Ordham had always been vaguely sorry for his mother, and his examination of the little house, this first time he was alone in it, deepened and somewhat clarified his sympathy. It seemed to him that she had just missed everything. She had almost been a great beauty, but although the general effect she managed to achieve, still made people, particularly in a ballroom, turn and stare at her, a closer inspection found the face, in spite of its large blue eyes, almost insignificant. If not born with a consuming desire for individual recognition, she had planted the ambition early in life, and consistently cultivated it. But although a feature in London society, she was not a personality, and there is a vast difference. Even her position in the political world, towering as it had been, she owed to her husband, brilliant, fascinating, and one of the chiefs of his party, as well as to the superb entertainments his income permitted her to give in St. James’s Square and Yorkshire. She had facility of speech, of pen, in all les graces; but she was devoid of originality, and almost stopped short of being clever. Distinguished in manner, she was deficient in charm and made no slaves. With a sincere love of beauty, she lacked the eye which corresponds to ear in music, and there was always a want of harmony in the detail of both her dress and her rooms. Worldly by birth and training, she was bohemian (of a sort) by instinct, and even when in Bridgminster House had mixed her parties in a fashion which society, less anxious to be amused at any cost than it became a few years later, condemned; and although nothing but indiscretions of which she was incapable could deprive her of the great position to which she had been born, and had held no less through her long period as a political hostess than her immense and powerful connection, she was now merely the faddish daughter of one peer and widow of another, instead of the personal force she still so ardently desired to be.
Even the pretty little house (for which, of course, she paid an exorbitant rent) lacked the individuality to which its rich collection of blue china and hawthorn jars, Chippendale and old oak furniture, fine brasses, antique vases, and Venetian mirrors, bits of Italian tapestry and stained glass, entitled it. The drawing-room, unexpectedly large, like so many of the drawing-rooms in those little houses in Mayfair, should have been a memorial sonnet to Rossetti, and it looked like the embodiment of his first incoherent dreams when groping for the formulæ of the new art-religion. At the end of this room was the famous portrait which Rossetti had painted at his own request. He had seen the young girl at the opera and thought her the living embodiment of Beatrice. One of his few patrons had been able to persuade the duke that the fashionably obscure artist was a genius, but more because he would disdain payment than because of any enthusiasm inspired by pictures which the duke thought as stiff and outlandish as those ridiculous formal gardens about Ordham Castle. He was a Briton to his marrow, was his Grace, and he carried his detestation of all things foreign to such an extent that he had never paid a second visit to the Continent nor to any of those country houses which kept green the memories of Palladio and Inigo Jones. But his daughter, who had also gone to the patron’s house to see “the Rossettis,” had conceived an immediate passion for the new school, and sweetly gave her father no peace until he consented to let the artist paint her. The duke yielded with the utmost ungraciousness, and stipulated that the man—what was his name?—was to charge nothing for the honour, and was to present the portrait to Lady Patricia at once—there should be no public exhibition. As Rossetti never exhibited, and asked for nothing but the joy of painting this Renaissance lady who might have served as the original inspiration of the Brotherhood, he agreed to anything and eagerly awaited the day appointed for the first sitting.
She had not entered his studio and removed her bonnet before he saw the mistake he had made. Here was no Beata Beatrix, no mediæval saint, no about-to-be-murdered spouse of a sixteenth-century Italian, haunting immense and gloomy chambers, but an excessively thin narrow young English girl almost six feet in height, with a little white face of no particular character, immense blue eyes without a particle of expression, and an extraordinary mass of pale golden hair, which stood out from her head like wings. But Rossetti was an artist. If his spirits went down to zero, it was not long before they ascended with a rush. At least here was material to work on; that hair, that poise of head, that aristocratic languor were no delusion, and he could conjure up his first impression of her and the dreams of beauty which had haunted him ever since. In short, he idealized her, and the long picture (which had been exhibited to all London society for twenty-five years) was one of the most characteristic things he had ever done, and, perhaps, had contributed as much as any cause to Lady Bridgminster’s fatal desire to express so much more than she could conceive. Against a background of dull blue tapestry, with full throat strained, the jaw line from chin to ear salient, with lids slowly drooping, hair that seemed to be an aura emanating from the pure young fires of her spirit, stood this vision in diaphanous white clasping against her angelic flatness an upright sheaf of Annunciation lilies. The thinness was the willow grace of a reed, the pale complexion the white symbol of maidenly exaltation; the half-opened eyes, as blue as an Italian lake, were looking straight into paradise. When this wonderful picture was finished and had been admired by the artists that worshipped at his shrine, Rossetti, with his tongue in his cheek, covered the hands and arms with tan-coloured suède gloves. In that touch, done perhaps, in a moment of unconscious foresight, as of deliberate sarcasm, Rossetti had epitomized the life of Lady Bridgminster.
