CHAPTER XX
Minna had rushed to London, which she loathed, from Nice, which she adored, and was occupying a suite of apartments in the Hotel Métropole. And the cause of her journey was Hugh; wherefore she regarded him with feelings of more than usual vindictiveness. His letter announcing his marriage with Irene had thrown her into a violent rage. She had stormed at her French maid, cast herself on her bed and wept, and then gone off to Monte Carlo, where she did her best to compromise herself with an Austrian banker who had been, for the past fortnight, most assiduous in his attentions. The necessitous gentlewoman whom, for shrewd social reasons, Minna employed as her chaperon and companion had chosen to be shocked. There had been a scene.
“My conscience won’t allow me to pass such things by without remonstrance,” the lady had said.
“I don’t pay you to have a conscience,” Minna had replied rudely. “I possess one too many of my own.”
“It is an outrage on common decency,” said the lady, who had a spirit as yet unbroken by servitude.
Whereupon Minna had dismissed her on the spot, and that evening found herself unchaperoned. Now, she had taken a little villa on the Cimiez Road, with a cool white loggia and tesselated floors. To live there in maiden seclusion was out of the question. To provide herself with the excitement that she craved, without some nominal protectress of her youth and beauty, would be to rank herself as unclassed. But she had not the faintest desire to set society’s skirts tightly drawn when she passed by, as did many fair and solitary owners of pretty villas between Cannes and St. Remo. Her dearly won fortune could buy her much more satisfactory delights. In a word, a chaperon was essential. For a whole month she sought far and wide. She offered lavish terms. Hundreds applied. But the ladies without conscience lacked influence. The influential chaperons seemed to be steeped in the crassest respectability. At last a paragon came within her horizon, a Mrs. Delamere, the widow of a colonel of artillery, a woman of the world.
“In the course of an incidented life,” she wrote, “I have found that discretion is the better part of virtue.”
The distorted epigram had brought Minna post-haste to London. She came, saw, conquered. Mrs. Delamere agreed to deposit her conscience with her bankers, and to accompany Minna southward, with the briefest possible delay.
It was five o’clock in the afternoon. Minna threw herself down on a couch and turned over the pages of a novel. She had just returned from a solitary drive in the Park, where she had not seen one familiar face. She hated London. It recalled a past life of miseries. The novel fell to the ground as she went over the tale of them, counted for the fiftieth time since her arrival, two days before. She had seen no one but Mrs. Delamere. In a moment of utter boredom, a vestige of gratitude had suggested a visit to the Bebros. But she could not face the ghosts of the horrors of that house. The sight of the dull, coarse, kindly faces would put back the hand of time, and set her again among the devils. A faint back-wash of the old hysteria met her at the thought. So she remained in solitary state in the gorgeous hotel, chafing at its dulness.
Presently she rose and walked with aimless unrest about the room. She rang for her maid.