‘No, after all, hanged if they shall drive me away!’ he exclaimed abruptly; and walked off, while his companion looked after him.
X
THE morning after this Littlemore received a note from Mrs Headway – a short and simple note, consisting merely of the words, ‘I shall be at home this afternoon; will you come and see me at five? I have something particular to say to you.’ He sent no answer to this inquiry, but he went to the little house in Chesterfield Street at the hour that its mistress had designated.
‘I don’t believe you know what sort of woman I am!’ she exclaimed, as soon as he stood before her.
‘Oh, Lord!’ Littlemore groaned, dropping into a chair. Then he added, ‘Don’t begin on that sort of thing!’
‘I shall begin – that’s what I wanted to say. It’s very important. You don’t know me – you don’t understand me. You think you do – but you don’t.’
‘It isn’t for the want of your having told me – many, many times!’ And Littlemore smiled, though he was bored at the prospect that opened before him. The last word of all was, decidedly, that Mrs Headway was a nuisance. She didn’t deserve to be spared!
She glared at him a little, at this; her face was no longer the face that smiled. She looked sharp and violent, almost old; the change was complete. But she gave a little angry laugh. ‘Yes, I know; men are so stupid. They know nothing about women but what women tell them. And women tell them things on purpose, to see how stupid they can be. I’ve told you things like that, just for amusement, when it was dull. If you believed them, it was your own fault. But now I am serious, I want you really to know.’
‘I don’t want to know. I know enough.’
‘How do you mean, you know enough?’ she cried, with a flushed face. ‘What business have you to know anything?’ The poor little woman, in her passionate purpose, was not obliged to be consistent, and the loud laugh with which Littlemore greeted this interrogation must have seemed to her unduly harsh. ‘You shall know what I want you to know, however. You think me a bad woman-you don’t respect me; I told you that in Paris. I have done things I don’t understand, myself, to-day; that I admit, as fully as you please. But I’ve completely changed, and I want to change everything. You ought to enter into that; you ought to see what I want. I hate everything that has happened to me before this; I loathe it, I despise it. I went on that way trying – one thing and another. But now I’ve got what I want. Do you expect me to go down on my knees to you? I believe I will, I’m so anxious. You can help me – no one else can do a thing – no one can do anything – they are only waiting to see if he’ll do it. I told you in Paris you could help me, and it’s just as true now. Say a good word for me, for God’s sake! You haven’t lifted your little finger, or I should know it by this time. It will just make the difference. Or if your sister would come and see me, I should be all right. Women are pitiless, pitiless, and you are pitiless too. It isn’t that she’s anything so great, most of my friends are better than that! – but she’s the one woman who knows, and people know that she knows. He knows that she knows, and he knows she doesn’t come. So she kills me – she kills me! I understand perfectly what he wants – I shall do everything, be anything, I shall be the most perfect wife. The old woman will adore me when she knows me – it’s too stupid of her not to see. Everything in the past is over; it has all fallen away from me; it’s the life of another woman. This was what I wanted; I knew I should find it some day. What could I do in those horrible places? I had to take what I could. But now I’ve got a nice country. I want you to do me justice; you have never done me justice; that’s what I sent for you for.’
Littlemore suddenly ceased to be bored; but a variety of feelings had taken the place of a single one. It was impossible not to be touched; she really meant what she said. People don’t change their nature; but they change their desires, their ideal, their effort. This incoherent and passionate protestation was an assurance that she was literally panting to be respectable. But the poor woman, whatever she did, was condemned, as Littlemore had said of old, in Paris, to Waterville, to be only half-right. The colour rose to her visitor’s face as he listened to this outpouring of anxiety and egotism; she had not managed her early life very well, but there was no need of her going down on her knees. ‘It’s very painful to me to hear all this,’ he said. ‘You are under no obligation to say such things to me. You entirely misconceive my attitude – my influence.’
‘Oh yes, you shirk it – you only wish to shirk it!’ she cried, flinging away fiercely the sofa-cushion on which she had been resting.
‘Marry whom you please!’ Littlemore almost shouted, springing to his feet.
He had hardly spoken when the door was thrown open, and the servant announced Sir Arthur Demesne. The baronet entered with a certain briskness, but he stopped short on seeing that Mrs Headway had another visitor. Recognising Littlemore, however, he gave a slight exclamation, which might have passed for a greeting. Mrs Headway, who had risen as he came in, looked with extraordinary earnestness from one of the men to the other; then, like a person who had a sudden inspiration, she clasped her hands together and cried out, ‘I’m so glad you’ve met; if I had arranged it, it couldn’t be better!’
