Love and Lucy
This was the manner of the man who, you may say, had quizzed, or
mesmerised, Lucy Meade into marriage. She had been scarcely eighteen;
I believe that she was just seventeen and a half when he presented
himself, the second of three pretty, dark-haired and grey-eyed girls,
the slimmest and, as I think, by far the prettiest. The Meades lived
at Drem House, which is practically within Bushey Park. Here the girls
saw much society, for the old Meades were hospitable, and the Mother
Meade, a Scotchwoman, had a great idea of establishing her daughters.
The sons she left to Father Meade and his competent money-bags. Here
then James Adolphus Macartney presented himself, and here sat smiling
bleakly, glaring through his glass, one eyebrow raised to enclose it
safely--and waited for her to give herself away. Swaying beneath that
shining disk, she did it infallibly; and he heard her out at leisure,
and accepted her.
That's poetry of course. Really, it came near to that. He had said to
her at a garden-party, in his easiest, airiest manner, "You can't help
knowing that I am in love with you. Now, don't you think that we
should be a happy couple? I do. What do you say, Lucy? Shall we have a
shot?" He had taken her hand--they were alone under a cedar tree--and
she had not known how to take it away. She was then kissed, and had
lost any opportunity there might have been. That was what really
happened, and as she told her sister Mabel some time afterwards, when
the engagement had been made public and there could be no question of
going back, "You know, Mabel, he seemed to expect it, and I couldn't
help feeling at the time that he was justified." Mabel, tossing her
head up, had protested, "Oh, my dear, nobody knows whether he was
justified but yourself;" and Lucy, "No, of course not." "The
question," Mabel went on, "is whether you encouraged him or not." Lucy
was clear about that: "No, not the least in the world. He--encouraged
himself. I felt that I simply had to do something."
I suspect that that is perfectly true. I am sure that he did just as I
said he always did, and bluffed her into marriage with an eyeglass and
smile awry. Whether or no he bluffed himself into it too, tempted by
the power of his magic apparatus, is precisely the matter which I am
to determine. It may have been so--but anyhow the facts show you how
successful he was in doing what had to be done. _Cosa fatta capo ha_,
as the proverb says. The thing done, whether wisely or not, was
smoothly done. Everything was of a piece with that. He pulled off
whatever he tried for, without any apparent effort. People used to say
that he was like a river, smoothly flowing, very deep, rippling,
constant in mutability, husbanding and guiding his eddies. It's not a
bad figure of him. He liked it himself, and smiled more askew and
peered more blandly when he heard it.
Small things betray men. Here is one. His signature was invariably in
full: "Yours very truly, James Adolphus Macartney." It was as if he
knew that Adolphus was rather comic opera, but wouldn't stoop to
disguise it. Why bother? He crowded it upon the Bishop, upon the Dean
and Chapter of Mells, upon old Lord Drake. He said, "Why conceal the
fact that my sponsors made a _faux pas_? There it is, and have done
with it. Such things have only to be faced to be seen as nothings.
What! are we reasonable beings?"
Now when Lucy Meade, practically a child for all her sedateness and
serious eyes, married him, two things terrified her on the day. One
was her husband and the other lest her friends should discover it.
They never did, and in time her panic wore off. She fought it in the
watches of the night and in the glare of her lonely days. Not a soul,
not her mother, not even Mabel, knew her secret. James never became
comic to her; she never saw him a figure of fun; but she was able to
treat him as a human being. Lancelot's arrival made all the
difference in the world to that matter as to all her other matters,
for even Lucy herself could not help seeing how absurdly jealous James
was of his offspring. For a time he was thrown clean out of the saddle
and as near falling in his own esteem as ever in life. But he
recovered his balance, and though he never regained his old
ascendency, which had been that of a Ju-ju, he was able to feel
himself, as he said, "Master in his own house," with a very real
reserve of terrorism--if it should be wanted. The great thing,
Macartney thought, was discipline, constant, watchful discipline. A
man must bend everything to that. Women have to learn the virtue of
giving up, as well as of giving. Giving is easy; any woman knows that;
but giving up. Let that be seen as a subtle, a sublimated form of
giving, and the lesson is learned. But practice makes perfect. You
must never relax the rein. He never did. There was all the ingenuity
and patience of a woman about him.
By this time, after twelve years and more of marriage, they were very
good friends; or, why not say, old acquaintances? There are two kinds
of crystallisation in love affairs, with all respect to M. de
Stendhal. One kind hardens the surfaces without any decorative
effect. There are no facets visible, no angles to catch the light. In
the case of the Macartney marriage I suspect this to have been the
only kind--a kind of callosity, protective and numbing. The less they
were thrown together, she found, the better friends they were. At home
they were really no more than neighbours; abroad she was Mrs.
Macartney, and never would dine out without him. She was
old-fashioned; her friends called her a prude. But she was not at all
unhappy. She liked to think of Lancelot, she said, and to be quiet.
And really, as Miss Bacchus (a terrible old woman) once said, Lucy was
so little of a married woman that she was perfectly innocent.
