CHAPTER X.

"HIS LADY SMILES; DELIGHT IS IN HER FACE."

That benevolent advice of Mrs. St. Aubyn's was not without its influence upon Leonard, lightly as he seemed to put aside the insinuation of evil.

The matron's speech helped to strengthen his own doubts and fears. Other eyes than his had noted Christabel's manner of receiving the Baron's attentions--other people had been impressed by the change in her. The thing was not an evil of his own imagining. She was making herself the talk of his friends and acquaintance. There was scandal--foul suspicion in the very atmosphere she breathed. That mutual understanding, that face to face arraignment, which he felt must come sooner or later, could not be staved off much longer. The wife who defied him thus openly, making light of him under his own roof, must be brought to book.

"To-morrow she and I must come to terms," Leonard said to himself.

No one had much leisure for thought that evening. The drawing-room was a scene of babble and laughter, music, flirtation, frivolity, everybody seeming to be blest with that happy-go-lucky temperament which can extract mirth from the merest trifles. Jessie Bridgeman and Mr.

Tregonell were the only lookers-on--the only two people who in Jack Vandeleur's favourite phrase were not "in it." Every one else was full of the private theatricals. The idea had only been mooted after luncheon, and now it seemed as if life could hardly have been bearable yesterday without this thrilling prospect. Colonel Blathwayt, who had been out shooting all the afternoon, entered vigorously into the discussion. He was an experienced amateur actor, had helped to swell the funds of half the charitable inst.i.tutions of London and the provinces; so he at once a.s.sumed the function of stage manager.

"De Cazalet can act," he said. "I have seen him at South Kensington; but I don't think he knows the ropes as well as I do. You must let me manage the whole business for you; write to the London people for stage and scenery, lamps, costumes, wigs. And of course you will want me for Alphonse."

Little Monty had been suggested for Alphonse. He was fair-haired and effeminate, and had just that small namby-pamby air which would suit Pauline's faint-hearted lover; but n.o.body dared to say anything about him when Colonel Blathwayt made this generous offer.

"Will you really play Alphonse?" exclaimed Christabel, looking up from a volume of engravings, ill.u.s.trating the costumes of the Directory and Empire, over which the young ladies of the party, notably Dopsy and Mopsy, had been giggling and ejaculating. "We should not have ventured to offer you a secondary part."

"You'll find it won't be a secondary character as I shall play it,"

answered the Colonel, calmly. "Alphonse will go better than any part in the piece. And now as to the costumes. Do you want to be picturesque, or do you want to be correct?"

"Picturesque by all means," cried Mopsy. "Dear Mrs. Tregonell would look too lovely in powder and patches."

"Like Boucher's Pompadour," said the Colonel. "Do you know I think, now fancy b.a.l.l.s are the rage, the Louis Quinze costume is rather played out.

Every ponderous matron fancies herself in powder and brocade. The powder is hired for the evening, and the brocade is easily convertible into a dinner gown," added the Colonel, who spent the greater part of his life among women, and prided himself upon knowing their ways. "For my part, I should like to see Mrs. Tregonell dressed like Madame Tallien."

"Undressed like Madame Tallien, you mean," said Captain Vandeleur: and thereupon followed a lively discussion as to the costume of the close of the last century as compared with the costume of to-day, which ended in somebody's a.s.sertion that the last years of a century are apt to expire in social and political convulsions, and that there was every promise of revolution as a wind-up for the present age.

"My idea of the close of the nineteenth century is that it will be a period of dire poverty," said the proprietor of the _Sling_; "an age of pauperism already heralded by the sale of n.o.ble old mansions, the breaking-up of great estates, the destruction of famous collections, galleries, libraries, the pious h.o.a.rds of generations of connoisseurs and bookworms, scattered to the four winds by a stroke of the auctioneer's hammer. The landed interest and the commercial cla.s.ses are going down the hill together. Suez has ruined our shipping interests; an unreciprocated free trade is ruining our commerce. Coffee, tea, cotton--our markets are narrowing for all. After a period of lavish expenditure, reckless extravagance, or at any rate the affectation of reckless extravagance, there will come an era of dearth. Those are wisest who will foresee and antic.i.p.ate the change, simplify their habits, reduce their luxuries, put on a Quakerish sobriety in dress and entertainments, which, if carried out nicely, may pa.s.s for high art--train themselves to a kind of holy poverty outside the cloister--and thus break their fall. Depend upon it, there will be a fall, for every one of those men and women who at this present day are living up to their incomes."

