CHAPTER X—LADY PHAYRE THROWS HER CAP OVER THE WINDMILLS.
It had been a quick rough grasp, bringing to Lady Phayre a new conception of handshakes. It had not been violent like that of certain per-fervid ones among her friends, forcing the rings into her delicate flesh; but her hand tingled, and the tingling mounted her arm and died away in a flutter in her bosom. Involuntarily she held up the hand in front of her, saw that it trembled a little, and then laid it against her cheek. A swift consciousness of the act brought a flush to her face. But instead of drawing away her hand, she moved it slightly so that her lips touched the palm, and there it stayed while she gave herself up to a day-dream. And the smile rose into her eyes which no one has ever seen in a woman’s, except when she has been taken unawares; which only comes when she is alone, and is looking half tremulously, half amusedly into her heart.
Gradually, however, the smile grew dim with a gathering moisture. She was not a woman to whom tears came readily. She was surprised and glad. They were a delicate test of the sincerity of her emotion. A drop hung on the lower lid for a moment and fell upon the back of her fingers, losing itself among the rings. Her heart melted over Goddard. Failure for him was different from failure for other men. The wherefore of this conclusion she did not argue out, content with the assurance of its truth in her own mind. The great battle, into whose side-issues she herself had been drawn, was lost. She was sorry. But she had spoken truly when she had said she was sorrier for him. The fallen cause was merged in the defeated man. Her thoughts drifted towards plans of consolation.
It was very still, silence only broken by the whirr of the little leaping flame jets in the fire. The white cat rose from the hearthrug, stretched himself, stole noiselessly over the pile carpet to the centre of the room, and then, after a dubious wag of the tail, returned to slumber. Lady Phayre did not change her attitude. Her occupation engrossed her. She was compounding balm for Goddard—a new and wondrous panacea, whose secret she had just discovered—an extract of many feminine simples as old as the leaves on the Tree of Knowledge.
The sudden opening of the door caused her to start with a foolish hope that it might be Goddard returning. But the neat maid-servant, in her subdued voice, announced Mr. Gleam.
He came forward eagerly, his dry equable face glowing with excitement.
“Have you seen Goddard?”
He was too preoccupied with his business even to linger his usual moment over her finger-tips.
“He has been here. Why do you want him?” The question was in a breath with the reply. Something had happened. She caught Gleam’s excitement, half rose in her chair, and looked up at him anxiously.
“To tell him some news. Great news. Glorious news. I am the only one who has got it. The enemy have been weakening all the time—a rift within their lute. Rosenthal has backed out. Cleaver & Flyte are in a panic—Rosenthal was behind them, you know. The others can’t stand alone. It’s utter rout!”
“But it’s too late!” exclaimed Lady Phayre, with a ring of dismay in her voice. “Haven’t you heard?”
“It isn’t. Not yet,” replied Gleam animatedly. “The managers won’t declare till to-morrow morning—unless they are fools. But I have more precise news still. You did not let me finish,” he laughed apologetically. “They will give in all along the line if the men hold out another four-and-twenty hours.”
“They must hold out,” cried Lady Phayre. “Oh, why isn’t Goddard there?”
“Better he should be here—if I could only get at him. Wiring couldn’t have been definite enough. It’s not safe. Let me track him down, and off he goes by the midnight train, or the newspaper train, and then——”
“He will win,” cried Lady Phayre exultantly.
“Of course. Come, see, conquer. As easy as lying. That is why I have killed three cab horses under me to find him. I was in despair. I knew he had left Ecclesby. At his house they assured me he was not in London—did not expect him for a couple of days. No news at the clubs—his offices. Then I came here. Thank Heaven, he is in London, at any rate. If I can’t find him, some one else will have to go down.”
“And Goddard lose his triumph after all? He must be found. Besides, they would not believe any one else.”
“I was thinking of going myself, en dernier ressort,” said Gleam rather quizzically, “just as I am. I think they would believe me.”
“So would the masters. A member of Parliament in dress clothes going about at six o’clock in the morning! Besides, you would catch your death of cold.”
She laughed playfully, but she was trembling all through with suppressed joy. The knuckles of her hand, that held a futile ball of a handkerchief, were white. There was a little pause. She looked on the ground for a moment, then she lifted her long lashes, and regarded him half-shyly, with a smile playing round her lips.
“What would you say if I told you where you can find him?”
“Anything,” cried Gleam. “Where is he?”
“At the Midland Grand Hotel.”
She told the lie with astounding charm. He whipped up his hat from the table and turned towards her.
