CHAPTER IX
WHICH FEATURES VARIOUS PERSONS WITH WHOM THE READER IS ALREADY ACQUAINTED
Some are born great, some attain greatness, and some have it thrust upon them to the lively embarrassment of their humble and retiring little souls. To his own notable surprise, General Frayling, on the morning following his wife's Cinderella dance, awoke to find himself the centre of interest in the life of the pretty pavilion situated in the grounds of the Hôtel de la Plage. He owed this unaccustomed ascendency to physical rather than moral or intellectual causes, being possessed of a temperature, the complexion of the proverbial guinea, and violent pains in his loins and his back.
These anxious symptoms developed—one cannot but feel rather unjustly—as the consequence of his own politeness, his amenity of manner, and the patient attentions he paid on the previous evening to one of his wife's guests. He had sat altogether too long for personal comfort in a draughty corner of the hotel garden, with Mrs. Callowgas. Affected by the poetic influences of moon, stars, and sea, affected also conceivably by pagan amorous influences, naughtily emanating from the neighbouring Venus Temple—whose elegant tapering columns adorn the façade of the local Mairie—Mrs. Callowgas became extensively reminiscent of her dear dead Lord Bishop. Protracted anecdotes of visitations and confirmation tours, excerpts from his sermons, speeches and charges, arch revelations of his diurnal and nocturnal conversation and habits—the latter tedious to the point of tears when not slightly immodest—poured from her widowed lips. The good lady overflowed. She frankly babbled. General Frayling listened, outwardly interested and civil, inwardly deploring that he had omitted to put on a waistcoat back-lined with flannel—waxing momentarily more conscious, also, that the iron—of the hard cold slats composing the seat of his garden chair—if not entering into his soul, was actively entering a less august and more material portion of his being through the slack of his thin evening trousers. He endured both tedium and bodily suffering with the fortitude of a saint and martyr; but next morning revealed him victim of a violent chill demanding medical aid.
The native local practitioner was reported mono-lingual, and of small scientific reputation; while our General though fluent in vituperative Hindustani, and fairly articulate in Arabic, could lay no claim to proficiency in the French language. Hence probable deadlock between doctor and patient. Henrietta acted promptly, foreseeing danger of jaundice or worse; and bade Marshall Wace telegraph to Cannes for an English physician. As a nurse she was capable if somewhat unsympathetic—illness and death being foreign to her personal programme. She attended upon her small sick warrior assiduously; thereby earning the admiration of the outsiders, and abject apologies for "being such a confounded nuisance to you, my love," from himself. Her maid, a Eurasian—by name Serafina Lousada, whom she had brought with her from Bombay a couple of years earlier, prematurely-wrinkled of skin and shrunken of figure, yet whose lustrous black eyes still held the embers of licentious fires—would readily have shared her labours. But Henrietta was at some trouble to eliminate Serafina from the sick-chamber, holding her tendencies suspect as insidiously and quite superfluously sentimental, where any male creature might be concerned.
Carteret and Sir Charles Verity, on the other hand, she encouraged with the sweetest dignity imaginable, to take turns at the bedside—and to look in upon her drawing-room, also, on their way back and forth thither. A common object and that a philanthropic one, gives unimpeachable occasions of intimacy. These Henrietta did not neglect, though touching them with a disarming pensiveness of demeanour. The invalid was, "the thing "—the thought of him wholly paramount with her. Her anxiety might be lightened, perhaps, but by no means deleted, by the attentions of these friends of former years.—A pretty enough play throughout, as the two gentlemen silently noted, the one with kindly, the other with sardonic, humour.
Her henchman, Marshall Wace, meanwhile, Henrietta kept on the run until the triangular patch of colour, straining either prominent cheek-bone, was more than ever accentuated. There was method, we may however take it, in the direction of these apparently mad runnings, since they so incessantly landed the runner in the salon of the Grand Hotel crowning the wooded headland. Damaris she refused to have with her. No—she couldn't consent to any clouding of the darling child's bright spirit by her private worries. Trouble, heaven knows, is bound to overtake each one of us more than soon enough! She—Henrietta—could endure her allotted portion of universal tribulation best in the absence of youthful witnesses.
