XLII HIS HOUSE OF CARDS

For three weeks they roamed about the beautiful gloomy old park with its formal gardens, its old-fashioned English rose garden and shrubberies, and its many groves and alleys. The Italian garden was their favourite setting for the love drama still in progress; and Ordham could imagine no more beautiful picture composed by woman and Nature than Mabel leaning on the moss-grown balustrade above the sunken garden, with the high rigid cypresses and the setting sun behind her, and her hand resting lightly on one of the urns. But if Mabel had the gift of making pictures of herself, she was as often absorbed in the pleasures offered by perfect country weather. They rode, drove, played tennis and croquet, received and returned calls and dinners, and even attended a meet. But one day the weather changed abruptly. They awoke to the sound of a steady hopeless downpour. This, to married lovers, bent only on being happy, was but an enchanting variation. They explored the castle, ransacked trunks in a garret, searched for hidden springs in panels and secret drawers of cabinets, and, with the aid of a lantern and conducted by Mrs. Felt, investigated underground rooms that may once have done duty as dungeons.

Finally, exhausted and chilled, they retreated to the library fire, where Ordham extended himself on the hearthrug, and Mabel, again a picture in a red scarf over her white frock and thrown into high relief by LaLa, lay in a deep easy chair and discoursed of popping corn and roasting chestnuts. Suddenly she sat erect, struck by a brilliant idea.

“I’ll cable mother to-morrow to bring over a lot of poppers and boxes of corn. It will be such fun to teach people, and so original.”

“I am afraid there are only tile stoves in Italy,” murmured Ordham, sleepily.

“Oh! I had forgotten Italy! Dear, darling Jackie, do let us spend six months at Ordham. With all my dreams I had hardly the ghost of an idea of how fascinating, how perfectly heavenly, it would be to live here. And not only the castle—but England, this country life, everything! I can’t go away!”

“But Mabel—not only am I due in Rome one week from to-day, but we cannot outstay our welcome. Bridg is not the most generous and hospitable of mortals. It is a miracle that he lent us the place at all, and if we stayed too long—What is the matter?”

Mabel was staring down at him with a face deeply flushed and the light of a terrified defiance in her eyes.

“What is it?” repeated Ordham, uneasily. “You are not ill?”

“Oh, no! Well—it would have to come out pretty soon, anyhow. Jackie, I have a terrible confession to make.”

“Confession?”

“Yes—don’t look as if you thought I was going to say I had been engaged before, or something. You will be surprised at first, but afterward you will be perfectly delighted. Oh, Jackie! I have leased Ordham for five years.”

“What?” Ordham rose slowly to his feet. There was a red stain on his face; he looked as if he had been struck. “What? I don’t understand.”

“I have always wanted it so much! I couldn’t resist when Lady Bridgminster said your brother was so anxious to break the entail—to make money out of the place. Of course I was not such a fool as to buy what will one day be ours, but it was my own idea to lease it, and I think it a very bright one. My, but he charged a price! Bobby was furious. But I don’t care if you will only stay. What is money for? Don’t look at me like that!”

“I am very much surprised.”

Ordham walked slowly to the end of the room and back again. Then he confronted his wife. “It was my right to be consulted,” he said, with his elaborate gentle courtesy, which Mabel had yet to learn might cover a very fury of anger, cold resentment, or the instinct of self-protection on the alert.

“You would never have consented,” she said ingenuously. “You would have said, ‘What is the use?’ You were so bent on going abroad.”

“Of course.”

“I am sure that when you have thought it over you will simply love the idea of this wonderful old castle being really your own instead of waiting and waiting and waiting for it. It is horrid, waiting for people to die, anyhow.”

“Much as I should like to possess Ordham, I have no desire to live in England. I do not care for English life except at rare intervals. There is nothing of the English country gentleman in me, and I prefer the Continent. That was one of my reasons for entering the diplomatic service.”

“How can anybody like those down-at-the-heel aristocracies and vulgar bourgeoisies with all the money when one can have England—the only real thing? Oh, Jackie dear, please, please stay!” She clasped her hands, and he noted afresh, sharply displeased with himself, how beautiful she was. “I know, I know we shall be much happier here. And I haven’t half seen London, been really a part of its wonderful life.”

“You are talking like a spoilt child, crying for a toy,” he said pleasantly. “Do you realize that you are asking me to give up my career?”

