LVI A DIPLOMATIST OUT OF THE SADDLE

During the following month Ordham’s large circle of acquaintances quite forgot his apparent infatuation for the Styr, so gay and debonair was he, so devoted to their society, so punctilious in his attendance upon his wife during her daily drives—“poor dear!”—so frankly and technically did he discuss the voice and histrionics of the prima donna, still a topic of conversation, so conventionally did he express his regret that he should be scribbling in the chancery of some embassy during her next visit to London. Such youthful aberrations as a young man’s fancy for a fashionable singer are too common to burden the memory with, and it is not even passing strange that to-day London has as completely forgotten his devotion to the great Styr as if he had worn an invisible cap; but, for that matter, they had forgotten it far sooner than he in his raw abraded vanity suspected; for in the composite drama of which Styr, during that richly exciting and varied season, was the chief figure, few minor details stood out.

He was now so correct in his attitude of husband and son-in-law, so entertaining and amusing, that he rang hard and clear like some finely constructed machine full of little silver bells. Mrs. Cutting was charmed, but Mabel was often faint with fear. Her brain might be young and small and ignorant, but it was in a constant steel-blue glare of intuitions these days. She had been the bride of a young man comparatively candid and open despite his diplomatic temperament; she now felt herself the honoured consort of a man of unthinkable age, wearing a vizor of youth which might drop at any moment and reveal unknown horrors, hatreds, diabolical purposes. Ordham played his part well, but he guessed that the face of the man she married was too deeply bitten into her memory for his present mask to deceive her. He did not care. He was doing his best; more could be asked of no man.

Possibly the fascination of the Ordhams of the old civilizations resides in those deep artificial layers which are the result of centuries of selection, rejection, experimentation. But deep in these organic edifications there may be more unbridled human nature than in the newer races; these, more or less conscious of a certain transparency, are, warily or intuitively, making and shaping their characters, always adapting themselves to their shifting conditions. Moreover, the man to whom leisure is but one more toy for his family lives on his practical surfaces. In men of Ordham’s class practical surfaces might almost be said to be nonexistent. When thrown on their own resources and scattered over an inhospitable globe, they wring a living out of it if their natural intelligence chimes with opportunity; but they are so generally failures that it is possible Darwin saw many of them during his voyages, and they, not the lower forms, suggested the immortal phrase, “survival of the fittest.” In the Ordhams, protected either by the law of primogeniture or other kindly energies of fate, those deep and multitudinous layers are not only full of charm, of delight to themselves and society, not only do they give them a sense or security which would betray itself in arrogance were they less well-bred, but, so deeply buried are such qualities as worthlessness, savagery, brutal selfishness, that only exceptional circumstances magnetize them to the surface. And even then it is only some final and terrible impetus that reveals them to their fellows in all their nakedness. No men are so protected by circumstance; in other words, by the world’s—their world’s—conventions.

Ordham, during these four weeks, when, as much from the instinct of noblesse oblige as pity for his young wife, whose very voice set his nerves on edge, whose every effort to please him served to remind that he was tied for life to a woman as transparent as a window-pane, was unable to stifle an unceasing whisper in the back of his brain that this could not last, that mortal endurance was not equal to three months more of this unnatural self-control, of a sullen defiance of desire for the woman who had made him feel as if he were a masculine Galatea and she a female Pygmalion. Had he but conceived one of those passions for her to which men are always liable, he would either have conquered it or have induced her to remain in England until tired of her. But he had given her his heart; he was filled not only with the imperious desires of the predatory male, but his brain, with pitiless logic, portrayed and reiterated every phase of the perfect union. Two powerful correlated personalities had met, and each was the helpless victim of the other.

It was still incomprehensible to him that he could fail to obtain anything he craved, much less what was beginning to seem of more value to him than life. “More than life,” indeed, was but a phrase; in his case, “more than career” represented the alternative. The forecasting of a blighting scandal held him in leash as effectively as his sense of duty to the girl he had married; married, when all was said, with his eyes open, for, whether deceived or not in the woman, he knew that he was yielding his liberty and had not hesitated a moment.

But specious arguments were not wanting half to convince him that both he and Styr were clever enough to blind the world until truth had escaped in such vagrant jets that people would have accepted the situation almost before they knew it existed. Mabel, he was now convinced, would never get a divorce, and the busy world, unless slapped in the face, is very lenient to the bearer of a great name, the dispenser of large hospitalities, and the owner of rare gifts. Nevertheless, Ordham was able to consider the possible reverse of the picture and to be thankful that circumstances kept him for the present in England. He half hoped that by the time he was free his worldly sense would wholly have conquered the primitive force of this newly realized passion, or that the latter would sink under his natural indolence and taste for procrastination. Indeed he had almost concluded that, intolerable as the strain was, he should emerge triumphant, when he met his mother entering the house in Grosvenor Square one afternoon as he was about to leave it. She told him that she had just received a telegram from Bridgminster’s servant stating that his master believed himself about to die and had expressed a wish to see her. All that had been consigned to the deepest pit in Ordham’s mind during the last few days rose instantly and quite calmly to the surface. He did not even hesitate.

“Insist that I go with you,” he said, turning to go upstairs with her. “Insist that you are not able to stand the ordeal alone.”

“But, Johnny—”

“I am going to ring for Hines to pack. Of course you start at once. When I join you in the family circle, I hope you will have impressed them with the fact that you cannot go without me.”

She recalled—perhaps it was his cool steady gaze above the sudden pallor of his face that evoked the memory—that however she may have managed this son of hers, she had never governed him; shrugging her shoulders, she went up to inform Mrs. Cutting and Mabel as volubly as a French woman of her terrible upset over the telegram, and her insistence to Johnny, whom she had providentially met as he was leaving the house, that he should go with her.