“Why did I not come to you at once? You are not a woman, but an Immortal. A crisis—a time of difficulty—and you come out of a rosy cloud like an Homeric goddess.”
Lady Phayre smiled on him divinely. She held out her hand.
“I won’t keep you. I am as eager as you are.”
In another minute she heard the wheels of his departing cab in the street below. She broke into a little ringing laugh: he had gone so promptly and unquestioningly on his fool’s errand. A woman in an exalted condition of mind has a queer sense of humour.
A wild fancy had seized her. It had grown into an irrepressible desire. Her woman’s wit had worked swiftly. The lie had mounted to her lips on wings of triumph, and spread radiance over her face. No wonder Gleam was enraptured.
Women who are in the habit of throwing their caps over windmills find it as monotonous as anything else after a time; but for one who has never done it before, the act is accompanied with a rare exhilaration.
Lady Phayre had lived a bright but perfectly exemplary life. No breath of scandal had ever rested upon her name. Sir Ephraim had cloyed her with affection, and hitherto she had regarded amatory offerings with a young confectioner’s serene indifference to puffs. If she dared now and then to flout at convention, she was only exercising the privileges of her position. No one could find a word to say against it. To have driven to a politician’s house at night to deliver a political message was a commonplace of propriety. But to take the message of victory to the man she loved, knowing, with a thrill that quivered from her feet to her hair, that the message would contain also the openly avowed gift of herself—that set matters on a totally different plane. It was wild, daring, unutterably sweet. The breathless moment that followed the lie was the supreme point of happiness in Lady Phayre’s life.
She went to a writing-table, took a sheet of the crested, delicately-scented paper, and wrote a hurried line, which she enclosed in an envelope and thrust in her corsage. Then she rang for her maid, and in a few moments was speeding across London in a hansom cab. The cold air caught her face, filling her with a joyous sense of vitality. She pictured, glowingly, the little scene that would take place. First, his look of wondering delight at her presence, then the illumination on his face when she gave him her breathless message. There would be just time to deliver it, if he was to catch the midnight train. The letter she would slip into the letter-box. It would be found after she had left. If it was forwarded to him the next day, so much the better.
She loved him. It was a new, wild sensation to her. The gradual drifting towards the rapids had been pleasant, though not unaccompanied by certain trepidations and misgivings. This evening had brought her to the edge, and the swirl fascinated her. For once Lady Phayre had lost her head. And yet there was method in her wildness. She felt herself worshipped, longed for, saw the man standing in passionate helplessness on the other side of the social gap between them. It was her prerogative to stretch the bridge across. In the midst of all the excitement, Lady Phayre was deliciously conscious that she was doing it gracefully.
Her mind was blissfully unheedful of the route. Crowded thoroughfares, dreary squares, long, gaunt streets—it was all the same to her. She lay back in a corner of the cab, felt the letter stiff against her bosom, beneath her sealskin jacket, and surrendered herself to her sensations. They were those of an angel of mercy committing a rapturous indiscretion.
At last the cab stopped at the given number of the quiet street where Goddard lived. Bidding the cabman wait, she ran up the steps and rang the bell. For a moment she hesitated with the letter in her hand, fingering it nervously. Then, with a little throb, half-joy, half-fear, she thrust it into the letter-box.
A servant came to the door and stared at the visitor. Lady Phayre’s heart beat so fast that she could scarcely speak.
“Mr. Goddard’s upstairs, ma’am. I’ll fetch him,” said the servant; and she ran up the stairs, leaving Lady Phayre standing in the hall.
She was a slatternly slip of a girl, in a print dress. The thought of men’s incapacity in the domestic economies brought a superior smile to Lady Phayre’s lips. She forgave him, on account of his sex, for being left to wait in a draughty passage. But the dining-room door was ajar, showing a light within. There was no reason against her entering, her hand was upon it, when it was suddenly opened wide, and, in the full light appeared the figure of a woman with sodden features, dull eyes, and loose, untidy hair, dressed in a dirty flannel dressing-gown.
For a second they stood watching one another. Then the woman made a step, and reeled sideways against the wall. She was drunk.
“Who the ———— are you?” she cried in a thick voice.
Lady Phayre was transfixed with horror. She shrank back, just as Goddard rushed down the stairs. He had heard his wife’s speech. It was an awful moment. At the sight of him the woman cowered.
“Stay in that room!” he thundered at her; then he slammed the door, and still gripping the knob, stood with livid features and heavily coming breath, staring into Lady Phayre’s white face.
“You here? What madness brought you?” he said hoarsely.
The sound of his voice addressing her was an awakening shock to Lady Phayre.
