Where Love Is

by William John Locke

There was silence. Norma pretended to read, but her thoughts, away from the printed lines, caused her face to harden and her lips to curl scornfully. She had been used to such scenes with her mother ever since she had worn a long frock, and that was seven years ago, when she came out as a young beauty of eighteen. The story of financial embarrassment had lost its fine edge of persuasion by overtelling. She had almost ceased to believe in it, and the lingering grain of credence she put aside with the cynical feeling that it was no great concern of hers, so long as her usual round of life went on. She had two hundred a year of her own, all of which she spent in dress, so that in that one particular at least, if she chose to be economical, she was practically independent. Money for other wants was generally procurable, with or without unpleasant dunning of her parents. She lived very little in their home in Wiltshire, a beautiful and stately young woman of fashion being a decorative adjunct to smart country-house parties. In London, if she sighed for a more extensive establishment and a more luxurious style of living, it was what she always had done. She had hated the furnished house or flat and the livery-stable carriage ever since her first season. In the same way she had always considered the omission from her scheme of life of a yacht and a villa at Cannes and diamonds at discretion as a culpable oversight on the part of the Creator. But the sordid makeshift of existence to which she was condemned was not a matter of yesterday. In spite of the financial embarrassments of the maternal fable she had noticed no cutting down of customary expenditure. Her father still played the fool on the stock exchange, her mother still attired herself elaborately and disdained to eat otherwise than à la carte at expensive restaurants, and she, Norma, went whithersoever the smart set drifted her. She had nothing to do with the vulgarity of financial embarrassments.

As to the question of marriage she was as fully determined as her mother that she should make a brilliant match. She had had two or three disappointments—the unwary duke, for instance. On the other hand she had refused eligibles like Lord Wyniard out of sheer caprice.

The only man who had given her a moment's stir of the pulses, a moment's thought of throwing her cap over the windmills, was a young soldier in the Indian Staff Corps. But he belonged to her second season, before she had really seen the world and grasped the inner meaning of life. Besides, her mother had almost beaten her; and in an encounter between the dragon who guarded the gold of her daughter's affections and the young Siegfried, it was the hero that barely escaped destruction; he fled to India for his life. Norma lost all sight and count of him for three years. Then she heard that he had married a schoolfellow of hers and was a month-old father. It was with feelings of peculiar satisfaction and sense of deliverance that she sent her congratulations to him, her love to his wife, and a set of baby shoes to the child. She had cultivated by this time a helpful sardonic humour.

There was now Morland King, within reasonable distance of a proposal. Her experience detected the signs, although little of sentimentality had passed between them. He was young, as marrying men go—a year or two under forty—of good family, fairly good-looking, very well off, with a safe seat in Parliament being kept warm for him by a valetudinarian ever on the point of retirement. Norma meant to accept him. She contemplated the marriage as coldly and unemotionally as King contemplated the seat in Parliament. But through the corrupted tissue of her being ran one pure and virginal thread. She used no lures. She remained chastely aloof, the arts of seduction being temperamentally repugnant to her. Knowledge she had of good and evil (a euphemism, generally, for an exclusive acquaintance with the latter), and she was cynical enough in her disregard of concealment of her knowledge; but she revolted from using it to gain any advantage over a man. At this period of her life she set great store by herself, and though callously determined on marriage condescended with much disdain to be wooed. Her mother, bred in a hard school, was not subtle enough to perceive this antithesis. Hence the constant scenes of which Norma bitterly resented the vulgarity. “We pride ourselves on being women of the world, mother,” she said, “but that does n't prevent our remembering that we are gentlefolk.” Whereat, on one occasion, Mr. Hardacre, in his flustering, feeble way, had told Norma not to be rude to her mother, only to draw upon himself the vials of his wife's anger.

He came in now, during the silence that had fallen on the two women—a short, stout, red-faced man, with a bald head, and a weak chin, and a drooping foxy moustache turning grey. He was bursting with an interminable tale of scandal that he had picked up at his club—a respectable institution with an inner coterie of vapid, middle-aged dullards whose cackle was the terror of half London society. It is a superstition among good women that man is too noble a creature to descend to gossip. Ten minutes in the members' smoking-room of the Burlington Club would paralyse the most scandal-mongering tabby of Bath, Cheltenham, or Tunbridge Wells.

“We were sure she was a wrong 'un from the first,” he explained in a thick, jerky voice to his listless auditors. “And now it turns out that she was in thick with poor Billy Withers, you know, and when Billy broke his neck—that was through another blessed woman—I'll tell you all about her by'm bye—when Billy broke his neck, his confounded valet got hold of Mrs. Jack's letters, and how she paid for 'em's the cream of the story—”

“We need not have that now, Benjamin,” said Mrs. Hardacre, with a warning indication that reverence was due to the young.

“Well, of course that's the end of it,” replied Mr. Hardacre, in some confusion.

But Norma rose with a laugh of hard mockery.

“The valet entered the service of Lord Wyniard, and now there's a pretty little divorce case in the air, with Jack Dugdale as petitioner and Lord Wyniard as corespondent. Are n't you sorry, mother, I did n't marry Wyniard and reform him, and save society this terrible scandal?”