He had intended to make many sketches of her during these sittings, but she inspired him no further, as much to her disappointment as to his. Nevertheless, he liked her well enough, and went to her house after she married Bridgminster as long as he went anywhere. He had no reason to regret the acquaintance, for she bought several of his pictures, patronized the entire Brotherhood, was one of the first to acknowledge the genius of Burne-Jones, and commissioned the greatest decorator of modern times to refurnish the state drawing-rooms of Ordham in the style of the Italian Renaissance.
Lady Bridgminster was superstitious about this picture, and, when moving from palace to hovel, to use her own expression, took it with her, refusing the offer of the new millionnaire to whom her step-son had unaccountably leased the splendid theatre of her triumphs. Not only did it remind her, that in spite of six sons and what she regarded as a lifetime of disappointments, she had once been young and romantic like other women, but she had a fancy that it was her real self, and that did she let it go out of her keeping she should become but a grey shadow flitting amongst people who never could be quite sure whether she were there or not. This was her one imaginative flight, and she cherished it.
“Lady Pat” was little broader and even less covered with flesh than when the picture was painted a quarter of a century ago. How she had ever contrived to produce six strapping boys was one of those mysteries which Nature will explain one day, no doubt, with other paradoxes. But they had cost her few pains, and nurses and tutors had brought, were bringing, them up. At Ordham Castle, where they had lived the year round, until the older boys went to school and the father’s death consigned the younger to the dower house in Kent, she had complained of their noise, but as a matter of fact she had not a nerve in her body. She was as hard and supple as a Toledo blade, with all the brain she really needed, and an internal organization practically flawless. With an appearance of the most æsthetic delicacy, she had never had so much as an attack of indigestion, never succumbed to the blues, when that malady was raging, and had no more emotional capacity than an incubator. Oscar Wilde once said of Lady Bridgminster that she would tempt St. Anthony to keep his vows; and true it was that, although only thirty-nine at the time of her husband’s death, still reigning as a beauty, and a great lady of whom any husband might be proud, not even an ambitious merchant had sought her hand. But by this time she knew her limitations far better than people fancied, and had neither the hope nor the wish to marry again. But she was a restless dissatisfied creature, bitterly regretting Bridgminster House and Ordham, and always flitting about in search of novelty and distraction. Her son, lying on the sofa in the drawing-room during the warm hours of the afternoon, contrasted her with Margarethe Styr, and pitied her, not the woman whose past was so black that even his imagination dared not lift the curtain.
XXIX
THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS AGAIN
It is possible that Ordham would have delayed paying his respects to his brother from week to week, had not a flattering paragraph in one of the newspapers brought upon him the immediate attentions of his creditors. He ground his teeth, flung their reminders into a drawer of the desk in his bedroom, ordered a telegram sent to Lord Bridgminster and his boxes packed, and started for the north next morning.
Of course he reserved a first-class carriage for the all-day journey. He would have patronized a train de luxe had there been one, or a motor, had the more brilliant extravagance come into being. To spend less to-day that he might have more to-morrow was a principle that only a long period of dire privation could have etched into his creed, and, no doubt, he would have managed to be a luxurious pauper.
During the journey his uneasy apprehensions were varied with remorseful memories of three old servants that had adored and spoilt him since he had come into the world, and to whom he had not given a thought during the past four years. These were the housekeeper, Mrs. Felt, Biscom, the butler, and Cobbs, the coachman. The sure instincts of childhood had driven him to take his little woes, not to his mother’s sterile bosom, but to the warm and pillowed surfaces of the personage who had inherited certain of the honours of Ordham, even as Lord Bridgminster had inherited his. Biscom, sovereign of the pantries, had permitted him to make himself ill as often as he desired, and Cobbs had taught him how to ride and had now his dogs in charge. Then there was Craven, the old gardener—he turned hot and cold at the thought that he had not brought a present to one of them!