THE LONDONERS

AN ABSURDITY

BY

ROBERT HICHENS

AUTHOR OF

"THE GARDEN OF ALLAH," "THE FRUITFUL VINE," ETC.

COPYRIGHT EDITION

LEIPZIG

BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ

1912

CONTENTS.

THE LONDONERS.

[CHAPTER I.]

"NOT ELLIMAN."

Mrs. Verulam came into her drawing-room slowly and rather wearily. It was a sultry afternoon in May—indeed, the papers were quite in a ferment about the exceptional heat-wave that was passing over London; and a premature old General, anxious apparently to be up to time, had just died of tropical apoplexy in Park Lane. Possibly it was the weather that had painted the pallor on Mrs. Verulam's exceedingly pretty face. Beneath her mist of yellow hair her dark-grey eyes looked out pathetically, with the sort of pathos that means nothing in particular—the grace of an indefinite sorrow. She was clad in a pale-pink tea-gown, elaborately embroidered in dull green and gold, and she was followed by her maid, the faithful Marriner, whose hands were full of bright-coloured cushions. The windows of the drawing-room, which faced Park Lane, and commanded a distant view of the Parade on Sunday mornings, stood open, and striped awnings defied the sunbeams above them. London hummed gently in the heat; and an Admiral in the next house but one might almost be heard ordering his valet, with many terrible expressions of the sea, to get out his ducks, and be quick about it.

"Oh, Marriner!" said Mrs. Verulam, in the voice which all self-respecting men worshipped and compared with Sarah Bernhardt's—"oh, Marriner, how terribly hot it is!"

"The heat is severe, ma'am, for the season of the year," replied Marriner.

Mrs. Verulam sat down on an immense sofa near the window, and Marriner proceeded to bank her up with cushions. She glanced into a tiny hand-mirror which hung by a silver chain at her side.

"I am as pale as a Pierrot," she murmured.

"I beg pardon, ma'am."

"Pierrot, Marriner, is the legendary emblem of—but it is too hot for history."

Marriner, who was ever athirst for information, looked disappointed. She had been on the eve of improving her mind, but the heat precluded the sweet processes of further education, so the poor soul was downcast. She bit her lip, secretly imitating a well-known actor whom she worshipped, and wondered why life is so full of misery. Mrs. Verulam lay back on the cushions and glanced wearily around. Her eyes fell upon an oval table that stood near by. Various notes and cards lay on it, and an immense bouquet of dull-red roses.

"What is all that?" she asked, with a fatigued gesture towards the table.

Marriner wheeled it forward till it stood beside the sofa, then she lifted the bouquet and turned it in her hands.

"From Mr. Hyacinth Rodney, ma'am," she said.

A thin smile curved Mrs. Verulam's lips. She took the flowers, glanced at their dusky beauty, touched their velvet petals with her fingers, then laid them down carelessly.

"They are remarkably fine specimens, ma'am," said Marriner. "I often think——" she checked herself.

"Yes, Marriner; what do you think?"

"That we are like the flowers, ma'am: we fade and die so soon."

"Dear me, Marriner, what original thoughts you have!"

"I can't help them coming, ma'am. They seem to take me like a storm, ma'am."

"Oh! more cards: General and Mrs. Le Mesurier, Lord Simeon, the Prince and Princess of Galilee—what curious names people are born with!—Mr. Marchington. Why will so many people call?"

"I think they wish to see you, ma'am."

"I know. But that's just it, Marriner; that is the problem."

"I like problems, ma'am."

"Then resolve me this one. Why do people with immortal souls spend their lives in leaving tiny oblongs of pasteboard on other people with immortal souls whom they scarcely know and don't care a straw about? Why do they do it, Marriner?"

"Might I speak, ma'am?"

"I ask you to."

"I don't feel convinced that their souls are immortal, ma'am. I have my doubts, ma'am."

"Then you are in the fashion. But that makes it all the more strange. If we have only one life, Marriner, why should we waste it in leaving cards?"

"Very true, ma'am."

A certain excitement had crept into Mrs. Verulam's grey eyes. She raised herself on her cushions dramatically.

"Marriner, we are fools!" she cried; "that is why we do it. That is why we do a thousand things that bore us—a thousand things that bore other people. Give me all those notes."

Marriner collected the envelopes which lay upon the table and handed them respectfully to her mistress. Mrs. Verulam tore them open one by one.

"'To have the honour to meet the Prince and Princess of——' 'Lady Emily Crane at home; conjuring and acrobats. Eleven o'clock.' 'Mr. Pettingham at home; the Unattached Club. Views of the Holy Land and a lecture. Supper, midnight.' 'Lady Clondart at home. Dancing. Eleven o'clock.' 'Mrs. Vigors at home. Sartorius will exhibit his performing panthers. Ten o'clock.' 'Sir Algernon Smith at home. The Grafton Galleries. Madame Melba will sing. Eleven o'clock.' 'Mrs.——' Oh! I can't open any more. Heavens! are we human, Marriner? Are we thinking, sentient beings that we live this life of absurdity? Acrobats, conjurors, the Holy Land, panthers, Melba. Thus do we deliberately complicate our existence, already so complicated, whether we will or no. Ah, it is intolerable! The season is a disease. London is a vast lunatic asylum."

"Oh, ma'am!"

"And we, who call ourselves the smart world, are the incurable patients. Give me something to read. Let me try to forget where I am and what I am."

She lay back trembling. Marriner handed to her the World. She opened it, and her eyes fell upon these words: "I really think that Mrs. Verulam is the smartest woman in town. Her mother, Lady Sophia Tree, is famous for her knowledge of the art of dress, but Mrs. Verulam surpasses even Lady Sophia in her understanding of what to wear and how to wear it. I met her driving in the Park on Friday in an exquisite creation of cinnamon canvas with touches of blue, that suited her dark-grey eyes and her exquisite golden-brown hair to——"

"Marriner, why do you give me this to read?"

"I thought you had not seen it, ma'am."

Mrs. Verulam threw the paper down.

"Leave me, Marriner," she said in a low voice.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Wait. Is Mrs. Van Adam's room quite ready for her?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Take Mr. Rodney's roses, unfasten them, and put them in vases about the room."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Now spray me, Marriner."

Marriner took up a silver bottle, pressed a minute bladder, and scattered a shower of tiny scented drops over the pretty face as pale as a Pierrot; then, carrying the burden of dull-red roses, she withdrew from the room as softly as a cat.

Mrs. Verulam lay back on the coloured cushions, and closed her eyes so tightly that her forehead was wrinkled in a frown. The Admiral who lived in the next house but one was just setting bravely forth in his ducks, on which the sun shone approvingly. At the doors of many houses stood carriages, and many pretty women were stepping into them dressed for dining, concerts, or drums. The Row was fairly full of crawlers, whose dull eyes—glazed with much staring—glanced eternally around in search of food for gossip. Flowers flamed along the Park railings from the Corner to the Marble Arch, and a few unfashionable people, who were fond of plants, examined the odorous pageant in botanical attitudes that seemed strangely out of place in London. And the concert of the town continued. Its music came faintly to the ears of Mrs. Verulam, as it had come now for so many seasons. For she was twenty-nine, and had not missed a London summer since she was eighteen, except that one, eight years ago, which followed the sudden death of a husband with whom she had never been really in love.

Lying there alone, Mrs. Verulam said to herself that she was utterly sick of this concert, which each succeeding year persistently encored. She heard the distant wheels, and thought of the parties to which they were rolling. She heard the very remote music of a band; and that reminded her of the quantities of cotillons she had led, and of the innumerable faces of men that she had wiped out of mirrors with her lace handkerchief. How curiously they flashed and faded on the calm surface of the imperturbable glass, their eyes full of gay or of languid enquiry, their mouths gleaming in set society smiles!

Was it a property of cotillon mirrors, she wondered, to make all men look alike, neat, vacuous, self-satisfied? Half unconsciously she fluttered her tiny handkerchief as if she passed it across an invisible mirror. And now the surface was clean and clear, empty of masks for a moment. Then there was borne on it a big and bearded countenance. It seemed too large almost to be called a face. Hair flourished upon that countenance as prickles upon the porcupine. Large and ox-like eyes of a reddish-brown hue stared heavily out beneath brows that seemed like thatched eaves. Mrs. Verulam, in fancy, gazed upon this apparition in the mirror and laid her handkerchief aside. She would not wipe the red-brown eyes, the thick lips, the intrusive hair away. And then, suddenly, she laughed to herself, thinking of the dancing sequel to her deed of the cotillon, and of what it would be like in reality.

"Poor fellow!" she thought. "He would die in a valse. That is why I will not, dare not, wipe him out of the mirror from which I long to eliminate for ever the other faces."

And she thought of a far-off cabbage-garden somewhere on the outskirts of Berkshire, where life was surely peaceful, contemplative, and more worthy than in London. Fruits ripened there. Pears hung upon the tree and cherries slept in the sun. And the bearded face was often bent wrathfully above the hapless snail or erring maggot. At least, so Mrs. Verulam supposed. For she had never yet visited this sweet Eden of vegetables and manly labours. Some day, perhaps, she would go there. Some day! Some day! She opened her eyes and glanced up. They fell upon a pet of hers, a ruddy squirrel with a bushy tail, which scrambled in a revolving cage such as squirrels are supposed to love. Persistently the squirrel scrambled and the golden cage went round. Mrs. Verulam watched it, and her mind sprang to the obvious comparison. She saw London, the cage, herself the squirrel turning in it and longing to be free. And how she pitied the squirrel! What woman has not bowels of mercy for herself? She had revolved through so many seasons. Would she revolve through many more? Suddenly an expression of stern resolve came into the pretty Pierrot face clouded by bright hair. Mrs. Verulam thrilled with a great determination. Her manner was almost Napoleonic as she sat upright and clasped her hands together in a gesture of negation. She swept the cards on the table into a heap. She flung the notes of invitation aside. She sprang up and went over to the squirrel. He peered at her with his bright and beady little eyes.

"Tommy," she said, "listen to me. Do you know that you are like me? Do you know that I, too, am in a cage—that I, too, am turning and turning in a prison that is monotonous as a circus, in which everyone and everything must go round and round and round? I am so tired of it, Tommy; so tired of my cage. And yet, do you know, half the world is trying to get into it—and can't! Isn't that absurd? To try to get into society! Oh, Tommy——"

"Mrs. Van Adam!" said the footman at the door.

Mrs. Verulam turned as a tall, slim, boyish-looking creature in a red gown and a red-and-black hat came upon her with a sweet rush and took her in strong arms of affection.

"Dearest Daisy!"

"Darling Chloe!"

The footman looked pleased beneath his powder. Perhaps it was his agreeable smile which drew Mrs. Verulam's attention to him.

"Francis, say 'not at home' this afternoon," she murmured, with a gesture of dismissal.

"Yes, ma'am."

And Francis took his smile below-stairs, leaving the two friends alone. They stood for a moment by the squirrel's cage, watching each other with kind eyes that were yet alight with sparks of criticism. For all sweet women are critics, just as all sweet babies are like their fathers. The laws of nature are so strangely immutable. Then Mrs. Van Adam said, in a low contralto voice that was almost manly:

"I believe you are sweeter here than you were in Paris. How do you manage it? America would love you."

"I am not a Duke."

"That's true, but you would come right next."

"And you! Oh, Chloe, in that hat! But why is your hair cut short?"

Mrs. Van Adam laughed, and took off the scarlet and black hat.

"It was so hot on our plantation in Florida that I wanted to have as little about me as possible," she said.

"It makes you look just like a boy!"

"I'll grow it again here."

"Have you brought a maid?"

"No. I want to engage a London woman."

"Come and sit down. It is so strange for us to be together again. How many years is it since we were schoolgirls in Paris, getting education instead of gowns? And now——"

"You're a little widow, and the darling of London!"

"And you——By the way, how is Mr. Van Adam?"

"I am told he is quite well."

Mrs. Verulam raised her eyebrows.

"You are told, Chloe!" she said. "You are told!"

But Mrs. Van Adam was looking about the room with eager dark eyes.

"Your house is delicious!" she exclaimed. "I shall love to be here. Florida is lonely, and New York is—well, it has no aristocracy. And a capital without an aristocracy is like a town man without a silk hat. The toilet is incomplete. It was cool of me to cable you that I was coming. But you don't mind?"

"I am delighted. I have been wanting you to come for so long."

"And the season is just beginning?"

The weariness that had died in Mrs. Verulam's eyes sprang up in them again.

"Yes," she said; "it is just beginning."

Mrs. Van Adam made an ecstatic gesture. There was in her manner something of the vivacity of a colt: a frolicsome readiness for bodily movement, a quickness of limb that goes with gaiety, and a sweeping appreciation of the luxury of joy. Her eyes danced and brimmed over with light, and expectation of pleasure turned her appearance almost to that of a child who sees a vision of sugar-plums.

"That's lucky!" she cried. "Daisy, you don't know how I feel about your society; I have never been in it, but I have heard of it ever since I was a girl in Paris. You told me a little then."

"I knew very little then."

"Well, you told me just all you knew, and it sounded perfect."

"Chloe, when I was in Paris I was a little fool." But Mrs. Van Adam did not seem to hear the remark; she was bent upon speaking, and she went on: "Since then I've heard the travellers' tales of the Holy Land."

"The Holy Land!"

"London, dear. Some of our travellers abuse the old town, it's true; but they want to go back to it when April comes round, all the same. I think it gets into their blood, as the East gets into the blood of lovers of the picturesque; anyhow, it's got into mine. Daisy, you think I'm pretty still, don't you?"

"Pretty—yes; lovely with that short hair."

"And I'm immensely rich, of course; and I'm an American. Give me London to play with."

"But, my dear Chloe——"

"Yes. Now do. You can give it me. I know that. Our papers are full of your triumphs. You are the pet of society."

"Nonsense, Chloe!"

"But you are; you go everywhere."

"Yes; that is why I am so tired—that is why——"

"Let me go with you. Oh, Daisy, if you only knew how I long to get into London society!"

"Oh, Chloe, if you only knew how I long to get out of it!"

Mrs. Van Adam looked quite petrified by this exclamation. She drew her black brows together, screwed up her eyes, and scrutinised Mrs. Verulam with a merciless curiosity, such as a child displays before a strange and ineffable monster. Her scrutiny was silent, exhaustive, and apparently conclusive, since she closed it with the remark:

"You little joker, you haven't altered a bit since Paris!" Then, without giving Mrs. Verulam time to assert the truth of her announced feeling, Chloe turned to the table that stood beside the sofa: "Cards!" she said. "What a heap! All yesterday's?"

"Or to-day's."

"And notes—invitations?"

Mrs. Verulam nodded.

"May I look at them?"