But let Marshall carry Damaris news daily—twice daily, if needs be. Let him read with her, sing to her; so that she, charming child, should miss her poor Henrietta, and their happy meetings at the little pavilion, the less. Especially let him seek the young girl, and strive to entertain her, when Sir Charles and Colonel Carteret were engaged on their good Samaritan visits to General Frayling.
"This break in our cherished intercourse," Henrietta wrote, in one of those many Wace-borne bulletins, "grieves me more than I can express. Permit Marshall to do all in his power to make up for this hospital incarceration of mine. Poor dear fellow, it is such a boon to him. I really crave to procure him any pleasure I can—above all the pleasure of being with you, which he values so very highly. All his best qualities show in this time of trial. He is only too faithful and wears himself to positive fiddle-strings in my service and that of the General. I send him to you, darling child, for a little change and recreation—relaxation from the strain of my husband's illness. Marshall is so sympathetic and feels for others so deeply. His is indeed a rare nature; but one which does not, alas! always quite do itself justice. I attribute this to an unfortunate upbringing rather than to any real fault in himself. So be good to him, Damaris. In being good to him—as I have said all along—you are being good to your fondly loving and, just now, sorely tried Henrietta Frayling."
All which sounded a note designed to find an echo in Damaris' generous heart. Which it did—this the more readily because, still penitent for her recent trifle of wild-oats sowing, our beloved maiden was particularly emulous of good works, the missionary spirit all agog in her. She was out to comfort, to sympathize and to sustain. Hence she doubly welcomed that high-coloured hybrid, Wace—actor, cleric, vocalist in one. Guilelessly she indulged and mothered him, overlooking his egoism, his touchiness and peevishness, his occasional defects of breeding and of taste. She permitted him, moreover, to talk without restraint upon his favourite subject—that of himself. To retail the despairs of an ailing and unhappy childhood; the thwarted aspirations of a romantic and sensitive boyhood; the doubts and disappointments of a young manhood conspicuously rich in promise, had the fates and his fellow creatures but shown themselves more intelligently sensible of his merits and his needs.
For this was the burden of his recurrent lament. Throughout life he had been misunderstood.
"But you, Miss Verity, do understand me," he almost passionately declared, waving white effeminate hands. "Ah! a pure influence such as yours"—
Here, rather to Damaris' thankfulness, words appeared to fail him. He moved to the piano and exhaled his remaining emotion in song.
Affairs had reached the above point about ten days after Henrietta's party and Damaris' midnight walk with Colonel Carteret by the shore of the sounding sea. General Frayling, though mending, was still possessed of a golden complexion and a temperature slightly above the normal, while his dutiful wife, still self-immured, was in close attendance, when an event occurred which occasioned her considerable speculation and perplexity.
It came about thus. At her request Marshall Wace walked up to the station early that morning, to secure the English papers on their arrival by the mail train from Paris. After a quite unnecessarily long interval, in Henrietta's opinion, he returned with an irritable expression and flustered manner. Such, at least, was the impression she received on his joining her in the wide airy corridor outside the General's sick-chamber.
"I thought you were never coming back," she greeted him. "What has detained you?"
"The Paris train was late," he returned. "And—wait an instant, Cousin Henrietta. I want to speak to you. Yes, I am hot and tired, and I am put out—I don't deny it."
"Why?" Henrietta asked him indifferently.
Her own temper was not at its brightest and best. The office of ministering angel had begun most woefully to pall on her. What if this illness betokened a break up of health on the part of General Frayling? Bath chairs, hot bottles, air-cushions, pap-like meals and such kindred unlovelinesses loomed large ahead! That was the worst of marrying an old, or anyhow an oldish, man. You never could tell how soon the natural order of things might be reversed, and you obliged to wait hand and foot on him, instead of his waiting hand and foot on you. Henrietta felt fretful. Her looking-glass presented a depressing reflection of fine lines and sharpened features. If she should wilt under this prolonged obligation of nursing, her years openly advertise their number, and she grow faded, passée, a woman who visibly has outlived her prime? She could have shaken the insufficiently dying General in his bed! Yes, insufficiently dying—for, in heaven's name, let him make up his mind and that speedily—get well and make himself useful, or veritably and finally depart before, for the preservation of her good looks, it was too late.