"The voice is the voice of FitzJesse, but the words are the words of Ca.s.sandra," said Colonel Blathwayt. "For my part, I am like the Greeks, and never listen to such gloomy vaticinations. I daresay the deluge _will_ come--a deluge now and again is inevitable; but I think the dry land will last our time. And in the meanwhile was there ever a pleasanter world than that we live in--an entirely rebuilt and revivified London--clubs, theatres, restaurants, without number--gaiety and brightness everywhere? If our amus.e.m.e.nts are frivolous, at least they are hearty. If our friendships are transient, they are very pleasant while they last. We know people to-day, and cut them to-morrow; that is one of the first conditions of good society. The people who are cut understand the force of circ.u.mstances, and are just as ready to take up the running a year or two hence, when we can afford to know them."

"Blessed are the poor in spirit," quoted little Monty, in a meek voice.

"Our women are getting every day more like the women of the Directory, and the Consulate," continued the Colonel. "We have come to short petticoats and gold anklets. All in good time we shall come to bare feet. We have abolished sleeves, and we have brought bodices to a _reductio ad absurdum_; but, although prudes and puritans may disapprove our present form, I must say that women were never so intelligent or so delightful. We have come back to the days of the _salon_ and the _pet.i.t souper_. Our daughters are sirens and our wives are wits."

"Charming for Colonel Blathwayt, whose only experience is of other people's wives and daughters," said little Monty. "But I don't feel sure that the owners are quite so happy."

"When a man marries a pretty woman, he puts himself beyond the pale,"

said Mr. FitzJesse; "n.o.body sympathizes with him. I daresay there was not a member of the Grecian League who did not long to kick Menelaus."

"There should be stringent laws for the repression of nice girls'

fathers," said little Monty. "Could there not be some kind of inst.i.tution like the Irish Land Court, to force parents to cash up, and hand over daughter and dowry to any spirited young man who made a bid?

Here am I, a conspicuous martyr to parental despotism. I might have married half a dozen heiresses, but for the intervention of stony-hearted fathers. I have gone for them at all ages, from pinafores to false fronts; but I have never been so lucky as to rise an orphan."

"Poor little Monty! But what a happy escape for the lady."

"Ah, I should have been very kind to her, even if her youth and beauty dated before the Reform Bill," said Mr. Montagu. "I should not have gone into society with her--one must draw the line somewhere. But I should have been forbearing."

"Dear Mrs. Tregonell," said Mopsy, gushingly, "have you made up your mind what to wear?"

Christabel had been turning the leaves of a folio abstractedly for the last ten minutes.

"To wear? Oh, for the play! Well, I suppose I must be as true to the period as I can, without imitating Madame Tallien. Baron, you draw beautifully. Will you make a sketch for my costume? I know a little woman in George Street, Hanover Square, who will carry out your idea charmingly."

"I should have thought that you could have imagined a short-waisted gown and a pair of long mittens without the help of an artist," said Jessie, with some acidity. She had been sitting close to the lamp, poring over a piece of point-lace work, a quiet and observant listener. It was a fixed idea among the servants at Mount Royal that Miss Bridgeman's eyes were constructed on the same principle as those of a horse, and that she could see behind her. "There is nothing so very elaborate in the dress of that period, is there?"

"I will try to realize the poetry of the costume."

"Oh, but the poetry means the bare feet and ankles, doesn't it?" asked Miss Bridgeman. "When you talk about poetry in costume, you generally mean something that sets a whole roomful of people staring and t.i.ttering."

"My Pauline will look a sylph!" said the Baron, with a languishing glance at his hostess.

And thus, in the pursuit of the infinitely little, the evening wore away. Songs and laughter, music of the lightest and most evanescent character, games which touched the confines of idiocy, and set Leonard wondering whether the evening amus.e.m.e.nts of Colney Hatch and Hanwell could possibly savour of wilder lunacy than these sports which his wife and her circle cultivated in the grave old reception-room, where a council of Cavaliers, with George Trevelyan of Nettlecombe, Royalist Colonel, at their head, had met and sworn fealty to Charles Stuart's cause, at hazard of fortune and life.

