VII
Like many people who believe in an over-ruling Providence, Miss Lestrange never left anything to it. On the contrary, when her plans succeeded, she remarked triumphantly that it was the will of heaven; and when they failed, she said nothing about it, and tried again. It is usually supposed that plans which play the part of Providence fail very easily, but this is not really so; it is only the result of the plan that fails--carefully combined arrangements made with due knowledge of the forces of life seldom fail. What fails is what we expected to win from such combinations. You plant, water, and gain your increase, and what you thought were the golden apples of the Hesperides taste like dust.
This is what happened to Miss Lestrange. She gave a whole-hearted devotion to Leslie; she kept him away from what she honestly believed to be adverse influences; she cared for the delicate little boy until he became as strong as the average youth; she made her home his home; people always referred to him as “your dear boy.”
This was the palace of her dreams, but the monarch had abdicated, and the palace without its King is a Court in mourning.
Leslie was vaguely dissatisfied; he had worshiped his Aunt Etta with an ignorant devotion all his life; he had given her the love of a child and the warm-hearted loyalty of a boy. Now he was grown up. He was nineteen, and he would probably never be quite as old again--in any case, he would never feel such unbroken confidence in his own judgment--and what did his aunt appear? A small, faded, old-fashioned woman, who said “No” to his wishes.
There is a time in every boy’s life when he looks very narrowly at his own parents; very often they are the barriers at the gates of his imaginary Paradise, and he regards them as barriers; but if there is solid stuff in the youth, the tie is strong enough to hold. His parents are, of course, wrong, their opinions are worthless, their ideas are effete and purely mirth-inspiring. But they are his parents. They are people who love him with a strange love; they are ignorant people, but he forgives them, and one day discovers that he himself belongs to this inferior branch of humanity, and is giving his life up for his sons, who regard him in his turn with affectionate depreciation.
Leslie loved his father with a deep natural love, which time turned into an irritated need. He had come to the conclusion that women were all very well, but that feminine relations were a jealous bore, and that--you must see life.
So he saw life. Saw it immaturely and unwisely--or rather he may have been said not to see it, but with the rush of youth’s music in his ears he ran blindfold, and Life mocked him to her heart’s content, and gave him pebbles for diamonds and dross for gold, till she blunted alike his discrimination and his growth.
Miss Lestrange stood by watching him with incompetent agony. She had seen these things happen before to other people’s boys, and she had always known why. The mothers were silly, the boys were unlicked cubs--they had been spoilt from the first. Now she was not quite so sure. Perhaps such things happened just out of misfortune, unhappiness, blunders that must come, accidents of the type which are said to haunt families who live according to the best regulations.
Lines came into Miss Lestrange’s placid face, she lost sleep, appetite, and repose. She woke with vague terrors, she was haunted by impotent fears. There was nothing to be done, and she hadn’t the strength to do nothing. Finally, the whole story focused on one notorious lady of musical comedy. The youth of London gave her desperate homage and adoration; she was old enough to be their mother; but they did not keep these gifts for their mothers, they gave them to Anastasia Falaise, and she accepted them with easy laughter.
Miss Lestrange wrote to her brother, and her brother replied heartlessly that it was “all right.”
Leslie went on worshipping at this popular shrine; he was continually absent from Mallows; if he was present he was silent when he wasn’t irritable. He never mentioned the lady’s name, but he wrote to her every day; she wrote to him sometimes, and vague ideas, resisted by common sense, prompted Miss Lestrange to tamper with their correspondence. This correspondence flourished even more conspicuously after the ineffective efforts of Leslie’s father. It was evident to Miss Lestrange that there was no help to be met in that quarter, so she attacked the citadel itself. With nervous incoherence she implored Leslie to come abroad, to give up this absurd infatuation. Leslie raised youth’s deadly standard of silence. He blocked her utterance with a gloomy stare.
Finally, he observed that he did not know what she meant, and left the room. Young men and even old ones are to be congratulated on this gift of absence; it is a very effective weapon. Leslie did not return for some time; when he did, Miss Lestrange said nothing further on the subject, for she had stayed in the room.
Finally, goaded to desperation, she committed an unprecedented error. She may, indeed, have been described as completely losing her head. She went to call one day by appointment on Anastasia Falaise.
Anastasia was staying in a famous London hotel. She had a charming sitting-room; it was littered with presentations, and she sat shaded by pink blinds with easy indolence in a large armchair.
Miss Lestrange’s first impression may be given as it flashed into her mind, “No woman of that type has any right to be so beautiful.” Anastasia showed neither youth nor years in her face; she might as easily have been thirty as fifty; she had no lines about her eyes and mouth or marring her low Greek forehead. Her wide-set dark eyes looked like some perennial mysterious spring of life. Her face and neck and hands were the color of warm ivory; her black hair was natural, but as nobody believed it, she would sometimes--to confirm it--let coil after coil fall to her knees. She had beauty as some men have genius, and she used it with more shrewdness and common sense than this other gift is often used. She had no particular wish to please Miss Lestrange, so she simply stared at her.
Miss Lestrange was vaguely uncomfortable; she felt that she was with an extraordinary person, and that she had lowered herself to the same level by doing an extraordinary thing. This was the kind of woman she knew how to snub; she did not know how to appeal to her.
