Robert Elsmere
stand towered beside it; chrysanthemums were everywhere; an invalid lady
in a 'best cap' occupied the sofa; and two girls were flitting about,
clearly making the last arrangements necessary for a 'musical
afternoon.'
The invalid was Mrs. Leyburn, the girls, of course, Rose and Agnes. Rose
at last was safely settled in her longed-for London, and an artistic
company, of the sort her soul loved, was coming to tea with her.
Of Rose's summer at Burwood very little need be said. She was conscious
that she had not borne it very well. She had been off-hand with Mrs.
Thornburgh, and had enjoyed one or two open skirmishes with Mrs. Seaton.
Her whole temper had been irritating and irritable--she was perfectly
aware of it. Towards her sick mother, indeed, she had controlled
herself; nor, for such a restless creature, had she made a bad nurse.
But Agnes had endured much, and found it all the harder because she was
so totally in the dark as to the whys and wherefores of her sister's
moods.
Rose herself would have scornfully denied that any whys and
wherefores--beyond her rooted dislike of Whindale--existed. Since her
return from Berlin, and especially since that moment when, as she was
certain, Mr. Langham had avoided her and Catherine at the National
Gallery, she had been calmly certain of her own heart-wholeness. Berlin
had developed her precisely as she had desired that it might. The
necessities of the Bohemian student's life had trained her to a new
independence and shrewdness, and in her own opinion she was now a woman
of the world judging all things by pure reasons.
Oh, of course, she understood him perfectly. In the first place, at the
time of their first meeting she had been a mere bread-and-butter miss,
the easiest of preys for any one who might wish to get a few hours'
amusement and distraction out of her temper and caprices. In the next
place, even supposing he had been ever inclined to fall in love with
her, which her new sardonic fairness of mind obliged her to regard as
entirely doubtful, he was a man to whom marriage was impossible. How
could any one expect such a superfine dreamer to turn bread-winner for a
wife and household? Imagine Mr. Langham interviewed by a rate-collector
or troubled about coals! As to her--simply--she had misunderstood the
laws of the game. It was a little bitter to have to confess it; a little
bitter that he should have seen it, and have felt reluctantly compelled
to recall the facts to her. But, after all, most girls have some young
follies to blush over.
So far the little cynic would get, becoming rather more scarlet,
however, over the process of reflection than was quite compatible with
the ostentatious worldly wisdom of it. Then a sudden inward restlessness
would break through, and she would spend a passionate hour pacing up and
down, and hungering for the moment when she might avenge upon herself
and him the week of silly friendship he had found it necessary as her
elder and monitor to cut short!
In September came the news of Robert's resignation of his living. Mother
and daughters sat looking at each other over the letter, stupefied. That
this calamity, of all others, should have fallen on Catherine, of all
women! Rose said very little, and presently jumped up with shining
excited eyes, and ran out for a walk with Bob, leaving Agnes to console
their tearful and agitated mother. When she came in she went singing
about the house as usual. Agnes, who was moved by the news out of all
her ordinary _sangfroid_, was outraged by what seemed to her Rose's
callousness. _She_ wrote a letter to Catherine, which Catherine put
among her treasures, so strangely unlike it was to the quiet indifferent
Agnes of every day. Rose spent a morning over an attempt at a letter,
which when it reached its destination only wounded Catherine by its
constraint and convention.
And yet that same night when the child was alone, suddenly some phrase
of Catherine's letter recurred to her. She _saw_, as only imaginative
people see, with every detail visualised, her sister's suffering, her
sister's struggle that was to be. She jumped into bed, and, stifling all
sounds under the clothes, cried herself to sleep, which did not prevent
her next morning from harbouring somewhere at the bottom of her, a
wicked and furtive satisfaction that Catherine might now learn there
were more opinions in the world than one.
As for the rest of the valley, Mrs. Leyburn soon passed from bewailing
to a plaintive indignation with Robert, which was a relief to her
daughters. It seemed to her a reflection on 'Richard' that Robert should
have behaved so. Church opinions had been good enough for 'Richard.'
'The young men seem to think, my dears, their fathers were all fools!'
The vicar, good man, was sincerely distressed, but sincerely confident,
also, that in time Elsmere would find his way back into the fold. In
Mrs. Thornburgh's dismay there was a secret superstitious pang. Perhaps
she had better not have meddled. Perhaps it was never well to meddle.
One event bears many readings, and the tragedy of Catherine Elsmere's
life took shape in the uneasy consciousness of the vicar's spouse as a
more or less sharp admonition against wilfulness in match-making.
Of course Rose had her way as to wintering in London. They came up in
the middle of October while the Elsmeres were still abroad, and settled
into a small house in Lerwick Gardens, Campden Hill, which Catherine had
secured for them on her way through town to the Continent.
As soon as Mrs. Leyburn had been made comfortable, Rose set to work to
look up her friends. She owed her acquaintance in London hitherto mainly
to Mr. and Mrs. Pierson, the young barrister and his aesthetic wife whom
she had originally met and made friends with in a railway-carriage. Mr.
