Robert Elsmere
of the drawing-room and shut off from it by a heavy curtain, which she
now left half-drawn.
'The latest?' said Fred Wharncliffe to Lady Aubrey, raising his eyebrows
with the slightest motion of the head towards the writing-room.
'I suppose so,' she said indifferently; 'she is East-Ending for a
change. We all do it nowadays. It is like Dizzy's young man who "liked
bad wine, he was so bored with good."'
Meanwhile, Madame de Netteville was leaning against the open window of
the fantastic little room, with Robert beside her.
'You look as if you had had a strain,' she said to him abruptly, after
they had talked business for a few minutes. 'What has been the matter?'
He told her Richards's story, very shortly. It would have been
impossible to him to give more than the driest outline of it in that
room. His companion listened gravely. She was an epicure in all things,
especially in moral sensation, and she liked his moments of reserve and
strong self-control. They made his general expansiveness more
distinguished.
Presently there was a pause, which she broke by saying--
'I was at your lecture last Sunday--you didn't see me!'
'Were you? Ah! I remember a person in black, and veiled, who puzzled me.
I don't think we want you there, Madame de Netteville.'
His look was pleasant, but his tone had some decision in it.
'Why not? Is it only the artisans who have souls? A reformer should
refuse no one.'
'You have your own opportunities,' he said quietly; 'I think the men
prefer to have it to themselves for the present. Some of them are
dreadfully in earnest.'
'Oh, I don't pretend to be in earnest,' she said with a little wave of
her hand; 'or, at any rate, I know better than to talk of earnestness to
_you_.'
'Why to me?' he asked, smiling.
'Oh, because you and your like have your fixed ideas of the upper class
and the lower. One social type fills up your horizon. You are not
interested in any other, and, indeed, you know nothing of any other.'
She looked at him defiantly. Everything about her to-night was splendid
and regal--her dress of black and white brocade, the diamonds at her
throat, the carriage of her head, nay, the marks of experience and
living on the dark subtle face.
'Perhaps not,' he replied: 'it is enough for one life to try and make
out where the English working class is tending to.'
'You are quite wrong, utterly wrong. The man who keeps his eye only on
the lower class will achieve nothing. What can the idealist do without
the men of action--the men who can take his beliefs and make them enter
by violence into existing institutions? And the men of action are to be
found with _us_.'
'It hardly looks just now as if the upper class was to go on enjoying a
monopoly of them,' he said, smiling.
'Then appearances are deceptive. The populace supplies mass and
weight--nothing else. What _you_ want is to touch the leaders, the men
and women whose voices carry, and then your populace would follow hard
enough. For instance,'--and she dropped her aggressive tone and spoke
with a smiling kindness,--'come down next Saturday to my little Surrey
cottage; you shall see some of these men and women there, and I will
make you confess when you go away that you have profited your workmen
more by deserting them than by staying with them. Will you come?'
'My Sundays are too precious to me just now, Madame de Netteville.
Besides, my firm conviction is that the upper class can produce a Brook
Farm, but nothing more. The religious movement of the future will want a
vast effusion of feeling and passion to carry it into action, and
feeling and passion are only to be generated in sufficient volume among
the masses, where the vested interests of all kinds are less tremendous.
You upper-class folk have your part, of course. Woe betide you if you
shirk it--but----'
'Oh, let us leave it alone,' she said with a little shrug. 'I know you
would give us all the work and refuse us all the profits. We are to
starve for your workman, to give him our hearts and purses and
everything we have, not that we may hoodwink him--which might be worth
doing--but that he may rule us. It is too much!'
'Very well,' he said drily, his colour rising. 'Very well, let it be too
much.'
And, dropping his lounging attitude, he stood erect, and she saw that he
meant to be going. Her look swept over him from head to foot--over the
worn face with its look of sensitive refinement and spiritual force, the
active frame, the delicate but most characteristic hand. Never had any
man so attracted her for years; never had she found it so difficult to
gain a hold. Eugenie de Netteville, _poseuse_, schemer, woman of the
world that she was, was losing command of herself.
'What did you really mean by "worldliness" and the "world" in your
lecture last Sunday?' she asked him suddenly, with a little accent of
scorn. 'I thought your diatribes absurd. What you religious people call
the "world" is really only the average opinion of sensible people which
neither you nor your kind could do without for a day.'
He smiled, half amused by her provocative tone, and defended himself not
very seriously. But she threw all her strength into the argument, and he
forgot that he had meant to go at once. When she chose she could talk
admirably, and she chose now. She had the most aggressive ways of
attacking, and then, in the same breath, the most subtle and softening
ways of yielding and, as it were, of asking pardon. Directly her
antagonist turned upon her he found himself disarmed he knew not how.
The disputant disappeared, and he felt the woman, restless, melancholy,
sympathetic, hungry for friendship and esteem, yet too proud to make any
direct bid for either. It was impossible not to be interested and
touched.
