III.
The woman’s orbit—in a civil state—is, like that of other celestial bodies, either annular or elliptic.
Those of the circle are orderly satellites, turning an eternal sameness to the attraction they patrol, and as incapable of suiting themselves to a suitor, or of varying their reflection of his passion to a man’s requirements, as of coyness with its quoted sunlight is the cold face of the moon.
And the moons are many. They rise, wax, wane; are new, old and eclipsed; pass by progressive phases of the familiar to the lean crescent of contempt, with a constancy in decrepitude—speaking amorously—which cannot only be followed, but—foretold.
And those of the ellipse? They, too, revolve, but come, enkindled, from the unknown night, torn with fantastic splendors toward their sun—drawn into him, it may be, by his spell, or past him with unsolved desires, yet bent to him still—dying out, darkened, into the empty way, spent, speedless, splendorless; a danger to orderly patrollers of an orbit, and a possible acquisition for any new system of superior attractions; being, at their ebb, but weak and idle wanderers—inconstant, easily attached; though at other times superb, imperious; yet malign portents to the thatched propriety that lives in fear of sparks.
Such divide the sex, the passive and the passionate; the reflectors and the inflamed. Men love the second, but they wed the first—moon, not comet, and they do well. For men prefer comfort to coronation, and like the easy sense of lordship which a satellite confers; for there is something soothing to mortal vanity in centripetal rigors when oneself is the center sought; and, though men disparage the sameness which they wive, they would be but ill content with its reverse.
Veynes knew as much; or, rather, knew that as much was known. He had, morever, warning in the fate of a too recent ancestor, who, allying himself to one of the comet kind—the frame of her picture still hung empty, in evicted memorial, at the court—came to unrecounted grief. So, fearing his desires, and the failure of his desires, and the outcome of either, he told himself, shaking his head with that unvalorous and how-to-perform-I-wot-not wisdom of youth, that his refined perceptions had been estranged by Miss Rosamond’s too candid lack of quality. Which may have been; for our refined perceptions are so often only an injected opiate, in spite of which our heart still beats and sickens. Yet he shook his head sadly. He had his father to consider; he had the estate to consider; he had his name to consider; but, firstly and finally, he had himself. And, alas! it takes more than honor, piety and pride together to make a man forget that. And a young man in especial. For we are very practical when young, and only fight the good fight for a substantial share in the plunder; we ask what a man will get in exchange for his soul.
Veynes fought it, there is that to his credit; and it is pleasant to remember that, of all his obligations, duty to his father died the hardest; sheer tenderness for the old man’s hopes often wringing from him a resolve to conquer passion and wed a pedigree. But the resolutions of the young are, happily, impermanent; and this kind beyond the rest, being written in acid, eats its way out—through the stuff of our wills.
So it was that, in spite of this clamoring chorus of expediencies, the small voice which claims in every man the justice of joy made itself heeded, and Miss Merlin received an offer of marriage; which, stung by South’s indifference, she allowed herself to accept.
After that, of course, the deluge!—and, thinking to float it out the better on a certificate of marriage, Veynes took Miss Rosamond to the registrar.
Then, with Lady Veynes in her prettiest frock, they went down together to the court, and crossing, with a sense of diplomacy, from the station by a field path into the French garden, which lay behind the western wing of the house, Veynes left his wife and advanced alone.
He was some time gone, and the lady, tired at last of the flowers, the reflector, and the mossy sundial, and tempted by the cropped turf, turned to her ancient consolation for leisures that were too long; so that the first thing which met Veynes’ eye on his return was her lithe figure, in fawn and gold, doing a little melancholy dance between the scarlet flower beds.
The sight did not sweeten his temper; it emphasized too loudly reproaches which hummed still against his ears. Even those red blossoms, which had lived in their mute livery so many years about the court, might have been too surprised to recognize, by the swift, small feet that brushed their petals, a future mistress.
As Veynes drew near, the dance became a little more flamboyant, still further ruffling him; the spaces of dainty petticoat seemed to enlarge his grievance.
“Well?” she inquired, loftily, as he approached, dropping into an attitude.
“Well,” he echoed, gruffly, “you needn’t fool about for the benefit of the gardeners. He won’t see you.”
His tone sided with the rebuff, and brought a flush of color to her face. She had been his wife only a night and a day.
“All right,” she replied, simply. “I will see him; and meanwhile the gardeners are very welcome.”
He flung himself into a seat. “Just as you please,” he grunted; “only he doesn’t know you’re here.”
She took no heed to the hint, but walked in her deliberate fashion to the edge of the lawn; then she turned and came back more slowly.
“What did you tell him?” she asked her husband.
His arms were stretched along the top of the seat, and he was staring gloomily at the house. He did not look up.