"If you like. They're stupid things."

"Stupid! They beat diamonds." She took one up with reverent fingers. "'To have the honour to meet the Prince and Princess of——'"

Mrs. Van Adam read the words aloud in a voice that shook with emotion. Her eyes glowed behind a veil of moisture as they gazed upon the sacred pasteboard. It seemed for a moment as if she would bend her pretty head and touch it with her pretty lips; but she was a woman of strong character, and she refrained. What that silent struggle cost her the world will never know. After a period of profound silence she laid the card down gently, as one lays down a blessed relic. Then she sprang upon Mrs. Verulam and passionately embraced her.

"Oh, you darling!" she cried.

Before Mrs. Verulam could either acquiesce or protest Mrs. Van Adam had fallen upon the other invitations, as the drowning man falls upon the straw. She rifled the big envelopes of their contents. She tore Lady Emily Crane from her modest concealment, brought Sir Algernon Smith into the sunlight in the twinkling of an eye, laid Lady Clondart upon the table like a Patience, and put Mrs. Vigors on end against a flower-vase. The acrobats, the conjuror, the Holy Land, Madame Melba, the panthers of Sartorius—she faced them all, and drew a deep breath that was like a sob. Heaven opened out before her, and she lay back against a cushion prostrated and overwhelmed. In great moments such as these the human creature feels its smallness, and hears the mighty inexorable pulse beating in the huge and mysterious heart of life. These two women were pale and silent while you could have counted a hundred, the one laid low by ennui, occasioned by the same cause that laid the other low by ecstasy. Thus do even the closest friends differ. At last Mrs. Van Adam lifted herself up, and spoke in a low voice as of an Anglican in Westminster Abbey:

"Take me with you, Daisy—oh, do—do take me with you!"

"Where?"

"To Lady Emily Crane's, to Mr. Pettingham's, to Lady Clondart's, Mrs. Vigors', Sir Algernon Smith's, and—oh, Daisy!—to have the honour to meet the—you know, I can't say it. Let me see the panthers, and the Holy Land, and the Prince and Princess."

"They are not in the least good-looking."

"The panthers, Daisy?"

"No; the royalties. Those I mean—they are foreign and plain."

"That doesn't matter. It is so unnecessary for them to take the trouble to be handsome; for us it's quite—quite different."

Mrs. Verulam smiled; but the smile flitted, and the bored expression returned.

"If I did take you, Chloe, you would find it all terribly dull, especially Mr. Pettingham's."

"Doesn't he know good people—not religious, you know, but good?"

"Oh yes—everybody in London; but his parties are dreadful. You sit in the pitch dark while he describes to you how he discovered Venice or Vienna, and shows you the Lido or Lowndes Square, upside down as often as not. His coloured slides are really agonising."

"But his guests?"

"Oh! they're all right, of course, so far as any—any smart people are all right."

Mrs. Van Adam was about to utter a fervent protest, but Mrs. Verulam displayed sudden energy. She sat straight up, planted her little feet firmly on a tiny satin footstool, clasped her soft hands, and said:

"No; hear me, Chloe. You don't understand things. It is my duty to tell you what this London society is. It is a cage, like the cage of my squirrel Tommy, and those who are in it are captives—yes, yes, wretched captives—for I speak of us, of the women. The men are not so bound. They can escape from a ball directly after supper without being thought greedy; they can leave invitations unanswered, and be considered well-bred; they can forget a dinner-party, and retain respect; they can commit a thousand outrages, and yet remain gentlemen. How it is so nobody knows, but everybody knows that it is so; but we—we women! What is London society to us?"

"Heaven."

"Purgatory. We have to look pretty when we should like to rest and be quietly plain; we have to talk when we have nothing to say to men who talk and have nothing to say to us; we have to take exercise—in the way of smiling—that would knock up an athlete; we have to be made love to——"

"Charming! Exquisite!"

"When we long to be left alone with our neuralgia, and to listen to music when all our nervous system is quivering for silence. We have to flirt through 'Tristan' and laugh through 'Lohengrin.' We have to eat when we are not hungry, watch polo when we are longing for sleep, go to Ranelagh instead of to bed, and stand like sheep in a pen for hours at a stretch."

"Yes, but the other sheep!"

"All baa in the same way and on the same note; all jump over the same imaginary fence, because one has jumped over a real one; are all branded with the same mark, washed in the same pool and shorn with the same scissors."

"Mercy, darling! Are you a farmer?"

A tender smile dawned in Mrs. Verulam's eyes.

"No," she murmured softly. "It was James Bush who taught me all about sheep."

"James Bush!"

"Yes. If you want to stop a ewe from coughing——"

"Daisy!"

Mrs. Verulam flushed a lovely rose colour.

"His knowledge is wonderful," she cooed. "He cured a calf which had the staggers with a preparation of his own—not Elliman."

"Who is he?"

"Some day I'll tell you; but it was not Elliman, and it was more effective."

And she fell into a beautiful reverie—one of those strange and mysterious trains of thought so apt to be suggested by an embrocation.

[CHAPTER II.]

BOSWELL AS CHAPERON.

But Mrs. Van Adam cared nothing for such high matters. Though a charming, she was perhaps not strictly an intellectual woman. And, besides, at the moment she was full of purpose.

"Daisy—Daisy dear!" she cried, gently and persuasively shaking her dreaming friend. "Is Mr. Bush in society?"

Mrs. Verulam turned pale.

"He—never!" she exclaimed.

"Oh," said Mrs. Van Adam, losing all interest in him, "then don't let us talk about him any more. But, Daisy, you will—you will take me out, won't you? You can, I know."

"Yes, I can. People will like you. But——"

"Then it's settled. Oh, how happy I am!"

She sprang up and almost danced round the room.

"But, Chloe, only for the next two months, or indeed less. For you must know that I have come to a great resolution."

Chloe choked a pirouette, which left her posed on tiptoe, with the skirt of her red gown swinging like a poppy in a wind.

"What is it?"

"Simply that this season is my last. Wait!" She held up one hand to check her friend's exclamation. "And," she added, "that I shall leave town at least by the first of July, if not sooner."

Chloe's face fell for a moment. But then she recovered from the shock.

"The first of July. Oh, by that time I shall know everybody, and——"

"Be as weary of everybody as I am."

"Be able to manage for myself. Besides, you darling, society won't let you leave it."

At these words Mrs. Verulam's face became almost as deplorable in expression as that of an undertaker who is obliged by cruel circumstance to attend to business on a Bank Holiday.

"That is what I fear," she said. "That is the terror which pursues me night and day. But it must, Chloe—it shall! And yet nobody knows—except those who have tried it—how terribly, how appallingly difficult it is to get out of society. To get into it is nothing. There are a thousand ways of doing that. Be a German Jew or a brewer, and you are there. I knew a man who got into it by merely going out to South Africa and coming back at once in the disguise of a millionaire. And he only spent a couple of hours at Cape Town. But once you are in society and popular, the cage-door is shut. And then what can the squirrel do?"

Tears flooded her dark grey eyes. Chloe pressed her friend's hand with forced sympathy for a misfortune which she found it difficult to understand. Mrs. Verulam cleared her throat and continued:

"I have made many attempts, but each one seems to give me a more secure footing in the great world. Once I lost all my money."

"What?"

"Gave out that I had, you know."

"And what happened?"

"Oh, it was so dreadful. My acquaintances rallied round me. Have you ever been rallied round?"

"I don't know that I have."

"It is most fatiguing. It is worse than the Derby, although, of course, you avoid the coaches. Another time I tried to become unfashionable—did my hair on the nape of my neck, wore a pelerine and elastic-sided boots."

"Surely they let you go then?"

"No. On the contrary, the Park was full of pelerines, and you met elastic-sided boots everywhere, even at Marlborough House."

"Marlborough House! You visit there?"

"Oh, naturally! Then, as a last resource, I took a really desperate step."

"What was that?"

"I went to live in St John's Wood."

Mrs. Verulam gazed firmly at Mrs. Van Adam, as if expectant of a fit on her friend's part. But Mrs. Van Adam merely repeated:

"St. John's Wood! Where is that?"

"Well, where it oughtn't to be, you understand."

"Oh!"

The word expressed mystification. Chloe was evidently at sea. Mrs. Verulam did not shed light through the clouds, but continued rapidly:

"The only effect of that was that I founded a colony."

"I thought only Mr. Chamberlain did that sort of thing."

"You don't understand. I mean that others followed me there, instead of leaving me there. Lady Crichton came to Selina Place. Lord Bray and his girl settled in Upsilon Road, and the old Duchess of Worcester sat down just round the corner in Maud Crescent. Oh, it was monstrous!"

Chloe's eyes shone.

"What would I give to be you?" she cried. "A Duchess sitting down just round the corner for one! How glorious!"

She spoke as Wagnerians of "Parsifal," and at that moment she worshipped her friend. But Mrs. Verulam made a petulant moue and said, almost with acrimony:

"I really believe there is only one way in which I could do what I wish; that is, without going to live in some other country, which I don't care to do."

"What way is that?"

"If I were to compromise myself seriously. Now, if I were married, I should have a weapon against the assaults of society."

"I don't quite see how."

"Dear Chloe, really you are not quite clever. I could be divorced, don't you see?"

A shadow came suddenly into Mrs. Van Adam's dark and boyish face.

"Divorced," she faltered. "Would—would that help you much?"

"Help me? It would save me. Nothing further would be needed. I should be out of everything at once, and in the most perfect peace and quiet."

The shadow deepened perceptibly, and Mrs. Van Adam moved rather uneasily on her sofa. However, she made no further remark, and Mrs. Verulam continued:

"Circumstances render that route to what I long for one which I can't take. And besides, in any case, I doubt if I should have been equal to it. For I was born respectable, and I shall certainly remain so. Yet, do you know, Chloe, if there were any way—if only I could compromise myself in the eyes of the world without compromising myself in my own eyes, I would do it. I would do anything to get out of my cage."

"As I would do anything to get into it."

Mrs. Verulam sighed deeply, put her handkerchief to her eyes, took it down, and then seemed with an effort of will to recover herself and to dismiss the problem that perplexed her. For she sat in a more flexible attitude, and, turning to Chloe, said ingenuously:

"And now, dear, about Mr. Van Adam."

Chloe jumped, and Mrs. Verulam, observing this, continued:

"Tell me all about him, when he will follow you, how happy you are together, and why he did not accompany you."

"Well, you see," Mrs. Van Adam said rather faintly, "his oranges."

"Oranges?"

"Yes. You know he grows them on a gigantic scale."

"Well?"

"And—and they can't always be left."

"Chloe, remember I was at school with you in Paris."

The words were very simple, but Mrs. Verulam uttered them without simplicity, and Chloe flushed quickly.

"I know," she said. "But it is—it is true. Oranges require a great deal of looking after."

"Oh, dear, if you prefer to keep me in the dark, of course I sha'n't say another word. Now I am sure you would like to see your room, so I shall ring for Marriner."

Mrs. Verulam leaned forward to touch the bell, but Chloe suddenly sprang up, sat down close beside her, and took her hand.

"You are right, Daisy. It's not the oranges."

"Of course not."

"No. It—I—Mr. Van Adam——"

"Yes?"

"Mr. Van Adam and I have parted."

"Parted!"

"We are separated."

"Legally?"

"Yes. We are—divorced."

Mrs. Verulam kissed Chloe pitifully.

"Oh, my poor Chloe! And so soon! How dreadful to have to divorce one's husband almost before the honeymoon was over."

Chloe's cheeks flushed more darkly.

"How rapidly you jump to conclusions, Daisy!" she said, almost irritably. "I remember now you used to do the same thing in Paris."

"Jump! But——"

"I did not say I divorced Mr. Van Adam. Now did I? Did I? Oh, I do dislike these imputations!"

Mrs. Verulam opened her pretty mouth to gasp, shut it without gasping, and then remarked, severely: "I hope he divorced you for something American, Chloe."

"Now, what do you mean?"

"For one of those American actions that are considered culpable in married people in your country: wearing your hair the wrong colour, or talking without an American accent, or disliking clams or Thanksgiving Day, or something of that kind."

"No, it was not clams. Besides, I like them rather. No, Daisy, it was an—an English action I was divorced for."

Mrs. Verulam began to look exceedingly grave.

"English! Then it must have been something bad!"

"No, it wasn't! It was all a mistake. Mr. Van Adam was terribly jealous. You have never seen him, Daisy. But he is one of those men with a temperament. Never marry a man with a temperament—that's to say, if he loves you. And Huskinson did love me."

She drooped pensively. But Mrs. Verulam's severity of expression increased.

"A temperament!" she said. "Now, Chloe, please don't abuse a man for not being deformed. I'm afraid you've done something dreadful."

"I haven't. I've done nothing. But I wouldn't defend the case. I was too proud. Huskinson——"

"Why is your husband's name Huskinson?"

"Ah! that's one of the things I've often and often wondered. It does seem so unnecessary. I feel that, too."

She checked the natural tendency to muse created by this strange problem, and went on:

"At first we were only pleasantly unhappy together. I liked his fury, and when he was good-tempered I bitterly resented it, and tried to check it by every means in my power. I generally succeeded in doing so. We women can do these things, you know, Daisy; and that's something."

"Yes."

"But as time went on, Huskinson——"

"I wonder why that's his name," Mrs. Verulam murmured uncontrollably.

"Got so accustomed to being angry that it became very monotonous. There was no variety in him at all. And one does look for variety in a man."

"Not if he's a London man."

"Huskinson isn't."

"Oh, with his name—no! Go on, darling."

"We were in New York at first, you know. And while we were there it was all right. I like a man angry in the street very well, or in a hotel. It shows people he's really fond of you. But then we went to the oranges—Florida, you see. And it was understood between us that we were to live an idyllic life there. The climate was suited to that sort of thing, and Huskinson's——"

"I do wonder——"

"Bungalow was specially constructed for peace, with verandas and rocking-chairs and a pet monkey, all complete. It was pretty."

She sighed.

"I never saw a pretty monkey yet," said Mrs. Verulam meditatively.

"Boswell was."

"Who on earth was Boswell?"

"Huskinson's monkey. It fed out of his hand."

"How greedy!"

"He didn't think so. Well, I meant Huskinson to become good-tempered now. He had been angry for two months or more, and it was right there should be a little change. Besides, we were to be quite alone, we and Boswell, so that I didn't require him to be jealous, as I had in New York City. But Huskinson is the sort of man who can't stop when once he has got into the way of a thing. He must go right on with it, wherever he is. That isn't artistic. Now, is it, Daisy dear?"

"I suppose not—no."

