Scarlet and Hyssop: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

"Yes, dear," said the other, "and you must wipe it up. Must you be going? Some people are coming in for Bridge almost immediately. Please dine here, if you can, to-day week. I will ask Mr. Spencer, and I will not ask Jack. That is the day before we all go down to Ascot. I hope you have backed Ardingly's horse for the Eclipse Stakes. Good-bye, dear."

Mildred went out, a limp figure, leaving Lady Ardingly looking like a restored sphinx on the hearth-rug. Then she spoke to herself very gently and slowly.

"I cannot bear cooks," she said, "and other people like them so much; but I think I deserve a great many aces at Bridge."

Jack and Mildred went their respective ways full of thoughts, which up to a certain point were very similar. Prominent, at any rate, in the mind of each was that, though they knew each other very well, they would not mention that they had had an interview with Lady Ardingly. Jack here was in the superior position, since he knew that Mildred had succeeded him in audience, and felt sure that, whether Mildred told him so or not, he would find some impress of what had taken place in the next intimate conversation they had together. With regard to his reflection on his own interview, he saw the admirable justice of the greater part of Lady Ardingly's views; he did not, however, see the fitness of telling Marie anything whatever. This appeared to him a heroic remedy for a contingency too remote to reckon with. He knew her, he told himself, well enough to know that he did not know her at all, and she was quite capable, as far as he was aware, of making what Lady Ardingly had called "a row of monstrous proportions." This, as she had herself said just now, at this juncture in his affairs would be fatal to him. She might even petition for a divorce, in which case, as Lady Ardingly said, "he went." There remained, as she had suggested, the other alternative of giving up Mildred, of terminating the whole affair. He had told Lady Ardingly he could not. At any rate, she was an invaluable friend; no false notions of sentiment or altruism ever found their way into her conversation. She advised from a flintily-logical, hard, worldly standpoint.

At this point his reflections travelled off into ways utterly unknown to her, and till lately unknown to himself; and even now he only groped his path among them in a dim twilight. For he had said "I can't," not from certainty of diagnosis, but from mere incredulity at his own symptoms. His long intrigue with Mildred he had brought himself to believe was necessary to him; he could not clearly picture any other way of life. No less necessary, so he had always thought, was his aloofness from Marie. But lately—dating, in point of fact, from the time of that scene when he had told Marie what he had heard said at the "Deuce of Spades"—he had been conscious of a change in himself as indefinable, but as certain, as the first hint of dawn. Again, a pulse beat in him which had long been dormant—the pulse that had throbbed in his arteries when he was younger by more years than he cared to count, when women had been to him, not the vehicle, but the deity, of passion. He had thrown his earlier convictions in the mud, and in the conduct of his life had trampled them under-foot; and now, at the end, like the trodden seeds of wheat, they were already in ear. Marie's frank and honest contempt for him had begun this process, for it had first jarred and disturbed, then woke to activity some relaxed fibre which had long been overlaid by grosser tissue, but was alive for all that.

Then, feebly at first, the knowledge of the "might-have-been" dawned on him—that drug always bitter, and only sometimes salutary, producing in some contrition and amendment, in others only recklessness. At present it was bitter; but the bitterness was tonic. He could not yet tell whether the "might-have-been" had passed into the "cannot-be." That depended partly on himself, no doubt, but partly on her. And of her, out of long familiarity, he knew nothing. Then, simultaneously with remorse, or, at any rate, with his appreciation of her scorn for him, came in another factor, his reawakened knowledge of her beauty—a low motive, it may be, on which to base faithfulness or recall the unfaithful, but, as long as men are men, a very real one. Yet for years he had sought another woman, dimming the light of complete desire with the damp of physical satiety. This other had ministered to the demands of the flesh, she had also fulfilled that which lay immediately behind, for she had supplied him always with a ready response to his more carnal ambitions: she had flattered his own self-flattery. He had posed, as it were, before a quantity of mirrors, sometimes convex, sometimes concave, which had showed him himself now taller, now shorter, than he was. But she had never shown him himself, still less any ideal of what he might be. Then, still touching the same spot, had come Lady Ardingly's gentle classification of Mildred as a cook, made, not with the air of discovery, but merely as a passing allusion to what both knew. A cook, that was all.

Mildred's reflections were far simpler to follow, and far less disquieting. No doubt she had made a mistake about the scandal she had tried to start about Marie, and it was a comfort to think that Lady Ardingly's remarks about the silliness of it being its own doom were true. Meantime it would be amusing to "run" Jim Spencer for a while, and she felt sure that, even if she could not do it, she could easily convey the impression that she was doing it. On the whole, she would not tell Jack she had seen Lady Ardingly (this was unnecessary, for he knew), and the rest of her meditation was composed of a sense of holding Jack's rein, whatever Lady Ardingly might say, and a superb determination to do her unselfish best for him. She was, as a matter of fact, hopelessly incapable of doing anything unselfish, but a benignant Providence having denied her the possibility of altruism, spared her also the humiliation of the knowledge of its absence.

It so happened that they met the next evening at an omnibus kind of party at Arthur Naseby's, a bachelor host. He was a man of strange and wayward tastes, and you were liable to meet a Sioux Indian in feathers there one week, and a missionary who had crossed Africa and been eaten, so he would explain, by cannibal tribes, the next. In his way he was an admirable host, and, before introducing any one of his guests to another, hissed into his ear a rapid précis of the chief events of the other's life. These were sometimes wildly enigmatical, as when he murmured: "Frightful scandal just five years ago. Her uncle found dead in the Underground—probably blackmail. Cut for years afterwards. Don't allude to first-class carriages. Daughter of old Toby Fairbank—mother a Jewess." But, as a rule, his information was a help to the newly introduced, and he always pronounced their names loudly and distinctly, instead of murmuring inaudibly. To-night the party centred round a gifted French actress, who recited several poems in a most melodious voice and with a childlike air which was quite killing to those who knew what she was talking about. Later on there was Bridge, owing to the repeated demands of Lady Ardingly, and Jack and Mildred having cut out, it was quite natural that they should have a talk together in a somewhat secluded window-seat.

"You are getting on, Jack," said she. "I should not be the least surprised if there was a boom in you, as Andrew would say. Dear Andrew! he always remembers my birthday, while I always strive to forget it. One has so many. But he gave me these pearls. Are they not pretty? Yes, Jack, you are booming. You are in the air!"

"That is always rather a nuisance," remarked Jack. "One can't help wanting to assure people that a close inspection will not repay them."