‘If you had arranged it?’ said Sir Arthur, crinkling a little his high, white forehead, while the conviction rose before Littlemore that she had indeed arranged it.
‘I’m going to do something very strange,’ she went on, and her eye glittered with a light that confirmed her words.
‘You’re excited, I’m afraid you’re ill.’ Sir Arthur stood there with his hat and his stick; he was evidently much annoyed.
‘It’s an excellent opportunity; you must forgive me if I take advantage.’ And she flashed a tender, touching ray at the baronet. ‘I have wanted this a long time – perhaps you have seen I wanted it. Mr Littlemore has known me a long, long time; he’s an old, old friend. I told you that in Paris, don’t you remember? Well, he’s my only one, and I want him to speak for me.’ Her eyes had turned now to Littlemore; they rested upon him with a sweetness that only made the whole proceeding more audacious. She had begun to smile again, though she was visibly trembling. ‘He’s my only one,’ she continued; ‘it’s a great pity, you ought to have known others. But I’m very much alone, I must make the best of what I have. I want so much that some one else than myself should speak for me. Women usually can ask that service of a relative, or of another woman. I can’t; it’s a great pity, but it’s not my fault, it’s my misfortune. None of my people are here; and I’m terribly alone in the world. But Mr Littlemore will tell you; he will say he has known me for years. He will tell you whether he knows any reason – whether he knows anything against me. He’s been wanting the chance; but he thought he couldn’t begin himself. You see I treat you as an old friend, dear Mr Littlemore. I will leave you with Sir Arthur. You will both excuse me.’ The expression of her face, turned towards Littlemore, as she delivered herself of this singular proposal had the intentness of a magician who wishes to work a spell. She gave Sir Arthur another smile, and then she swept out of the room.
The two men remained in the extraordinary position that she had created for them; neither of them moved even to open the door for her. She closed it behind her, and for a moment there was a deep, portentous silence. Sir Arthur Demesne, who was very pale, stared hard at the carpet.
‘I am placed in an impossible situation,’ Littlemore said at last, ‘and I don’t imagine that you accept it any more than I do.’
The baronet kept the same attitude; he neither looked up nor answered. Littlemore felt a sudden gush of pity for him. Of course he couldn’t accept the situation; but all the same, he was half sick with anxiety to see how this nondescript American, who was both so valuable and so superfluous, so familiar and so inscrutable, would consider Mrs Headway’s challenge.
‘Have you any question to ask me?’ Littlemore went on.
At this Sir Arthur looked up. Littlemore had seen the loo
k before; he had described it to Waterville after the baronet came to call on him in Paris. There were other things mingled with it now – shame, annoyance, pride; but the great thing, the intense desire to know, was paramount.
‘Good God, how can I tell him?’ Littlemore exclaimed to himself.
Sir Arthur’s hesitation was probably extremely brief; but Littlemore heard the ticking of the clock while it lasted. ‘Certainly, I have no question to ask,’ the young man said in a voice of cool, almost insolent surprise.
‘Good-day, then.’
‘Good-day.’
And Littlemore left Sir Arthur in possession. He expected to find Mrs Headway at the foot of the staircase; but he quitted the house without interruption.
On the morrow, after lunch, as he was leaving the little mansion at Queen Anne’s Gate, the postman handed him a letter. Littlemore opened and read it on the steps of his house, an operation which took but a moment. It ran as follows: –
‘DEAR MR LITTLEMORE, – It will interest you to know that I am engaged to be married to Sir Arthur Demesne, and that our marriage is to take place as soon as their stupid old Parliament rises. But it’s not to come out for some days, and I am sure that I can trust meanwhile to your complete discretion.
‘Yours very sincerely,
‘NANCY H.
‘P.S. – He made me a terrible scene for what I did yesterday, but he came back in the evening and made it up. That’s how the thing comes to be settled. He won’t tell me what passed between you – he requested me never to allude to the subject. I don’t care; I was bound you should speak!’
Littlemore thrust this epistle into his pocket and marched away with it. He had come out to do various things, but he forgot his business for the time, and before he knew it had walked into Hyde Park. He left the carriages and riders to one side of him and followed the Serpentine into Kensington Gardens, of which he made the complete circuit. He felt annoyed, and more disappointed than he understood – than he would have understood if he had tried. Now that Nancy Beck had succeeded, her success seemed offensive, and he was almost sorry he had not said to Sir Arthur – ‘Oh, well, she was pretty bad, you know.’ However, now the thing was settled, at least they would leave him alone. He walked off his irritation, and before he went about the business he had come out for, had ceased to think about Mrs Headway. He went home at six o’clock, and the servant who admitted him informed him in doing so that Mrs Dolphin had requested he should be told on his return that she wished to see him in the drawing-room. ‘It’s another trap!’ he said to himself, instinctively; but, in spite of this reflection, he went upstairs. On entering the apartment in which Mrs Dolphin was accustomed to sit, he found that she had a visitor. This visitor, who was apparently on the point of departing, was a tall, elderly woman, and the two ladies stood together in the middle of the room.
