Two other riders came in sight, meeting them, along the road—a lady, followed by her groom. Dorothy Verners sitting her horse as if she had been cradled on it, straight, tall Dorothy whose beauty was so different from Phoebe’s soft prettiness. Dorothy had beauty like a birthright. She came of generations of women whose first duty was to be admirable, who had, as it were, experimented long ago with beauty and had fixed its lines for their successors. Where Phoebe suggested a hasty improvisation of comeliness, where, in her, comeliness was unexpected and almost an impertinence, in Dorothy it was authentic and assured.
Had Reuben, seeing Phoebe in the magic vision of his love, called her a thoroughbred because she took a fall without blubbering? It was a compliment, and he had meant it. He had meant it because she had, surprisingly, not flinched. But of the real thoroughbreds, of those who were, without compliment, thoroughbred, one would take for granted that they did not flinch and the surprise would be not that they did not flinch, but if they did. He had not been seeing Dorothy Verners lately; he had been forgetting her authenticity; and he hadn’t the slightest doubt, watching her approach, that he belonged with her order, that he was an aristocrat who, if he stooped to trade, stooped only to rise again. He saw himself through his own eyes.
And Dorothy looked at him through hers, seeing a dark man, not unhandsome, who was of good stock, but a nonentity until he had brought unpleasant notoriety upon himself by too summary a method of dealing with Mr. Bantison and, after that, had stepped down to association with the manufacturers. No doubt it was a manufacturer’s daughter with whom he took his ride. Some of them she had heard, upstarts, did ride. A man who had lost caste, a man to be ignored. Would it hurt him to be, emphatically, ignored by her? He deserved to be hurt, but probably his skin was thick and, in any case, why was she wasting thought on him? He was cut by the county: she had not to create a precedent. She did what she knew others did. She cut him dead, and it came, unreasonably, as a shock to Hepplestall.
He was used to the cut direct, he didn’t even tighten his lips now when one of his former acquaintance passed him by without a glance. But he hadn’t anticipated this, he hadn’t included Dorothy, and her contempt struck at him like a blow. It wasn’t what Dorothy stood for, it wasn’t that she was the reigning toast, and that to carry her off was to have been his splendid score off Whitworth. It was, simply, that she was the one woman, and, yes, he admitted her right to be contemptuous; he had permitted her to see him in demeaning company. He looked at Phoebe with intolerable hatred in his eyes, he could have found satisfaction in lashing her with his whip till he was exhausted. Well, he didn’t do that.
But Phoebe comprehended something of his thought. She tried—God knows she tried—to win him back to her as they rode home. She chattered gayly, keeping it up bravely while jealousy and fear gnawed her heart, and Hepplestall stared glumly straight ahead with never a word for Phoebe. Her words were like sea foam breaking idly on granite.
Words didn’t do. Then, what would? Desperately, she came to her decision. He was slipping from her, there was wreck, but there was still the possibility of rescue. When she said “Good night,” there was invitation in her eye; and something, not love, took him, later, across the passage to her room. Phoebe’s last gambling card was played.
CHAPTER IV—ALMACK’S CLUB
MR. LUKE VERNERS put on his boots in his lodging in Albemarle Street, St. James, in a very evil mood. He was in London, and ordinarily liked to be in London although it was a place where a man must remember his manners, where he wasn’t a cock crowing on his dung-hill, but a mighty small atom in a mighty big crowd; but London with his wife and his daughter was a cruel paradox. Why the plague did a man cramp his legs in a coach for all those miles from Lancashire to London if it wasn’t to get away from wife and daughter? And here he was tied to the family petticoats, in London. It was enough to put any man into bad temper.