"Well, in Florida he was just as he was in New York. That man would sit in a rocking-chair with Boswell on his knee or in his hair, and be as furiously jealous as Othello. Even that monkey couldn't soothe him. It was too monotonous. I told him so. But he didn't seem to see it. I said being abused and watching oranges grow was all right for a certain time, but if it continued for eternity I should wish I hadn't married."

"That was rather cruel."

"That was what he said. He beat Boswell with a cane, and cried, and told the men on the plantation that if I said such a thing again he should cut down their wages. That set them against me. And Boswell took a hatred for me, too. I was beginning to grow quite weary of it all when Bream Rockmetteller came."

"Bream Rockmetteller!"

"Huskinson's dearest chum, Bream Rock——"

"I do wonder——"

"——Metteller was to sympathise with Huskinson; that was why he was invited. He travelled nearly two thousand miles to do it, but as soon as he was in the bungalow Huskinson became furiously jealous of him. You see, Bream didn't think me ugly; that was his first mistake. Oh, how that man did blunder! He admired the way I put my clothes on too, and thought it suited me quite well to wear my hair short. In fact, he went from one crime to another—so Huskinson considered."

"Then, was Bream the——"

"Yes. Oh, Daisy, a little man with one of those beards you see in a nonsense book, and a voice that shook him when he spoke, it was so much too large for him, and feet as small as yours, and stocks and shares in all his pockets, and even up his sleeves. How could anyone suppose that I——"

"Then, why didn't you defend it?"

Chloe put her lips together. When she did that she looked like a very determined boy.

"Because I was in the right."

"I see," said Mrs. Verulam, accepting a good reason in the usual sweet womanly way.

"I was perfectly innocent. I had to sit with Bream while Huskinson was seeing about the oranges."

"Of course."

"And when Huskinson attacked Bream it was my duty to say that Bream was harmless."

"Certainly."

"But my doing this brought Huskinson to the verge of madness. He went away suddenly for a week."

"Leaving Bream?"

"Yes. And then he came back, and said that we had deceived him by being together alone."

"How unreasonable!"

"That the whole plantation was talking about us, and that Boswell was nothing at all in the way of a chaperon. This was too much. While Bream was in the billiard-room, arguing with Huskinson and locking up the revolvers, I packed my trunks, got into the buggy, and proceeded. I thought that my woman's dignity required it of me. The next thing was that Huskinson sued for a divorce. I wouldn't defend it, for I was real angry. Bream was down with fever. And the end of it was that Huskinson got the case."

"Dreadful!"

Chloe, who had been looking very emotional during the latter part of her tragic narrative, changed her expression to one of calm indifference at this remark.

"Why dreadful? I don't think so. It was all done very quietly, right away from New York. Nobody will hear of it over this way. Even in New York they don't know it, for Huskinson turned sulky when he'd done it, went back to his oranges, and won't say a word to anyone. Bream's still down with fever somewhere in California. And though he's got that big voice he scarcely ever speaks. Besides, I'm innocent."

She looked hard at Mrs. Verulam.

"Yes, dear; I know that."

Chloe winked away something that might have been the usual thing that is winked away on such an occasion. Then she said with a gay smile:

"So I've packed my trunks, and come over here to forget it all and have a good time."

Mrs. Verulam gazed at her meditatively, and said "Oh!"

Chloe, her narrative over, seemed to desire movement. She got up and wandered about the room in a slightly reckless manner, touching ornaments with fingers that seemed deliberately dare-devil, and examining pictures with eyes that were self-consciously bold. Occasionally she shot a side-glance towards Mrs. Verulam, who remained with her feet planted on the satin footstool in an attitude of profound and rather grievous thought. Presently, in her peregrinations, Chloe reached the World, which Mrs. Verulam had flung down in her wrath of ennui. Chloe bent and picked it up.

"Ah, this is your great paper!" she cried. "I love it. I want to see my name in it some day."

While she spoke, she had been idly turning the pages. And now she gave a great cry, such as Marguerite gives over the dead body of Valentine in the fourth act of "Faust."

Mrs. Verulam started round on her sofa, and saw that Chloe's face was pale as death, and that the World was fluttering upside down in her nerveless hand.

"Chloe, what is the matter? Are you ill? Oh, I must ring for Marriner!"

But Chloe pointed to the paper.

"Read—read!" she muttered.

Mrs. Verulam snatched the World from her, and read this innocent little paragraph:

"'A considerable sensation has been caused in the neighbourhood of Florida by the Van Adam divorce, the details of which have only just become generally known. They are, unfortunately, very unfavourable to the beautiful Mrs. Van Adam, from whom the famous orange-grower and millionaire has been freed by the action of the court. A great deal of sympathy is expressed for Mr. Van Adam, whose honeymoon had scarcely concluded when the sad circumstances arose which obliged him to condemn, not merely his wife, but also his trusted friend, Mr. Bream Rockmetteller, the well-known stockbroker. Mr. Van Adam is staying at present at his bungalow in the midst of his orange-groves in Florida. His only companion is said to be the monkey which used in former days to accompany him on all his wanderings.'"

"That's Boswell," Chloe murmured hysterically.

Mrs. Verulam laid the paper down rather impressively.

"Chloe," she said, "you can never get into the cage now, that is certain."

Chloe sobbed. It was a bitter moment for her. She looked at the invitation-cards. She thought of the panthers and of the Prince and Princess, and became rapidly, and very naturally, hysterical.

"Is it—oh, is it quite impossible?" she said in a broken voice.

"Quite. If you were a man, now!"

Chloe lifted her head.

"If you were a man," Mrs. Verulam continued, in the voice of a philosopher, "that paragraph might open the cage-door for you. London is very fond of wicked men—forgive me, darling!—of men who are supposed, and hoped, to be wicked. With your wealth, your history, and a different sex, you would be a great success this season."

"Oh, why am I not a man?"

"Marriner—she's my maid, and marvellously well informed about everything—Marriner might know. I can't tell."

"And I have been a man. How cruel it all is!"

Mrs. Verulam was really surprised this time. For a moment she thought that Chloe's brain was turned by Huskinson's action and its results.

"Chloe dear, collect yourself," she said firmly. "Pull yourself together, darling. Don't deceive yourself even for a moment You have always been what you are now—a woman."

"No, no!" Chloe repeated doggedly; "I was a man. They all thought so."

Mrs. Verulam became seriously alarmed.

"I think, dear, you had better lie down quietly, and put on a cold compress. I shall send you up some strong tea in a few minutes, and——"

"Don't be foolish, Daisy. I was a man at a fancy ball in Chicago once, just before I married Huskinson. I went in a man's ordinary morning costume, and took in everyone. Even Huskinson didn't know me! Ah, that suit—it was such a neat tweed, Daisy!—it reminds me of happy days. I carry it everywhere with me."

She spoke sentimentally, and Mrs. Verulam was led to observe:

"I'm afraid you love Bream—I mean Huskinson?"

"No, I don't; no, no!" Chloe said vehemently. "No, I don't!"

"Oh, I'm glad to hear it, under the circumstances."

"But naturally I look back to the days before—before——"

"Yes, yes, dear. I know, I know!"

Mrs. Verulam patted Chloe's hands gently. Then she smiled, and said:

"You should have come over in the tweed suit, Chloe, then London would have been at your feet."

She spoke without definite intention, merely anxious to tide over an awkward moment. She heard no strange echo of her remark replying from the future in tones to mock her. She saw no little cloud rising upon the horizon. She thrilled with no convulsive premonition of a marching destiny approaching stealthily with slippered feet. And when Chloe looked at her fixedly for the space of three minutes, and then said slowly, "Should I? Should I?" she thought nothing of it. Nor did she specially remark her friend's sudden absence of mind, or the expression of curious whimsicality that stole into her face. The human soul is sometimes strangely unobservant in great crises.

"Are you at home this afternoon?" Chloe remarked abruptly.

"No, not to anyone."

"I'm glad. Let me go upstairs and change my dress, and then I want to talk to you ever so much more. Oh, that horrible, wicked paragraph!"

Mrs. Verulam touched the bell. Francis answered it.

"Please send Mrs. Marriner to me," she said.

Francis retired smiling, and in a moment the faithful Marriner appeared sedately in the aperture of the door.

"Marriner," said Mrs. Verulam, "this is Mrs. Van Adam. I want you to take great care of her. She has come from Florida."

"A long distance, indeed, ma'am. I trust the oranges are doing well, ma'am?"

Chloe turned paler, and Mrs. Verulam said hastily:

"Never mind the oranges, Marriner. Mrs. Van Adam is going to engage a maid in London. Meanwhile I know you will see that she is perfectly comfortable in every way."

"Certainly, ma'am."

"Marriner will show you your room, Chloe; and tea will be ready as soon as you are."

Mrs. Van Adam followed the faithful Marriner towards the door. Reaching it, she looked back at Mrs. Verulam, exclaimed, "I am going to put on a tailor-made costume," and vanished.

Just as the door shut, Mrs. Verulam heard the voice of Marriner saying:

"I trust, ma'am, the stairs will not inconvenience you. In Florida I am aware that the one-storey residence and the ample veranda are quite the mode."

[CHAPTER III.]

NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE BUN EMPEROR.

When Mrs. Verulam was alone once more she fell into deep and earnest thought. She was a little pleased, a little vexed, a little agitated, a little excited, and a little perplexed. She found herself in a novel situation, that was also, in a degree, an awkward situation. An hour ago she had been sighing for a means of escape from society; she had even been yearning to be compromised, in order that she might be shunned, and, being shunned, might find that peace which she had so long desired. Now she was shut up with a divorced woman, whose story was told in the weekly issue of the best-known society paper of the day; and this divorced woman, innocent certainly, but guilty in the eyes of the world and of the law, was her intimate and old school friend, knew scarcely a soul in England except herself, and had arrived to make a long stay with her just as the season was beginning. Here was food for thought, indeed. That paragraph rendered it quite impossible for Mrs. Van Adam to obtain any footing whatever in society; that paragraph also rendered it quite impossible for Mrs. Verulam to introduce her to charming friends. If Mrs. Verulam stirred abroad with Chloe, the most awkward complications must ensue; if she stayed at home with her, people would call and introductions would be inevitable. As Mrs. Verulam sat there, it began to seem to her that Providence had at length heard her cry, and had made the necessary arrangements for her exit from society—at any rate, for one summer. If Chloe stayed on with her in Park Lane, she would—she could have no season at all. For even these dear friends who so clung to her, who rallied round her in her supposed poverty, who assumed pelerines and elastic-sided boots in her imitation, who even followed her into the wicked Wood, and there abode like disciples in the desert, even these would not be able to visit or to receive her when she had for close companion the now infamous, although so innocent, Mrs. Van Adam. Should she keep Chloe? That was the problem which Mrs. Verulam was now debating. The sacred duties of hospitality, the yet more sacred duties of friendship, ought surely to decide that question in the affirmative. And yet Mrs. Verulam could not hide from herself the fact that she had intended her exit from society—desired, certainly—to be made more gradually than was possible under the new circumstances so suddenly arisen. She had intended, as it were, to make an effective farewell speech, to see around her not a single dry eye while she made it, to hear the murmur of uncontrollable regret, and to note personally the devastation caused by her brilliant and unalterable decision, persisted in despite so many difficulties. She had, in fact, intended, like an actress, to have a good-bye season; but Fate seemed about to dispose matters otherwise. And so Mrs. Verulam bit her pretty lip and sighed a gentle sigh.

In the midst of these pathetic evolutions the drawing-room door opened, and James, the second footman, showed in a tall, thin, fiddle-faced man of about forty-two, whose rather plaintive eyes and agreeable expression quarrelled mildly with a sinister moustache of the tooth-brush persuasion, and whose neat black hair and soothing gait diffused around him an atmosphere of scented repose and aristocracy. This was Mr. Hyacinth Rodney, whose claim upon our notice is that he believes he loves Mrs. Verulam.

On seeing him Mrs. Verulam started, for she was "not at home," and to be forced by a careless flunkey to be what you are not, "doth work like madness in the brain." But James was gone, and Mr. Rodney was reposefully approaching. So Mrs. Verulam was true to her order and smiled at him.

"Thank you for your roses," she said, "a thousand times."

Mr. Rodney was seated. It would scarcely be true to say that he sat down, so imperceptibly, so noiselessly, so adroitly, was the manœuvre executed. He took Mrs. Verulam's hand into his as a botanist takes a wondrous orchid.

"Happy roses," he said, in a low voice full of music as soft as Berlioz's ballet of sylphs; "they came from Mitching Dean." Mitching Dean was Mr. Rodney's place in Hampshire. Almost everything he possessed, gave away, or thought much about, seemed to come from there. "But I did not come to be thanked for giving myself a pleasure," he added; "I came to bring glad tidings."

"I shall think of you as a herald angel."

"Flying ever to my heaven in Park Lane."

"Charming! But your tidings?"

"Are of Ascot, or, rather, of Sunninghill. My mission has been successful: the house is yours."

Mr. Rodney glanced at his long feet modestly. This was his way of concealing pride in his own resource and gratification at his own diplomacy.

"Ascot, Sunninghill!" Mrs. Verulam said, with an intonation of pretty bewilderment which was not assumed.

Mr. Rodney withdrew his eyes from his feet rather suddenly and looked at Mrs. Verulam.

"Surely you have not forgotten that in the early spring you commissioned me to get you Ribton Marches for the race week," he murmured, with a sort of soporific reproach.

"Oh! did I? Of course; now I remember."

"Only now?" He contrived a sigh that was an art product, and resumed: "I opened delicate negotiations about the matter on February the fourteenth, and have been proceeding carefully ever since. One false step would have been instant destruction."

"My dear Mr. Rodney——"

"Instant destruction," he repeated, with a slight sforzando, "owing to the temper of the owner, Mr. Lite, the Bun Emperor."

"The Bun Emperor!"

"He is universally named so by the children of the British Isles, for whom he—caters, I think they call it."

"Dear me! how many words there are in the dictionary that one never hears in society."

"Mercifully—most mercifully! Mr. Lite is a man of very peculiar proclivities. I have made a minute study of them in order to carry out your instructions successfully."

"It is most good and industrious of you."

"Oh, I shrink from nothing in such a cause. He is, I must tell you, a man of violent temper and enormous means, devoted to home life, and extremely suspicious of strangers."

"What a terrible combination of idiosyncrasies!"

"Precisely. My difficulty was to dislodge a man of such a character from his 'temple of domesticity,' as he calls it, even for one week. There were, I confess it, moments in which despair seized me, and I could have cried aloud, like an Eastern pilgrim, 'Allah has turned his face from me!'"

"I am quite ashamed to have given you so much trouble. Is that really what Eastern pilgrims say?"

"When the desert is waterless and the camels die like flies."

