2,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: William John Locke
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
HAVE you dined at Ranelagh lately?” asked Norma Hardacre. “I have never been there in my life,” replied Jimmie Padgate. “In fact,” he added simply, “I am not quite sure whether I know where it is.” “Yours is the happier state. It is one of the dullest spots in a dull world.” “Then why on earth do people go there?” The enquiry was so genuine that Miss Hardacre relaxed her expression of handsome boredom and laughed. “Because we are all like the muttons of Panurge,” she said. “Where one goes, all go. Why are we here to-night?” “To enjoy ourselves. How could one do otherwise in Mrs. Deering’s house?” “You have known her a long time, I believe,” remarked Norma, taking the opportunity of directing the conversation to a non-contentious topic. “Since she was in short frocks. She is a cousin of King’s—that’s the man who took you down to dinner—” She nodded. “I have known Mr. King many weary ages.” “And he has never told me about you!” “Why should he?”
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
Table of contents
Chapter I—THE FIRST GLIMPSE
Chapter II—THE FOOL’S WISDOM
Chapter III—A MODERN BETROTHAL
Chapter IV—THE GREAT FROCK EPISODE
Chapter V—A BROKEN BUTTERFLY
Chapter VI—THE LOVERS
Chapter VII—A MAD PROPHET
Chapter VIII—HER SERENE HIGHNESS
Chapter IX—SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
Chapter X—TWO IDYLLS
Chapter XI—DANGER
Chapter XII—NORMA’S ENLIGHTENMENT
Chapter XIII—THE OPTIMIST AT LARGE
Chapter XIV—THE BUBBLE REPUTATION
Chapter XV—MRS. HARDACRE LAUGHS
Chapter XVI—IN THE WILDERNESS
Chapter XVII—THE INCURABLE MALADY
Chapter XVIII—A RUDDERLESS SHIP
Chapter XIX—ABANA AND PHARPAR
Chapter XX—ALINE PREPARES FOR BATTLE
Chapter XXI—THE MOTH MEETS THE STAR
Chapter XXII—CATASTROPHE
Chapter XXIII—NORMA’S HOUR
Chapter XXIV—MRS. HARDACRE FORGETS
Chapter XXV—THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT
Chapter XXVI—EARTH AGAIN
Chapter XXVII—A DINNER OF HERBS
Chapter XXVIII—THE WORD OF ALINE
Chapter I—THE FIRST GLIMPSE
Chapter II—THE FOOL’S WISDOM
LIKE the inexplicable run on a particular number at the roulette-table, there often seems to be a run on some particular phenomenon thrown up by the wheel of daily life. Such a recurrent incident was the meeting of Norma and Jimmie Padgate during the next few weeks. She met him at Mrs. Deering’s, she ran across him in the streets. Going to spend a weekend out of town, she found him on the platform of Paddington Station. The series of sheer coincidences established between them a certain familiarity. When next they met, it was in the crush of an emptying theatre. They found themselves blocked side by side, and they laughed as their eyes met.
“ This seems to have got out of the domain of vulgar chance and become Destiny,” she said lightly.
“ I am indeed favoured by the gods,” he replied.
“ You don’t deserve their good will because you have never come to see me.”
Jimmie replied that he was an old bear who loved to growl selfishly in his den. Norma retorted with a reference to Constance Deering. In her house he could growl altruistically.
“ She pampers me with honey,” he explained.
“ I am afraid you’ll get nothing so Arcadian with us,” she replied, “but I can provide you with some excellent glucose.”
They were moved a few feet forward by the crowd, and then came to a halt again.
“ This is my ward, Miss Aline Marden,” he said, presenting a pretty slip of a girl of seventeen, who had hung back shyly during the short dialogue, and looked with open-eyed admiration at Jimmie’s new friend. “That is how she would be described in a court of law, but I don’t mind telling you that really she is my nurse and fostermother.”
The girl blushed at the introduction, and gave him an imperceptible twitch of the arm. Norma smiled at her graciously and asked her how she had liked the play.
