CHAPTER XV

There had been a moment in Sprats’s life when she had faced things—it was when she heard that Lucian and Haidee had made a runaway marriage. This escapade had been effected very suddenly; no one had known that these two young people were contemplating so remarkable a step. It was supposed that Miss Brinklow was fully alive to the blessings and advantages attendant upon a marriage with Mr. Eustace Darlington, who, as head of a private banking firm which carried out financial operations of vast magnitude, was a prize of much consequence in the matrimonial market: no one ever imagined that she would throw away such a chance for mere sentiment. But Haidee, shallow as she was, had a certain vein of romance in her composition; and when Lucian, in all the first flush of manhood and the joyous confidence of youth, burst upon her, she fell in love with him in a fashion calculated to last for at least a fortnight. He, too, fell madly in love with the girl’s physical charms: as to her mental qualities, he never gave them a thought. She was Aphrodite, warm, rosy-tinted, and enticing; he neither ate, slept, nor drank until she was in his arms. He was a masterful lover; his passion swept Haidee out of herself, and before either knew what was really happening, they were married. They lived on each other’s hearts for at least a week, but their appetites were normal again within the month, and there being no lack of money and each having a keen perception of the joie de vivre, they settled down very comfortably.

Sprats had never heard of Haidee from the time of the latter’s visit to Simonstower until she received the news of her marriage to Lucian. The tidings came to her with a curious heaviness. She had never disguised from herself the fact that she herself loved Lucian: now that{137} she knew he was married to another woman she set herself the task of distinguishing between the love that she might have given him and the love which she could give him. Upon one thing she decided at once: since Lucian had elected Haidee as his life’s partner, Haidee must be Sprats’s friend too, even if the friendship were all on one side. She would love Haidee—for Lucian’s sake, primarily: for her own if possible. But when events brought the three together in London, Sprats was somewhat puzzled. Lucian as a husband was the must curious and whimsical of men. He appeared to be absolutely incapable of jealousy, and would watch his wife flirting under his eyes with appreciative amusement. He himself made love to every girl who aroused any interest or curiosity in him—to women who bored him he was cold as ice, and indifferent to the verge of rudeness. He let Haidee do exactly as she pleased; with his own liberty in anything, and under any circumstances, he never permitted interference. Sprats was never able to decide upon his precise feelings for his wife or his attitude towards her—they got on very smoothly, but each went his or her own way. And after a time Haidee’s way appeared to run in parallel lines with the way of her jilted lover, Eustace Darlington.

Mr. Darlington had taken his pill with equanimity, and had not even made a wry face over it. He had gone so far as to send the bride a wedding present, and had let people see that he was kindly disposed to her. When the runaways came back to town and Lucian began the meteor-like career which brought his name so prominently before the world, Darlington saw no reason why he should keep aloof. He soon made Lucian’s acquaintance, became his friend, and visited the house at regular intervals. Some people, who knew the financier rather well, marvelled at the kindness which he showed to these young people—he entertained them on his yacht and at his place in Scotland, and Mrs. Damerel was seen constantly, sometimes attended by{138} Lucian and sometimes not, in his box at the opera. At the end of two years Darlington was regarded as Haidee’s particular cavalier, and one half their world said unkind things which, naturally, never reached Lucian’s ears. He was too fond of smoothness in life to say No to anything, and so long as he himself could tread the primrose path unchecked and untroubled, he did not care to interfere in anybody’s arrangements—not even in Haidee’s. It seemed to him quite an ordinary thing, an everyday occurrence, that he and she and Darlington should be close friends, and he went in and out of Darlington’s house just as Darlington went in and out of his.

Lucian, all unconsciously, had developed into an egoist. He watched himself playing his part in life with as much interest as the lover of dramatic art will show in studying the performance of a great actor. He seemed to his own thinking a bright and sunny figure, and he arranged everything on his own stage so that it formed a background against which that figure moved or stood with striking force. He was young; he was a success; people loved to have him in their houses; his photograph sold by the thousands in the shop windows; a stroll along Bond Street or Piccadilly was in the nature of a triumphal procession; hostesses almost went down on their knees to get him to their various functions; he might have dined out every night, if he had liked. He very often did like—popularity and admiration and flattery and homage were as incense to his nostrils, and he accepted every gift poured at his shrine as if nothing could be too good for him. And yet no one could call him conceited, or vain, or unduly exalted: he was transparently simple, ingenuous, and childlike; he took everything as a handsome child takes the gifts showered upon him by admiring seniors. He had a rare gift of making himself attractive to everybody—he would be frivolous and gay with the young, old-fashioned and grave with the elderly. He was a butterfly and a man of fashion; there was no better dressed man in town,{139} nor a handsomer; but he was also a scholar and a student, and in whatever idle fashion he spent most of his time, there were so many hours in each day which he devoted to hard, systematic reading and to his own work. It was the only matter in which he was practical; in all other moods he was a gaily painted, light-winged thing that danced and fluttered in the sunbeams. He was careless, thoughtless, light-hearted, sanguine, and he never stopped to think of consequences or results. But through everything that critical part of him kept an interested and often amused eye on the other parts.

Sprats at this stage watched him carefully. She had soon discovered that he and Haidee were mere children in many things, and wholly incapable of management or forethought. It had been their ill-fortune to have all they wanted all their lives, and they lived as if heaven had made a contract with them to furnish their table with manna and their wardrobes with fine linen, and keep no account of the supply. She was of a practical mind, and had old-fashioned country notions about saving up in view of contingencies, and she expounded them at certain seasons with force and vigour to both Lucian and Haidee. But as Lucian cherished an ineradicable belief in his own star, and had never been obliged to earn his dinner before he could eat it, there was no impression to be made upon him; and Haidee, having always lived in the softest corner of luxury’s lap, could conceive of no other state of being, and was mercifully spared the power of imagining one.