"Imitative even to the last. But, then, how did you ever persuade the—the Bun Emperor to leave his home? It sounds like the 'Arabian Nights.'"

Mr. Rodney looked at his feet again, and seemed to grow thin with self-appreciation, for he never swelled with pride, any rotund exhibition being against his nature.

"Well, after many attempts, I found that I could only manage the affair in one way. Mr. Lite is very susceptible to titles—for advertising purposes, you understand."

Mrs. Verulam's face was a mask of perplexity.

"In reference to his buns."

"In reference to his buns! I'm really afraid——"

"This was literally the only string I could play upon, the only hold I could obtain over his inordinate passion for what he calls 'the home.' As soon as I had made sure of the fact, I ventured"—his voice sank in a deprecatory diminuendo—"I ventured, I hope not unduly, to make a promise on your behalf."

"Indeed!"

"Indeed. I said that if Mr. Lite would consent to let 'the home' to you for the race week, I would persuade you to use your influence with Lady Sophia——"

"Mamma!"

"With regard to the—well, in fact, the buns. Did I go too far?"

"And what is poor mamma to do? I can't ask her to eat a bun, Mr. Rodney, I really can't do that."

Mr. Rodney's fiddle face reddened with horror at the idea.

"Pray, pray don't! Such a shocking notion would never have occurred to me. I trust that my natural delicacy could not go so far astray. No, I only pledged myself that you would persuade Lady Sophia to sign her name at the bottom of a word in praise—only a word—in praise of the buns. I have the form here with me."

Mr. Rodney took a silver case from his pocket, and extracted therefrom a sheet of note-paper.

"Mr. Lite drew this up under my supervision," he said. "It reads thus: 'I beg to say that I have every confidence in your buns. They look inviting on a counter, they should be nourishing, and they seem desirable in every respect. Your influence upon the digestions of our children is, I feel almost certain, such as will commend itself to all who have the desire ebullient within them to advance the cause of humanity.' Place for signature: 'Lady Sophia Tree.' I think Mr. Gladstone could scarcely improve upon that."

And Mr. Rodney again observed his boots.

"Mamma has only to sign that? She needn't eat anything?"

"Only to sign, I assure you."

"Then I am sure she will do it. She likes to see herself in print, and, as you know, has a fancy for authorship. You may have seen her name in the Pall Mall Magazine and The Lady's Realm?"

Mr. Rodney bent his head.

"Often. Then that is happily arranged. I am dining with Mr. Lite to-night at the Crystal Palace to clinch the matter finally."

Mrs. Verulam's eyes filled with tears.

"You are dining at the Crystal Palace for me? Oh, Mr. Rodney!"

For a moment she was quite overcome. Nor was he entirely unmoved, although, manlike, he rigidly controlled the expression of a feeling that did him honour. He cleared his throat twice, it is true, but when he spoke again his voice was perfectly calm and natural.

"You will send this by messenger to Lady Sophia?"

"I will."

"And now as to your Ascot house-party."

At these words Mrs. Verulam was recalled to all her perplexities, and she involuntarily murmured:

"Chloe Van Adam!"

"Ah!" said Mr. Rodney, manifesting sudden animation, "did I hear you say Van Adam? Then you recognised my style? You read my little paragraph?"

"Your style? Your little what?"

"My little word in The World this week with reference to that sad American matter."

"Oh, then it was you who put it in?"

"I have a friend in New York, Lord Bernard Roche, who sends me news of that world with which the White Star Line and the ties of brotherhood connect us. He wrote to me full of poor Huskinson's—as he calls him—matrimonial misfortunes."

"He calls him Huskinson, too?"

"Too! That is his name. In America they have names like that."

"And Bream?"

Mr. Rodney's face expressed a cultivated surprise.

"You know about Bream? Oh, but of course, in my paragraph I——"

"And Boswell? Oh!"

"You know about Bos—but I never mentioned its name in my——"

"Her Grace the Duchess of Southborough and the Lady Pearl McAndrew!" announced James.

Mrs. Verulam, whose mind was now fastened upon the presence of Chloe in the house, and her imminent advent into the room, rose up distractedly as two ladies slowly advanced, one smiling, and one on the contrary. The former was the Duchess, the latter was her only child. Her Grace was tall, elderly, large and respectable-looking. Lady Pearl was a trifle shorter, a trifle less elderly, a trifle narrower, and a trifle—but only a trifle—less respectable-looking. The family likeness was marked, and the Southborough family was not one in which a family likeness was an unmixed benefit.

"So glad to find you at home, dear Mrs. Verulam," the Duchess said suavely, greeting Mr. Rodney also with marked cordiality. "We quite thought you would have been out on such a lovely day. What do you say? What?"

This to James, who had suddenly returned into the room to whisper respectfully in the ducal ear.

"Not enough! An extra sixpence! Certainly not. Tell him to go."

Exit James.

"But I know," her Grace continued, "that you are quite independent of the weather. In that respect you are like Southborough. He always—— What? What do you say? He won't go?"

This to James, who had made a flushed re-entry accompanied by more emphatic whisperings.

"No, I sha'n't. Tell him so. Not another penny. We only took him from Whiteley's. He knows that. What?"

Whispers from James.

"It isn't more than two miles. No, no! Certainly not."

"Can I be of any service?" murmured Mr. Rodney, seeing the footman remaining blankly.

"Oh, thank you! It is only an extortionate cabman. If you will send him away."

"Certainly."

Mr. Rodney and James departed. The Duchess, the Lady Pearl and Mrs. Verulam sat down.

"Southborough always defies the weather. He is like—was it Ajax, Pearl? you ought to know."

"I quite forget," Lady Pearl said mournfully.

Mr. Rodney came in again.

"It is quite right. Lord Birchington has gone," he said.

"Birchington! You don't mean to tell me the fellow was my brother?"

"Yes."

"Oh, I fancied I knew his face. Then that quite accounts for the attempt at extortion. Birchington is always in difficulties, and I daresay cab-driving doesn't pay too well. I hope, Mr. Rodney, you didn't give in to his demands?"

"Well, really—he seemed so convinced, that I—just a sixpence, you know."

"Dear, dear! That's the way to become poor, Mr. Rodney. You ought to take more care of your money, and not let my worthless brother prey on you. It's only two miles—not a step more. I'm so glad you are back from St. John's Wood, Mrs. Verulam. You were so difficult to get at there—even by omnibus."

"It was rather far out."

"And then the neighbourhood is hardly—— However, the Duke likes it, so I mustn't say a word against it. I believe he had rooms there or something, when he was only an eldest son. And he's always going to see them, for 'auld lang syne,' you know. Yes, I will have some tea, thank you. No sugar! Gout, you know; gout! We all have it, even poor Pearl! That's what depresses her so much."

"No, mother, it is not the gout—it is the sorrows of life."

"We must all feel that at times, I am sure," said Mr. Rodney sympathetically.

"Not if we go to Carlsbad at regular intervals," said the Duchess, who was essentially a materialist. "But one can't always afford that."

"I would rather try a sisterhood," said the Lady Pearl.

"It would be cheaper," said the Duchess appraisingly.

"It would be more retired—most apart, mother. That is the point."

Mrs. Verulam glanced in an attracted manner at Lady Pearl.

"Ah," she said; "you, too, feel the hollowness of society?"

Mr. Rodney looked painfully shocked.

"Society hollow!" he almost whispered.

"As a drum," said Lady Pearl, in a sepulchral voice. "I envy the woman to whom its doors are closed. That Mrs. Van Adam, for instance, of whom everyone is talking."

Mrs. Verulam turned scarlet, and Mr. Rodney looked gratified.

"My little paragraph seems to have been read," he murmured.

"Pearl," said the Duchess severely, "what should you know about such a person? My dear, you forget yourself."

Mrs. Verulam gasped and looked towards the door, through which at every instant she expected to see Chloe enter the room.

"Oh, Duchess!" she said in agitated protest. "Perhaps, after all, there is something to be said on her side. Mr. Van Adam may have——"

"Huskinson Van Adam is a splendid fellow, from all I can gather," Mr. Rodney ventured to suggest, a little anxious lest Mrs. Verulam's unexpected charity should compromise her in the eyes of the Duchess. "I have been at some pains to learn the truth of the matter, and I am afraid that the evidence of the Crackers could leave no doubt in any unprejudiced mind."

"The Crackers, Mr. Rodney!" cried the Duchess in her loud voice. "What had the fifth of November to say to it?"

"Crackers, Duchess, answer to your Crofters in Florida, I believe."

"Really. How very absurd!"

"Oh, but," Mrs. Verulam interposed, losing her head in the agitation and apprehension of the moment, "it was Mr. Van Adam who set the Crackers, or Crofters, or whatever you call them, against his wife. Why, and even Boswell——"

She paused, confronted by faces of unutterable amazement. And in the pause the drawing-room door was flung open, the prim soprano voice of the faithful Marriner announced "Mr. Van Adam!" and in walked a dark young man in a tweed suit.

Mrs. Verulam half rose from her sofa, leaned one trembling hand upon the back of it, and, gasping quite audibly, stared at the figure in the doorway as a sceptic might stare when a ghost rises to convince him. The Duchess put up her eyeglasses with keen interest to take stock of the newcomer. The Lady Pearl looked decidedly less gouty than she had a moment before. And as for Mr. Rodney, he sat as if petrified with surprise at finding the veracity of his paragraph thus impugned in full publicity, and in his very presence. Meanwhile there was a sound of violent scrabbling upon the staircase as the faithful Marriner, for once entirely dismissed from composure, made haste to gain the seclusion of a back attic, in which she could go, without delay, into a supreme fit of hysterics. And the young gentleman in the tweed suit, his hands thrust into his pockets, surveyed the assembled multitude with eyes that seemed as if about to fall out of his head.

[CHAPTER IV.]

THE TWEED SUIT.

How long the silence lasted Mrs. Verulam was never able to determine. Nor in after-days could she remember by which member of the party it was broken. As a matter of fact, however, it was the young gentleman in the tweed suit who spoke first. He took his hands out of his pockets with a sort of deliberate carefulness, walked jauntily into the room, and sharply whispered, in passing near the sofa against which poor little Mrs. Verulam was hopelessly reared up:

"Introduce me as my husband!"

Mrs. Verulam's lips were dry. Her head swam, and she saw various shapes, extremely bright in colour, dancing a sort of appalling polka before her eyes. Gazing steadily at these dancing shapes, she said in a piercing voice:

"Duchess—Mr. Van Adam!"

Then she sat down upon the springy sofa in such wise that she moved several times up and down like a cork buoyed upon the waves of the sea. And all the time she thus emulated a cork she kept her eyes fixed upon the young man in the tweed suit, who appeared to rise and fall, or rather to elongate and to diminish in telescope fashion, while he bowed before the Duchess, and received in return a dignified and smiling salutation. But the sofa subsided into a calm, and Mrs. Verulam was obliged to collect herself. Mr. Rodney was addressing her in an excited murmur:

"I had no idea, no notion at all, that you knew Mr. Van Adam."

"Oh yes."

"Besides, I fully understood he was in Florida."

"Oh no."

"This makes my paragraph all wrong."

"Oh yes."

"It is really most unfortunate."

"Oh no."

Mrs. Verulam felt like a pendulum, and that she would go on helplessly alternating affirmatives and negatives for the next century or two. But Mr. Rodney, who, being of a very precise habit, was seriously upset by being given the lie direct—in tweed, too, on a London afternoon of May!—repeated "Oh no!" in accents of such indignant amazement that Mrs. Verulam was obliged to recover her equilibrium.

"Oh yes, I mean," she said. "Oh yes, yes, yes!"

This repetition signified the approach of hysteria. The young gentleman in the tweed suit rapidly intervened.

"My kind hostess's invitation lured me from my orange-groves," he said, in his deep contralto voice, fixing his large dark eyes with a hypnotic expression upon Mrs. Verulam.

"Oh," the Duchess said, "then you are staying with Mrs. Verulam?"

"Yes," said the young gentleman, still looking at Mrs. Verulam.

"Oh yes," she began feebly. "Oh yes, yes——"

"Might I ask for a cup of tea, Mrs. Verulam?" he exclaimed, in what might, with but slight exaggeration, be called a voice of thunder.

"Certainly," she answered, putting about fifteen lumps of sugar with a shaking hand into the nearest cup. "You don't take sugar, I think?"

"Gouty?" said her Grace. "Ah, you and Pearl would sympathise. Let me introduce you to my girl. Mr. Van Adam—Lady Pearl McAndrew."

Bows.

"I am not gouty, mother," Lady Pearl said, in her morose voice. "I am only melancholy. And that"—she addressed herself to the tweed suit—"is because I cannot, I will not, blind myself to the actual condition of the world I see around me."

"Oh, my dear," said the Duchess, "Carlsbad would cure you. But," she added to the tweed suit, "unfortunately, I can't afford to send her there just at present."

The Lady Pearl grew large with vexation, as people of sensitive nature will when, having elaborately surrounded themselves with an interesting atmosphere, they find it ruthlessly dissipated by a Philistine allusion to uric acid. She seemed about to make some almost apoplectic rejoinder when Mr. Rodney mellifluously chipped in.

"I believe in the climate of Florida gout is practically unknown," he said, speaking obliquely towards the tweed suit. "My friend, Lord Bernard Roche"—he paused, expectant of some eager exclamation from the person whom Lord Bernard in his letters called "poor old Huskinson." But none came. "Lord Bernard Roche, now in New York—City"—he again paused, and once more in vain—"tells me so."

His conclusion was a trifle flurried. When we don't get what we want, in conversation, we are apt to be put to confusion. Mr. Rodney looked very hard indeed at the tweed suit, and then, although not introduced, added to it:

"I think you know Lord Bernard? He tells me so in his very charming and entertaining letters."

"Oh yes—Lord Bernard—oh yes, certainly," exclaimed the tweed suit, with a sudden flaring vivacity.

"A very sympathetic nature," Mr. Rodney continued, in softest music. "I am sure that you have found it so. A man to go to confidently in any trouble."

"Oh, certainly. Most undoubtedly yes."

The Duchess had caught Mr. Rodney's gracious innuendo, and she now chimed in, with her most basso-profondo manner:

"Ah, Mr. Van Adam! but in London you must forget all your troubles. London is the most cheerful place imaginable."

"Oh, mother!"

"Yes, Pearl, it is for a healthy person. No doubt," to the tweed, "you are staying for the season?"

The tweed looked towards Mrs. Verulam, and then, after a perceptible pause, answered:

"Yes."

"Well, then," continued her Grace, who was aware of Huskinson Van Adam's millionaire propensities, "you will soon be quite cheerful again, I'll warrant. You have been over before, I suppose?"

"In Paris. I know Paris quite well, but not London."