Pierson was bustling and shrewd; not made of the finest clay, yet not at
all a bad fellow. His wife, the daughter of a famous Mrs. Leo Hunter of
a bygone generation, was small, untidy, and in all matters of religious
or political opinion 'emancipated' to an extreme. She had also a strong
vein of inherited social ambition, and she and her husband welcomed Rose
with greater effusion than ever, in proportion as she was more beautiful
and more indisputably gifted than ever. They placed themselves and their
house at the girl's service, partly out of genuine admiration and
good-nature, partly also because they divined in her a profitable social
appendage.
For the Piersons, socially, were still climbing, and had by no means
attained. Their world, so far, consisted too much of the odds and ends
of most other worlds. They were not satisfied with it, and the
friendship of the girl-violinist, whose vivacious beauty and artistic
gift made a stir wherever she went, was a very welcome addition to their
resources. They feted her in their own house; they took her to the
houses of other people; society smiled on Miss Leyburn's protectors more
than it had ever smiled on Mr. and Mrs. Pierson taken alone; and
meanwhile Rose, flushed, excited, and totally unsuspicious, thought the
world a fairy tale, and lived from morning till night in a perpetual din
of music, compliments, and bravos, which seemed to her life indeed--life
at last!
With the beginning of November the Elsmeres returned, and about the same
time Rose began to project tea-parties of her own, to which Mrs. Leyburn
gave a flurried assent. When the invitations were written, Rose sat
staring at them a little, pen in hand.
'I wonder what Catherine will say to some of these people!' she
remarked in a dubious voice to Agnes. 'Some of them are queer, I admit;
but, after all, those two superior persons will have to get used to my
friends some time, and they may as well begin.'
'You cannot expect poor Cathie to come,' said Agnes with sudden energy.
Rose's eyebrows went up. Agnes resented her ironical expression, and
with a word or two of quite unusual sharpness got up and went.
Rose, left alone, sprang up suddenly, and clasped her white fingers
above her head, with a long breath.
'Where my heart used to be there is now just--a black--cold--cinder,'
she remarked with sarcastic emphasis. 'I am sure I used to be a nice
girl once, but it is so long ago I can't remember it!'
She stayed so a minute or more; then two tears suddenly broke and fell.
She dashed them angrily away, and sat down again to her note-writing.
Amongst the cards she had still to fill up was one of which the envelope
was addressed to the Hon. Hugh Flaxman, 90 St. James's Place. Lady
Charlotte, though she had afterwards again left town, had been in Martin
Street at the end of October. The Leyburns had lunched there, and had
been introduced by her to her nephew, and Lady Helen's brother, Mr.
Flaxman. The girls had found him agreeable; he had called the week
afterwards when they were not at home; and Rose now carelessly sent him
a card, with the inward reflection that he was much too great a man to
come, and was probably enjoying himself at country houses, as every
aristocrat should, in November.
The following day the two girls made their way over to Bedford Square,
where the Elsmeres had taken a house in order to be near the British
Museum. They pushed their way upstairs through a medley of
packing-cases, and a sickening smell of paint. There was a sound of an
opening door, and a gentleman stepped out of the back room, which was to
be Elsmere's study, on to the landing.
It was Edward Langham. He and Rose stood and stared at each other a
moment. Then Rose in the coolest, lightest voice introduced him to
Agnes. Agnes, with one curious glance, took in her sister's defiant
smiling ease and the stranger's embarrassment; then she went on to find
Catherine. The two left behind exchanged a few _banal_ questions and
answers. Langham had only allowed himself one look at the dazzling face
and eyes framed in fur cap and boa. Afterwards he stood making a study
of the ground, and answering her remarks in his usual stumbling fashion.
What was it had gone out of her voice--simply the soft callow sounds of
first youth? And what a personage she had grown in these twelve
months--how formidably, consciously brilliant in look and dress and
manner!
Yes, he was still in town--settled there, indeed, for some time. And
she--was there any special day on which Mrs. Leyburn received visitors?
He asked the question, of course, with various hesitations and
circumlocutions.
'Oh dear, yes! Will you come next Wednesday, for instance, and inspect a
musical menagerie? The animals will go through their performances from
four till seven. And I can answer for it that some of the specimens will
be entirely new to you.'
The prospect offered could hardly have been more repellent to him, but
he got out an acceptance somehow. She nodded lightly to him and passed
on, and he went downstairs, his head in a whirl. Where had the crude
pretty child of yester-year departed to--impulsive, conceited, readily
offended, easily touched, sensitive as to what all the world might think
of her and her performances? The girl he had just left had counted all
her resources, tried the edge of all her weapons, and knew her own place
too well to ask for anybody else's appraisement. What beauty--good
heavens!--what _aplomb_! The rich husband Elsmere talked of would hardly
take much waiting for.
So cogitating, Langham took his way westward to his Beaumont Street
rooms. They were on the second floor, small, dingy, choked with books.
Ordinarily he shut the door behind him with a sigh of content. This
evening they seemed to him intolerably confined and stuffy. He thought
of going out to his club and a concert, but did nothing, after all, but
sit brooding over the fire till midnight, alternately hugging and hating
his solitude.