“I think you know my nephew, Leslie Lestrange,” she began, blushing a little at her companion’s insolent, inanimate beauty.
“There are half-a-dozen photographs of him, and the contents of several jewelers’ shops, I should fancy, just behind you,” observed Anastasia. “Have you come to retrieve them? I told him that unless his people were whole-sale jewelers he had better try a less expensive amusement.”
“His family is one of the oldest in England,” said Miss Lestrange impressively.
“Well, he’s young enough,” observed the imperturbable beauty. She had a slight American intonation which Miss Lestrange found strangely aggravating; it annoyed her almost beyond the power of speech.
“I have always taken the greatest interest in my nephew’s concerns,” she continued. “I have brought him up from his babyhood. I stand to him in the place of his parents.”
“And yet I had a very sensible letter from his father the other day,” interrupted Anastasia, and she laughed a low velvety laugh of pure pleasure (which Miss Lestrange promptly mistook for vulgar impertinence). “I think it is the most sensible letter I ever had, and I answered it. I guess he hasn’t sent you here, has he?”
“My brother married regrettably a second time,” said Miss Lestrange coldly, “a woman of no family connections, singularly unsuited to bring up a delicate and sensitive child; even her husband has never pressed the point.”
“You don’t say,” observed Anastasia, narrowly regarding her exquisite fingers. “Poor disconnected lady, I feel quite sorry for her!”
“On the contrary,” replied Miss Lestrange, “she has, I think, been very fortunate; a marriage of that kind for a girl in Edith Walton’s position, and at her age--she was thirty at the time--does not happen every day over here.”
Anastasia suddenly woke up for the first time; she opened her great eyes wide and looked at Miss Lestrange. It was a look so vital, so amazingly keen, staring out of the soft, mysterious, velvety dullness, that Miss Lestrange jumped.
Then Anastasia sank back into her usual attitude of inspired indolence.
“What did you say her name was?” she asked languidly. “Haddlestone? I knew some people called that once--way out West.”
“No, Walton,” repeated Miss Lestrange distinctly; “but it really hardly matters what her name is, I think, to the subject under discussion.”
“Were you discussing anything?” Anastasia asked calmly. “I wasn’t. I am merely wasting my time. However, I won’t waste any more of it. What do you want?” and her voice suddenly turned brisk and business-like.
“I want you,” said Miss Lestrange with a sudden quiver of pathetic middle-aged passion, “to let my boy go. You are a beautiful woman; what does one boy more or less matter to you--a practically penniless boy, too? Send him about his business, like a--like a kind-hearted woman.”
“How do you know I am a kind-hearted woman?” Anastasia asked curiously.
“Because,” said Miss Lestrange, rising to her feet, “you have all the advantages on your side; you can easily afford to be.”
“Well, I do call that cute!” drawled Anastasia. “That’s the best thing you’ve said yet, only it’s not true. However, we needn’t go into that. Now, Miss Lestrange, you’ve made a great mistake; if you had left the matter in your brother’s hands you’d never have heard of it again--that is to say, you wouldn’t seriously have heard of it. But, somehow or other, you’ve put an idea into my head; well, that was a mistake. I have very few ideas, and I always act upon them. I’m going to act right now; but I don’t want an audience--so, good-by!”
Anastasia rose too. She was head and shoulders above her companion, and Miss Lestrange drew a long breath at the sight of her majestic swaying figure. This was a woman to wreck kingdoms, and why should she bother her head about a boy--a boy like Leslie, whose connections she didn’t even know, whose disabilities she must, of course, see? It was all very odd. The two women looked at each other for a moment.
“I can’t understand you,” said Miss Lestrange at last, a little helplessly, “and I don’t see that I can offer you anything you want in exchange for what I ask.”
“You can’t,” said Anastasia; “nobody can offer me what I want except chocolates. Fortunately, I’m still very fond of chocolates. Well, good-by, Miss Lestrange; I’m sorry I can’t oblige you, but I’ve got to be amused, and I am going to amuse myself with your nephew.”
“Oh, amuse yourself as much as you like,” murmured Miss Lestrange, holding out her hand in farewell, “but don’t marry him!”
“I guess you’re going to be disappointed,” observed Anastasia, as her companion, reaching the door, turned to look back at her. “I guess you’re going to feel disconnected, too!”
Miss Lestrange didn’t know what her hostess meant, but she had said all she had to say and done all she could do. There was nothing more to act upon, and she knew that she had failed.
Suddenly Miss Lestrange felt old and helpless; something that had always accompanied her--a sense of the inherent dignity and interest of her position--which made her observe the world blandly, as one who has a right to a front seat on a grand-stand--left her. She felt as if she was, after all, only one of the crowd, liable to be pushed and jogged by elbows, even liable to be thrust permanently aside. She stood quite still in the finely upholstered lounge of the big hotel, and a waiter came up and asked her if he could bring her anything.
“Yes,” said Miss Lestrange, sitting down at one of the many little tables scattered about. “You may bring me a cup of tea. Perhaps,” she said to herself, “that was what I wanted. I have missed my tea.”