husband’s clothes lacked buttons and his companion all imaginable chic; she might well p
oint out to Beattie, Lady Elsbacher, that according to her husband’s carpenter’s wife, the interior of her husband’s home resembled a cave encumbered with packing cases in dark-coloured wood, whereas in her day … Or she might even point out to Cammie, Lady Fittleworth, to Mrs. de Bray Pape and Mrs. Luther that, having a defective water supply, her husband’s woman probably provided him only with difficulty with baths… . But every now and then someone – as had been the case once or twice with the three American ladies – would point out, a little tentatively, that her husband was by now Tietjens of Groby to all intents and purposes. And people – and in particular American ladies – would attach particular importance before her to English county gentlemen who had turned down titles and the like. Her husband had not turned down a title; he had not been able to, for much as Mark had desired to refuse a baronetcy at the last moment he had been given to understand that he couldn’t. But her husband had practically turned down a whole great estate and the romantic aspect of that feat was beginning to filter through to her friends. For all her assertions that his seeming poverty was due to dissolute living and consequent bankruptcy, her friends would occasionally ask her whether in fact his poverty was not simply a voluntary affair, the result either of a wager or a strain of mysticism. They would point out that she and her son at least had all the symptoms of considerable wealth as a sign rather that Christopher did not desire wealth or was generous, than that he had no longer money to throw away… .
There were symptoms of that sort of questioning of the mind rising up in the American ladies whom Cammie Fittleworth liked to have staying with her. Hitherto Sylvia had managed to squash them. After all, the Tietjens household below her feet was a singular affair for those who had not the clue to its mystery. She had the clue herself; she knew both about the silent feud between the two brothers and about their attitude to life. And if it enraged her that Christopher should despise things that she so valued it none the less gratified her to know that, in the end, she was to be regarded as responsible for that silent feud and the renunciation that it had caused. It was her tongue that had set going the discreditable stories that Mark once had believed against his brother.
But if she was to retain her power to blast that household with her tongue she felt she ought to have details. She must have corroborative details. Otherwise she could not so very convincingly put over her picture of abandoned corruption. You might have thought that her coercing Mrs. de Bray Pape and her son into making that rather outrageous visit and in awakening Mrs. Lowther’s innocent curiosity as to the contents of the cottage she had been inspired solely by the desire to torment Valentine Wannop. But she was aware that there was more than that to it. She might get details of all sorts of queernesses that, triumphantly, to other groups of listeners she could retail as proof of her intimacy with that household.
If her listeners showed any signs of saying that it was queer that a man like Christopher who appeared to be a kindly group of sacks should actually be a triply crossed being compounded of a Lovelace, Pandarus, and a Satyr she could always answer: ‘Ah, but what can you expect of people who have hams drying in their drawing-room!’ Or if others alleged that it was queer, if Valentine Wannop had Christopher as much under her thumb as she was said to have, even by Sylvia, that she should still allow Christopher to run an Agapemone in what was after all her own house, Sylvia would have liked to be able to reply: ‘Ah, but what can you expect of a woman upon whose stairs you will find, side by side, a hairbrush, a frying pan, and a copy of Sappho!’
That was the sort of detail that Sylvia needed. The one item she had: The Tietjenses, she knew from Mrs. Carpenter Cramp, had an immense fireplace in their living-room and, after the time-honoured custom they smoked their hams in that chimney. But to people who did not know that smoking hams in great chimneys was a time-honoured custom the assertion that Christopher was the sort of person who dried hams in his drawing-room would bring up images of your finding yourself in a sort of place where hams reclined on the sofa-cushions. Even that to the reflective would not necessarily be proof that the perpetrator was a Sadic lunatic – but few people are reflective and at any rate it was queer, and one queerness might be taken as implying another.
But as to Valentine she could not get details enough. You had to prove that she was a bad housekeeper and a blue stocking in order that it should be apparent that Christopher was miserable – and you had to prove that Christopher was miserable in order to make it apparent that the hold that Valentine Wannop certainly had over him was something unholy. For that, it was necessary to have details of misplaced hairbrushes, frying pans, and copies of Sappho.
It had, however, been difficult to get those details. Mrs. Cramp when appealed to had made it rather plain that, far from being a bad housekeeper Valentine Wannop did no housekeeping at all whereas Marie Léonie – Lady Mark – was a perfect devil of a ménagère. Apparently Mrs. Cramp was allowed no further into the dwelling than the wash house – because of half-pounds of sugar and dusters that Mrs. Cramp in the character of charwoman had believed to be her perquisites. Marie Léonie hadn’t.