"Paris is horrible," said the Lady Pearl. "The Bois de Boulogne makes me sick."

Mr. Rodney's smooth hair nearly stood on end. Hearing Paris decried was to his social and orthodox nature like blasphemy to the ears of an exceptionally pious Pope. Such sayings ran in his veins like ice-cold water, and almost gave him pneumonia. But, ere he could utter his illness, another personality was added to the group in Mrs. Verulam's drawing-room. This was a round and swart young man, with spectacles, short legs, and a conceited manner. Probably he was announced by the footman. But he seemed simply to be in the room, to have greeted everyone except the tweed suit, to have sat down, taken a cup of tea, and said, "Paris is the only place in the world!" before a person desirous of doing so could exclaim "Knife!"

Such was the rapidity of that ardent creature—Mr. Ingerstall, artist and egoist.

"Paris, I repeat," he reiterated, looking all round him, and speaking with a clipping utterance, "is the only place in the world."

And he began to drink his tea with extraordinary swiftness of absorption. No man on earth could assimilate a liquid in a shorter space of time than Mr. Ingerstall. In his hands the commonest actions assumed the dignity of feats. In his mouth the most ordinary remarks took on an aspect of Mount Sinai.

Mr. Rodney breathed again. Paris had found a defender. The Lady Pearl did not appear angry at being contradicted. She was accustomed to it, and custom is everything. She looked mildly at Mr. Ingerstall and said:

"Really!"

Mr. Ingerstall handed his cup to Mrs. Verulam in order that it might be refilled. Then, staring hard at the tweed suit, towards whom, as a stranger, he thought it fit to address his educational remarks, he cried:

"Really! There is no art except in Paris, no possibility of dining out of Paris, no good dressmaker beyond the limits of Paris, no perfect language except the perfect language of Paris, no gaiety, no nerve, no acting, no dancing, no love-making worthy of the name, but in Paris!"

"Then, Mr. Ingerstall, why on earth do you always live in London?" the Duchess said heavily.

"Because I find more caricatures there," said Mr. Ingerstall, taking the second cup of tea from Mrs. Verulam's hands with the manner of a conjurer at the head of his profession.

And again he stared at the tweed suit; then he turned to Mrs. Verulam and exclaimed:

"Please introduce me to that gentleman."

"Mr. Ingerstall—Mrs.—Mr. Van Adam," said Mrs. Verulam.

It seemed to her that everybody in London was in her drawing-room intent on the acquaintance of the hybrid friend who had brought her to such confusion. Nevertheless, she found some comfort in the fact that, so far, the tweed suit was accepted as genuine. But Mr. Ingerstall's eyes were terribly sharp; and, then, he wore spectacles. And what can be hidden from a vision naturally acute, and aided by glasses of enormous power? Mrs. Verulam trembled.

"You know Paris?" said Mr. Ingerstall to the tweed suit.

"Yes; quite well."

"You agree with me, then?"

"Certainly," said the tweed suit, moving rather uneasily under the piercing gaze of the artist.

Mr. Ingerstall's swart face was irradiated with a triumphal grin, which was distinctly simian. He turned to the Duchess: "There, your Grace," he said; "you see there are others of my opinion."

"Ah! but Mr. Van Adam doesn't know London yet," the Duchess retorted.

"Then I'll show it him!" cried Mr. Ingerstall, with a glee that was diabolic. "I'll show him Madame Tussaud's, the Piccadilly fountain, the mosaics—heaven preserve us all!—in St Paul's, "glowing with life and colour," as the poor dear Chapter expresses it, the Royal Academy—at its very best this year—the sublime architecture of Buckingham Palace, the restaurants out of which you are turned at half-past twelve, after mumbling the final course of your abbreviated supper by the light of a tallow-candle. Oh, I'll show Mr. Adams London!"

"Van Adam," interposed Mr. Rodney restoratively.

"Mr. Van Adam, London. Will you come with me?"

He thrust this last remark at the tweed suit, which replied in a rather muffled voice:

"Thank you very much."

"That's settled, then," said Mr. Ingerstall, hastily devouring a lozenge-shaped cake covered with pink sugar; "and then we'll see, Duchess, whether this gentleman doesn't swear by blessed Paris to the end of his life."

"Oh, really, Mr. Ingerstall, you ought to go to the Morgue instead of to heaven when you die," her Grace rejoined tartly, as she turned with great deliberation to Mrs. Verulam. "What are your plans for the season, Mrs. Verulam? Are you going to Ascot?"

Mr. Rodney looked at his boots and endeavoured modestly to conceal the simple and unostentatious fact that he felt himself a hero. Mrs. Verulam hesitatingly replied:

"I haven't thought much about it as yet."

But this was too much for Mr. Rodney. To be snatched suddenly from the summit of a candlestick and incontinently shovelled away under a bushel is an event calculated to rouse the temper of the very mildest flaneur who ever wore polished boots. Mr. Rodney's fiddle face assumed a sudden look of stern resolution, and in a voice a trifle louder than usual he almost exclaimed:

"Mrs. Verulam has secured through me the finest house in the neighbourhood of the course."

"If you want to go racing, you really ought to run across the Channel and go to Longchamps," began Mr. Ingerstall with intense rapidity.

But the Duchess had had enough of him, and when the Duchess had had enough of anybody, she could be like a park of artillery and a stone wall combined. She could both decimate and offer a blank and eyeless resistance to attack. On the present occasion she preferred to become a stone wall to the chattering artist, and, presenting to him the entirety of her back, she said with animation to Mr. Rodney:

"Indeed! Which house d'you mean?"

"Ribton Marches," that gentleman responded, in a way that was nearly unbridled.

"The Bun Emperor's palace!" exclaimed her Grace in a thrilling bass. "Mrs. Verulam, you are a public benefactor. Is Mr. Van Adam to be of your party?"

Mrs. Verulam looked helplessly across at the tweed suit as if for orders. Apparently she received them, for she suddenly said, "Yes," with a jerk.

The Duchess glanced from the sombre countenance of the Lady Pearl to the tweed suit. It was evident from her protuberant eyeballs that her mind was busily at work.

"Ribton Marches is a palace," she continued; "it would hold a regiment."

"Oh!" interposed Mr. Rodney, "I scarcely think that Mr. Lite would care to entertain a——"

"I know Mr. Lite very well," the Duchess interrupted; "a most worthy, generous man. He has given me thousands of buns from time to time."

"Does your Grace eat so many?" said the rasping voice of Mr. Ingerstall from behind. "If you wish to get a really perfect bun, go to the Maison——"

"For the school-children on the Duke's estates," the Duchess continued inflexibly. "It has been a very great saving for us; and, in return, all we have had to do is to let the good man use our names in his advertising processes. 'Your buns are exquisite'—the phrase was mine. You can see it in the Daily Telegraph any day."

At the phrase, "your buns are exquisite," the phantom of a superior smile flitted beneath the shadow of Mr. Rodney's sinister moustache. He was thinking of the choice bit of prose to which the name of Lady Sophia Tree was so soon to be appended.

"Have you made up your house-party yet?" the Duchess proceeded blandly to Mrs. Verulam.

"Not yet. Indeed"—here Mrs. Verulam shot a rather cruel glance out of her grey eyes at Mr. Rodney—"indeed, the matter of my having the house——"

"The palace," interjected the Duchess.

"Is scarcely finally settled yet."

"I clinch it to-night at the Crystal Palace," murmured Mr. Rodney through his teeth.

"The Crystal Palace!" cried Mr. Ingerstall; "there's a glass house at which everybody should throw stones. Burmese warriors made of chocolate, or something of the kind, plaster statues of Melancholy, sardines in boxes mixed up with jet bracelets and bicycle exhibitions, a concert-room like a fourth-rate swimming-bath, a—but you shall see it," he cried to the tweed suit, who again replied hastily:

"Thank you very much."

"If your party is not made up, Mrs. Verulam," the Duchess resumed, "I am sure the Duke and I and Pearl will be most happy to join it."

"Indeed, mother," said the Lady Pearl grievously, "I do not wish——"

"My dear, nonsense; it will do your gout a great deal of good, breathing the pine-laden air, if Mrs. Verulam can find room for you——"

"I shall be delighted," said Mrs. Verulam, whose mental condition at the moment rendered her quite prepared to accept any proposition, even of murder or arson, that might be made to her.

"Then that is settled," the Duchess said briskly, rustling the skirt of her gown as a signal of her imminent departure. "It will be an advantage to you to have me at Ribton Marches, because I know all the ins and outs of the place. The Duke and I lunched there with Mr. Lite to sign our little token of approbation of his buns, and he showed me everything. Well, really, we must be getting on. Come, Pearl——"

The Lady Pearl rose wearily. Her face still expressed either a tendency to gout or an understanding of life; but it must be confessed that, as she looked towards the tweed suit and bowed a dignified farewell, a trace of animation crept into her manner, and she looked more distinctly less respectable than the Duchess than she had on her entry into Mrs. Verulam's drawing-room. The Duchess cordially shook the tweed suit's hand at parting.

"Come and see us," she said vigorously.

"Many thanks."

"Come to-morrow."

The reply was a rather faint, "With pleasure."

"Mrs. Verulam will give you our address—Belgrave Square. You can get a bus from the corner of Hamilton Place that will put you down at—oh, but of course that doesn't matter to you. I wish the Duke had an orange-grove. Good-bye, Mr. Ingerstall."

She looked him over meditatively; then she said:

"Perhaps you won't mind just coming out with us to hail a—thank you very much. Good-bye."

She proceeded out of the room, followed by Lady Pearl and Mr. Ingerstall, the latter of whom turned sharply at the door to say to the tweed suit:

"Very well, then; I'll come to-morrow morning to show you London, and increase your commendable love of Paris. Ah! when you see the mosaics—mercy on us!"

He shot out of the room with his short arms raised towards heaven. A moment later they heard his voice piercingly hailing a bus outside for the Duchess.

Meanwhile Mr. Rodney was being terribly de trop. Mrs. Verulam had now come to what is called the end of the tether. She wanted to bounce up from her sofa, take Mr. Rodney by the shoulders, thrust him forcibly out of the house, and then go into violent hysterics. This was what she wanted to do. What she had to do was to sit quiet and see him becoming suspicious, and, finally, jealous of the tweed suit, which also wanted to go into hysterics. Mr. Rodney was considerably exercised, first by finding that he had apparently told a lie in the World, secondly, by being made suddenly aware that Mrs. Verulam had a male friend of whom she had never spoken to him, and, moreover, a friend so intimate that she summoned him from the orange-groves of Florida to stay alone with her in London, all divorced as he was. All this greatly perturbed him, and so soon as the Duchess was gone he promised himself the pleasure of probing, with his usual exquisite dexterity, into the problem so abruptly presented to him. He therefore sat tight, and began to look very observant. Mrs. Verulam was gripped by the cold hands of despair. She forced a faded smile.

"You mustn't forget your engagement at the Crystal Palace, Mr. Rodney," she said, with a terrible effort after sprightliness.

Mr. Rodney grew wrinkled, a habit of his when forced into painful thought.

"I am not likely to forget any detail of my service to you," he said, with a pressure that tended in the direction of emphasis. "But we do not dine till half-past eight."

"The trains are very slow on that line, I believe," Mrs. Verulam added, with a vagueness as to the different railway systems that would have made her fortune as a director.

"Still, they do not take three hours to do the six miles," said Mr. Rodney, with a distinct approach to sarcasm.

Mrs. Verulam collapsed. There was no more fight left in her. She shut her eyes very tightly and tried not to breathe hard. When she opened them again Mr. Rodney was looking at the tweed suit in a very crafty manner.

"I have heard much of you, Mr. Van Adam," he said slowly.

"Indeed!"

"Yes. I have even had the pleasure of writing a little word about you."

The tweed suit started.

"May I ask where?"

Mr. Rodney laid his long white hand gently upon the World.

"Here."

The word dropped from him like a pebble. The tweed suit flushed scarlet, and its dark eyes darted a look of boyish fury upon the demure writer of paragraphs. But it only said, in a voice that slightly shook:

"Indeed!"

"May I have the pleasure of showing you?" said Mr. Rodney, gently unfolding the journal for men and women, and laying one finger upon the Van Adam paragraph. The tweed suit pretended to read it carefully. "You will notice a slight mistake at the close," Mr. Rodney continued in a resentful voice, and glancing from the tweed suit to Mrs. Verulam and back again. "It would not have crept in" (errors have no other gait than that generally attributed to the insect world) "had I known that we were to have the unexpected pleasure of welcoming you to London."

"Thank you very much."

Mr. Rodney had now set foot upon the path of magnanimity. He bit his lower lip, and took another step upon it.

"I shall be glad to rectify my error next week," he said.

"I am obliged to you."

"In the meanwhile, anything that I can do to render your short"—he paused interrogatively; there was no rejoinder, and he continued—"stay among us agreeable, I shall be only too happy to accomplish."

The tweed suit bowed convulsively, and Mrs. Verulam began to breathe audibly upon her sofa.

"Mitching Dean," Mr. Rodney added, with a sense of glorious martyrdom, "Mitching Dean is entirely at your service."

"Mitching Dean!" the tweed suit repeated, with a befogged intonation.

"Yes. Its butter, its roof, its roses——"

"Roses!" said the suit, as if trying to break an intolerable spell. "Ah! the English roses are exquisite! I have some dark-red ones in my room here."

Mrs. Verulam coughed sharply. Mr. Rodney's face grew a dull brick-red.

"Dark-red roses in your room?" he said. He looked rapidly at all the drawing-room vases, and then cast a pale and reproachful glance at Mrs. Verulam. Then he got up slowly. He felt that his investigation into the relations of the pretty widow and the divorced American orange-grower could not be pursued satisfactorily in such a moment of confusion and despair. He must have time for thought. To-night he would free himself as early as might be from the thraldom of the Bun Emperor. He would wander amid the japanned-tin groves of the Crystal Palace. He would seek the poetical solitude afforded by an exhibition of motor-cars, or plunge into the peaceful villages of the chocolate-hued and inanimate Burmese. To-night! to-night! He must think; he must collect himself; he must reason; he must plan.

"My train," he murmured a little frantically; "I must catch it. I must go! I must indeed!"

He spoke as if multitudes were endeavouring to hold him, and keep him back from a stern purpose. He pressed Mrs. Verulam's hand. "Cruel!" he murmured. He bowed to the tweed suit. "Au revoir!" He was at the door. "My train! Good-bye!" He was gone, and instantly Mrs. Verulam on her sofa, the tweed suit on its chair, were in violent hysterics.

