VI CERTAIN INEVITABLE PHASES

Somewhat to his surprise, but vastly to his gratification, Ordham, on the following afternoon, was handed a card inscribed “Hiobe Lutz,” accompanied by a line of introduction on one of Gr?fin von Tann’s. He had just risen from luncheon in the Legation, and received the rather formidable looking female in the anteroom. She addressed him in such German as he had seldom heard in Bavaria, announced that she should never utter a word of English during his lessons, that he must dismiss his other teachers and study with her every morning, Sundays excepted, from ten until twelve. The last was a harrowing prospect, for he hated early rising; but he had the wit to perceive that here was the force to control his indolence and furnish his brain, that he would never fascinate this grenadier with his wiles and be permitted to entertain her in English. Moreover, he realized that she had received instructions from Margarethe Styr, and this flattered him deeply. The arrangement was quickly made and Fr?ulein Lutz departed, announcing that upon his second failure to appear promptly at ten o’clock she should consider herself dismissed. She would not waste her time,—she was assisting a historian upon a great work,—no, not for anybody.

Several hours later Ordham left a card on Countess Tann, and with it a note of thanks. But he did not ask for admittance. It cost him an unaccustomed effort of self-denial to turn from her door when there was a bare possibility of crossing its threshold, but he had reflected that he had no right to take advantage of his chance intimacy with a recluse, nor even of her very marked kindness; moreover, that, having done his duty, it was her privilege to ask him to come another day and drink a cup of tea.

But the days passed and it waxed evident that she had no intention of embracing her opportunity. In ordinary conditions he might have been piqued, for he was more spoilt than he knew; certainly disappointed. But even he had his worries, and two descended upon him the day after his return from Neuschwanstein.

One arrived in the morning mail. It was a request from his tailor to pay a bill of four years’ standing, a letter whose inexorable business flavour—which seemed to him sheer insolence—left him aghast. It is true that he had received several reminders from this necessary but ignominious person during the past six months, and tossed them, half read, into his waste-basket. It annoyed him to receive a bill at all, but that the demands of a mere machine might increase in firmness, much less hint of “summons,” had never crossed his mind. Until his father’s death four years since, he had rarely read a bill, or even, extravagant as he was, suffered remonstrance from a parent, who, regretting that his favourite son should not have been his first, made a point of ignoring the fact when he could. Every acre of the large estate was entailed, Lord Bridgminster’s personal property was small, and there were five sons more to educate and provide for. The oldest son and his father had not met for years, but while there was antipathy, there was no rancour; and Lord Bridgminster, never being called upon to meet debts for a man who lived the year round in his hunting box, contrived to forget him. Disappointed in his second wife, after the glamour of her peculiar personality had vanished, he devoted himself to politics and the son whom he fain would believe must inherit the solid honours as well as the brains of his house. Whenever the boy came home from Eton, and later, from Oxford,—where it rarely occurred to him to open a book,—he was received at Ordham Castle with all the honours and attentions due to the heir, and, had his father lived a year longer, the celebration of his twenty-first birthday would have dimmed the memory of the perfunctory festivities with which the majority of Lord Ordham had been announced to the county. And as it grew to be an accepted fact that the Timon would never marry, the oldest of the second family was so generally recognized as the heir, that, from the servants up, he was visited with no reminders of the long interval which might elapse before he could spend the income that went with the titles. Even after his father’s death it was some time before he began to appreciate the difference in his fortunes, for he spent the following summer yachting with a friend, and, a few months later, left Christ Church abruptly and went for a tour round the world. He finished in Paris, where, through the influence of his mother, a place had been found for him, unofficially, in the British Embassy. Moreover, Lord Bridgminster had managed to leave him two thousand pounds, and, although this ran away quickly, it served to postpone the day when he must reckon with a younger son’s portion.

