Ordham had imbibed the half-admitted principle that those that toiled existed merely by virtue of their usefulness to the great. It might be necessary to throw a bone occasionally to prevent snarling, or even for mere humanity’s sake; but that these underlings should presume to demand a settlement of accounts at inconvenient seasons—the liberty would hardly be greater did they solicit an invitation to dinner! That it was dishonest to buy when you had no definite prospect of paying, Ordham would have regarded as a principle of foreign growth, possibly American, wholly plebeian. It was not a matter upon which he had ever wasted a moment’s analysis; but possibly, had it been put to him with uncompromising bluntness, he would have been startled and ashamed, for he was not only kind and lavish, but without conscious arrogance; as for the word “dishonesty” it never entered his conversation or head unless some man of his class committed incomprehensible follies and went to Wormwood Scrubbs.
But if he had not as yet given the question sufficient thought even to defend himself on the ground that the tradespeople were more culpable than the fatuous class whose reckless habits they encouraged that they might suck their life blood undetected, he had long since begun to resent his paltry income, and to wonder in what torpors Providence drowsed when she permitted his useless miserly brother to come into the world before himself. Still, he had felt the actual pinch very seldom, for Bridgminster, under strong pressure, had twice paid his debts since the death of his father, and his temperament and tastes saved him from certain of the snares that are spread for young and engaging patricians.
But if too fastidious and too indifferent for dissipation, his sensuous artistic pleasure-loving nature, his extravagant personal habits,—he was one of the best-dressed young men in Europe,—and his careless generosity, demanded the income of an heir-apparent, and his brother incredibly failed to settle it upon him. Of the word “economy” he had not the vaguest appreciation. He would no more have bought a cheap edition of a favourite book than he would have worn ready-made clothing; clear type, hand-made paper, and a chaste binding were as necessary to his enjoyment as the contents they adorned, and he had already collected a considerable library in three languages. In Paris he had kept house with two brother secretaries, and, personally, a brougham and a riding horse. He by no means despised cards and the turf. He had attended the opera and theatre every night in the week, if only for an act, and he had made a notable little collection of etchings, prints, and bibelôts. Moreover, the three young men had done the Embassy credit by the elegance and originality of their entertainments. When Lord Bridgminster paid the last of the bills whose gracefully dissipated substance had added lustre to his name, he announced in no mistakable terms that his brother would hereafter live within his income or go to the devil. It is possible that the reverberations of his wrath reached London, for it was shortly after Ordham arrived in Munich that his tradespeople, whose existence he had forgotten, began to send in their accounts. Ordham, of course, had not taken his brother’s proclamation seriously; nevertheless, he knew that he would have more trouble extracting money in the future. He relied upon the blandishments of his mother, the only member of the family tolerated by its present head.
Lady Bridgminster, still a woman of considerable fashion, was always hard up, always in debt. She had been a beauty of the early Rossetti type in her young womanhood; that great painter, indeed, had immortalized her on canvas; and since her husband’s death what she had saved in food, avoiding increase, she had spent on rare and lovely fabrics, stones, and distracted dressmakers, that she might retain her individual style and with it the illusion of youth. She gave her oldest son much advice, but never a penny. The advice by no means was to reform his habits, but to find him a rich wife. She was quite sensible of his attractions and thought he should have established himself before this. “Bridg is thirty-eight,” she had written him just as he was leaving Paris. “As likely as not he will suddenly cease to be a misogynist at forty, come up to London, and make a fool of himself; he would be putty in the hands of the first clever mother of portionless daughters that marked him as her own. Then where would be those golden apples you have grown accustomed to regard as your own (in pickle)? I have always believed them to be just a shelf too high, and that is the reason I have been so firm about the diplomatic career; not only because it suits your talents, but because it will be the means of dazzling some wealthy American girl, to whom the prospect of a position in the diplomatic circles of Europe will prove quite as alluring as a coronet—which, for that matter, you may win for yourself. I prefer an American, because her relatives will not be likely to live in England. An alliance with any of the modern British tribes might prove extremely awkward; and who else over here has any money—I mean for poor dowagers and younger sons? The Americans, when well-bred, have such a charming independence, yet know exactly how far to go. And then they are generous and would pay my bills. Tradespeople are so tiresome. Don’t ask me, dear Johnny, for money. As well ask courage of a mouse. If I were young enough, or did not have six boys inadequately provided for, I might marry again. As it is, my only present hope is in you. Too bad the other boys are not girls. I should defy any man in England to escape me if I marked him for my prey with a pink and white complexion on the hook.