"I met Sir Charles Verity at the station," Wace went on. "He was coming out of the first class salle d'attente. He stopped and spoke to me, enquired for cousin Fred; but his manner was peculiar, autocratic to a degree. He made me feel in the way, feel that he was annoyed at my being there and wanted to get rid of me."
"Imagination, my dear Marshall. In all probability he wasn't thinking about you one way or the other, but merely about his own affairs, his own—as Carteret reports—remarkably clever book.—But why, I wonder, was he at the station so early?"
Henrietta stood turning the folded newspaper about and idly scanning the head-lines, while the wind, entering by the open casements at the end of the corridor, lifted and fluttered the light blue gauze scarf she wore round her shoulders over her white frilled morning gown.
"He didn't tell me," the large, soft, very hot young man said. "You may call it imagination, Cousin Henrietta; but I can't. I am positive his manner was intentional. He meant to snub me, by intimating of how slight account I am in his estimation. It was exceedingly galling. I do not want to employ a vulgar expression—but he looked down his nose at me as if I was beneath contempt. You know that insolent, arrogant way of his?"
"Oh, la-la!" Henrietta cried. "Don't be so childish!"—Though she did in point of fact know the said way perfectly well and admired it. Once upon a time hadn't Sir Charles, indeed, rather superbly practised it in her—Henrietta's—defence?
She sighed; while her temper took a nasty turn towards her yellow-faced, apologetic little General, waiting patiently for sight of the English newspapers, under the veil of mosquito netting in his little bed. Even in his roaring forties—had his forties ever roared though?—she doubted it—not to save his life could he ever have looked down his nose at an offending fellow-man like that.—Ah! Charles Verity—Charles Verity!—Her heart misgave her that she had been too precipitate in this third marriage. If she had waited?—
"Of course, with my wretchedly short sight, I may have been mistaken," Wace continued, pointedly ignoring her interruption, "but I am almost convinced I recognized Colonel Carteret and Miss Verity—Damaris—through the open door, on the other side of the salle d'attente, in the crowd on the platform about to take their places in the train from Cannes, which had just come in."
Henrietta ceased to scan the head-lines or deplore her matrimonial precipitation.
"Carteret and Damaris alone and together?" she exclaimed with raised eyebrows.
"Yes, and it occurred to me that I there touched upon the explanation, in part at least, of Sir Charles Verity's offensive manner. He had been to see them off and was, for some reason, unwilling that we—you and I, cousin Henrietta—should know of their journey."
Even in private life, at the very head-waters and source of her intrigues and her scheming, Henrietta cleverly maintained an effect of secrecy. She showed herself an adept in the fine art of outflanking incautious intruders. Never did she wholly reveal herself or her purposes; but reserved for her own use convenient run-holes, down which she could escape from even the most intimate of her co-adjutors and employees. If masterly in advance, she showed even more masterly in retreat; and that too often at the expense of her fellow intriguers. Without scruple she deserted them, when personal safety or personal reputation suggested the wisdom of so doing. Though herself perplexed and suspicious, she now rounded on Wace, taking a high tone with him.
"But why, my dear Marshall, why?" she enquired, "should Sir Charles object to our—as you put it—knowing? That seems to me an entirely gratuitous assumption on your part. In all probability Mary Ellice and the boys were on the platform too, only you didn't happen to catch sight of them. And, in any case, our friends at the Grand Hotel are not accountable to us for their comings and goings. They are free agents, and it does really strike me as just a little gossipy to keep such a very sharp eye upon their movements.—Don't be furious with me"—
Henrietta permitted herself to reach up and pat the young man on the shoulder, playfully, restrainingly. An extraordinarily familiar proceeding on her part, marking the strength of her determination to avoid any approach to a quarrel, since she openly denounced and detested all those demonstrations, as between friends and relations, which come under the generic title of "pawing."