And he had been brought up in that criminal ignorance of the value of money which has compassed the ruin of so many of the younger members of the British aristocracy. American fathers may live up to the last dollar of the large income they make by the constant turning over of their discrepant capital, die bankrupt, or leave nothing but a life insurance to their women; but the sons, no matter how indulged, grow up in the electric atmosphere of a business country; the subject of money and its infinite meanings is never long absent from the conversation about them nor from their minds; they witness the rise and fall of fortunes, the fluctuation of incomes, the accidents to which the most cautious are liable; and they live through those periodical rabies of the money market known as panics, which focus the attention of the most careless. Leisure they know to be merely an incident; they realize that, however wise it may be to enjoy life while conditions are favourable, it is equally wise to keep one’s energies polished and alert. And these energies are born in the blood, which perhaps is the whole point.

There is, save for war and sport, little latent energy in the blood of the young British aristocrat whose ancestors have too long been men of leisure. He has no acquaintance with business, and as little premonition of the serious responsibilities of life as of its ugly contacts. Surrounded, sheltered, reared in an atmosphere of plenty, with expensive habits, and self-denial no part of his creed (and the sons of peers comparatively poor are no exceptions), he has during his father’s lifetime all the advantages and refinements of the concentrated income of the estates that go to the head of the house. Then comes the inevitable moment when he is turned adrift, and confronted with the problem of maintaining his legitimate position in the world upon a younger son’s pittance. Readjustment taking place in few characters except at the conclusion of a series of shocks, and as often not then, he goes on spending mechanically, expecting that a new deus ex machina will as inevitably appear as the regular if sometimes invisible stars.

Ordham had imbibed the half-admitted principle that those that toiled existed merely by virtue of their usefulness to the great. It might be necessary to throw a bone occasionally to prevent snarling, or even for mere humanity’s sake; but that these underlings should presume to demand a settlement of accounts at inconvenient seasons—the liberty would hardly be greater did they solicit an invitation to dinner! That it was dishonest to buy when you had no definite prospect of paying, Ordham would have regarded as a principle of foreign growth, possibly American, wholly plebeian. It was not a matter upon which he had ever wasted a moment’s analysis; but possibly, had it been put to him with uncompromising bluntness, he would have been startled and ashamed, for he was not only kind and lavish, but without conscious arrogance; as for the word “dishonesty” it never entered his conversation or head unless some man of his class committed incomprehensible follies and went to Wormwood Scrubbs.

But if he had not as yet given the question sufficient thought even to defend himself on the ground that the tradespeople were more culpable than the fatuous class whose reckless habits they encouraged that they might suck their life blood undetected, he had long since begun to resent his paltry income, and to wonder in what torpors Providence drowsed when she permitted his useless miserly brother to come into the world before himself. Still, he had felt the actual pinch very seldom, for Bridgminster, under strong pressure, had twice paid his debts since the death of his father, and his temperament and tastes saved him from certain of the snares that are spread for young and engaging patricians.

But if too fastidious and too indifferent for dissipation, his sensuous artistic pleasure-loving nature, his extravagant personal habits,—he was one of the best-dressed young men in Europe,—and his careless generosity, demanded the income of an heir-apparent, and his brother incredibly failed to settle it upon him. Of the word “economy” he had not the vaguest appreciation. He would no more have bought a cheap edition of a favourite book than he would have worn ready-made clothing; clear type, hand-made paper, and a chaste binding were as necessary to his enjoyment as the contents they adorned, and he had already collected a considerable library in three languages. In Paris he had kept house with two brother secretaries, and, personally, a brougham and a riding horse. He by no means despised cards and the turf. He had attended the opera and theatre every night in the week, if only for an act, and he had made a notable little collection of etchings, prints, and bibel?ts. Moreover, the three young men had done the Embassy credit by the elegance and originality of their entertainments. When Lord Bridgminster paid the last of the bills whose gracefully dissipated substance had added lustre to his name, he announced in no mistakable terms that his brother would hereafter live within his income or go to the devil. It is possible that the reverberations of his wrath reached London, for it was shortly after Ordham arrived in Munich that his tradespeople, whose existence he had forgotten, began to send in their accounts. Ordham, of course, had not taken his brother’s proclamation seriously; nevertheless, he knew that he would have more trouble extracting money in the future. He relied upon the blandishments of his mother, the only member of the family tolerated by its present head.