‘I’m so glad you’ve come back,’ said Mrs Dolphin, without meeting her brother’s eye. ‘I want so much to introduce you to Lady Demesne, and I hoped you would come in. Must you really go – won’t you stay a little?’ she added, turning to her companion; and without waiting for an answer, went on hastily – ‘I must leave you a moment – excuse me. I will come back!’ Before he knew it, Littlemore found himself alone with Lady Demesne, and he understood that, since he had not been willing to go and see her, she had taken upon herself to make an advance. It had the queerest effect, all the same, to see his sister playing the same tricks as Nancy Beck!
‘Ah, she must be in a fidget!’ he said to himself as he stood before Lady Demesne. She looked delicate and modest, even timid, as far as a tall, serene woman who carried her head very well could look so; and she was such a different type from Mrs Headway that his present vision of Nancy’s triumph gave her by contrast something of the dignity of the vanquished. It made him feel sorry for her. She lost no time; she went straight to the point. She evidently felt that in the situation in which she had placed herself, her only advantage could consist in being simple and business-like.
‘I’m so glad to see you for a moment. I wish so much to ask you if you can give me any information about a person you know and about whom I have been in correspondence with Mrs Dolphin. I mean Mrs Headway.’
‘Won’t you sit down?’ asked Littlemore.
‘No, I thank you. I have only a moment.’
‘May I ask you why you make this inquiry?’
‘Of course I must give you my reason. I am afraid my son will marry her.’
Littlemore was puzzled for a moment; then he felt sure that she was not yet aware of the fact imparted to him in Mrs Headway’s note. ‘You don’t like her?’ he said, exaggerating in spite of himself the interrogative inflexion.
‘Not at all,’ said Lady Demesne, smiling and looking at him. Her smile was gentle, without rancour; Littlemore thought it almost beautiful.
‘What would you like me to say?’ he asked.
‘Whether you think her respectable.’
‘What good will that do you? How can it possibly affect the event?’
‘It will do me no good, of course, if your opinion is favourable. But if you tell me it is not, I shall be able to say to my son that the one person in London who has known her more than six months thinks her a bad woman.’
This epithet, on Lady Demesne’s clear lips, evoked no protest from Littlemore. He had suddenly become conscious of the need to utter the simple truth with which he had answered Rupert Waterville’s first question at the Théâtre Français. ‘I don’t think Mrs Headway respectable,’ he said.
‘I was sure you would say that.’ Lady Demesne seemed to pant a little.
‘I can say nothing more – not a word. That’s my opinion. I don’t think it will help you.’
‘I think it will. I wished to have it from your own lips. That makes all the difference,’ said Lady Demesne. ‘I am exceedingly obliged to you.’ And she offered him her hand; after which he accompanied her in silence to the door.
He felt no discomfort, no remorse, at what he had said; he only felt relief. Perhaps it was because he believed it would make no difference. It made a difference only in what was at the bottom of all things – his own sense of fitness. He only wished he had remarked to Lady Demesne that Mrs Headway would probably make her son a capital wife. But that, at least, would make no difference. He requested his sister, who had wondered greatly at the brevity of his interview with Lady Demesne, to spare him all questions on this subject; and Mrs Dolphin went about for some days in the happy faith that there were to be no dreadful Americans in English society compromising her native land.
Her faith, however, was short-lived. Nothing had made any difference; it was, perhaps, too late. The London world heard in the first days of July, not that Sir Arthur Demesne was to marry Mrs Headway, but that the pair had been privately, and it was to be hoped, as regards Mrs Headway, on this occasion indissolubly, united. Lady Demesne gave neither sign nor sound; she only retired to the country.
‘I think you might have done differently,’ said Mrs Dolphin, very pale, to her brother. ‘But of course everything will come out now.’
‘Yes, and make her more the fashion than ever!’ Littlemore answered, with cynical laughter. After his little interview with the elder Lady Demesne, he did not feel himself at liberty to call again upon the younger; and he never learned – he never even wished to know – whether in the pride of her success she forgave him.