"No, pray don't be furious with me," she repeated. "I quite appreciate how sensitive you naturally must be upon the subject of Damaris."
"You have given me encouragement, cousin Henrietta"—this resentfully.
"And why not? Don't be disingenuous, my dear Marshall. I have given you something much more solid than mere encouragement, namely active help, opportunity. In the right direction, to the right person, I have repeatedly praised you. But the prize, in this case, is to him who has address and perseverance to win it. You possess signal advantages through your artistic tastes, your music, your reciting. But I have never disguised from you—now honestly, have I?—there were obstacles and even prejudices to be overcome."
"Sir Charles despises me."
"But his daughter gives ample proof that she does not. And—you don't propose to marry Sir Charles, do you?"
Henrietta laughed a trifle shrilly. The tone of that laugh pierced her hearer's armour of egoism. He stared at her in interrogative surprise—observing which she hastened to retreat down a run-hole.
"Ah!" she cried, "it is really a little too bad to tease you, Marshall. But one can't but be tempted to do so at moments. You take everything so terribly au grand sérieux, my young friend."
"You mean to convey that I am ponderous?"
"Well—perhaps—just a shade," she archly agreed. "And of ponderosity you must make an effort to cure yourself.—Mind, though a fault, I consider it one on the right side—in the connection, that is, which we have just now been discussing. When a girl has as much intelligence as—we needn't name names, need we?—she resents perpetual chaff and piffle. They bore her—seem to her a flagrant waste of time. Her mind tends to scorn delights and live laborious days—a tendency which rectifies itself later as a rule. All the same in avoiding frivolity, one must not rush to the other extreme and be heavy in hand. A happy mien in this as in all things, my dear Marshall."
"I cannot so far degrade myself as to be an opportunist," he returned sententiously.
"Yet the opportunist arrives; and to arrive is the main thing, after all—at least I imagine so.—Now I really cannot stay here any longer giving you priceless advice; but must take the General his newspapers.—By the way, did Sir Charles say anything about coming to see him this afternoon?"
As she asked the question Henrietta ran her eye down over the announcements in the Court Circular. Marshall replied in the negative. She made no comment, hardly appearing to notice his answer. But, as she stepped lightly and delicately away down the airy corridor to the door of the sick-room, over her blue gauze draped shoulder she flung back at him—
"This confinement to the house is getting quite on my nerves. I must really allow myself a little holiday.—Take a drive to-morrow if Frederic is no worse. I will call at the Grand Hotel, I think, and see darling Damaris, just for a few minutes, myself."
Information which went far to restore her hearer's equanimity. His affairs, as he recognized, were in actively astute safe-keeping.
Marshall Wace spent the rest of the morning in the drawing-room of the villa, at the piano, composing a by no means despicable setting of Shelley's two marvellous stanzas, which commence:
"Rarely, rarely comest thou,
Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?"
The rich baritone voice, vibrant with apparent passion, swept out through the open windows, across the glittering garden. Miss Maud Callowgas, walking along that portion of the esplanade immediately in front of the hotel, paused in the grilling sunshine to listen. Heaven upon earth seemed to open before her pale, white-lashed eyes. If she could only ascertain what fortune she might eventually count on possessing—but Mama was so dreadfully close about everything to do with money! The Harchester bishopric was a fat one, worth from ten to fifteen thousand a year. That she knew from the odious, impudent questions asked about it by some horrible nonconformist member, in the House of Commons, just after her father's death. Surely Mama must have saved a considerable amount out of so princely an income? She had always kept down expenses at the Palace. The servants left so often because they declared they had not enough to eat.
Then through the open window of the villa embowered in roses, there amid the palms and pines—and in a falling cadence too:
"How shall ever one like me
Win thee back again?"
But Maud Callowgas needed no winning, being very effectually won already, so it was superfluous thus movingly to ask the question. The mid-day sun striking through her black-and-white parasol made her feel dizzy and faint.—If only she could learn the amount of her fortune, she could let Mrs. Frayling learn the amount of it too—just casually, in the course of conversation, and then—Everyone said Mrs. Frayling was doing her best to "place" her cousin-by-marriage, to secure him a well-endowed wife.