Lady Bridgminster, still a woman of considerable fashion, was always hard up, always in debt. She had been a beauty of the early Rossetti type in her young womanhood; that great painter, indeed, had immortalized her on canvas; and since her husband’s death what she had saved in food, avoiding increase, she had spent on rare and lovely fabrics, stones, and distracted dressmakers, that she might retain her individual style and with it the illusion of youth. She gave her oldest son much advice, but never a penny. The advice by no means was to reform his habits, but to find him a rich wife. She was quite sensible of his attractions and thought he should have established himself before this. “Bridg is thirty-eight,” she had written him just as he was leaving Paris. “As likely as not he will suddenly cease to be a misogynist at forty, come up to London, and make a fool of himself; he would be putty in the hands of the first clever mother of portionless daughters that marked him as her own. Then where would be those golden apples you have grown accustomed to regard as your own (in pickle)? I have always believed them to be just a shelf too high, and that is the reason I have been so firm about the diplomatic career; not only because it suits your talents, but because it will be the means of dazzling some wealthy American girl, to whom the prospect of a position in the diplomatic circles of Europe will prove quite as alluring as a coronet—which, for that matter, you may win for yourself. I prefer an American, because her relatives will not be likely to live in England. An alliance with any of the modern British tribes might prove extremely awkward; and who else over here has any money—I mean for poor dowagers and younger sons? The Americans, when well-bred, have such a charming independence, yet know exactly how far to go. And then they are generous and would pay my bills. Tradespeople are so tiresome. Don’t ask me, dear Johnny, for money. As well ask courage of a mouse. If I were young enough, or did not have six boys inadequately provided for, I might marry again. As it is, my only present hope is in you. Too bad the other boys are not girls. I should defy any man in England to escape me if I marked him for my prey with a pink and white complexion on the hook.

“I don’t know what your opportunities will be in Munich, but at least you will be able to live within your income for a bit; you could not spend money in a dowdy old German town if you tried—at least no one else could, but I rather fancy you could spend money in the canals of Mars. If Munich has no magnet for the American heiress, try to pass your examinations this year, that you may be launched the sooner.” Then followed several pages of news about his brothers, one of whom was at Sandhurst, one at Eton, the others with a tutor in the country, all “growing at a frightful rate,” and costing every penny their father had been able to set aside for their education. In a postscript she reverted to the first theme. “Remember that you must, must marry money. You are the grand seigneur. You will never learn economy. And why should you?”

Ordham recalled this letter as he stared at the epistle of his tailor. He longed to send the man a check accompanied by a curt withdrawal of his patronage. This being out of the question, and Bridgminster untractable for the present, his diplomacy conquered his indignation and he wrote a polite note, promising to call and settle his account “immediately upon his arrival in London.” Then, concluding upon further reflection that the man was indulging in what the Americans called bluff, he dismissed the matter into one of the water-tight compartments of his mind, where it rubbed elbows in the dark with other episodes best forgotten.

But the second evil was more pressing. For two weeks past, having exhausted even his fertile ingenuity in excuses for not calling upon a certain Frau von Wass, he had burned her letters unopened. She was a Bulgarian, married these twenty years to a Bavarian Privy Councillor (Geheimrath), barely tolerated in Munich society, which has little hospitality for foreigners, and indulging her amorous propensities at the constant risk of her position; the Müncheners, lenient to their own, or to the outsider they embrace voluntarily, circle like lynxes in the pathway of the intruder. Hélène Wass was both stupid and clever; the well-trained instincts of the born adventuress taught her how to entertain as well as to fascinate men; but she bored her own sex with her egotism, her imaginary complaints, her tirades against her husband, servants, enemies, and antagonized them by the bewildering variety and grandeur of her Paris costumes, her ostentation, and her conquests. Of plebeian origin, but, with the external traits of heredity corrected by a ten years’ sojourn in a convent in Vienna, determined to have admiration, excitement, and money at any cost, her father having lost his little fortune in speculation, it is possible that she would have drifted into the half-world had not an anxious relative persuaded her to marry the wealthy and respectable Herr Geheimrath von Wass, although he was thirty years her senior and already fat. She met him while visiting a school friend in Hungary, where he owned an estate.

