‘From her husband, I suppose,’ Waterville suggested.
‘From her husband? From which? The last was named Beck.’
‘How many has she had?’ Waterville inquired, anxious to hear how it was that Mrs Headway was not respectable.
‘I haven’t the least idea. But it wouldn’t be difficult to find out, as I believe they are all living. She was Mrs Beck – Nancy Beck – when I knew her.’
‘Nancy Beck!’ cried Waterville, aghast. He was thinking of her delicate profile, like that of a pretty Roman empress. There was a great deal to be explained.
Littlemore explained it in a few words before they returned to their places, admitting indeed that he was not yet able to elucidate her present situation. She was a memory of his Western days; he had seen her last some six years before. He had known her very well and in several places; the circle of her activity was chiefly the Southwest. This activity was of a vague character, except in the sense that it was exclusively social. She was supposed to have a husband, one Philadelphus Beck, the editor of a Democratic newspaper, the Dakotah Sentinel; but Littlemore had never seen him – the pair were living apart – and it was the impression at San Diego that matrimony, for Mr and Mrs Beck, was about played out. He remembered now to have heard afterwards that she was getting a divorce. She got divorces very easily, she was so taking in court. She had got one or two before from a man whose name he had forgotten, and there was a legend that even these were not the first. She had been exceedingly divorced! When he first met her in California, she called herself Mrs Grenville, which he had been given to understand was not an appellation acquired in matrimony, but her parental name, resumed after the dissolution of an unfortunate union. She had had these episodes – her unions were all unfortunate – and had borne half a dozen names. She was a charming woman, especially for New Mexico; but she had been divorced too often – it was a tax on one’s credulity; she must have repudiated more husbands than she had married.
At San Diego she was staying with her sister, whose actual spouse (she, too, had been divorced), the principal man of the place, kept a bank (with the aid of a six-shooter), and who had never suffered Nancy to want for a home during her unattached periods. Nancy had begun very young; she must be about thirty-seven to-day. That was all he meant by her not being respectable. The chronology was rather mixed; her sister at least had once told him that there was one winter when she didn’t know herself who was Nancy’s husband. She had gone in mainly for editors – she esteemed the journalistic profession. They must all have been dreadful ruffians, for her own amiability was manifest. It was well known that whatever she had done she had done in self-defence. In fine, she had done things; that was the main point now! She was very pretty, good-natured and clever, and quite the best company in those parts. She was a genuine product of the far West – a flower of the Pacific slope; ignorant, audacious, crude, but full of pluck and spirit, of natural intelligence, and of a certain intermittent, haphazard good taste. She used to say that she only wanted a chance – apparently she had found it now. At one time, without her, he didn’t see how he could have put up with the life. He had started a cattle-ranch, to which San Diego was the nearest town, and he used to ride over to see her. Sometimes he stayed there for a week; then he went to see her every evening. It was horribly hot; they used to sit on the back piazza. She was always as attractive, and very nearly as well-dressed, as they had just beheld her. As far as appearance went, she might have been transplanted at an hour’s notice from that dusty old settlement to the city by the Seine.
‘Some of those Western women are wonderful,’ Littlemore said. ‘Like her, they only want a chance.’
He had not been in love with her – there never was anything of that sort between them. There might have been, of course; but as it happened there was not. Headway apparently was the successor of Beck; perhaps there had been others between. She was in no sort of ‘society’; she only had a local reputation (‘the elegant and accomplished Mrs Beck’, the newspapers called her – the other editors, to whom she wasn’t married), though, indeed, in that spacious civilisation the locality was large. She knew nothing of the East, and to the best of his belief at that period had never seen New York. Various things might have happened in those six years, however; no doubt she had ‘come up’. The West was sending us everything (Littlemore spoke as a New Yorker); no doubt it would send us at last our brilliant women. This little woman used to look quite over the head of New York; even in those days she thought and talked of Paris, which there was no prospect of her knowing; that was the way she had got on in New Mexico. She had had her ambition, her presentiments; she had known she was meant for better things. Even at San Diego she had prefigured her little Sir Arthur; every now and then a wandering Englishman came within her range. They were not all baronets and M.P.s, but they were usually a change from the editors. What she was doing with her present acquisition he was curious to see. She was certainly – if he had any capacity for that state of mind, which was not too apparent – making him happy. She looked very splendid; Headway had probably made a ‘pile’, an achievement not to be imputed to any of the others. She didn’t accept money – he was sure she didn’t accept money.