Had Mr. Rodney left his hat behind by mistake and returned to fetch it, he must have stood on the threshold petrified. As there is often a method in madness, so there is sometimes a hilarity in hysteria. There is the frantic laughter of the human soul making a sudden and distracted exit from the prison in which it has been gradually accumulating a frightful excess of emotion. It leaps out with hyæna cry, and with the virulent cachinnations of a thing inhuman. Mrs. Verulam's shriek of laughter as the hall-door closed behind Mr. Rodney's thin back was far more terrible than Chloe Van Adam's burst of tears. It flew up like a monstrous and horrible balloon, seeming to take form, to sway, to swell as a gas-filled bladder, to burst with a tearing desperation, to die down in a chuckle of agony. And as the laughter of Mrs. Verulam faded with the sharp swiftness of hysteria into a flood of tears, the tears of Chloe Van Adam bloomed into a shriek of laughter. The two women took it in turns, as the children say, to leap to the opposite poles of emotion, until the footman James, below stairs, the faithful Marriner above, heard and trembled.

But all things must have an end, and at last the waves of tumult receded and receded, the laughter leaped lower, the sobs subsided, and presently an awful silence reigned, broken only by the sound of female pants—not the rustle of rational dress, but the murmur of escaping breaths, long, bronchial, and persistent. And then even these died away, till you might have heard the note of the falling pin upon the receptive carpet.

"Chloe!"

"Daisy!"

"Oh, oh, oh!"

"Ah, ah, ah!"

"Oh, don't—don't, or I shall begin again."

"So shall I! Oh, let us keep quiet! Oh, do let us—oh, do let us—oh——"

"Hush!" cried Mrs. Verulam. And suddenly she sprang up, went over to the tweed suit, clasped it in her arms and kissed it. "There, there!" she said; "it's all over now. Oh, but why did you do it?"

"But why did you say that nobody would be let in?"

"I told Francis I was out. He must have forgotten to tell James. He shall leave me to-morrow."

"And I thought I would give you a little surprise."

"You did! You did! When I saw you at the door I thought I should have died!"

"And I wanted to be elsewhere."

"And Marriner! The extraordinary noise she made running upstairs. She fell down twice. I heard her."

Mrs. Verulam leaned against Chloe and laughed till the tears ran down her cheeks, but this time with honest merriment. And Chloe echoed her with a delicious emulation. That gaiety did them good. A sense of humour is often salvation. And, indeed, they might have been laughing now had not their silver joviality been arrested by a flat-handed thump on the drawing-room door. They stopped and looked at each other. The flat-handed thump was repeated.

"Who on earth can this be?" whispered Mrs. Verulam apprehensively. "Come in!"

The door stole open and the faithful Marriner appeared, with twisted features, red eyes, and betouzled hair.

"Oh, ma'am!" she said. "Oh, my! Oh, dear, oh!"

She advanced into the room with her poor feet turned in, and wringing her horrified hands. Her black dress was torn at the knees, showing how she had fallen as she scrambled atticwards. Mrs. Verulam looked at the dress, remembered once more the noise of the tumbles, and laughed again till the tears ran out of her eyes.

"Poor Marriner!" she said. "Poor dear Marriner! Mr. Van Adam, Marriner!" (She mimicked the voice of announcement.) "Mr. Van Adam!"

The faithful Marriner's complexion turned a blackish grey.

"Oh, ma'am, forgive me—forgive me!" she cried.

In another minute she might have been led to go back upon the whole course of her education, and to utter some such damning exclamation as "I didn't go for to do it!" but mercifully Chloe averted that imminent calamity by saying:

"There, there, Marriner! Never mind. I made you. It was all my fault. Besides, there is no serious harm done. At least, is there, Daisy?"

And she turned reflectively to Mrs. Verulam.

"Please shut the door, Marriner," Mrs. Verulam said.

The faithful Marriner did so, and then returned, still on turned-in deplorable feet.

"And now let us be quite calm, and consider," Mrs. Verulam said. "Marriner, you may sit down for a moment."

Marriner sank upon the edge of a chair, and tried to fold her hands respectfully, but failed. She could not so soon command her body.

"Nobody recognised you, Chloe," said Mrs. Verulam; "not even Mr. Ingerstall?"

"Horrid little man! No!"

"They all think you your husband?"

"Yes, they take me for Huskinson." A light sprang up in her eyes. "In fact, so far as they are concerned, I am a man!"

"Tcha, tcha, tcha!" clicked Marriner, making the condemnatory noise so dear to limited natures in moments of tension or surprise.

"Oh, Daisy, I wonder, would it be possible——"

She stopped and looked doubtfully at Marriner.

"Marriner is absolutely to be trusted," Mrs. Verulam answered to the look.

"Oh yes, ma'am!" said the faithful one, beginning gradually to recover.

"Well, then—could I not? No, Daisy, I must speak to you alone! I know that Marriner will keep the secret of this afternoon."

"Oh, ma'am, with my best blood!" cried Marriner, vaguely quoting from historical novels, but meaning well.

She got up, gained the door, turned, repeated in a high voice "With my best blood, ma'am!" and went softly out.

"Well, Chloe, what is it?"

"Didn't you tell me you longed to get out of society and couldn't?"

"Yes. I long to get out gracefully, and—er—just a little bit later on in the season. You see, dear, there's the Ascot house, and the Duke and Duchess coming. I must stay in the cage till the race week's over."

And Mrs. Verulam looked at Chloe a little awkwardly, all the problems presented by the Florida divorce suit returning upon her.

"And I must stay in it, too, just—just till that lovely week's over," Chloe said with a coaxing accent. "Just till then, Daisy. I must see the Bun Emperor's palace, and Mr. Pettingham's coloured slides, and the Prince and Princess, and Sartorius—oh, I must! I must!"

"But how?"

"As Huskinson."

"What?"

Mrs. Verulam's voice grew shrill. But Chloe was persistent.

"Why not?" she urged with tender cunning. "You see I can do it. Nobody will recognise me. Huskinson has never been in London, and has no London friends. Women have lived as men before me. I read of one in the papers who was a sailor for forty years without being discovered, and of another who fought in battles, and got drunk, and swore, and was a man in every way."

"My dear Chloe, you mustn't drink! Oh, but it's impossible!"

"No; but listen. It's heaven-sent—this mistake, I mean. I only intended to show you alone I could be a man. But now, Daisy, you want to get out of society! I want to get into it. We can do it together—one go in, one get out, like the little man and woman in the cardboard barometer. Let me stay here as Huskinson. You can compromise yourself harmlessly with me, and I can have a good time just for a month or two, just till after Ascot, anyway."

"You will have to see the mosaics!" said Mrs. Verulam.

"I'll bear that. I'll bear anything. The game is worth the candle. Oh yes, it is. And then, after Ascot, I'll vanish—you'll perhaps be dropped. It's a perfect plan. Now, isn't it? Isn't it?"

"Really, it is not bad," said Mrs. Verulam. "Yes, I might get out of the cage through you, and yet preserve my self-respect."

"Of course you might. I say it's heaven-sent."

"Heaven-sent—but Francis!"

This sudden cri de cœur alarmed Chloe for her friend's reason.

"Heaven—Francis!" she said helplessly.

What could such words mean but that poor Daisy's reason was tottering upon its throne?

"The footman who let you in when you arrived! The footman who shall leave my service to-morrow. How to keep his mouth shut! Wait! Did anyone else see you?"

"Not a creature."

Mrs. Verulam knit her pretty brows.

"Francis loves Marriner," she said, in an inward voice of subtle meditation. "Francis loves Marriner."

She paused.

"Does he? Why?"

"I can't think, but he does. It isn't only that Marriner told me so, but he did himself; so I suppose it's true. Chloe, if we are to do this dreadful thing, Francis' affection must be played upon."

"It sounds like a flower and a hose."

"It's a footman's heart and a woman's cleverness. Marriner shall accept Francis on the condition of his keeping our secret from everyone, especially from James."

"I see. It's all perfect. Oh, except my clothes!"

"Your clothes! Why, you've got them on!"

"But only these! I must have frock-coats, lavender pants—trousers, I mean—silk hats, clawhammers, and—and—well, you know, Daisy—other things. I can't have a man to measure me; at least, can I?"

Mrs. Verulam thought silently for a moment. Then she said: "You must be ill."

"Why?"

"For a day or two. Your tweed shall go to a first-rate tailor. Francis—Francis has been valet to the Marquis of Greenbank. He'll know all about that. We'll measure your head in bed, and get the hats. Yes, yes, we'll manage it all. Poor Mr. Rodney!"

A mischievous smile, the true little grin of the coquette, curled her sweet lips.

"They were his roses I put into your room, Chloe," she said.

And Chloe laughed and echoed, "Poor Mr. Rodney!" Then she added, "And James Bush, dear?"

Mrs. Verulam blushed.

"Come, dear, it is time for you to be ill," she said hastily. And she took the tweed suit affectionately by the waist and led it from the room.

[CHAPTER V.]

CHLOE WAITS FOR HER TROUSERS.

"Kindly tell Mr. Van Adam that I have come to take him to St Paul's Cathedral to see the mosaics," cried Mr. Ingerstall, at three o'clock on the following afternoon, to the smiling Francis.

"Mr. Van Adam is ill in bed, sir."

"Ill in bed!" shrieked Mr. Ingerstall. "What with?"

"I couldn't say, sir."

And the smile of Francis widened till it nearly touched the ears on either side of his head. Mr. Ingerstall looked very angry indeed. When he had arranged to show a man an atrocity at a certain fixed hour, he considered that man ought to be well enough to see it.

"I don't understand this at all," he snapped. "When did Mr. Van Adam go to bed?"

"Yesterday afternoon, sir. Very soon after you left, sir."

"He looked quite well."

"That was an accident, sir."

"An accident! What d'you mean?"

"His looking well when he was ill, sir."

Mr. Ingerstall glared up at Francis through his enormous spectacles, as if he would read the footman's soul. Having read it, he could make nothing of it. So he darted one fat hand into his pocket, snatched out a card-case, extracted a card with lightning dexterity, gave it to Francis, exclaimed, "I shall call to show Mr. Van Adam the mosaics to-morrow at three precisely!" and marched away with immense rapidity, throwing sharp glances around him at all the passers-by, and rolling his broad little body as if accommodating himself to the turbulent waters of the Bay of Biscay. Francis went on smiling upon the doorstep for the space of a moment, and was just about to retreat into the hall and close the front door, when a private cab, painted very dark green and black, drove up, and the long face of Mr. Rodney peered forth over the apron.

"Is Mrs. Verulam at home?" he asked plaintively.

Francis stepped out to the pavement.

"She is not at home, sir, but I can ask if she will see you, sir."

"Please do so," said Mr. Rodney. "I have some important news for her."

Francis retired, and came back in a moment to say that Mrs. Verulam would receive Mr. Rodney. The latter released himself from his hansom, bearing a quantity of carnations from Mitching Dean, and ascended the stairs, wearing on his countenance a carefully prepared expression of almost defiant resignation. He found Mrs. Verulam, in a delightful robe of palest primrose silk, sitting at her writing-table, and holding in her hand a pen which had that moment traced the magic words, "My dear Mr. Bush." She smiled at him in her most cordial manner as she accepted his flowers.

"Carnations!" she said.

"From Mitching Dean."

"They are lovely. Thank you so much!"

"Not at all. May I venture to hope that—that they are worthy of a place in your own room?"

"I will have them put in water there at once."

She rang the bell and gave the bouquet to Francis, with orders that the faithful Marriner was at once to dispose the flowers about her boudoir. Mr. Rodney's face expressed a gentle relief. He almost permitted himself the luxury of a cheerful smile as he sat down and prepared to unfold his last new mission.

"I was just writing the invitations for my Ascot party," Mrs. Verulam said lightly.

"Ah, it was about that I ventured to call," said Mr. Rodney, with a thin animation. "Last night I succeeded in my endeavour. I put the corner-stone to my temple of negotiations. I clinched the bargain with Mr. Lite."

"How good of you! What was the dinner like?"

Mr. Rodney went a little pale, and hurried on:

"But there are one or two conditions. I wanted to speak with you about them."

"Oh," said Mrs. Verulam, going to a drawer and taking out an envelope. "Here is mamma's signature to the praise of the buns. There was nothing else, was there?"

"Thank you very much," said Mr. Rodney, taking it carefully. "It will be all right. But I must tell you"—he lowered his voice impressively—"that Mr. Lite is a man of singularly tenacious affections."

"Indeed!"

"I scarcely knew how tenacious until—well, until we were wandering among the steel-knife exhibits last night after dinner."

Mrs. Verulam involuntarily shuddered.

"For it was only then that he was moved fully to unbosom himself to me, fully to reveal the depths of a peculiar—I may say a very peculiar character."

Mr. Rodney paused, as if to choose his words, and then resumed:

"I gathered then that the soul of Mr. Lite is the—the residence of two masterful passions, the one a keen desire to obtain the very best names in England as signatures in praise of his—er—his wares, the other an affection amounting—yes, really, I may say amounting almost to fury, for what he calls 'the home.' Now, as you may suppose, on an occasion such as that of last evening, these two extraordinary passions found themselves in opposition—in acute opposition."

"How terrible!"

"It really was. There were moments, I must confess, in which I should have been relieved if the present exhibition at the Crystal Palace had been of a somewhat different nature. However, nothing of that kind happened, I am thankful to say."

Mrs. Verulam assented, and he continued softly:

"And, indeed, Lady Sophia's name won the day. That I may tell you at once. But having indulged the former of his two passions, Mr. Lite became suddenly the slave—to some extent, only to some extent—of the latter. And this is what I wish to consult you about."

"Yes."

"He will, with his devoted wife—'the wife,' as he somewhat exclusively calls her; he has no family—turn out of 'the home' for the space of six clear days, Monday to Saturday inclusive; but he cannot bring himself to leave the neighbourhood or to allow a strange staff of servants to intrude into Ribton Marches. Therefore he makes, or wishes to make, these conditions: that you retain his servants—there are plenty of them, I may tell you—to wait upon your party, and that you permit him and 'the wife' to lodge for the week in a small fishing-cottage that stands at the edge of a piece of artificial water beyond the small pine-wood at the outskirts of the grounds."

"Oh, Mr. Rodney, but——"

"He promises that they will regard the grounds as yours, and that under no circumstances whatever will they emerge from the seclusion of the fishing-cottage."

Mrs. Verulam brightened up.

"Oh, under those conditions I have no objection. But it would be very unpleasant to have a man of violent temper prowling about and spying upon what my guests were doing in his garden or conservatories."

"Intolerable! intolerable! But the Bun Emperor is a man of his word, I feel sure; and, indeed, he offers to accept these conditions in black and white, and to sign his name to them if you wish it."

"Oh dear, no!" Mrs. Verulam said hastily, with all a woman's usual dislike to anything business-like.