The local doctor and the parson, both of whom visited the house, had contributed only palely coloured portraits of the young woman. Sylvia had gone to call on them and making use of the Fittleworth ægis – hinting that Lady Cammie wanted details of her humbler neighbours for her own instruction – Sylvia had tried to get behind the professional secrecy that distinguished parsons and doctors. But she had not got much behind. The parson gave her the idea that he thought Valentine rather a jolly girl, very hospitable and with a fine tap of cider at disposal and fond of reading under trees – the classics mostly. Very much interested also in rock-plants as you could see by the bank under Tietjens’s windows… . Their house was always called Tietjens’s. Sylvia had never been under those windows and that enraged her.
From the doctor, Sylvia, for a faint flash, gained the impression that Valentine enjoyed rather poor health. But it had only been an impression arising from the fact that the doctor saw her every day – and it was rather discounted by the other fact that the doctor said that his daily visits were for Mark who might be expected to pop off at any moment. So he needed careful watching. A little excitement and he was done for… . Otherwise Valentine seemed to have a sharp eye for old furniture as the doctor knew to his cost, for in a small way he collected himself. And he said that at minor cottage-sales and for small objects Valentine could drive a bargain that Tietjens himself never achieved.
Otherwise, from both the doctor and the parson, she had an impression of Tietjens’s as a queer household – queer because it was so humdrum and united. She really herself had expected something more exciting! Really. It did not seem possible that Christopher should settle down into tranquil devotion to brother and mistress after the years of emotion she had given him. It was as if a man should have jumped out of a frying pan into – a duckpond.
So, as she looked at the red flush on Fittleworth’s face an almost mad moment of impatience had overcome her. This fellow was about the only man who had ever had the guts to stand up to her… . A fox-hunting squire: an extinct animal!
The trouble was, you could not tell quite how extinct he was. He might be able to bite as hard as a fox. Otherwise she would be running down, right now, running down that zigzag orange path to that forbidden land.
That she had hitherto never dared. From a social point of view it would have been outrageous, but she was prepared to chance that. She was sure enough of her place in Society and if people will excuse a man’s leaving his wife they will excuse the wife’s making at least one or two demonstrations that are a bit thick. But she had simply not dared to meet Christopher; he might cut her.
Perhaps he would not. He was a gentleman and gentlemen do not usually cut women with whom they have slept.… But he might… . She might go down there and in a dark low-ceilinged room be making some sort of stipulation – God knew what, the first that came into her head – to Valentine. You can al
ways make up some sort of reason for approaching the woman who has supplanted you. But he might come mooning in, and suddenly stiffen into a great, clumsy – oh adorable! – face of stone.
That was what you would not dare to face. That would be death. She could imagine him going out of the room, rolling his shoulders. Leaving the whole establishment to her, closing only himself in invisible bonds – closed to her by the angel with the flaming sword… . That was what he would do. And that before the other woman. He had come once very near it and she had hardly recovered from it. That pretended illness had not been so much pretended as all that! She had smiled angelically, under the great crucifix, in the convent that had been her nursing-home – angelically, amongst lilies, upon the General, the sisters, the many callers that gradually came to her teas. But she had had to think that Christopher was probably in the arms of his girl, and he had let her go when she had, certainly physically, needed his help.
But that had not been a calm occasion, in that dark empty house… . And he had not, at that date, enjoyed the favours, the domesticity, of that young woman. He hadn’t had a chance of comparison, so that the turning-down need not count. He had treated her barbarously – as social counters go it had been helpful to her – but only at the strong urge of a young woman driven to fury. That could be palliated. It hardly indeed affected her now as a reverse. Looked at reasonably, if a man comes home intending to go to bed with a young woman who has bewitched him for a number of years and finds another woman who tells him that she has cancer and does a very creditable faint from the top of the stairs and then – in spite of practice and being as hard as nails – puts her ankle out of joint, he has got to choose between the one and the other. And the other in this case had been vigorous, determined on her man, even vituperative. Obviously Christopher was not the sort of man who would like seducing a young woman whilst his wife was dying of internal cancer, let alone a sprained ankle. But the young woman had arrived at a stage when she did not care for any delicacies or their dictates.