XXVIII A ROSSETTI

Nothing, save, possibly, a voluntary check from his brother, could have surprised Ordham more than the information that he had passed his examinations. With the optimism, not inherent, but veneered upon his mind by a too fortunate life, he had, up to the moment of his arrival, taken his success in this ordeal for granted; perhaps it is fairer to state that he saw himself always, when prefiguring his future, as an ambassador in Paris or St. Petersburg; but no sooner did he find himself at the entrance to those forbidding straits which he must traverse to find the sole agency for his talents, than he descended into the depths of black despair. He would not pass. How could he? His French was good, for he had talked it in the nursery, and it had been actively exercised in Paris. But he had barely brushed up his Latin. He should forget every date—of course! And how could any man remember a mass of stuff it had taken Mill and Smith a lifetime to grind out? And German! They laid as much stress upon it as if England meditated immediate occupation of middle and southeastern Europe. They would treat him like a witness at a murder trial. How he hated that hideous language—and how could he have been so fatuous as to imagine that he could accumulate the necessary amount in less than a year?—the greater part of which he had wasted. For once in his life he knew remorse, repentance, wished that he had a will of iron, and had exercised it during that delightful sojourn in Munich. It shamed him to reflect that what little he did know he owed to the interest of one woman and the determined pounding of another.

He appeared before the board of examiners, pale, dejected, resigned, with no crest whatever, and impressed that formidable body as being at least a modest youth, high-bred and dignified, who would not be rejected for personal reasons did he survive the mental ordeal—a finale which sometimes surprised the cock-sure aspirant for diplomatic honours.

And he had passed! Not brilliantly, but he was launched upon the diplomatic sea, and he had no apprehension, with his immense family influence and the talents he was beginning to appreciate, of foundering. For a few moments he felt an inclination to be wildly jubilant. But this he sternly repressed, shrugged his shoulders, and reminded himself that such a commonplace achievement was to be expected of any man who had brains instead of porridge in his skull. To this succeeded an hour of irritation and disgust that he had not distinguished himself, put his rival competitors to the blush, made them wish he had forborne to enter the lists. But he was generous and philosophical, and this mood also passed. He wrote a note to Lord Bridgminster, and sent telegrams to Countess Tann, Princess Nachmeister, Fr?ulein Lutz, and his mother. Then he felt that he might dismiss the tiresome matter from his mind, as well as the harrowing ordeal that awaited him in the north, and settle down to the enjoyment of such plays as the month of August afforded.

He found the English drama and its interpretations tame and trite after those highly seasoned performances of the Continent with what were practically whole star casts, but they were better than visiting political country houses with his mother; and he slept late, strolled up and down Piccadilly, and wrote daily notes to Margarethe Styr, whom he missed quite as much as he had anticipated. It would have been interesting to abuse the play with her and drive out into the cool green English country every afternoon. He consoled himself by reading several new books he had not heard of while abroad, and sending them to her with colloquial ramblings on the fly-leaves. It was very cool and pleasant in his mother’s little house in Chesterfield Street, where hitherto he had passed but a night or two during hasty visits from Paris. He had been little in England since Lady Bridgminster, shorn of her power, had departed out of Bridgminster House in St. James’s Square, and made a nest for herself on the income of a dowager supplemented by a small annual allowance from her tight-fisted papa, and occasional checks from the duchess; the latter assisting her to enjoy life after a fashion and contract new debts.

Ordham had always been vaguely sorry for his mother, and his examination of the little house, this first time he was alone in it, deepened and somewhat clarified his sympathy. It seemed to him that she had just missed everything. She had almost been a great beauty, but although the general effect she managed to achieve, still made people, particularly in a ballroom, turn and stare at her, a closer inspection found the face, in spite of its large blue eyes, almost insignificant. If not born with a consuming desire for individual recognition, she had planted the ambition early in life, and consistently cultivated it. But although a feature in London society, she was not a personality, and there is a vast difference. Even her position in the political world, towering as it had been, she owed to her husband, brilliant, fascinating, and one of the chiefs of his party, as well as to the superb entertainments his income permitted her to give in St. James’s Square and Yorkshire. She had facility of speech, of pen, in all les graces; but she was devoid of originality, and almost stopped short of being clever. Distinguished in manner, she was deficient in charm and made no slaves. With a sincere love of beauty, she lacked the eye which corresponds to ear in music, and there was always a want of harmony in the detail of both her dress and her rooms. Worldly by birth and training, she was bohemian (of a sort) by instinct, and even when in Bridgminster House had mixed her parties in a fashion which society, less anxious to be amused at any cost than it became a few years later, condemned; and although nothing but indiscretions of which she was incapable could deprive her of the great position to which she had been born, and had held no less through her long period as a political hostess than her immense and powerful connection, she was now merely the faddish daughter of one peer and widow of another, instead of the personal force she still so ardently desired to be.