“Do you really care as much about it as you think? If you had been the oldest son and inherited four years ago, should you have thought about it?”

He took another turn up and down the room. “Perhaps not,” he said finally. “But I think a great deal about it at present.”

“I don’t believe you have ever known what you wanted. Somebody always—Lady Bridgminster says that she and your father chose your career, that you were always too indolent to plan anything, take any initiative. Oh, I have heard her discuss you a thousand times. I am sure that if you settle down here, you will like it a million times better than that tiresome old Continent. You can run for Parliament if you want a career. Lady Bridgminster says that you have all sorts of abilities if you would only wake up, and politics are certainly in your blood.”

A white light was rising in his brain. “I fancy that I am quite the most dronish man alive. More than once in my life I have had the sensation of being gently engineered up to or past some crisis—and too indolent—polite word!—even to attempt to formulate the impression.” He paused a full minute as if he would repress the question that finally slipped from his tongue, “Was I engineered into this marriage?”

Mabel flushed again and her eyes expanded, but she clapped her hands with a fine assumption of gay defiance. “Should you really have thought of marrying me if the idea had not deliberately been put into your head?”

He gazed at her with heavy veiled eyes, which she misread, and which covered revolt and fury. “How interesting,” he said softly. “Do tell me about it. It was your clever mother, of course.”

“And yours! She frightened you and roused all your stubbornness by threatening you with that dreadful Rosamond Hayle—who was engaged all the time! Oh, it was too funny!” Mabel, carried away by her little sense of drama, and completely deceived by her husband’s smiling face, ran on. “You can’t find any fault with me, at least, for I was frightfully in love with you—I never thought of any one else from the moment we met in Munich. Lady Bridgminster, of course, wanted you to marry a fortune, and Momma was equally set on the match, as she is so hard to please, and you are as much her ideal as mine. Heavens! how they coached poor little me. My head nearly burst with the effort even to look intellectual. I had to play the scornful indifferent beauty lest your lordship wander off in search of more difficult game. And all the time I was simply dying to write you a little note and ask you to meet me for a walk in Kensington Gardens and have it out. That last week I had to take to embroidery in order to keep my eyes down. If you could see those stitches! But Momma and Lady Bridgminster said that I must hold off a while longer, that if I dropped into your hand like a ripe plum, you would find some way of getting out of it; your mother says that the only time you really rouse yourself is when you want to get out of something you have let yourself in for, and then you display positive genius. I was frightened half to death. Oh, thank heaven, it is all over!”

She made a graceful leap and flung her arms about his neck. “You don’t mind a bit, do you? It isn’t as if I were a poor girl angling for a rich man; and I should have been as wild about you if your brother had a dozen children. Now you can always tell yourself that you didn’t marry me for my horrid money, but really fell in love. That is much nicer. You are too funny. You might have fallen in love with me in the course of a year or two if left to yourself, but in such a short time—without pilots—oh, never! And now it has turned out so wonderfully for the best.”

“I wonder.” He disengaged himself and walked the length of the room again. He felt a fool in a world of liars.

Mabel tactfully returned to her chair and bided her time. She had a shrewd albeit a small brain, and suddenly guessed that he felt some natural resentment at having been piloted, even for his own happiness. She had wisely yielded to the impulse to confess what he must have discovered in time (she had no belief in her ability to keep any secret for long), and never could man be more complacent than during his honeymoon. What the silliest woman does not know instinctively up to a certain point is not worthy of record, and Mabel felt that she had every reason to be sure of herself. Not only was she beautiful and accomplished, but she had all the arrogance of new-world wealth. Reared in luxury, she would have found it difficult to recall an ungratified wish, save possibly for unlimited sweets, but nevertheless she had a very keen sense of the value and power of money; and as she watched the nervous figure of her husband perambulating the upper end of the room and then glanced slowly about the immense apartment with its thousands of volumes, many of them priceless, the ceiling with its carved and pictured panels and gilded rosettes, its gallery supported on Corinthian pillars, carved in suave and flowing lines, and its stone mantel in three stories cut with the arms of the house, the upper panel set with a faded picture of the Ordham that fell at Towton in 1461, she concluded that no man in his senses would quarrel for long with a ruse that had given him while still in his first youth one of the greatest properties in England. Their income was something over four hundred thousand dollars a year, and Mrs. Cutting’s was at their disposal. To spend such a sum on the Continent was practically impossible. A mere attaché could not outshine his chief in the splendour of his establishment; and as for continental society, Mabel had all that contempt for it peculiar to the ambitious American who knows nothing of the inner circles of the European aristocracies and whose Mecca is London. With what might be called the American dollar instinct she had aimed straight for the top. To an immediate title she was indifferent, for she knew that Bridgminster would not marry. With all the strength of her slender equipment—and youth is always strong—she loved Ordham. She would have spurned strawberry leaves for his sake; but live in England and be a great lady and a “beauty” she would. These were legitimate ambitions, quite compatible with love, and as she had brought so much to her husband, she was entitled to much in return. Indeed, he should be eager to give all the equivalent in his power for the fortune that had been placed at his independent disposal. Mabel would have settled her ultimate penny on him instead of the solitary million upon which both sides, without bringing the young people into the sordid discussion, had agreed; but she was too American not to feel that when a penniless young man, with no earning capacity whatever, marries a wealthy and generous girl, he should give her something besides love in return.