“Ah!” she exclaimed, the disgust and revolt of her soul finding its only expression in an inarticulate cry. And then she instinctively fled towards the street door.
But Goddard overtook her in two or three great strides. She shrank into the corner, put up her hand as if he were about to touch her.
“Let me go. Don’t come near me. Don’t speak to me. It is horrible.”
“Yes, it’s horrible,” he replied fiercely. “But it is my curse, and not my fault, that I have a wife like that.”
“Your wife, your wife?” she said in a queer, faint voice. “That—that woman your wife?”
“You did not think it was my mistress?” he exclaimed with bitter coarseness. “To come to her after leaving you!”
She recovered her composure with a strong effort.
“I will trouble you to open that door for me.”
He slid back the latch, held the door open for her to pass out, followed her, and, shutting it behind him, stood with her on the steps. Then, before she had time to descend, he seized her by the wrist.
“What madness made you come to this house? Tell me.”
Her first impulse was to wrench herself free and rush down to the waiting cab, so as to fly from the loathed spot, and be alone with her sickening mortification. But he held her too firmly.
“Tell me,” he said again sternly. “You would not come here without some good reason.”
“Let go my arm. You are hurting me.”
“Forgive me,” he said, in a softer tone, dropping her wrist. “The hell of indoors followed me out here.”
Lady Phayre at that moment hated him intensely. If it had been a mere personal service to him, rather than perform it she would have called to her safe-conduct into the cab the policeman who was pacing the solitary, windswept street. But she reflected on the gravity of the issue. Mastering her repugnance, she told him in a few curt sentences the object of her mission. The longing for escape tingled through every fibre in her body. As soon as the last word of the hated task was spoken, she shuddered, flew down the steps, and rushed into the cab.
At the door of Queen’s Court Mansions, after she had paid her fare, her heart stood still with a sickening recollection. She had left the letter behind in the box. For a moment she thought of driving back to claim it; but that was impossible. She crawled up the stairs and went to bed, her brain reeling with rage, disgust, and humiliation.
Goddard stood bareheaded on the steps till the cab had disappeared in the darkness, and then let himself in with his latch-key. He went into the dining-room. Lizzie, lying half asleep on the couch by the fire, turned her glazed eyes towards him as he entered. Her hair was squalidly loose, her face bloated, her figure shapeless, her dirty dressing-gown half open, her stockings wrinkling around her ankles. The room smelt of spirits; the furniture was awry; the table-cloth was askew, and on it were crumbs of a half-eaten Bath bun, a dirty handkerchief, and a copy of a penny novelette, lying open at a great stain of grease.
A wave of indescribable loathing passed through the man. A savage desire leaped from his heart to snatch the sofa-cushion from under her and stifle her with it as she lay there, but it ended in a great lump in his throat.
“I told you to go to bed,” he said fiercely. “Go at once.”
She rose to her feet and staggered, unable to walk. If she had fallen to the ground, Goddard felt that he could not have touched her. She dropped back on the couch. He rang the bell and the girl appeared.
“Call cook and put your mistress to bed at once. I am going back to Ecclesby to-night. I don’t know how long I shall be away. I shall wire to Mrs. Smith to come here to-morrow.”
The girl went out to fetch the cook. Lizzie looked at him with stupid gravity.
“Think I believe you’re a-going to Ecclesby? You’re going to that Piccadilly Circus woman.”
Goddard sprang forward, caught her by the loose collar of her dressing gown, and shook her till the stuff tore.
“Do you want me to kill you?” he said, between his teeth, glaring at her.
She was frightened, and began to whimper.
Goddard stood for a moment looking at her. Then he passed his hand through his hair in a passionate gesture.
“O God!” he cried, in a low, trembling voice, and then strode out of the room.
He sought mechanically his still unpacked bag, his overcoat and necessaries, and went out into the night. At St. Pancras Station he found Gleam waiting on the platform. He was conscious of the Member asking him for certain explanations concerning the Midland Grand Hotel and Lady Phayre, and of listening to details of the leakage of secrets, Rosenthal’s defection, to congratulations, encouragement, adieux as the train moved off, but it was all a phantasmagoria in which his intellect worked independently of himself. The glorious news he was carrying, the certain victory that was to crown his hopes and ambitions, the thousands of lives whose destiny he was bearing in his hands—all loomed like vague shadows at the back of his consciousness. But his brain was on fire with passionate love for Lady Phayre, and wild hatred of the woman from whom he had just parted. If man ever carried the fires of hell in his heart it was Goddard, that night, as he was on his way to realise the first great ambition of his life.