Waterville – it was very strange – was positively scandalised at this success. He held that Mrs Headway ought never to have been allowed to marry a confiding gentleman; and he used, in speaking to Littlemore, the same words as Mrs Dolphin. He thought Littlemore might have done differently.
He spoke with such vehemence that Littlemore looked at him hard – hard enough to make him blush.
‘Did you want to marry her yourself?’ his friend inquired. ‘My dear fellow, you’re in love with her! That’s what’s the matter with you.’
This, however, blushing still more, Wat
erville indignantly denied. A little later he heard from New York that people were beginning to ask who in the world was Mrs Headway.
LADY BARBERINA
I
IT is well known that there are few sights in the world more brilliant than the main avenues of Hyde Park of a fine afternoon in June. This was quite the opinion of two persons who, on a beautiful day at the beginning of that month, four years ago, had established themselves under the great trees in a couple of iron chairs (the big ones with arms, for which, if I mistake not, you pay twopence), and sat there with the slow procession of the Drive behind them, while their faces were turned to the more vivid agitation of the Row. They were lost in the multitude of observers, and they belonged, superficially, at least, to that class of persons who, wherever they may be, rank rather with the spectators than with the spectacle. They were quiet, simple, elderly, of aspect somewhat neutral; you would have liked them extremely, but you would scarcely have noticed them. Nevertheless, in all that shining host, it is to them, obscure, that we must give our attention. The reader is begged to have confidence; he is not asked to make vain concessions. There was that in the faces of our friends which indicated that they were growing old together, and that they were fond enough of each other’s company not to object (if it was a condition) even to that. The reader will have guessed that they were husband and wife; and perhaps while he is about it he will have guessed that they were of that nationality for which Hyde Park at the height of the season is most completely illustrative. They were familiar strangers, as it were; and people at once so initiated and so detached could only be Americans. This reflection, indeed, you would have made only after some delay; for it must be admitted that they carried few patriotic signs on the surface. They had the American turn of mind, but that was very subtle; and to your eye – if your eye had cared about it – they might have been of English, or even of Continental, parentage. It was as if it suited them to be colourless; their colour was all in their talk. They were not in the least verdant; they were grey, rather, of monotonous hue. If they were interested in the riders, the horses, the walkers, the great exhibition of English wealth and health, beauty, luxury and leisure, it was because all this referred itself to other impressions, because they had the key to almost everything that needed an answer – because, in a word, they were able to compare. They had not arrived, they had only returned; and recognition much more than surprise was expressed in their quiet gaze. It may as well be said outright that Dexter Freer and his wife belonged to that class of Americans who are constantly ‘passing through’ London. Possessors of a fortune of which, from any standpoint, the limits were plainly visible, they were unable to command that highest of luxuries – a habitation in their own country. They found it much more possible to economise at Dresden or Florence than at Buffalo or Minneapolis. The economy was as great, and the inspiration was greater. From Dresden, from Florence, moreover, they constantly made excursions which would not have been possible in those other cities; and it is even to be feared that they had some rather expensive methods of saving. They came to London to buy their portmanteaus, their tooth-brushes, their writing-paper; they occasionally even crossed the Atlantic to assure themselves that prices over there were still the same. They were eminently a social pair; their interests were mainly personal. Their point of view always was so distinctly human that they passed for being fond of gossip; and they certainly knew a good deal about the affairs of other people. They had friends in every country, in every town; and it was not their fault if people told them their secrets. Dexter Freer was a tall, lean man, with an interested eye, and a nose that rather aspired than drooped, yet was salient withal. He brushed his hair, which was streaked with white, forward over his ears, in those locks which are represented in the portraits of clean-shaven gentlemen who flourished fifty years ago, and wore an old-fashioned neckcloth and gaiters. His wife, a small, plump person, of superficial freshness, with a white face, and hair that was still perfectly black, smiled perpetually, but had never laughed since the death of a son whom she had lost ten years after her marriage. Her husband, on the other hand, who was usually quite grave, indulged on great occasions in resounding mirth. People confided in her less than in him; but that mattered little, as she confided sufficiently in herself. Her dress, which was always black or dark grey, was so harmoniously simple that you could see she was fond of it; it was never smart by accident. She was full of intentions, of the most judicious sort; and though she was perpetually moving about the world she had the air of being perfectly stationary. She was celebrated for the promptitude with which she made her sitting-room at an inn, where she might be spending a night or two, look like an apartment long inhabited. With books, flowers, photographs, draperies, rapidly distributed – she had even a way, for the most part, of having a piano – the place seemed almost hereditary. The pair were just back from America, where they had spent three months, and now were able to face the world with something of the elation which people feel who have been justified in a prevision. They had found their native land quite ruinous.