Ordham laughed and shook hands with the handsome charming woman, who looked so unconventionally eager in spite of her cool eyes. “I have never been so flattered in my life, and it is wonderful of you to be so enchantingly frank. Men must get so sick of transparent angling—I wonder that anything induces the big fish to bite. Please don’t let Miss Cutting know that you like me, or she will be sure to hate me. Of course I shall call at five to-day. And dine with you to-morrow? May I?”
He walked to his club in a very thoughtful mood. Here, no doubt, was the natural solution of his difficulties. But with the prospect of that easy escape came a passionate wave of protest, the protest of masculine youth at paying the price. He had not the faintest idea that he could fall in love with Mabel Cutting; and were her millions an adequate compensation for the loss of his precious liberty? He felt that a man’s youth should last until thirty. Time enough then for shackles: wife—and children! He blushed angrily at the thought. This cursed question of money! If his brother would settle two thousand a year on him, he would not consider matrimony with the most beautiful girl that walked.
And deep down in his heart he heard a murmured demand for the woman by the Isar. Was this woman, perchance, his mate? He stopped, appalled at the thought, in the middle of Piccadilly, and was nearly run over by a hansom cab. To what end? The difference in their ages meant nothing to him, but he could not ask the various diplomatic circles of the world to accept Margarethe Styr. Nor was there the least probability that she would renounce her career to keep house for him and devote her talents to the advancement of his own. Even if she loved him—and did she?—how could he demand such a sacrifice? Society would be a poor substitute for art, for the adulation of the multitude. Moreover, there was the question of money again. She might possess small fortune, but it would not go far in his world. To permit her to remain on the stage he would not consider for a moment. He would neither abandon his career nor would he live on a woman’s earnings. To marry a girl with a large inheritance was one thing, but to loaf about while his famous wife sang to a public ignorant of his very name, that neither might want for the luxuries to which they were accustomed—good God!
He wondered, as he turned abruptly from the door of his club and strolled down into St. James’s Park, that the idea of marrying Margarethe Styr had postulated itself. It had not even occurred to him before. He had looked forward to seeing her as often as he could manage, to keeping her in his life, but not even to being her lover. Did he love her? Had he loved her during those enchanting months, and been too contented, too occupied, to understand? Had she purposely refrained from exercising those seductions of which she must be passed mistress, because she knew that love would devastate the lives of both? For a moment he seemed to be peering over the edge of a round wall into the great wells of human nature. He had a passing impression that Margarethe Styr was Nature herself, that in her bosom were all the mysteries, the secrets, the treasures of life, and that they were his, whether he could ever take them or not.
Did he love her? He drew his brows together in the deepest perplexity he had ever experienced. There was no turbulence of emotion in him, no madness of passion, no desire. It was a mental longing—that and something deeper, which he did not pretend to define, but which, so far at least, did not affect his senses. Were they on fire, with the instinct of man for his mate, he knew that he should take the next train for the Continent. But they were not, and the idea suddenly entered his cool wise young brain that he had better stay away from the Continent altogether. It was quite possible that a multiplicity of causes, her own subtle manipulation among them, had delayed his loving this most complete of all women, and it was on the cards that they both would lose their heads the moment they met again. Well! They had got through a dangerous summer safely, and its memory was wholly delightful. He, at least, would not defy the gods, but steer clear of the siren’s rock. Aside from motives of prudence, he was by no means sure that he wanted to experience a tremendous passion; the indolence, the super-civilization in him shrank from elemental tumults. He had locked up the memory of the scene with his brother, but he heard the key rattle for a moment, and his distaste for the primitive increased.
He jerked up the thought of his career and forced his mind to dwell upon it, succeeding so thoroughly that he felt ambition incarnate as he headed for home. He would begin his duties in the Foreign Office on the morrow instead of demanding a leave of absence; that would keep him in England for six months to come. Then he would manage to be sent to St. Petersburg or Madrid, instead of to Berlin, as he had contemplated.
At luncheon he was forced to listen to eulogies of a woman he would not have married had she presented him with a million in the funds, and revenged himself by talking about Mabel Cutting. But deep down in his being went on that same mysterious protest, mutter, demand for the supreme rights of mortal on this imperfect plane called life.
XXXII
EVERY MAN HIS OWN PILOT
Mrs. Cutting had bought, several years since, the lease of one of the great houses in Grosvenor Square from a bachelor who, late in life, had inherited it among other properties, and had lived comfortably at his club too long to move or to think favorably of matrimony. At his tenant’s tactful suggestion he reserved the ancestral furniture and pictures, sending them to one of his country houses, and Mrs. Cutting, in refurnishing, had wisely gone to Paris. Knowing the importance of the least of individualizations in a city which resents the unorthodox and is correspondingly fascinated by it, she had, instead of making her mansion the replica of a thousand other fine houses or even of permitting herself to be seduced by æstheticism, that bastard of the Brotherhood, re-created the big heavy rooms into a setting appropriate for a marquise of the eighteenth century. But too wise, or too indifferent, to become the slave of any period, her house was merely light, gay, brilliant, not too full of exquisite furniture gilded and brocaded; there were pastels in very old frames, costly trifles, the whole effect infinitely French. Everybody pronounced the word vaguely upon entering the series of reception rooms, drawing-rooms, and boudoirs, barely noting if the effect were produced by the pale brocades set in the white and gold of the panelled walls, the polished floors, the old but beautiful rugs, or by the numberless details, such as the bluish grey inner blinds, drawn up on either side and in the middle, that one sees in any modern French house. But the effect was there, that bright delicate luxurious setting for two beautiful women as dainty and splendid as ever the aristocracy of France achieved before her people found themselves; and all London approved and went there to be refreshed. Although it was now quite three years since the house had been remodelled and thrown open, the illness and death of her husband, followed by litigation, had called Mrs. Cutting so often from the city of her heart that the season just past was the first she had spent uninterruptedly in London since she had been able to equip herself for conquest. An outsider, lacking the halo of fame, no matter how wealthy, cannot impress herself deeply upon a vast and busy society with no more obvious setting than a house hired from some economical noble. But this past season was a very pleasant memory to Mrs. Cutting, not only on account of her daughter’s unqualified success, but because no American in London could dispute the fact that her house had been the scene of the most superb and perfectly appointed entertainments with which dollars had ever defied sovereigns.
Lady Bridgminster, at once the most exclusive and the most independent of women (her Bohemian protégés belonged to the aristocracies of the art world), had been her sponsor, and she had met at once many great people, ordinarily indifferent to or disapproving of rich Americans, whom she might not have met for years, if ever. She was booked for certain country houses in the autumn and early winter which she had long felt she owed it to her American pride to visit, but, even with her already select acquaintance and social tact, hitherto inaccessible. In consequence, never had two women been such devoted friends from the middle of April until the middle of July as “Lady Pat” and Mrs. Cutting, and society had been considerably amused.