The commonplace deceit of the girl quickly developed into the subtlety of the woman, and she found no difficulty in managing a husband whose ruling passion was vanity. She found Munich as dull, narrow, and provincial as only an exclusive court society can be; but she consoled herself with the assurance that she extracted more out of it than any woman who courtesied to the King by divine right. She had loved much, but had never been tempted to leave her dull important old husband, and had long since forgotten the dreams of her convent days, when she had alternately yearned for the honourable proposals of an archduke and the untrammelled life of a cocotte. In all the eminent women of the half-world there is something of the grande dame, and doubtless, had fate, at the critical moment, dealt them a rich and powerful husband, they would have become equally distinguished members of society. So it was, at least, with Hélène Wass. Although Munich never ceased to harp upon the suggestion of the demimondaine in her dress, her beauty, her very essence,—whatever they may have meant by that,—she was now a very great little lady, and no inferior ever made a mistake in approaching her.

She was thirty-nine, and, without artifice, looked quite ten years younger. Her light blue eyes, sometimes insolently bright, often soft and languid, so thickly lashed that they looked made up; her abundant hair, of a rich hot brown, arranged with apparent carelessness about her pale eager often excited, little face; her slender, tiny, stately, and always smartly attired figure—composed a magnet for the eyes of men wherever she appeared. She had fascinated Ordham, always on the lookout for the uncommon, not only by her odd beauty, her sprightliness, her wild morbid moods, but by her subtle appeal to his sympathies. Far too clever to practise upon men’s senses alone, she had quickly discovered that the young Englishman was chivalrous, possibly sentimental, and, in the outer wrappings of his heart, indubiously soft. Unlike Mrs. Cutting, she did not divine the hardness at the core, that hardness which is the inevitable result of waiting for dead men’s shoes, of resentment against fate for putting the shoes on the wrong feet, of belonging to a class which secretly believes itself to be above all laws.

But she quickened his sympathies so effectually that he had suddenly found her in his arms, gasping out her hatred of life, her frantic desire to die at once. He had been stirred, flattered, delighted; but all these emotions lasted little over a fortnight. He soon chafed at the halter round his neck, and endeavoured to escape from it without wounding the susceptibilities of a lady to whom he was still young enough to be grateful. To escape, however, he was determined; not only did he shrink from her tropical storms, but—and for once her astuteness had failed her—he had no mind to be at any woman’s beck and call. She had sent him summonses at all hours of the day and night, and forced him to break more than one engagement he would have preferred to keep. Courteous diplomacy failing, he had been driven to ignore her existence. Her present command, however, he could not afford to disregard, for it arrived in a telegram, and announced that if he did not call upon her at three o’clock she would call upon him at the Legation at four.

He had a bad two hours with Fr?ulein Lutz, and was so dull and absent at luncheon that although there were guests he had no difficulty in making his escape. But he lingered in his own room, cursing his folly, for half an hour longer; then, offering a cab driver double fare to hasten, managed to arrive at the “palace” of the eminent Geheimrath at a quarter to four.

Frau Hélène, familiar with his habits, had not expected him earlier, and had preserved the equanimity necessary to the r?le she was determined to play. Instead of being conducted to the Pompadour boudoir, where he expected to find her in negligée and tears, he was ushered into the great Empire drawing-room, where she stood severely attired in a black velvet gown, whose train gave her fictitious inches and accented the proud mask into which she had set her mobile little face. She saw at a glance that he was very white and nervous, but more dignified, more remote, than ever, and only long experience, and the cool brain of the born huntress, enabled her to restrain her passion. She completely disconcerted him by putting out her hand and smiling brightly.