"Then that's comfortably arranged," Mr. Rodney said.

He looked at his boots for a couple of minutes, then glanced away and added:

"I hope your guest, Huskinson Van Adam, is well?"

Mrs. Verulam concealed a smile by looking very miserable suddenly.

"Indeed, I am sorry to say he is not at all well."

"Dear, dear!"

"In fact, he is in bed. He is not able to be up."

"I am grieved. What is the matter?"

"Nervous prostration."

"Following upon the shock of his wife's dreadful conduct, I suppose?"

"Possibly."

Mrs. Verulam stole a glance at Mr. Rodney, and continued with gentle artfulness:

"I think he must love her still."

At these words Mr. Rodney brightened up wonderfully.

"Poor fellow!" he said; "poor fellow! I must get him up some melons from Mitching Dean. Americans like them. And the Mitching Dean melons are marvellously nourishing."

"It will be like your usual kind self."

Mr. Rodney bloomed into absolute vivacity under these gentle breezes of good-nature.

"And now," he said, "about the party. Ribton Marches will, as the Duchess says, hold a regiment. There are dozens of bedrooms, and the reception-rooms are very large."

"Oh," Mrs. Verulam said, "I only mean to have quite a little party—eight in all, including myself—four women and four men."

"Yes?"

"The Duchess, Lady Pearl, myself, the Duke, you, dear Mr. Rodney"—Mr. Rodney bowed happily—"Mr. Ingerstall, to worry the Duchess—you know how overwhelming she is if there is nobody about to worry her—Mr. James Bush, and Mr. Van Adam."

Mr. Rodney calculated gravely.

"But that is three ladies and five men," he said.

"No, indeed!" Mrs. Verulam grew red under the swift knowledge of her absurd mistake, and cried: "Oh yes, of course. How stupid of me! That won't do, will it? Never mind; I'll ask Miss Bindler, Lord Kingsbridge's sister—you know how fond she is of racing—and someone else."

She was obviously confused for a moment. Mr. Rodney attributed her condition to a wrong cause, prompted by the jealousy that almost habitually preyed upon him in regard to Mrs. Verulam. His mind instantly fastened upon the only name in the list that was totally unfamiliar to him.

"Mr. James Bush?" he murmured enquiringly.

Mrs. Verulam recovered herself promptly, but a curious shining look came into her grey eyes as she answered:

"Of the Farm, Bungay Marshes, Lisborough."

"Of the Farm, Bungay Marshes, Lisborough?"

"You have not heard of him?"

"I don't think so. Which are his clubs?"

"His clubs? Oh, he doesn't belong to any."

Mr. Rodney looked almost prostrated. A man who didn't belong to any clubs joining Mrs. Verulam's select little Ascot party at Ribton Marches!

"James Bush does not care for anything of that kind," Mrs. Verulam went on, with a thrill of something very like enthusiasm.

"Indeed!" said Mr. Rodney, with a frosty intonation of wonder.

"Oh no; he never comes to London. Did I never mention him to you?"

"Never."

"I met him some time ago in the country, quite by chance," Mrs. Verulam said airily.

"Really?"

"Yes. We fraternised."

"Oh!"

"I found him a most interesting, intelligent man; full of enthusiasm."

"Enthusiasm! How very odd!" Mr. Rodney said, as if to be full of enthusiasm were to be full of some extraordinary disease.

"For his work."

"He is a workman?"

"He is a gardener—that is to say, he has a garden and a small farm, as he tells me. And he attends to them himself, with the help of an elderly labourer, Jacob Minnidick."

If it were possible for Mr. Rodney's long and sallow face to become more astounded than it had been during the progress of this conversation, it became so at the mention of this name.

"Jacob Minnidick!" he repeated in tones of flagrant amazement. "Jacob Minnidick!"

The name really laid him low, like a blow from the shoulder. He had never heard one like it before, and it seemed to take him straight into a different and dreadful world.

"Yes. Isn't it a pretty name? I am very much interested in Mr. Bush. It is he who has made me wish to give up society."

In her excitement Mrs. Verulam had spoken incautiously. She had hardly meant to go so far so soon. Mr. Rodney's veins suddenly swelled. His mouth opened, and he looked as if he were going to have some dreadful fit. He clenched his hands, and seemed to struggle for air. Mrs. Verulam was really terrified.

"Oh, Mr. Rodney, Mr. Rodney! what is it? what is it?" she exclaimed.

Mr. Rodney put up one long hand to his high collar, intruded a couple of fingers within its circle, and pulled it outwards, at the same time screwing his head rapidly from side to side. Mrs. Verulam was about to rush to the bell in terror when, with a convulsive effort, he collected himself.

"Please don't," he said.

Mrs. Verulam didn't, but she was still very much alarmed.

"What is it? what is it?" she repeated. "Oh, please do tell me."

Mr. Rodney got up, walked to the window, and back again, and then stood still.

"Made you wish to give up society!" he said in a sepulchral voice. "Do you really mean that?"

"But surely that was not the reason of your seizure?"

"Indeed it was. Nothing else could have so affected me."

He spoke with the deepest feeling. Mrs. Verulam was almost touched.

"I am so sorry. But I thought it was physical."

He sat down again.

"An access occasioned by horror of mind," he said. "That you—that anyone, but most especially that you—should wish to give up society! What an appalling notion!" He put his hand up again to his collar, but withdrew it. "Horrible! Unnatural!" he murmured.

"I cannot agree with you," Mrs. Verulam said, recovering her composure.

He looked at her almost with fear.

"What—what is the meaning of this possession?" he said. "Who is this man, this person—Bush?"

Mrs. Verulam flushed angrily.

"Please don't speak of my friends like that," she said.

"I beg your pardon. I will go. I had better go. I must have air—I must have air."

And he rose and tottered out, leaving Mrs. Verulam in a state of mingled indignation and alarm. She went to the window, and saw Francis assisting him into the black-and-green cab. His upward movements to reach the step were like those of one decrepit with age. When the cab had driven slowly away in the direction of Piccadilly, she sat down at the writing-table and went on with her interrupted note.

"My dear Mr. Bush,

"I remember very well, when we met at Basildene on that unforgettable day when you were helping my friend Mrs. Ringden to swarm her bees—is that the right expression?—you told me of your righteous hatred against the doings of society, and expressed your unalterable determination never to enter what is, ridiculously enough perhaps, called the gay world. Nevertheless, I want to persuade you to take a little holiday from your noble labour of working in your garden, and seeing after your farm at Bungay, and to join me at Ascot in June for the race week. I see a 'No' rising to your lips. But wait a moment before uttering it. Let me tell you first that, moved by weariness of my empty life in town, and stirred by your example and your maxims—'There's nought like pea-podding,' etc.—I intend to retire from society at the end of June, and to emulate your beautiful intimacy with Mother Nature. This Ascot party is practically my farewell, and my beginning of better things. Confidently, therefore, I summon you to be present at Ribton Marches, Sunninghill, Berks, from Monday to Saturday, June the — to the —, to support me in my determination, and assist me with your advice as to my future and more useful and fruitful life. Do not refuse. Mr. Minnidick will, I am certain, look after everything carefully in your absence, and I shall be really hurt if you say no. With kindest regards,

"Believe me,
"Yours very truly,
"Daisy Verulam.

"P.S.—How is the garden looking, and how are the sheep? No more ewes coughing, I hope? But that marvellous preparation of yours—'Not Elliman,' I always call it—has prevented all that, I know."

Mrs. Verulam put this note into an envelope with an eager hand, addressed it to "The Farm, Bungay Marshes, Lisborough," sent it to the post, and then hastened, with glowing cheeks and bright eyes, to Chloe Van Adam's bedroom.

Chloe was in bed, attended by the faithful Marriner, who had attained to that useful and beautiful age which permits a female to administer to a (supposed) suffering youth without the tongue of detraction being set instantly a-wagging. Nor could Mrs. Verulam's household, who laboured under the delusion that Chloe was her orange-growing husband, find much food for injurious gossip in the short and occasional visits—always chaperoned by Marriner—that the pretty hostess made to the chamber of her invalid guest. Having entered the room and carefully shut the door, Mrs. Verulam sat down by Chloe's bedside.

"Will those trousers never come?" cried the latter with energy. "Oh, Daisy, it is dreadful to feel that I might be calling on a Duchess and that I am under a coverlet! This bed is like a grave. Do send Francis to tell that tailor to hurry up."

"Patience, dear. I am sure you will be able to go out to-morrow. I expect Mr. Ingerstall was in a fearful state of fury at your being too ill to see the mosaics to-day. He is afraid that you will grow to like London if you are snatched away from his influence."

"Horrid little creature! Oh, do tell me some news. It is so dreadful lying here. Has anything happened?"

"Marriner," said Mrs. Verulam, "you may go on reading 'Studies in Pessimism,' if you like."

"I thank you, ma'am," said the faithful Marriner, eagerly opening her pocket Schopenhauer.

"Well, Chloe," pursued Mrs. Verulam; "in the first place, Mr. Rodney has just been having a sort of fit downstairs."

"Gracious! Is he epileptic?"

"No, only conventional."

"Does conventionality make people foam at the mouth?"

"Not exactly. But he really had a sort of convulsion when I told him that I intended to give up society. I was quite alarmed."

"You told him that?"

"Yes. I was carried away. You see, we had been speaking"—Mrs. Verulam lowered her voice—"of James Bush."

Chloe plunged on her pillows so as to get a clearer view of her friend's face, on which she fixed her sparkling, boyish eyes with a merciless scrutiny.

"Ah!" she said. "Now tell me all about him. Who is he? What is he? Where is he?"

Mrs. Verulam clasped Chloe's hand on the quilt softly.

"Chloe," she said, "he is a man!"

"I gathered that. Very few women are called James."

"That's not enough. It is not a christening that makes a man, it is life."

The faithful Marriner looked up from her pocket Schopenhauer with respectful appreciation of this reasoned truth.

"Well, then, what life does he lead?" cried Chloe.

"A life of wholesome labour, of silent communion with the earth—a life devoid of frivolity and devoted to meditation and sheep and bees and things of that kind."

The conclusion was a little vague, but the intention to praise was obvious, and Chloe was deeply interested.

"Meditation, sheep, bees," she repeated—"isn't all that what is called small culture?"

"Oh, indeed, there is nothing small about James Bush!" exclaimed Mrs. Verulam. "Oh no! He is immense, powerful, calm! He is my idea of Agag!"

The faithful Marriner again glanced up. The word "Anak" trembled upon her well-informed lips, but respect for her mistress held her mum. Only a slight rustle betrayed the thrill of deep learning that ran through her.

"Really!" said Chloe. "Go on, dear."

"I met James Bush in the country at a time when I was just beginning fully to feel the emptiness of society."

"Emptiness! Oh, how can you!"

"I remember our first meeting so well," Mrs. Verulam continued with a soft rapture of romance. "He came towards me with his head in a sort of meat-safe, holding in his strong hands the lid of a saucepan, upon which he beat with a wooden spoon with all his might and main."

Chloe sat up in bed and gasped.

"But why—why was he dressed so?" she asked.

"To protect him in his duties."

"What duties—among the sheep?"

"No, oh no! He was swarming bees. Ah, how beautifully he swarms! If only these London creatures who call themselves men could see him!"

"I didn't know one person could swarm alone before. Go on, dear. Did he raise his meat-safe to you?"

"No. He took no notice of me at all, except to tell me to get out of the way. That struck me directly. It was so different from what a London man would do!"

"I should say so. Gracious!"

"It was only afterwards that we talked, and that I learned what a man's life can and should be."

She glowed tenderly, and Chloe's suspicions were confirmed. She shuffled on the sheet towards her friend, and whispered in her right ear:

"Daisy, you're in love with Mr. Bush!"

The faithful Marriner hastily fluttered the pages of Schopenhauer's monumental work, endeavouring not to hear, and failing in the endeavour. Mrs. Verulam replied, after a short pause:

"I'm not sure."

"I am!"

"Hush! I shall know at Ascot."

"Is he coming to Ribwick——? What is the palace called?"

"Ribton Marches. Yes."

"How exciting! Oh, to think that you——"

She stopped and sighed, and, with woman's marvellous intuition, Mrs. Verulam knew that her mind was Huskinson-bound for the moment; that she saw once again the sands, the oranges, the crackers, and the razor-backs of far-off Florida; that she heard again the rattlesnakes of her sweet native land singing their serenades to the peaceful alligator; that she played once more upon the wide veranda with the errant Boswell, and watched the sunset behind the curly pines with the baleful Bream. Yes, Mrs. Verulam divined all this, and, clasping her friend's hand, was silent, thinking of the many mysteries by which we are all surrounded, whether our lot be cast in Margate or in Maryland. When she spoke again, she said in a very low voice:

"I will confess to you that James Bush is a hero in my eyes. Whether he can ever be anything more to me I cannot tell. To me, Chloe, he is the embodiment of the life I mean to lead, the life of simplicity, in which everything has its value; the—the passing of—of a butterfly, the agony of a grasshopper, the swarming of a bee, the—the murmur of even the—the meanest owl that lives——"

"Are owls mean?"

"Yes. James Bush is the embodiment of the earth, from which we come, to which we go; the earth that we ought all to till and love, to delve in and to delight in. The earth! Dear Mother Earth!"

The faithful Marriner coughed discreetly, and Mrs. Verulam shut up, but not before Chloe had cried:

"I don't think I like a man to be too earthy!"

Mrs. Verulam rose to go to her room and put some eau-de-cologne upon her forehead.

"Wait," she whispered as she went. "Wait till you see him!"

"Marriner," said Chloe, "would you mind going to Francis, and asking him when I may expect my pants?"

[CHAPTER VI.]

FATIMAH WAS UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF HASCHISH.

Mr. Rodney's condition of mind during, and for some time after, his drive from Mrs. Verulam's door in the black-and-green cab would scarcely afford fit subject for minute description. When a thoroughly estimable man ceases to take an interest in his "little place in the country," forgets whether he has put on the same pair of lavender gloves on two successive evenings or not, is careless about the set of his white tie, and totally unaware that his hair is unevenly parted when he is setting forth to the "crush" of a Countess, analysis should hold its merciless hand, psychology should veil its piercing eye. Suffice it, then, to say that Mr. Rodney was indeed sore smitten and afflicted by the terrible revelation of Mrs. Verulam's maniacal determination. To a man of his nature, life is society and society is life; the mode is to him what the burning bush was to Moses; the fashion of the day is the god in the car under whose wheels he loves to lie. Men, women, sorrows, joys, all people, all things, are but food for the sustenance of the deity whose rouged and powdered face looks down, like Jezebel's, from the lattices of a meretricious heaven, intent only on gaining an empty compliment, or a sly œillade from the worshipping world below. The thought that a woman who was not only in the fashion, but literally the fashion, a woman with whom he was in love, should suddenly fall under an influence with a ridiculous name, hobnailed boots, and no club, rendered him almost imbecile with impotent agitation; and it is on record that he was seen in the late afternoon of the day of Mrs. Verulam's appalling deliverance furiously pacing the Thames Embankment, and that at night he—how was never known—in some manner made his way to Clapham Common, upon which preposterous portion of the earth he wandered alone for nearly an hour and a half, uttering exclamations of despair, and making crude and tragic gestures.

