Eyes that belonged to his life’s history were looking at him. Lips that he had kissed with the lover’s first rapture were smiling at him, kindly, with a bewitching archness, as if the lapse of years meant nothing to that vivid life. Immortal youth might have been there, so little mark had the years made upon that peerless beauty.
It was Miriam Stanhope who was looking at him with a smile that invited his attention, and in the next moment the beautiful head bent graciously — just enough to tell him he was recognized.
He sprang up, made his way out of the stalls as quickly as he could, without behaving badly to all those prettily-dressed women who had to suffer from such disturbances.
He hardly knew why he was so eager to find his way to her box. She was just the last person he wanted to see. She was ancient history. She represented the initial chapter in the story of a life that had been a series of failures. She had spoilt his life, and he had never wanted to see her face again — would not have gone half a mile out of his way to see her — but she was there, and it might amuse him to waste a few minutes with her. After all, he had a certain curiosity about her career between the day she flung him over so heartlessly, and to-night, when he saw her dazzling and beautiful as ever: the same radiant vision as on that first night among overdressed men and half-naked women at the “Gilded Lily.”
She was not alone in her box. There was a woman with her — a modest little creature in black lace, who was sitting with her back to the stage, and who drew her chair into the background as if to make room for him.
“Please don’t let me disturb you,” he said. “I have only come for a few minutes before the act begins.”
“You were surprised to see me, I dare say,” Miriam said, making play with her fan.
He thought her hand trembled ever so little and yet he could hardly believe that she was agitated by this unexpected meeting, she who had thrown him off like a soiled glove.
“Nothing is surprising — all roads cross in the labyrinth of life. If I am surprised it is at your not looking a day older since you started on your yachting tour.”
“The sea keeps one young. My husband was devoted to his yacht, and half our lives were spent on board her. It was our only home.”
“Except those delightful hotels along the Riviera, just the most perfect home anyone could have,” said the person in black.
“Delightful, because one could change them at an hour’s notice. If one was bored at Beaulieu, a few words on the telephone, and they were ready for one at Cannes. I don’t think I was meant to live long in one place. At least that is what I always felt while Fred was alive. He was by nature a rover.”
The curtain was going up, and George moved towards the door.
She gave him her hand.
“Good-night, Mr. Bertram. I’m glad you don’t think me much changed in all these years.”
“What have Syrens to do with time? Calypso is one of the Immortals.”
“Don’t begin by calling me disagreeable names, but come and see me and let us talk of the years that are gone.”
“I never talk of the dead,” George answered with a gloomy look. “Good-night, Mrs. Stanhope.”
“My name is Apperley. I have been a widow more than a year. Be sure you call before I leave for the South. I am at the Coburg Hotel.”
He did not answer, nor did he linger over that new sensation of meeting hands, a hand out of a remote past.
He saw another act of the musical comedy, but the music had lost all charm for him. Indeed, the music of a new and popular school that was being played in the orchestra was not the music he heard. He was listening to a waltz that had been the rage when the “Gilded Lily” was the favourite resort of golden youth.
It was all dreary, dead, and done with. He felt more disgusted with life than before his meeting with Miriam, and his blue devils were at their bluest when he went home to his chambers in Paper Buildings. He lived in chambers now. He could no longer support home. His mother bored him, and he preferred dining with his father at one of his clubs to meeting him in Portman Square.
He was a bad sleeper at his best, and he slept a little worse than usual to-night. But just in the grey and tardy dawn, when he had tried one of his bedside books after another and tossed them away in disgust, he burst out laughing. “After all, if I was a fool, I had my excuse — she is the most beautiful thing God ever made!”
And then he thought of the two women who had rejected him — and compared the two types. Wide, wide as the poles asunder, one all clay and the other all spirit.
He did not call at the “Coburg.” He was engaged in a case that interested him as much as anything ever interested him now. One of those Will cases which involve domestic treason, and the darker side of everyday life. People were talking of the trial, and George might have been a star at any of the dinners to which he was invited. But he hated smart parties, and was not to be tempted by the most brilliant assembly of bigwigs in London.
Thoughts of Miriam flashed across his mind sometimes — so little changed, superlatively handsome still — in her particular style — the style that undergraduates and young soldiers rave about — the style for which successive Squires go down the steep and easy hill that leads to the bankruptcy court.
“It was my style once,” he thought, “and I was as big an ass as the U.G. on King’s Parade — with a ‘dog who knew him for the fool he was.’” But the haunting face is not Miriam’s face. The haunting face has a mind behind it, a mind that lights the eyes and trembles on the lips.
This was how he thought of Mrs. Stanhope, now Mrs. Apperley, in wakeful nights, when an overworked brain made sleep impossible.
The Will case was interesting him in spite of himself. There were difficulties, mysteries even, and it was a case worth troubling about. Everybody was talking about it, men at the clubs and in the House buttonholed him, and tried to get him to express an opinion — though they got nothing but black looks for their pains.
And in the watches of the night, when he was tired of thinking of that web of treachery and falsehood which he was gradually unravelling by the aid of an extraordinary number of witnesses, he thought from sheer weariness of the fair Mrs. Apperley.