It was true that Ordham, supported by his mother, could give her as definite a place in London society as if his brother were already dead; but Mabel’s position was already brilliant, no girl had ever received more flattering attentions, and she was too young to be affected by her mother’s occasional lament that they did not, even under Lady Bridgminster’s wing, “go everywhere,” that there were peaks inaccessible to the Cutting millions and proud descent until some great permanent connection cleared the way as a matter of course. Nevertheless, that cool little brain, inherited from money-makers and money-conservers, reminded Mabel that her Jackie, in not yet being able to make her Countess of Bridgminster, was not giving value received; therefore should he live in England and permit her to derive every possible advantage from this marriage. Mabel’s character was not built about a deeply embedded steel frame like Ordham’s, but she was thoroughly spoilt, although so well brought up that she had never dared to snub or contradict her mother in the vulgar American style. One private little resource she had, however, which she had often brought to bear when her doting and unsuspecting parent would have spared her the fatigue of pleasures beyond her years: she could not only weep beautifully, but work herself up into a condition bordering upon hysteria; and she had invariably terrified her parent into submission when driven to this extreme, as well as her teachers and governesses,—every one, in fact, whose pleasant duty it was to keep the little feet of the amiable heiress upon the strait and narrow way that leads to perfect success.

Mabel arranged herself gracefully in her chair and spread out her voluminous white skirts as a bed for LaLa, complacently sure of her victory in this engagement with her equally spoilt young husband. In the course of a few moments he walked down the room and stood before her.

“You are so wonderfully clever,” he said, with his charming smile. “It only makes me the more confident that you were born to be the wife of a diplomatist. But I cannot loaf here on your money. You are not the first American I have known, and I have absorbed a few ideas that might not have bothered me a year or two ago. I am now all the more disposed to make a career for myself that I may in a measure balance this great fortune of yours. Bridg is not yet forty. We are a long-lived race. It may be twenty, thirty, years before I can offer you any other equivalence. I hate politics. I have passed my examinations by a miracle. The diplomatic path is almost as miraculously smoothed for me by family influence. We have been for generations what is known as one of the diplomatic families; and just now one of my mother’s cousins is prime minister and another secretary for the colonies. A year hence and they may be in opposition. I saw in this morning’s Times that one of my own cousins has been appointed ambassador to St. Petersburg. He will do anything for my mother. We can go there if you dislike the idea of Rome. My promotion should be very rapid. When you are the wife of an ambassador you will find it vastly more entertaining than giving tiresome house parties in England.”

“But even if your promotion were rapid, we’d be frightfully old before you became ambassador—forty-five you’d be at the very least. Lady Bridgminster—I’ve heard all that discussed—” She had looked at him steadily during his long speech, at first with smiling incredulity, then with growing apprehension. For the first time she took note of the long line of his jaw, of the coldness of which those large ingenuous blue eyes were capable. Her brain worked rapidly. She recalled Lady Bridgminster’s amused comments upon the driving of “Johnny” in any direction by employing the right sort of opposition, that distinguished dame’s tactical use of Rosamond Hayle. But something deep down within her trembled a little—hinting of impotence, so new a sensation that she barely recognized it, although she fully understood that her Jackie had made up his mind. Therefore, postponing the higher tactics, she did what all sensible women mated to obstinate men ever do, she burst into tears.

