'Very good, my lord.'
'Did her ladyship leave any message?'
'None, my lord. She merely said she was going to dine with Mr and Mrs Cavendish, and would probably not be back till late.'
He frowned like a spoilt child.
'Well, I sha'n't be back till late either, if at all,' he said fretfully. 'Just come and get me into my dress suit, will you?'
Robson followed him upstairs obediently, and bore with his caprices, which were many, during the business of attiring him for the evening. He was in an exceedingly bad humour, and gave vent to what the children call a 'bad swear' more than once. Finally he got into a hansom and was driven off at a rattling pace, the respectable Robson watching his departure from the open hall door.
'You're a nice one!' remarked that worthy personage, as the vehicle containing his master turned a sharp corner and disappeared. 'Up to no end of pranks; as bad and worse than if you was the regular son of a king! Yes, taking you on and off, one would almost give you credit for being a real prince, you've got so little conscience! But my lady's one too many for you, I fancy; she's quiet but she's clever; and I don't believe she'll keep her eyes shut much longer. She can't, if you're a-going on continual in the way you are.'
Thus Robson soliloquised, shutting the street door with a bang to emphasise the close of his half-audible observations. Then he went up into Delicia's study to give Spartan some dinner. Spartan received the plateful brought to him with majestic indifference, and an air which implied that he would attend to it presently. He had a little white glove of Delicia's between his paws, and manifested no immediate desire to disturb himself. He had his own canine ideas of love and fidelity; and though he was only a dog, it may be he had a higher conception of honour and truth than is attained by men, who, in the excess of self-indulgence, take all the benefits of love and good fortune as their 'rights,' and are destitute of even the saving grace of gratitude.
CHAPTER VI
It was no impetus of feminine recrimination or spite that had caused Delicia to go out on that particular evening, and thus deprive her husband of her society in the same abrupt fashion with which he had so often deprived her of his. Mr and Mrs Cavendish were old friends of hers. They had known her when she was a little orphan girl with no brothers or sisters—no companions of her own age to amuse her—nothing, in fact, but her own pensive and romantic thoughts, which had, though she then knew it not, helped to weave her now brilliant destiny. They were elderly, childless people, and they had always been devoted to Delicia, so that when Mrs Cavendish paid an unexpected call in the afternoon and stated that she and her husband were 'mopy,' and that they would take it very kindly if Delicia would come and dine with them, and afterwards accompany them to the 'Empire,' for which they had a box near the stage, Delicia readily accepted the proposition as a welcome change from her own uncomfortable and unprofitable thoughts. To begin with, she had grown so accustomed now to her husband's telegrams announcing that he would not be back to dinner, that she accepted his absence as a far greater probability than his home-returning. Therefore she was glad of the chance of dining in friendly company. Next, the idea of going to the 'Empire' filled her with a certain sense of pained curiosity and excitement. La Marina was the chief attraction there, and she had never seen her. So she shut up her books and papers, put on a simple black skirt, and a pretty blouse of soft pink chiffon, daintily adorned with a shoulder-knot of roses, tied her rich hair up, in the fashion of the picture of Madame le Brun, with a strip of pink ribbon, bade good-bye to Spartan, gave him her glove to guard by way of consolation, and then went with her old friend, leaving for her husband, in case he should return, the brief note that had vexed his high mightiness so seriously. And it was with a strained anticipation and sharp unrest that she sat in the box at the 'Empire,' withdrawn from view as much as possible, and waited for the appearance of the famous dancer, whose performance was advertised on the programme as 'Marvellous Evolution! The Birth of a Butterfly! La Marina!' The music-hall was crowded, and looking down on the densely-packed arena, she saw rows and rows of men, smoking, grinning, whispering in each other's ears,—some sitting squat in their fauteuils, with the bulging appearance of over-filled flour sacks, the extended feet beyond the sacks, and the apoplectically swelled heads on the tops thereof, suggestive of the full meals just enjoyed,—others, standing up with opera glasses levelled at the promenade, or else leering in the same direction without glasses at all. There were young men, sodden and stupid with smoke and drink,—and old men, blear-eyed and weak-jointed, painfully endeavouring to assume the airs of joyous juvenility. There were fast women, with eyelashes so darkened with kohl as to give them the appearance at a distance of having no eyes at all, but only black sockets;—middle-aged frowsy feminine topers, whose very expression of face intimated a 'looking forward to the next glass,'—and a few almost palsy-stricken antiquities of womanhood, the possible ruins of fifty-year-ago ballet-girls and toe-and-heel stage 'fairies,' who sat in the stalls twisting their poor old mouths into the contortion of a coquettish smile—a contortion dreadfully reminding one of the way a skull grins when some careless gravedigger throws it out of the mould where it has hidden its ghastly mirth for perhaps twenty years. All this seething witches' cauldron of life, Delicia looked down upon with a mingling of shame and sorrow. Were these low-looking creatures real humanity?—the humanity which God created and redeemed? Surely not! They were more like apes than human beings—how was it?—and why was it? She was still pondering the question when old Mr Cavendish spoke.