She will be beautiful to the last, like Ninon de Lenclos, and her task is all the easier, since she has no mind. Ninon was witty, so must have had a mind, and yet she kept her beauty.
At last curiosity, one Saturday afternoon, led his steps to the Coburg Hotel. He wanted to see how his old flame looked by daylight. He had only seen her in the glare of the theatre, and daylight might mean revelations — paint, beauty-doctors.
He called at four o’clock, hoping to find her alone. No doubt she would have women dropping in to tea. He remembered that she did not love solitude — she wanted to be amused — and that quiet little woman in black would hardly amuse her. The widow of a rich man, she was sure to attract friends, of a sort.
She was at home, and would see Mr. Bertram — the question being quietly asked and answered on the telephone. Her rooms were on the third floor, looking over roofs and tree-tops and into the blue of a March sky. A spacious sitting-room full of spring flowers — daffodils, tulips. Tables littered with books.
Mrs. Apperley was seated at a desk writing. She laid down her pen and rose to meet him. The little woman who was with her at the theatre had been sitting near her with a book in her hand, and rose at the same time.
“You have not been very gallant,” Miriam said. “I should have thought when a friend of the long ago asked you to call, you would have been a shade more empressé.”
“I have been up to my eyes—”
“In this tremendous Will case? Yes, I understand. I see you are leading counsel for the plaintiff, and that there is half a million at stake.”
There was a difference in the tone of her voice. It had been rather a pretty voice, he thought, in the days when she was Miriam Stanhope, a light gay voice, with a tendency to become ever so little shrill when she was exc
ited — and in those days she never talked long without exciting herself. The tone was graver now, the voice deeper. She spoke somewhat slowly and with a touch of languor, like a person accustomed to listen rather than to talk, to sit at ease and allow people to amuse her. Certainly there was a change.
“She is playing the grande dame,” he thought. “What an actress she is, and what a pity she hadn’t gone on the stage.”
All the comedy actresses of recent seasons flashed across his mind as he talked to her. She was handsomer than the handsomest of them, and there was something superb about her that would have made her success certain.
“I had no time to introduce you to my friend Miss Mason, the other night,” she said presently, smiling at the little woman in grey.
He bowed and the grey lady responded with a gracious movement of her neat little head. Whatever Miss Mason might he, he made up his mind that she was a lady, whom circumstances had brought into companionship with Mrs. Apperley.
“You will have to be attentive to Miss Mason, if you and I are to renew our old friendship,” Miriam said. “Florence Mason and I have been bosom friends for a good many years. We have roamed the world over together.”
“I fear my chief merit with Mr and Mrs. Apperley lay in my being a good sailor,” Miss Mason said, in a matter-of-fact tone.
“A great advantage for us — but your smallest merit,” said Miriam. “My husband hated a bad sailor; it tried his nice easy temper sorely, when some silly woman at Cannes or San Remo implored him to take her for a cruise, and turned green before we sat down to luncheon. There was a short shrift for that sort of person. She was handed over to the steward, and my maid, and she was never allowed to set foot on our deck again. You remember, Florence?”
“Poor Mr. Apperley. Yes, he was merciless to bad sailors, though he was always kind, and never let them know how he hated them.”
After a little more talk about the yacht and the strange places they had seen, Miss Mason remembered she had a letter to write, and slipped out of the room.
Then there was a silence for some moments, and George rose and took up his hat.
“Pray don’t go. Florence will come back in a few minutes to give us our tea. See,” pointing to the clock, “it is nearly the witching hour.”
“You are very kind, but I must get back to chambers. I may have people waiting for me.”
“Not to-day. This is a dies non. If you won’t sit by my hearth for an hour, I shall think that you have never forgiven me — that you are still angry with me.”
“Don’t let us talk about forgiveness. When you threw me over, your manner of doing it was a shock; but I am something of a stoic, and I took the only course open to me, and I ruled you out of my life.”
“And you have never been sorry. You have never regretted the days when we were so happy together?” she asked in a plaintive tone.
“No more than I have regretted any other dream. I may regret my youth sometimes, but not the folly that went with my youth.”
“You are indeed a stoic. But I am not as hard as you imagine. For even in my placid life with the best of husbands there were times when my thoughts went back to the old days — most of all when the yacht touched at the places where we had been together: those dear little towns in Italy which you so loved.”
“But of which you so soon were weary. Why talk of the past, Mrs. Apperley? You have prospered and been happy since you escaped the horrors of domestic life in South Kensington. And I, too, have done well. We can both afford to blot one uncomfortable page out of our lives.”
Miss Mason reappeared before Miriam could reply, and there was tea, and a few minutes of animated talk, just long enough for George to discover that the little woman in grey was a somewhat superior person, who could talk of books or of politics with judgment and aplomb.
“Florence reads all the new books, and remembers all the old ones,” Mrs. Apperley said patronizingly, but with a certain respect for the superior mind. “She has a wonderful memory. She was my guide, philosopher and friend in all our wanderings. She knew the history of every place we visited, and could make quite dull little towns interesting.”