“That was a wild telegram,” she said, in her soft, somewhat thick voice. “But—let us sit quite in the middle of the room where we cannot be overheard—I felt that I must see you before I go away.”

“You are going away?” Ordham felt like a prisoner reprieved, but employed the tone of polite regret.

“My husband is so ill (this, of course, is a profound secret) that I have persuaded him to go to his estate in Hungary and die in peace. Not that he has the least idea he must die, poor old dear; we call it resting for a time. As you may fancy, dear Mr. Ordham, I have few regrets in leaving a city whose insults and slights I have been forced to endure for fifteen years—I was married on my sixteenth birthday” (Ordham had looked her up also in the Graf Buch), “and now—well—”

He drew a long breath and clenched his hands. She continued:

“I felt that I must see you before I left. I telegraphed because I felt sure that you had ceased to open my notes—”

“Oh! How can you say such a thing?”

“You were quite right. I have done the same thing myself. But many, many times! When a woman of my age makes a fool of herself, she does not deserve half the consideration which you have shown to me. Seven years may be very few as time goes, but they are an eternity when a woman commits the folly of loving a man younger than herself—”

“Oh! How can you say such things? How can you—” Ordham, who had been prepared for worse, felt as if his brain were being flicked with red-hot whips. He sprang to his feet and strode up and down the room, longing to tear his hair, to bolt from the house. Frau von Wass continued:

“Allow me to see myself as I should see another woman in the same circumstances. And while it has not been a happy experience, it has been salutary. Of course, I knew, when you turned as sulky as Adonis and as polite as an unfaithful husband, that it was all over. But—being a woman—”

“I am so sorry!”

“You say that in precisely the same tone when you forget an appointment or are late for dinner.” She spoke with soft humour. “But I did not send for you to reproach you, but for two reasons: to express my regret that I was so short-sighted as to sacrifice friendship to love, and to ask you to renew the first delightful relationship during the short time I shall remain in Munich.”

“Why not?” he asked eagerly, in his immense relief. He had found her wholly charming during their earlier acquaintance; and was quite willing to obliterate the entr’acte, were only she. He took a straight chair opposite her, and did not even look at the little white hands lying so helplessly on the black velvet lap. He shrank from her, and she guessed this, and for the moment was filled with such a rage of hatred that she would have stuck a knife into him had one been at hand. As it was she dropped her eyelashes, and permitted her red lips to quiver. Then she looked him full in the face and said quietly:

“It is too kind of you to believe that you can stand me for a fortnight longer. You are safe. You gave me a blow on the heart that has paralyzed it—no! do not get up again. I am not reproaching you, merely stating the case, quite dispassionately, as you can see. Love is a sealed book to me from this time forth, and, far from feeling reproachful,—ah! dear Mr. Ordham,—I am grateful. Just so often as a woman loves does she die. She comes to life again in the course of time, but with less and less of energy, illusion, her original power to love and be happy. I sometimes think that love is a congestion of a spot in the brain round the image of the man, which stares at her waking and sleeping, never to be banished from the tortured consciousness till Time has drained the blood from that little spot. And then it withers! And the best man on earth could never give life to that dead spot again. I am telling all this to your curious analytical mind, knowing of old how such things interest you, and being quite beyond all sensation myself. Now,” she concluded, rising like royalty and holding out her hand, which he took limply, “I shall let you go—how cold your hand is!”

“I am congealed! You have made me utterly miserable.”

“Not utterly, but a little. You deserve that much. Poor boy!” Her accent was that of the indulgent woman of the world. “Your education has begun too early. Nature did you an ill turn in giving you a brain and a charm out of all proportion to your years. You ought to be amusing yourself with nice English girls” (she knew that he hated English girls), “not playing up to a lot of European flirts a dozen years older than yourself. Be thankful that you fell into my hands. You are now as free as air once more—only—you will come here often this last fortnight?”