“I don’t know what your opportunities will be in Munich, but at least you will be able to live within your income for a bit; you could not spend money in a dowdy old German town if you tried—at least no one else could, but I rather fancy you could spend money in the canals of Mars. If Munich has no magnet for the American heiress, try to pass your examinations this year, that you may be launched the sooner.” Then followed several pages of news about his brothers, one of whom was at Sandhurst, one at Eton, the others with a tutor in the country, all “growing at a frightful rate,” and costing every penny their father had been able to set aside for their education. In a postscript she reverted to the first theme. “Remember that you must, must marry money. You are the grand seigneur. You will never learn economy. And why should you?”
Ordham recalled this letter as he stared at the epistle of his tailor. He longed to send the man a check accompanied by a curt withdrawal of his patronage. This being out of the question, and Bridgminster untractable for the present, his diplomacy conquered his indignation and he wrote a polite note, promising to call and settle his account “immediately upon his arrival in London.” Then, concluding upon further reflection that the man was indulging in what the Americans called bluff, he dismissed the matter into one of the water-tight compartments of his mind, where it rubbed elbows in the dark with other episodes best forgotten.
But the second evil was more pressing. For two weeks past, having exhausted even his fertile ingenuity in excuses for not calling upon a certain Frau von Wass, he had burned her letters unopened. She was a Bulgarian, married these twenty years to a Bavarian Privy Councillor (Geheimrath), barely tolerated in Munich society, which has little hospitality for foreigners, and indulging her amorous propensities at the constant risk of her position; the Müncheners, lenient to their own, or to the outsider they embrace voluntarily, circle like lynxes in the pathway of the intruder. Hélène Wass was both stupid and clever; the well-trained instincts of the born adventuress taught her how to entertain as well as to fascinate men; but she bored her own sex with her egotism, her imaginary complaints, her tirades against her husband, servants, enemies, and antagonized them by the bewildering variety and grandeur of her Paris costumes, her ostentation, and her conquests. Of plebeian origin, but, with the external traits of heredity corrected by a ten years’ sojourn in a convent in Vienna, determined to have admiration, excitement, and money at any cost, her father having lost his little fortune in speculation, it is possible that she would have drifted into the half-world had not an anxious relative persuaded her to marry the wealthy and respectable Herr Geheimrath von Wass, although he was thirty years her senior and already fat. She met him while visiting a school friend in Hungary, where he owned an estate.
The commonplace deceit of the girl quickly developed into the subtlety of the woman, and she found no difficulty in managing a husband whose ruling passion was vanity. She found Munich as dull, narrow, and provincial as only an exclusive court society can be; but she consoled herself with the assurance that she extracted more out of it than any woman who courtesied to the King by divine right. She had loved much, but had never been tempted to leave her dull important old husband, and had long since forgotten the dreams of her convent days, when she had alternately yearned for the honourable proposals of an archduke and the untrammelled life of a cocotte. In all the eminent women of the half-world there is something of the grande dame, and doubtless, had fate, at the critical moment, dealt them a rich and powerful husband, they would have become equally distinguished members of society. So it was, at least, with Hélène Wass. Although Munich never ceased to harp upon the suggestion of the demimondaine in her dress, her beauty, her very essence,—whatever they may have meant by that,—she was now a very great little lady, and no inferior ever made a mistake in approaching her.
She was thirty-nine, and, without artifice, looked quite ten years younger. Her light blue eyes, sometimes insolently bright, often soft and languid, so thickly lashed that they looked made up; her abundant hair, of a rich hot brown, arranged with apparent carelessness about her pale eager often excited, little face; her slender, tiny, stately, and always smartly attired figure—composed a magnet for the eyes of men wherever she appeared. She had fascinated Ordham, always on the lookout for the uncommon, not only by her odd beauty, her sprightliness, her wild morbid moods, but by her subtle appeal to his sympathies. Far too clever to practise upon men’s senses alone, she had quickly discovered that the young Englishman was chivalrous, possibly sentimental, and, in the outer wrappings of his heart, indubiously soft. Unlike Mrs. Cutting, she did not divine the hardness at the core, that hardness which is the inevitable result of waiting for dead men’s shoes, of resentment against fate for putting the shoes on the wrong feet, of belonging to a class which secretly believes itself to be above all laws.
But she quickened his sympathies so effectually that he had suddenly found her in his arms, gasping out her hatred of life, her frantic desire to die at once. He had been stirred, flattered, delighted; but all these emotions lasted little over a fortnight. He soon chafed at the halter round his neck, and endeavoured to escape from it without wounding the susceptibilities of a lady to whom he was still young enough to be grateful. To escape, however, he was determined; not only did he shrink from her tropical storms, but—and for once her astuteness had failed her—he had no mind to be at any woman’s beck and call. She had sent him summonses at all hours of the day and night, and forced him to break more than one engagement he would have preferred to keep. Courteous diplomacy failing, he had been driven to ignore her existence. Her present command, however, he could not afford to disregard, for it arrived in a telegram, and announced that if he did not call upon her at three o’clock she would call upon him at the Legation at four.