“I told him I was married. He nearly bucked out of his chair, and looked as frightened as if he’d heard I was dead. So I said: ‘To an actress,’ and he put his face into his hands and cried.”
“What a soft!”
“Oh, anything you please! He said some other things that were a bit harder.”
“About me?”
“About the whole sickening concern. Said I might go to the deuce my own way, but it shouldn’t be through the Court; and that while he lived—which wouldn’t be for long—the old place should know only its own sort of people.”
“What sort is that?”
“People of birth and breeding, I suppose.”
“I see! Like Lord Egglesham, for instance, who shared the honeymoon with his fond parents; or Aubrey Beauthair, who gets fuzzy before ladies. Well, I’m going to show your father what a person is like who has been neither born nor bred; I dare say it will interest him. Shall I say that you’ll dine here?”
“Say what you like,” he growled.
She turned again toward the long west wing of the great house, which glowed above the box hedges, warm and red with sunlight above its clinging roses.
Her heart was not so brave as her words, but it carried her past the powdered footman with the air of a duchess, as she gave her name, though she read doubts in his curdling face as to her reception, and shared them herself. But therein she wronged a man too proud to let any woman suffer a slight in his own house; and in due time the heavily curtained library door was opened, and the earl entered and bowed.
“I am Lady Veynes,” said his visitor, quietly. She felt a sudden kindness and pity for the frail, bent old man, who was still as white as his son had reported.
He bowed again.
“I was waiting in the garden when my hus—your son was in here,” she went on, simply; “he came out and told me all about it. I’m very sorry. I mean I’m very sorry it is so bad for you. Your son said you’d wish him better dead. I hope you won’t. He’s an awfully good son; he thinks no end of you; and he’s outside now tremendously cut up.”
Lord Egham made no sign, but he was looking in the woman’s face.
“I’ve never thought about it,” she continued, naïvely, “but I didn’t suppose there was such a difference between people as—as there seems to be. I thought if a man’s wife was pure and true to him, and loved him, he got all his change—I mean all he stood to; isn’t that it? You don’t think so, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything about you, you see,” she explained, with warming sympathy; “you were only the Earl of Something, and it didn’t seem to matter much what an earl felt; he didn’t seem quite human; it really didn’t seem as if he could feel so very much. But you see you do.”
The earl bent his head gravely, but there was the ghost of a smile about his drawn lips.
“Sir,” she said, with a little gesture which opened her arms and seemed pathetically to expose herself, “I am sorry to be here to trouble you; I didn’t come for that. I suppose you think I was very glad to catch your son, and his title, and money, and things; but I wasn’t. I didn’t want them; I don’t know what you do with them; but I wanted to belong somewhere. I’m all by myself, you see,” with a little isolating wave of her hand, “and that’s dreary enough at times, especially for a woman.”
She waited a moment to allow the earl to fill the gap, but he did not. He was watching her intently.
“I came down here with my husband,” she continued at length, with an air of embroidering the interval; “he didn’t want me to come in to—to bother you, but I felt I must. I don’t want you to fall out with him; you haven’t had him back so long, I know; it seems pretty rough on you every way; but if you can’t take us both on, I’ll go. Of course I can’t go for good, but it’ll seem good enough, I dare say; I can keep out of the way, and you can have him to yourself; and you won’t have to apologize to all your friends for his making a fool of himself.”
There was some gentle irony in her voice, and it wavered as she concluded:
“I’ve been pretty lonely before, but it was never anything like this; and if I’d known how bad you’d take me I’d have stayed so.”
Her nervousness and her desire for simple expression soaked her speech in a kind of sweetened slanginess, from which, usually, she was able to wring out her thoughts into very clean English. Slang was, in fact, the charcoal outline of most of her talk, but it was generally concealed by the color. The latter she supplied on this occasion in person. She was a very pretty woman, and seemed able to look her prettiest at will; the need for beauty painting it freshly on her face. She had the dancer’s trick, too, of seeming to float above her anchored feet, like a butterfly with folded wings.
There were tears in her eyes, which aided the apparent sincerity in her tone, though, indeed, she was sufficiently sorry for the silent man before her to make it a very solid counterfeit of the fact; but the tears were come of disappointment and hurt pride.
However, to a man, the tear in a woman’s eye is always a tear, a salt tear; and in such eyes they looked well enough, and ill enough, to warm a colder heart than was in Lord Veynes’ father; for age is tenderer to beauty than youth, being a wayfarer among flowers which the other wears; besides, it sees at sundown, and lips seem redder and eyelids sadder when they face the sunset.
Lord Egham made a step forward, and offered her a seat. And Rosamond murmured to herself: “I’ve come to stay!”