Leonard stood with his back to the wide old fireplace, watching these revellers, and speculating, in a troubled spirit, as to how much of this juvenile friskiness was real; contemplating, with a cynical spirit, that nice sense of cla.s.s distinction which enabled the two St. Aubyn girls to keep Mopsy and Dopsy at an impa.s.sable distance, even while engaged with them in these familiar sports. Vain that in the Post Office game, Dopsy as Montreal exchanged places with Emily St. Aubyn as Newmarket. Montreal and Newmarket themselves are not farther apart geographically than the two damsels were morally as they skipped into each other's chairs. Vain that in the Spelling game, the South Belgravians caught up the landowner's daughters with a surpa.s.sing sharpness and sometimes turned the laugh against those tender scions of the landed aristocracy. The very att.i.tude of Clara St. Aubyn's chin--the way she talked apart with Mrs. Tregonell, seemingly unconscious of the Vandeleur presence, marked her inward sense of the gulf between them.

It was midnight before any one thought of going to bed, yet there was unwonted animation at nine o'clock next morning in the dining-room, where every one was talking of the day's expedition: always excepting the master of the house, who sat at one end of the table, with Termagant, his favourite Irish setter, crouched at his feet, and his game-bag lying on a chair near at hand.

"Are you really going to desert us?" asked Mopsy, with her sweetest smile.

"I am not going to desert you, for I never had the faintest intention of joining you," answered Leonard bluntly; "whether my wife and her friends made idiots of themselves by playing nursery games in her drawing-room, or by skipping about a windy height on the edge of the sea, is their own affair. I can take my pleasure elsewhere."

"Yes; but you take your pleasure very sadly, as somebody said of English people generally," urged Mopsy, whose only knowledge of polite literature was derived from the cla.s.sical quotations and allusions in the _Daily Telegraph_; "you will be all alone, for Jack and little Monty have promised to come with us."

"I gave them perfect freedom of choice. They may like that kind of thing. I don't."

Against so firm a resolve argument would have been vain. Mopsy gave a little sigh, and went on with her breakfast. She was really sorry for Leonard, who had been a kind and useful friend to Jack for the last six years--who had been indeed the backbone of Jack's resources, without which that gentleman's pecuniary position would have collapsed into hopeless limpness. She was quite sharp-sighted enough to see that the present aspect of affairs was obnoxious to Mr. Tregonell--that he was savagely jealous, yet dared not remonstrate with his wife.

"I should have thought he was just the last man to put up with anything of that kind," she said to Dopsy, in their bedchamber confidences; "I mean her carrying on with the Baron."

"You needn't explain yourself," retorted Dopsy, "it's visible to the naked eye. If you or I were to carry on like that in another woman's house we should get turned out; but Mrs. Tregonell is in her own house, and so long as her husband doesn't see fit to complain--"

"But when will he see fit? He stands by and watches his wife's open flirtation with the Baron, and lets her go on from bad to worse. He must see that her very nature is changed since last year, and yet he makes no attempt to alter her conduct. He is an absolute worm."

"Even the worm will turn at last. You may depend he will," said Dopsy sententiously.

This was last night's conversation, and now in the bright fresh October morning, with a delicious coolness in the clear air, a balmy warmth in the sunshine, Dopsy and Mopsy were smiling at their hostess, for whose kindness they could not help feeling deeply grateful, "whatever they might think of her conduct. They recognized a divided duty--loyalty to Leonard as their brother's patron, and the friend who had first introduced them to this land of Beulah--grat.i.tude to Mrs. Tregonell, without whose good graces they could not long have made their abode here.

"You are not going with us?" asked Christabel, carelessly scanning Leonard's shooting gear, as she rose from the table and drew on her long _mousquetaire_ gloves.

"No--I'm going to shoot."

"Shall you go to the Kieve? That's a good place for woodc.o.c.k, don't you know?" Jessie Bridgeman stared aghast at the speaker. "If you go that way in the afternoon you may fall in with us: we are to drink tea at the farm."

"Perhaps I may go that way."

"And now, if every one is ready, we had better start," said Christabel, looking round at her party.