“Of course.” He shook hands with her once more and escaped from the house. As he opened the gate, absorbed in his miserable reflections, and quite unaware of his white dejected face, he did not notice a carriage that passed, nor that the occupant leaned forward suddenly; but a moment later he vaguely recognized the brougham and liveries of Countess Tann.

Within the magnificent Empire salon, which had tempted more than one member of the royal family, upon whom restrictions as to quarterings did not sit as heavily as upon the anointed, Hélène Wass sat with clenched hands and contorted face. She had fought down her passion at the risk of a fainting fit, but, well as she thought she knew herself, she had not guessed how difficult it would be, hardly what proportions her passion had assumed. She had not had the faintest intention of leaving Munich; her object had been to disarm her episodical lover, as cold and restive as a young girl, and with other methods and other arts win him again. Failing that, she would indulge in the doubtful joy of his mere friendship. But now she discarded not only the last alternative, but the waiting policy.

One of Ordham’s charms for this blasée woman of plebeian origin was the atmosphere of intellectual remoteness in which he seemed to dwell, and which, combined with his dignity and fine manners, made him the most finished type of the traditional aristocrat she had ever met. It was when she realized that she might never penetrate those outer envelopes of gayety and candour with which he concealed the intense reserve of his nature, that she had fallen genuinely in love with him; and the love of a woman of that sort is far more dangerous than her mere passion.

To-day, as he had sat in his straight chair, with his hands resting lightly, yet with a suggestion of weight, on his lap, completely at his ease in spite of his distress, his watchful brain throwing an almost visible shadow over his youth, she had become violently conscious that to possess this man wholly she would see the earth crumble under her feet. It was the first time in her life that she had considered sacrificing the world for any man. Whether she loved Ordham more than she had ever loved before, she could not be sure, for when a woman has loved many times memory is the last thing she cultivates; but love, heretofore, had not demanded sacrifice as a part of its programme. Nor had she ever felt quite so sick of Munich, its passive impregnability, the eternal weary round of official dinners she was forced, as the wife of a Geheimrath, to give and attend; the husband, whom she had expected, when she married him, to leave her a young widow, had never seemed so hopelessly hale, the future had never looked so short.

She tore and gnawed her handkerchief until her gown was strewn with lint, but her brain worked clearly. Only a brief while of self-control and she felt positive that she could reawaken his interest. Then she would force him to compromise her in such a manner that he could not desert her when she fled from Munich. Six months at her villa in Italy, and then a quiet wedding; and in addition to owning the unfortunate youth, body and soul, she should enjoy a fair prospect of blinding the world to her indiscretion with the coronet of Bridgminster. So far, she had had no occasion to appeal to the young Englishman’s honour or chivalry, but let her be able to demonstrate to him that, through the mighty passion he had awakened, her life was in ruins, and he would marry her beyond the shadow of a doubt. The opposition of his family would merely crystallize that obstinacy that showed its grim face now and again amidst the vacillations of a character still immature. To the young man’s ruined career and maimed life, to his possibly broken heart, she gave not a thought; or had she, it would have made no difference in her plans. There is no adventuress so utterly unscrupulous as the society cocotte, with her demands so much more complicated than those of the women of commerce, particularly when her sated senses are electrified for the last time. Hélène Wass knew that she should never love again, and for love and the pleasure of spending money she had lived since the convent doors had closed behind her. Money of her own she now had in abundance, for her father had speculated rationally during the later years of his life and had left her, his sole heir, a considerable fortune. Once her lips gave a satirical twist as the question obtruded itself: should she have had the courage to sacrifice all for love on a younger son’s meagre income? Then she felt something like a pang of gratitude that there was no obstacle to her headlong abandonment to a passion, which, whatever suffering and mortification it entailed, gave her back her youth, awoke once more in her weary brain the power to dream, to vizualize a future. Years before, it seemed to her, as she sat there and heard the heavy feet of her old husband in the hall, she had resigned herself to the interminable blankness of the present.