“ It was heavenly,” she said with a little sigh. “Did n’t you think so?”
Norma, who had characterised the piece as the most dismal performance outside a little Bethel, was preparing a mendacious answer, when a sudden thinning in the crush brought to her side Mrs. Hardacre, from whom she had been separated. Mrs. Hardacre inquired querulously for Morland King, who had gone in search of the carriage. Norma reassured her as to his ability to find it, and introduced Jimmie and Aline. Mr. Padgate was Mr. King’s oldest friend. Mrs. Hardacre bowed disapprovingly, took in with a hard glance the details of Aline’s cheap, homemade evening frock, and the ready-made cape over her shoulders, and turned her head away with a sniff. She had been put out of temper the whole evening by Norma’s glacial treatment of King, and was not disposed to smile at the nobodies whom it happened to please Norma to patronise.
At last King beckoned to them from the door, and they crushed through the still waiting crowd to join him. By the time Jimmie Padgate and his ward had reached the pavement they had driven off.
“ Wonder if we can get a cab,” said Jimmie.
“ Cab!” cried the girl, taking his arm affectionately. “One would think you were a millionaire. You can go in a cab if you like, but I’m going home in a ‘bus. Come along. We’ll get one at Piccadilly Circus.”
She hurried him on girlishly, talking of the play they had just seen. It was heavenly, she repeated. She had never been in the stalls before. She wished kind-hearted managers would send them seats every night. Then suddenly:
“ Why did n’t you tell me how beautiful she was?”
“ Who, dear?”
“ Why, Miss Hardacre. I think she is the loveliest thing I have ever seen. I could sit and look at her all day long. Why don’t you paint her portrait—in that wonderful ivory-satin dress she was wearing to-night? And the diamond star in her hair that made her look like a queen—did you notice it? Why, Jimmie, you are not paying the slightest attention!”
“ My dear, I could repeat verbatim every word you have said,” he replied soberly. “She is indeed one of the most beautiful of God’s creatures.”
“ Then you’ll paint her portrait?”
“ Perhaps, deary,” said Jimmie, “perhaps.”
Meanwhile in the brougham King was giving Norma an account of Jimmie’s guardianship. She had asked him partly out of curiosity, partly to provide him with a subject of conversation, and partly to annoy her mother, whose disapproving sniff she had noted with some resentment. And this in brief is the tale that King told.
Some ten years ago, John Marden, a brother artist of Jimmie Padgate’s, died penniless, leaving his little girl of seven with the alternative of fighting her way alone through an unsympathetic world, or of depending on the charity of his only sister, a drunken shrew of a woman, the wife of a small apothecary, and the casual mother of a vague and unwashed family. Common decency made the first alternative impossible. On their return to the house after the funeral, the aunt announced her intention of caring for the orphan as her own flesh and blood. Jimmie, who had taken upon himself the functions of the intestate’s temporary executor, acquiesced dubiously. The lady, by no means sober, shed copious tears and a rich perfume of whisky. She called Aline to her motherly bosom. The child, who had held Jimmie’s hand throughout the mournful proceedings, for he had been her slave and playfellow for the whole of her little life, advanced shyly. Her aunt took her in her arms. But the child, with instinctive repugnance to the smell of spirits, shrank from her kisses. The shrew arose in the woman; she shook her vindictively, and gave her three or four resounding slaps on face and shoulders. Jimmie leaped from his chair, tore the scared little girl from the vixen’s clutches, and taking her bodily in his arms, strode with her out of the house, leaving the apothecary and his wife to settle matters between them. It was only when he had walked down the street and hailed a cab that he began to consider the situation.
“ What on earth am I to do with you?” he asked whimsically.
The small arms tightened round his neck. “Take me to live with you,” sobbed the child.
“ Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings we learn wisdom. So be it,” said Jimmie, and he drove home with his charge.
As neither aunt nor uncle nor any human being in the wide world claimed the child, she became mistress of Jimmie’s home from that hour. Her father’s pictures and household effects were sold off to pay his creditors, and a little bundle of torn frocks and linen was Aline’s sole legacy.
“ I happened to look in upon him the evening of her arrival,” said King, by way of conclusion to his story. “In those days he managed with a charwoman who came only in the mornings, so he was quite alone in the place with the kid. What do you think I found him doing? Sitting cross-legged on the model-platform with a great pair of scissors and needles and thread, cutting down one of his own night garments so as to fit her, while the kid in a surprising state of déshabillé was seated on a table, kicking her bare legs and giving him directions. His explanation was that Miss Marden’s luggage had not yet arrived and she must be made comfortable for the night! But you never saw anything so comic in your life.”
He leaned back and laughed at the reminiscence, not unkindly. Mrs. Hardacre, bored by the unprofitable tale, stared at the dim streets out of the brougham window. Norma, on friendlier terms with King, the little human story having perhaps drawn them together, joined in the laugh.
“ And now, I suppose, when she grows a bit older, Mr. Padgate will marry her and she will be a dutiful little wife and they will live happy and humdrum ever after.”
“ I hope he will provide her with some decent rags to put on,” said Mrs. Hardacre. “Those the child was wearing to-night were fit for a servant maid.”
“ Jimmie would give her his skin if she could wear it,” said Morland, somewhat tartly.
This expression of feeling gave him, for the first time, a special place in Norma’s esteem. After all, a woman desires to like the man who in a few months’ time may be her husband, and hitherto Morland had presented a negativity of character which had baffled and irritated her. The positive trait of loyalty to a friend she welcomed instinctively, although if charged with the emotion she would have repudiated the accusation. When the carriage stopped at the awning and red strip of carpet before the house in Eaton Square where a dance awaited her, and she took leave of him, she returned his handshake with almost a warm pressure and sent him away, a sanguine lover, to his club.
The next morning Constance Deering, taking her on a round of shopping, enquired how the romance was proceeding.
“ He has had me on probation,” replied Norma, “and has been examining all my points. I rather think he finds me satisfactory, and is about to make an offer.”
“ What an idyllic pair you are!” laughed her friend.
Norma took the matter seriously.
“ The man is perfectly right. He is on the lookout for a woman who can keep up or perhaps add to his social prestige, who can conduct the affairs of a large establishment when he enters political life, who can possibly give him a son to inherit his estate, and who can wear his family diamonds with distinction—and it does require a woman of presence to do justice to family diamonds, you know. He looks round society and sees a girl that may suit him. Naturally he takes his time and sizes her up. I have learned patience and so I let him size to his heart’s content. On the other hand, what he can give me falls above the lower limit of my requirements, and personally I don’t dislike him.”
“ Mercy on us!” cried Constance Deering, “the man is head over ears in love with you!”
“ Then I like him all the better for dissembling it so effectually,” said Norma, “and I hope he’ll go on dissembling to the end of the chapter. I hate sentiment.” They were walking slowly down Bond Street, and happened to pause before a picture-dealer’s window, where a print of a couple of lovers bidding farewell caught Mrs. Deering’s attention.
“ I call that pretty,” she said. “Do you hate love too?” Norma twirled her parasol and moved away, waiting for the other.
“ Love, my dear Connie, is an appetite of the lower middle classes.”
“ My dear Norma!” the other exclaimed, “I do wish Jimmie Padgate could hear you!”
Norma started at the name. “What has he got to do with the matter?”
“ That’s one of his pictures.”
“ Oh, is it?” said Norma, indifferently. But feminine curiosity compelled a swift parting glance at the print.
“ I imagine our guileless friend has a lot to learn,” she added. “A few truths about the ways of this wicked world would do him good.”
“ I promised to go and look round his studio to-morrow morning; will you come and give him his first lesson?” asked Mrs. Deering, mischievously.
“ Certainly not,” replied Norma.
But the destiny she had previously remarked upon seemed to be fulfilling itself. A day or two afterwards his familiar figure burst upon her at a Private View in a small picture-gallery. His eyes brightened as she withdrew from her mother, who was accompanying her, and extended her hand. .
“ Dear me, who would have thought of seeing you here? Do you care for pictures? Why have n’t you told me? I am so glad.”
“ Love of Art did n’t bring me here, I assure you,” replied Norma.
“ Then what did?”
Jimmie in his guilelessness had an uncomfortable way of posing fundamental questions. In that respect he was like a child. Norma smiled in silent contemplation of the real object of their visit. At first her mother had tossed the cards of invitation into the waste-paper basket. It was advertising impudence on the part of the painter man, whom she had met but once, to take her name in vain on the back of an envelope. Then hearing accidentally that the painter man had painted the portraits of many high-born ladies, including that of the Duchess of Wiltshire, and that the Duchess of Wiltshire herself—their own duchess, who gave Mrs. Hardacre the tip of her finger to shake and sometimes the tip of a rasping tongue to meditate upon, whom Mrs. Hardacre had tried any time these ten years to net for Heddon Court, their place in the country—had graciously promised to attend the Private View, in her character of Lady Patroness-in-Chief of the painter man, Mrs. Hardacre had hurried home and had set the servants’ hall agog in search of the cards. Eventually they had been discovered in the dust-bin, and she had spent half an hour in cleansing them with bread-crumbs, much to Norma’s sardonic amusement. The duchess not having yet arrived, Mrs. Hardacre had fallen back upon the deaf Dowager Countess of Solway, who was discoursing to her in a loud voice on her late husband’s method of breeding prize pigs. Norma had broken away from this exhilarating lecture to greet Jimmie.
He kept his eager eyes upon her, still waiting for an answer to his question:
“ What did?”
Norma, fairly quick-witted, indicated the walls with a little comprehensive gesture.
“ Do you call this simpering, uninspired stuff Art?” she said, begging the question.
“ Oh, it’s not that,” cried Jimmie, falling into the trap. “It’s really very good of its kind. Amazingly clever. Of course it’s not highly finished. It’s impressionistic. Look at that sweeping line from the throat all the way down to the hem of the skirt,” indicating the picture in front of them and following the curve, painter fashion, with bent-back thumb; “how many of your fellows in the Academy could get that so clean and true?”
“ I have just met Mr. Porteous, who said he could n’t stay any longer because such quackery made him sick,” said Norma.
Jimmie glanced round the walls. Porteous, the Royal Academician, was right. The colour was thin, the modelling flat, the drawing tricky, the invention poor. A dull soullessness ran through the range of full-length portraits of women. He realised, with some distress, the clever insincerity of the painting; but he had known Foljambe, the author of these coloured crimes, as a fellow-student at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, and having come to see his work for the first time, could not bear to judge harshly. It was characteristic of him to expatiate on the only merit the work possessed.
“ Mr. Porteous even said,” continued Norma, “that it was scandalous such a man should be making thousands when men of genius were making hundreds. It was taking the bread out of their mouths.”
“ I am sorry he said that,” said Jimmie. “I think we ought rather to be glad that a man of poor talent has been so successful. So many of them go to the wall.”
“ Do you always find the success of your inferior rivals so comforting?” asked Norma. “I don’t.” She thought of the depredatory American.
Jimmie pushed his hat to the back of his head—a discoloured Homburg hat that had seen much wear—and rammed his hands in his pockets.
“ It’s horrible to regard oneself and one’s fellow-creatures as so many ghastly fishes tearing one another to pieces so as to get at the same piece of offal. That’s what it all comes to, does n’t it?”
The picture of the rapt duke as garbage floating on the tide of London Society brought with it a certain humourous consolation. That of her own part in the metaphor did not appear so soothing. Jimmie’s proposition being, however, incontrovertible, she changed the subject and enquired after Aline. Why had n’t he brought her?
“ I am afraid we should have argued about Foljambe’s painting,” said Jimmie, with innocent malice.
“ And we should have agreed about it,” replied Norma. She talked about Aline. Morland King had been talebearing. It was refreshing, she confessed, once in a way to hear good of one’s fellow-creatures: like getting up at six in the morning in the country and drinking milk fresh from the cow. It conferred a sense of unaccustomed virtue. The mention of milk reminded her that she was dying for tea. Was it procurable?
“ There’s a roomful of it. Can I take you?” asked Jimmie, eagerly.
She assented. Jimmie piloted her through the chattering crowd. On the way they passed by Mrs. Hardacre, still devoting the pearls of her attention to the pigs. She acknowledged his bow distantly and summoned her daughter to her side.
“ What are you affiche-ing yourself with that nondescript man for?” she asked in a cross whisper.
Norma moved away with a shrug, and went with Jimmie into the crowded tea-room. There, while he was fighting for tea at the buffet, she fell into a nest of acquaintances. Presently he emerged from the crush victorious, and, as he poured out the cream for her, became the unconscious target of sharp feminine glances.
“ Who is your friend?” asked one lady, as Jimmie retired with the cream-jug.
“ I will introduce him if you like,” she replied. He reappeared and was introduced vaguely. Then he stood silent, listening to a jargon he was at a loss to comprehend. The women spoke in high, hard voices, with impure vowel sounds and a clipping of final consonants. The conversation gave him a confused impression of Ascot, a horse, a foreign prince, and a lady of fashion who was characterised as a “rotter.” Allusion was also made to a princely restaurant, which Jimmie, taken thither one evening by King, regarded as a fairy-land of rare and exquisite flavours, and the opinion was roundly expressed that you could not get anything fit to eat in the place and that the wines were poison.
Jimmie listened wonderingly. No one seemed disposed to controvert the statement, which was made by quite a young girl. Indeed one of her friends murmured that she had had awful filth there a few nights before. A smartly dressed woman of forty who had drawn away from the general conversation asked Jimmie if he had been to Cynthia yet. He replied that he very seldom went to theatres. The lady burst out laughing, and then seeing the genuine enquiry on his face, checked herself.
“ I thought you were trying to pull my leg,” she explained. “I mean Cynthia, the psychic, the crystal gazer. Why, every one is going crazy over her. Do you mean to say you have n’t been?”
“ Heaven forbid!” said Jimmie.
“ You may scoff, but she’s wonderful. Do you know she actually gave me the straight tip for the Derby? She did n’t mean to, for she does n’t lay herself out for that sort of thing—but she said, after telling me a lot of things about myself—things that had really happened—she was getting tired, I must tell you—‘I see something in your near future—it is a horse with a white star on its forehead—it has gone—I don’t know what it means.’ I went to the Derby. I had n’t put a cent on, as I had been cleaned out at Cairo during the winter and had to retrench. The first horse that was led out had a white star on his forehead. None of the others had.. It was St. Damien—a thirty to one chance. I backed him outright for £300. And now I have £9000 to play with. Don’t tell me there’s nothing in Cynthia after that.”
The knot of ladies dissolved. Jimmie put Norma’s teacup down and went slowly back with her to the main room. He was feeling depressed, having lost his bearings in this unfamiliar world. Suddenly he halted.
“ I wish you could pinch me,” he said.
“ Why?”
“ To test whether I am awake. Have I really heard a sane and educated lady expressing her belief in the visions of a crystal-gazing adventuress?”
“ You have. She believes firmly. So do heaps of women.”
“ I hope to heaven you don’t!” he cried with a sudden intensity.
“ What concern can my faith be to you?” she asked.
“ I beg your pardon. No concern at all,” he said apologetically. “But I generally blurt out what is in my mind.”
“ And what is in your mind? I am a person you can be quite frank with.”
“ I could n’t bear the poem of your life to be sullied by all these vulgarities,” said Jimmie.
“ As I remarked to you the first evening I met you, Mr. Padgate,” she said, holding out her hand by way of dismissal, “you are an astonishing person!”
The poem of her life! The phrase worried her before she slept that night. She shook the buzzing thing away from her impatiently. The poem of her life! The man was a fool.
Chapter III—A MODERN BETROTHAL
AYOUNG woman bred to a material view of the cosmos and self-trained to cynical expression of her opinions may thoroughly persuade herself that marriage is a social bargain in which it would be absurd for sentiment to have a place, and yet when the hour comes for deciding on so trivial an engagement, may find herself in an irritatingly unequable frame of mind. For Norma the hour had all but arrived. Morland King had asked to see her alone in view of an important conversation. She had made an appointment for ten o’clock, throwing over her evening’s engagements. Her parents were entertaining a couple of friends in somebody else’s box at the opera, and would return in time to save the important conversation from over-tediousness. She intended to amuse herself placidly with a novel until King’s arrival.
This was a week or two after her encounter with Jimmie at the picture-gallery, since which occasion she had neither seen nor heard of him. He had faded from the surface of a consciousness kept on continued strain by the thousand incidents and faces of a London season. To Jimmie the series of meetings had been a phenomenon of infinite import. She had come like a queen of romance into his homely garden, and her radiance lingered, making the roses redder and the grass more green. But the queenly apparition herself had other things to think about, and when she had grown angry and called him a fool, had dismissed him definitely from her mind. It was annoying therefore that on this particular evening the fool phrase should buzz again in her ears.
She threw down her book and went on to the balcony, where, on this close summer night, she could breathe a little cool air. A clock somewhere in the house chimed the half-hour. Morland was to come at ten. She longed for, yet dreaded, his coming; regretted that she had stayed away from the opera, where, after all, she could have observed the everlasting human comedy. She had dined early; the evening had been interminable; she felt nervous, and raged at her weakness. She was tired, out of harmony with herself, fretfully conscious too of the jarring notes in a room furnished by uneducated people of sudden wealth. The Wolff-Salamons, out of the kindness of their shrewd hearts, had offered the house for the season to the Hard-acres, who had accepted the free quarters with profuse expressions of gratitude; which, however, did not prevent Mr. Hardacre from railing at the distance of the house (which was in Holland Park) from his club, or his wife from deprecating to her friends her temporary residence in what she was pleased to term the Ghetto. Nor did the Wolff-Salamons’ generosity mitigate the effect of their furniture on Norma’s nerves. When Jimmie’s phrase came into her head with the suddenness of a mosquito, she could bear the room no longer.
She sat on the balcony and waited for Morland. There at least she was free from the flaring gold and blue, and the full-length portrait of the lady of the house, on which with delicate savagery the eminent painter had catalogued all the shades of her ancestral vulgarity. Perhaps it was this portrait that had brought back the irony of Jimmie’s tribute. The poem of her life! She sat with her chin on her palm, thinking bitterly of circumstance. She had never been happy, had grown to disbelieve in so absurd and animal a state. It had always been the same, as far back as she could remember. Her childhood: nurses and governesses—a swift succession of the latter till she began to regard them as remote from her inner life as the shop girl or railway guard with whom she came into casual contact. The life broken by visits abroad to fashionable watering or gambling places where she wandered lonely and proud, neglected by her parents, watching with keen eyes and imperturbable face the frivolities, the vices, the sordidnesses, taking them all in, speculating upon them, resolving some problems unaided and storing up others for future elucidation. Her year at the expensive finishing school in Paris where the smartest daughters of America babbled and chattered of money, money, till the air seemed unfit for woman to breathe unless it were saturated with gold dust. As hers was not, came discontent and overweening ambitions. Yet the purity was not all killed. She remembered her first large dinner-party. The same Lord Wyniard of the unclean scandal had taken her down. He was thirty years older than she, and an unsavoury reputation had reached even her young ears. The man regarded her with the leer of a satyr. She realised with a shudder for the first time the meaning of a phrase she had constantly met with in French novels—“il la dévêtit de ses yeux.” His manner was courtly, his air of breeding perfect; yet he managed to touch her fingers twice, and he sought to lead her on to dubious topics of conversation. She was frightened.
In the drawing-room, seeing him approach, she lost her head, took shelter with her mother, and trembling whispered to her, “Don’t let that man come and talk to me again, mother, he’s a beast.” She was bidden not to be a fool. The man had a title and twenty thousand a year, and she had evidently made an impression. A week afterwards her mother invited a bishop and his wife and Lord Wyniard to dinner, and Lord Wyniard took Norma down again. And that was her start in the world. She had followed the preordained course till now, with many adventures indeed by the way, but none that could justify the haunting phrase—the poem of her life!
Was the man such a fool, after all? Was it even ignorance on his part? Was it not, rather, wisdom on a lofty plane immeasurably above the commonplaces of ignorance and knowledge? The questions presented themselves to her vaguely. She was filled with a strange unrest, a craving for she knew not what. Yet she would shortly have in her grasp all—or nearly all—that she had aimed at in life. She counted the tale of her future possessions—houses, horses, diamonds, and the like. She seemed to have owned them a thousand years.
The clock in the house chimed ten in a pretentious musical way, which irritated her nerves. The silence after the last of the ten inexorable tinkles fell gratefully. Then she realised that in a minute or two Morland would arrive. Her heart began to beat, and she clasped her hands together in a nervous suspense of which she had not dreamed herself capable. A cab turned the corner of the street, approached with crescendo rattle, and stopped at the house. She saw Morland alight and reach up to pay the cabman. For a silly moment she had a wild impulse to cry to him over A Modern Betrothal the balcony to go away and leave her in peace. She waited until she heard the footman open the front door and admit him, then bracing herself, she entered the drawing-room, looked instinctively in a mirror, and sat down.
She met him cordially enough, returned his glance somewhat defiantly. The sight of him, florid, sleek, faultlessly attired, brought her back within the every-day sphere of dulled sensation. He held her hand long enough for him to say, after the first greeting:
“ You can guess what I’ve come for, can’t you?”
“ I suppose I do,” she admitted in an off-hand way. “You will find frankness one of my vices. Won’t you sit down?”
She motioned him to a chair, and seating herself on a sofa, prepared to listen.
“ I’ve come to ask you to marry me,” said King.
“ Well?” she asked, looking at him steadily.
“ I want to know how it strikes you,” he continued after a brief pause. “I think you know practically all that I can tell you about myself. I can give you what you want up to about fifteen thousand a year—it will be more when my mother dies. We’re decent folk—old county family—I can offer you whatever society you like. You and I have tastes in common, care for the same things, same sort of people. I’m sound in wind and limb—never had a day’s illness in my life, so you would n’t have to look after a cripple. And I’d give the eyes out of my head to have you; you know that. How does it strike you?”
Norma had averted her glance from him towards the end of his speech, and leaning back was looking intently at her hands in her lap. For the moment she felt it impossible to reply. The words that had formulated themselves in her mind, “I think, Mr. King, the arrangement will be eminently advantageous to both parties,” were too ludicrous in their adequacy to the situation. So she merely sat silent and motionless, regarding her manicured finger-nails, and awaiting another opening. King changed his seat to the sofa, by her side, and leaned forward.
“ If you had been a simpler, more unsophisticated girl, Norma, I should have begun differently. I thought it would please you if I put sentiment aside.”
Her head motioned acquiescence.
“ But I’m not going to put it aside,” he went on. “It has got its place in the world, even when a man makes a proposal of marriage. And when I say I’m in love with you, that I have been in love with you since the first time I saw you, it’s honest truth.”
“ Say you have a regard, a high regard, even,” said Norma, still not looking at him, “and I’ll believe you.”
“ I’m hanged if I will,” said Morland. “I say I’m in love with you.”
Norma suddenly softened. The phrase tickled her ears again—this time pleasantly. The previous half-hour’s groping in the dark of herself seemed to have resulted in discovery. She gave him a fleeting smile of mockery.
“ Listen,” she said. “If you will be contented with regard, a high regard, on my side, I will marry you. I really like you very much. Will that do?”
“ It is all I ask now. The rest will come by and by.”
“ I’m not so sure. We had better be perfectly frank with each other from the start, for we shall respect each other far more. Anyhow, if you treat me decently, as I am sure you will, you may be satisfied that I shall carry out my part of the bargain. My bosom friends tell one another that I am worldly and heartless and all that—but I’ve never lied seriously or broken a promise in my life.”
“ Very well. Let us leave it at that,” said Morland. “I suppose your people will have no objection?”
“ None whatever,” replied Norma, drily.
“ When can I announce our engagement?”
“ Whenever you like.”
He took two or three reflective steps about the room and reseated himself on the sofa.
“ Norma,” he said softly, bending towards her, “I believe on such occasions there is a sort of privilege accorded to a fellow—may I?”
She glanced at him, hesitated, then proffered her cheek. He touched it with his lips.
The ceremony over, there ensued a few minutes of anticlimax. Norma breathed more freely. There had been no difficulties, no hypocrisies. The mild approach to rapture on Morland’s part was perhaps, after all, only a matter of common decency, to be accepted by her as a convention of thescène à faire. So was the kiss. She broke the spell of awkwardness by rising, crossing the room, and turning off an electric pendant that illuminated the full-length portrait on the wall.
“ We can’t stand Mrs. Wolff-Salamon’s congratulations so soon,” she said with a laugh.
Conversation again became possible. They discussed arrangements. King suggested a marriage in the autumn. Norma, with a view to the prolongation of what appealed to her as a novel and desirable phase of existence—maidenhood relieved of the hateful duty of husband-hunting and unclouded by parental disapprobation—pleaded for delay till Christmas. She argued that in all human probability the Parliamentary vacancy at Cosford, the safe seat on which Morland reckoned, would occur in the autumn, and he could not fix the date of an election at his own good pleasure. He must, besides, devote his entire energy to the business; time enough when it was over to think of such secondary matters as weddings, bridal tours, and the setting up of establishments.
“ But you have to be considered, Norma,” he said, half convinced.
“ My dear Morland,” she replied with a derisive lip, “I should never dream of coming between you and your public career.”
He reflected a moment. “Why should we not get married at once?”
Norma laughed. “You are positively pastoral! No, my dear Morland, that’s what the passionate young lover always says to the coy maiden in the play, but if you will remember, it does n’t seem to work even there. Besides, you must let me gratify my ambitions. When I was very young, I vowed I would marry an emperor. Then I toned him down into a prince. Later, becoming more practical, I dreamed of a peer. Finally I descended to a Member of Parliament. I can’t marry you before you are a Member.”
“ You could have had dozens of ‘em for the asking, I’m sure,” returned the prospective legislator with a grin. “Take them all round, they’re a shoddy lot.”
He yielded eventually to Norma’s proposal, alluding, however, with an air of ruefulness, to the infinite months of waiting he would have to endure. Tactfully she switched him off the line of sentiment to that of soberer politics. She put forward the platitude that a Parliamentary life was one of great interest. Morland did not rise even to this level of enthusiasm.
“‘ Pon my soul, I really don’t know why I’m going in for it. I promised old Potter years ago that I would come in when he gave up, and the people down there more or less took it for granted, the duchess included, and so without having thought much of it one way or the other, I find myself caught in a net. It will be a horrible bore. The whole of the session will be one dismal yawn. Never to be certain of sitting down to one’s dinner in peace and comfort. Never to know when one will have to rush off at a moment’s notice to take part in a confounded division. To have shoals of correspondence on subjects one knows nothing of and cares less for. It will be the life of a sweated tailor. And I, of all people, who like to take things easy! I’m not quite sure whether I’m an idiot or a hero.”
He ended in a short laugh and leaned against the mantelpiece, his hands in his pockets.
“ It would be the sweet and pretty thing for me to say,” remarked Norma, “that in my eyes you will always be heroic.”
“ Well, ’pon my soul, I shall be. We ’ll see precious little of one another.”
“ We ’ll have all the more chance of prolonging our illusions,” she replied.
On the whole, however, her conduct towards him was irreproachable. T [...]
