She was on the point of bursting into angry tears, but when she found herself snatched up, her slippers tumbling off, the hood of the burnous falling over her eyes, her face crushed anyhow against her husband’s sinewy chest, she suddenly felt oddly contented, disinclined to protest or to struggle.
Lord Holme did not trouble himself to ask what she was feeling or why she was feeling it.
He thought of himself—the surest way to fasten upon a man the thoughts of others.
CHAPTER IV
ROBIN PIERCE and Carey were old acquaintances, if not exactly old friends. They had been for a time at Harrow together. Pierce had six thousand a year and worked hard for a few hundreds. Carey had a thousand and did nothing. He had never done anything definite, anything to earn a living. Yet his talents were notorious. He played the piano well for an amateur, was an extraordinarily clever mimic, acted better than most people who were not on the stage, and could write very entertaining verse with a pungent, sub-acid flavour. But he had no creative power and no perseverance. As a critic of the performances of others he was cruel but discerning, giving no quarter, but giving credit where it was due. He loathed a bad workman more than a criminal, and would rather have crushed an incompetent human being than a worm. Secretly he despised himself. His own laziness was as disgusting to him as a disease, and was as incurable as are certain diseases. He was now thirty-four and realised that he was never going to do anything with his life. Already he had travelled over the world, seen a hundred, done a hundred things. He had an enormous acquaintance in Society and among artists; writers, actors, painters—all the people who did things and did them well. As a rule they liked him, despite his bizarre bluntness of speech and manner, and they invariably spoke of him as a man of great talent; he said because he was so seldom fool enough to do anything that could reveal incompetence. His mother, who was a widow, lived in the north, in an old family mansion, half house, half castle, near the sea coast of Cumberland. He had one sister, who was married to an American.
Carey always declared that he was that rara avis an atheist, and that he had been born an atheist. He affirmed that even when a child he had never, for a moment, felt that there could be any other life than this earth-life. Few people believed him. There are few people who can believe in a child atheist.
Pierce had a totally different character. He seemed to be more dreamy and was more energetic, talked much less and accomplished much more. It had always been his ambition to be a successful diplomat, and in many respects he was well fitted for a diplomatic career. He had a talent for languages, great ease of manner, self-possession, patience and cunning. He loved foreign life. Directly he set foot in a country which was not his own he felt stimulated. He felt that he woke up, that his mind became more alert, his imagination more lively. He delighted in change, in being brought into contact with a society which required study to be understood. His present fate contented him well enough. He liked Rome and was liked there. As his mother was a Roman he had many Italian connections, and he was far more at ease with Romans than with the average London man. His father and mother lived almost perpetually in large hotels. The former, who was enormously rich, was a malade imaginaire. He invariably spoke of his quite normal health as if it were some deadly disease, and always treated himself, and insisted on being treated, as if he were an exceptionally distinguished invalid. In the course of years his friends had learned to take his view of the matter, and he was at this time almost universally spoken of as “that poor Sir Henry Pierce whose life has been one long martyrdom.” Poor Sir Henry was fortunate in the possession of a wife who really was a martyr—to him. Nobody had ever discovered whether Lady Pierce knew, or did not know, that her husband was quite as well as most people. There are many women with such secrets. Robin’s parents were at present taking baths and drinking waters in Germany. They were later going for an “after cure” to Switzerland, and then to Italy to “keep warm” during the autumn. As they never lived in London, Robin had no home there except his little house in Half Moon Street. He had one brother, renowned as a polo player, and one sister, who was married to a rising politician, Lord Evelyn Clowes, a young man with a voluble talent, a peculiar power of irritating Chancellors of the Exchequer, and hair so thick that he was adored by the caricaturists.
Robin Pierce and Carey saw little of each other now, being generally separated by a good many leagues of land and sea, but when they met they were still fairly intimate. They had some real regard for each other. Carey felt at ease in giving his violence to the quiet and self-possessed young secretary, who was three years his junior, but who sometimes seemed to him the elder of the two, perhaps because calm is essentially the senior of storm. He had even allowed Robin to guess at the truth of his feeling for Lady Holme, though he had never been explicit, on the subject to him or to anyone. There were moments when Robin wished he had not been permitted to guess, for Lady Holme attracted him far more than any other woman he had seen, and he had proposed to her before she had been carried off by her husband. He admired her beauty, but he did not believe that it was her beauty which had led him into love. He was sure that he loved the woman in her, the hidden woman whom Lord Holme and the world at large—including Carey—knew nothing about. He thought that Lady Holme herself did not understand this hidden woman, did not realise, as he did, that she existed. She spoke to him sometimes in Lady Holme’s singing, sometimes in an expression in her eyes when she was serious, sometimes even in a bodily attitude. For Robin, half fantastically, put faith in the eloquence of line as a revealer of character, of soul. But she did not speak to him in Lady Holme’s conversation. He really thought this hidden woman was obscured by the lovely window—he conceived it as a window of exquisite stained glass, jewelled but concealing—through which she was condemned to look for ever, through which, too, all men must look at her. He really wished sometimes, as he had said, that Lady Holme were ugly, for he had a fancy that perhaps then, and only then, would the hidden woman arise and be seen as a person may be seen through unstained, clear glass. He really felt that what he loved would be there to love if the face that ruled was ruined; would not only still be there to love, but would become more powerful, more true to itself, more understanding of itself, more reliant, purer, braver. And he had learnt to cherish this fancy till it had become a little monomania. Robin thought that the world misunderstood him, but he knew the world too well to say so. He never risked being laughed at. He felt sure that he was passionate, that he was capable of romantic deeds, of Quixotic self-sacrifice, of a devotion that might well be sung by poets, and that would certainly be worshipped by ardent women. And he said to himself that Lady Holme was the one woman who could set free, if the occasion came, this passionate, unusual and surely admirable captive at present chained within him, doomed to inactivity and the creeping weakness that comes from enforced repose.
Carey’s passion for Lady Holme had come into being shortly before her marriage. No one knew much about it, or about the rupture of all relations between him and the Holmes which had eventually taken place. But the fact that Carey had lost his head about Lady Holme was known to half London. For Carey, when carried away, was singularly reckless; singularly careless of consequences and of what people thought. It was difficult to influence him, but when influenced he was almost painfully open in his acknowledgment of the power that had reached him. As a rule, however, despite his apparent definiteness, his decisive violence, there seemed to be something fluid in his character, something that divided and flowed away from anything which sought to grasp and hold it. He had impetus but not balance; swiftness, but a swiftness that was uncontrolled. He resembled a machine without a brake.