But she was one-and-thirty, and as sweet and pretty a woman as you
would wish to see. She had the tender, dragging smile of a Luini
Madonna; grave, twilight eyes, full of compassionate understanding;
very dark eyebrows, very long lashes, like the fringe of rain over a
moorland landscape. She had a virginal shape, and liked her clothes to
cling about her knees. Long fingers, longish, thin feet. But her
humorous sense was acute and very delightful, and all children loved
her. Such charms as these must have been as obvious to herself as they
were to everybody else. She had a modest little court of her own.
Francis Lingen was almost admittedly in love with her; one of
Macartney's friends. But she accepted her riches soberly, and did not
fret that they must be so hoarded. If, by moments, as she saw herself,
or looked at herself, in the glass, a grain of bitterness surged up in
her throat, that all this fair seeming could not be put out to
usury--! well, she put it to herself very differently, not at all in
words, but in narrowed scrutinising eyes, half-turns of the pretty
head, a sigh and lips pressed together. There had been--nay, there
was--Lancelot, her darling. That was usufruct; but usury was a
different thing. There had never been what you would call, or Miss
Bacchus would certainly call, usury. That, indeed! She would raise her
fine brows, compress her lips, and turn to her bed, then put out the
light. Lying awake very often, she might hear James chain the front
door, trumpet through his nose on the mat, and slowly mount the stairs
to his own room. She thought resolutely of Lancelot pursuing his
panting quests at school, or of her garden in mid-June, or of the
gorse afire on Wycross Common,--and so to sleep.
A long chapter, but you will know the Macartney pair by means of it.
CHAPTER II
A DINNER PARTY
This was not to be one of Macartney's grand full-dress dinner-parties,
the sort where you might have two lords, and would be sure to have one
with his lady; or a Cabinet Minister in a morning-coat and greenish
tie; or a squire and squiress from Northumberland up for a month of
the season; or the Dean of Mells. No, nor was it to be one which Lucy
had to give to her visiting-list, and at which, as Macartney rarely
failed to remark, there was bound to be a clergyman, and some lean
woman with straw-coloured hair interested in a Settlement. It was to
be a particular kind of dinner-party, this one, of which the first
object was to bring Urquhart in touch with Lingen. It could have been
done at a club, no doubt. Macartney admitted it. "Yes, I know, I
know,"--he used his most tired voice, as if he had been combating the
suggestion all along. "You are perfectly right. It might--if it had
not happened to be exactly what I didn't want. Jimmy Urquhart is
rather a queer fish. He is apt to shy off if one is not careful. It
don't suit me to bring them together explicitly, do you see? I want
them to happen on each other. They can do that better here than
anywhere. Do you see?"
Lucy saw, or saw enough. She never enquired into James's law affairs.
"Shall I like Mr. Urquhart, do you think?" she asked him.
The eyeglass focussed upon the cornice, and glared at a fly which
found itself belated there. "Oh, I think so. Why not?"
"Well, you see, I don't know why not--or why I should. Have I ever
seen him?"
James was bored. "No doubt you have. He's very much about."
"Yes," said Lucy, "but I am not."
James left the fly, and fixed her--apparently with horror. Then he
looked at his boots and moved his toes up and down. "He looks like a
naval officer," he said; "you instinctively seek the cuffs of his
coat. Beef-coloured face, blue eyes, a square-jawed chap. Yes, you
might like him. He might amuse you. He's a great liar." Lucy thought
that she might like Mr. Urquhart.
On those lines the party was arranged: the Blisses because "we owe
them a dinner; and I think the Judge will be amused by Jimmy;" the
Worthingtons--make-weights; but "She's a soft pink woman, like a
Persian kitten."
"Does Mr. Urquhart like that?" Lucy asked, but James, who didn't like
his jokes to be capped, said drily, "I don't know."
Then Lucy's favourite sister Mabel was to be allowed because James
rather liked Corbet. He thought him good style. Now we wanted two
women. One must be Miss Bacchus--"hideous, of course," said James; "a
kind of crime, but very smart." He meant that she mixed with the
aristocracy, which was true, though nobody knew why. The last was to
be Margery Dacre, a very pretty girl. Lucy put her forward, and James
thought her over, gazing out of window. "I like her name," he said--so
Lucy knew that she was admitted.
That was all. The rest was her care, and he washed his mind of it,
very sure that she would see to it. He wished the two men to meet for
a particular reason in a haphazard way, because it was better to drift
Urquhart into a thing than to lead him up to it. Moreover, it was not
at all disagreeable to him that Urquhart, a club and office
acquaintance, should see how comfortably placed he was, how well
appointed with wife and child, with manservant and maidservant and
everything that was his. Urquhart was a rich man, and to know that his
lawyer was rich was no bad thing. It inspired confidence. Now the
particular thing to be done with the two men, Francis Lingen and
Urquhart, was this. Francis Lingen, who might be a baronet some day
and well to do, was at the moment, as at most moments hitherto, very
short of money. Urquhart always had plenty. Macartney's idea was that
he might get Urquhart to fill Francis Lingen's pockets, on terms which
could easily be arranged. There was ample security, of course. Francis
Lingen could have gone to the Jews, or the bank, but if the thing
could be done in a gentlemanly way through one's lawyer, who also
happened to be a gentleman, in one's own set, and so on--well, why
not?
Hence the little dinner, over whose setting forth Lucy puckered her