On their way back to their seats Littlemore, whose tone had been humorous, but with that strain of the pensive which is inseparable from retrospect, suddenly broke into audible laughter.
‘The modelling of a statue and the works of Voltaire!’ he exclaimed, recurring to two or three things she had said. ‘It’s comical to hear her attempt those flights, for in New Mexico she knew nothing about modelling.’
‘She didn’t strike me as affected,’ Waterville rejoined, feeling a vague impulse to take a considerate view of her.
‘Oh, no; she’s only – as she says – fearfully changed.’
They were in their places before the play went on again, and they both gave another glance at Mrs Headway’s box. She leaned back, slowly fanning herself, and evidently watching Littlemore, as if she had been waiting to see him come in. Sir Arthur Demesne sat beside her, rather gloomily, resting a round pink chin upon a high stiff collar; neither of them seemed to speak.
‘Are you sure she makes him happy?’ Waterville asked.
‘Yes – that’s the way those people show it.’
‘But does she go about alone with him that way? Where’s her husband?’
‘I suppose she has divorced him.’
‘And does she want to marry the baronet?’ Waterville asked, as if his companion were omniscient.
It amused Littlemore for the moment to appear so. ‘He wants to marry her, I guess.’
‘And be divorced, like the others?’
‘Oh, no; this time she has got what she wants,’ said Littlemore, as the curtain rose.
He suffered three days to elapse before he called at the Hôtel Meurice, which she had designated, and we may occupy this interval in adding a few words to the story we have taken from his lips. George Littlemore’s residence in the far West had been of the usual tentative sort – he had gone there to replenish a pocket depleted by youthful extravagance. His first attempts had failed; the days were passing away when a fortune was to be picked up even by a young man who might be supposed to have inherited from an honourable father, lately removed, some of those fine abilities, mainly dedicated to the importation of tea, to which the elder Mr Littlemore was indebted for the power of leaving his son well off. Littlemore had dissipated his patrimony, and he was not quick to discover his talents, which, consisting chiefly of an unlimited faculty for smoking and horse-breaking, appeared to lie in the direction of none of the professions called liberal. He had been sent to Harvard to have his aptitudes cultivated, but here they took such a form that repression had been found more necessary than stimulus – repression embodied in an occasional sojourn in one of the lovely villages of the Connecticut valley. Rustication saved him, perhaps, in the sense that it detached him; it destroyed his ambitions, which had been foolish. At the
age of thirty, Littlemore had mastered none of the useful arts, unless we include in the number the great art of indifference. He was roused from his indifference by a stroke of good luck. To oblige a friend who was even in more pressing need of cash than himself, he had purchased for a moderate sum (the proceeds of a successful game of poker) a share in a silver-mine which the disposer, with unusual candour, admitted to be destitute of metal. Littlemore looked into his mine and recognised the truth of the contention, which, however, was demolished some two years later by a sudden revival of curiosity on the part of one of the other shareholders. This gentleman, convinced that a silver-mine without silver is as rare as an effect without a cause, discovered the sparkle of the precious element deep down in the reasons of things. The discovery was agreeable to Littlemore, and was the beginning of a fortune which, through several dull years and in many rough places, he had repeatedly despaired of, and which a man whose purpose was never very keen did not perhaps altogether deserve. It was before he saw himself successful that he had made the acquaintance of the lady now established at the Hôtel Meurice. To-day he owned the largest share in his mine, which remained perversely productive, and which enabled him to buy, among other things, in Montana, a cattle-ranch of much finer proportions than the dry acres near San Diego. Ranches and mines encourage security, and the consciousness of not having to watch the sources of his income too anxiously (an obligation which for a man of his disposition spoils everything) now added itself to his usual coolness. It was not that this same coolness had not been considerably tried. To