Glancing at my hostess I re-experienced the conviction that she was a surprising woman. Odd indeed was the contrast she made with her surroundings. The room was of an indescribable daintiness. Overhead arched a pale blue plaster dome upon which painted birds flitted among fleecy clouds or perched upon blossoming branches. The side-walls, except for door and window openings, were covered with coral pink studded regularly with small crystal buttons, the spacing being accentuated by a connecting diaper-design of silver thread.
From the cornice, at the beginning of the dome, hung a deep valance of white lace which was repeated in the long window curtains and innumerable cushions on chairs, chaise-longue and foot-stools. The whole room, in fact, seethed with a sort of suds of lace and chiffonerie like an old-fashioned valentine in the midst of which Lady Sarah sat enthroned in a curious chair contrived to represent a sea-shell.
Her costume, as nearly as I could make it out, was a voluminous silk prowler or slip-cover of silk matching the walls, and like them, edged with lace. An intricate mob-cap covered all but a severe bang of red-brown hair which shrieked at its dainty surroundings as loudly as the green parrot who, raucous and unconfined, swung acrobatically about his perch.
“Shut up, Selim,” commanded the bird’s mistress; then, having noted my looks of appraisal, “Isn’t this place hideous? I hate a room that foams at the mouth. My husband takes it for the season. Poor creature, his taste is ghastly; he was born in Nottingham. This house was built by the government for one of the old king’s mistresses. It gives Wimpole a thrill merely to rent it.”
She sank back languidly into the recesses of her shell, suppressing a yawn and I could see the faint lines running from the corners of her eyes to the lobes of her ears, lines of disillusionment, of hunger denied, of ...
During the interval since our meeting at the Casino I had learned something of her tragic story. Born amid the highest and most refined nobility, the daughter of Sir Rupert Alleyne and Mary, Lady Beaverboard, she had seen her ancestral fortune lost by her father in speculative adventures induced by the old taint of the Alleyne madness. In his fifty-third year Sir Rupert inherited by the laws of succession the estates and titles of the Beaverboard interests, becoming subsequently Duke of Axminster. These honors marked the beginning of the end.
The final crash came with Sir Rupert’s attempt to corner the Italian antique market together with all the important trans-atlantic steamship lines, his idea being to completely control the American demand for ancestral portraits and objets d’art. The stately halls of Alleynecourt were thronged with continental adventurers freighted down with spurious Botticelli, Allegretti and other masters.
When the Duke, raving, was carted away to Old Drury, his daughter sought refuge with her uncle, Egbert Alleyne, whose scientific works on graptolites and stromatoporoids kept him impoverished and ill-at-ease in a tiny cottage in Gloucestershire.
Here Horace Wimpole found her. He was at that time senior partner in the firm of Wimpole & Tripp, laces, of Nottingham, with a peerage in view and an o’er-vaulting snobbery which he saw prospects of gratifying by an alliance with the penurious but well-connected Sarah Alleyne. On her side it was a bitter bargain,—her youth, her rugged beauty, her hopes of romance in exchange for wealth and comfort for herself and her crazed sire. She accepted.
A week after the Westminster Gazette announced the bestowal of a title upon Horace, Lord Wimpole, the ennobled merchant led his aristocratic bride from the church portico. Blithely rang the bells of St. George’s and lustily rose the cheers of the bluff English onlookers whose worship of nobility and all the panoply thereof is the enduring wonder of the world. Wimpole promptly did his duty by his father-in-law and had the ancient zany removed from Old Drury to a private padded-cell in a fashionable asylum. The old man’s last whimsy was that he was Admiral Napier and he was given the run of a small garden where, in full uniform and spy-glass in hand, he made observations and issued authoritative commands.