Tower of Ivory: A Novel

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

“You will do everything you wish, of course. I should not think of opposing you.”

She stared at him in unwilling admiration in spite of her suffering, her indignation. He had mastered his excitement, and were he a kindly relative he could not be more courteous, more full of solicitude. She turned her back on him, thinking of nothing to say but “Thank you,” and she left the room feeling like an honoured guest reluctantly dismissed.

But the next three days were a nightmare to Ordham. He was determined to pay all respect to Mabel dead, which, to do him justice, he had, with brief lapses, managed to pay her living. He even sat beside the bed for a few moments after they had dressed her and folded her hands, and filled her arms with lilies. She was less pinched, less shrunken, in death. A little of her beauty had returned to her, and she looked no more than sixteen. Again pity possessed him, and he left the room abruptly and wandered about the darkened house. For three days he barely went out, and as he could not settle himself to read, and as every blind, according to that depressing old provincial custom, was down, as the house seemed to grow more and more silent, darker and darker, until he thought he should go mad, he took refuge in the attic, where in an unused room he opened a back window, and, companioned by LaLa, who clung to him, sat gazing by the hour over the roofs, trying not to think of the future, but making no bones about wishing the present were over.

Then came the ordeal at which he had to appear as chief mourner; but he girded up his loins, and, as a matter of fact, very nearly wept as he followed the long narrow casket out of the house. It was to remain in the mortuary chapel in Brompton Cemetery until Mrs. Cutting could close her house and start for New York. There was another short service out there, and as he was as white as death, and his shoulders sagged, the distinguished gathering, among whom were many Americans, pitied him intensely.

LIX
WHEN ORDHAM WAS BRIDGMINSTER

Bridgminster was also dead; and on the day following Mabel’s funeral, Ordham, in company with his mother and two of his brothers, started for Scotland to escort the body of the late head of their house to Ordham Castle and bury him in the vault beneath the village church with his fathers.

Ordham had endeavoured to forget Margarethe Styr until the last rites had been paid to his wife, but he sent her a telegram as he was leaving London, several from Scotland, and another as soon as he arrived at the castle. When his brother’s funeral was over, his relatives departed, and he was quite alone—certain matters necessary of adjustment detained him at Ordham for a few days—he sat down to write a long impassioned letter to her. But his pen fell from his hand. For the first time in his life he could have written a great love-letter, abandoned himself recklessly in words; but he knew that if he made no mention of marriage, Styr, even if she received the letter in a state of mind absolutely responsive—by no means certain!—would notice the omission. She loved him as profoundly as a woman is capable of loving; the terrible confession by which she purposed to save him was proof enough of that; but she was also clear-sighted and practical. No subtlety of omission would ever deceive her, and all arguments against the public relation should come from her; that was her right. It was not that he had the least doubt she would continue to make these protests that held his pen, but the doubt of his own sincerity did he protest in black and white that he intended to marry her. Not only did this woman still magnetize all the truth that was in him, but he knew that he could not make that particular protest as strong as the rest of his letter; she would detect the difference, and, with feminine inconsistency, be wounded to the quick.

And although he loved her the more for the pity that melted him every time he thought of that past she was forced to crowd out of her memory would she live at all, and admired her increasingly that she had risen to such triumphant heights of character and fortune above that Paphian ruin, he was appalled at the thought of introducing her into the line of mothers of the house of Ordham. If Mabel’s boy had only lived! Or if he could be sure that Styr would have no children. But to have his possible sons and daughters cower from their fellows under the knowledge that their mother had been a woman of the streets—he was no longer young and indolent enough, careless and arrogant enough, to quaff his goblet to the dregs with no thought of the morrow.

If Styr had been one of the world’s great singers for twenty years, that would be quite another matter. Ugly facts disappear into the alembic of Fame to emerge picturesque fiction. In course of time history would relate that one of the Countesses of Bridgminster had been a famous prima donna, her descendants would point with pride to her pictures by Lenbach and Sargent in the gallery of Ordham. But Munich was not the world, and although Styr had triumphed briefly in London, it was as a “discovery,” not as a prima donna of established fame. Nor had she more than a year left in which to make a world-wide reputation, for she must leave the stage if she married him. He knew that he should win on this point, if he was able to overcome her scruples and marry her at all; but the result would be, as she well knew, an immediate—and fatally easy—disinterring of her past, a past which her brief and narrow career would by no means annul. And neither wealth nor abilities nor the great name he now bore would enable him to force his wife upon those circles which, representing their countries abroad, are compelled to exercise, or simulate, a rigidity of convention which London and other great capitals can afford to disdain.

He tortured his mind for a restless day, roaming over the castle and the moors, but could think of no way out of the difficulty save to leave the problem to time. In any case, they could not marry for a year; two years would be more decent still. They might mutually agree to leave the question unopened for that length of time. During that period many things might happen; she might become so famous in the Anglo-Saxon world that, as is often the case, mere time would be annihilated by the dazzle of her reputation,—people would talk of her as if “they had known her always”; an experience which has its annoyances for those that resent having ten or twenty years added to their age, but not without its compensations. He, also, should be on his way toward establishment; for although it was not likely that any influence he could bring to bear would lessen the prescribed term of probation, those two years would give him opportunities to show his mettle, and he could rise rapidly enough thereafter. Yes, by degrees, the marriage might be accomplished, or it was possible they both might fear to disturb a relation in which they had found happiness; although it was his disposition to do all honour to the woman he loved, compensate her to the fullest degree for all she had been made to endure by malignant circumstances; and at the base of his nature was a love of order, of regularity. Like many another man, he might enter lightly enough into a liaison; but deliberately to contemplate one that should last the lifetime of himself and the woman for whom he felt all the refinements as well as the passions of love which a man generally reserves for his wife—it seemed to him an ugly and a grotesque jumble of contradictions. Better renounce diplomacy at once and seek usefulness in other ways. Moreover, he wanted her constant companionship.