take only one – the principal – instance: he had lost his wife after only a twelvemonth of marriage, some three years before the date at which we meet him. He was more than forty when he encountered and wooed a young girl of twenty-three, who, like himself, had consulted all the probabilities in expecting a succession of happy years. She left him a small daughter, now intrusted to the care of his only sister, the wife of an English squire and mistress of a dull park in Hampshire. This lady, Mrs Dolphin by name, had captivated her landowner during a journey in which Mr Dolphin had promised himself to examine the institutions of the United States. The institution on which he reported most favourably was the pretty girls of the larger towns, and he returned to New York a year or two later to marry Miss Littlemore, who, unlike her brother, had not wasted her patrimony. Her sister-in-law, married many years later, and coming to Europe on this occasion, had died in London – where she flattered herself the doctors were infallible – a week after the birth of her little girl; and poor Littlemore, though relinquishing his child for the moment, remained in these disappointing countries, to be within call of the Hampshire nursery. He was rather a noticeable man, especially since his hair and moustache had turned white. Tall and strong, with a good figure and a bad carriage, he looked capable but indolent, and was usually supposed to have an importance of which he was far from being conscious. His eye was at once keen and quiet, his smile dim and dilatory, but exceedingly genuine. His principal occupation to-day was doing nothing, and he did it with a sort of artistic perfection. This faculty excited real envy on the part of Rupert Waterville, who was ten years younger than he, and who had too many ambitions and anxieties – none of them very important, but making collectively a considerable incubus – to be able to wait for inspiration. He thought it a great accomplishment, he hoped some day to arrive at it; it made a man so independent; he had his resources within his own breast. Littlemore could sit for a whole evening, without utterance or movement, smoking cigars and looking absently at his finger-nails. As every one knew that he was a good fellow and had made his fortune, this dull behaviour could not well be attributed to stupidity or to moroseness. It seemed to imply a fund of reminiscence, an experience of life which had left him hundreds of things to think about. Waterville felt that if he could make a good use of these present years, and keep a sharp look-out for experience, he too, at forty-five, might have time to look at his finger-nails. He had an idea that such contemplations – not of course in their literal, but in their symbolic intensity – were a sign of a man of the world. Waterville, reckoning possibly without an ungrateful Department of State, had also an idea that he had embraced the diplomatic career. He was the junior of the two Secretaries who render the personnel of the United States Legation in London exceptionally numerous, and was at present enjoying his annual leave of absence. It became a diplomatist to be inscrutable, and though he had by no means, as a whole, taken Littlemore as his model – there were much better ones in the diplomatic body in London – he thought he looked inscrutable when of an evening, in Paris, after he had been asked what he would like to do, he replied that he should like to do nothing, and simply sat for an interminable time in front of the Grand café, on the Boulevard de la Madeleine (he was very fond of cafés), ordering a succession of demitasses. It was very rarely that Littlemore cared even to go to the theatre, and the visit to the Comédie Française, which we have described, had been undertaken at Waterville’s instance. He had seen Le Demi-Monde a few nights before, and had been told that L’Aventurière would show him a particular treatment of the same subject – the justice to be meted out to unscrupulous women who attempt to thrust themselves into honourable families. It seemed to him that in both of these cases the ladies had deserved their fate, but he wished it might have been brought about by a little less lying on the part of the representatives of honour. Littlemore and he, without being intimate, were very good friends, and spent much of their time together. As it turned out, Littlemore was very glad he had gone to the theatre, for he found himself much interested in this new incarnation of Nancy Beck.