Even the pretty little house (for which, of course, she paid an exorbitant rent) lacked the individuality to which its rich collection of blue china and hawthorn jars, Chippendale and old oak furniture, fine brasses, antique vases, and Venetian mirrors, bits of Italian tapestry and stained glass, entitled it. The drawing-room, unexpectedly large, like so many of the drawing-rooms in those little houses in Mayfair, should have been a memorial sonnet to Rossetti, and it looked like the embodiment of his first incoherent dreams when groping for the formul? of the new art-religion. At the end of this room was the famous portrait which Rossetti had painted at his own request. He had seen the young girl at the opera and thought her the living embodiment of Beatrice. One of his few patrons had been able to persuade the duke that the fashionably obscure artist was a genius, but more because he would disdain payment than because of any enthusiasm inspired by pictures which the duke thought as stiff and outlandish as those ridiculous formal gardens about Ordham Castle. He was a Briton to his marrow, was his Grace, and he carried his detestation of all things foreign to such an extent that he had never paid a second visit to the Continent nor to any of those country houses which kept green the memories of Palladio and Inigo Jones. But his daughter, who had also gone to the patron’s house to see “the Rossettis,” had conceived an immediate passion for the new school, and sweetly gave her father no peace until he consented to let the artist paint her. The duke yielded with the utmost ungraciousness, and stipulated that the man—what was his name?—was to charge nothing for the honour, and was to present the portrait to Lady Patricia at once—there should be no public exhibition. As Rossetti never exhibited, and asked for nothing but the joy of painting this Renaissance lady who might have served as the original inspiration of the Brotherhood, he agreed to anything and eagerly awaited the day appointed for the first sitting.

She had not entered his studio and removed her bonnet before he saw the mistake he had made. Here was no Beata Beatrix, no medi?val saint, no about-to-be-murdered spouse of a sixteenth-century Italian, haunting immense and gloomy chambers, but an excessively thin narrow young English girl almost six feet in height, with a little white face of no particular character, immense blue eyes without a particle of expression, and an extraordinary mass of pale golden hair, which stood out from her head like wings. But Rossetti was an artist. If his spirits went down to zero, it was not long before they ascended with a rush. At least here was material to work on; that hair, that poise of head, that aristocratic languor were no delusion, and he could conjure up his first impression of her and the dreams of beauty which had haunted him ever since. In short, he idealized her, and the long picture (which had been exhibited to all London society for twenty-five years) was one of the most characteristic things he had ever done, and, perhaps, had contributed as much as any cause to Lady Bridgminster’s fatal desire to express so much more than she could conceive. Against a background of dull blue tapestry, with full throat strained, the jaw line from chin to ear salient, with lids slowly drooping, hair that seemed to be an aura emanating from the pure young fires of her spirit, stood this vision in diaphanous white clasping against her angelic flatness an upright sheaf of Annunciation lilies. The thinness was the willow grace of a reed, the pale complexion the white symbol of maidenly exaltation; the half-opened eyes, as blue as an Italian lake, were looking straight into paradise. When this wonderful picture was finished and had been admired by the artists that worshipped at his shrine, Rossetti, with his tongue in his cheek, covered the hands and arms with tan-coloured suède gloves. In that touch, done perhaps, in a moment of unconscious foresight, as of deliberate sarcasm, Rossetti had epitomized the life of Lady Bridgminster.

He had intended to make many sketches of her during these sittings, but she inspired him no further, as much to her disappointment as to his. Nevertheless, he liked her well enough, and went to her house after she married Bridgminster as long as he went anywhere. He had no reason to regret the acquaintance, for she bought several of his pictures, patronized the entire Brotherhood, was one of the first to acknowledge the genius of Burne-Jones, and commissioned the greatest decorator of modern times to refurnish the state drawing-rooms of Ordham in the style of the Italian Renaissance.

Lady Bridgminster was superstitious about this picture, and, when moving from palace to hovel, to use her own expression, took it with her, refusing the offer of the new millionnaire to whom her step-son had unaccountably leased the splendid theatre of her triumphs. Not only did it remind her, that in spite of six sons and what she regarded as a lifetime of disappointments, she had once been young and romantic like other women, but she had a fancy that it was her real self, and that did she let it go out of her keeping she should become but a grey shadow flitting amongst people who never could be quite sure whether she were there or not. This was her one imaginative flight, and she cherished it.

“Lady Pat” was little broader and even less covered with flesh than when the picture was painted a quarter of a century ago. How she had ever contrived to produce six strapping boys was one of those mysteries which Nature will explain one day, no doubt, with other paradoxes. But they had cost her few pains, and nurses and tutors had brought, were bringing, them up. At Ordham Castle, where they had lived the year round, until the older boys went to school and the father’s death consigned the younger to the dower house in Kent, she had complained of their noise, but as a matter of fact she had not a nerve in her body. She was as hard and supple as a Toledo blade, with all the brain she really needed, and an internal organization practically flawless. With an appearance of the most ?sthetic delicacy, she had never had so much as an attack of indigestion, never succumbed to the blues, when that malady was raging, and had no more emotional capacity than an incubator. Oscar Wilde once said of Lady Bridgminster that she would tempt St. Anthony to keep his vows; and true it was that, although only thirty-nine at the time of her husband’s death, still reigning as a beauty, and a great lady of whom any husband might be proud, not even an ambitious merchant had sought her hand. But by this time she knew her limitations far better than people fancied, and had neither the hope nor the wish to marry again. But she was a restless dissatisfied creature, bitterly regretting Bridgminster House and Ordham, and always flitting about in search of novelty and distraction. Her son, lying on the sofa in the drawing-room during the warm hours of the afternoon, contrasted her with Margarethe Styr, and pitied her, not the woman whose past was so black that even his imagination dared not lift the curtain.