George Bertram could understand that the wealthy American’s widow had been improving herself with the aid of Miss Mason, who was not quite the common kind of companion. Miriam’s accent was more refined, and that air of Bohemianism natural to the atmosphere in which he had first known her had given place to a primness that sat curiously upon the woman he had first seen waltzing at the “Gilded Lily.” Me smiled as he walked back to the Temple, thinking how strange it seemed to have been sitting at tea with his old love, talking of Shakespeare and the musical glasses.
Certainly Miriam had suffered a sea-change that was almost a transformation, and had become a person that a man could take into a friend’s drawing-room as his wife without being put to the blush; but it seemed to him that the old charm had evaporated under Miss Mason’s influence. The chic, the animal spirits of the old Miriam had suited her sparkling beauty. The beauty was there still, mellowed, not coarsened by the passage of time, but the brilliance was gone — the magnetic power, the something indefinable, that belongs to Calypso, and Cleopatra, and all the other syrens. Miriam now was more; like Helen of Troy, the eminently respectable young person whom circumstances, and not her wicked will, had placed in a false position.
“I like the old Miriam best,” he thought. “This one will never turn me into a beast.”
He did not mean to see her again. He thought it was something on his part to have been civil, and he knew that she would have been better pleased if he had poured the passionate wrath of an ill-used lover on her head. He had punished her more by his absolute indifference than he could have done by the bitterest reproaches.
The trial went on for another week, and he had no time to remember Mrs. Apperley’s existence, and hardly time to scribble a brief line of refusal to her invitation to dine with her and do a theatre after dinner. Florence had told her of a Pinero comedy that it was one’s duty to see.
The trial ended in a triumph for the plaintiff and his leading counsel. The result had hinged in a great measure upon the expert evidence, whether the testator had been of a disposing mind when he signed the will that left his property in so unexpected a manner, and George Bertram had shown himself a master of the most recondite details in the medical aspect of the case — had demonstrated that the testator was not compos mentis at the time, and by inference that the doctor who tried to prove his sanity by hard swearing was a disgrace to his profession.
It was the cross-examination of this witness which constituted the leading counsel’s crowning triumph, and his father unreservedly praised him at their nine o’clock dinner on the night that ended the prolonged trial.
He had to call on Mrs. Apperley after refusing to dine with her, and this time he found her in a bevy of women, having happened to call upon her “day.”
Among the women he discovered that Lady Cheveril who took John Rayner to other people’s houses, and whom he remembered on the night when he saw the sudden change in Mary’s face and knew that Lady Cheveril’s friend was Miss Tremayne’s enemy.
The other women would talk of nothing but Rayner, and were insatiable in their questioning. Laura knew all about his schemes, Laura had him in her pocket. It was in vain that she told them she knew nothing about his business affairs—” except that everything he touches seems to turn to gold.”
“Seems!” cried a lady who had invested a hundred pounds, the savings of a lucky week-end at auction-bridge. “I hope it isn’t a question of seeming. You scare me, Laura. Is the gold going to turn into withered leaves?”
“I know nothing of Jack’s affairs in the city.”
“Then what in Heaven’s name do you talk about? I thought he came straight to you as soon as the Stock Exchange closed, every afternoon.”
“Every afternoon is a large order. He looks in sometimes after business hours — but as I know he must be tired, I ne
ver speak of business — above all, I never ask him questions.”
“Laura is quite wonderful,” said one.
“What an ideal wife you would be for a business man,” said another.
George heard the undercurrent of malevolence in all their talk. He had come in at the close of the entertainment, and they were all gone before he had been there ten minutes. He could hardly follow on the instant.
“Laura Cheveril is making herself impossible,” said Mrs. Apperley, with an ominous shake of the head.
“I wonder Miss Mason allows you to know her.”
“Oh, she goes everywhere, or at least she used. People are beginning to drop her, I’m afraid, on account of Argentine Jack. He is too much of a Bohemian,” concluded Miriam, with the air of one who had never passed the frontier of that mythical land.
“If you advise me to drop her, I shall obey you,” she said, with a dove-like glance at George.
He hurried away after this.
No doubt the women about her were second-rate, but she shone like a star among them. She had dressed with especial care for her day, and her clothes were exquisite. She might have been a duchess at the top of the fashion. She stood out among shoddy gentilities, as she had done at the “Gilded Lily” — and yet — though he walked through those familiar streets thinking about her, she did not charm him. She might interest him as a character study — no more to him than one of those vain women in Molière’s comedies.
Beauty was no longer paramount in his estimation of a woman. It was no longer beauty that could hold him. He had known a charm more subtle, an attraction not to be defined in words.
Mrs. Apperley at the same time was exulting in the fact that he had disapproved of her association with Lady Cheveril. “It is the first sign of his taking any interest in me,” she told Miss Mason, from whom she had no secrets, “and I believe he is just as much in love with me as he was ten years ago.”
“It is certainly a good sign,” replied her friend, “and I think you may have caught him again. But he is rather an unpromising subject.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1032