He had changed his clothes for a travelling suit and was giving his final directions to the distracted Hines when there was a tap at his door. He opened it himself, and seeing his mother-in-law, stepped out and closed it behind him. Mrs. Cutting’s face was pale and there was fear in her eyes.

“You are not really going!” she exclaimed.

“Has not my mother explained?”

“Your mother can take Stanley with her. It is not possible that you will leave Mabel now—when—almost any minute—”

“Oh, I shall be gone but a few days. Surely—”

“Mabel, poor child, is persuading herself that you ought to go, but she overrates her power of endurance. I know—I know—that after you are gone there will be a reaction—she will break down. I would not answer for the consequences.”

Ordham sighed. He was hardly aware of the woman’s presence, save in so far as she forced him to talk when he would have preferred not to open his mouth for twenty-four hours. “Surely you and the doctor—”

“Of course you know practically nothing about such things.” Mrs. Cutting actually blushed; woman of society as she was, she would be a prude until the end. “But it is dangerous to agitate—”

“Why in heaven’s name should she be agitated because I absent myself for a few days? It has struck me that she grows more sensible every day.”

“Oh, men! I repeat that I am convinced that she will break down as soon as she realizes that she cannot see you constantly,—that you have actually deserted her at a time like this!”

“Deserted! Dear Mrs. Cutting, is not that rather a strong word? I shall not be gone more than a week at most.”

“A week! Oh, how shall I make you understand?”

“Perhaps it is because there is really nothing to make clear. You are agitating yourself for nothing.” There was no nervousness, no abstraction, even, in his manner. He smiled into her eyes and stood quite at his ease, with all that blend of charm and formality that had won her approval the day she met him in Princess Nachmeister’s park. A memory struggled upward in her mind. It was ghostly, evasive; then it took form. She recalled that fleeting moment in which she had responded to the cool ruthless kernel of this young man, so elaborately endowed for public service. Her own ambitions might be dust before the week was out, but he—he would survive more than the knowledge that he had been the death of his young wife. She shook from head to foot in the first real terror and agitation she had ever known.

“You will kill her,” she stammered. “If there should be any complication—”

He ceased to smile and, taking her hand, drew it through his arm and led her to the door of her own room. “You know that no girl could be stronger than Mabel,” he said soothingly, and in so impersonal a manner that Mrs. Cutting felt as if the blood in her veins were freezing. “And there is nothing in the world as natural as this sort of thing. Think of the thousands of women that bring their children into the world, every month in the year, who are in every sort of trouble; from the Brittany women, whose husbands have gone on the grand pêche, and are more likely than not to return no more, to the poor creatures in Whitechapel, beaten and kicked up to the last minute. Women were made to bring children into the world and to survive far worse ordeals than a separation of a few days from their devoted husbands. What on earth could I do if I were here? It seems to me, for that matter, rather nicer that I should not be.”

“Mabel is not inured to suffering like those women,” Mrs. Cutting began, but Ordham opened her door and gently pushed her in. He went on to the drawing-room. Mabel, although perhaps a shade sallower than common, was quite alert and cheerful. He understood her tactics, but if the time was past when she could deceive him in any way, he was not only grateful to her now but moved to admiration; for after all she was very young. No doubt in time she would make a clever woman of sorts. And although he believed his mother-in-law’s fears to be sheer nonsense, he was quite aware that Mabel (like all women, of course!) would fancy herself unhappy during his absence.

“It is too dreadful to think that I must part with you, even for a few days,” she said brightly. “You keep me up so! But of course if Lady Pat feels that you are necessary, I gracefully yield. But do make it as short as possible. You will, won’t you?”

“Of course!” He stooped and kissed her with more warmth than usual. “Lady Pat is quite right. I don’t fancy Bridg will make a pathetic death-bed scene and try her nerves; that is not in his line; but there may be other details—she is quite right. For the matter of that, this may be but a false alarm—in any case we need not be away too long.”

“No, indeed!” Lady Bridgminster rose. “I shall return in less than a week. But go I must, and Johnny owes me a filial duty once in a while. Has your four-wheeler come? Mine was to follow me here.”

“I am quite ready.”

They drove to Paddington station, followed by two four-wheelers with luggage atop and servant within. “What is your game, Johnny?” asked Lady Bridgminster, with lively curiosity. “Why inflict yourself with Bridg if you had to take a holiday? No doubt Mabel, who is a model wife, if she is a fright at present, would have given you a few days at Ordham. You never wanted for excuses.”

“I had no intention until you came in of making any excuse.”

“But why Bridg? I doubt if he will be glad to see you.”

“That is not of the slightest consequence.”

Her curiosity was not relieved until she was in her reserved compartment, and the maid, having arranged her pillows, had gone to her second-class carriage. Then Ordham closed the door and shook hands through the window with his mother.

“Good-by for the present,” he said. “I have just time to catch my train at Victoria.”

“John Ordham!”

“If you write to Mabel or her mother, you might comment upon my hatred of letter writing. I am going to the Continent and shall remain away exactly a week. If I think best, I shall write or telegraph Mabel from there, but it hardly matters. I shall have returned before she will have had time to think much about it.”

Lady Bridgminster was given no opportunity to remonstrate, for he walked swiftly to his waiting hansom and drove off. But considering that she was a lady too philosophical to cut wrinkles in her complexion by worrying over the inevitable, she looked almost blanched and thoughtful as she settled herself with a magazine and recalled all she had heard of her son’s friendship this year and last for Margarethe Styr.

“Johnny!” she thought. “Of all men! It must be serious indeed.”