Such deeds as these sufficiently proclaim the extraordinary condition to which he was reduced. But there was more to come. Three days later he departed to Mitching Dean, in the very top of the season, and he might perhaps have been there at this moment, forgotten and clean gone out of recollection, had not a violent telegram from Mr. Lite, the Bun Emperor, summoned him back to town. The telegram ran as follows:

"Where the devil is Lady Sophia Tree's bun praise?—Perry Lite."

On receipt of this despairing cry, Mr. Rodney started from the hammock in which he was sulking upon the Mitching Dean lawn like one distraught. He remembered his obligations, and to him obligations were sacred things. In his despair he had thrust Lady Sophia's delicate tribute—his tribute, indeed!—to the Lite buns into the pocket of one of his frock-coats, and there it doubtless remained in darkness, instead of blazing forth, heavily "leaded," in the most popular paper of the day. Now, this frock-coat was up in town. Accordingly, Mr. Rodney ordered round the brougham, drove to the Mitching Dean station—often alluded to by him in conversation as "my bijou station at Mitching Dean"—and took the train to town to do his duty by Mr. Lite. Once there, he remained. Upon his hall table in Grosvenor Place he found a sacred assemblage of invitations to the very best houses. He looked into his vellum-bound and silver-clasped "engagement" book, and discovered that Mr. Pettingham summoned him to the Unattached Club to see views of the Holy Land and to hear a lecture that very night. And he heard all around him the murmur of the monster that he loved licking its lips over its repast of pleasure. His procedure, therefore, was as follows: He extracted the bun praise from the frock-coat and forwarded it at once to Ribton Marches, with many an explanation and apology. He then accepted "with pleasure" all the invitations which he had found upon his table, and, finally, he made a careful toilet, dined quietly, and, stepping into the green-and-black cab, ordered his coachman to drive him to the Unattached Club.

As he rolled thither on indiarubber tyres he wondered whether he should meet Mrs. Verulam. She used to go there. And, indeed, everybody invariably went to Mr. Pettingham's parties, which were intensely smart, as well as slightly educational in tone. But the deadly influence that emanated from the Farm, Bungay Marshes, Lisborough, might have deterred the pretty widow from adhering to her usual habit upon this occasion. Mr. Rodney's long limbs trembled in the cab until the horse began to gallop, under the impression that only the most rapid motion could save it from an earthquake imminent at its back. If Mrs. Verulam should have already yielded to the baleful and hypnotic powers of the man Bush, should have already died to the only life worth living!

The galloping horse was thrown violently upon its haunches. The brilliant light above the door of the Unattached Club shone upon the twisted face of Mr. Rodney. He was compelled to recollect himself, and to get out. Still trembling with unwonted agitation, he made his way downstairs to the magnificent suite of apartments in the area retained by the enthusiastic Mr. Pettingham for his popular gatherings. A door was thrown open, and he found himself in the pitch dark, and in an atmosphere of heat that was almost suffocating. By this atmosphere Mr. Rodney knew that the room was packed with women of title. He could not see them, but the very great difficulty he experienced in drawing breath proved to him that they were there in this black well on the threshold of which he was standing. He realised them, and he also realised that he had arrived rather late, more especially when he perceived at some distance off a pale circle of light, rather resembling a theatrical moon that had sat up late too many nights running, and heard a small and quacking voice say:

"I very much regret that, owing to a slight accident, resulting in serious injury to my Jerusalem, I am unable to show my views of the Holy Land this evening. I shall therefore substitute for them my slides of Morocco, and shall tell you a few of my recent experiences while travelling with my very good friends Prince Carl of Schmelzig-Heinstein and the Duke of Drigg through the far-famed land of the Moors."

The quacking voice paused to allow a murmur of "Charming! charming!" to rise like incense out of the darkness, and then added:

"The Palestine soup, which you will presently find upon the supper menu, will, I fear, not strike you as appropriate in the changed circumstances. I regret that there has been no time to substitute for it some potage Tetuan. You will now see the Prince, the Duke and myself as we appeared when in the act of landing at Tangier."

The quacking voice hurled out these last three words with impressive emphasis. Under cover of them Mr. Rodney, who, from old experience, knew the plan of the room, glided down the two steps from the door, and crawled with infinite precaution among the invisible duchesses in search of a seat. For Mr. Pettingham's lectures were long, and his slides were often slow to appear when summoned with a duck-like "Hey, presto!" Now, as Mr. Rodney crawled, like Jean Valjean in the sewers of Paris, he heard upon every side the slow breathing of almost suffocated society. Here he recognised the familiar snort of the Lady Jane Clinch, famous for her luncheons, there the piping sigh of the old Countess of Sage, who was born on the day of the Battle of Waterloo, and talked of the Crimean War as a recent event. He heard the Baroness Clayfield-Moor shuffling her feet, according to her immemorial custom, and recognised, with a happy thrill of instant knowledge, the stifled cough of Mrs. Brainton Gumm, the Banana Queen, who had taken society by storm two seasons ago, and still kept her footing by paying it with persistent entertainments. A little further forward the familiar sneeze of the Duchess of Southborough broke upon his listening ear, and his bosom heaved with the exultant satisfaction of the hare with many friends. There was, indeed, no atmosphere in which Mr. Rodney felt more thoroughly like a fish in water than the atmosphere of Mr. Pettingham's delightful gatherings. The utter darkness in which they invariably took place lent them a peculiar charm, obliging the acute society man to rely on an unusual sense for the discovery of those known to him. The eye was rendered useless; the guns of vision were, for the moment, spiked. Success and comfort depended upon the senses of hearing and of touch. Never did Mr. Rodney feel more completely the rapture of the sleuth-hound than when he followed the trail of one attractive to him through the dense human jungle of the Unattached Club.

To-night, however, he was a little bit off-colour, owing to the agony of mind which he had been enduring for the last few days. In consequence, perhaps, of this fact, his feet forgot for an instant their ancient cunning, and when he heard the Duchess of Southborough sneeze a second time in his immediate vicinity he started, and trod heavily upon a neighbouring Marchioness. Of course he knew her. Directly she screamed he discovered an old and valued friend, and poured forth a complete apology into the blackness, an apology which was whisperingly accepted. But this painful misadventure slightly flurried him, and caused him to commit a solecism the memory of which haunted him to the last days of his life. For, after making his peace with the Marchioness, he inadvertently sat down in the Duchess of Southborough's lap, just as Mr. Ingerstall was vehemently hissing into her ears, "The only thing that makes Tangier possible is the fact that there is a French Consulate there. That cursed thing, British influence——" It was at this point that the Duchess suddenly began to struggle feebly, and to catch her breath beneath the unexpected imposition of Mr. Rodney. He got up immediately. Any gentleman would have done so, much more our friend from Mitching Dean. But the Duchess, partly from surprise, since she had not heard anyone approaching her in the darkness, partly from the physical collapse very naturally brought about in an elderly lady who is suddenly called upon to support a weight of some twelve stone or thereabouts, continued to gurgle in a very alarming manner. Mr. Pettingham, who, rod in hand, was in the very act of pointing to a small figure relieved in colours upon the sheet, and saying, "There you will perceive my excellent friend the Prince stepping into the first boat to go ashore," was brought up short in his informing discourse.

"I hope nothing is the matter? No one is taken ill?" he quacked anxiously.

The perspiration broke out in a cold cloud upon Mr. Rodney's face. He bent down to the darkness from which he had just risen, and murmured with a pungent agony, and a disregard of grammar that did him credit:

"Duchess, it's only me! I do assure you it's only me, Mr. Rodney! Pray, pray forgive me! Oh, pray do recover! Be all right! Oh, Duchess, for our old friendship's sake be all right, or they'll turn on the lights!"

This tragic appeal was not without its effect upon her Grace. She good-naturedly came to, and Mr. Rodney, fortunately discovering an unoccupied seat on her off-side, sat down and hastily went on apologising, while Mr. Pettingham proceeded with his discourse.

"I cannot—I can never tell you how grieved and shocked I am," Mr. Rodney whispered.

"What is your weight?" whispered back the Duchess.

"My—I beg your pardon!"

"How much do you weigh? You are monstrously heavy for your size."

"I am very sorry. I am quite ashamed—only just twelve stone, I do assure you—I am really——"

"My dear man, never mind. If Mr. Pettingham will keep the room so dark we must all expect to be sat on. Where have you been all this long time? I haven't seen you anywhere for the last three days."

"I have been at Mitching Dean."

"What, at this time of year?"

"I have not been at all well."

"Gout? Carlsbad would do you more good than Mitching Dean."

"It was not the gout; it was more painful than that," Mr. Rodney hissed, with genuine emotion. "Is Mrs. Verulam here to-night?"

"Yes, in pale green—charming little creature!"

Mr. Rodney thrilled.

"Mr. Van Adam is with her," continued the Duchess. "They are about eighteen rows behind us, and Pearl is sitting with them."

"Indeed!"

"Yes. Mr. Van Adam has quite cheered her up, poor child; or else it is Dr. Spencer Hill's new spray treatment that she is trying. But I really am inclined to think it is Mr. Van Adam. He is a great success in London."

"Really!"

"Oh, a great success!" By the sound of her whisper Mr. Rodney knew that the Duchess had turned her head to the near side. "Isn't he, Mr. Ingerstall?"

"I really don't know. I only know that he liked the mosaics—actually admired them!" snapped that gentleman, in the distance; "and yet he has lived in Paris. He has seen the——"

"How did Mrs. Verulam get to know him?" continued her Grace to the off-side.

The palpitations of jealousy seized Mr. Rodney.

"I have no idea," he whispered.

"Was she ever in Florida?"

"Oh dear, no!"

"Of course, people are talking——"

"Might I venture to request silence?" quacked the irritated voice of Mr. Pettingham at this juncture. "It is almost impossible for me to bring my friend the Duke of Drigg's adventure in the Soko vividly before you if I do not have the kind assistance of your complete attention. Well, as I was saying, it was very evident to me that Fatimah was decidedly under the influence of haschish." He struck a bell. "Here you see Fatimah under the influence of haschish."

"These adventures of Drigg's are very uninteresting," continued the Duchess, resuming her conversation in a louder whisper. "People are talking, you know, Mr. Rodney."

"Talking—what about?"

"Oh, Mrs. Verulam and Mr. Van Adam. But I take a more charitable view. After all, she's twenty-eight."

"Oh, surely not more than twenty-seven!"

"Englishwomen always look more than their age," Mr. Ingerstall whispered violently. "It's an extraordinary thing! Now, a Parisian——"

"Twenty-eight, Mr. Rodney; and getting on towards twenty-nine. And he looks a mere boy. You have heard all about him? Did Bernard Roche ever tell you his age?"

"No, never!" said Mr. Rodney, suddenly registering a vow to write on the morrow to New York and find out a great deal about Huskinson, against whom he was rapidly conceiving a most deadly hatred.

"He seems very young to have got a divorce," her Grace whispered reflectively. "However, in America I suppose they begin earlier than we do over here. People develop more rapidly, I believe."

"Yes, Duchess; but about Mrs. Verulam and Mr. Van Adam. What are people saying?"

Mr. Rodney's note was hoarse.

"Oh, the usual thing. And certainly it is a little strange, his coming all the way from Florida to stay with her—alone in the house, too. A little injudicious, certainly. Old Martha Sage is terribly shocked about it. She declares it is the most extraordinary affair she has known since the Crimean War!"

Mr. Rodney turned pale in the darkness. On what a precipice was Mrs. Verulam walking. And James Bush, too! But Lady Sage and the Duchess knew nothing yet of him. The darkness became to Mr. Rodney like a spinning ball, in whose interior he violently revolved through space. He was recalled to himself by hearing the Duchess say:

"Are you going on to the panthers?"

"The panthers?"

"Of Sartorius, at Mrs. Vigors' in Brook Street?"

"Oh yes, I believe I am, if there is time. Pettingham is a little lengthy to-night."

"Terribly!"

She listened for a moment.

"Dear! Fatimah is still evidently under the influence of haschish. This is endless!"

She agitated her enormous fan in the darkness. All around might now be heard a rustling as of wings. The Dowagers, half suffocated, were doing likewise. Mr. Pettingham sipped at a glass of water, and calmly continued:

"When the Duke said this to Fatimah, the Prince and I were convulsed. I got down off my donkey——"

"This is wonderfully interesting," Chloe murmured to Mrs. Verulam eighteen rows back.

Mrs. Verulam, who was lost in a reverie, through which James Bush moved with all the dignity of her idea of Agag, started and replied:

"D'you think so? I think it appalling! Even the Holy Land must have been better than this. If he takes us into the interior, I shall faint."

"I shall now proceed to show you some views of the interior," continued Mr. Pettingham, with a quacking complacency. "First try to imagine yourselves in one of the filthy alleys of the Jewish quarter of Tetuan." He struck the bell again. "Here you see one of the filthy alleys faithfully reproduced."

"If only somebody would open a window," murmured Mrs. Verulam distractedly. "Oh, but I forgot; we are in the basement of the club, and there are none."

"Is it really true that the Princess of Galilee is here?"

"Yes, poor thing, in the front row. Oh, Chlo—oh, Mr. Van Adam, if you only knew how I long to be quietly away from all this, sitting in some sweet garden, with the quiet marshes stretching away all round me on every side, and——"

"Oh, not marshes; they are horrible! You should see the swamps in Florida!"

"An English marsh is quite, quite different. Mr. Bush has lived in one all his life at Bungay." She sank her voice on the last romantic word, and breathed a gentle sigh. "He will tell us of his life—of the true, best life—when he comes to Ribton Marches," she added softly. "For he has accepted my invitation in his own dear, characteristic manner. I meant to have told you. I got his letter—or, rather, his postcard—to-night, just before we were starting."

"What did it say?"

"'Coming.—J. Bush.'"

"Isn't that a little short—for an answer to you, I mean?"

"Yes, short and to the point. How much better than filling sheets and sheets of letter-paper with empty phrases and meaningless compliments."

"Yes?" said Chloe rather doubtfully, as she settled her shirt-front, and slightly pulled up her trousers to prevent them getting into "knees." And then her attention was claimed by the Lady Pearl, who murmured in her ear: