She had, though a very unpoetic personage, this in common with poets and grasshoppers, that she seldom looked beyond the immediate day. But now the immediate day frowned on her, grey and ugly; and, grasshopper-like, she began to feel the shiver and the rime of frost.
Her income under settlement was enough, as her brother had more than once told her, to enable her to live very quietly at her dower-house, or at any quiet rural place with her children. But as she would infinitely have preferred a fatal dose of chloral to such an existence her future vaguely terrified her. It was no longer possible to rely upon Ronald, and she found bankers and lenders were all fully alive to the fact that the widowed Duchess of Otterbourne with only her jointure was a very different person to Lady Kenilworth, who had always had the money potentialities of her lord’s future inheritance behind her, and had also had the ingenious ability in matters financial of Cocky at her back.
Poor Cocky! Whoever would have thought that she would have so sincerely missed his support as she now did?
Her aunt’s legacy was well-nigh finished; she had spent it recklessly. When it had come to her it had seemed inexhaustible, but it actually dissolved as fast as a water-ice in a ballroom. She was much tormented by the sense of her poverty. She felt that she could not afford to run any more risks in supplying the deficiencies in her exchequer. She knew that her brother was now aware of her tendency to replace resources by ingenious intrigue; and any step which would compromise her afresh she was afraid to take.
What on earth could she do?
What a wretch William Massarene had been not to leave her some portion of his immense wealth! She thought about it until she persuaded herself that she had been deeply wronged. After torturing her as he had done surely he should have left her at peace for the rest of her actual life! She really thought so. If he had only left his fortune to his wife she could have mesmerized that dull, simple soul into anything. But the fortune had all gone to the woman she hated the most in the world, that stately, lily-like, silent person who had considered that her own songs were not good enough to be sung at the Harrenden House concerts; and who had sent her all those receipts and counterfoils without even her compliments, just as you might send her boxes after a dismissed maid!
She had no inclination to write good or bad music now; she was absorbed in the discords of her life. Her tradespeople in Paris and London were no longer pliant; they even wrote rudely; Beaumont no doubt had talked. Meanwhile she wanted money every moment as a plant wants air.
There was a man near her in Cannes who was made of money and of whom she had often thought: Adrian Vanderlin. But how to reach him she did not know. He was a hermit. He had a beautiful place three miles from Cannes, and was at that moment in residence there; so much she learned from an archduke who had been to see him, but the rest was not easy even to her audacity. Vanderlin, who had divorced his wife and was a financier, would scarcely, she reasoned, be an ingénu. If she could see him—well, she had few doubts as to the effect she produced on those who saw her. Experience had justified her optimism.
One day she drove through the olive-woods which were on his estate and through which a drive had been cut which was open to the public. She saw the château at a distance; it was built in the style of François Premier, and was at once elegant and stately; it had long terraces which looked out on to the sea. It was precisely the sort of place to which she would like to come when east winds were blowing down Piccadilly and north winds down the Champs Elysées.
“How could that woman be so stupid as to separate from him?” she said to the Archduke in whose carriage she was. That gentleman smiled.