II
HIS delay in going to see her was nevertheless calculated; there were more reasons for it than it is necessary to mention. But when he went, Mrs Headway was at home, and Littlemore was not surprised to see Sir Arthur Demesne in her sitting-room. There was something in the air which seemed to indicate that this gentleman’s visit had already lasted a certain time. Littlemore thought it probable that, given the circumstances, he would now bring it to a close; he must have learned from their hostess that Littlemore was an old and familiar friend. He might of course have definite rights – he had every appearance of it; but the more definite they were the more gracefully he could afford to waive them. Littlemore made these reflections while Sir Arthur Demesne sat there looking at him without giving any sign of departure. Mrs Headway was very gracious – she had the manner of having known you a hundred years; she scolded Littlemore extravagantly for not having been to see her sooner, but this was only a form of the gracious. By daylight she looked a little faded; but she had an expression which could never fade. She had the best rooms in the hotel, and an air of extreme opulence and prosperity; her courier sat outside, in the ante-chamber, and she evidently knew how to live. She attempted to include Sir Arthur in the conversation, but though the young man remained in his place, he declined to be included. He smiled, in silence; but he was evidently uncomfortable. The conversation, therefore, remained superficial – a quality that, of old, had by no means belonged to Mrs Headway’s interviews with her friends. The Englishman looked at Littlemore with a strange, perverse expression which Littlemore, at first, with a good deal of private amusement, simply attributed to jealousy.
‘My dear Sir Arthur, I wish very much you would go,’ Mrs Headway remarked, at the end of a quarter of an hour.
Sir Arthur got up and took his hat. ‘I thought I should oblige you by staying.’
‘To defend me against Mr Littlemore? I’ve known him since I was a baby – I know the worst he can do.’ She fixed her charming smile for a moment on her retreating visitor, and she added, with much unexpectedness, ‘I want to talk to him about my past!’
‘That’s just what I want to hear,’ said Sir Arthur, with his hand on the door.
‘We are going to talk American; you wouldn’t understand us! – He speaks in the English style,’ she explained, in her little sufficient way, as the baronet, who announced that at all eve
nts he would come back in the evening, let himself out.
‘He doesn’t know about your past?’ Littlemore inquired, trying not to make the question sound impertinent.
‘Oh, yes; I’ve told him everything; but he doesn’t understand. The English are so peculiar; I think they are rather stupid. He has never heard of a woman being –’ But here Mrs Headway checked herself, while Littlemore filled out the blank. ‘What are you laughing at? It doesn’t matter,’ she went on; ‘there are more things in the world than those people have heard of. However, I like them very much; at least I like him. He’s such a gentleman; do you know what I mean? Only, he stays too long, and he isn’t amusing. I’m very glad to see you, for a change.’
‘Do you mean I’m not a gentleman?’ Littlemore asked.
‘No indeed; you used to be, in New Mexico. I think you were the only one – and I hope you are still. That’s why I recognised you the other night; I might have cut you, you know.’
‘You can still, if you like. It’s not too late.’
‘Oh, no; that’s not what I want. I want you to help me.’
‘To help you?’
Mrs Headway fixed her eyes for a moment on the door. ‘Do you suppose that man is there still?’
‘That young man – your poor Englishman?’
‘No; I mean Max. Max is my courier,’ said Mrs Headway, with a certain impressiveness.
‘I haven’t the least idea. I’ll see, if you like.’
‘No; in that case I should have to give him an order, and I don’t know what in the world to ask him to do. He sits there for hours; with my simple habits I afford him no employment. I am afraid I have no imagination.’
‘The burden of grandeur,’ said Littlemore.
‘Oh yes, I’m very grand. But on the whole I like it. I’m only afraid he’ll hear. I talk so very loud; that’s another thing I’m trying to get over.’