Such at least was the woman whom Robert Elsmere felt. Whether in his
hours of intimacy with her, twelve months before, young Alfred Evershed
had received the same impression may be doubted. In all things Eugenie
de Netteville was an artist.
Suddenly the curtain dividing them from the larger drawing-room was
drawn back, and Sir John Headlam stood in the doorway. He had the
glittering amused eyes of a malicious child as he looked at them.
'Very sorry, madame,' he began in his high cracked voice, 'but
Wharncliffe and I are off to the New Club to see Desforets. They have
got her there to-night.'
'Go,' she said, waving her hand to him, 'I don't envy you. She is not
what she was.'
'No, there is only one person,' he said, bowing with grotesque little
airs of gallantry, 'for whom time stands still.'
Madame de Netteville looked at him with smiling half-contemptuous
serenity. He bowed again, this time with ironical emphasis, and
disappeared.
'Perhaps I had better go back and send them off,' she said, rising. 'But
you and I have not had our talk out yet.'
She led the way into the drawing-room. Lady Aubrey was lying back on the
velvet sofa, a little green paroquet that was accustomed to wander
tamely about the room perching on her hand. She was holding the field
against Lord Rupert and Mr. Addlestone in a three-cornered duel of wits,
while M. de Querouelle sat by, his plump hands on his knees, applauding.
They all rose as their hostess came in.
'My dear' said Lady Aubrey, 'it is disgracefully early, but my country
before pleasure. It is the Foreign Office to-night, and since James took
office I can't with decency absent myself. I had rather be a
scullerymaid than a minister's wife. Lord Rupert, I will take you on if
you want a lift.'
She touched Madame de Netteville's cheek with her lips, nodding to the
other men present, and went out, her fair stag-like head well in the
air, 'chaffing' Lord Rupert, who obediently followed her, performing
marvellous feats of agility in his desire to keep out of the way of the
superb train sweeping behind her. It always seemed as if Lady Aubrey
could have had no childhood, as if she must always have had just that
voice and those eyes. Tears she could never have shed, not even as a
baby over a broken toy. Besides, at no period of her life could she
have looked upon a lost possession as anything else than the opportunity
for a new one.
The other men took their departure for one reason or another. It was not
late, but London was in full swing, and M. de Querouelle talked with
gusto of four 'At homes' still to be grappled with.
As she dismissed Mr. Wharncliffe, Robert too held out his hand.
'No,' she said, with a quick impetuousness, 'no: I want my talk out. It
is barely half-past ten, and neither of us wants to be racing about
London to-night.'
Elsmere had always a certain lack of social decision, and he lingered
rather reluctantly--for another ten minutes, as he supposed.
She threw herself into a low chair. The windows were open to the back of
the house, and the roar of Piccadilly and Sloane Street came borne in
upon the warm night air. Her superb dark head stood out against a stand
of yellow lilies close behind her, and the little paroquet, bright with
all the colours of the tropics, perched now on her knee, now on the back
of her chair, touched every now and then by quick unsteady fingers.
Then an incident followed which Elsmere remembered to his dying day with
shame and humiliation.
In ten minutes from the time of their being left alone, a woman who was
five years his senior had made him what was practically a confession of
love--had given him to understand that she knew what were the relations
between himself and his wife--and had implored him with the quick breath
of an indescribable excitement to see what a woman's sympathy and a
woman's unique devotion could do for the causes he had at heart.
The truth broke upon Elsmere very slowly, awakening in him, when at last
it was unmistakable, a swift agony of repulsion, which his most friendly
biographer can only regard with a kind of grim satisfaction. For after
all there is an amount of innocence and absent-mindedness in matters of
daily human life, which is not only _niaiserie_, but comes very near to
moral wrong. In this crowded world a man has no business to walk about
with his eyes always on the stars. His stumbles may have too many
consequences. A harsh but a salutary truth! If Elsmere needed it, it was
bitterly taught him during a terrible half-hour. When the half-coherent
enigmatical sentences, to which he listened at first with a perplexed
surprise, began gradually to define themselves; when he found a woman
roused and tragically beautiful between him and escape; when no
determination on his part not to understand; when nothing he could say
availed to protect her from herself; when they were at last face to face
with a confession and an appeal which were a disgrace to both--then at
last Elsmere paid 'in one minute glad life's arrears,'--the natural
penalty of an optimism, a boundless faith in human nature, with which
life, as we know it, is inconsistent.
How he met the softness, the grace, the seduction of a woman who was an
expert in all the arts of fascination he never knew. In memory
afterwards it was all a ghastly mirage to him. The low voice, the
splendid dress, the scented room came back to him, and a confused memory
of his own futile struggle to ward off what she was bent on
saying--little else. He had been maladroit, he thought, had lost his
presence of mind. Any man of the world of his acquaintance, he believed,
trampling on himself, would have done better.
But when the softness and the grace were all lost in smart and
humiliation, when the Madame de Netteville of ordinary life disappeared,
and something took her place which was like a coarse and malignant
underself suddenly brought into the light of day--from that point
onwards, in after days, he remembered it all.