But Ordham had seen women cry easily before, and was not as moved as a husband of four short weeks should be while his lovely bride wept and sobbed over the arm of her chair. He was ice-cold with anger; Mabel’s betrayal of the secret that his mother also was indifferent to his career was the final indignity; and he reflected cynically that the sooner a man discovered just how much a woman’s tears were worth the better.

But he was always courteous. He was also quite aware that underneath his wrath he was as much in love as ever. He was young and this exquisite creature was his; he appreciated the force of that subtle argument of hers, that if she had lent herself to the plot it had been through love alone. It would be some time before he forgot that she was an accomplished liar, and that he had been made a fool of by three clever women; but there was no particular reason why either he or his wife should be miserable when they still had much to make them happy. But they should be happy in his way, not hers. So he bent down and patted her head, somewhat awkwardly, for he felt anything but affectionate, and said very kindly:

“Don’t cry, Mabel. We will think no more about it.”

“No more about what?” sobbed Mabel. “Do you mean that you will go abroad?”

“Of course.”

“That means that you hate me.”

“How can you say such a thing?”

“You do! You do! If you didn’t, you wouldn’t refuse the first thing I ever asked you.”

“But the first thing happens to affect my whole future.”

“You don’t consider that it affects mine, too!” with sobs of increasing vehemence. “I shall be utterly miserable playing third fiddle to a lot of horrid old official women that think more of themselves than the Queen of England, of never being able to get away from the everlasting cackling of foreign languages, and of always being ill, for I—I—am never well abroad—”

“Oh? I first met you in Munich, and I never saw even an English girl with so beautiful a bloom.”

“But I’m never well unless I’m happy!” articulated the desperate Mabel. “And I hate, hate, hate the Continent. I adore England. I must, must live my dreams. I have dreamed of this for years. A dozen men could have given me castles, but I wanted you, and you ought to give me that much in return.”

“If you love me so much, it seems odd to me that you do not place my future before those old fairy tales of your childhood,” said the logical male to his mate.

“I can’t, oh, I can’t!” She raised her face to his. There was a pause. Ordham stared at her, fascinated, almost forgetting his anger. He had never seen such big tears. One by one the immense crystal drops welled from those dark pools and slipped down her flushed cheeks. He felt that a woman was fortunate indeed to possess such a gift as those beautiful iridescent spheres, which, no doubt, she could command at will—irresistibly his thoughts flew to the soap bubbles of his boyhood—mechanically he began to count them—Mabel suddenly gave a strangled cry of defeat and rage, sprang to her feet, and fled from the room.

For two hours he sat by the fire and smoked, depressed and apprehensive, but determined. Then he went upstairs and knocked at his wife’s door. It was locked, but in a few moments the maid opened it gently and announced that Mrs. Ordham, after crying for the past two hours without pause, had fallen asleep.

On the following morning Hines informed him that mademoiselle—the maid—was quite worried: her mistress had cried all night, and was now in such an hysterical condition that she thought of sending for the doctor. Once more the husband craved admittance and was denied. He went for a ride, the weather being fine again. Upon his return he was told that the doctor was with his wife. In real alarm, he posted himself beside Mabel’s door, and in a few moments the little old man who had ushered him into the world came out.

“No—no—nothing serious, of course not. That is to say—you understand. She became alarmingly wrought up at the prospect of leaving England—you know what fancies—”

Ordham felt as if his very marrow had turned cold. “Not yet—surely not yet—” he stammered.

The doctor nodded. He rubbed his hands, feeling important and a trifle excited. “Indulge her for the present. You have the rest of your life for that career of lies they call diplomacy. Indulge this dear child, or I won’t answer for the consequences—her maid tells me that even when crossed in ordinary circumstances her health is menaced—the poor dear spoilt child of fortune! And so beautiful! I have pledged her my professional word to persuade you to remain in England for a year, at least. And what more natural, more beautiful, indeed, than this wish of hers that your first child should be born at Ordham? Think, too, of foreign doctors! So, go in, dear boy, and promise her to sit tight. Do, and she’ll be as fit as a fiddle to-morrow.”

Ordham, baffled and helpless, turned on his heel. “You can tell her that I will remain in England—of course,” he said. “I will see her in an hour or two. Just now I wish to go for a walk.”