Lady Hilda was tall and beautiful, and Lady Hilda spoke, as she always used to speak, with manifest sincerity. Now, it is not in human nature not to feel flattered when a beautiful woman pays one genuine homage; and Arthur Berkeley was quite as human, after all, as most other people. ‘You’re very kind,’ he said, smiling. ‘I must make it lunch, then, though I really ought to be working in the mornings instead of running about merely to amuse myself. What day will suit you best?’
‘Oh, not to amuse yourself, Mr. Berkeley,’ Hilda answered pointedly, ‘but to gratify us. That, you know, is a work of benevolence. Say Monday next, then, at two o’clock. Will that do for you?’
‘Perfectly,’ Berkeley answered, taking her proffered hand extended to him with just that indefinable air of frankness which Lady Hilda knew so well how to throw into all her actions. ‘Good evening. Wilton Place, isn’t it!—Gracious heavens!’ he thought to himself, as he glanced after her satin train sweeping slowly down the grand staircase, ‘what on earth would the dear old Progenitor say if only he saw me in the midst of these meaningless aristocratic orgies. I am positively half-wheedled, it seems, into making love to an earl’s daughter! If this sort of thing continues, I shall find myself, before I know it, connected by marriage with two-thirds of the British peerage. A beautiful woman, really, and quite queen-like in her manner when she doesn’t choose rather to be unaffectedly gracious. How she sat upon that tall young man with the brown moustaches over by the mantelpiece! I didn’t hear what she said to him, but I could see he was utterly crushed by the way he slank away with his tail between his legs, like a whipped spaniel. A splendid woman—and no doubt about it; looks as if she’d stepped straight out of the canvas of Titian, with the pearls in her hair and everything else exactly as he painted them. The handsomest girl I ever saw in my life—but not like Edie Le Breton. They say a man can only fall in love once in a lifetime. I wonder whether there’s any truth in it! Well, well, you won’t often see a finer woman in her own style than Lady Hilda Tregellis. Monday next, at two precisely; I needn’t make a note of it—no fear of my forgetting.’
‘I really do think,’ Lady Hilda said to herself as she unrolled the pearls from her thick hair in her own room that winter evening, ‘I almost like him better than I did Ernest Le Breton. The very first night I saw him at Lady Mary’s I fell quite in love with his appearance, before I knew even who he was; and now that I’ve found out all about him, I never did hear anything so absolutely and delightfully original. His father a common shoemaker! That, to begin with, throws Ernest Le Breton quite into the shade! HIS father was a general in the Indian army—nothing could be more BANAL. Then Mr. Berkeley began life as a clergyman; but now he’s taken off his white choker, and wears a suit of grey tweed like any ordinary English gentleman. So delightfully unconventional, isn’t it? At last, to crown it all, he not only composes delicious music, but goes and writes a comic opera—such a comic opera! And the best of it is, success hasn’t turned his head one atom. He doesn’t run with vulgar eagerness after the great people, like your ordinary everyday successful nobody. He took no more notice of me, myself, at first, because I was Lady Hilda Tregellis, than if I’d been a common milkmaid; and he wouldn’t come to our garden party because he wanted to go down to Pilbury Regis to visit the Le Bretons at their charity school or something! It was only after I played the war-dance arrangement so well—I never played so brilliantly in my life before—that he began to alter and soften a little. Certainly, these pearls do thoroughly become me. I think he looked after me when I was leaving the room just a tiny bit, as if he was really pleased with me for my own sake, and not merely because I happen to be called Lady Hilda Tregellis.’
CHAPTER XXI. — OFF WITH THE OLD LOVE.
‘It’s really very annoying, this letter from Selah,’ Herbert Le Breton murmured to himself, as he carefully burnt the compromising document, envelope and all, with a fusee from his oriental silver pocket match-case. ‘I had hoped the thing had all been forgotten by this time, after her long silence, and my last two judiciously chilly letters—a sort of slow refrigerating process for poor shivering naked little Cupid. But here, just at the very moment when I fancied the affair had quite blown over, comes this most objectionable letter, telling me that Selah has actually betaken herself to London to meet me; and what makes it more annoying still, I wanted to go up myself this week to dine at home with Ethel Faucit. Mother’s plan about Ethel Faucit is exceedingly commendable; a girl with eight hundred a year, cultivated tastes, and no father or other encumbrances dragging after her. I always said I should like to marry a poor orphan. A very desirable young woman to annex in every way! And now, here’s Selah Briggs—ugh! how could I ever have gone and entangled myself in my foolish days with a young woman burdened by such a cognomen!—here’s Selah Briggs must needs run away from Hastings, and try to hunt me up on her own account in London. If I dared, I wouldn’t go up to see her at all, and would let the thing die a natural death of inanition—sine Cerere et Baccho, and so forth—(I’m afraid, poor girl, she’ll be more likely to find Bacchus than Ceres if she sticks in London); but the plain fact is, I don’t dare—that’s the long and the short of it. If I did, Selah’d be tracking me to earth here in Oxford, and a nice mess that’d make of it! She doesn’t know my name, to be sure; but as soon as she called at college and found nobody of the name of Walters was known there, she’d lie in wait for me about the gates, as sure as my name’s Herbert Le Breton, and sooner or later she’d take it out of me, one way or the other. Selah has as many devils in her as the Gergesene who dwelt among the tombs, I’ll be sworn to it; and if she’s provoked, she’ll let them all loose in a legion to crush me. I’d better see her and have it out quietly, once for all, than try to shirk it here in Oxford and let myself in at the end for the worse condemnation.’
Under this impression, Herbert Le Breton, leaning back in his well-padded oak armchair, ordered his scout to pack his portmanteau, and set off by the very first fast train for Paddington station. He would get over his interview with Selah Briggs in the afternoon, and return to Epsilon Terrace in good time for Lady Le Breton’s dinner. Say what you like of it, Ethel Faucit and eight hundred a year, certe redditum, was a thing in no wise to be sneezed at by a judicious and discriminating person.
Herbert left his portmanteau in the cloakroom at Paddington, and drove off in a hansom to the queer address which Selah had given him. It was a fishy lodging of the commoner sort in a back street at Notting Hill, not far from the Portobello Road. At the top of the stairs, Selah stood waiting to meet him, and seemed much astonished when, instead of kissing her, as was his wont, he only shook her hand somewhat coolly. But she thought to herself that probably he didn’t wish to be too demonstrative before the eyes of the lodging-house people, and so took no further notice of it.